Snopes, like most other sites using popups, sets a cookie the first time you visit, so you only get the popup once per some amount of time (however long until the cookie expires). Also, these days sites get around popup blockers these days by raising the popups on a mouse click event, instead of when you first visit the page. Try clicking on an empty area of the page to generate the popup (after you have cleared your cookies).
I can confirm that they do use popups as I got one from them just yesterday. Actually what I got was a pop-under, masquerading as a Windows dialog box, which is even worse. Snopes' advertising has become quite obnoxious, but their content is still good so I grudgingly put up with it. Incidentally, if you hate popunders as much as I do, please vote for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=369306 to kill them forever. (Don't add comments to the bug though, that's bad bugzilla etiquette)
A railgun could never shoot things directly into a stable orbit; the orbit would always intersect the Earth's surface. The payload would still have to include a rocket to circularize the orbit after launch. So you'd have to build a rocket capable of surviving not only the incredible acceleration of the railgun but the friction of traveling at orbital velocity inside the atmosphere. Either that or you'd have to have some sort of space-tug to rendezvous with the payload immediately and boost its orbit; seems to me like those would be some pretty extreme orbital maneuvers.
Perhaps you haven't heard, but WiMAX isn't like WiFi where it's provided at random places; instead it will be a pervasive network built out by major carriers, like cell service. Sprint has committed to it as their 4G technology and is rolling it out nationwide, starting now. 100 million people will have WiMAX by the end of the year.
Yes, but once you add an extra battery (even replacing the optical drive), the weight is back up to the Air's weight. And Lenovo's hours are not equivalent to Apple's. I have a Thinkpad (X60s) with 8 hours quoted extended battery life, and I'd say 5.5-6 hours is a more reasonable estimate. Apple tends to err on the side of underestimating battery life to account for actual usage and battery degradation. Also, Thinkpads are not scratchproof; mine definitely has wear and tear marks. I'd wait until the Air is out before dismissing its durability out of hand.
Well, this beats Air on weight slightly but loses on battery (4hrs vs 5hrs, but I suspect it's a lot more because Apple's estimate is very conservative). With extended battery or multiple batteries it's going to be heavier. The Air's case is solid aluminum and it's probably pretty durable (we can't know until release). 4GB RAM may enable some "media work" but it's still going to be hampered by the crappy Intel integrated graphics.
Instead, focus on the ways in which this *actually* beats the Air: Ethernet jack, full-size display port (no dongle required), 3 USB ports (vs 1), optical drive, 3 PCI Express slots, GPS, WiMAX. There's some good stuff there, the best IMHO being WiMAX, which will be a killer feature in about a year when Sprint's WiMAX is up and running.
Of course, when making a purchasing decision you also have to count the intangibles like MagSafe power, magnetic screen latch, OS X, Apple hardware drivers, TrackPoint, and aesthetics (which could go either way depending on the image you're trying to project, and don't tell me you're not trying to project an image with your $3000 laptop purchase...)
If you add up all the salaries of the people who have to wait 10 minutes for their computer to be ready in the morning, you will quickly find that it is far more cost-effective to leave all the computers on 24/7. Anyone who *really* cares about improving energy efficiency will not whine and nag people to turn off their computers; they will instead work on improving boot times and/or making sure that hibernation support is turned on and works properly with all hardware. Of course, whining and nagging is a lot easier.
I think the real problem isn't the lack of a LAN port, but the lack of WiMAX. A laptop like this needs Internet access *everywhere*, not just where there happens to be WiFi, after you set up and pay $10 or whatever. With WiMAX, if your company doesn't do WiFi you can just VPN in using your WiMAX. I do this on my laptop with 3G (EVDO) PC card today, but built-in WiMAX would be so much better. Next year, when Sprint's WiMAX service is actually operational, I expect to see a MacBook Air with WiMAX. And that's when I'll buy one.
