As opposed to a "neutral net", regulated and censored by the *government*?!
What part of the internet has the government "censored" to date? I've been reading articles via Slashdot and the EFF for years, but I can't recall a single instance of this.
China, on the other hand, is much more authoritative, and has a much stronger interest in censoring the internet. Yet they've largely failed. Why? Because even with an army of government-dime censors, it's really impossible to censor anything on the net. The same thing happens as when the government censors obscene material - the targeted item becomes hyped, copied, and traded on black markets. Think 2 Live Crew: their "banned" album sold tons of copies - notwithstanding its bombastically crappy music!
The difference: It's impossible to block information, no matter how bad the government wants to do so. But it's entirely possible to block competitors - just killfile google.com until it pays its Broadband Access Regulatory Fees, or whatever deceptive moniker the Telcos want to slap on it. That's what should worry you.
How much taxpayer money was already paid to the "service providers" for fiber optics to every home in the country?
True - and it's exactly like every other tax-supported network, such as roads and the mail system. These projects are ultra-critical national infrastructure, and they seem to do just fine with public support.
It's telling that these other systems also have "neutrality," and it works extremely well. The USPS has no interest in delaying your parcel by two weeks. Every driver on the freeway is bound by the same set of rules. And guess what - when we need extra capacity, the taxpayers buy it! What's wrong with that system?
The difference is that unlike these government projects, the internet backbone is almost entirely privatized. It's true that ultraconservatives ordinarily support privatization as "more efficient" than government support. But haven't we recently seen some phenomenally anti-consumer behavior in privatized industries? And this administration is hardly a "typical" conservative gang - the federal bureaucracy has grown explosively under its leadership. Odd, that. I guess it depends whether the heads of the corporate shepherds are your friends.
The problem, as future economic historians will state in tragic retrospect, is that unlike the federal government, private corporations do not have their customers' best interests at heart - often they're in direct conflict. We don't put Microsoft in charge of our missile defense network, because every 20 minutes, they'd be hassling the federal government to pay their monthly licensing fees for the laser-guidance software!
It's more evidence of our shameful government that has completely discarded the notion of serving the people.
But I disagree with you. Consider this: How sexy did "resource management" sound before it was well-implemented in Dune 2, Warcraft, and Command & Conquer? Tech trees and odds ratios used to be the exclusive domain of those scary, pinheaded, turn-based-wargamer types.
So, I understand. When you approach this idea, you're thinking "neighborhood block watch," which ranks just above "after-school special" on the gamer-ometer.
However, I'm thinking a development-based team - dynamic, humanlike, complex personalities - artificial-intelligence algorithms that define how your guys respond to ambiguous situations. I think it has promise!
Now if only I can convince Blizzard to throw $10MM at me to prototype it, I'll be all set.
How do you make the game a challenge without giving everyone Kryptonite rings?
:shrug: That's the problem with modern games... if you have a man with infinite strength, developers can only imagine games that involve him using it to fight evil.
How about not focusing on the obvious? If feats of strength become uninteresting, then how about basing a game on other challenges - stuff that relies on other skills, or tests even the mettle of a Superman?
For instance:
Forcing Superman to choose between several simultaneous events. (yeah yeah, Superman III, yeah I know it sucked.) Could lead to some kind of subtle ethics-based character refinement, kind of like Ultima IV.
Having Superman fight crime indirectly by serving as the leader of a community task force, teaching local citizens how to fight crime. You have to teach them good police skills - the proper balance between ineffectiveness, mob justice, and unnecessary personal risks. You could stop all of the crime by yourself, but the victory is in having your (entirely mortal, and all too human) team members become effective cops.
Using Superman's skills in an unusual role. For instance: Superman is powerful, but not omniscient; just because he has X-ray vision doesn't know where to look. How about capitalizing on that? Might be fun to see Superman cast as a private detective, clandestinely flying from rooftop to rooftop in order to tail a gangster.
That's ten minutes of brainstorming by one guy. I wonder what all of the talented folks at Blizzard could imagineer together?
I imagine they justify it as building their brand and capturing more users to their "portal" if you can call it that, and they are certainly using it to push Google Talk, which with VoIP though IM is kind of the next big battlefield in communications.
I don't know how much ROI they get out of this. Again, POP access to GMail makes Google totally invisible for this process. It may cross my mind that I'm using Google when I give out my email address, but that's about it. And I certainly never see ads for Google Talk as part of my POP access.
And in exchange for this very, very small amount of "mindshare," Google provides me with about 2,000,000,000 bytes of space for mail storage, as well as the computer hardware and network infrastructure to receive, store, and deliver this mail to me.
This just doesn't seem to be a high-yield strategy for Google. I'm very glad that they do this (since I use their POP access daily) - but if I were their bizdev guy, I'd encourage Google to eliminate POP access. That way, everyone would use GMail.com, and Google could pitch its ads to email users, etc.
In some respects they are like Microsoft in that they have a big revenue stream though their search ads, so they can throw money to monopoli...errr.. win market share in other areas by giving stuff away for free.
"Giving stuff away for free" is what doomed the.com economy to bankruptcy and an investment crash. The fact that Google can sustain a low-yield venture, doesn't make it not a low-yield venture.
And no business is a perpetual hegemony - not even Microsoft. There is no "manifest destiny" in business.
