>How do you tell science and political bullshit apart, other than by whether you like the result?
Um, by examining the scientific evidence?
Global warming, oops, sorry, climate change, is one of those things where this is hard to do.
We have a sample size of 1, with what is largely considered to be a chaotic system with uncontrolled inputs.
Good luck figuring out what is scientific evidence, and what is people playing with numbers to support a "conclusion" they had before they looked at any data.
Oh, and that great quote/joke about "the plural of anecdote is not data"... well, we only have a single anecdote (1 planet) and limited observations, so I'm not sure how to call that data anyway. You know the joke about the blind people and the elephant, right?
All that said... I do tend to believe in climate change, I just don't know about "human-influenced" nor do I have any real position on what the best thing to do about it is. Can we really manage the planetary climate? I'd say we don't know enough to know what we are doing. The only firm conclusion you can come to is we have insufficient data.
Of course, by the time we have sufficient data, it may be too late for our society to survive in the way that we have for the last 500 years... which is a vanishingly small amount of time, as far as the planet is concerned.
It could simply be an area map showing density and flow, kind of like a windspeed chart on a weather map.
The problem with that is the required resolution of the chart to be useful. For a windspeed chart, your grid size can be fairly large, and still give useful information, squares a couple hundred meters on a side in cities and larger than that outside of major metro areas.
For a chart of cellphone travel as a representation of driving speeds... your grid size has to be half the width of the road. Road traffic is, by its nature, bi-directional (ignoring one-way roads). A heavily-utilized road, with a lot of traffic flowing in both directions, will show up as... either nothing (equal flow cancelling each other out, thereby not telling you if traffic is flowing fast or slow), or a vortex, if the grid size is larger than the width of the traffic lanes in a single direction. And a vortex that is 100 meters wide, and 15 kilometers long... that's a weird thing to show on a windspeed map.:)
You also have the added complexity that you want to show not just speed of the flow, but also density. Of course, that can be fairly easily handled, but it already makes it slightly more complicated than your windspeed chart.
With a resolution of half the width of the road, you know enough to tell a lot about the traffic effects on the surrounding geography, such as the issues the GP raised.
Have you looked at how little 3G cellphone network services are being used? I wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that Veeker was financed by some of the cellphone service providers, in the hopes that they would come up with something that people would actually use with the MMS/3G services that are currently bleeding red ink.
Seriously. The GP said "rates are ridiculous" and that should be a clue. When you find a service the depends on you spending crazy amounts of money... look at who you are giving that money to, and you probably found the originator of the idea.
The point is to make money for Verizon and Cingular. You being silly enough to actually do it is another matter entirely. I hope.
"refocus the company revenue strategies on their intellectual property licensing opportunities"
Umm... you don't read much in the tech/financial rags, do you?
IBM is currently estimated (in 2003, I haven't seen any more recent figures) to make about $1 BILLION per year in revenue from licensing patents. Now, admittedly, they only do total revenue per year of about $80 Billion, so that's a small percentage... but a really big number anyway.
The fact that diebold also makes ATM's indicates nothing less than malice in the design...
Diebold BOUGHT the voting machine deisgn (by buying the company that made it). It is unrelated to their ATM designs.
They slapped the company name on it after they bought it. That says "We stake our reputation on this product."
Or at least, that's what it says to me.
Or, looked at another way, they thought the product was good enough to buy and put their name on.
I'd say that makes it related.
This is the same reason (you knew I couldn't hold the rant in, didn't you?) that I want to boycott *all* Sony products after seeing/hearing what Sony BMG did with root kits on audio CDs (and some other things in their consumer electronics lines, yes, I'm talking about DRM in BD). They said "We put our company name behind this product, and you can judge our company by this product."
Well, they did, and I did.
As to the "malice in design" specifically... have you looked at the software people that coded the voting machines? As of a few years ago, a bunch of them had convictions for fun crimes like computer fraud... just the sort of people *I* want coding my voting machine. Check the wiki entry for them.
Your comment is a good example of the philosophical difference between the BSD license and the GPL.
If somebody wants to take BSD code, modify it and not release those changes, then so be it. It doesn't hurt the rest of us, as we still have FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD to use. Beyond that, such use may make somebody else better off. Thus, there's a net benefit overall. We lose nothing, yet others gain.
That's a really good way to say that, and shows the BSD/GPL difference very well.
The basic philosophy of the BSD license seems to be "the more good code out there, the better" and that the use that code is put to, and the freedoms associated with it, are secondary to having good code.
The basic philosophy of the GPL is that the next guy down the line gets the same freedoms that you get, and that is more important than code quality. (It assumes that good code will eventually result, but that isn't the primary point of the license.)
In the short term, the GPL is more limiting (less free) than the BSD license, but in the long term, the GPL preserves freedom better than the BSD license.
If Apple lets Verizon Wireless (my CSP) or Cingular cripple it (and that's about the only way the Cellular Service Providers will sell it) then it will be just as useless as every other phone out there.
