Do you buy many movies on DVD, or is $20 for a movie on DVD too much in your opinion? The price you're offering is 1/4 the going rate for most movies, and so it seems like a pretty lowball offer to me. It would cost you nearly $4 to rent the movie, and that means you have to return it.
A DVD is more flexible (at the moment) than a downloaded movie. It can play on any computer or DVD player, which is a cheap device. Your downloaded movie would be considerably harder to play on your TV or portable device, and even if they were to incorporate the DRM code to allow you to authorize that device it would be inconveninent and jack up the price of that object.
So, let's say that DRM'ed downloads would be of less general utility than the DVD. The downloads would have some advantages (e.g. the ability to back them up), but that's relatively minor.
Still, it sounds like you're really lowballing them on the price at a mere five bucks. Can I then infer that you think that $20 for a DVD as it is now is too much, and that you don't buy many DVDs?
The idea is that you're holding them without any charge until you gather the evidence on the hard drive.
I understand that the police will sometimes be unable to completely make a case until they've gathered all the evidence, but it seems that there should be some sort of intermediate level to say, "We have at least some reason to hold this guy."
Perhaps what's needed is a judge to say, "Yeah, you have enough evidence, and the guy presents enough of a flight risk, for me to let you hold him for three months", even if that evidence would be insufficient for a real indictment.
Because right now it sounds like "We're going to lock this guy up for 90 days with absolutely no evidence at all on our say-so."
Actually, it controls their money flow: they can't be paid by certain sources to blog politically.
Then again, the court has decided that spending money is a form of speech, which is the basis of restrictions on campaign finance laws, so perhaps we're really saying the same thing.
I still think of it as slightly sleazy, since they're clearly counting on turning a judgment against them into a profit-making opportunity by counting on some people not paying attention. I'm never happy about coupon settlements, where the lawyers make more than the plaintiffs, though that's the class-action lawyers' fault, not Netflix's.
So I end up being only slightly nauseated by Netflix, rather than disgusted. Yippee.
The original email that I got from Netflix is taken nearly word-for-word from the settlement, but leaves out this tasty tidbit:...the upgraded service shall renew automatically (following an email reminder) at the end of the upgraded month at Netflix's regular subscription rate for the upgraded program, unless and until the Class Member cancels the service or modifies his or her subscription.
I probably clicked to indicate that I read the full version at some point, but it's a seven page document and I suspect most people rely on the summaries of long legal documents, we not being lawyers.
I'm gonna count on them to send me a nice, clear email at the end of the month. We'll see. Usually they've been pretty good, but I know some Netflix subscribers have been unhappy.
*sigh* This is exactly the sort of game that always seems to come out of class-action lawsuits, which is why I ignore most of the ones that come my way. This one seemed chintzy, but not evil. "What could it hurt?" I figured when I saw it.
It's not the features; it's the polish. It's hard to get a bunch of distributed, disconnected open source developers to apply the repeated, dull effort to make the UI snappy and responsive.
The fact that the Firefox developers were working with well-understood feature sets certainly made it easier for them to put in the core architecture, which in turn made it possible for them to demand solidity from the individual feature developers. But the core team has as much to do with it as the actual feature set.
Most of the time, open source UIs are worse than their commercial brethren because they lack a cogent, coherent tack. You can't win just by adding features. An iPod does exactly, precisely what it should do and not a single thing more.
I can think of a few examples of really brilliant open-source UIs: Firefox and Eclipse come to mind. So it's not impossible. But in those cases the amazingly solid core UI was developed by key players, and other developers contributed functionality.
So I'm gonna guess that the answer in this case is "almost certainly not".
In this case, it's because they're selling a car in the US. And because the US is a car-centric culture which uses more gasoline per person than anybody else in the world. And because it's the US which is prone to going to war over access to oil.
In addition, it lets you shift from a dependency on oil to a variety of other fuels: coal, wind, hydro, etc. Even if it isn't cost-effective in terms of miles per dollar, there are externalities to take into account:
* The price of the occasional war * The price of terrorism sponsored by some OPEC states * The price of dependency on oil importing stations (e.g. New Orleans)
Really, I'm not trying to start a flame war here over the necessity of the Iraq war or to cast blame on any state in particular. But if the US reduces its dependency on a fossil fuel from a very volatile region it may do more good than just the immediate environmental and economic effects.