The last update of Yahoo IM on Windows is a monster...
Ugh - I know; I use Yahoo Messenger, and I loathe it. I've been itching to switch to Trillian for a few weeks now.
Because the supermajority of defendants will be uninsured.
Let's start with the presumption that the RIAA has presumably already set its settlement offers to maximize return on uninsured people. This means that altering these offers in any way will result in lower yield for the RIAA for uninsured defendants.
Now let's develop that presumption as a hypothetical equation:
P = the probability that any defendant will be insured. (The RIAA can't determine this value for any defendant, making this a crap shoot.)
G = the gained money that the RIAA could make off of an insured defendant (on average) by adjusting the insurance rate.
L = the money that the RIAA would lose off of an uninsured defendant (on average) by adjusting the insurance rate.
The critical equation is: N = (G * P) - (L * (1-P)).
N, here, is the net profit or loss of the adjustment. If N is positive, then adjusting the RIAA settlement policy results in more money, so it should change. If N is negative, then adjusting the policy would result in less money, so it should not change.
I posit that N will undoubtedly be negative. I base this suggestion on the inference that P will be 0.00001 or smaller, i.e., only one out of every 100,000 defendants will be insured. So even if an alteration nets an additional $100,000 from an insured defendant but loses $1 from an uninsured defendant, then at an insurance rate of 0.00001, the RIAA only breaks even.
Gmail supports POP so you never have to even visit the site, you can use the mail program of your choice on your machine. Gmail is a homerun winner as far as I'm concerned...
I like Gmail - it's my primary user interface. It's reliable and transparent, and I use it exactly as you've described.
However, when I use Outlook to fetch my mail from Gmail via POP, I wonder just what Google is getting out of this arrangement. Microsoft gets my money from the Outlook purchase. Gmail gets... what, exactly? Google is both completely invisible and completely uncompensated (by me) in this process. They get the ability to data-mine my email, I guess.
Huh? Like when there's an address in the email, and Google offers to map it for me?
I've been using Gmail for about two years, and I've never seen this feature. In fact, I'm looking at an email right now that clearly contains an address, and I see no link of any kind.
Like when there's a time in the email, and Google offers to put it on my calendar?
:shrug: Email and calendar appointments are routinely stored together, so that's not exactly a huge leap of innovation.
At least Google (and now others) are all on point together, sweating out the competition, working on that next great internet killer app, and they're all having to compete publicly for a change.
I agree that this is good, but if they just keep producing killer apps in the same fashion - producing Google SQL to compete with MS Access, Google Present! to compete with PowerPoint, etc. - then they might see just the same tepid response that they're receiving now.
Hypothetical: What if Google produces an analog for every single application that you use today, only it's free and on the web? Prediction: You still wouldn't use them, or would only use them occasionally.
Well, what's the problem, then? The problem is that web apps - Google's as much as anyone else's - don't offer the unified experience of a locally-installed software base.
Google Earth is a silo: you visit that site, and you do your satellite-spy thing, and then you leave.
Google Picasa is a silo: you visit the site, and you edit your photos, and then you leave.
Gmail is a silo: you visit the site, and you check and write email, and then you leave.
The model here is that every time you want to do something, you have to load up a browser, visit the site, and begin fresh work on some data. Data exchange between applications is limited at best: you might be able to extract some data (hoping it's in the right format) and upload it to another silo - but if not, you're strictly limited to copying and pasting some raw text.
Contrast this with your experiences working on a local software base. Everything is immediately available within a few clicks away from the Start Button, or the Mighty Apple, or your *n?x right-click menu - even if you don't have an internet connection. You have file associations; you have drag-and-drop; you have object linking; you have interoperability of office applications. And you have filesystem organization - if a project involves some email, some Word files, and a few spreadsheets, you can keep them all in the same folder.
You get none of this with the current generation of web apps.
Now if Google's gaggle of research efforts are some of the elements of a future GoogleOS, that's very promising. But they consistently (publicly) deny that that's their goal. And regardless of where Google might go tomorrow, it doesn't much impact what it is today: a company with many fledgling projects... but too little cohesion. Meanwhile, Microsoft is going more in this direction, with WinFS and Avalon and such. Its efforts are kind of sucky because it's not really motivated by competition, but at least its aim is correct.
I hope Google succeeds - if nothing else, Bob knows that the desktop software market has been stagnant since, oh, 1995 or so. We need some competition and fresh blood. But that's not a trend that one can extrapolate from its current model.
Nothing in this executive order (or in state and local laws that are being enacted all over the place) would stop eminent domain for needful public works. If your community needs a new freeway, school, or firehouse, eminent domain is still an option (preferably the option of last resort).
You're missing the context of this discussion thread. The post to which I was responding stated: "When it comes to the disposition of private property, only the people who own it should get votes." I was pointing out the problems with this position.
As you'll see in my other comments to this post, I like the text of Bush's executive order - and I think that the pre-Kelo eminent domain process was a very good balance. In other words, I agree with you.
When it comes to the disposition of private property, only the people who own it should get votes. After all, it sounds nice to take someone *else's* private property for your use, but not so nice to take *yours*.
Right. And since we'd need the unanimous consent of about 500 homeowners in order to build any freeway, we can count on never again building a municipal highway in America.
