I want a hybrid engine with more horsepower. I want plastic sidepanels that don't dent. I want a car radio that loads new mp3's from my home computer over wireless every time I park in the garage. I want to be able to talk with my car like KITT. I want a car with high tail lights and a snub nose and aggressive curves like something out of Ridge Racer.
Only a geek could possibly wish for all these features in *one* car. I'm afraid your personalized car is just not being built right now.
There is some astonishingly good reason, incidentally, for why plastic panels are not being picked up by other automakers, excluding Saturn. I just can't remember what it is right now.
that are trying to look just like each other so they can avoid being unpopular
What you need to do is get to a Saab dealer, and see what different is like.:-)Even the new 9-3, coming in October, is still built with a very different automaking philosophy.
Great lease rates too--they vigorously oversubsidize the leases on the cars to get them more popular.
makes as much sense as telling Bill Gates to concentrate on selling applications and stop mucking about with that silly Windows stuff.
While Windows dominance is a major part of MS strategy, my understanding is that it is the applications that really bring in the cash for MS--specifically Office and the server apps.
Following your argumentation, all this is actually detrimental to its forgery-proofness.
Absolutely...except that forged money can only be spent by the forger once. (It order to spend it, its ownership must be relinquished.) A fake ID can be used lots of times. For that reason, currency forgery (in small amounts) doesn't pay off.
Because right now, show a NY cop an out-of-state ID that is HORRIBLY fake, and he will almost never be able to reconize it. Scores of states (like 50 or something, right?) and scores of ID's all different. It makes no sence.
There is actually a very interesting advantage to the scores of different ID cards--it gives counterfeiters 50 different things to counterfeit. Sure everyone is gonna take a crack at the kindergartner can do it New Jersey photo driver's license. That hardly matters. On the other hand, take a Pennsylvania. The PA license has a devilishly hard hologram to fake--and my understanding is no one is trying to do it. On the other hand, if all the licenses were the same, and had the same hologram, that means that every single counterfeiter in this country would be putting all their effort, resources, and be discussing how to counterfeit the National ID card.
Indeed, look at the poor bastards in California. Here we have a state that not significant changes to their licenses every two years (far more than any other state) and recently introduced a license that probably caused every counterfeiter in the nation to cream his pants. On the other hand, California has many times more counterfeiters than any other state, the license looks so good that people trust it without doubt, and the state issued a big challenge to counterfeiters everywhere, whether or not they are in California, to try it out. Somehow the less difficult Pennsylvania license goes right under the radar.
I would also like to point out that the state of California, as I said, changes their licenses every two years to thwart counterfeiters. Not only do they not exactly succeed--but they also cause differently looking CA licenses to exist. Ohio has issued the same (butt ugly) license since 1995. California has changed at least four times since 1992, with two significant changes (at least four of those types are still valid.) So not only does your NYC cop need to know what a CA license looks like--he also has to know what four of them look like--all in the attempt to prevent unpreventable counterfeiting.
Regrettably, few people realize this, and if they did, we wouldn't be in as stupid a situation as we are now.
Generally I dislike libertarianism as it is often used as what I perceive as cover for the rich to get richer at everyone else's expense.
As a Libertarian, I have to vigorously disagree. If that were the case, why is it that Cato and the LP do not attract the super huge sums of money from the wealthy that other organizations do? (The Economist and WSJ are certainly free market oriented, but that is not necessarily Libertarian to me.)
Indeed, at the most recent Libertarian convention, Otto Guevara, head of the Movimiento Libertario came to speak. Based in Costa Rica, with the help of proportional reprsentation, Movimiento Libertario holds 10% of the seats in the Costa Rican National Assembly (most any Libertarian movement has had anywhere anytime.) (Note: not only am i very involved in the LP, i also happen to be Costa Rican as well.)
Anyway, he said that when he was getting started, he thought that Libertarianism would most appeal to business people and the wealthy. He found out that they simply weren't interested--because often their wealth stemmed from government regulations, or at least government regulations today protected their wealth/livelyhoods from competition.
