Well, I did read the article, and I have to say it didn't exactly meet high standards of analytical brilliance.
There's a very simple reason for Microsoft to try search business away from Google. If Google makes money at it, then so can Microsoft.
On the other hand, the idea that Google's Chrome OS is going to be a threat to MS Windows on the desktop anytime soon is fantasy. Think about Android. Android is a fascinating OS, but it hasn't taken the phone world by storm -- yet.
I think that Google may be more interested in defining the capabilities of classes of devices. The thing about laptops and desktops is that the platform vendor is not in the capability limiting business. On a mobile phone, it is, because people don't pay for most of their phones. The carriers do, and the carriers are interested in things like lock-in and preventing competition with network services by software using generic network services. Android, I think, is an attempt to liberalize controls on what mobile devices can do.
Likewise in the great spectrum auction, Google tried to leverage their participation into a change of the auction's rules.
So, putting on my wildass speculation hat for a moment, I am lead to wonder whether the Chrome operating system is an attempt to alter the course of the netbook space away from devices that are artificially constrained, and possibly which tie users to specific networks and service providers. One can imagine a version of Windows for netbooks carefully constrained so it doesn't undermine the main Windows product, and which tries to funnel users toward Bing. Given Microsoft's clout with manufacturers, they could well launch such a device. It could be sold at very low margins from Microsoft's perspective because it would generate a regular revenue stream.
That kind of closed world is bad for Google. It doesn't have to take the world by storm with these offerings, it just has to tip developments in the right places to keep the world open. A straight-jacketed version of Windows XP that funnels users to MS services but is cheap to put on a netbook might seem like a good deal to a manufacturer, but not if they have to put their systems up against a more open one.
I think I've heard this from him. However, I suspect he might want to qualify that advice.
One thing to keep in mind is that when it comes to security, you don't get it from following a few simple rule formulas like "never write down a password". It's quite obvious that in *some* situations, stronger passwords on paper in your wallet are a better choice, in other cases it would be a really, really bad idea.
The theory is that writing passwords down turn them into "something you have", analogous to carrying your car keys. And in the old days when we were talking about passwords to resources on corporate LANs for low level drones, that's probably reasonable. It was never reasonable for somebody like the CEO of comptroller where getting ahold of that particular wallet would be very, very useful.
The problem with th car key analogy is that cars can't be stolen over the Internet. Corporate VLANs can be accessed over the Internet, as can your Amazon 1-click or eBay account. So personally, I think carrying passwords in your wallet is a bad idea for most people these days.
What I think makes sense if you are moderately paranoid is to write down *part* of your password. It can be a high entropy string of symbols. The remaining part should be easy to remember but not trivial to guess.
Even so, what we're talking about here is relying on passwords -- even strong ones -- too much, when really you need to be minding the store better. You need to do more things around the passwords, like limiting the number of login attempts in a certain period, and looking for suspicious behavior.
No. The U.S. government is spending $18 million dollars or something, but we don't have a ghost of a chance of figuring out what that might be after it's been filtered through some non-technical political reporter's blog, then the Slashdot editorial slice-and-dice.
That's an interesting analysis, but it leaves out one important fact. Practically every Bible from the time of the Codex Sinaiticus and earlier would be "corrupt" by your standard.
Until Christianity became an imperial religion, the need for a "canonical Bible" was not at all clear. People got on with the teachings they'd received by whoever brought Christianity to their locality. The idea of an exclusive "canon" was actually a gnostic innovation -- some of them wanted to throw out any references to a good Old Testament God, for example. It's no accident that the canon (more or less as we know it) was finalized shortly after Christianity became the official religion.
That's why we have four Gospels. That was the smallest number that they could be reduced to without having large parts of the Church break off.
The idea that the Codex was junk that was thrown in the trash is utter nonsense. As a physical artifact, it would have been very, very valuable. At the very least it'd be recycled into a palimpsest. If it were considered heretical, it would have been destroyed, not set aside.
He's not visiting a foreign country. He's visiting a virtual country. Not only a virtual country, but a virtual country whose ostensible purpose is to play roles that involve acting in ways contrary to social norms. Yet somehow this artificial world evolves the notion of -- politeness. That's not at all an inevitable or obvious result until you've played a game like this.
Sure, it's obvious if you play. It's obvious if you ever visit the big blue room that the sky is blue, but it's not obvious to everyone to wonder "why?".
That this happens raises a number of interesting points about human behavior. One might ask why this sort of thing happens in some circumstances (MMO games) but not others (blog threads). These are all quite interesting things to think about. To think about them academically, it has to start with a paper. The first papers probably tell us things we already know, but you can't talk about what is unknown without reference to what is known, and you can't refer to anything academically until it's in a paper somewhere. Therefore the first papers on the road to interesting research may well tell us things we already know informally.
Well, if that's a kind of driving you frequently do, then a diesel is probably your best bet. That's the best case scenario driving for in internal combustion engine both in terms efficiency and minimal environmental impact. I doubt many people in Grass Range Montana are going to be buying these.
But for most drivers, most of the time, a three hundred mile range electric car that charges in 45 minutes will be extremely practical. In some ways more practical if you just drive it into your garage at night and plug in; you'll never have to think about finding a gas station.
One thing to consider in the short term is that most households have more than one car. In the short term replacing one of them with a vehicle like this will be very pragmatic. If they ever have the itch to drive over five hundred miles without stopping for more than a few minutes, they can take the gasoline engine.