And so, I won't care.
Lots of phones out there that have great specs as announced by the manufactures. And then the phone is crippled in software by the cell service companies, and it's a piece of trash that no one wants. Or, you can buy the uncrippled version for $499 (still with a 2-year contract).
I don't think even Steve Jobs could convince Verizon not to cripple a phone so that it will only accept music through the Verizon cellular data network. Because a phone that isn't so crippled won't need an over-priced data plan, and will lose Verizon profits that they are convinced they deserve.
Sorry, no.
Part of the joy of Apple products that the they control the entire experience. Part of that is that (with some notable exceptions) ongoing costs and hassles are minimized. I have an iPod. I love it. It works great with the iTunes Music Store. You don't *have* to use the iTMS, though. You won't have that option with a Verizon-crippled cellphone.
You have a tense problem. (insert joke about a tee-pee and a wigwam)
Microsoft is punishing paid customers. Microsoft wants them to be continuously paying customers, and this sounds like a great way to do that.
Customer: My computer stopped working, the OS de-activated itself. Microsoft: Oh, you just need to buy a new activation license, that's the simplest way to fix this. That will be $279.95. Thank you for you call.
See? That's a paying customer. Software that never breaks, and doesn't really need upgrading/replacing? That's a paid (past tense) customer, and that doesn't help the next quarter's finacial reports.
This is all about making software that wears out, just like your car, your toothbrush, and your favorite comfortable pair of shoes that doesn't have any tread left.
Am I the only one here who gets her news from newspapers, ala The New York Times and The Wallstreet Journal?
I actually get most of my news from Reuters news feeds (Yahoo! news, usually) and from Google News, where I try to filter to a source that looks semi-reliable. Mixed results there, frankly.
But The New York Times? I mostly stopped paying attention to them when they changed their motto to "The New York Times... We only make up 17% of our news!" Their editors were what made the paper great, because they kept things focused and honest... and, it seems, in the name of cost cutting, they cut the editorial staff to the point that they are no longer a reliable news source. Sad.
Which, admittedly, is still way better than Fox News.
Contrary to the terms stated on the syllabus, which you received the first day of class and which you assented to by your signature on date X/Y/Z (copy attached), you have failed to attach an appropriately signed and dated copyright license form (in triplicate) with the submission of your paper. You have not granted me sufficient license in order to properly evaluate your paper, therefore, it can not be graded.
And would a 90-day limited license satisfy the requirements to "properly evaluate your paper"???
After 90 days, the class is over, the license expires, and any copies in databases must be deleted. Sounds fine for everyone except TurnItIn.com.
Or does the requirement to "properly evaluate your paper" extend until the university no longer offers that class, because your paper must be evaluated against all future papers also? Which requires that you give the university an unlimited license for any use, public or private, commercial or non-commercial. Becuase the "evaluation" is conducted by an external for-profit company.
Hmm... somehow I don't think the professor himself would like to be forced to sign such a license with the university.
If you buy a pressed CD with printed label on the disc, that makes perfect sense.
If you buy a CD-R of software with the title and S/N written on it with a Sharpie... Do you have an expectation of having bought legal software? Are you making a legal transaction, or are you knowingly buying infringed goods? Somehow that doesn't sound nearly as bad as "buying stolen goods" does it? There's probably a reason for that... But if you buy stolen goods, the cops can confiscate the property from you, and return it to its rightful owner. You forfeit it because it was stolen. Why not with software or other intellectual property? If you unknowingly buy stolen goods, can you sue the seller for your money back when the cops take the item away from you?
There are limits to how much protection a consumer should have. Usually that limit is where it damages another citizen. But if you buy something that looks like a legit product, yes, you bought it, and the seller should be responsible for making it right. Because, for software, that is just a monetary payment, you are not depriving the copyright holder of any property, only income.
What do you do for the presidential election? Same issue, same resolution.
Hold your nose, and vote for the third-party fruitcake. Almost by definition, most 3rd-party candidates in the USA are fruitcakes. They have one issue they make some sense on, and most everything else they are well-characterized as a fruitcake. But you aren't voting to get them elected, you are voting to contribute to the "51/34/26% of votes cast go to neither of the major party candidates" (whatever percentage you want, as 1% more than 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/4 or whichever you think is significant) at which point we might actually get a viable third party in this country.
Same way the mid-term elections go here. Hold your nose and vote for the party that does not occupy the White House. Having either party in charge of both Houses of Congress and the White House is bad for the country.
I never could figure out why they make kids get up at the crack of dawn to go to school. You don't have to be a genius to realize people learn better when they're awake.
Go to sleep 8 hours before you need to wake up, and you'll have less of a problem waking up. Most parents realize this for their elementary and middle school kids, and enforce bedtimes that make sense. High schoolers are being transitioned into more personal responsibility, and part of that is a relaxed curfew and bedtime. And like most people suddenly given extra freedom, they don't handle it too well, speaking generally. (Ready for the people saying "I handled it just fine!"? Yep... "generally" means "there are exceptions to this".)