Instead, he appealed to the common man...the taxi drivers, the street lottery sellers, the ice cream vendors who walk through the neighborhoods of San Jose. They saw the opportunities that Libertarianism offered, because often it was government regulations which were preventing them from advancing (regulations promulgated by an unsympathetic bureaucracy.) . I don't believe that there could ever be too many Taxis in the Metropolitan region of San Jose, but regulations make it difficult for drivers to get taxi medallions. Pirate taxi drivers (those unlicensed but do it anyway) know that it's not a safety issue, it simply is a revenue maker for the government and it keeps competition out.
Even though my grandmother said it would be heresy to vote for any other party than Liberacion, one of the two main parties, I know many in my family were attracted to the ML message. My uncle runs a gas station/car fix it place, and the ML message hit him pretty strongly--these are not wealthy people, they are simply trying to make their lives better through their own capabilities and blessings.
When you live in a small nation, it is so much easier to see what the results are of any one law.
Here's an item that you may have in your home, but which is often rented for no good reason by offices: water coolers.
Where I live, I can get a water cooler rental at $8/mo with a cold tap, and $14/mo with a hot tap. Most people just go ahead and rent the water cooler, and get the water delivered.
On the other hand, you can get a water cooler with both cold and hot taps for $150. I just found a friend of mine who owns a small business has been paying $8/mo for five years now. He cut that out pretty quickly.
You're not getting particular great answers to this question.:-)
The PowerPC is a completely different chip architecture (search for explanation of RISC vs. CISC if you want more detail) in comparison to the Intel x86 architecture. There is a lot of complex discussion on this, but theoretically speaking the Power PC architecture is more advanced and efficient at the same processor speed.
At any rate, the Mac OS is optimized for this processor type. I guess it could be rewritten to run on x86, if Apple wanted to do that.
With the help of an emulator, Win32 programs can be executed in the Mac OS environment. (Virtual PC is the one that I can think of off the top of my head.) It's a testament to the architecture of the Power PC that the performance of Windows in an emulated environment is pretty good. (Not a computer science person, but my understanding is that Virtual PC makes Windows thinks that it's on an x86 computer...and it's an elegant hack.)
I think other posts here are discussing how Apple can/will migrate Mac OS X to the 64 bit processor, and whether or not 32 bit programs need to be recomplied/redesigned for the new processor, or if they can run directly on it in some sorta emulation mode.
One problem I've got is that the directors are saying things like if you can't deal with the entire message, then don't view it at all. Who ever came up with this take it all or leave it proposition with regards to art? Isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder?
Furthermore, I think it's deeply patronizing--they are saying that without sex scene x, violence scene y or cuss word z, whatever it is they are trying to convey to us we won't get. Sensitivities to messages are different from person to person, some people will get the idea in the first five minutes, others you need to show them the film/book 10 times plus kick them in the nuts (which if you do it once in a film automatically upgrades it from PG to PG-13--oddness of rating system) before they get the idea.
With regards to books, this idea already has standing. Often books sold in the US are edited in a way that books sold in Europe are not. There was much discussion about this I believe with one of the Hitchhiker books (me thinks The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) which had obscenities cut from it in the US edition, but not the UK edition. However, the US edition, in place of the obscenities, has a lot more innovative text, which Adams put in for the US version.
Some people have this hangup that somehow being able to swear is art, because of some sorta relation to free speech (or show boobies, or someone being killed in slow motion, et cetera.) I believe the reality is that all that may or may not better reflect reality, but it doesn't intrinsically enhance the art worthiness of it (especialy for most movies.)
...is an interesting way of looking at things, but I wouldn't put too much stock into it.
For instance, I guess most people say that in politics winning is everything. But quite a lot can be said about losing as well. In 2000 every single Libertarian candidate in my county lost, and most of them lost big--I think the max one got was 7% of the vote (now that I think about it, I was that candidate:-)
However, one county comissioner's race, the clerk of courts race, the county treasurer's race, and I think a judgeship's race went unexpectedly for the democrats. Our LP candidates threw almost all of the county for the Democrats in spite of the fact that it's a strong Republican county. For a 3rd party candidate, there's actually a victory to be had in throwing a race. Next time you campaign, the candidates take you seriously, not to mention the people who won with "your help."
My point in saying that is, I'm sure that MS takes that 1% of their revenue lost very seriously, because I suspect that it matters quite a lot more to them than just 1% of their operations, in the same way that a Republican candidate who lost the election with 48% of the vote takes an LP'er who got less than 2% of the vote very seriously.