If we are thinking about a reasonably distant future in which support for ICE vehicles becomes harder to find, batteries will surely be better than they are today. Even if not it isn't hard to imagine schemes to make longer drives possible (e.g. auxiliary power sources in the car or in a trailer).
Sure, all sources are suspect, but not equally so. Expert testimony should meet certain quality standards.
Think about the OJ trial. Johnny Cochran did not roll over and die in the face of forensic evidence in that trial. Athough OJ may have been guilty as hell, Cochran did his job professionally where the LAPD did not. This demonstrates an important point. Standards for what is presented as "expert opinion" do not preclude challenging such opinions. In fact standards should make challenges easier where the most common types of defects of evidence are present.
There are many problems, but the key one is this: putting this information in the mouth of an "expert witness" is a misrepresentation of its authoritativeness.
If you have a grizzled looking old cop in his best uniform testifying about all the ways a martial arts weapon can hurt somebody, you'd probably assume he's talking from experience. If you have a thirteen year old kid wearing his Bruce Lee pajamas (which he still sleeps in) reading from what you've been told is a printout of a web page, you'd treat the information in a different way, even though its the same information from the same source.
A Wikipedia article on rigor mortis might get some details of rigor mortis right where some experienced coroner gets them wrong, simply by luck or the many eyeballs effect. But I wouldn't count on it.
(1) Hire a firm that knows about marketing software.
(2) Sell it to a company that already markets software to your target audience.
Difficult, good answers:
(1) Make a serious stab at starting your own software company and hire people who know how to do this.
Easy, bad answers:
(1) Ask some random bloke on Slashdot what he thinks.
I've been down this road myself, and believe me there are thousands of things that seem obviously true about selling software that turn out to be horribly wrong in ways you couldn't possibly imagine. Take pricing, for example, one of the most basic decisions you have to make. We thought we'd price our product low because killing ourselves to make sales wasn't appealing. Boy was that ever wrong. We ended up killing ourselves to make small sales. I finally browbeat my partner into raising the price, and suddenly sales became a lot easier. What happened was that the pragmatic adopters always wait for the early adopters to take the risk, and the early adopters were turned off by the low price because they wanted the shiniest, coolest toy. Until we raised prices, we had two or three really good customers who kept us going, and dozens of whiney, tight fisted bottom feeders who'd paid next to nothing for our software and thought that entitled them to endless free consulting.
It turns out the pricing decision was waaay more complicated than we ever dreamed. You can price your product too low to sell, or price it too high. In some cases you can make money with a really cheap product (think stuff like ring tones and really asinine iPhone apps) as long as it's the kind of thing nobody would ever dream of calling for support.
If you really want to make a serious business out of selling software, you've got to prepare yourself to learn a lot about business and marketing, even if you hire people to help you with this. Oh, and of course business law. You do have liability insurance, don't you? A lawyer to write your license agreements?
If you just want to make a few bucks out of something you've done for fun, and have no interest in the headaches of running a business, then at least get a little legal advice about how to protect yourself from liability. Then don't worry, be happy. You're doing this for fun.
Or you could open source your software. If writing software is something you love to do, and the money is something that you don't want to worry about, then this might be a better choice for you. You see making money and looking after a business takes money, so unless you're willing to devote some effort and investment into those things, you're almost certainly going to lose money, especially if you account for the trouble and opportunity costs the headaches you'll inevitably have. Having written an open source product that people use and appreciate can be a very economically valuable thing to you. It can open doors to new jobs or consulting contracts, for example. And if you are coding this thing for fun, you'll get to do more coding when you hear back from users about what they want. That's really the most personally rewarding thing about owning a business: learning about customers and getting better at serving their needs.
At least that's the most rewarding thing about owning a moderately successful business. It's possible that owning a business that makes you fabulously wealthy means never having to say you're sorry, but I couldn't tell you about that. It sounds like that's not what you're looking for, in any case.
Well, I guess I'll just have to ignore everything you have to say about the KindleDX then. You see Slashdot analysis is like geometry. It relies on pure reason, rather than mere sensory experience which has been known to be misleading.
The secret, as in many business situations, is cash flow. As long as the cash is coming in, you can weather any storm. If you have better cash flow than the other guy, you can outlast him in a fight.
If you look at a monopolist's legal expenses as a black box, cash spent on litigation, fines, and settlements is analogous to R&D. You put cash in on one end, you get ownership of a technology out the other. The companies you crush aren't going to rise from the dead. The stockholders are happy to get any cash they can out of a settlement, they aren't going to try to restart the company as a going to concern. Trying to win back ownership of some technical area once the monopolist is entrenched is not likely to be profitable; ownership of that area is more valuable to the monopolist has part of its portfolio than it is to the victim company's investors.
So the monopolist goes on doing the illegal things it has always done, just different enough so that the next company in its sights has to assemble its case from scratch. That takes cash.
Now we have an interesting situation with Google. Google has cash too: 17B to Microsoft's 23.9B. But here's something interesting: the current ratio. That's the ratio of short term assets (cash-like things) to short term liabilities. For Google, that's 10.1; for Microsoft that's 1.7. Microsoft has roughly twice the amount of cash on hand than it needs to keep running. That's healthy. Google, on the other hand has 10x the cash it needs to keep running. That's insanely healthy. It means they've got insane amounts of money to spend.