Let me ask you something, what *doesn't* constitute a "fully automated" worm?
Unfortunately, we've long since stopped being clear on the distinction between "worms", "trojans", and "viruses". (Actually, I'm not entirely clear on the differnce between worms and viruses myself. Wikipedia draws a distinction between the two.) But many things that are called "worms" require some sort of user intervention in order to run.
For exmaple, the "Loveletter" worm is called a worm, and it wasn't fully automated: it depended on the user to click on a file. The social engineering aspect was that people didn't expect a.vbs file to do any harm.
It's become increasingly hard to get users to assist that way, so the propagation is a little slower. Virus checkers scan email attachements, and even Microsoft Outlook no longer just runs any attachment that comes into the mailbox. There are dead ends wherever a user is smart enough not to run the attachment, and even if you could con the user into running the attachment the worm may have to wait hours or days for the user to get around to it.
A fully automated worm, on the other hand, propagates without the help of users on any unpatched system. So it spreads fast, very fast.
IM viruses are not a new vector, but as other vectors are gradually plugged it sounds like the next one in line. The Windows OS is a great vector because there's so much of it around, but IM tools are also pretty common. Sure, users will randomly click things, and there's only a little you can do about that, but if you can exploit a security hole automatically, your worm will get everywhere it's gonna go in hours. Sweet, if you like that sort of thing.
The intial question was, will they sell any at all? Oh, sure it was always guaranteed to be more than zero, but there are plenty of people who would have doubted that they'd sell more than a few thousand at that price given the restrictions (low resolution, DRM)
Check around this thread on Slashdot and you'll see plenty of people declaring that they'd never buy it. So selling a million isn't a significant contribution to Apple's revenue, but it is a significant proof of the concept. With that they may be able to expand the availability (more TV shows, shorts, perhaps even movies) and that could be a really big deal.
How big? Local TV affiliates are already speaking up, and satellite and cable providers are getting nervous. We're talking serious change in the way entertainment is distributed.
So yeah, a million isn't much on its own, but it could be very, very important as an indicator of what could happen in the future.
When you put up a non-compliant.mobi site, you do more than just create a site people don't wish to visit. You also cast doubt on any other.mobi site.
The goal of.mobi is to create a whole set of sites that you can trust them to work on your mobile device, and people will comfortably go there rather than the.com equivalent, with which people are already reasonably comfortable. If.mobi has a meaning at all, it's only to ensure that comfort. Otherwise it's just a way for registrars to get more money out of you.
From an economics perspective, "free markets" do not necessarily mean "every man for himself". There are also aggregates of people which enforce rules on themselves in order to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Corporations are one example; exclusive TLDs are another. Each.mobi site represents not just itself but a piece of the.mobi group, and they're all diminished by each non-compliant site.
Another nice thing about the new classfile specification is that it's going to make certain new kinds of optimization possible. The more you can prove about what's on the stack at any given point, the more you can inline.
Not only does inlining eliminate method call overhead, but it allows you to re-run the peephole optimizer, which can eliminate range checks, reduce redudant type checks, etc.
The ultimate performance promise of Java is that it can do optimization very, very late in the process. Native libraries are basically black boxes in C/C++, and it's very hard to do that sort of inlining because most of the type information has been lost. Java may, someday, with sufficient ingenuity, rival or even beat C++ in performance, and it already does in certain limited areas.
Of course C# has all of the same advantages, and even though it's more recent there are some areas where its performance beats Java. I'd love to see all the Microsoft reasearchers vs. all the Sun researchers coming up with increasingly brilliant ways to take advantage of the late binding to turn a performance hindrance into a benefit.
"Wire fraud" implies that the spam mails were trying to secure money by fraud. Some of them probably were, but not necessarily all of them. The CAN-SPAM law was designed to make simple bulk advertising illegal unless it met certain criteria (valid unsubscribe addresses, non-forged headers, etc.) Wire fraud is a more difficult challenge to meet, though I bet when the prosecutions are ready they'll probably try that, too.
I believe that they can prosecute under the CAN-SPAM act even without proving that these were the guys who infected the computers, which may be a bigger challenge.