And yet, highways must be built.
Why should we tolerate the injustice of forcibly evicting a homeowner based on eminent domain? Because democracy = collective action, and except in the case of unanimity, someone is going to lose or be disappointed. We're balancing individual liberty vs. community progress... and since this is Slashdot, I'll quote Mr. Spock: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."
So where do we draw the line? Let's put someone in charge of the city's best interests, someone who's removed from the biases of the interested parties, and let's have them decide. And if they choose wrongly, we can replace them with someone more trustworthy...
Its really not a good thing, the deals the RIAA offer you for breach of copyright are only small compared to what they are entitled to sue you for, this will only encourage the RIAA to more vigourously prosecute and increase fines.
Two flaws in this argument:
The RIAA's settlements are already calculated to maximize their return. These are business decisions based on how much money they can extract from you without a fight. If you'd decline any settlement over or equal to $100, then they're going to offer you $99.99. The mechanics of this decision are driven by (1) their costs in fighting the suit, (2) their odds of winning at trial, and (3) their perception of your likelihood to settle - if none of these things change, then their settlement offer won't, either.
As for their perception of your likelihood to settle:
You don't have to tell them that you're insured, since it's irrelevant to the case. And I don't think that the Piratbyran Insurance Group is going to reveal that information to them voluntarily! So the RIAA would have no way to know if you're insured, and would have to act accordingly (i.e., by assuming that you're not.)
So why is there never a word said about the fourth branch of the federal government: the unconstitutional and entirely illegal regulatory branch?
There's plenty said about them. The CIA has been in the news an awful lot recently, as I recall. Even the dingy old U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is getting a suprising amount of ink these days.
The reason they're not discussed more is because their functions are pretty mundane. The public doesn't care how the NIH decides to award federal grants, or how the SEC polices the stock market. Just printing the letters "IRS" in an article headline will guarantee that the public ignores it.
This is an extremely deleterious consequence of America's love of drama - the undramatic goes unmonitored. Meanwhile, our politicians keep us amused (and distracted from their actions) by waving flags and conjuring images of terr'ists.
What are the alphabet agencies -- FDA, EPA, OSHA, and so on -- doing when they pass laws? And, while these laws are called regulations, so as not to upset anyone who might actually read the Constitution, the Webster's dictionary defines regulation as a rule, ordinance or law.
:shrug: Webster's is for colloquial English; I recommend trying Black's Law Dictionary. Unfortunately, my copy isn't here, but I'd bet my eye teeth that it does more than merely suggest that "law" and "regulation" are synonyms.
Agency regulations are not laws. Laws are rules that apply to your actions: things that you may do, or must do, or must not do. Agency regulations are rules that apply to the actions of an agency: how it can utilize a power (that has already been given to it by the Executive or Legislative), how it cannot utilize a power, etc.
It's true that an agency sometimes relies on its own regulations to determine how to treat you. But the agency's power to deal with you in such a way was given to it by a law. And if the agency oversteps its legal authority, then a regulation won't save it.
Example: The IRS has many regulations that dictate how you must pay your federal taxes. Yet, these regulations aren't laws - the law passed by Congress is that:
You must submit an annual federal income tax payment; and
The IRS is responsible for creating a tax formula that adheres to the dictates of the legislature; and
You must use the IRS formula, and follow the IRS submission procedures, to prove that you're paying the correct amount.
Now, what happens if the IRS believes that you've failed your legal duties under #1 or #3? It can't do anything to you! It has no such power. It merely tells the executive branch that you've violated the tax laws, and the executive prosecutes you for evasion - under the general tax laws passed by Congress.
And, of course, it can be reversed at the stroke of a pen by Bush or any future president.
Yeah, but imagine the political backlash. Kelo stands apart from almost every other recent SCOTUS decision by engendering bipartisan, across-the-board irritation. If the majority justices could've been voted out of office, they would have been. (This is one instance where the constitutional checks-and-balances system works admirably well: even though I disagree with the justices, I support their right to rule in their best conscience.)
Now, Bush may be underwiring his sagging ratings with this feel-good order - but can you really imagine a president announcing that he's changed his mind? Political seppuku, I tell ya...
Yeah. And we may as well rename the police to the "Ass-Beating Brigade."
My point is that both powers - police and eminent domain - are forceful powers that can be outrageously abused, but that also can be (and usually are) exercised for the public good. If you break a law, even for a damn good reason, then you're probably going to be arrested (and perhaps roughed up in the ordinary course of police work.) And if your house is in the way of a new and much-needed interplanet^K^K^K^K^K^K^K^K^K^K^K metropolitan highway, then it really sucks to be you, but the public needs your land.
Of course, with great power comes... nah, never mind, that fruit is too low-hanging.
While the executive order makes for nice PR, it has no effect on Kelo or any other action taken by local governments.
As well it shouldn't - such an order would be an unjustified intrusion into the powers reserved to the states, and hence unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment.
Furthermore, it's probably really only good as "advice" to the Attorney General.
Not just the AG, but the entire executive branch - which is almost always the branch that invokes eminent domain on behalf of the federal government. From TFA: "The Attorney General shall: (i) issue instructions to the heads of departments and agencies to implement the policy..., (ii) monitor takings by departments and agencies for compliance...," etc.