If Microsoft manages to use its monopoly power to steal Google's business, this picture will change quickly. Google's revenues would dry up fast. So if there is some kind of illegal anticompetitive thing going on, Google had better react fast, but if it does, it has the cash to put up a good fight.
here effectively recognize bicycles as legitimate users of the road in their laws, either by defining them as vehicles, or by giving riders the the responsibilities and privileges of other vehicle operators (citation: http://bikelaws.org/ ).
A few states have special restrictions, such as using a bike path if possible. Four states require bicycles to use the shoulder of the road, but not when that would be hazardous.
There have been periodic laws to ban bicycles from the road, or to mandate really stupid things like riding against traffic, but they have universally been rejected at the state level. A few additional requirements may apply in your jurisdiction to bicycles (e.g. helmets, and audible signals). A very small number of localities have restrictive bike ordinances. But the default and overwhelmingly most common case is that bicycles have legal rights to use roads other than limited access highways.
Sadly, there are many pedestrians and bicyclists hit in my city, and with very few exceptions is the motorist ever held liable.
So we are to outlaw pedestrians? Get rid of crosswalks?
I know about cyclists getting hit. A good friend of mine was killed while riding by a hit and run driver. He didn't have to die, but the driver didn't call an ambulance. He left him in a ditch to die. So should we outlaw cars based on this? No. It was an irresponsible driver that killed him.
It is quite possible for cars and bikes to share the road at an acceptable level of risk. It's not so hard. We just have to enforce the law. The most fundamental law is responsible operation of your type vehicle. For cars this means to drive at reasonable speeds with awareness of what is or may be ahead of you. It's not any different than what you have to do to avoid hitting stranded motorists. For bicycles it means riding in the normal direction, using hand signals, and not swerving or weaving into traffic unpredictably.
When you point it to them that they should not be on the road, you would think you were asking an African-American to sit on the back of the bus, or a Japanese U.S citizen to take a "vacation" until the war is over.
Naturally they are angry at you (if you live here in the US). You're trying to stop them from doing something they have a perfect right to do. If I told you you couldn't walk down the sidewalk or sit on a park bench, you wouldn't like it either. So in a sense, it is like the things you are talking about. The difference is a matter of degree, not kind.
Legally, the bike is traffic on anything but a limited access highway. You might not like him being there. You might think the law should be changed to further limit or even ban bike traffic. But until you can get the law changed, "bikes are not traffic" (which I take to mean that they have no legal rights to use the road) is simply wrong.
There's lots of vehicles on the road I wish weren't there. When I've got to deal with a tractor trailer making a tricky turn, I wish it wasn't there. When I'm behind agricultural or construction machinery and I cannot pass, I wish they weren't there. When I'm on a road with narrow lanes and I've got to look out for some huge SUV that barely fits, I wish it wasn't there. But I can't wish it away, and more importantly, I can't wish my legal and moral responsibility to drive in a safe manner away. Even if I am dealing with an illegal vehicle (e.g. a bicycle on an limited access highway) it is my responsibility to drive in a manner which ensures everybody, including the driver of the illegal vehicle, remains safe. If I drive in an unsafe way because I don't think that vehicle should be there, I'm breaking the law. Even if the law agrees with me that the vehicle shouldn't be there, I'd actually be the greater lawbreaker in that case.
Now it sometimes happens in the course of driving that things are not safe as we'd want them to be. I might come around a blind curve and find a front end loader ahead. I might be in the right lane and a car in the left has an engine that suddenly belches smoke so it needs to get into the breakdown lane. I might even encounter a bad driver who cuts me off. It's natural to feel fear and sometimes anger, but these are facts of driving, which will never be totally safe. Driving itself is a tradeoff between the benefits of safety and the benefits of mobility. It takes maturity and mental toughness, but when confronted with a situation that irritates or outrages you on the road, you just have to eat it. Driving requires we all share the road. It is always the case that if you force some set of vehicles or drivers off the road, driving becomes a bit safer. By that measure, we should force cars of the road, because roads would be come very much safer for the remaining vehicles. But it's not about absolute safety. It's about the greatest safety consistent with freedom of movement.
This is not a technological advance. It is a scientific (or perhaps mathematical) advance.
The point is not that AES is broken; the point is that insights have been gained into its vulnerabilities. It's not necessarily the thin end of the wedge because we don't know whether such a wedge exists, but it could be *a* thin end of *a* wedge. Or it might not. If an AES crack is ever found, it might not be based on this discovery, but this discovery would still have its place in the history of the crack. It's like mathematical proof. Sometimes the first proof of a conjecture is complicated and messy, but then not too long after a shorter and more elegant proof is found. It may be that knowledge that something is provable is a motivation; or that lesser insight somehow fertilize mathematical imagination. It's hard to say because the process of mathematical creativity is so mysterious.
Even so, the GPS chip itself hardly be a challenge to a battery that supplies a cell phone transmitter. OEM modules draw something like 100mw; low power GPS chips draw even less. If it is correlated to the GPS running and nothing else, something else must be very wrong with the engineering of the device.
I suspect the battery too as the ultimate cause of the heating, but it seems very unlikely to me that the GPS module could use more than a watt. That doesn't seem credible.
What modules on the device can draw enough power to trigger some kind of unexpected battery condition? Well the transmitter of course. The CPU. Maybe the audio drivers? But the GPS unit? Why would it use so much power?
It seems to me that this is the kind of thing you can tell from specs. Entire OEM modules use less than one watt in continuous operation. GPS ICs according to the spec sheets I've seen use less than 1/10 of a watt (e.g. less than 10mw when run from a 3.6v li-ion battery).
