It's not my friends/acquaintances that I'm worried about. And frankly I think the "more information / better communication will make us will make us more tolerant" line is wishful thinking. There have always been groups on the edge of society that were harshly treated if their (harmless) habits were exposed. Mutually Assured Destruction doesn't help in those cases - the majority may redefine all the sins that the majority commits to be socially acceptable, but not the minority sins.
Furthermore, I don't really buy the idea that lack of privacy is something that is good for society. Your relationship with your customers is not the same as the one with your boss or coworkers or parents or friends or spouse or kids. It's not so much that I want to keep things secret so much as I want them to be presented in context, which is why we tend to only share private aspects of our life when we think someone knows us well enough to understand them. People will always be unduly influenced by first impressions - it's fundamental psychology, not culture - and so I think this compartmentalization of our personal lives will always be valuable to some extent.
Even if this generation becomes more tolerant, the previous generation is still going around for quite some time, and will have disproportionate control of politics and business for that time. Most of the benefits that result from this newfound lack of privacy will take a full generation to come to fruition, whereas the damage it causes can be felt now.
Finally, even if society becomes less judgmental in personal life, there will always be profit/power motive in using your information against you. I don't trust the government or the insurance companies to look the other way when given info they can use against me, and if history is any indication, governments and corporations will aways be untrustworthy.
So, I really don't think this Victorian judgment bullshit is going away anytime soon, and I'll keep my Victorian privacy till then thank-you-very-much:)
Gah, I knew this was going to happen, but I get sick of having to pepper my writing with so many qualifiers that it becomes nothing but.
So to make it absolutely clear - no I don't think that there is a Universal Atheist Doctrine apart from the obvious disbelief in god. However, the individuals who I knew, like most people who have spent time thinking out their beliefs, had developed them into a fairly coherent system. This included, for example, thoughts on how everything can be explained without the need for god and how all human traits, even ones people like to think of as higher than nature and thus evidence of human spirituality, are the result of evolution. All well and good. This framework for explaining their beliefs was, for all practical purposes, their doctrine. Yes, I know the word is not a perfect fit, hence the phrase "so to speak". Furthermore, these specific individuals were always quite quick to use this framework to explain away any faults they might have rather than admit that there is anything about themselves or their behavior that they might want to change.
This is not a strawman, nor an indictment of all atheists (I consider myself one) - it is a anecdote, nothing more nothing less. I could give other anecdotes about how the behaviors of people of various political bents caused me to have poor initial opinions of those groups as well. The purpose in sharing any of these is not to stereotype all members of the group, but to let them know how the actions of some affect the reputation of the whole. Hopefully, those to whom the criticism applies will think more about their behavior, and those to whom it doesn't will consider speaking up more to avoid being drown out by a vocal minority.
Hehe, I just noticed that both of the replies I made in this thread were to you:) I'm not picking you - you just had some of the more interesting comments in the thread I guess.
And to add to this post, I think it is probably the teachings of Buddism as a whole, of which the lack of free will is just a component, that leads you to react the way you do, and that the concept of no free will in other contexts will lead to other behavior.
Its more of a [concept] of working to end the suffering of others (or at least think you are doing so) that motivates moral action in people who don't believe in free will. I would extend that to say that it is true of all people, not just ones that don't believe in free will. You don't have to believe that someone had no choice in order to choose for yourself not to retaliate. You don't have to believe in the lack of free will to believe that escalating a problem will cause more suffering that than turning your cheek.
But lets be honest here - the reason that we work to end the suffering of others is because it makes us feel better when we do so, and we feel worse when we stand by and do nothing. Self justification is a way of blowing off these feelings, or redirecting them in anger towards the people we think are "telling us whats right and wrong". In my experience I have seen many more people use the concept of no free will as a means of self justification than I have seen react in the manner that you have.
As as side note, it was the selfish self-justifying attitudes of most of the atheists that I knew which kept me searching for meaning within the church for as long as I did. Of course, most Christians did this as well, but I blamed that squarely on them as the Bible didn't seem to support it, whereas with the atheists it was a stated part of their doctrine, so to speak.