(ok...ok...it's an apples to mustard greens comparison, i'm just saying that there are lots of ways of looking at that data)
...in an odd way, you bring up a point that not a single person has mentioned.
Japan is a highly bureaucratic country--has been for hundreds of years now, and certainly since the war.
Japan is also a country which prides itself on organization, and strives to put in place hierarchies of bureaucracy.
So why do they need the number now? Clearly they have survived perfectly well without it. That to me is the oddest part--I can't find a single article saying why they suddenly need a universal ID number. My personal stereotypes of the Japanese say that it certainly has nothing to do with fraud or identification theft.
I don't think it's Ashcroft incidentally, but I believe that the companies who make ID card systems (Polaroid, Viisage, Unisys...et cetera) are really good at selling their systems to schmuck politicians who don't realize that they have no need for em.
I heard that was the Bulgarian experience. Bulgarians had pre-berlin internal passports for identification with the government security forces...after communism collapsed, the need for an ID card took a big dive. However, a country on the verge of bankruptcy, required that everyone get new ID cards in the mid to late 90's. The general belief is a.) some ID card maker made a great pitch b.) part of that pitch was that new ID cards would represent a profit opportunity for the government.
I just got this here in Columbus (I consider Michigan and Ohio mid-east incidentally:) and it's not a bad service at 49.95 for 1.5mbps down, 384up. I am an ex Time Warner subscriber, where I paid 44.95 for usually about 500-700kbps, and now I get 1300-1600 pretty reliably. Plus I get 3 IP addresses.
I found myself thinking...well...i could just save the $15/month and go for the second tier, and I would never notice if it were slower or not from regular TW RR service (WOW 2nd tier is 500kbps. Would I sincerely realize the 200kbps difference most of the time?) Then I realized, geek that I am, that the rest of my life would be spent wondering how much better my internet experience would be for only $15 extra per month.
I think this is really just a dick measuring contest--one which I find myself falling into quite a lot.
claim to being first interactive series...
on
Fahrenheit
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
what they claim will be the world's first interactive TV series
In reality that happened here in Columbus in December 1977, with, at the time, the most sophisticated pilot cable TV project ever--QUBE
"The row of five buttons were reserved for responses to Qube's original interactive programming. Each of the five buttons could be assigned a meaning at the headend, allowing up to five answers to a question -- at least 'yes, no or undecided'. The headend could poll all the boxes, collect all the responses, and immediately report to viewers the percentages for each of the possible answers...."And we had interactive games, like a card game where the five buttons were used to play the hands. We had community auctions, too, where items were sold live by an auctioneer in the studio, each incremental bid made through the remote. The bids were locked in by constantly polling the network. An our subscribers also could interact with us directly through special programs called, "Qube at Your Service", which combined phone calls with questions that viewers would answer on their remotes. We always tried to be as responsive to our subscribers as possible."
The article discusses why QUBE failed.
Perhaps the following should be more noted by fellow Columbians:
"Two programs originating in Columbus went national and still flourish today. Pinwheel grew into a new cable channel, Nickelodeon. Sight on Sound evolved into Music Television, known worldwide as MTV."
...absolutely correct. what is more, people are under the mistaken presumption that anything which is not a right must therefore be a privilege--the reality being that very few things related to government can truly be called privileges--otherwise the government could deny you the privilege for no reason at all. If any thing, civil rights acts have pretty much dispensed with all privileges.
So let me say this: you have the unalienable right to obtain a driver's license.
However, once you do get that license, you are locked into this odd contract that the state has put together for you, whether you know or understand it, and as part of that contract, you waive some of your legal rights and standings that you would otherwise have.
The main cause of the Chicago experience is a lack of a proper voter registration system.
Having said that, your example of a airport security system is a subject of controversy that clearly is not solved to this day--and for that matter, its efficacy is not entirely proven either. Someone here on/. has a sig line that says that there are no technology based solutions for human problems, and the urge to carry a bomb on an airplane or commit voter fraud is clearly a human problem.
Having said that, if there's something I definitely do not want to see, is taking airport security standards of guilt v. innocence and applying them to how I interact with my government and choose its leaders.
*in the place where I pollwork, the person is "verfied" by signature (which is a kinda sorta biometric) and by being able to recall their address. I know in some states actually having the voter registration card is required.