I'm not saying that GPS use doesn't trigger this. I'm not saying it can't be the chip. But if it is, this is something they surely should have known about just by reading the specs. I can't believe that they don't watch the power consumption figures for each component they put in a device like this.
Well, you have some good points, but that doesn't make the opposite position "silly".
The issue here is realism. "Murder, She Wrote?" Man, if that were realistic, then anybody who was Jessica's nephew or niece would be forced to wear orange jumpsuits for public safety reasons. Associating them would be asking to catch a bad case of homicide.
Murder is useful in stories and games because it provides a ready made motivation for plot action. In mysteries, the Great Detective is kind of like a cross between a watchmaker and a janitor. His job is to clean up the mess left by the murderer, and he does it by constructing an intricate mechanism -- the theory of the crime -- under adverse conditions.
Killing in games exists in order to provide stimulation. Kill or be killed is primal. It's not the only way to provide stimulation, nor does it have to be realistic. Nethack (I can post screenshots for the interested) can be nerve wracking because you only get one shot before you have to go all the way back to the start. The kid friendly Mario games abound in kill or be killed scenarios.
So successful games exploit kill-or-be-killed without realistic killing. So why have it at all?
I think the reason is that age old driver of human progress (and failure): because we can. We have a game with killing, and everything in this release is getting more realistic, therefore the killing is more realistic. There's also a very stupid reason, which is for more stimulation. That goes away fast as the brain adapts. You need that combination of player investment and decision making that kicks the brain into flow state. That's why people will be playing nethack long after most FPS games on the market are a distant memory.
I think the other possible reason for graphic killing is artistic. Maybe that's an extension of the "because we can" reason; if we're going to do it, let's do it as well as possible. The crux is "as well as possible." When Stephen King uses violence, he'll give you twenty pages of suspense describing the thirty seconds leading up to it, and then it's over in a paragraph. Of course video games are a different medium, but the general principles apply: the greatest impact requires restraint. Without it, people adjust to the new level of whatever it is (in this case gore) and they stop responding. You want a response.
The final question is whether graphic killing in games is somehow bad for us. I think this is both a complicated and profound question (they aren't always the same thing). The complication is that details matter: not just "realism" but context in the game play and story. Imagine a white supremacy game in which the player has to kill as many Jews and gays and latinos. Imagine that the game is very crude, almost cartoony, and music and text praise the user every time he kills an innocent person. Now imagine a game that tries to immerse the player in a realistic an experience of the Normandy Invasions on D-Day as consistent with game play. The D-Day game draws on scholarship and first person experiences; the killing of young and inexperienced German troops is not artistically tweaked to make it seem more glorious and wonderful than it actually was. Now ask yourself: is the realistic death depicted in the D-Day game somehow more corrupting of the human spirit than the glorified cartoon gore of the racist game?
I mean, isn't the GPS chip running all the time to give you cellular 9-1-1 and location based services?
It's not like OEM GPS units are an exotic technology either. You determine the thermal dissipation of the unit on the test bench just by firing it up. This is some kind of system behavior phenomenon.
If I had to pull an answer out of my donkey I'd guess that the initial cause of the overheating is plain old CPU wattage. Normally the CPU would run throttled down, but then when you do mapping and processing GPS data it's chugging away all the time doing trigonometry -- and mobile CPUs are probably not power optimized for continual floating point operations. And then some kind of thermal runaway gets triggered in some component -- possibly the backliight or battery.
It's not strictly true to talk about the kinds of economic models Anderson is talking about (if I understand this correctly) as "free". They just involve transactions on the consumer end that are too small to bother collecting money for -- from the consumer. That's not anything particularly revolutionary. Television ran for years that way with advertising revenues.
But if you look at television news, you see the Achilles heel of these models when it comes to journalism. The three national networks for many years had news shows which were produced to serious journalistic standards. But local news was a practically a by-word for cheap sensationalism. "If it bleeds it leads". It's not that it is impossible to have high quality local news, newspapers did it for years. It just wasn't economical to put the effort in for local markets unless the consumer ponied up dough.
The secret of "free" information is that those tiny increments of consumer value -- usually eyeball time on an advertisement, but it could possibly be other thigns -- can be aggregated on an enormous scale into packages that are valuable enough to pay for things like journalism. Under Internet models, local news gathered to journalistic standards is not economical.
Now various crowd source models such as twitter have their place in the information ecosystem. They may beat journalism to the punch in many instances, or correct mistakes journalists make. But we need journalists to correct the mistakes the crowd makes even more. You can't use a model like Wikipedia as proof that quality journalism is possible with volunteers. Journalism is much more difficult than holding forth on a topic you might know a little (or a lot) about. Suggesting that something like Wikipedia can replace journalism is like suggesting it can replace science.
Possibly because there are more participants in track and that's a highly specialized skill.
In any case, there isn't any any single skill you can call "jumping". A body ideal for stuffing a basketball isn't necessarily ideal for the high jump. That said, jumping in general favors slim but strong people with well balanced development. There's also definitely a "weak link" effect; if your powerful buttocks drive their force through a weak calf, you end up losing power. When I competed in Chinese martial arts, the most common training injury was a pulled gastroc (large calf muscle). I quit competition when I developed arthritis in my right (jumping) big toe.
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Well, I did read the article, and I have to say it didn't exactly meet high standards of analytical brilliance.