But you're correct that this is pretty limited, since virtually all eminent domain cases involve a state or local government. Nor could it (unless it were done in another manner, e.g., tied to state funding via the commerce clause.) And it's further weakened by the host of exceptions - see Sec. 3.
...not that the Bush administration cares to bother with respectin separation of powers.
Generally I agree with you, but in this case, your vitriol is unsupported. Also, the headline here ("Kelo repealed"... the decision "undo[es] the previous Kelo decision") is completely wrong and misleading and stupid. The poster, physicsphairy, should stick with physics.
(For once,) Bush isn't trumping the statement of the judiciary - he's not even addressing it, since his order doesn't use the word "constitutionality" at all.
Read as: "Whether or not the Supreme Court correctly granted us this power, we're ordering ourselves not to use it."
- David Stein
Re:I don't that is correct.
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I doubt the release of the files was known everywhere the moment it was mentioned on IRC.
Heh. I remember being on the undernet #quake channel the moment Quake 1 was released. Sheer madness... literally thousands of people just sitting on IRC waiting for news, with some top-level admins and an occasional id software employee popping in. Of course, the mods had to make the channel +m to keep order - and even then, the channel was filled with a steady stream of join and part notices.
Of course, everyone was constantly hitting id's FTP site, looking for the file - nothing, nothing, nothing. Suddenly someone posted a message to #quake saying, "yo it is there fuckers" - and so it was...
I had a log of that IRC session, but it got vaped in a hard drive crash.:(
You created or purchased and incorporated a host of different technologies, your customer install base incorporates tens of thousands of applications installed in millions of instances, and as a result your business model requires tremendous backward compatibility.
Backwards compatibility is indeed the bane of MS's existence.
Frankly, I don't see why they bother. Is it really important to support EMM386.EXE, or 80386 protected mode? How much value actually derives from ensuring that Vista can run old Windows 3.1 apps?
The irony is that in many cases, this compatibility is long gone. Ever try running an old SVGA game from 1994 with SoundBlaster Pro support on Windows XP? Or just about anything that relies on DOS4/GW? These models fail miserably under native Windows.
Of course, if you do want to play those games on your machine, you have several options: DOSBox, ScummVM, DOS4/GW stub replacements, etc. These neat projects emulate antiquated hardware and software with such accuracy that these old programs run very well.
And this brings me to my point in this post: Rather than struggling to provide legacy support for Windows 95 and older platforms, Microsoft should be stripping this functionality out of the Vista core - and building it into an emulator that gets bundled with Vista.
This should be eminently feasible for several reasons:
Emulation has made great strides in the past decade, even in freeware/open-source projects that people knock together in their spare time.
Microsoft already has some R&D in emulation, after acquiring Connectix's Virtual PC. (It's a shame that they let this great platform languish after they acquired it.)
Taking this functionality out of the Windows core would not only improve performance - perhaps vastly! - but would also improve security, since the old apps would run in the sandbox of the emulator.
Of all companies to author this emulation, Microsoft holds a unique position - since it initially wrote many of the technologies that it would need to emulate.
So I just don't get why it continues to let "backwards compatibility" sap resources from its core platform. The cynic in me says that they're banking on planned obsolescence to bolster the sagging hardware market. The optimist in me... has no response.
Reading that essay - from a Vista Guy with a position - gives of one clear message: Vista actually is a bloated weedy mess beyond any measure.
Yeah, that's my reaction, too. 5,000 lines of code per day? That doesn't sound like responsible software engineering. It sounds like a code binge - and let's face it, we all know how that generally turns out.
If Microsoft were really committed to quality code, it wouldn't project a release date for Vista. It would announce a release date when the code was approaching completion - perhaps even the first few public betas. By projecting a release date before then, Microsoft limits its options for responding to deep bugs that arise during the beta: its solutions have to be shoehorned into fitting the projection. That's what it sounds like it's doing.
I've been an ardent Microsoft user since 3.0 - no, since the early days of running MS-DOS on a 12MHz 80286 - but Vista is the first Microsoft OS that I really don't want. The features that Vista offers over XP don't justify the added complexities and new security holes of the new platform (not to mention the planned hardware and software obsolescence.) And all of this "creeping oversight" BS - Hailstorm, DRM, Palladium, Windows Genuine Advantage - makes me leery as well.
Microsoft has always been hostile and unfair to its competitors... but now it's being hostile and unfair to its users. I'm not inclined to tolerate it.
Shortwave may have many advantages, but it has one specific drawback: it requires the use of a shortwave radio, which is a pretty rare device. A foreign government might well consider these devices as medium-grade indicators of espionage. Contrast this with a plain-jane cellphone or internet connection, which is approaching ubiquity.
(Of course, the "numbers station" phenomenon makes little sense in the context of internet connectivity - or even cell communication - because (1) the sender is obviously committing espionage, and (2) transcribing spoken workds is an incredibly low-bandwidth and error-prone mechanism. Steganography is where it's at, and it's a very safe vector in light of today's information glut. One amazingly easy way to send a coded message would be as an attachment to a Nigerian spammer email message. Your email program could have a filter that, prior to/dev/nulling these messages, tests the attachment against some kind of public key for authentication.)