The only chance we have of any free will at all is in quantum weirdness which is not much free will to speak of Here's a thought experiment I've had in the past - I'd be interested in more mathematically inclined folks chiming in on whether it is valid or not. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem states that any sufficiently complex formal system cannot be both consistant and complete. Now if we were to assume a deterministic world, like Einstein and Newton believed in, then our universe is a consistant formal system, where the state of the universe is a statement in system, and the laws of physics are the rules for deriving other valid statements. By Godel, this means that there are states of the universe that are true (consistant with the system), but cannot be derived by the rules of physics. Now as an observer, upon seeing this state, you would simply assume that your understanding of the laws of physics were lacking, and you would then amend your understanding physics to encompass this new behavior. However, this is indistinguishable from the situation where the rules never existed at all prior to the state occurring. In other words you could have an active being outside of nature that kept adding rules to the system as he went along, but all his miracles would be explainable in retrospect. Of course this puts limits on this god - he cannot contradict the rules he has already proclaimed. Or more poetically, when god speaks, the very core of the world adjusts itself to the fulfillment of that word and the word cannot be broken.
Now what is Free Will other than the idea that we are more than biological automatons - that we have the ability to act outside of the laws of nature, that we are gods in a limited sense? Now imagine that each of us has a small walled off black box that we are gods over, whose laws are determined by the choices that we make over time. We don't determine the interfaces of these black boxes - that is the realm of the general laws of the universe, just what goes on inside them. And like god, we can't unchoose the choices we have made - they have shaped us permanently - but we can continue to make choices.
And this is where it gets interesting. If there is only one supernatural being, the difference between him making up the rules as he goes verses him creating a world with all the rules in place and let them play out, is just splitting hairs. However, if there are multiple supernatural beings then it makes all the difference. And yet if the influence of these other beings on the laws of physics was very subtle because it only acted locally, the difference would still appear superficially to be non-existant even though a difference did exist. We would not be aware of the existence of these smaller realms for a very long time. In the mean time they would look random, and once discovered they would appear to follow rules that were very complex, and varied from realm to realm.
What is this black box? I don't know. It could be the branes or tiny rolled up dimensions of string theory, hidden in some "quantum weirdness" or any other number of things. But now were getting into a "god of the gaps" argument - I can't prove that these exist, nor am I trying to. I don't even necessarily believe that this is how the universe works - it's just an example that shows that while determinism and free will are concepts that sound completely and utterly in contradiction with one another, they don't have to be. And I'm no quantum physicist but I'd have to imagine that the determinism + randomness that it expouses if anything has even more wiggle room for free will.
Yeah, this is stupid. At least with the TV License, people only had to pay if they owned a tuner, whose main purpose was to watch the broadcast content, the vast majority of which was BBC produced. There were exceptions like folks that had a TV with tuner but only used it as a DVD monitor, but it at least attempted to be targeted at people using the service. This is just ridiculous - there are so many applications of broadband that BBC content is a tiny minority. If they are concerned about their revenue stream drying up as media moves online, they should just limit their online content to folks that paid the TV license rather than allowing all UK IP addresses like they do now.
If you think it's hard now, just imagine what we had to do before USB keyboards. How the heck am I supposed to press three L keys and two T keys with a single PS2 port? Thank Hubbard for network terminals.
This is in response to several posts here concerning whether the auction costs are going to affect the consumer costs.
The biggest question is how much competition they will have. This newly reallocated spectrum will primarily be used for some sort of wireless broadband. The bandwidth available will make existing 2G, 3G wireless technologies look like a joke, so these are not serious competitors. It will overlap with the hardline broadband market somewhat, so there will be some competition there. But the largest competition will come from other wireless broadband providers. IE the various companies that picked up chunks of spectrum in this last auction are by and large the only ones that will be major players in this new market.
Now if there was no competition whatsoever, then Verizon would charge whatever the market would bear, and would continue doing so long after they had recouped whatever sunk costs they had. However, there is going to be some competition, so they won't be able to get away with this completely.
If there was fierce competition, they might continue lower their prices to meet the competitors with no regard to the short-term affect on recouping their investment, just to get marketshare in the hope it will generate more revenue in the future. But this is unlikely to happen either, given the limited number of players.
Their competitors will have their own sunk costs, and shareholders that are eager to see a return on this investment. How low they are willing to go in a price war will absolutely take this into consideration. So raising the price of one bidder would not effect the final price to the consumer that much, and a company that insanely overbid would suffer in the stock market eventually. But raising the floor price for all the bidders would have an effect on the price to the consumer.