There's a very simple reason for Microsoft to try search business away from Google. If Google makes money at it, then so can Microsoft.
On the other hand, the idea that Google's Chrome OS is going to be a threat to MS Windows on the desktop anytime soon is fantasy. Think about Android. Android is a fascinating OS, but it hasn't taken the phone world by storm -- yet.
I think that Google may be more interested in defining the capabilities of classes of devices. The thing about laptops and desktops is that the platform vendor is not in the capability limiting business. On a mobile phone, it is, because people don't pay for most of their phones. The carriers do, and the carriers are interested in things like lock-in and preventing competition with network services by software using generic network services. Android, I think, is an attempt to liberalize controls on what mobile devices can do.
Likewise in the great spectrum auction, Google tried to leverage their participation into a change of the auction's rules.
So, putting on my wildass speculation hat for a moment, I am lead to wonder whether the Chrome operating system is an attempt to alter the course of the netbook space away from devices that are artificially constrained, and possibly which tie users to specific networks and service providers. One can imagine a version of Windows for netbooks carefully constrained so it doesn't undermine the main Windows product, and which tries to funnel users toward Bing. Given Microsoft's clout with manufacturers, they could well launch such a device. It could be sold at very low margins from Microsoft's perspective because it would generate a regular revenue stream.
That kind of closed world is bad for Google. It doesn't have to take the world by storm with these offerings, it just has to tip developments in the right places to keep the world open. A straight-jacketed version of Windows XP that funnels users to MS services but is cheap to put on a netbook might seem like a good deal to a manufacturer, but not if they have to put their systems up against a more open one.
I think I've heard this from him. However, I suspect he might want to qualify that advice.
One thing to keep in mind is that when it comes to security, you don't get it from following a few simple rule formulas like "never write down a password". It's quite obvious that in *some* situations, stronger passwords on paper in your wallet are a better choice, in other cases it would be a really, really bad idea.
The theory is that writing passwords down turn them into "something you have", analogous to carrying your car keys. And in the old days when we were talking about passwords to resources on corporate LANs for low level drones, that's probably reasonable. It was never reasonable for somebody like the CEO of comptroller where getting ahold of that particular wallet would be very, very useful.
The problem with th car key analogy is that cars can't be stolen over the Internet. Corporate VLANs can be accessed over the Internet, as can your Amazon 1-click or eBay account. So personally, I think carrying passwords in your wallet is a bad idea for most people these days.
What I think makes sense if you are moderately paranoid is to write down *part* of your password. It can be a high entropy string of symbols. The remaining part should be easy to remember but not trivial to guess.
Even so, what we're talking about here is relying on passwords -- even strong ones -- too much, when really you need to be minding the store better. You need to do more things around the passwords, like limiting the number of login attempts in a certain period, and looking for suspicious behavior.
No. The U.S. government is spending $18 million dollars or something, but we don't have a ghost of a chance of figuring out what that might be after it's been filtered through some non-technical political reporter's blog, then the Slashdot editorial slice-and-dice.
That's an interesting analysis, but it leaves out one important fact. Practically every Bible from the time of the Codex Sinaiticus and earlier would be "corrupt" by your standard.
Until Christianity became an imperial religion, the need for a "canonical Bible" was not at all clear. People got on with the teachings they'd received by whoever brought Christianity to their locality. The idea of an exclusive "canon" was actually a gnostic innovation -- some of them wanted to throw out any references to a good Old Testament God, for example. It's no accident that the canon (more or less as we know it) was finalized shortly after Christianity became the official religion.
That's why we have four Gospels. That was the smallest number that they could be reduced to without having large parts of the Church break off.
The idea that the Codex was junk that was thrown in the trash is utter nonsense. As a physical artifact, it would have been very, very valuable. At the very least it'd be recycled into a palimpsest. If it were considered heretical, it would have been destroyed, not set aside.
Of course he'd be a smartass. Natural selection discourages dumbass engineers who fly on planes they fix themselves.
Well, isn't that the point?
He's not visiting a foreign country. He's visiting a virtual country. Not only a virtual country, but a virtual country whose ostensible purpose is to play roles that involve acting in ways contrary to social norms. Yet somehow this artificial world evolves the notion of -- politeness. That's not at all an inevitable or obvious result until you've played a game like this.
Sure, it's obvious if you play. It's obvious if you ever visit the big blue room that the sky is blue, but it's not obvious to everyone to wonder "why?".
That this happens raises a number of interesting points about human behavior. One might ask why this sort of thing happens in some circumstances (MMO games) but not others (blog threads). These are all quite interesting things to think about. To think about them academically, it has to start with a paper. The first papers probably tell us things we already know, but you can't talk about what is unknown without reference to what is known, and you can't refer to anything academically until it's in a paper somewhere. Therefore the first papers on the road to interesting research may well tell us things we already know informally.
Well, if that's a kind of driving you frequently do, then a diesel is probably your best bet. That's the best case scenario driving for in internal combustion engine both in terms efficiency and minimal environmental impact. I doubt many people in Grass Range Montana are going to be buying these.
But for most drivers, most of the time, a three hundred mile range electric car that charges in 45 minutes will be extremely practical. In some ways more practical if you just drive it into your garage at night and plug in; you'll never have to think about finding a gas station.
One thing to consider in the short term is that most households have more than one car. In the short term replacing one of them with a vehicle like this will be very pragmatic. If they ever have the itch to drive over five hundred miles without stopping for more than a few minutes, they can take the gasoline engine.