And it would have taken you a similarly short time to RTFA, and see the directions Apple provided for reloading your ipod to disable this lock.
Thanks for that completely vapid contribution. "Restore" = "wiping out the entire iPod hard drive." I'm sure that owners will be completely willing to lose all of their MP3s in order to reset the volume cap.
Next time, try thinking for a moment before hitting your "RTFA" hotkey.
You're still free to use your iPod at deafening levels if you like...
Not if someone has enabled this feature: "Parents can even set a lock code that prevents the volume from going above a certain amount."
Just what the world needs: another techno-crutch that will absolve parents of the annoyance of actual parenting. Let's not talk to kids about the effects of loud noises on their hearing - that's too difficult. Instead, let's be passive-aggressive pricks and preempt their judgment with parental-surrogate crippleware.
Of course, it will take the recipients of such devices 0.003 milliseconds to punch "amplified headphones" into RadioShack.com and come up with six hits. They will then tune in at twice the volume as a predictable act of rebellion. So the kids are still deaf, but the parents can shrug and say, "My conscience is clean, and that's what really matters." And of course, they can then sue Radio Shack, and lobby Congress for laws that criminalize the sale of amplified headphones to minors.
And of course #2, this "feature" will undoubtedly manifest primarily as an obstacle and annoyance to (1) people who buy an iPod from eBay but discover that it's been capped at 0.5 decibels, (2) kids whose buddies (or playground bullies) enable this "feature" as a prank, and (3) people who inadvertently trigger this feature and then can't disable it.
I hate the direction our country has taken - and the fact that our technologists have fallen victim to the same pathogenic thinking.
Thus pulling ahead of bandwidth issues - it is once again faster to send data by the US Postal Service, considering stuff in terabyte units.
How can one even make such a comparison? Can't the USPS, in theory, deliver an infinite amount of data in one delivery or one package? Even if you restrict the USPS delivery mechanism to 3.5" floppy disks, couldn't it deliver a billion of them in one shipment? Essentially, USPSTP is a massively (infinitely) parallel communications channel, so you just can't compare it with serial networking.
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- David Stein
What part of the internet has the government "censored" to date? I've been reading articles via Slashdot and the EFF for years, but I can't recall a single instance of this.
China, on the other hand, is much more authoritative, and has a much stronger interest in censoring the internet. Yet they've largely failed. Why? Because even with an army of government-dime censors, it's really impossible to censor anything on the net. The same thing happens as when the government censors obscene material - the targeted item becomes hyped, copied, and traded on black markets. Think 2 Live Crew: their "banned" album sold tons of copies - notwithstanding its bombastically crappy music!
The difference: It's impossible to block information, no matter how bad the government wants to do so. But it's entirely possible to block competitors - just killfile google.com until it pays its Broadband Access Regulatory Fees, or whatever deceptive moniker the Telcos want to slap on it. That's what should worry you.
- David Stein
True - and it's exactly like every other tax-supported network, such as roads and the mail system. These projects are ultra-critical national infrastructure, and they seem to do just fine with public support.
It's telling that these other systems also have "neutrality," and it works extremely well. The USPS has no interest in delaying your parcel by two weeks. Every driver on the freeway is bound by the same set of rules. And guess what - when we need extra capacity, the taxpayers buy it! What's wrong with that system?
The difference is that unlike these government projects, the internet backbone is almost entirely privatized. It's true that ultraconservatives ordinarily support privatization as "more efficient" than government support. But haven't we recently seen some phenomenally anti-consumer behavior in privatized industries? And this administration is hardly a "typical" conservative gang - the federal bureaucracy has grown explosively under its leadership. Odd, that. I guess it depends whether the heads of the corporate shepherds are your friends.
The problem, as future economic historians will state in tragic retrospect, is that unlike the federal government, private corporations do not have their customers' best interests at heart - often they're in direct conflict. We don't put Microsoft in charge of our missile defense network, because every 20 minutes, they'd be hassling the federal government to pay their monthly licensing fees for the laser-guidance software!
It's more evidence of our shameful government that has completely discarded the notion of serving the people.
- David Stein
Heh - kudos on the choice reference.
But I disagree with you. Consider this: How sexy did "resource management" sound before it was well-implemented in Dune 2, Warcraft, and Command & Conquer? Tech trees and odds ratios used to be the exclusive domain of those scary, pinheaded, turn-based-wargamer types.
So, I understand. When you approach this idea, you're thinking "neighborhood block watch," which ranks just above "after-school special" on the gamer-ometer.
However, I'm thinking a development-based team - dynamic, humanlike, complex personalities - artificial-intelligence algorithms that define how your guys respond to ambiguous situations. I think it has promise!
Now if only I can convince Blizzard to throw $10MM at me to prototype it, I'll be all set.
- David Stein
How about not focusing on the obvious? If feats of strength become uninteresting, then how about basing a game on other challenges - stuff that relies on other skills, or tests even the mettle of a Superman?
For instance:
That's ten minutes of brainstorming by one guy. I wonder what all of the talented folks at Blizzard could imagineer together?
- David Stein
I don't know how much ROI they get out of this. Again, POP access to GMail makes Google totally invisible for this process. It may cross my mind that I'm using Google when I give out my email address, but that's about it. And I certainly never see ads for Google Talk as part of my POP access.