Doesn't matter when you need to wake up, you'll "naturally" slide your bedtime to the right until you are getting about 5 hours sleep a night, if you are a normal high school teen.
Then you'll be dragging in school.
(Sometimes I wish I would follow my own advice on that... like most Americans, I operate on a permanent sleep deficit. Ugh.)
Plus, for places with school bus service and families where both parents work, the kids should be leaving for school before the parents do, so that the parents can be sure the kids actually did leave for school. School starting after work starts is bad.
And as has already been said elsewhere, school start times are also about effficient use of school buses (same bus serving 2 or 3 different schools with different start times) and avoiding/minimizing school buses driving in morning rush hour.
After all, if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide.
I heard a response to this that I really liked...
If I'm not doing anything wrong, why are you wasting scarce police resources looking into my private life?
The only problem with that is that it only works until the invasive checks are automated and conducted by (unlimited-resource) computers. But until then, it's a good response.
- Bluray, in particular, uses the same poor compression technology as standard DVD, and displays a lot of the same artifacting (less extreme, because it's higher resolution and bitrate, but nevertheless there)
Both of the new formats are backward compatible with DVDs and both employ the same video compression techniques: MPEG-2, Video Codec 1 (VC1) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.
This is one of those "only makes sense with the backstory" comments.
The original software Sony released for mastering BluRay movies only supported the MPEG2 codec at a bitrate that made a 2-hour movie take all the space available on the disc, and still look slightly less good than the HDDVD version in H.264.
Sony released an updated version of this mastering software in... early/mid August, that included support for H.264, so future movie releases should no longer have this limitation. But the first set of movies released for BluRay didn't show the format to its full potential because of this.
Also in my opinion (and mine only - don't want to start a flameware) it is too much of a one man crusade. I think that there is way too much emphasis and publicity surrounding Negroponte and what he thinks that people (like me) will start to wonder if this is really a group effort or just one man's dream.
Actually, I think this improves the chances of success.
Committees don't accomplish anything. Well, they can sometimes kill a project, but that's usually a side-effect of getting nothing done. Groups... sometimes you'll find a useful and productive group, but that group is usually coalesced around... One single unreasonable individual.
There's nothing like one single unreasonable individual to change the world.
Reasonable people change themselves to suit the world. Unreasonable people change the world to suit themselves.
I understand that this article is talking about the UK, but I am going to reply to your comment from the US perspective anyway.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that the police have no Constitutional requirement to prevent crime of any type. They investigate crime and apprehend suspected criminals, only. ACLU press release concerning one case related to this. There are several other cases on this topic also.
A cop standing on a street corner watching a mugging in progress has no legal requirement to stop the crime in progress. He should, however, watch carefully in order to make a proper identification to assist in apprehending the alleged perpetrator after the crime occurs.
All these idiots had to do was make their demo disc show the movies side by side with the DVD version and it would make the difference clear. But they didn't.
What I would like to see, really, is a 7-way comparison.
1) normal DVD player hooked up to a SD 32" CRT 2) normal DVD player hooked up to a 32" HDTV (DLP, LCD or whatever, probably 720p) 3) normal DVD player hooked up to a 50" HDTV with non-HD cables (which I suspect is standard across America) 4) progressive DVD player hooked up to a 50" HDTV 5) progressive DVD player with upsampling hooked up to a 50" HDTV with HD cables (DVI or whatever, this was probably the high-end setup 6 months ago) 6) HD-DVD/BD player hooked up to a 50" HDTV with non-HD cables (no bets on how common this will be) 7) HD-DVD/BD player hooked up to a 50" HDTV with HD cables (DVI/HDCP or whatever)
And then back them up so they are standing as far away from the row of TVs as their chair/couch in the living room is from the TV...
I'm really curious how many people (or what percentage) would say to #7 "Yes, that's worth an extra $3200" and walk out the store with it. $700 for the HD player, $2300 for the HDTV, and of course you have to buy the Monster HD cables for $200.;)
I really think it wouldn't be that high... and most of them would actually end up with #6 and not notice the difference. They've always used coax... or S-Video for high quality stuff.
Final comment is regarding color depth, undersaturation, and over saturation. Since they are all related/same. Film is still by far superior in this regard. DSLRs still undersaturate long before standard color film. Oversaturation is still a problem. Look at the full res pixels of anything shiny. It stands out pretty bad. Skin tones have always been a huge problem. I have no clue why since skin tones are typically in the mid range. Color depth and saturation/undersaturation still has a lot of room for improvement with DSLRs.
Not a guarantee this is the problem, but one thing that does tend to mess up a lot of digital images is white balance. You don't really think about this with film, because you buy a film that is designed for a certain white balance. Film X for sunlight, film Y for flourescents, film Z for incandescents. Same thing when you buy a film for a certain color temperature of light or flash. (Literally, white balance and light color temperature are the same thing. Light color temperature is usually measured in degrees Kelvin, somewhere between about 4000 and 6000.)