You are confused; radiosity is not the holy grail of graphics. *Global illumination* is the holy grail of graphics, and radiosity is one algorithm for global illumination, but not really the best from a correctness standpoint (doesn't do caustics, for example). The most physically correct algorithm for global illumination is monte carlo bidirectional path tracing (with Metropolis light transport for speed), and it's a form of raytracing. Fully photorealistic rendering is basically a solved problem; take a look at the Indigo renderer if you want to see some truly awesome feats of rendering (for example, a prism separating a beam of light, simulating a rainbow with only a light source and drops of water, or rendering effects produced by light polarization). Photorealism is now constrained only by modeling tools and rendering time; the software is there.
Unfortunately the kind of raytracing talked about in the article is not monte carlo path tracing; it's a much more simplistic form of raytracing that doesn't deal with global illumination at all, and so looks little different from rasterization with stencil shadows in the style of Doom 3. Doing raytracing this way allows you to get away with casting less than 10 rays per pixel, so you get decent performance. Full monte carlo path tracing requires hundreds if not thousands or more rays per pixel (depending on the scene) to get results. But it really does achieve the "holy grail" of global illumination; in 2100 when we all have Blue Gene in our laptops I expect all 3D rendering to be monte carlo path tracing.
Yes, right now in the non-hypothetical real world there is definitely a stable equilibrium that needs something to disrupt it. I was talking about your hypothetical game-theoretic situation where all ISPs used my pricing scheme already; I am arguing that this would also be a stable equilibrium. We just need something to overcome the transition energy between these two states.
Right, P2P would be somewhat less popular, but I don't think it would disappear, not by a long shot. Even considering bandwidth charges, it would still be by *far* the cheapest way to get movies, music, etc. Leeching would become more popular, but there are P2P models that deal with leeching (witness the very popular bittorrent sites with required ratios).
ISPs wouldn't have to spend boatloads of money on traffic shaping and filtering.
It's even better than that. Not only would they not *have* to do traffic shaping and filtering; they wouldn't *want* to. This is something I've learned from my Dad: when you're doing business with someone, the most important thing is to make sure their interests are aligned with yours. As long as that's true, you will always get along and nobody will try to screw the other guy. *That's* why ISP business models need to change; with current business models, the interests of customers and ISPs are almost opposite.
How would one ISP cheat? By offering unlimited service? The monthly fee would have to be far higher than the monthly minimum for the variable service, so the only people who would be likely to switch would be the minority heavy users whose fees are already higher. The heavy users would abuse the unlimited service, forcing the price to go even higher, while the majority could stay with the low-priced variable service. The fixed-price ISP would be driven out of business, not the other way around.
I think the only thing keeping unlimited service alive is momentum at this point; once people learned to accept variable service they would never go back. That, and most people have no idea how much bandwidth they use. Given a great reporting tool to make bandwidth usage explicit and obvious just like cell phone minutes, I think people would switch in droves because the majority would save money.
Bandwidth *is* a scarce commodity; it is *not* unlimited. In *every* connection, there is *always* a bottleneck; it can be one of the endpoints but usually it is somewhere in the cloud. You are generally sharing that bottleneck with other people, so someone has to decide how to efficiently allocate the the limited bandwidth. Fortunately we have a great system for doing that: it's called free-market capitalism, and its tool is money.
Who's the luddite here? The person arguing that people should pay for what they use? Or the guy raving that everything should be unlimited, despite the very real limitations of hardware? Face it, buddy, nothing is actually unlimited; selling unlimited bandwidth is a sham.