As is usual in law enforcement, they'll throw as many laws as they can at the problem and see which ones stick.
His point (to the degree that he had one) is that Google shows a bias towards commerce. If I asked you to tell me about flowers, you'd give me something more like a dictionary or encyclopedia definition, but Google gives me places to buy them.
That comes as no surprise to you, of course, and you (the intelligent Slashdotter) would have no trouble finding out what you wanted to know by giving Google just a bit of context. The only people asking about "flowers" in the most general sense are third-graders writing reports. Everybody else wants to know something more specific: where to get them, how to plant them, when they bloom, etc.
Google's bias, implicit in the links model because web pages are supported by money, is for the commerial links in the absence of any other information. Which you already knew. So I can't tell you why he's bothering to write about it, except to tell the non-slashdotters of the world that Google can't read your mind and it can be misleading. Duh.
Shakespeare continually rewrote his plays. He adapted them for different actors and different venues, and abridged them in various different ways depending on the tastes of the times. He sometimes had to censor his texts when the rules demanded changes.
I'm not sure what legend's source for "He didn't even bother to cross out anything as he wrote" is, but it's unfounded. No original Shakespeare manuscripts exist in his own hand.
Most of his plays have several different versions, and when you go to perform one you have to pick which one you want to take as your base text. This is made harder by the fact that many of these these folios and quartos are reconstructions by the actors themselves, some of which are mistaken, but others changes represent times when Shakespeare himself edited the text.
Hamlet, for example, is very different between the First Folio and Second Quarto editions. When Kenneth Branagh combined the two to make his movie, he was doing a Hamlet which Shakespeare himself probably never saw. He'd rewritten the play, and Branagh had combined two rewrites. Which one Shakespeare would have preferred is up for debate, but it certainly shows that Shakespeare did revisit his plays.
I suspect legend's source is the fact that Shakespare was one prolific son of a bitch; he was cranking out works of genius almost faster than you could copy the things. He'd put out several plays a year at times. There are internal contradictions in the text that suggest that Shakespeare didn't revise quite as many times as he should have.
And yes, IAASS (I Am A Shakespeare Scholar). I'm directing Merry Wives of Windsor right now, a play which certainly could have used a few more editing passes.
Re:I don't care what they call it, it ain't Ma Bel
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At this risk of being utterly humorless, I've seen the term cougar used for that, but I can't cite a good definitive source. And the verb tadpole, after a move with that name.
Prof. Good in fact gets it backwards: the "neurotic" diagnosis tells us less about computers than it does about us.
We do anthropomorphize, not just comparatively intelligent things like computers but cars and even utterly inanimate objects. If you stub your toe on a rock, you might well "punish" the rock by hitting it. You know it's irrational but the illusion of anthropomorphization is strong.
The lesson is that we should design our UIs knowing that people will interpret the responses as if they were coming from a human. And yeah, that means that like most people, the computers will appear to be neurotic. Windows 98 is only marginally more neurotic than some of my friends.
Of more interest to me is their assertion that "The chip will not contain home addresses, social security numbers, or other information that might facilitate identity theft."
Without a doubt, people will be able to read your RFID off this thing. They're lying if they say otherwise. They claim to be able to reduce the effective range to 10 cm, but even if that were true it would still be sniffed by a guy bumping into you in a crowd.
I think that the critical concern is, what's on it and how would it be used? If it's nothing more than your picture and biometric ID info, that is in a sense public information already: it's easy to take your picture; you leave your fingerprints everywhere, etc. Your iris scan is marginally more private but I wouldn't trust my life to that. If there are passwords on it, it had better be a one-way cryptosystem and they'd better make sure it's a damn good one.
But even if this thing stored a mini-CD rather than an RFID tag, I'd be concerned if it contained real identity-theft information. Your passport can always be stolen, and even returned without your notice.
So if they expect the uniqueness of the RFID tag to be some security, they're stupid. But I think the intent is to just make it convenient for them to bring up your picture and other ID info to be checked against your actual features (e.g. checking the picture to see if it looks like you, checking the results of the iris scan, checking to see if your PIN/password guess matches, etc.)
The ability to mass-swipe passport data without the owner's awareness does open up a new line of attack, where they can steal many passports until they find one that matches themselves closely enough, especially if they can disable the parts of it that they can't easily fake. Proper digital signing of the data would help with that.