If we are thinking about a reasonably distant future in which support for ICE vehicles becomes harder to find, batteries will surely be better than they are today. Even if not it isn't hard to imagine schemes to make longer drives possible (e.g. auxiliary power sources in the car or in a trailer).
No engine under the hood means you can fit two in there.
Sure, all sources are suspect, but not equally so. Expert testimony should meet certain quality standards.
Think about the OJ trial. Johnny Cochran did not roll over and die in the face of forensic evidence in that trial. Athough OJ may have been guilty as hell, Cochran did his job professionally where the LAPD did not. This demonstrates an important point. Standards for what is presented as "expert opinion" do not preclude challenging such opinions. In fact standards should make challenges easier where the most common types of defects of evidence are present.
There are many problems, but the key one is this: putting this information in the mouth of an "expert witness" is a misrepresentation of its authoritativeness.
If you have a grizzled looking old cop in his best uniform testifying about all the ways a martial arts weapon can hurt somebody, you'd probably assume he's talking from experience. If you have a thirteen year old kid wearing his Bruce Lee pajamas (which he still sleeps in) reading from what you've been told is a printout of a web page, you'd treat the information in a different way, even though its the same information from the same source.
A Wikipedia article on rigor mortis might get some details of rigor mortis right where some experienced coroner gets them wrong, simply by luck or the many eyeballs effect. But I wouldn't count on it.
(moderately) Easy, good answers:
(1) Hire a firm that knows about marketing software.
(2) Sell it to a company that already markets software to your target audience.
Difficult, good answers:
(1) Make a serious stab at starting your own software company and hire people who know how to do this.
Easy, bad answers:
(1) Ask some random bloke on Slashdot what he thinks.
I've been down this road myself, and believe me there are thousands of things that seem obviously true about selling software that turn out to be horribly wrong in ways you couldn't possibly imagine. Take pricing, for example, one of the most basic decisions you have to make. We thought we'd price our product low because killing ourselves to make sales wasn't appealing. Boy was that ever wrong. We ended up killing ourselves to make small sales. I finally browbeat my partner into raising the price, and suddenly sales became a lot easier. What happened was that the pragmatic adopters always wait for the early adopters to take the risk, and the early adopters were turned off by the low price because they wanted the shiniest, coolest toy. Until we raised prices, we had two or three really good customers who kept us going, and dozens of whiney, tight fisted bottom feeders who'd paid next to nothing for our software and thought that entitled them to endless free consulting.
It turns out the pricing decision was waaay more complicated than we ever dreamed. You can price your product too low to sell, or price it too high. In some cases you can make money with a really cheap product (think stuff like ring tones and really asinine iPhone apps) as long as it's the kind of thing nobody would ever dream of calling for support.
If you really want to make a serious business out of selling software, you've got to prepare yourself to learn a lot about business and marketing, even if you hire people to help you with this. Oh, and of course business law. You do have liability insurance, don't you? A lawyer to write your license agreements?
If you just want to make a few bucks out of something you've done for fun, and have no interest in the headaches of running a business, then at least get a little legal advice about how to protect yourself from liability. Then don't worry, be happy. You're doing this for fun.
Or you could open source your software. If writing software is something you love to do, and the money is something that you don't want to worry about, then this might be a better choice for you. You see making money and looking after a business takes money, so unless you're willing to devote some effort and investment into those things, you're almost certainly going to lose money, especially if you account for the trouble and opportunity costs the headaches you'll inevitably have. Having written an open source product that people use and appreciate can be a very economically valuable thing to you. It can open doors to new jobs or consulting contracts, for example. And if you are coding this thing for fun, you'll get to do more coding when you hear back from users about what they want. That's really the most personally rewarding thing about owning a business: learning about customers and getting better at serving their needs.
At least that's the most rewarding thing about owning a moderately successful business. It's possible that owning a business that makes you fabulously wealthy means never having to say you're sorry, but I couldn't tell you about that. It sounds like that's not what you're looking for, in any case.
Disclaimer: I own a KindleDX...
Well, I guess I'll just have to ignore everything you have to say about the KindleDX then. You see Slashdot analysis is like geometry. It relies on pure reason, rather than mere sensory experience which has been known to be misleading.
The secret, as in many business situations, is cash flow. As long as the cash is coming in, you can weather any storm. If you have better cash flow than the other guy, you can outlast him in a fight.
If you look at a monopolist's legal expenses as a black box, cash spent on litigation, fines, and settlements is analogous to R&D. You put cash in on one end, you get ownership of a technology out the other. The companies you crush aren't going to rise from the dead. The stockholders are happy to get any cash they can out of a settlement, they aren't going to try to restart the company as a going to concern. Trying to win back ownership of some technical area once the monopolist is entrenched is not likely to be profitable; ownership of that area is more valuable to the monopolist has part of its portfolio than it is to the victim company's investors.
So the monopolist goes on doing the illegal things it has always done, just different enough so that the next company in its sights has to assemble its case from scratch. That takes cash.
Now we have an interesting situation with Google. Google has cash too: 17B to Microsoft's 23.9B. But here's something interesting: the current ratio. That's the ratio of short term assets (cash-like things) to short term liabilities. For Google, that's 10.1; for Microsoft that's 1.7. Microsoft has roughly twice the amount of cash on hand than it needs to keep running. That's healthy. Google, on the other hand has 10x the cash it needs to keep running. That's insanely healthy. It means they've got insane amounts of money to spend.