Here's what you are missing: the reason you now hate ISPs so much is *not* that ISPs are inherently evil. The actual problem is that the ISP's interests are simply not aligned with yours. You want to use tons of bandwidth, but to an ISP a customer who uses tons of bandwidth is a liability to be liquidated at the first opportunity. And *why* is that? It's unlimited pricing! If you were paying for what you used, the ISP would be happy to give you as much as you wanted! They would be offering you the highest speeds their hardware could handle, instead of the measly 6Mbps they're giving you now. They would be falling over themselves to upgrade their networks so you can pay them more! They would be defending your anonymity against the RIAA's subpoenas, so you would use more P2P! When your interests are aligned with the ISP, they won't seem evil any more. Can you really not see that? Are you really that blinded by your misdirected rage?
Wow... That's brilliant. But it could be even better: make the bandwidth degradation continuous. There's a small fixed monthly fee, like $5, to cover fixed costs. You start the month with the max speed your line can offer, and each byte you transfer lowers the max speed by a small amount. If you transfer a lot, your connection will become slow, but the speed will asymptotically approach zero. At any time, you can pay any amount you want and get a speed boost commensurate with your payment. Your home modem has a "speed gauge", and there's a monitor application which shows your current speed and allows you to charge your account instantly. You can also set automatic charges to keep your speed high automatically, but you can set spending caps.
It's perfect because there's no huge overage fees, ever. Nobody's access is ever completely cut off; just slowed; you'll practically always be able to get email. Virus-riddled spam zombies will see their connections soon slow to a crawl, and their owners will be accountable. Everyone can choose the exact amount of money they want to spend on Internet service and get service exactly appropriate to their needs. Gamers and P2P users will be able to get the highest speeds available subject only to hardware limitations.
However, the biggest benefit is this: suddenly it's in the ISP's best interest to get their customers to use as *much* bandwidth as possible. P2P users go from being an ISP's worst customers to their *best* customers, the most profitable ones. This will cause ISPs to start standing up to the copyright cartels, and gives them incentives to improve their networks so they can increase the speed and get more money. It also helps with Net Neutrality, because a neutral net uses more bandwidth than a closed one with walls everywhere.
So many problems with the Internet today can be traced back to problems with the ISP business model; this model would solve all of them. Instead of fighting with the ISPs and viewing them as the enemy, we just need to get their interests aligned with ours, and this business model does that perfectly. How can we get the ISPs to adopt it?
This is a good thing because it puts the ISP on the side of the heavy P2P user. P2P users suddenly become an ISP's most profitable customers instead of the least profitable. If this became widespread ISPs would start standing up to the copyright cartels (well, those which aren't wholly owned subsidiaries of same, at least). Also, it gives them an actual incentive to upgrade their networks instead of just trying to squeeze more out of the ones they have.
I know it's painful to have to actually pay for the bandwidth you use, but rational pricing structures are, in the end, good for everyone.
Where did you get that tidbit of info? I suppose it's possible that Remote Disk is built into the BIOS (or firmware or whatever Macs have) but I'd hardly assume that without firm confirmation from Apple.
If a system panics when a ZFS file system is unexpectedly removed, that is a different issue.
Actually, kernel panics are *explicitly* the issue. I am questioning the assertion of the above post which claimed that kernel panics when removing a removable drive are "by design" in ZFS. My post was explicitly not concerned with data integrity, though I am sure ZFS does a fine job in this regard. Did you even read my post, or were you just looking for a venue to astroturf for ZFS?
Let me forestall any further confusion by assuring you that I have nothing against ZFS; to the contrary I am sure it is a fantastic and reliable filesystem.
You need to do a "zpool export" or something before you can unplug a detachable disk to avoid the panic when you unplug it. That's not a bug. It's by design.
Well then it's a stupid design. Of course the filesystem can't guarantee no data loss in this situation, but a kernel panic is *not* a valid response. Requiring explicit unmount commands for removable drives is a design decision that should have died when we moved away from non-journaled filesystems.
Disclaimer: I'm assuming that ZFS on Mac does, in fact, cause kernel panics when an external drive is removed without unmounting; as the parent posts imply. I haven't tested it myself...