Without knowing more details about how Google placed it's bids in the C-Block once the reserve was met, then it is hard to know how many companies were affected by it.
Now, if they pushed Verizon to bid higher to win the contract won't they just charge the end users more? That was my first thought reading the summary - bidding-up just to raise the final price is not a cool thing to do, and does not benifit citizens/tax-payers/consumers, as it will increase the cost of anything deployed in the C Block, and delay uptake. However...
Google's top priority heading into the auction was to make sure that bidding on the so-called "C Block" reached the $4.6 billion reserve price that would trigger the important "open applications" and "open handsets" license conditions. We were also prepared to gain the nationwide C Block licenses at a price somewhat higher than the reserve price....
We're glad that we did. Based on the way that the bidding played out, our participation in the auction helped ensure that the C Block met the reserve price. In fact, in ten of the bidding rounds we actually raised our own bid -- even though no one was bidding against us -- to ensure aggressive bidding on the C Block. It does sound like they were only bidding up against themselves when the price was below the reserve - but I don't know why they would bid below the reserve to begin with if they were genuinely determined to see the reserve met, and genuinely willing to purchase the spectrum at that price.
In turn, that helped increase the revenues raised for the U.S. Treasury. I still find it extremely odd that they would mention this as a "good thing" at all. Seeing as how the number of rounds were not fixed (bidding continued until a round occurred with no increases in bids), the bidding strategy they described was not the best way to obtain their stated goals - they should have placed their first bid at the reserve price and then not bid higher until/unless someone else outbid them. Unless they were bidding themselves up above the reserve because had an unstated goal of running up the price for their competitors.
The CIO isn't the only thing new about this company. Back in September Terra Firma, a private equity firm, bought out EMI. These new owners are very cost conscious and have been making drastic changes across the board. These include a new CEO, a new CIO, cutting 1-2 thousand staff (out of 5.5 thousand total), being the first of the major labels to sell DRM-free music on a wide scale, cutting the amount of funding RIAA and IFPI get to prosecute file sharers and threatening to end it all together.
In general the changes have been very consumer friendly, but several big artists have left out of concern that this decimated EMI will not be able to promote their acts as well as they have in the past.
For those interested in how they come up with that 16.2 million number, it works like this. A true 8-bit display has (2^8)^3 = 16,777,216 colors/pixel. A true 6-bit display has (2^6)^3 = 262,144 colors/pixel.
Now consider dithering four pixels in a single channel (say red), where each of the four pixels has an intensity of either V or V+1. If half of the pixel are V and half are V+1, the dithered value will appear to have an intensity of V+1/2, same for 1/4 or 3/4 - effectively giving three more intensities between V and V+1. So there are (2^6-1)*3 dithered values that each channel can represent in addition to the (2^6) real intensities. This gives a grand total of:
Since all the colors you see on a monitor are dithered (r,g,b) anyway, the 16.2 million colors wouldn't be lie by itself - if they claimed 16.2 million colors at 1/4 the resolution and 4 times the dot pitch, but of course they don't bother to mention that fact. What is par
My interpretation is not that I don't like rating things average, but that selection bias means that I only watch things that I expect to like, and more often than not that turns out to be the case. Every now and then I'll end up disliking a movie that I had high hopes for, or watch a movie I know I won't like with someone else, but for the most part I enjoy the (few) movies I see. And since you only rate the films you've watched, the majority of ratings by the majority of people will be positive.
But that's okay. In this context, the information from rating comes from clustering according to what movies you liked, and the extent to which you liked them isn't as important. Most of the info that netflix has about your viewing habits is binary - did you rent it or not. The main purpose of ranking is just to let them know about movies you rented and didn't like, or movies you watched outside of netflix. So, even if the vast majority of your movies are rated okay, good, or great, that is really all you need.
My iTunes ratings on the other hand, are another issue:)
My first thought was that this was okay, since "Apple Software" only referred to the proprietary software, and not the "OpenSource Components". In that case it would only restrict the use of the modified LGPL code when it is used in conjunction with their proprietary code. In otherwords, it wouldn't restrict the use of the LGPL code at all, just reiterate that the proprietary code that it is linked against still has all the same restrictions even if you swap-out the LGPL libraries with modified ones. However, looking closer at the license:
1. General. The Apple and any third party software, documentation and any fonts accompanying this License whether on disk, in read only memory, on any other media or in any other form (collectively the "Apple Software") are licensed, not sold, to you by Apple Inc. So it appears as thought the "OpenSourced Components" are included in the definition of the "Apple Software", and thus this could be interpreted as placing restrictions on their use that is in contradiction with the terms of the LGPL. Of course, if it ever went to trial the inevitable outcome would be that this section would be nullified or interpreted according to my first paragraph.
