I'm not sure that is better at all. Either an ISP has an editorial function, or it does not.
This is a bit black-and-white. ISP's host lots of data and services for customers, and there are many valid reasons to pull data or services.
1. Malware. If the service is causing problems for other ISP's and services, yours will be blacklisted. Get the malware off. 2. Overuse of limited resources. A script that is monopolizing the resources of a server will need to be dealt with. 3. Spam. ISP's hate spammers as much as everyone else, if not moreso, and for exactly the same reasons. 4. Legal tussles. Very few ISP's look forward to getting pulled into expensive legal battles. Part of the tradeoff with the DMCA in the US is that ISP's are explicitly not responsible for infringing material presuming they take content down promptly upon notification. Before the DMCA, ISP's were potential lawsuit targets. 5. Hack sources. Similar to Malware, but if one of your machines is hacking the ISP, you can bet it's getting booted off of the network.
Some ISP's refuse to host racist, sexual, or other types of websites for moral reasons. Also, depending on the inflammation level they tend to draw DDOS and hack attacks, which make it more difficult to conduct any business. While I tend to have problems with common carriers refusing to host information for moral reasons, there are currently no shortage of ISP's willing to do so. Most are pretty broad about what they will accept. So in practical terms it's not very problematic.
How would you like it if your job, country, and culture was stereotyped into the guilt-ridden nonsense that The Simpsons aired?
Isn't that what they air every week?
Banksy got a high profile forum, and he used it to spur discussions about how we treat emerging labor markets. Considering he had a sickly unicorn punching DVD holes, do you really think he was saying "this is the way that it is?" It seems to me like his point was that we take for granted the objects around us, but have a profound ignorance about their origins. And he managed to do this in a way that A: got into a mainstream production, B: got people talking, and C: actually educated people, albeit indirectly. I know far more about the actual conditions in animation shops of South Korea than I had before this intro was released.
My router says we average about 80 GB per month. Most of that is Netflix streaming and keeping large school files in sync. A single game full-game download hits about 10GB, and demos are about 4GB each.
RAGE is a 3D game engine that ID has been developing, as well as a title of similar name. If it is everything they say it is, it may replace Unreal Tournament as the default go-to 3D engine for upcoming game development.
Yes, though a small child running into most people would be one of the minor annoyances that happens all of the time, results in a talking-to, and everyone moves on. In this case, the woman was unfortunately fragile enough that the result, which normally would be harmless, was actually deadly. Should the child, who clearly already doesn't know not to run into people, be held responsible at age 4 for not knowing that elderly people are incredibly fragile and get potentially fatal complications easily?
The poor elderly lady's life may have the same value, but it doesn't have anywhere near the same durability. A 40 year old friend of mine was sucked under the wheels of a big-rig and survived, while my grandmother died due to having a very curable disease but for which the surgery would have killed her. Considering that healthy 4 year olds still use plastic cups, it's unfortunate but not surprising that the destructive force of large toddlers mixes poorly with the elderly.
Of course, that's why this is being litigated in Civil court, and not Criminal court.
The 6 minute charge time may be an exaggeration, but the battery company does sell surprisingly long-life batteries for industrial robots.
Ten years ago traction control, electronic stability control, and semiautomatic shifting were experimental prototypes unlikely to go anywhere. Now you can get minivans with semi-automatic shifting if you'd like. It will get here.
In Rome and parts of Italy, "gas stations" are basically a parking spot in the shoulder, with a small gasoline vending machine. I'm somewhat surprised we don't have those in big cities here in the states.
Designing a one-off prototype by hand is far easier than designing a full fabrication and manufacturing process that can quickly and reliably create multi-thousand dollar vehicles en-masse.
Further, there are a lot of engineering challenges potentially left to come... we know how fast it can charge, and we know how far it can drive. They haven't mentioned how long the battery actually lasts as a battery, possibly because they're facing an engineering hurdle. A truism of batteries is that the faster you charge, the shorter the lifespan of the battery. Lots of non-trivial engineering will also go into making it not explode or cover the passenger compartment in toxic chemicals upon impact.