I don't need Intrade to tell me what's happening at the polls; I can get that from the news. [...] we're basically counting on Intrade to let the wisdom of crowds ferret out all of that before the polls
The thing you have to understand about prediction markets is they don't represent a magical source of extra information. Prediction markets work only based on information that is already publicly available. They simply combine and weigh that information better than any other method of making predictions, and that is still a valuable service.
When the markets predict John McCain winning the nomination, they are not simply reacting to recent NH poll numbers; nothing a market does is "simple". The market is weighing *all* the available evidence to come to the conclusion that John McCain has the best overall chance to win the nomination. When you look at the market's prediction, you can be reasonably sure that single source reflects all the information you would likely be able to gather yourself if you dedicated all your time to researching the elections.
The campaign contains relatively few surprises.
Well put your money where your mouth is, bub. If you know better than the market, you stand to make money on it. The truth is, the volatility of these election markets reflects the *actual* uncertainty in *everyone*'s predictions about this primary, which is further a reflection of the actual volatility of public opinion itself. There *have* been surprises. Six months ago nobody expected Giuliani to do this poorly; nobody saw Huckabee's gains among evangelicals; etc etc. To pretend otherwise is silly; if you knew these things ahead of time you would be sitting pretty with a great position in the markets right now.
That's just it. I haven't heard a single word about this
Of course you haven't. They aren't available yet. Rest assured, you will.
The people who will be most affected by it, are those who don't use computers
Yes, but I guarantee that 100% of them watch TV. TV is therefore the perfect way to contact them. And TV stations have the perfect motive to communicate the message effectively. I don't see how anyone thinks this will be a problem.
Your condescending remarks are way off target. My comment was not an endorsement of the program to subsidize converter boxes. I was just pointing out that the article's "problem" doesn't exist, nothing more. In fact, I'd tend to agree with you that subsidies are a bad idea.
As soon as TV stations themselves begin to worry about whether they will lose watchers, they will simply run commercials explaining to people how they can get *free* converter boxes from the government. TV is the one of the most effective communication mechanisms ever devised, after all. Problem solved.
When I saw the summary I thought this was a central marketplace for CC work, with some sort of standard fee structure and licensing terms. So people making CC work could easily set commercial use prices, people buying CC work could pay instantly over the Internet through CC and be assured of standard reasonable terms without negotiation, and CC could even make a little profit. Seems to me this could be a valuable service, if CC is not allergic to profit in any form. I know there's plenty of CC-noncommercial work out there that I would have certainly paid a reasonable fee to use, if there was a standard easy way to do so.
Anyone can be a wikipedia editor. Not everyone chooses to be a wikipedia editor. Furthermore, those who do choose to edit a page are not necessarily qualified to do so. For subjects which are not noteworthy, the intersection of the set of people who choose to edit and the set of people who are qualified to edit is very small. This results in bad wikipedia pages.
Because the supply of editors on Wikipedia, while large, is not inexhaustible. The quality of Wikipedia depends on a critical mass of people familiar with the subjects it covers, who are constantly visiting and able to correct errors and generally maintain articles. If there is an article that only a few people in the world are qualified to edit, then the quality of that article is not going to be up to the same standard as the articles on more popular subjects. Vandalism, subtle manipulation, style gaffes, and simply wrong information are likely to persist much longer in unpopular articles, if they are ever fixed at all. If Wikipedia as a whole is to meet even a minimum standard of quality, it must reject articles that cannot be properly maintained.
If you wanted a project to actually include the whole of human knowledge, you would have to implement some sort of reputation system, so that you could include the fringe information while providing a clear indication of its likely poor quality. I submit that this hypothetical project exists. It is called the World Wide Web. The reputation system is called PageRank.
Slashdot Mirror
Snopes, like most other sites using popups, sets a cookie the first time you visit, so you only get the popup once per some amount of time (however long until the cookie expires). Also, these days sites get around popup blockers these days by raising the popups on a mouse click event, instead of when you first visit the page. Try clicking on an empty area of the page to generate the popup (after you have cleared your cookies).