There's also the fact that you're now broadcasting that you're an American, but one's accent and skin color do that pretty effectively already.
So my biggest concern is not that the info is broadcast but what info it is they're broadcasting. They're promising that it won't be the kind of info used in identity theft. These days identity theft is so trivial that it hardly requires them to broadcast your SSN, but aside from that it sounds like they've promised to make it no worse.
If anything, it may help. The prevalence of identity theft means that we need to make our identities a lot more secure. Biometrics are far from perfect; I prefer password-protected private keys. But whatever is chosen, two-factor or three-factor identification is going to be necessary in the near future.
I'd campaign to have all the data locked against a password that you have memorized, but there are problems with that if you forget your own password. So I'm undecided on that.
That's literally true in one extremely important sense. They had expected that the solar panels would be covered with dust and useless by now, but something is cleaning them off, and they still don't know what. They had figured that solar panel wipers wouldn't be effective enough given the weight they'd add, but it turns out they got lucky and didn't need them. So yeah, you can say that the environment is less hostile than they expected.
It's probably true in other senses as well, but it was the solar panels that they expected to have gone long ago. Now we're going to see what actually does fail permanently first.
It definitely puts pressure on future mission designers to manage expectations as carefully as the rover mission designers. Fortunately, as long as the technology keeps improving, they'll continue to get better.
But perception of "how much we need" is a much thornier problem for the administrator of NASA. Success is always good; few people have any idea how much this costs, and most are sort of resigned to the few bucks per person this mission costs. In return they get to be The Country That Explores The Planets, and people are willing to pay a lot for that kind of pride.
What gets people ticked about the price is failure. It maakes people feel like laughingstocks in front of the world. Few people really understand the science, or benefit directly from what we learn about Mars, but they feel good that it's us who discovered it. They feel like the most advanced country in the world.
So I wouldn't worry about people saying, "Yeah, we know quite enough about Mars." That's a mission people can get behind, as compared to (say) a war costing 1,000 times as much. The war may accomplish more (depending on whom you ask) but Science (with a capital S, the vague and mysterious one, as opposed to the lower-case-s "science" where we actually learn stuff) is always popular. At least when it wins.
The article doesn't allege family members disappearing. Mostly it accuses the FBI of doing investigations without filing the proper paperwork. In fact most of the time it's stuff for which they had received permission but failed to file the necessary continuing paperwork.
I'm not thrilled about this; having a secret court allowing the FBI secret rights is a step towards a real police state. So the article is extremely troubling, and the allegations need to be investigated.
But nobody has disappeared. Yet. If they have it's not an "abuse of the act", it's an out-and-out coup. And you don't find out about coups via FOIA. This is telling the FBI to get its act together before it decides its capable of worse.
They're not suggesting using the Al or Mg as an energy source, the way oil is. They're suggesting it as a way to move energy from a central source to individual vehicles.
That central plant could be coal- or oil- powered, or nuclear, solar, wind, whatever. That powers a chemical factory turning aluminum and magnesium ore into wire, which is then dropped off in each car. I assume that most the input is actually magnesium or aluminum oxide taken out of cars that have used their wires, once the process is bootstrapped.
The same outline applies to the various hydrogen-based solutions: there is no free hydrogen on earth, but it may be more efficient to manufacture it in a central place and distrubute it. It's not getting us any energy, but it is replacing our dependence on oil with renewable resources (wind, hydro) or home-grown (coal) or at the very least not dependent on volatile Middle East politics (nuclear).
Petroleum is convenient because it is an energy source AND a distribution medium, after some processing. But it's also a political nightmare and environmental nightmare, so one possibility is to break petroleum's two functions into two separate entities, then solve them individually. The power-distribution one has all sorts of problems; liquid petroleum-based gasoline is nicely energy dense, easy to pipe, and doesn't require pressurization. This is yet another take on that problem. Probably not a good one, as numerous other posters have pointed out, but it's an interesting idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you buy many movies on DVD, or is $20 for a movie on DVD too much in your opinion? The price you're offering is 1/4 the going rate for most movies, and so it seems like a pretty lowball offer to me. It would cost you nearly $4 to rent the movie, and that means you have to return it.