If Microsoft manages to use its monopoly power to steal Google's business, this picture will change quickly. Google's revenues would dry up fast. So if there is some kind of illegal anticompetitive thing going on, Google had better react fast, but if it does, it has the cash to put up a good fight.
here effectively recognize bicycles as legitimate users of the road in their laws, either by defining them as vehicles, or by giving riders the the responsibilities and privileges of other vehicle operators (citation: http://bikelaws.org/ ).
A few states have special restrictions, such as using a bike path if possible. Four states require bicycles to use the shoulder of the road, but not when that would be hazardous.
There have been periodic laws to ban bicycles from the road, or to mandate really stupid things like riding against traffic, but they have universally been rejected at the state level. A few additional requirements may apply in your jurisdiction to bicycles (e.g. helmets, and audible signals). A very small number of localities have restrictive bike ordinances. But the default and overwhelmingly most common case is that bicycles have legal rights to use roads other than limited access highways.
So we are to outlaw pedestrians? Get rid of crosswalks?
I know about cyclists getting hit. A good friend of mine was killed while riding by a hit and run driver. He didn't have to die, but the driver didn't call an ambulance. He left him in a ditch to die. So should we outlaw cars based on this? No. It was an irresponsible driver that killed him.
It is quite possible for cars and bikes to share the road at an acceptable level of risk. It's not so hard. We just have to enforce the law. The most fundamental law is responsible operation of your type vehicle. For cars this means to drive at reasonable speeds with awareness of what is or may be ahead of you. It's not any different than what you have to do to avoid hitting stranded motorists. For bicycles it means riding in the normal direction, using hand signals, and not swerving or weaving into traffic unpredictably.
Naturally they are angry at you (if you live here in the US). You're trying to stop them from doing something they have a perfect right to do. If I told you you couldn't walk down the sidewalk or sit on a park bench, you wouldn't like it either. So in a sense, it is like the things you are talking about. The difference is a matter of degree, not kind.
Legally, the bike is traffic on anything but a limited access highway. You might not like him being there. You might think the law should be changed to further limit or even ban bike traffic. But until you can get the law changed, "bikes are not traffic" (which I take to mean that they have no legal rights to use the road) is simply wrong.
There's lots of vehicles on the road I wish weren't there. When I've got to deal with a tractor trailer making a tricky turn, I wish it wasn't there. When I'm behind agricultural or construction machinery and I cannot pass, I wish they weren't there. When I'm on a road with narrow lanes and I've got to look out for some huge SUV that barely fits, I wish it wasn't there. But I can't wish it away, and more importantly, I can't wish my legal and moral responsibility to drive in a safe manner away. Even if I am dealing with an illegal vehicle (e.g. a bicycle on an limited access highway) it is my responsibility to drive in a manner which ensures everybody, including the driver of the illegal vehicle, remains safe. If I drive in an unsafe way because I don't think that vehicle should be there, I'm breaking the law. Even if the law agrees with me that the vehicle shouldn't be there, I'd actually be the greater lawbreaker in that case.
Now it sometimes happens in the course of driving that things are not safe as we'd want them to be. I might come around a blind curve and find a front end loader ahead. I might be in the right lane and a car in the left has an engine that suddenly belches smoke so it needs to get into the breakdown lane. I might even encounter a bad driver who cuts me off. It's natural to feel fear and sometimes anger, but these are facts of driving, which will never be totally safe. Driving itself is a tradeoff between the benefits of safety and the benefits of mobility. It takes maturity and mental toughness, but when confronted with a situation that irritates or outrages you on the road, you just have to eat it. Driving requires we all share the road. It is always the case that if you force some set of vehicles or drivers off the road, driving becomes a bit safer. By that measure, we should force cars of the road, because roads would be come very much safer for the remaining vehicles. But it's not about absolute safety. It's about the greatest safety consistent with freedom of movement.
This is not a technological advance. It is a scientific (or perhaps mathematical) advance.
The point is not that AES is broken; the point is that insights have been gained into its vulnerabilities. It's not necessarily the thin end of the wedge because we don't know whether such a wedge exists, but it could be *a* thin end of *a* wedge. Or it might not. If an AES crack is ever found, it might not be based on this discovery, but this discovery would still have its place in the history of the crack. It's like mathematical proof. Sometimes the first proof of a conjecture is complicated and messy, but then not too long after a shorter and more elegant proof is found. It may be that knowledge that something is provable is a motivation; or that lesser insight somehow fertilize mathematical imagination. It's hard to say because the process of mathematical creativity is so mysterious.
Even so, the GPS chip itself hardly be a challenge to a battery that supplies a cell phone transmitter. OEM modules draw something like 100mw; low power GPS chips draw even less. If it is correlated to the GPS running and nothing else, something else must be very wrong with the engineering of the device.
I suspect the battery too as the ultimate cause of the heating, but it seems very unlikely to me that the GPS module could use more than a watt. That doesn't seem credible.
What modules on the device can draw enough power to trigger some kind of unexpected battery condition? Well the transmitter of course. The CPU. Maybe the audio drivers? But the GPS unit? Why would it use so much power?
Again, how do you know it is the GPS chip itself?
It seems to me that this is the kind of thing you can tell from specs. Entire OEM modules use less than one watt in continuous operation. GPS ICs according to the spec sheets I've seen use less than 1/10 of a watt (e.g. less than 10mw when run from a 3.6v li-ion battery).