*(wow you used the word jurisdiction three times...nifty.) Anyway, the other side of this is the following--
a person can be trying to throw off a small election--and be running from precinct to precinct to do so. the issue here is that if it is a small election, it is likely a small jurisdiction, and they will be noticed.
a person can be trying to throw off a large election--and in order to do this they would have to have lots of people involved--or they simply are not going to be mathematically making any difference. In either instance, it's difficult.
The key way that the system in Chicago worked was by not having a proper registration system. The voter registration system has gotten rid of a great amount of voter fraud.
Now having said that, another way to reduce voter fraud is to get rid of inactive voters from the lists. If you don't vote, you shouldn't be registered (the idea that people don't vote because they aren't registered is utter BS. When people are interested in an election, they will get themselves registered. Having said that, there is nothing wrong with same day registration, which may or may not use photograph based identifying documents, for those who suddenly get the urge to vote.) Having fewer people on the rolls that others could pretend to be will reduce voter fraud (and I respectfully disagree with Chairman Israel and say that voter fraud is not really all that big nor widespread.)
What about those who refuse to be photographed for religious reasons?
What about those who were promised that there would never be a national/ID card--or requirement to have a state ID card?
What about those of us who believe in the idea that a person is innocent before being guilty, and that the requirement to show ID reverses that maxim such that a person is now guilty of being no one (or alterntively, guilty of claiming to be someone they are not) until they themselves prove that they are someone (or the right person?)
I simply do not want to live in a jurisdiction which requires ID's to vote. As someone who has worked the polls in my home state, I think it's unnecessary and sets bad precedence.
"So you don't wanna see my ID to vote?" "No, How do i know it isn't fake?"
"I guess you don't. All you can do is believe me that it is real." "Well why don't we stop arguing over cheap plastic cards, and I'll just believe who you say you are the first time round."
Having worked in tech support, I always imagined that a call to a GM support line would run like this:
Helpline: "General Motors Helpline, how can I help you?"
Customer: "I have a 1998 Camaro, and when I'm doing 60mph on the Garden State Parkway, shifting into 4th gear with the air conditioning on, my radio station mysteriously switches from my favorite radio station to that crappy country station. Is there a way I can solve this problem?"
...and it is an amazing bitch to use. The edmunds article you link talks about the horrific complexity of iDrive. Indeed, BMW North America has a call center with 20 employees (not all day, but during the day 20 employees, though it's a 24/7 call center) to support just iDrive, and not the other features of the 745i--or any other BMW vehicle.
But that's not to say that iDrive doesn't have potential--with a major redesign it does. However in the long run, until cars drive themselves, having so many features in so many menus (especially features that are either critical or often adjusted) will not work out very well.
One of the things that get me excited about this is that the PKC could (but doesn't yet) have all sorts of information that normally would be out of the realm of your average doctor's personal knowledge base. On the other hand, I would think it wonderful that the doctor could pull up normal diagnoses--and the computer also say what a person who was a trained homeopath would say, or a trained doctor in traditional chinese medicine, or someone who was an Ayurvedic doctor, et cetera. The doctor could then leverage all that knowledge into more advanced solutions--even if their training wasn't necessarily in that field.
Having said all that, I think one of the main uses of a doctor is their intuition--and that isn't exactly replaceable by a computer.
The last film I saw was SW2:AOTC in a DLP theater. Now I know why DLP is so cool--the brightness is amazing, so the first ten minutes of MIB2 was spent thinking "god...its just not as bright."
****spoilers alert*****
Anyway, i think i generally liked it enough, though there were a few cheezy moments. My biggest disappointment is that they didn't develop the video store guy enough...here's a guy who, having seen all those mysteries unknown videos, who probably has a good idea of what MIB does, and he really wasn't showing it off (which woulda really annoyed Kay and Jay since they try to be all secret and shit.) C'mon...he coulda had his own black sunglasses or something....and his gf was way too cute.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Create complex genetically evolved oscillator-cum-radio receiver
2. ???
3. Profit!
I want a hybrid engine with more horsepower. I want plastic sidepanels that don't dent. I want a car radio that loads new mp3's from my home computer over wireless every time I park in the garage. I want to be able to talk with my car like KITT. I want a car with high tail lights and a snub nose and aggressive curves like something out of Ridge Racer.