And in exchange for this very, very small amount of "mindshare," Google provides me with about 2,000,000,000 bytes of space for mail storage, as well as the computer hardware and network infrastructure to receive, store, and deliver this mail to me.
This just doesn't seem to be a high-yield strategy for Google. I'm very glad that they do this (since I use their POP access daily) - but if I were their bizdev guy, I'd encourage Google to eliminate POP access. That way, everyone would use GMail.com, and Google could pitch its ads to email users, etc.
In some respects they are like Microsoft in that they have a big revenue stream though their search ads, so they can throw money to monopoli...errr.. win market share in other areas by giving stuff away for free.
"Giving stuff away for free" is what doomed the .com economy to bankruptcy and an investment crash. The fact that Google can sustain a low-yield venture, doesn't make it not a low-yield venture.
And no business is a perpetual hegemony - not even Microsoft. There is no "manifest destiny" in business.
The last update of Yahoo IM on Windows is a monster...
Ugh - I know; I use Yahoo Messenger, and I loathe it. I've been itching to switch to Trillian for a few weeks now.
- David Stein
Because the supermajority of defendants will be uninsured.
Let's start with the presumption that the RIAA has presumably already set its settlement offers to maximize return on uninsured people. This means that altering these offers in any way will result in lower yield for the RIAA for uninsured defendants.
Now let's develop that presumption as a hypothetical equation:
- P = the probability that any defendant will be insured. (The RIAA can't determine this value for any defendant, making this a crap shoot.)
- G = the gained money that the RIAA could make off of an insured defendant (on average) by adjusting the insurance rate.
- L = the money that the RIAA would lose off of an uninsured defendant (on average) by adjusting the insurance rate.
The critical equation is: N = (G * P) - (L * (1-P)).N, here, is the net profit or loss of the adjustment. If N is positive, then adjusting the RIAA settlement policy results in more money, so it should change. If N is negative, then adjusting the policy would result in less money, so it should not change.
I posit that N will undoubtedly be negative. I base this suggestion on the inference that P will be 0.00001 or smaller, i.e., only one out of every 100,000 defendants will be insured. So even if an alteration nets an additional $100,000 from an insured defendant but loses $1 from an uninsured defendant, then at an insurance rate of 0.00001, the RIAA only breaks even.
- David Stein
I like Gmail - it's my primary user interface. It's reliable and transparent, and I use it exactly as you've described.
However, when I use Outlook to fetch my mail from Gmail via POP, I wonder just what Google is getting out of this arrangement. Microsoft gets my money from the Outlook purchase. Gmail gets... what, exactly? Google is both completely invisible and completely uncompensated (by me) in this process. They get the ability to data-mine my email, I guess.
- David Stein
I've been using Gmail for about two years, and I've never seen this feature. In fact, I'm looking at an email right now that clearly contains an address, and I see no link of any kind.
Like when there's a time in the email, and Google offers to put it on my calendar?
- David Stein
I agree that this is good, but if they just keep producing killer apps in the same fashion - producing Google SQL to compete with MS Access, Google Present! to compete with PowerPoint, etc. - then they might see just the same tepid response that they're receiving now.
Hypothetical: What if Google produces an analog for every single application that you use today, only it's free and on the web? Prediction: You still wouldn't use them, or would only use them occasionally.
Well, what's the problem, then? The problem is that web apps - Google's as much as anyone else's - don't offer the unified experience of a locally-installed software base.
Google Earth is a silo: you visit that site, and you do your satellite-spy thing, and then you leave.
Google Picasa is a silo: you visit the site, and you edit your photos, and then you leave.
Gmail is a silo: you visit the site, and you check and write email, and then you leave.
The model here is that every time you want to do something, you have to load up a browser, visit the site, and begin fresh work on some data. Data exchange between applications is limited at best: you might be able to extract some data (hoping it's in the right format) and upload it to another silo - but if not, you're strictly limited to copying and pasting some raw text.
Contrast this with your experiences working on a local software base. Everything is immediately available within a few clicks away from the Start Button, or the Mighty Apple, or your *n?x right-click menu - even if you don't have an internet connection. You have file associations; you have drag-and-drop; you have object linking; you have interoperability of office applications. And you have filesystem organization - if a project involves some email, some Word files, and a few spreadsheets, you can keep them all in the same folder.
You get none of this with the current generation of web apps.
Now if Google's gaggle of research efforts are some of the elements of a future GoogleOS, that's very promising. But they consistently (publicly) deny that that's their goal. And regardless of where Google might go tomorrow, it doesn't much impact what it is today: a company with many fledgling projects... but too little cohesion. Meanwhile, Microsoft is going more in this direction, with WinFS and Avalon and such. Its efforts are kind of sucky because it's not really motivated by competition, but at least its aim is correct.
I hope Google succeeds - if nothing else, Bob knows that the desktop software market has been stagnant since, oh, 1995 or so. We need some competition and fresh blood. But that's not a trend that one can extrapolate from its current model.
- David Stein
You're missing the context of this discussion thread. The post to which I was responding stated: "When it comes to the disposition of private property, only the people who own it should get votes." I was pointing out the problems with this position.
As you'll see in my other comments to this post, I like the text of Bush's executive order - and I think that the pre-Kelo eminent domain process was a very good balance. In other words, I agree with you.