I can confirm that they do use popups as I got one from them just yesterday. Actually what I got was a pop-under, masquerading as a Windows dialog box, which is even worse. Snopes' advertising has become quite obnoxious, but their content is still good so I grudgingly put up with it. Incidentally, if you hate popunders as much as I do, please vote for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=369306 to kill them forever. (Don't add comments to the bug though, that's bad bugzilla etiquette)
A railgun could never shoot things directly into a stable orbit; the orbit would always intersect the Earth's surface. The payload would still have to include a rocket to circularize the orbit after launch. So you'd have to build a rocket capable of surviving not only the incredible acceleration of the railgun but the friction of traveling at orbital velocity inside the atmosphere. Either that or you'd have to have some sort of space-tug to rendezvous with the payload immediately and boost its orbit; seems to me like those would be some pretty extreme orbital maneuvers.
Perhaps you haven't heard, but WiMAX isn't like WiFi where it's provided at random places; instead it will be a pervasive network built out by major carriers, like cell service. Sprint has committed to it as their 4G technology and is rolling it out nationwide, starting now. 100 million people will have WiMAX by the end of the year.
Yes, but once you add an extra battery (even replacing the optical drive), the weight is back up to the Air's weight. And Lenovo's hours are not equivalent to Apple's. I have a Thinkpad (X60s) with 8 hours quoted extended battery life, and I'd say 5.5-6 hours is a more reasonable estimate. Apple tends to err on the side of underestimating battery life to account for actual usage and battery degradation. Also, Thinkpads are not scratchproof; mine definitely has wear and tear marks. I'd wait until the Air is out before dismissing its durability out of hand.
Well, this beats Air on weight slightly but loses on battery (4hrs vs 5hrs, but I suspect it's a lot more because Apple's estimate is very conservative). With extended battery or multiple batteries it's going to be heavier. The Air's case is solid aluminum and it's probably pretty durable (we can't know until release). 4GB RAM may enable some "media work" but it's still going to be hampered by the crappy Intel integrated graphics.
Instead, focus on the ways in which this *actually* beats the Air: Ethernet jack, full-size display port (no dongle required), 3 USB ports (vs 1), optical drive, 3 PCI Express slots, GPS, WiMAX. There's some good stuff there, the best IMHO being WiMAX, which will be a killer feature in about a year when Sprint's WiMAX is up and running.
Of course, when making a purchasing decision you also have to count the intangibles like MagSafe power, magnetic screen latch, OS X, Apple hardware drivers, TrackPoint, and aesthetics (which could go either way depending on the image you're trying to project, and don't tell me you're not trying to project an image with your $3000 laptop purchase...)
If you add up all the salaries of the people who have to wait 10 minutes for their computer to be ready in the morning, you will quickly find that it is far more cost-effective to leave all the computers on 24/7. Anyone who *really* cares about improving energy efficiency will not whine and nag people to turn off their computers; they will instead work on improving boot times and/or making sure that hibernation support is turned on and works properly with all hardware. Of course, whining and nagging is a lot easier.
I think the real problem isn't the lack of a LAN port, but the lack of WiMAX. A laptop like this needs Internet access *everywhere*, not just where there happens to be WiFi, after you set up and pay $10 or whatever. With WiMAX, if your company doesn't do WiFi you can just VPN in using your WiMAX. I do this on my laptop with 3G (EVDO) PC card today, but built-in WiMAX would be so much better. Next year, when Sprint's WiMAX service is actually operational, I expect to see a MacBook Air with WiMAX. And that's when I'll buy one.