:-)Even the new 9-3, coming in October, is still built with a very different automaking philosophy.
Only a geek could possibly wish for all these features in *one* car. I'm afraid your personalized car is just not being built right now.
There is some astonishingly good reason, incidentally, for why plastic panels are not being picked up by other automakers, excluding Saturn. I just can't remember what it is right now.
that are trying to look just like each other so they can avoid being unpopular
What you need to do is get to a Saab dealer, and see what different is like.
Great lease rates too--they vigorously oversubsidize the leases on the cars to get them more popular.
makes as much sense as telling Bill Gates to concentrate on selling applications and stop mucking about with that silly Windows stuff.
While Windows dominance is a major part of MS strategy, my understanding is that it is the applications that really bring in the cash for MS--specifically Office and the server apps.
Following your argumentation, all this is actually detrimental to its forgery-proofness.
Absolutely...except that forged money can only be spent by the forger once. (It order to spend it, its ownership must be relinquished.) A fake ID can be used lots of times. For that reason, currency forgery (in small amounts) doesn't pay off.
"Weakest link of chain" comes to mind.
In some situations. underage peeps are always going to be trying to make an New Jersey license to drink. However, note the following:
a.) no one makes a fake New Jersey license in New Jersey, since no one in the state actually trusts it (oddly enough, reducing fraud)
b.) if you have to do something in your own state, like, banking, you need a fake license from your own state, not from another
Because right now, show a NY cop an out-of-state ID that is HORRIBLY fake, and he will almost never be able to reconize it. Scores of states (like 50 or something, right?) and scores of ID's all different. It makes no sence.
There is actually a very interesting advantage to the scores of different ID cards--it gives counterfeiters 50 different things to counterfeit. Sure everyone is gonna take a crack at the kindergartner can do it New Jersey photo driver's license. That hardly matters. On the other hand, take a Pennsylvania. The PA license has a devilishly hard hologram to fake--and my understanding is no one is trying to do it. On the other hand, if all the licenses were the same, and had the same hologram, that means that every single counterfeiter in this country would be putting all their effort, resources, and be discussing how to counterfeit the National ID card.
Indeed, look at the poor bastards in California. Here we have a state that not significant changes to their licenses every two years (far more than any other state) and recently introduced a license that probably caused every counterfeiter in the nation to cream his pants. On the other hand, California has many times more counterfeiters than any other state, the license looks so good that people trust it without doubt, and the state issued a big challenge to counterfeiters everywhere, whether or not they are in California, to try it out. Somehow the less difficult Pennsylvania license goes right under the radar.
I would also like to point out that the state of California, as I said, changes their licenses every two years to thwart counterfeiters. Not only do they not exactly succeed--but they also cause differently looking CA licenses to exist. Ohio has issued the same (butt ugly) license since 1995. California has changed at least four times since 1992, with two significant changes (at least four of those types are still valid.) So not only does your NYC cop need to know what a CA license looks like--he also has to know what four of them look like--all in the attempt to prevent unpreventable counterfeiting.
Regrettably, few people realize this, and if they did, we wouldn't be in as stupid a situation as we are now.
Far more important than AOL on OSX!"
Yes, but will it be as important when it's accidentally reposted to slashdot in about 6-9 months?
Generally I dislike libertarianism as it is often used as what I perceive as cover for the rich to get richer at everyone else's expense.
As a Libertarian, I have to vigorously disagree. If that were the case, why is it that Cato and the LP do not attract the super huge sums of money from the wealthy that other organizations do? (The Economist and WSJ are certainly free market oriented, but that is not necessarily Libertarian to me.)
Indeed, at the most recent Libertarian convention, Otto Guevara, head of the Movimiento Libertario came to speak. Based in Costa Rica, with the help of proportional reprsentation, Movimiento Libertario holds 10% of the seats in the Costa Rican National Assembly (most any Libertarian movement has had anywhere anytime.) (Note: not only am i very involved in the LP, i also happen to be Costa Rican as well.)
Anyway, he said that when he was getting started, he thought that Libertarianism would most appeal to business people and the wealthy. He found out that they simply weren't interested--because often their wealth stemmed from government regulations, or at least government regulations today protected their wealth/livelyhoods from competition.