A DVD is more flexible (at the moment) than a downloaded movie. It can play on any computer or DVD player, which is a cheap device. Your downloaded movie would be considerably harder to play on your TV or portable device, and even if they were to incorporate the DRM code to allow you to authorize that device it would be inconveninent and jack up the price of that object.
So, let's say that DRM'ed downloads would be of less general utility than the DVD. The downloads would have some advantages (e.g. the ability to back them up), but that's relatively minor.
Still, it sounds like you're really lowballing them on the price at a mere five bucks. Can I then infer that you think that $20 for a DVD as it is now is too much, and that you don't buy many DVDs?
The idea is that you're holding them without any charge until you gather the evidence on the hard drive.
I understand that the police will sometimes be unable to completely make a case until they've gathered all the evidence, but it seems that there should be some sort of intermediate level to say, "We have at least some reason to hold this guy."
Perhaps what's needed is a judge to say, "Yeah, you have enough evidence, and the guy presents enough of a flight risk, for me to let you hold him for three months", even if that evidence would be insufficient for a real indictment.
Because right now it sounds like "We're going to lock this guy up for 90 days with absolutely no evidence at all on our say-so."
Very nice explication of the situation; thank you. I just wanted to add in the expansion of the acronym (it being novel, useful, and non-obvious).
Actually, it controls their money flow: they can't be paid by certain sources to blog politically.
Then again, the court has decided that spending money is a form of speech, which is the basis of restrictions on campaign finance laws, so perhaps we're really saying the same thing.
You're right; there it was at the bottom.
I still think of it as slightly sleazy, since they're clearly counting on turning a judgment against them into a profit-making opportunity by counting on some people not paying attention. I'm never happy about coupon settlements, where the lawyers make more than the plaintiffs, though that's the class-action lawyers' fault, not Netflix's.
So I end up being only slightly nauseated by Netflix, rather than disgusted. Yippee.
The original email that I got from Netflix is taken nearly word-for-word from the settlement, but leaves out this tasty tidbit: ...the upgraded service shall renew automatically (following an email reminder) at the end of the upgraded month at Netflix's regular subscription rate for the upgraded program, unless and until the Class Member cancels the service or modifies his or her subscription.
I probably clicked to indicate that I read the full version at some point, but it's a seven page document and I suspect most people rely on the summaries of long legal documents, we not being lawyers.
I'm gonna count on them to send me a nice, clear email at the end of the month. We'll see. Usually they've been pretty good, but I know some Netflix subscribers have been unhappy.
*sigh* This is exactly the sort of game that always seems to come out of class-action lawsuits, which is why I ignore most of the ones that come my way. This one seemed chintzy, but not evil. "What could it hurt?" I figured when I saw it.
Now I know. Thanks, Jeremy Wall.
It's not the features; it's the polish. It's hard to get a bunch of distributed, disconnected open source developers to apply the repeated, dull effort to make the UI snappy and responsive.
The fact that the Firefox developers were working with well-understood feature sets certainly made it easier for them to put in the core architecture, which in turn made it possible for them to demand solidity from the individual feature developers. But the core team has as much to do with it as the actual feature set.
Most of the time, open source UIs are worse than their commercial brethren because they lack a cogent, coherent tack. You can't win just by adding features. An iPod does exactly, precisely what it should do and not a single thing more.
I can think of a few examples of really brilliant open-source UIs: Firefox and Eclipse come to mind. So it's not impossible. But in those cases the amazingly solid core UI was developed by key players, and other developers contributed functionality.
So I'm gonna guess that the answer in this case is "almost certainly not".
In this case, it's because they're selling a car in the US. And because the US is a car-centric culture which uses more gasoline per person than anybody else in the world. And because it's the US which is prone to going to war over access to oil.
In addition, it lets you shift from a dependency on oil to a variety of other fuels: coal, wind, hydro, etc. Even if it isn't cost-effective in terms of miles per dollar, there are externalities to take into account:
* The price of the occasional war
* The price of terrorism sponsored by some OPEC states
* The price of dependency on oil importing stations (e.g. New Orleans)
Really, I'm not trying to start a flame war here over the necessity of the Iraq war or to cast blame on any state in particular. But if the US reduces its dependency on a fossil fuel from a very volatile region it may do more good than just the immediate environmental and economic effects.