I'm not saying that GPS use doesn't trigger this. I'm not saying it can't be the chip. But if it is, this is something they surely should have known about just by reading the specs. I can't believe that they don't watch the power consumption figures for each component they put in a device like this.
Well, you have some good points, but that doesn't make the opposite position "silly".
The issue here is realism. "Murder, She Wrote?" Man, if that were realistic, then anybody who was Jessica's nephew or niece would be forced to wear orange jumpsuits for public safety reasons. Associating them would be asking to catch a bad case of homicide.
Murder is useful in stories and games because it provides a ready made motivation for plot action. In mysteries, the Great Detective is kind of like a cross between a watchmaker and a janitor. His job is to clean up the mess left by the murderer, and he does it by constructing an intricate mechanism -- the theory of the crime -- under adverse conditions.
Killing in games exists in order to provide stimulation. Kill or be killed is primal. It's not the only way to provide stimulation, nor does it have to be realistic. Nethack (I can post screenshots for the interested) can be nerve wracking because you only get one shot before you have to go all the way back to the start. The kid friendly Mario games abound in kill or be killed scenarios.
So successful games exploit kill-or-be-killed without realistic killing. So why have it at all?
I think the reason is that age old driver of human progress (and failure): because we can. We have a game with killing, and everything in this release is getting more realistic, therefore the killing is more realistic. There's also a very stupid reason, which is for more stimulation. That goes away fast as the brain adapts. You need that combination of player investment and decision making that kicks the brain into flow state. That's why people will be playing nethack long after most FPS games on the market are a distant memory.
I think the other possible reason for graphic killing is artistic. Maybe that's an extension of the "because we can" reason; if we're going to do it, let's do it as well as possible. The crux is "as well as possible." When Stephen King uses violence, he'll give you twenty pages of suspense describing the thirty seconds leading up to it, and then it's over in a paragraph. Of course video games are a different medium, but the general principles apply: the greatest impact requires restraint. Without it, people adjust to the new level of whatever it is (in this case gore) and they stop responding. You want a response.
The final question is whether graphic killing in games is somehow bad for us. I think this is both a complicated and profound question (they aren't always the same thing). The complication is that details matter: not just "realism" but context in the game play and story. Imagine a white supremacy game in which the player has to kill as many Jews and gays and latinos. Imagine that the game is very crude, almost cartoony, and music and text praise the user every time he kills an innocent person. Now imagine a game that tries to immerse the player in a realistic an experience of the Normandy Invasions on D-Day as consistent with game play. The D-Day game draws on scholarship and first person experiences; the killing of young and inexperienced German troops is not artistically tweaked to make it seem more glorious and wonderful than it actually was. Now ask yourself: is the realistic death depicted in the D-Day game somehow more corrupting of the human spirit than the glorified cartoon gore of the racist game?
I mean, isn't the GPS chip running all the time to give you cellular 9-1-1 and location based services?
It's not like OEM GPS units are an exotic technology either. You determine the thermal dissipation of the unit on the test bench just by firing it up. This is some kind of system behavior phenomenon.
If I had to pull an answer out of my donkey I'd guess that the initial cause of the overheating is plain old CPU wattage. Normally the CPU would run throttled down, but then when you do mapping and processing GPS data it's chugging away all the time doing trigonometry -- and mobile CPUs are probably not power optimized for continual floating point operations. And then some kind of thermal runaway gets triggered in some component -- possibly the backliight or battery.
It's not strictly true to talk about the kinds of economic models Anderson is talking about (if I understand this correctly) as "free". They just involve transactions on the consumer end that are too small to bother collecting money for -- from the consumer. That's not anything particularly revolutionary. Television ran for years that way with advertising revenues.
But if you look at television news, you see the Achilles heel of these models when it comes to journalism. The three national networks for many years had news shows which were produced to serious journalistic standards. But local news was a practically a by-word for cheap sensationalism. "If it bleeds it leads". It's not that it is impossible to have high quality local news, newspapers did it for years. It just wasn't economical to put the effort in for local markets unless the consumer ponied up dough.
The secret of "free" information is that those tiny increments of consumer value -- usually eyeball time on an advertisement, but it could possibly be other thigns -- can be aggregated on an enormous scale into packages that are valuable enough to pay for things like journalism. Under Internet models, local news gathered to journalistic standards is not economical.
Now various crowd source models such as twitter have their place in the information ecosystem. They may beat journalism to the punch in many instances, or correct mistakes journalists make. But we need journalists to correct the mistakes the crowd makes even more. You can't use a model like Wikipedia as proof that quality journalism is possible with volunteers. Journalism is much more difficult than holding forth on a topic you might know a little (or a lot) about. Suggesting that something like Wikipedia can replace journalism is like suggesting it can replace science.
Possibly because there are more participants in track and that's a highly specialized skill.
In any case, there isn't any any single skill you can call "jumping". A body ideal for stuffing a basketball isn't necessarily ideal for the high jump. That said, jumping in general favors slim but strong people with well balanced development. There's also definitely a "weak link" effect; if your powerful buttocks drive their force through a weak calf, you end up losing power. When I competed in Chinese martial arts, the most common training injury was a pulled gastroc (large calf muscle). I quit competition when I developed arthritis in my right (jumping) big toe.
The worst I've seen in many moons.
But I'm sure she'll turn the other cheek.
I can't believe I'm actually encouraging one of these threads...