Instead, he appealed to the common man...the taxi drivers, the street lottery sellers, the ice cream vendors who walk through the neighborhoods of San Jose. They saw the opportunities that Libertarianism offered, because often it was government regulations which were preventing them from advancing (regulations promulgated by an unsympathetic bureaucracy.) . I don't believe that there could ever be too many Taxis in the Metropolitan region of San Jose, but regulations make it difficult for drivers to get taxi medallions. Pirate taxi drivers (those unlicensed but do it anyway) know that it's not a safety issue, it simply is a revenue maker for the government and it keeps competition out.
Even though my grandmother said it would be heresy to vote for any other party than Liberacion, one of the two main parties, I know many in my family were attracted to the ML message. My uncle runs a gas station/car fix it place, and the ML message hit him pretty strongly--these are not wealthy people, they are simply trying to make their lives better through their own capabilities and blessings.
When you live in a small nation, it is so much easier to see what the results are of any one law.
Here's an item that you may have in your home, but which is often rented for no good reason by offices: water coolers.
Where I live, I can get a water cooler rental at $8/mo with a cold tap, and $14/mo with a hot tap. Most people just go ahead and rent the water cooler, and get the water delivered.
On the other hand, you can get a water cooler with both cold and hot taps for $150. I just found a friend of mine who owns a small business has been paying $8/mo for five years now. He cut that out pretty quickly.
You're not getting particular great answers to this question. :-)
The PowerPC is a completely different chip architecture (search for explanation of RISC vs. CISC if you want more detail) in comparison to the Intel x86 architecture. There is a lot of complex discussion on this, but theoretically speaking the Power PC architecture is more advanced and efficient at the same processor speed.
At any rate, the Mac OS is optimized for this processor type. I guess it could be rewritten to run on x86, if Apple wanted to do that.
With the help of an emulator, Win32 programs can be executed in the Mac OS environment. (Virtual PC is the one that I can think of off the top of my head.) It's a testament to the architecture of the Power PC that the performance of Windows in an emulated environment is pretty good. (Not a computer science person, but my understanding is that Virtual PC makes Windows thinks that it's on an x86 computer...and it's an elegant hack.)
I think other posts here are discussing how Apple can/will migrate Mac OS X to the 64 bit processor, and whether or not 32 bit programs need to be recomplied/redesigned for the new processor, or if they can run directly on it in some sorta emulation mode.
One problem I've got is that the directors are saying things like if you can't deal with the entire message, then don't view it at all. Who ever came up with this take it all or leave it proposition with regards to art? Isn't beauty in the eye of the beholder?
Furthermore, I think it's deeply patronizing--they are saying that without sex scene x, violence scene y or cuss word z, whatever it is they are trying to convey to us we won't get. Sensitivities to messages are different from person to person, some people will get the idea in the first five minutes, others you need to show them the film/book 10 times plus kick them in the nuts (which if you do it once in a film automatically upgrades it from PG to PG-13--oddness of rating system) before they get the idea.
With regards to books, this idea already has standing. Often books sold in the US are edited in a way that books sold in Europe are not. There was much discussion about this I believe with one of the Hitchhiker books (me thinks The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) which had obscenities cut from it in the US edition, but not the UK edition. However, the US edition, in place of the obscenities, has a lot more innovative text, which Adams put in for the US version.
Some people have this hangup that somehow being able to swear is art, because of some sorta relation to free speech (or show boobies, or someone being killed in slow motion, et cetera.) I believe the reality is that all that may or may not better reflect reality, but it doesn't intrinsically enhance the art worthiness of it (especialy for most movies.)
...is an interesting way of looking at things, but I wouldn't put too much stock into it.
:-)
For instance, I guess most people say that in politics winning is everything. But quite a lot can be said about losing as well. In 2000 every single Libertarian candidate in my county lost, and most of them lost big--I think the max one got was 7% of the vote (now that I think about it, I was that candidate
However, one county comissioner's race, the clerk of courts race, the county treasurer's race, and I think a judgeship's race went unexpectedly for the democrats. Our LP candidates threw almost all of the county for the Democrats in spite of the fact that it's a strong Republican county. For a 3rd party candidate, there's actually a victory to be had in throwing a race. Next time you campaign, the candidates take you seriously, not to mention the people who won with "your help."