- David Stein
Right. And since we'd need the unanimous consent of about 500 homeowners in order to build any freeway, we can count on never again building a municipal highway in America.
And yet, highways must be built.
Why should we tolerate the injustice of forcibly evicting a homeowner based on eminent domain? Because democracy = collective action, and except in the case of unanimity, someone is going to lose or be disappointed. We're balancing individual liberty vs. community progress... and since this is Slashdot, I'll quote Mr. Spock: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."
So where do we draw the line? Let's put someone in charge of the city's best interests, someone who's removed from the biases of the interested parties, and let's have them decide. And if they choose wrongly, we can replace them with someone more trustworthy...
- David Stein
Two flaws in this argument:
As for their perception of your likelihood to settle:
- David Stein
There's plenty said about them. The CIA has been in the news an awful lot recently, as I recall. Even the dingy old U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is getting a suprising amount of ink these days.
The reason they're not discussed more is because their functions are pretty mundane. The public doesn't care how the NIH decides to award federal grants, or how the SEC polices the stock market. Just printing the letters "IRS" in an article headline will guarantee that the public ignores it.
This is an extremely deleterious consequence of America's love of drama - the undramatic goes unmonitored. Meanwhile, our politicians keep us amused (and distracted from their actions) by waving flags and conjuring images of terr'ists.
What are the alphabet agencies -- FDA, EPA, OSHA, and so on -- doing when they pass laws? And, while these laws are called regulations, so as not to upset anyone who might actually read the Constitution, the Webster's dictionary defines regulation as a rule, ordinance or law.
Agency regulations are not laws. Laws are rules that apply to your actions: things that you may do, or must do, or must not do. Agency regulations are rules that apply to the actions of an agency: how it can utilize a power (that has already been given to it by the Executive or Legislative), how it cannot utilize a power, etc.
It's true that an agency sometimes relies on its own regulations to determine how to treat you. But the agency's power to deal with you in such a way was given to it by a law. And if the agency oversteps its legal authority, then a regulation won't save it.
Example: The IRS has many regulations that dictate how you must pay your federal taxes. Yet, these regulations aren't laws - the law passed by Congress is that:
- You must submit an annual federal income tax payment; and
- The IRS is responsible for creating a tax formula that adheres to the dictates of the legislature; and
- You must use the IRS formula, and follow the IRS submission procedures, to prove that you're paying the correct amount.
Now, what happens if the IRS believes that you've failed your legal duties under #1 or #3? It can't do anything to you! It has no such power. It merely tells the executive branch that you've violated the tax laws, and the executive prosecutes you for evasion - under the general tax laws passed by Congress.- David Stein
Yeah, but imagine the political backlash. Kelo stands apart from almost every other recent SCOTUS decision by engendering bipartisan, across-the-board irritation. If the majority justices could've been voted out of office, they would have been. (This is one instance where the constitutional checks-and-balances system works admirably well: even though I disagree with the justices, I support their right to rule in their best conscience.)
Now, Bush may be underwiring his sagging ratings with this feel-good order - but can you really imagine a president announcing that he's changed his mind? Political seppuku, I tell ya...
- David Stein
Yeah. And we may as well rename the police to the "Ass-Beating Brigade."
My point is that both powers - police and eminent domain - are forceful powers that can be outrageously abused, but that also can be (and usually are) exercised for the public good. If you break a law, even for a damn good reason, then you're probably going to be arrested (and perhaps roughed up in the ordinary course of police work.) And if your house is in the way of a new and much-needed interplanet^K^K^K^K^K^K^K^K^K^K^K metropolitan highway, then it really sucks to be you, but the public needs your land.
Of course, with great power comes... nah, never mind, that fruit is too low-hanging.
- David Stein
As well it shouldn't - such an order would be an unjustified intrusion into the powers reserved to the states, and hence unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment.
Furthermore, it's probably really only good as "advice" to the Attorney General.
Not just the AG, but the entire executive branch - which is almost always the branch that invokes eminent domain on behalf of the federal government. From TFA: "The Attorney General shall: (i) issue instructions to the heads of departments and agencies to implement the policy..., (ii) monitor takings by departments and agencies for compliance...," etc.
But you're correct that this is pretty limited, since virtually all eminent domain cases involve a state or local government. Nor could it (unless it were done in another manner, e.g., tied to state funding via the commerce clause.) And it's further weakened by the host of exceptions - see Sec. 3.
Generally I agree with you, but in this case, your vitriol is unsupported. Also, the headline here ("Kelo repealed"... the decision "undo[es] the previous Kelo decision") is completely wrong and misleading and stupid. The poster, physicsphairy, should stick with physics.
(For once,) Bush isn't trumping the statement of the judiciary - he's not even addressing it, since his order doesn't use the word "constitutionality" at all.
Read as: "Whether or not the Supreme Court correctly granted us this power, we're ordering ourselves not to use it."
- David Stein
Heh. I remember being on the undernet #quake channel the moment Quake 1 was released. Sheer madness... literally thousands of people just sitting on IRC waiting for news, with some top-level admins and an occasional id software employee popping in. Of course, the mods had to make the channel +m to keep order - and even then, the channel was filled with a steady stream of join and part notices.