First to file does not invalidate prior art. Most of the confusion here is about what does and does not constitutes prior art. Prior art includes published data and shipped products, as these are easily dated and verified. It does not include lab notebooks and internal prototypes, as they are not. The only thing that first-to-file changes is that these internal documents are no longer considered when determining who invented something first.
I've never had all that great of an experience with remote desktop outside of a LAN environment. Given the choice of using remote desktop or working directly on the laptop, I would happily lug the laptop home. Oh, and I was also assuming that working on company documents or connecting to the company VPN (not counting remote desktop) using personal machines was verboten. I suppose that might not be true everywhere.
If this is the case it is natural that no solution is going to work. Oh, I think there is a solution that will work, he just needs to get a lockable container that is a little bigger. Something that can't be stolen, and will hold all his equipment without inconveineince. Something that will make him feel more at home again. That's right, he needs to get a Tuff Shed. Just plop it right down in the middle of the cubefarm. Sure he won't have any lighting, but he's a programmer dog-gone-it; the glow of his monitor is all the light he needs. And when the boss asks what the hell this monstrosity is doing in his building, he'll just mumble something about a stapler. So they might move him down to the basement. A true hacker is only truly at home when in the basement. See, there is a solution. You just need to think out of the cube - and into the shed. Tuff Shed.
My main machine is a laptop, and I have never once brought it home - if I need to work I'll be at the office, billing time. The reason I have a laptop is because I am on several projects, and spend time in 5 labs spread across two buildings, depending on what equipment I need and who I am working with. I also get sent on business trips once or twice a year, and I'll bring my laptop with me then. Even if you only work out of the office once a month, the hassle saved by not having to keep files in sync between multiple computers/flashdrives makes a laptop much more convenient than a desktop.
That said, if he was planning on working at home, I don't see why he wouldn't just take the laptop home rather than leaving it on. Unless he wasn't planning on working at home, but just leaves the computer on in case he gets the odd "emergency" call. That I could definitely understand. I wouldn't want to drag my laptop home everyday if I wasn't planning on using it - it just becomes a liability then.
The reason for this is simple - people have a personal connection with their pets and their friends but not with strangers. The solution is equally simple - allow rich people to keep poor people as pets. All their needs will be taken care of and, they will have a more leisured life than the vast majority of people even in the first world. Instead of a chihuahua, Paris can doll around the street with her little Mexican kid. Instead of having a hunting dog, the Joneses can have their very own Appalachian Redneck. An why have a pit bull when you can have your property protected by an Urban Gangsta? Naturally we would need places to train these people to be obedient - we could call them public schools.
Okay, this iPhone pwns all mantra is getting a bit ridiculous, especially in the context of Android where it is almost completely irrelevant. The iPhone has been quite successful - it has surpassed sales of Microsoft, and could very well overtake sales of RIM in time after the enterprise apps are officially released. But even if it does that is only a fraction of the cellphone market.
Do you honestly think that Nokia, Motorola, LG, Ericson, Samsung, Kyocera, and more all going to be put out of business by a single company, nay a single phone? As 1337 as the iPhone is, there will never be a single phone that is best for everyone. That not the way it works. These other phones need some OS to run and the current offerings suck. I would be ecstatic if the "only" affect that Android had was to wipe the Symbian/J2ME/BREW stack of the face of the earth. If it managed to do that, it would have the majority of the cellphone market, even if it was never anywhere near competitive with the iPhone, and even considering the growing popularity of smartphones. If that's failure sign me up on the loosing team.
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The first thing I though of were the acrobatics in "The Gods Themselves" by Asimov.
It's not my friends/acquaintances that I'm worried about. And frankly I think the "more information / better communication will make us will make us more tolerant" line is wishful thinking. There have always been groups on the edge of society that were harshly treated if their (harmless) habits were exposed. Mutually Assured Destruction doesn't help in those cases - the majority may redefine all the sins that the majority commits to be socially acceptable, but not the minority sins.