You don't do that with digital cameras, you just have the one sensor. You have to tell the camera what the white balance is. Most modern DSLRs (and a lot of the better digital point-n-shoot cameras) have a white balance setting with profiles for various lighting conditions. (A lot of them now have "custom" settings also, where you can take a picture of a white card and use that to set the white balance in the camera right then.) This will strongly affect how colors look, and is most noticable with skin tones, simply because your eye knows what is right for your friend's face, but won't notice as much that the shirt is not the right shade. You notice when a skin tone has too much red or blue or whatever.
Play with the white balance on your DSLR, and you can probably improve the skin tone output in your pictures.
Nope. People have no right to low prices. There is an assumption that a market economy will prevent artificially high prices, however. Competition is supposed to help with that.
But.
Music sales (licensing) is a government-granted monopoly, through copyright law. Competition is not possible. There is, therefore, an interest (in democracies), and perhaps even a right, to not have these government-granted monopolies be abused with artificially high prices.
That's the only place "rights" come into a discussion of prices.
That's where a chunk of the entitlement feeling comes from.
All I can say is, if I do purchase a HD-disc and then discover it won't play at full resolution on my hardware, I'll simply download a free-market copy. I'm sure they'll still be available.
I have a question in response to this statement.
After you discover that your purchased product is inferior to the pirated version, will you continue to purchase the crippled legal version? Or will that be your last purchase of HD content, and you will then become purely a consumer of pirated content, because it is a better product?
That's my problem.
I'm avoiding going HD because I know myself well enough to know how frustrated I'd be buying an inferior purposefully-crippled product, and then having to download a pirated non-crippled format anyway. I'd quickly swear off buying HD content, just to avoid the frustration. Note that I didn't say I'd avoid HD content, just that I would avoid buying it.
And I don't like that. I actually like being a law-abiding citizen. But not when the game is rigged.
With storage getting cheap and more abundant, I fear that giant archives of public data will be collected daily and stored for hundreds of years...all ready to be pulled for review later.
I don't fear that... not for "hundreds of years" at least. For 20 years, yes, I do fear that.
Talk to NASA about long-term data storage. They had magnetic tapes from the Apollo program that have decayed such that the data is no longer retrievable, a combination of tape and reader problems. NASA spent a fair amount of money trying to move data from these tapes to something new in the mid 1990s. They were only partially successful.:(
Government organizations have the same problems that home consumers have with storage of large amounts of data. (Just the definition of "large" changes.) It's only good for as long as the specific storage media you use, and the reader for that thing, lasts. When you have to move it to the next amazing storage media, you find just how big a problem you've set up for yourself.
For the life of the media/reader, I'm worried about this. For most of these things, that seems to run in the 5-20 year range, depending on how well it is stored. Past that? They'll have the same problem as I have with the 3-1/2 inch magneto-optical disks I have at home. No way to read them, and no money at the time the drive failed to buy a replacement to move them to the next best thing, which at the time was CD-Rs, and which would have had to be moved to DVD-R by now.
Long-term digital data storage is simply not a solved problem. And as a photographer that shoots purely digital, that concerns me a lot. As a citizen concerned with government programs like you fear, I find that vaguely reassuring.
Are you simply suggesting an easier to maintain or more explicit blacklist/whitelist, or do you have a novel method that actually does what I suggest is impossible given the information the phone is provided?
The ideal solution to this is for the software to have limited telepathic abilities. It should query the caller to find out who they are, then poke in your head to find out if you want to talk to that person. Then the phone only rings if it's a person you want to talk to. If it is someone you don't want to talk to, but want something from, they get dropped to voicemail. Otherwise, they are simply disconnected.
See?
Solves all the poster's problems.
Now there's just the little issue of implementing the limited telepathic abilities in the software. And, of course, preventing it from reading your mind enough to find out how petty and self-centered you are that it decides to stop working for you.
Generally, a question where the only good answer is a telepathic interface indicates one of two things... insufficiently advanced technology, or a questioner who does not understand what he is asking for. Personally, I'm not really sure which this is. I remember reading about "intelligent agents" on the internet that would know everything about you, and go find the things you were interested in. This seems a perfect application for those (also never implemented) pieces of technology.
You could of course also argue that part of the problem is that Caller ID does not identify the calling person, but instead the calling phone number. An obvious design flaw. See? I'm back to "insufficiently advanced technology" again.
There's a problem there... most fish farms don't raise fish the way cattle ranches raise cattle. Cattle ranches have a stable population and breed more young from that population, plus trading breeding males and females (usually males) with other cattle ranches. It's a mostly self-contained system.
Most fish farms catch wild juvenile fish of whatever species out at sea in huge nets, corrals them in some coastal area, and then feed them until they get to an appropriate size.
You can see where, if there are no more wild young fish, this could cause a problem for the fish farms.