Let me ask you something, what *doesn't* constitute a "fully automated" worm?
.vbs file to do any harm.
Unfortunately, we've long since stopped being clear on the distinction between "worms", "trojans", and "viruses". (Actually, I'm not entirely clear on the differnce between worms and viruses myself. Wikipedia draws a distinction between the two.) But many things that are called "worms" require some sort of user intervention in order to run.
For exmaple, the "Loveletter" worm is called a worm, and it wasn't fully automated: it depended on the user to click on a file. The social engineering aspect was that people didn't expect a
It's become increasingly hard to get users to assist that way, so the propagation is a little slower. Virus checkers scan email attachements, and even Microsoft Outlook no longer just runs any attachment that comes into the mailbox. There are dead ends wherever a user is smart enough not to run the attachment, and even if you could con the user into running the attachment the worm may have to wait hours or days for the user to get around to it.
A fully automated worm, on the other hand, propagates without the help of users on any unpatched system. So it spreads fast, very fast.
IM viruses are not a new vector, but as other vectors are gradually plugged it sounds like the next one in line. The Windows OS is a great vector because there's so much of it around, but IM tools are also pretty common. Sure, users will randomly click things, and there's only a little you can do about that, but if you can exploit a security hole automatically, your worm will get everywhere it's gonna go in hours. Sweet, if you like that sort of thing.
The intial question was, will they sell any at all? Oh, sure it was always guaranteed to be more than zero, but there are plenty of people who would have doubted that they'd sell more than a few thousand at that price given the restrictions (low resolution, DRM)
Check around this thread on Slashdot and you'll see plenty of people declaring that they'd never buy it. So selling a million isn't a significant contribution to Apple's revenue, but it is a significant proof of the concept. With that they may be able to expand the availability (more TV shows, shorts, perhaps even movies) and that could be a really big deal.
How big? Local TV affiliates are already speaking up, and satellite and cable providers are getting nervous. We're talking serious change in the way entertainment is distributed.
So yeah, a million isn't much on its own, but it could be very, very important as an indicator of what could happen in the future.
When you put up a non-compliant .mobi site, you do more than just create a site people don't wish to visit. You also cast doubt on any other .mobi site.
.mobi is to create a whole set of sites that you can trust them to work on your mobile device, and people will comfortably go there rather than the .com equivalent, with which people are already reasonably comfortable. If .mobi has a meaning at all, it's only to ensure that comfort. Otherwise it's just a way for registrars to get more money out of you.
.mobi site represents not just itself but a piece of the .mobi group, and they're all diminished by each non-compliant site.
The goal of
From an economics perspective, "free markets" do not necessarily mean "every man for himself". There are also aggregates of people which enforce rules on themselves in order to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Corporations are one example; exclusive TLDs are another. Each
Another nice thing about the new classfile specification is that it's going to make certain new kinds of optimization possible. The more you can prove about what's on the stack at any given point, the more you can inline.
Not only does inlining eliminate method call overhead, but it allows you to re-run the peephole optimizer, which can eliminate range checks, reduce redudant type checks, etc.
The ultimate performance promise of Java is that it can do optimization very, very late in the process. Native libraries are basically black boxes in C/C++, and it's very hard to do that sort of inlining because most of the type information has been lost. Java may, someday, with sufficient ingenuity, rival or even beat C++ in performance, and it already does in certain limited areas.
Of course C# has all of the same advantages, and even though it's more recent there are some areas where its performance beats Java. I'd love to see all the Microsoft reasearchers vs. all the Sun researchers coming up with increasingly brilliant ways to take advantage of the late binding to turn a performance hindrance into a benefit.
In fact, that's exactly the link in the summary.
Which is why this is hardly news. The discovery of the CCR5-delta32 gene's relevance to the black death and AIDS dates back to at least 1996; the article in that link is dated 1998.
And the PBS web site the synopsis refers to is dated 2002. So the submitter can't even claim that this is an article about a new TV show.
"Wire fraud" implies that the spam mails were trying to secure money by fraud. Some of them probably were, but not necessarily all of them. The CAN-SPAM law was designed to make simple bulk advertising illegal unless it met certain criteria (valid unsubscribe addresses, non-forged headers, etc.) Wire fraud is a more difficult challenge to meet, though I bet when the prosecutions are ready they'll probably try that, too.