The sexy engineering may be done. But there is a lot of engineering left to do. Heck, the turnaround time on creating and manufacturing a new Simpsons doll is about a year. Something as big as a car is inherently going to take time.
may have heightened American's awareness and concern.
Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but hightened concern in the US doesn't normally equate to hightened awareness. We are still that country that bans matches on board of aircraft because of security "concerns," but allows on butane lighters because of a lack of awareness.
If American's security concerns about the internet were heightened, I wouldn't keep coming across people surfing with expired copies of Norton Antivirus on XP SP1 machines that spew more worthless zombie crap than George Romero.
"Hey, let's build in a big red button into the internet. That way, when the president needs to stop all communication, crashing lots of security systems and generally leading to anarchy and billions of dollars of lost productivity, he will be able to flip a Lexan shield and push the button. Don't worry, though, those crafty hackers will never be able to break through Lexan." You might as well mount a gun pointed at our country's head and put a big sticker on it in Chinese saying "please don't pull this trigger."
Other things besides the Windows Operating System that Microsoft has sold or had a hand in:
1. Video game consoles. 2. MP3 players. 3. Webcams. 4. Overpriced Tech Support. 5. Web Content (MSN). 6. Bad Cell Phones 7. Good Cell phones 8. PDAs 9. Software 10. Cloud storage 11. An Encyclopedia 12. Servers 13. Video Game Software 14. Internet TV devices
To be fair, the Xbox 360 is a relatively recent success. And Bing, problematic as it is, has clawed back some marketshare from Google. They weren't first (or second) to the "Smartphones that aren't overbuilt garbage" market, but Windows Phone 7 is a respectable effort that may or may not pay off. Zune was too little too late to matter, but at least they tried. And they were pretty much first in console purchasing of TV shows and Movies for your tele.
They're never way in front of everyone. And they let their old products languish too much. But they do make efforts at creating new product lines, and some of those have been decent.
To be fair, the far more frightening thing is that someone can take out a base full of nuclear missiles with a backhoe and a bottle of Jager. My server room at least has a UPS, and the fate of the free world doesn't depend on that.
While I'd tend to agree, we're busy people. Just because you have a job interview that day, or thought it was Wednesday instead of Tuesday, or needed to pick up your daughter from recital after work, doesn't mean that it's a vote against the system. It means the opportunity cost of voting was higher than the expected payout (a very, very slim vote at a change in government).
Also, has there ever been a US election where 1/2 of the population showed up?
I've seen people attempt to avoid RSI by sitting "perfectly" and typing as "perfectly" as they can, while sitting as still as possible. What part of Repetitive Stress did they not understand?
Get multiple keyboards, and switch between them regularly. Sit close, medium, and far from your desk. Wrap your leg over the chair's arm, and back again. Grab your laptop and work on your lap. Change positions like a small child. Once an hour, get up and go to the bathroom, grab a drink, or have a quick F2F meeting. When someone comes into your office to interrupt you, take the opportunity to stand up and stretch.
You're not going to get RSI from using a computer wrong. You're going to get RSI from using a computer. You can help prevent that by treating your body like a fleshy, veiney, meaty machine that requires motion to stay functional, rather than like a metallic car engine that can be tuned to perfection. Give your joints a break, give your butt a break, and don't work rigidly in one position.
In defense of consumers: there is no real way of judging build quality in modern computers. "Brand name" strength is a terrible indicator, as brands like HP and Sony have some of the most miserable long-term reliability numbers. Industry numbers like Mean Time Between Failures bears little or no resemblance to reality.
Also, computer innovation generally means adding crap that isn't supported properly in the OS anyway, and will go away the moment you need to reinstall. The Lenovo I'm typing this on has a touchstrip launcher that takes twice as long to launch as extra buttons would, a camera-driven login system that only logs you in ideal circumstances, and a couple of unique hardware buttons that are mapped uselessly. The most genuinely innovative feature is a hybrid SSD / Disk HDD, which speeds up access and boot times significantly but at the cost of a proprietary HDD driver in all relevant OSs.