Of course, everyone was constantly hitting id's FTP site, looking for the file - nothing, nothing, nothing. Suddenly someone posted a message to #quake saying, "yo it is there fuckers" - and so it was...
I had a log of that IRC session, but it got vaped in a hard drive crash. :(
- David Stein
Heh. You do realize that A{2} is longer, harder to parse, and more lexically obfuscated than just using AA?
Lemme guess... you love Perl, don't you? ;)
- David Stein
Backwards compatibility is indeed the bane of MS's existence.
Frankly, I don't see why they bother. Is it really important to support EMM386.EXE, or 80386 protected mode? How much value actually derives from ensuring that Vista can run old Windows 3.1 apps?
The irony is that in many cases, this compatibility is long gone. Ever try running an old SVGA game from 1994 with SoundBlaster Pro support on Windows XP? Or just about anything that relies on DOS4/GW? These models fail miserably under native Windows.
Of course, if you do want to play those games on your machine, you have several options: DOSBox, ScummVM, DOS4/GW stub replacements, etc. These neat projects emulate antiquated hardware and software with such accuracy that these old programs run very well.
And this brings me to my point in this post: Rather than struggling to provide legacy support for Windows 95 and older platforms, Microsoft should be stripping this functionality out of the Vista core - and building it into an emulator that gets bundled with Vista.
This should be eminently feasible for several reasons:
So I just don't get why it continues to let "backwards compatibility" sap resources from its core platform. The cynic in me says that they're banking on planned obsolescence to bolster the sagging hardware market. The optimist in me... has no response.
- David Stein
Yeah, that's my reaction, too. 5,000 lines of code per day? That doesn't sound like responsible software engineering. It sounds like a code binge - and let's face it, we all know how that generally turns out.
If Microsoft were really committed to quality code, it wouldn't project a release date for Vista. It would announce a release date when the code was approaching completion - perhaps even the first few public betas. By projecting a release date before then, Microsoft limits its options for responding to deep bugs that arise during the beta: its solutions have to be shoehorned into fitting the projection. That's what it sounds like it's doing.
I've been an ardent Microsoft user since 3.0 - no, since the early days of running MS-DOS on a 12MHz 80286 - but Vista is the first Microsoft OS that I really don't want. The features that Vista offers over XP don't justify the added complexities and new security holes of the new platform (not to mention the planned hardware and software obsolescence.) And all of this "creeping oversight" BS - Hailstorm, DRM, Palladium, Windows Genuine Advantage - makes me leery as well.
Microsoft has always been hostile and unfair to its competitors... but now it's being hostile and unfair to its users. I'm not inclined to tolerate it.
- David Stein
You wouldnt.
Shortwave may have many advantages, but it has one specific drawback: it requires the use of a shortwave radio, which is a pretty rare device. A foreign government might well consider these devices as medium-grade indicators of espionage. Contrast this with a plain-jane cellphone or internet connection, which is approaching ubiquity.
(Of course, the "numbers station" phenomenon makes little sense in the context of internet connectivity - or even cell communication - because (1) the sender is obviously committing espionage, and (2) transcribing spoken workds is an incredibly low-bandwidth and error-prone mechanism. Steganography is where it's at, and it's a very safe vector in light of today's information glut. One amazingly easy way to send a coded message would be as an attachment to a Nigerian spammer email message. Your email program could have a filter that, prior to /dev/nulling these messages, tests the attachment against some kind of public key for authentication.)
- David Stein
Thanks for that completely vapid contribution. "Restore" = "wiping out the entire iPod hard drive." I'm sure that owners will be completely willing to lose all of their MP3s in order to reset the volume cap.
Next time, try thinking for a moment before hitting your "RTFA" hotkey.
- David Stein
Not if someone has enabled this feature: "Parents can even set a lock code that prevents the volume from going above a certain amount."
Just what the world needs: another techno-crutch that will absolve parents of the annoyance of actual parenting. Let's not talk to kids about the effects of loud noises on their hearing - that's too difficult. Instead, let's be passive-aggressive pricks and preempt their judgment with parental-surrogate crippleware.
Of course, it will take the recipients of such devices 0.003 milliseconds to punch "amplified headphones" into RadioShack.com and come up with six hits. They will then tune in at twice the volume as a predictable act of rebellion. So the kids are still deaf, but the parents can shrug and say, "My conscience is clean, and that's what really matters." And of course, they can then sue Radio Shack, and lobby Congress for laws that criminalize the sale of amplified headphones to minors.
And of course #2, this "feature" will undoubtedly manifest primarily as an obstacle and annoyance to (1) people who buy an iPod from eBay but discover that it's been capped at 0.5 decibels, (2) kids whose buddies (or playground bullies) enable this "feature" as a prank, and (3) people who inadvertently trigger this feature and then can't disable it.
I hate the direction our country has taken - and the fact that our technologists have fallen victim to the same pathogenic thinking.
- David Stein
How can one even make such a comparison? Can't the USPS, in theory, deliver an infinite amount of data in one delivery or one package? Even if you restrict the USPS delivery mechanism to 3.5" floppy disks, couldn't it deliver a billion of them in one shipment? Essentially, USPSTP is a massively (infinitely) parallel communications channel, so you just can't compare it with serial networking.
- David Stein