:)
Furthermore, I don't really buy the idea that lack of privacy is something that is good for society. Your relationship with your customers is not the same as the one with your boss or coworkers or parents or friends or spouse or kids. It's not so much that I want to keep things secret so much as I want them to be presented in context, which is why we tend to only share private aspects of our life when we think someone knows us well enough to understand them. People will always be unduly influenced by first impressions - it's fundamental psychology, not culture - and so I think this compartmentalization of our personal lives will always be valuable to some extent.
Even if this generation becomes more tolerant, the previous generation is still going around for quite some time, and will have disproportionate control of politics and business for that time. Most of the benefits that result from this newfound lack of privacy will take a full generation to come to fruition, whereas the damage it causes can be felt now.
Finally, even if society becomes less judgmental in personal life, there will always be profit/power motive in using your information against you. I don't trust the government or the insurance companies to look the other way when given info they can use against me, and if history is any indication, governments and corporations will aways be untrustworthy.
So, I really don't think this Victorian judgment bullshit is going away anytime soon, and I'll keep my Victorian privacy till then thank-you-very-much
Hah, I knew all along - the government's new antiterrorism powers were created solely to use on civilians.
Gah, I knew this was going to happen, but I get sick of having to pepper my writing with so many qualifiers that it becomes nothing but.
So to make it absolutely clear - no I don't think that there is a Universal Atheist Doctrine apart from the obvious disbelief in god. However, the individuals who I knew, like most people who have spent time thinking out their beliefs, had developed them into a fairly coherent system. This included, for example, thoughts on how everything can be explained without the need for god and how all human traits, even ones people like to think of as higher than nature and thus evidence of human spirituality, are the result of evolution. All well and good. This framework for explaining their beliefs was, for all practical purposes, their doctrine. Yes, I know the word is not a perfect fit, hence the phrase "so to speak". Furthermore, these specific individuals were always quite quick to use this framework to explain away any faults they might have rather than admit that there is anything about themselves or their behavior that they might want to change.
This is not a strawman, nor an indictment of all atheists (I consider myself one) - it is a anecdote, nothing more nothing less. I could give other anecdotes about how the behaviors of people of various political bents caused me to have poor initial opinions of those groups as well. The purpose in sharing any of these is not to stereotype all members of the group, but to let them know how the actions of some affect the reputation of the whole. Hopefully, those to whom the criticism applies will think more about their behavior, and those to whom it doesn't will consider speaking up more to avoid being drown out by a vocal minority.
Hehe, I just noticed that both of the replies I made in this thread were to you:) I'm not picking you - you just had some of the more interesting comments in the thread I guess.
And to add to this post, I think it is probably the teachings of Buddism as a whole, of which the lack of free will is just a component, that leads you to react the way you do, and that the concept of no free will in other contexts will lead to other behavior.
But lets be honest here - the reason that we work to end the suffering of others is because it makes us feel better when we do so, and we feel worse when we stand by and do nothing. Self justification is a way of blowing off these feelings, or redirecting them in anger towards the people we think are "telling us whats right and wrong". In my experience I have seen many more people use the concept of no free will as a means of self justification than I have seen react in the manner that you have.
As as side note, it was the selfish self-justifying attitudes of most of the atheists that I knew which kept me searching for meaning within the church for as long as I did. Of course, most Christians did this as well, but I blamed that squarely on them as the Bible didn't seem to support it, whereas with the atheists it was a stated part of their doctrine, so to speak.
Now what is Free Will other than the idea that we are more than biological automatons - that we have the ability to act outside of the laws of nature, that we are gods in a limited sense? Now imagine that each of us has a small walled off black box that we are gods over, whose laws are determined by the choices that we make over time. We don't determine the interfaces of these black boxes - that is the realm of the general laws of the universe, just what goes on inside them. And like god, we can't unchoose the choices we have made - they have shaped us permanently - but we can continue to make choices.
And this is where it gets interesting. If there is only one supernatural being, the difference between him making up the rules as he goes verses him creating a world with all the rules in place and let them play out, is just splitting hairs. However, if there are multiple supernatural beings then it makes all the difference. And yet if the influence of these other beings on the laws of physics was very subtle because it only acted locally, the difference would still appear superficially to be non-existant even though a difference did exist. We would not be aware of the existence of these smaller realms for a very long time. In the mean time they would look random, and once discovered they would appear to follow rules that were very complex, and varied from realm to realm.