But really, the biggest problem with modern "innovations" in computing hardware is that they are always specific enough to be useless. Computers with built-in camera docs so you can print directly and easily. Wait, that's Windows 7-32 computer with a Canon camera doc to print to a Canon printer easily if you haven't put anything on top of your tower. Here's an innovative computer with built-in biometric detector. Wait, that's tied to a proprietary XP modification, only works on a vanilla login screen, and doesn't really work anyway.
All-In-One's here tend to be really expensive. I've known a lot of businesses that were on a desktop standard, and a big part of that reason was cost. They'd get parts of setups second hand from other businesses that upgraded... a monitor here, a wireless card there. New towers would come in, costing them $100 or less. Any sort of all-in-one would lock them to a single standard.
Laptops appeal to people's fantasies about portability and travel. "I might take that and use my laptop at a coffee shop!" Most people don't, of course, but the option is quite appealing.
This also applies to simple things. I used to keep everything in a massive, strung-out online todo list. Toodledoo was the last one, if anyone cares. But it quickly blossomed out to hundreds of entries, none of which were going to get done.
I do still keep a toodledo list for certain important things. But generally speaking, everything I intend to do in a day gets written down on a paper notebook in my pocket. One paper = one day. If something doesn't get done in a day, the following morning I'll sit down and decide what needs to get done that day. Sometimes things get brought across, but frequently items that seemed essential to get done just get dropped. My todo list is far more manageable now, overall more probably gets done. And while I forget certain things, at least I'm not kicking myself about not getting to them every time I scan down a list of 100 items to do right now.
Definitely forget some things. Distill information down to the important things, and lose the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that is better at all. Either an ISP has an editorial function, or it does not.
This is a bit black-and-white. ISP's host lots of data and services for customers, and there are many valid reasons to pull data or services.
1. Malware. If the service is causing problems for other ISP's and services, yours will be blacklisted. Get the malware off.
2. Overuse of limited resources. A script that is monopolizing the resources of a server will need to be dealt with.
3. Spam. ISP's hate spammers as much as everyone else, if not moreso, and for exactly the same reasons.
4. Legal tussles. Very few ISP's look forward to getting pulled into expensive legal battles. Part of the tradeoff with the DMCA in the US is that ISP's are explicitly not responsible for infringing material presuming they take content down promptly upon notification. Before the DMCA, ISP's were potential lawsuit targets.
5. Hack sources. Similar to Malware, but if one of your machines is hacking the ISP, you can bet it's getting booted off of the network.
Some ISP's refuse to host racist, sexual, or other types of websites for moral reasons. Also, depending on the inflammation level they tend to draw DDOS and hack attacks, which make it more difficult to conduct any business. While I tend to have problems with common carriers refusing to host information for moral reasons, there are currently no shortage of ISP's willing to do so. Most are pretty broad about what they will accept. So in practical terms it's not very problematic.
I would like to complain about Ed Vaizey's opinion about public forums. Where do I go to censor him?
How would you like it if your job, country, and culture was stereotyped into the guilt-ridden nonsense that The Simpsons aired?
Isn't that what they air every week?
Banksy got a high profile forum, and he used it to spur discussions about how we treat emerging labor markets. Considering he had a sickly unicorn punching DVD holes, do you really think he was saying "this is the way that it is?" It seems to me like his point was that we take for granted the objects around us, but have a profound ignorance about their origins. And he managed to do this in a way that A: got into a mainstream production, B: got people talking, and C: actually educated people, albeit indirectly. I know far more about the actual conditions in animation shops of South Korea than I had before this intro was released.
My router says we average about 80 GB per month. Most of that is Netflix streaming and keeping large school files in sync. A single game full-game download hits about 10GB, and demos are about 4GB each.
RAGE is a 3D game engine that ID has been developing, as well as a title of similar name. If it is everything they say it is, it may replace Unreal Tournament as the default go-to 3D engine for upcoming game development.