You are confused; radiosity is not the holy grail of graphics. *Global illumination* is the holy grail of graphics, and radiosity is one algorithm for global illumination, but not really the best from a correctness standpoint (doesn't do caustics, for example). The most physically correct algorithm for global illumination is monte carlo bidirectional path tracing (with Metropolis light transport for speed), and it's a form of raytracing. Fully photorealistic rendering is basically a solved problem; take a look at the Indigo renderer if you want to see some truly awesome feats of rendering (for example, a prism separating a beam of light, simulating a rainbow with only a light source and drops of water, or rendering effects produced by light polarization). Photorealism is now constrained only by modeling tools and rendering time; the software is there.
Unfortunately the kind of raytracing talked about in the article is not monte carlo path tracing; it's a much more simplistic form of raytracing that doesn't deal with global illumination at all, and so looks little different from rasterization with stencil shadows in the style of Doom 3. Doing raytracing this way allows you to get away with casting less than 10 rays per pixel, so you get decent performance. Full monte carlo path tracing requires hundreds if not thousands or more rays per pixel (depending on the scene) to get results. But it really does achieve the "holy grail" of global illumination; in 2100 when we all have Blue Gene in our laptops I expect all 3D rendering to be monte carlo path tracing.
Yes, right now in the non-hypothetical real world there is definitely a stable equilibrium that needs something to disrupt it. I was talking about your hypothetical game-theoretic situation where all ISPs used my pricing scheme already; I am arguing that this would also be a stable equilibrium. We just need something to overcome the transition energy between these two states.
How would one ISP cheat? By offering unlimited service? The monthly fee would have to be far higher than the monthly minimum for the variable service, so the only people who would be likely to switch would be the minority heavy users whose fees are already higher. The heavy users would abuse the unlimited service, forcing the price to go even higher, while the majority could stay with the low-priced variable service. The fixed-price ISP would be driven out of business, not the other way around.
I think the only thing keeping unlimited service alive is momentum at this point; once people learned to accept variable service they would never go back. That, and most people have no idea how much bandwidth they use. Given a great reporting tool to make bandwidth usage explicit and obvious just like cell phone minutes, I think people would switch in droves because the majority would save money.
Bandwidth *is* a scarce commodity; it is *not* unlimited. In *every* connection, there is *always* a bottleneck; it can be one of the endpoints but usually it is somewhere in the cloud. You are generally sharing that bottleneck with other people, so someone has to decide how to efficiently allocate the the limited bandwidth. Fortunately we have a great system for doing that: it's called free-market capitalism, and its tool is money.
Who's the luddite here? The person arguing that people should pay for what they use? Or the guy raving that everything should be unlimited, despite the very real limitations of hardware? Face it, buddy, nothing is actually unlimited; selling unlimited bandwidth is a sham.
Here's what you are missing: the reason you now hate ISPs so much is *not* that ISPs are inherently evil. The actual problem is that the ISP's interests are simply not aligned with yours. You want to use tons of bandwidth, but to an ISP a customer who uses tons of bandwidth is a liability to be liquidated at the first opportunity. And *why* is that? It's unlimited pricing! If you were paying for what you used, the ISP would be happy to give you as much as you wanted! They would be offering you the highest speeds their hardware could handle, instead of the measly 6Mbps they're giving you now. They would be falling over themselves to upgrade their networks so you can pay them more! They would be defending your anonymity against the RIAA's subpoenas, so you would use more P2P! When your interests are aligned with the ISP, they won't seem evil any more. Can you really not see that? Are you really that blinded by your misdirected rage?
Wow... That's brilliant. But it could be even better: make the bandwidth degradation continuous. There's a small fixed monthly fee, like $5, to cover fixed costs. You start the month with the max speed your line can offer, and each byte you transfer lowers the max speed by a small amount. If you transfer a lot, your connection will become slow, but the speed will asymptotically approach zero. At any time, you can pay any amount you want and get a speed boost commensurate with your payment. Your home modem has a "speed gauge", and there's a monitor application which shows your current speed and allows you to charge your account instantly. You can also set automatic charges to keep your speed high automatically, but you can set spending caps.