You might also notice that fish farming reduces the breeding population of every succeeding generation, by pulling fish out of the wild population before they get to a size where they can reproduce before showing up on your dinner table. (Someone else in this thread defined sustainability as making sure your grandkids can hunt Bambi too... fish farming doesn't do that.)
Fish farming is part of the problem, not the solution. And when the wild populations are gone, so are the fish farms.
God help me, I'm starting to turn into a tree-hugger.
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>How do you tell science and political bullshit apart, other than by whether you like the result?
Um, by examining the scientific evidence?
Global warming, oops, sorry, climate change, is one of those things where this is hard to do.
We have a sample size of 1, with what is largely considered to be a chaotic system with uncontrolled inputs.
Good luck figuring out what is scientific evidence, and what is people playing with numbers to support a "conclusion" they had before they looked at any data.
Oh, and that great quote/joke about "the plural of anecdote is not data"... well, we only have a single anecdote (1 planet) and limited observations, so I'm not sure how to call that data anyway. You know the joke about the blind people and the elephant, right?
All that said... I do tend to believe in climate change, I just don't know about "human-influenced" nor do I have any real position on what the best thing to do about it is. Can we really manage the planetary climate? I'd say we don't know enough to know what we are doing. The only firm conclusion you can come to is we have insufficient data.
Of course, by the time we have sufficient data, it may be too late for our society to survive in the way that we have for the last 500 years... which is a vanishingly small amount of time, as far as the planet is concerned.
It could simply be an area map showing density and flow, kind of like a windspeed chart on a weather map.
:)
The problem with that is the required resolution of the chart to be useful. For a windspeed chart, your grid size can be fairly large, and still give useful information, squares a couple hundred meters on a side in cities and larger than that outside of major metro areas.
For a chart of cellphone travel as a representation of driving speeds... your grid size has to be half the width of the road. Road traffic is, by its nature, bi-directional (ignoring one-way roads). A heavily-utilized road, with a lot of traffic flowing in both directions, will show up as... either nothing (equal flow cancelling each other out, thereby not telling you if traffic is flowing fast or slow), or a vortex, if the grid size is larger than the width of the traffic lanes in a single direction. And a vortex that is 100 meters wide, and 15 kilometers long... that's a weird thing to show on a windspeed map.
You also have the added complexity that you want to show not just speed of the flow, but also density. Of course, that can be fairly easily handled, but it already makes it slightly more complicated than your windspeed chart.
With a resolution of half the width of the road, you know enough to tell a lot about the traffic effects on the surrounding geography, such as the issues the GP raised.
Here's a good question: What's the point?
Have you looked at how little 3G cellphone network services are being used? I wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that Veeker was financed by some of the cellphone service providers, in the hopes that they would come up with something that people would actually use with the MMS/3G services that are currently bleeding red ink.
Seriously. The GP said "rates are ridiculous" and that should be a clue. When you find a service the depends on you spending crazy amounts of money... look at who you are giving that money to, and you probably found the originator of the idea.
The point is to make money for Verizon and Cingular. You being silly enough to actually do it is another matter entirely. I hope.
"refocus the company revenue strategies on their intellectual property licensing opportunities"
Umm... you don't read much in the tech/financial rags, do you?
IBM is currently estimated (in 2003, I haven't seen any more recent figures) to make about $1 BILLION per year in revenue from licensing patents. Now, admittedly, they only do total revenue per year of about $80 Billion, so that's a small percentage... but a really big number anyway.
What do you mean refocus???
They slapped the company name on it after they bought it. That says "We stake our reputation on this product."
Or at least, that's what it says to me.
Or, looked at another way, they thought the product was good enough to buy and put their name on.
I'd say that makes it related.
This is the same reason (you knew I couldn't hold the rant in, didn't you?) that I want to boycott *all* Sony products after seeing/hearing what Sony BMG did with root kits on audio CDs (and some other things in their consumer electronics lines, yes, I'm talking about DRM in BD). They said "We put our company name behind this product, and you can judge our company by this product."
Well, they did, and I did.
As to the "malice in design" specifically... have you looked at the software people that coded the voting machines? As of a few years ago, a bunch of them had convictions for fun crimes like computer fraud... just the sort of people *I* want coding my voting machine. Check the wiki entry for them.
That's a really good way to say that, and shows the BSD/GPL difference very well.
The basic philosophy of the BSD license seems to be "the more good code out there, the better" and that the use that code is put to, and the freedoms associated with it, are secondary to having good code.
The basic philosophy of the GPL is that the next guy down the line gets the same freedoms that you get, and that is more important than code quality. (It assumes that good code will eventually result, but that isn't the primary point of the license.)
In the short term, the GPL is more limiting (less free) than the BSD license, but in the long term, the GPL preserves freedom better than the BSD license.
It doesn't matter how wonderful the phone is.
If Apple lets Verizon Wireless (my CSP) or Cingular cripple it (and that's about the only way the Cellular Service Providers will sell it) then it will be just as useless as every other phone out there.
And so, I won't care.