Yes, though a small child running into most people would be one of the minor annoyances that happens all of the time, results in a talking-to, and everyone moves on. In this case, the woman was unfortunately fragile enough that the result, which normally would be harmless, was actually deadly. Should the child, who clearly already doesn't know not to run into people, be held responsible at age 4 for not knowing that elderly people are incredibly fragile and get potentially fatal complications easily?
The poor elderly lady's life may have the same value, but it doesn't have anywhere near the same durability. A 40 year old friend of mine was sucked under the wheels of a big-rig and survived, while my grandmother died due to having a very curable disease but for which the surgery would have killed her. Considering that healthy 4 year olds still use plastic cups, it's unfortunate but not surprising that the destructive force of large toddlers mixes poorly with the elderly.
Of course, that's why this is being litigated in Civil court, and not Criminal court.
My mother's old Sentra got 0-60 in approximately 30 seconds. You whippersnappers have no patience.
The 6 minute charge time may be an exaggeration, but the battery company does sell surprisingly long-life batteries for industrial robots.
Ten years ago traction control, electronic stability control, and semiautomatic shifting were experimental prototypes unlikely to go anywhere. Now you can get minivans with semi-automatic shifting if you'd like. It will get here.
In Rome and parts of Italy, "gas stations" are basically a parking spot in the shoulder, with a small gasoline vending machine. I'm somewhat surprised we don't have those in big cities here in the states.
Designing a one-off prototype by hand is far easier than designing a full fabrication and manufacturing process that can quickly and reliably create multi-thousand dollar vehicles en-masse.
Further, there are a lot of engineering challenges potentially left to come... we know how fast it can charge, and we know how far it can drive. They haven't mentioned how long the battery actually lasts as a battery, possibly because they're facing an engineering hurdle. A truism of batteries is that the faster you charge, the shorter the lifespan of the battery. Lots of non-trivial engineering will also go into making it not explode or cover the passenger compartment in toxic chemicals upon impact.
The sexy engineering may be done. But there is a lot of engineering left to do. Heck, the turnaround time on creating and manufacturing a new Simpsons doll is about a year. Something as big as a car is inherently going to take time.
61% may need to use their brain more. That doesn't mean they have said device with which to satisfy that need.
may have heightened American's awareness and concern.
Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but hightened concern in the US doesn't normally equate to hightened awareness. We are still that country that bans matches on board of aircraft because of security "concerns," but allows on butane lighters because of a lack of awareness.
If American's security concerns about the internet were heightened, I wouldn't keep coming across people surfing with expired copies of Norton Antivirus on XP SP1 machines that spew more worthless zombie crap than George Romero.
"Hey, let's build in a big red button into the internet. That way, when the president needs to stop all communication, crashing lots of security systems and generally leading to anarchy and billions of dollars of lost productivity, he will be able to flip a Lexan shield and push the button. Don't worry, though, those crafty hackers will never be able to break through Lexan." You might as well mount a gun pointed at our country's head and put a big sticker on it in Chinese saying "please don't pull this trigger."
Why would he need a costume? He can already force-choke.
http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2008/12/22/alg_cheney-waves.jpg
At the risk of overposting in this thread...
Other things besides the Windows Operating System that Microsoft has sold or had a hand in:
1. Video game consoles.
2. MP3 players.
3. Webcams.
4. Overpriced Tech Support.
5. Web Content (MSN).
6. Bad Cell Phones
7. Good Cell phones
8. PDAs
9. Software
10. Cloud storage
11. An Encyclopedia
12. Servers
13. Video Game Software
14. Internet TV devices
To be fair, the Xbox 360 is a relatively recent success. And Bing, problematic as it is, has clawed back some marketshare from Google. They weren't first (or second) to the "Smartphones that aren't overbuilt garbage" market, but Windows Phone 7 is a respectable effort that may or may not pay off. Zune was too little too late to matter, but at least they tried. And they were pretty much first in console purchasing of TV shows and Movies for your tele.
They're never way in front of everyone. And they let their old products languish too much. But they do make efforts at creating new product lines, and some of those have been decent.
"Gore, I don't care about the penguins. Order the damned launch."
To be fair, the far more frightening thing is that someone can take out a base full of nuclear missiles with a backhoe and a bottle of Jager. My server room at least has a UPS, and the fate of the free world doesn't depend on that.