What is this black box? I don't know. It could be the branes or tiny rolled up dimensions of string theory, hidden in some "quantum weirdness" or any other number of things. But now were getting into a "god of the gaps" argument - I can't prove that these exist, nor am I trying to. I don't even necessarily believe that this is how the universe works - it's just an example that shows that while determinism and free will are concepts that sound completely and utterly in contradiction with one another, they don't have to be. And I'm no quantum physicist but I'd have to imagine that the determinism + randomness that it expouses if anything has even more wiggle room for free will.
Yeah, this is stupid. At least with the TV License, people only had to pay if they owned a tuner, whose main purpose was to watch the broadcast content, the vast majority of which was BBC produced. There were exceptions like folks that had a TV with tuner but only used it as a DVD monitor, but it at least attempted to be targeted at people using the service. This is just ridiculous - there are so many applications of broadband that BBC content is a tiny minority. If they are concerned about their revenue stream drying up as media moves online, they should just limit their online content to folks that paid the TV license rather than allowing all UK IP addresses like they do now.
If you think it's hard now, just imagine what we had to do before USB keyboards. How the heck am I supposed to press three L keys and two T keys with a single PS2 port? Thank Hubbard for network terminals.
This is in response to several posts here concerning whether the auction costs are going to affect the consumer costs.
The biggest question is how much competition they will have. This newly reallocated spectrum will primarily be used for some sort of wireless broadband. The bandwidth available will make existing 2G, 3G wireless technologies look like a joke, so these are not serious competitors. It will overlap with the hardline broadband market somewhat, so there will be some competition there. But the largest competition will come from other wireless broadband providers. IE the various companies that picked up chunks of spectrum in this last auction are by and large the only ones that will be major players in this new market.
Now if there was no competition whatsoever, then Verizon would charge whatever the market would bear, and would continue doing so long after they had recouped whatever sunk costs they had. However, there is going to be some competition, so they won't be able to get away with this completely.
If there was fierce competition, they might continue lower their prices to meet the competitors with no regard to the short-term affect on recouping their investment, just to get marketshare in the hope it will generate more revenue in the future. But this is unlikely to happen either, given the limited number of players.
Their competitors will have their own sunk costs, and shareholders that are eager to see a return on this investment. How low they are willing to go in a price war will absolutely take this into consideration. So raising the price of one bidder would not effect the final price to the consumer that much, and a company that insanely overbid would suffer in the stock market eventually. But raising the floor price for all the bidders would have an effect on the price to the consumer.
Without knowing more details about how Google placed it's bids in the C-Block once the reserve was met, then it is hard to know how many companies were affected by it.
We're glad that we did. Based on the way that the bidding played out, our participation in the auction helped ensure that the C Block met the reserve price. In fact, in ten of the bidding rounds we actually raised our own bid -- even though no one was bidding against us -- to ensure aggressive bidding on the C Block. It does sound like they were only bidding up against themselves when the price was below the reserve - but I don't know why they would bid below the reserve to begin with if they were genuinely determined to see the reserve met, and genuinely willing to purchase the spectrum at that price. In turn, that helped increase the revenues raised for the U.S. Treasury. I still find it extremely odd that they would mention this as a "good thing" at all. Seeing as how the number of rounds were not fixed (bidding continued until a round occurred with no increases in bids), the bidding strategy they described was not the best way to obtain their stated goals - they should have placed their first bid at the reserve price and then not bid higher until/unless someone else outbid them. Unless they were bidding themselves up above the reserve because had an unstated goal of running up the price for their competitors.
The CIO isn't the only thing new about this company. Back in September Terra Firma, a private equity firm, bought out EMI. These new owners are very cost conscious and have been making drastic changes across the board. These include a new CEO, a new CIO, cutting 1-2 thousand staff (out of 5.5 thousand total), being the first of the major labels to sell DRM-free music on a wide scale, cutting the amount of funding RIAA and IFPI get to prosecute file sharers and threatening to end it all together.
In general the changes have been very consumer friendly, but several big artists have left out of concern that this decimated EMI will not be able to promote their acts as well as they have in the past.
For those interested in how they come up with that 16.2 million number, it works like this.
A true 8-bit display has (2^8)^3 = 16,777,216 colors/pixel.