Lots of phones out there that have great specs as announced by the manufactures. And then the phone is crippled in software by the cell service companies, and it's a piece of trash that no one wants. Or, you can buy the uncrippled version for $499 (still with a 2-year contract).
I don't think even Steve Jobs could convince Verizon not to cripple a phone so that it will only accept music through the Verizon cellular data network. Because a phone that isn't so crippled won't need an over-priced data plan, and will lose Verizon profits that they are convinced they deserve.
Sorry, no.
Part of the joy of Apple products that the they control the entire experience. Part of that is that (with some notable exceptions) ongoing costs and hassles are minimized. I have an iPod. I love it. It works great with the iTunes Music Store. You don't *have* to use the iTMS, though. You won't have that option with a Verizon-crippled cellphone.
there really should be a way to sandbox "hostile" apps
Every application gets its own virtual machine. No visibility outside that virtual machine.
Why is the paranoid option becoming the reasonable option? That's starting to seriously disturb me.
effectively punishing paying customers
Nope.
You have a tense problem. (insert joke about a tee-pee and a wigwam)
Microsoft is punishing paid customers. Microsoft wants them to be continuously paying customers, and this sounds like a great way to do that.
Customer: My computer stopped working, the OS de-activated itself.
Microsoft: Oh, you just need to buy a new activation license, that's the simplest way to fix this. That will be $279.95. Thank you for you call.
See? That's a paying customer. Software that never breaks, and doesn't really need upgrading/replacing? That's a paid (past tense) customer, and that doesn't help the next quarter's finacial reports.
This is all about making software that wears out, just like your car, your toothbrush, and your favorite comfortable pair of shoes that doesn't have any tread left.
Am I the only one here who gets her news from newspapers, ala The New York Times and The Wallstreet Journal?
I actually get most of my news from Reuters news feeds (Yahoo! news, usually) and from Google News, where I try to filter to a source that looks semi-reliable. Mixed results there, frankly.
But The New York Times? I mostly stopped paying attention to them when they changed their motto to "The New York Times... We only make up 17% of our news!" Their editors were what made the paper great, because they kept things focused and honest... and, it seems, in the name of cost cutting, they cut the editorial staff to the point that they are no longer a reliable news source. Sad.
Which, admittedly, is still way better than Fox News.
For newspapers, I still like The Washington Post.
Contrary to the terms stated on the syllabus, which you received the first day of class and which you assented to by your signature on date X/Y/Z (copy attached), you have failed to attach an appropriately signed and dated copyright license form (in triplicate) with the submission of your paper. You have not granted me sufficient license in order to properly evaluate your paper, therefore, it can not be graded.
And would a 90-day limited license satisfy the requirements to "properly evaluate your paper"???
After 90 days, the class is over, the license expires, and any copies in databases must be deleted. Sounds fine for everyone except TurnItIn.com.
Or does the requirement to "properly evaluate your paper" extend until the university no longer offers that class, because your paper must be evaluated against all future papers also? Which requires that you give the university an unlimited license for any use, public or private, commercial or non-commercial. Becuase the "evaluation" is conducted by an external for-profit company.
Hmm... somehow I don't think the professor himself would like to be forced to sign such a license with the university.
you buy something, it belongs to you
If you buy a pressed CD with printed label on the disc, that makes perfect sense.
If you buy a CD-R of software with the title and S/N written on it with a Sharpie... Do you have an expectation of having bought legal software? Are you making a legal transaction, or are you knowingly buying infringed goods? Somehow that doesn't sound nearly as bad as "buying stolen goods" does it? There's probably a reason for that... But if you buy stolen goods, the cops can confiscate the property from you, and return it to its rightful owner. You forfeit it because it was stolen. Why not with software or other intellectual property? If you unknowingly buy stolen goods, can you sue the seller for your money back when the cops take the item away from you?
There are limits to how much protection a consumer should have. Usually that limit is where it damages another citizen. But if you buy something that looks like a legit product, yes, you bought it, and the seller should be responsible for making it right. Because, for software, that is just a monetary payment, you are not depriving the copyright holder of any property, only income.
What do you do for the presidential election? Same issue, same resolution.
Hold your nose, and vote for the third-party fruitcake. Almost by definition, most 3rd-party candidates in the USA are fruitcakes. They have one issue they make some sense on, and most everything else they are well-characterized as a fruitcake. But you aren't voting to get them elected, you are voting to contribute to the "51/34/26% of votes cast go to neither of the major party candidates" (whatever percentage you want, as 1% more than 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/4 or whichever you think is significant) at which point we might actually get a viable third party in this country.
Same way the mid-term elections go here. Hold your nose and vote for the party that does not occupy the White House. Having either party in charge of both Houses of Congress and the White House is bad for the country.
I never could figure out why they make kids get up at the crack of dawn to go to school. You don't have to be a genius to realize people learn better when they're awake.