I believe that they can prosecute under the CAN-SPAM act even without proving that these were the guys who infected the computers, which may be a bigger challenge.
As is usual in law enforcement, they'll throw as many laws as they can at the problem and see which ones stick.
His point (to the degree that he had one) is that Google shows a bias towards commerce. If I asked you to tell me about flowers, you'd give me something more like a dictionary or encyclopedia definition, but Google gives me places to buy them.
That comes as no surprise to you, of course, and you (the intelligent Slashdotter) would have no trouble finding out what you wanted to know by giving Google just a bit of context. The only people asking about "flowers" in the most general sense are third-graders writing reports. Everybody else wants to know something more specific: where to get them, how to plant them, when they bloom, etc.
Google's bias, implicit in the links model because web pages are supported by money, is for the commerial links in the absence of any other information. Which you already knew. So I can't tell you why he's bothering to write about it, except to tell the non-slashdotters of the world that Google can't read your mind and it can be misleading. Duh.
Shakespeare continually rewrote his plays. He adapted them for different actors and different venues, and abridged them in various different ways depending on the tastes of the times. He sometimes had to censor his texts when the rules demanded changes.
I'm not sure what legend's source for "He didn't even bother to cross out anything as he wrote" is, but it's unfounded. No original Shakespeare manuscripts exist in his own hand.
Most of his plays have several different versions, and when you go to perform one you have to pick which one you want to take as your base text. This is made harder by the fact that many of these these folios and quartos are reconstructions by the actors themselves, some of which are mistaken, but others changes represent times when Shakespeare himself edited the text.
Hamlet, for example, is very different between the First Folio and Second Quarto editions. When Kenneth Branagh combined the two to make his movie, he was doing a Hamlet which Shakespeare himself probably never saw. He'd rewritten the play, and Branagh had combined two rewrites. Which one Shakespeare would have preferred is up for debate, but it certainly shows that Shakespeare did revisit his plays.
I suspect legend's source is the fact that Shakespare was one prolific son of a bitch; he was cranking out works of genius almost faster than you could copy the things. He'd put out several plays a year at times. There are internal contradictions in the text that suggest that Shakespeare didn't revise quite as many times as he should have.
And yes, IAASS (I Am A Shakespeare Scholar). I'm directing Merry Wives of Windsor right now, a play which certainly could have used a few more editing passes.
At this risk of being utterly humorless, I've seen the term cougar used for that, but I can't cite a good definitive source. And the verb tadpole, after a move with that name.
Prof. Good in fact gets it backwards: the "neurotic" diagnosis tells us less about computers than it does about us.
We do anthropomorphize, not just comparatively intelligent things like computers but cars and even utterly inanimate objects. If you stub your toe on a rock, you might well "punish" the rock by hitting it. You know it's irrational but the illusion of anthropomorphization is strong.
The lesson is that we should design our UIs knowing that people will interpret the responses as if they were coming from a human. And yeah, that means that like most people, the computers will appear to be neurotic. Windows 98 is only marginally more neurotic than some of my friends.
Of more interest to me is their assertion that "The chip will not contain home addresses, social security numbers, or other information that might facilitate identity theft."
Without a doubt, people will be able to read your RFID off this thing. They're lying if they say otherwise. They claim to be able to reduce the effective range to 10 cm, but even if that were true it would still be sniffed by a guy bumping into you in a crowd.
I think that the critical concern is, what's on it and how would it be used? If it's nothing more than your picture and biometric ID info, that is in a sense public information already: it's easy to take your picture; you leave your fingerprints everywhere, etc. Your iris scan is marginally more private but I wouldn't trust my life to that. If there are passwords on it, it had better be a one-way cryptosystem and they'd better make sure it's a damn good one.
But even if this thing stored a mini-CD rather than an RFID tag, I'd be concerned if it contained real identity-theft information. Your passport can always be stolen, and even returned without your notice.
So if they expect the uniqueness of the RFID tag to be some security, they're stupid. But I think the intent is to just make it convenient for them to bring up your picture and other ID info to be checked against your actual features (e.g. checking the picture to see if it looks like you, checking the results of the iris scan, checking to see if your PIN/password guess matches, etc.)