While I'd tend to agree, we're busy people. Just because you have a job interview that day, or thought it was Wednesday instead of Tuesday, or needed to pick up your daughter from recital after work, doesn't mean that it's a vote against the system. It means the opportunity cost of voting was higher than the expected payout (a very, very slim vote at a change in government).
Also, has there ever been a US election where 1/2 of the population showed up?
Piggybacking on this subject, does anyone have a favorite alternative keyboard? Has anyone actually used the FrogPad, AlphaGrip, or the OrbiTouch?
I've seen people attempt to avoid RSI by sitting "perfectly" and typing as "perfectly" as they can, while sitting as still as possible. What part of Repetitive Stress did they not understand?
Get multiple keyboards, and switch between them regularly. Sit close, medium, and far from your desk. Wrap your leg over the chair's arm, and back again. Grab your laptop and work on your lap. Change positions like a small child. Once an hour, get up and go to the bathroom, grab a drink, or have a quick F2F meeting. When someone comes into your office to interrupt you, take the opportunity to stand up and stretch.
You're not going to get RSI from using a computer wrong. You're going to get RSI from using a computer. You can help prevent that by treating your body like a fleshy, veiney, meaty machine that requires motion to stay functional, rather than like a metallic car engine that can be tuned to perfection. Give your joints a break, give your butt a break, and don't work rigidly in one position.
In defense of consumers: there is no real way of judging build quality in modern computers. "Brand name" strength is a terrible indicator, as brands like HP and Sony have some of the most miserable long-term reliability numbers. Industry numbers like Mean Time Between Failures bears little or no resemblance to reality.
Also, computer innovation generally means adding crap that isn't supported properly in the OS anyway, and will go away the moment you need to reinstall. The Lenovo I'm typing this on has a touchstrip launcher that takes twice as long to launch as extra buttons would, a camera-driven login system that only logs you in ideal circumstances, and a couple of unique hardware buttons that are mapped uselessly. The most genuinely innovative feature is a hybrid SSD / Disk HDD, which speeds up access and boot times significantly but at the cost of a proprietary HDD driver in all relevant OSs.
But really, the biggest problem with modern "innovations" in computing hardware is that they are always specific enough to be useless. Computers with built-in camera docs so you can print directly and easily. Wait, that's Windows 7-32 computer with a Canon camera doc to print to a Canon printer easily if you haven't put anything on top of your tower. Here's an innovative computer with built-in biometric detector. Wait, that's tied to a proprietary XP modification, only works on a vanilla login screen, and doesn't really work anyway.
All-In-One's here tend to be really expensive. I've known a lot of businesses that were on a desktop standard, and a big part of that reason was cost. They'd get parts of setups second hand from other businesses that upgraded... a monitor here, a wireless card there. New towers would come in, costing them $100 or less. Any sort of all-in-one would lock them to a single standard.
Laptops appeal to people's fantasies about portability and travel. "I might take that and use my laptop at a coffee shop!" Most people don't, of course, but the option is quite appealing.
This also applies to simple things. I used to keep everything in a massive, strung-out online todo list. Toodledoo was the last one, if anyone cares. But it quickly blossomed out to hundreds of entries, none of which were going to get done.
I do still keep a toodledo list for certain important things. But generally speaking, everything I intend to do in a day gets written down on a paper notebook in my pocket. One paper = one day. If something doesn't get done in a day, the following morning I'll sit down and decide what needs to get done that day. Sometimes things get brought across, but frequently items that seemed essential to get done just get dropped. My todo list is far more manageable now, overall more probably gets done. And while I forget certain things, at least I'm not kicking myself about not getting to them every time I scan down a list of 100 items to do right now.
Definitely forget some things. Distill information down to the important things, and lose the rest.
There is a lossless JPEG standard built into the original JPEG specification, but nobody supports it. JPEG-LS also went nowhere.
But they do exist.
If you have to fall back to flash because HTML5 is unsupported in the current browser, how well do HTML4-based browsers support the video tag above?