Go to sleep 8 hours before you need to wake up, and you'll have less of a problem waking up. Most parents realize this for their elementary and middle school kids, and enforce bedtimes that make sense. High schoolers are being transitioned into more personal responsibility, and part of that is a relaxed curfew and bedtime. And like most people suddenly given extra freedom, they don't handle it too well, speaking generally. (Ready for the people saying "I handled it just fine!"? Yep... "generally" means "there are exceptions to this".)
Doesn't matter when you need to wake up, you'll "naturally" slide your bedtime to the right until you are getting about 5 hours sleep a night, if you are a normal high school teen.
Then you'll be dragging in school.
(Sometimes I wish I would follow my own advice on that... like most Americans, I operate on a permanent sleep deficit. Ugh.)
Plus, for places with school bus service and families where both parents work, the kids should be leaving for school before the parents do, so that the parents can be sure the kids actually did leave for school. School starting after work starts is bad.
And as has already been said elsewhere, school start times are also about effficient use of school buses (same bus serving 2 or 3 different schools with different start times) and avoiding/minimizing school buses driving in morning rush hour.
After all, if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide.
I heard a response to this that I really liked...
If I'm not doing anything wrong, why are you wasting scarce police resources looking into my private life?
The only problem with that is that it only works until the invasive checks are automated and conducted by (unlimited-resource) computers. But until then, it's a good response.
This is one of those "only makes sense with the backstory" comments.
The original software Sony released for mastering BluRay movies only supported the MPEG2 codec at a bitrate that made a 2-hour movie take all the space available on the disc, and still look slightly less good than the HDDVD version in H.264.
Sony released an updated version of this mastering software in... early/mid August, that included support for H.264, so future movie releases should no longer have this limitation. But the first set of movies released for BluRay didn't show the format to its full potential because of this.
That where this comment came from.
Also in my opinion (and mine only - don't want to start a flameware) it is too much of a one man crusade. I think that there is way too much emphasis and publicity surrounding Negroponte and what he thinks that people (like me) will start to wonder if this is really a group effort or just one man's dream.
Actually, I think this improves the chances of success.
Committees don't accomplish anything. Well, they can sometimes kill a project, but that's usually a side-effect of getting nothing done.
Groups... sometimes you'll find a useful and productive group, but that group is usually coalesced around...
One single unreasonable individual.
There's nothing like one single unreasonable individual to change the world.
Reasonable people change themselves to suit the world.
Unreasonable people change the world to suit themselves.
Indeed, what about police? Can they be blamed?
I understand that this article is talking about the UK, but I am going to reply to your comment from the US perspective anyway.
The US Supreme Court has ruled that the police have no Constitutional requirement to prevent crime of any type. They investigate crime and apprehend suspected criminals, only. ACLU press release concerning one case related to this. There are several other cases on this topic also.
A cop standing on a street corner watching a mugging in progress has no legal requirement to stop the crime in progress. He should, however, watch carefully in order to make a proper identification to assist in apprehending the alleged perpetrator after the crime occurs.
Don't you just love how things work in the US?
All these idiots had to do was make their demo disc show the movies side by side with the DVD version and it would make the difference clear. But they didn't.
;)
What I would like to see, really, is a 7-way comparison.
1) normal DVD player hooked up to a SD 32" CRT
2) normal DVD player hooked up to a 32" HDTV (DLP, LCD or whatever, probably 720p)
3) normal DVD player hooked up to a 50" HDTV with non-HD cables (which I suspect is standard across America)
4) progressive DVD player hooked up to a 50" HDTV
5) progressive DVD player with upsampling hooked up to a 50" HDTV with HD cables (DVI or whatever, this was probably the high-end setup 6 months ago)
6) HD-DVD/BD player hooked up to a 50" HDTV with non-HD cables (no bets on how common this will be)
7) HD-DVD/BD player hooked up to a 50" HDTV with HD cables (DVI/HDCP or whatever)
And then back them up so they are standing as far away from the row of TVs as their chair/couch in the living room is from the TV...
I'm really curious how many people (or what percentage) would say to #7 "Yes, that's worth an extra $3200" and walk out the store with it. $700 for the HD player, $2300 for the HDTV, and of course you have to buy the Monster HD cables for $200.
I really think it wouldn't be that high... and most of them would actually end up with #6 and not notice the difference. They've always used coax... or S-Video for high quality stuff.
Not a guarantee this is the problem, but one thing that does tend to mess up a lot of digital images is white balance. You don't really think about this with film, because you buy a film that is designed for a certain white balance. Film X for sunlight, film Y for flourescents, film Z for incandescents. Same thing when you buy a film for a certain color temperature of light or flash. (Literally, white balance and light color temperature are the same thing. Light color temperature is usually measured in degrees Kelvin, somewhere between about 4000 and 6000.)
You don't do that with digital cameras, you just have the one sensor. You have to tell the camera what the white balance is. Most modern DSLRs (and a lot of the better digital point-n-shoot cameras) have a white balance setting with profiles for various lighting conditions. (A lot of them now have "custom" settings also, where you can take a picture of a white card and use that to set the white balance in the camera right then.) This will strongly affect how colors look, and is most noticable with skin tones, simply because your eye knows what is right for your friend's face, but won't notice as much that the shirt is not the right shade. You notice when a skin tone has too much red or blue or whatever.