My point in saying that is, I'm sure that MS takes that 1% of their revenue lost very seriously, because I suspect that it matters quite a lot more to them than just 1% of their operations, in the same way that a Republican candidate who lost the election with 48% of the vote takes an LP'er who got less than 2% of the vote very seriously.
(ok...ok...it's an apples to mustard greens comparison, i'm just saying that there are lots of ways of looking at that data)
...in an odd way, you bring up a point that not a single person has mentioned.
Japan is a highly bureaucratic country--has been for hundreds of years now, and certainly since the war.
Japan is also a country which prides itself on organization, and strives to put in place hierarchies of bureaucracy.
So why do they need the number now? Clearly they have survived perfectly well without it. That to me is the oddest part--I can't find a single article saying why they suddenly need a universal ID number. My personal stereotypes of the Japanese say that it certainly has nothing to do with fraud or identification theft.
I don't think it's Ashcroft incidentally, but I believe that the companies who make ID card systems (Polaroid, Viisage, Unisys...et cetera) are really good at selling their systems to schmuck politicians who don't realize that they have no need for em.
I heard that was the Bulgarian experience. Bulgarians had pre-berlin internal passports for identification with the government security forces...after communism collapsed, the need for an ID card took a big dive. However, a country on the verge of bankruptcy, required that everyone get new ID cards in the mid to late 90's. The general belief is
a.) some ID card maker made a great pitch
b.) part of that pitch was that new ID cards would represent a profit opportunity for the government.
I just got this here in Columbus (I consider Michigan and Ohio mid-east incidentally :) and it's not a bad service at 49.95 for 1.5mbps down, 384up. I am an ex Time Warner subscriber, where I paid 44.95 for usually about 500-700kbps, and now I get 1300-1600 pretty reliably. Plus I get 3 IP addresses.
I found myself thinking...well...i could just save the $15/month and go for the second tier, and I would never notice if it were slower or not from regular TW RR service (WOW 2nd tier is 500kbps. Would I sincerely realize the 200kbps difference most of the time?) Then I realized, geek that I am, that the rest of my life would be spent wondering how much better my internet experience would be for only $15 extra per month.
I think this is really just a dick measuring contest--one which I find myself falling into quite a lot.
what they claim will be the world's first interactive TV series
In reality that happened here in Columbus in December 1977, with, at the time, the most sophisticated pilot cable TV project ever--QUBE
Read about it here.
From the article:
"The row of five buttons were reserved for responses to Qube's original interactive programming. Each of the five buttons could be assigned a meaning at the headend, allowing up to five answers to a question -- at least 'yes, no or undecided'. The headend could poll all the boxes, collect all the responses, and immediately report to viewers the percentages for each of the possible answers...."And we had interactive games, like a card game where the five buttons were used to play the hands. We had community auctions, too, where items were sold live by an auctioneer in the studio, each incremental bid made through the remote. The bids were locked in by constantly polling the network. An our subscribers also could interact with us directly through special programs called, "Qube at Your Service", which combined phone calls with questions that viewers would answer on their remotes. We always tried to be as responsive to our subscribers as possible."
The article discusses why QUBE failed.
Perhaps the following should be more noted by fellow Columbians:
"Two programs originating in Columbus went national and still flourish today. Pinwheel grew into a new cable channel, Nickelodeon. Sight on Sound evolved into Music Television, known worldwide as MTV."
...absolutely correct. what is more, people are under the mistaken presumption that anything which is not a right must therefore be a privilege--the reality being that very few things related to government can truly be called privileges--otherwise the government could deny you the privilege for no reason at all. If any thing, civil rights acts have pretty much dispensed with all privileges.
So let me say this: you have the unalienable right to obtain a driver's license.
However, once you do get that license, you are locked into this odd contract that the state has put together for you, whether you know or understand it, and as part of that contract, you waive some of your legal rights and standings that you would otherwise have.
The main cause of the Chicago experience is a lack of a proper voter registration system.
/. has a sig line that says that there are no technology based solutions for human problems, and the urge to carry a bomb on an airplane or commit voter fraud is clearly a human problem.
Having said that, your example of a airport security system is a subject of controversy that clearly is not solved to this day--and for that matter, its efficacy is not entirely proven either. Someone here on
Having said that, if there's something I definitely do not want to see, is taking airport security standards of guilt v. innocence and applying them to how I interact with my government and choose its leaders.