It's perfect because there's no huge overage fees, ever. Nobody's access is ever completely cut off; just slowed; you'll practically always be able to get email. Virus-riddled spam zombies will see their connections soon slow to a crawl, and their owners will be accountable. Everyone can choose the exact amount of money they want to spend on Internet service and get service exactly appropriate to their needs. Gamers and P2P users will be able to get the highest speeds available subject only to hardware limitations.
However, the biggest benefit is this: suddenly it's in the ISP's best interest to get their customers to use as *much* bandwidth as possible. P2P users go from being an ISP's worst customers to their *best* customers, the most profitable ones. This will cause ISPs to start standing up to the copyright cartels, and gives them incentives to improve their networks so they can increase the speed and get more money. It also helps with Net Neutrality, because a neutral net uses more bandwidth than a closed one with walls everywhere.
So many problems with the Internet today can be traced back to problems with the ISP business model; this model would solve all of them. Instead of fighting with the ISPs and viewing them as the enemy, we just need to get their interests aligned with ours, and this business model does that perfectly. How can we get the ISPs to adopt it?
This is a good thing because it puts the ISP on the side of the heavy P2P user. P2P users suddenly become an ISP's most profitable customers instead of the least profitable. If this became widespread ISPs would start standing up to the copyright cartels (well, those which aren't wholly owned subsidiaries of same, at least). Also, it gives them an actual incentive to upgrade their networks instead of just trying to squeeze more out of the ones they have.
I know it's painful to have to actually pay for the bandwidth you use, but rational pricing structures are, in the end, good for everyone.
Let me forestall any further confusion by assuring you that I have nothing against ZFS; to the contrary I am sure it is a fantastic and reliable filesystem.
Disclaimer: I'm assuming that ZFS on Mac does, in fact, cause kernel panics when an external drive is removed without unmounting; as the parent posts imply. I haven't tested it myself...
When the markets predict John McCain winning the nomination, they are not simply reacting to recent NH poll numbers; nothing a market does is "simple". The market is weighing *all* the available evidence to come to the conclusion that John McCain has the best overall chance to win the nomination. When you look at the market's prediction, you can be reasonably sure that single source reflects all the information you would likely be able to gather yourself if you dedicated all your time to researching the elections.Well put your money where your mouth is, bub. If you know better than the market, you stand to make money on it. The truth is, the volatility of these election markets reflects the *actual* uncertainty in *everyone*'s predictions about this primary, which is further a reflection of the actual volatility of public opinion itself. There *have* been surprises. Six months ago nobody expected Giuliani to do this poorly; nobody saw Huckabee's gains among evangelicals; etc etc. To pretend otherwise is silly; if you knew these things ahead of time you would be sitting pretty with a great position in the markets right now.
Your condescending remarks are way off target. My comment was not an endorsement of the program to subsidize converter boxes. I was just pointing out that the article's "problem" doesn't exist, nothing more. In fact, I'd tend to agree with you that subsidies are a bad idea.
As soon as TV stations themselves begin to worry about whether they will lose watchers, they will simply run commercials explaining to people how they can get *free* converter boxes from the government. TV is the one of the most effective communication mechanisms ever devised, after all. Problem solved.
When I saw the summary I thought this was a central marketplace for CC work, with some sort of standard fee structure and licensing terms. So people making CC work could easily set commercial use prices, people buying CC work could pay instantly over the Internet through CC and be assured of standard reasonable terms without negotiation, and CC could even make a little profit. Seems to me this could be a valuable service, if CC is not allergic to profit in any form. I know there's plenty of CC-noncommercial work out there that I would have certainly paid a reasonable fee to use, if there was a standard easy way to do so.
If you wanted a project to actually include the whole of human knowledge, you would have to implement some sort of reputation system, so that you could include the fringe information while providing a clear indication of its likely poor quality. I submit that this hypothetical project exists. It is called the World Wide Web. The reputation system is called PageRank.