A true 6-bit display has (2^6)^3 = 262,144 colors/pixel.
Now consider dithering four pixels in a single channel (say red), where each of the four pixels has an intensity of either V or V+1. If half of the pixel are V and half are V+1, the dithered value will appear to have an intensity of V+1/2, same for 1/4 or 3/4 - effectively giving three more intensities between V and V+1. So there are (2^6-1)*3 dithered values that each channel can represent in addition to the (2^6) real intensities. This gives a grand total of:
Dithered 6-bit display has ((2^6-1)*3 + 2^6)^3 = 16,194,277 colors/(4 pixels).
Since all the colors you see on a monitor are dithered (r,g,b) anyway, the 16.2 million colors wouldn't be lie by itself - if they claimed 16.2 million colors at 1/4 the resolution and 4 times the dot pitch, but of course they don't bother to mention that fact. What is par
My interpretation is not that I don't like rating things average, but that selection bias means that I only watch things that I expect to like, and more often than not that turns out to be the case. Every now and then I'll end up disliking a movie that I had high hopes for, or watch a movie I know I won't like with someone else, but for the most part I enjoy the (few) movies I see. And since you only rate the films you've watched, the majority of ratings by the majority of people will be positive.
:)
But that's okay. In this context, the information from rating comes from clustering according to what movies you liked, and the extent to which you liked them isn't as important. Most of the info that netflix has about your viewing habits is binary - did you rent it or not. The main purpose of ranking is just to let them know about movies you rented and didn't like, or movies you watched outside of netflix. So, even if the vast majority of your movies are rated okay, good, or great, that is really all you need.
My iTunes ratings on the other hand, are another issue
This can't be Windows 7 only - Linux has had Direct X11 for years. This is yet another case of Microsoft playing catchup.
First to file does not invalidate prior art. Most of the confusion here is about what does and does not constitutes prior art. Prior art includes published data and shipped products, as these are easily dated and verified. It does not include lab notebooks and internal prototypes, as they are not. The only thing that first-to-file changes is that these internal documents are no longer considered when determining who invented something first.
I've never had all that great of an experience with remote desktop outside of a LAN environment. Given the choice of using remote desktop or working directly on the laptop, I would happily lug the laptop home. Oh, and I was also assuming that working on company documents or connecting to the company VPN (not counting remote desktop) using personal machines was verboten. I suppose that might not be true everywhere.
My main machine is a laptop, and I have never once brought it home - if I need to work I'll be at the office, billing time. The reason I have a laptop is because I am on several projects, and spend time in 5 labs spread across two buildings, depending on what equipment I need and who I am working with. I also get sent on business trips once or twice a year, and I'll bring my laptop with me then. Even if you only work out of the office once a month, the hassle saved by not having to keep files in sync between multiple computers/flashdrives makes a laptop much more convenient than a desktop.
That said, if he was planning on working at home, I don't see why he wouldn't just take the laptop home rather than leaving it on. Unless he wasn't planning on working at home, but just leaves the computer on in case he gets the odd "emergency" call. That I could definitely understand. I wouldn't want to drag my laptop home everyday if I wasn't planning on using it - it just becomes a liability then.
They were right to come visiting you terrorist you :)
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Read a fucking dictionary. This is absolutely censorship. What you meant to say is that this isn't a Constitutional Free Speech issue.
Okay, this iPhone pwns all mantra is getting a bit ridiculous, especially in the context of Android where it is almost completely irrelevant. The iPhone has been quite successful - it has surpassed sales of Microsoft, and could very well overtake sales of RIM in time after the enterprise apps are officially released. But even if it does that is only a fraction of the cellphone market.
Do you honestly think that Nokia, Motorola, LG, Ericson, Samsung, Kyocera, and more all going to be put out of business by a single company, nay a single phone? As 1337 as the iPhone is, there will never be a single phone that is best for everyone. That not the way it works. These other phones need some OS to run and the current offerings suck. I would be ecstatic if the "only" affect that Android had was to wipe the Symbian/J2ME/BREW stack of the face of the earth. If it managed to do that, it would have the majority of the cellphone market, even if it was never anywhere near competitive with the iPhone, and even considering the growing popularity of smartphones. If that's failure sign me up on the loosing team.
slavery is acceptable as long as it can be done sustainably, without driving the human population to extinction? Good to know.