Let me add a few things to all of this:
*in the place where I pollwork, the person is "verfied" by signature (which is a kinda sorta biometric) and by being able to recall their address. I know in some states actually having the voter registration card is required.
*(wow you used the word jurisdiction three times...nifty.) Anyway, the other side of this is the following--
a person can be trying to throw off a small election--and be running from precinct to precinct to do so. the issue here is that if it is a small election, it is likely a small jurisdiction, and they will be noticed.
a person can be trying to throw off a large election--and in order to do this they would have to have lots of people involved--or they simply are not going to be mathematically making any difference. In either instance, it's difficult.
The key way that the system in Chicago worked was by not having a proper registration system. The voter registration system has gotten rid of a great amount of voter fraud.
Now having said that, another way to reduce voter fraud is to get rid of inactive voters from the lists. If you don't vote, you shouldn't be registered (the idea that people don't vote because they aren't registered is utter BS. When people are interested in an election, they will get themselves registered. Having said that, there is nothing wrong with same day registration, which may or may not use photograph based identifying documents, for those who suddenly get the urge to vote.) Having fewer people on the rolls that others could pretend to be will reduce voter fraud (and I respectfully disagree with Chairman Israel and say that voter fraud is not really all that big nor widespread.)
What about those who refuse to be photographed for religious reasons?
What about those who were promised that there would never be a national/ID card--or requirement to have a state ID card?
What about those of us who believe in the idea that a person is innocent before being guilty, and that the requirement to show ID reverses that maxim such that a person is now guilty of being no one (or alterntively, guilty of claiming to be someone they are not) until they themselves prove that they are someone (or the right person?)
I simply do not want to live in a jurisdiction which requires ID's to vote. As someone who has worked the polls in my home state, I think it's unnecessary and sets bad precedence.
"So you don't wanna see my ID to vote?"
"No, How do i know it isn't fake?"
"I guess you don't. All you can do is believe me that it is real."
"Well why don't we stop arguing over cheap plastic cards, and I'll just believe who you say you are the first time round."
Having worked in tech support, I always imagined that a call to a GM support line would run like this:
Helpline: "General Motors Helpline, how can I help you?"
Customer: "I have a 1998 Camaro, and when I'm doing 60mph on the Garden State Parkway, shifting into 4th gear with the air conditioning on, my radio station mysteriously switches from my favorite radio station to that crappy country station. Is there a way I can solve this problem?"
...and it is an amazing bitch to use. The edmunds article you link talks about the horrific complexity of iDrive. Indeed, BMW North America has a call center with 20 employees (not all day, but during the day 20 employees, though it's a 24/7 call center) to support just iDrive, and not the other features of the 745i--or any other BMW vehicle.
But that's not to say that iDrive doesn't have potential--with a major redesign it does. However in the long run, until cars drive themselves, having so many features in so many menus (especially features that are either critical or often adjusted) will not work out very well.
One of the things that get me excited about this is that the PKC could (but doesn't yet) have all sorts of information that normally would be out of the realm of your average doctor's personal knowledge base. On the other hand, I would think it wonderful that the doctor could pull up normal diagnoses--and the computer also say what a person who was a trained homeopath would say, or a trained doctor in traditional chinese medicine, or someone who was an Ayurvedic doctor, et cetera. The doctor could then leverage all that knowledge into more advanced solutions--even if their training wasn't necessarily in that field.
Having said all that, I think one of the main uses of a doctor is their intuition--and that isn't exactly replaceable by a computer.
20%? Where did ya get that number from? If it were that high, I should think that people would have given up on e-commerce.
thanks for the info...drop me a line if on it if you don't mind. my stay there wasn't long enough to see the collapse.
The last film I saw was SW2:AOTC in a DLP theater. Now I know why DLP is so cool--the brightness is amazing, so the first ten minutes of MIB2 was spent thinking "god...its just not as bright."
...and his gf was way too cute.
****spoilers alert*****
Anyway, i think i generally liked it enough, though there were a few cheezy moments. My biggest disappointment is that they didn't develop the video store guy enough...here's a guy who, having seen all those mysteries unknown videos, who probably has a good idea of what MIB does, and he really wasn't showing it off (which woulda really annoyed Kay and Jay since they try to be all secret and shit.) C'mon...he coulda had his own black sunglasses or something.