Play with the white balance on your DSLR, and you can probably improve the skin tone output in your pictures.
Do people have a right to low prices?
Nope. People have no right to low prices. There is an assumption that a market economy will prevent artificially high prices, however. Competition is supposed to help with that.
But.
Music sales (licensing) is a government-granted monopoly, through copyright law. Competition is not possible. There is, therefore, an interest (in democracies), and perhaps even a right, to not have these government-granted monopolies be abused with artificially high prices.
That's the only place "rights" come into a discussion of prices.
That's where a chunk of the entitlement feeling comes from.
All I can say is, if I do purchase a HD-disc and then discover it won't play at full resolution on my hardware, I'll simply download a free-market copy. I'm sure they'll still be available.
I have a question in response to this statement.
After you discover that your purchased product is inferior to the pirated version, will you continue to purchase the crippled legal version? Or will that be your last purchase of HD content, and you will then become purely a consumer of pirated content, because it is a better product?
That's my problem.
I'm avoiding going HD because I know myself well enough to know how frustrated I'd be buying an inferior purposefully-crippled product, and then having to download a pirated non-crippled format anyway. I'd quickly swear off buying HD content, just to avoid the frustration. Note that I didn't say I'd avoid HD content, just that I would avoid buying it.
And I don't like that. I actually like being a law-abiding citizen. But not when the game is rigged.
With storage getting cheap and more abundant, I fear that giant archives of public data will be collected daily and stored for hundreds of years...all ready to be pulled for review later.
:(
I don't fear that... not for "hundreds of years" at least. For 20 years, yes, I do fear that.
Talk to NASA about long-term data storage. They had magnetic tapes from the Apollo program that have decayed such that the data is no longer retrievable, a combination of tape and reader problems. NASA spent a fair amount of money trying to move data from these tapes to something new in the mid 1990s. They were only partially successful.
Government organizations have the same problems that home consumers have with storage of large amounts of data. (Just the definition of "large" changes.) It's only good for as long as the specific storage media you use, and the reader for that thing, lasts. When you have to move it to the next amazing storage media, you find just how big a problem you've set up for yourself.
For the life of the media/reader, I'm worried about this. For most of these things, that seems to run in the 5-20 year range, depending on how well it is stored. Past that? They'll have the same problem as I have with the 3-1/2 inch magneto-optical disks I have at home. No way to read them, and no money at the time the drive failed to buy a replacement to move them to the next best thing, which at the time was CD-Rs, and which would have had to be moved to DVD-R by now.
Long-term digital data storage is simply not a solved problem. And as a photographer that shoots purely digital, that concerns me a lot. As a citizen concerned with government programs like you fear, I find that vaguely reassuring.
Are you simply suggesting an easier to maintain or more explicit blacklist/whitelist, or do you have a novel method that actually does what I suggest is impossible given the information the phone is provided?
The ideal solution to this is for the software to have limited telepathic abilities. It should query the caller to find out who they are, then poke in your head to find out if you want to talk to that person. Then the phone only rings if it's a person you want to talk to. If it is someone you don't want to talk to, but want something from, they get dropped to voicemail. Otherwise, they are simply disconnected.
See?
Solves all the poster's problems.
Now there's just the little issue of implementing the limited telepathic abilities in the software. And, of course, preventing it from reading your mind enough to find out how petty and self-centered you are that it decides to stop working for you.
Generally, a question where the only good answer is a telepathic interface indicates one of two things... insufficiently advanced technology, or a questioner who does not understand what he is asking for. Personally, I'm not really sure which this is. I remember reading about "intelligent agents" on the internet that would know everything about you, and go find the things you were interested in. This seems a perfect application for those (also never implemented) pieces of technology.
You could of course also argue that part of the problem is that Caller ID does not identify the calling person, but instead the calling phone number. An obvious design flaw. See? I'm back to "insufficiently advanced technology" again.
Fish farms or bust.
There's a problem there... most fish farms don't raise fish the way cattle ranches raise cattle. Cattle ranches have a stable population and breed more young from that population, plus trading breeding males and females (usually males) with other cattle ranches. It's a mostly self-contained system.
Most fish farms catch wild juvenile fish of whatever species out at sea in huge nets, corrals them in some coastal area, and then feed them until they get to an appropriate size.
You can see where, if there are no more wild young fish, this could cause a problem for the fish farms.
You might also notice that fish farming reduces the breeding population of every succeeding generation, by pulling fish out of the wild population before they get to a size where they can reproduce before showing up on your dinner table. (Someone else in this thread defined sustainability as making sure your grandkids can hunt Bambi too... fish farming doesn't do that.)
Fish farming is part of the problem, not the solution. And when the wild populations are gone, so are the fish farms.
God help me, I'm starting to turn into a tree-hugger.