The ability to mass-swipe passport data without the owner's awareness does open up a new line of attack, where they can steal many passports until they find one that matches themselves closely enough, especially if they can disable the parts of it that they can't easily fake. Proper digital signing of the data would help with that.
There's also the fact that you're now broadcasting that you're an American, but one's accent and skin color do that pretty effectively already.
So my biggest concern is not that the info is broadcast but what info it is they're broadcasting. They're promising that it won't be the kind of info used in identity theft. These days identity theft is so trivial that it hardly requires them to broadcast your SSN, but aside from that it sounds like they've promised to make it no worse.
If anything, it may help. The prevalence of identity theft means that we need to make our identities a lot more secure. Biometrics are far from perfect; I prefer password-protected private keys. But whatever is chosen, two-factor or three-factor identification is going to be necessary in the near future.
I'd campaign to have all the data locked against a password that you have memorized, but there are problems with that if you forget your own password. So I'm undecided on that.
That's literally true in one extremely important sense. They had expected that the solar panels would be covered with dust and useless by now, but something is cleaning them off, and they still don't know what. They had figured that solar panel wipers wouldn't be effective enough given the weight they'd add, but it turns out they got lucky and didn't need them. So yeah, you can say that the environment is less hostile than they expected.
It's probably true in other senses as well, but it was the solar panels that they expected to have gone long ago. Now we're going to see what actually does fail permanently first.
It definitely puts pressure on future mission designers to manage expectations as carefully as the rover mission designers. Fortunately, as long as the technology keeps improving, they'll continue to get better.
But perception of "how much we need" is a much thornier problem for the administrator of NASA. Success is always good; few people have any idea how much this costs, and most are sort of resigned to the few bucks per person this mission costs. In return they get to be The Country That Explores The Planets, and people are willing to pay a lot for that kind of pride.
What gets people ticked about the price is failure. It maakes people feel like laughingstocks in front of the world. Few people really understand the science, or benefit directly from what we learn about Mars, but they feel good that it's us who discovered it. They feel like the most advanced country in the world.
So I wouldn't worry about people saying, "Yeah, we know quite enough about Mars." That's a mission people can get behind, as compared to (say) a war costing 1,000 times as much. The war may accomplish more (depending on whom you ask) but Science (with a capital S, the vague and mysterious one, as opposed to the lower-case-s "science" where we actually learn stuff) is always popular. At least when it wins.
The article doesn't allege family members disappearing. Mostly it accuses the FBI of doing investigations without filing the proper paperwork. In fact most of the time it's stuff for which they had received permission but failed to file the necessary continuing paperwork.
I'm not thrilled about this; having a secret court allowing the FBI secret rights is a step towards a real police state. So the article is extremely troubling, and the allegations need to be investigated.
But nobody has disappeared. Yet. If they have it's not an "abuse of the act", it's an out-and-out coup. And you don't find out about coups via FOIA. This is telling the FBI to get its act together before it decides its capable of worse.
They're not suggesting using the Al or Mg as an energy source, the way oil is. They're suggesting it as a way to move energy from a central source to individual vehicles.
That central plant could be coal- or oil- powered, or nuclear, solar, wind, whatever. That powers a chemical factory turning aluminum and magnesium ore into wire, which is then dropped off in each car. I assume that most the input is actually magnesium or aluminum oxide taken out of cars that have used their wires, once the process is bootstrapped.
The same outline applies to the various hydrogen-based solutions: there is no free hydrogen on earth, but it may be more efficient to manufacture it in a central place and distrubute it. It's not getting us any energy, but it is replacing our dependence on oil with renewable resources (wind, hydro) or home-grown (coal) or at the very least not dependent on volatile Middle East politics (nuclear).
Petroleum is convenient because it is an energy source AND a distribution medium, after some processing. But it's also a political nightmare and environmental nightmare, so one possibility is to break petroleum's two functions into two separate entities, then solve them individually. The power-distribution one has all sorts of problems; liquid petroleum-based gasoline is nicely energy dense, easy to pipe, and doesn't require pressurization. This is yet another take on that problem. Probably not a good one, as numerous other posters have pointed out, but it's an interesting idea.