The big genre film around that time is the next Harry Potter movie. But that's not the reason. The reason is almost certainly that the film sucks.
March is a terrible time to release movies, at least according to Hollywood wisdom; people are huddled at home rather than watching movies. March is a good time to dump big movies that didn't turn out well.
The article just says "conspiracy", which is pretty vague. I suspect that it means "conspiracy to commit fraud", 18 USC 371, punishable by up to 5 years.
Sounds entirely reasonable to me. I have no idea how the money flows, but I assume that McDonalds' spends $100M to be the Official Fat Bomb and NBC spends $1B to be the official coverage, how much (if any) of that does London see?
I suspect it's none, and that money goes to paying officials, feeding athletes, etc., but I have no idea if the balance works out. The IOC is presumably turning a profit, since it never has beg-a-thons the way charities do (or if it does I'm not aware.)
Cities appear to want the games for the prestige of having them, no matter what they cost. That's idiotic, but I've never heard of anybody organizing a campaign to stop a city from bidding.
Perhaps when it comes time to bid for the 2016 Olympics, we'll hear from local businesses in some cities begging the city not to spend so much money on games they won't profit from, and cite the Londoners.
A recent article points out that the sky is actually a range of wavelengths which we perceive as "blue" because of color mixing in the eye. So it's not just a special property of that frequency of blue, but rather an illusion that nets out to that blue.
2. A person infringes the London Olympics association right if in the course of trade he uses in relation to goods or services any visual or verbal representation (of any kind) in a manner likely to create in the public mind an association between the London Olympics and...the goods or services
3 (1) For the purposes of paragraph 2 (and without prejudice to its generality) the use by a person of a combination of expressions of a kind specified in sub-paragraph (2) shall be treated, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, as being likely to create in the public mind an association with the London Olympics.
(2) The combinations referred to in sub-paragraph (1) are combinations of--any of the expressions in the first group, with any of the expressions in the second group or any of the other expressions in the first group.
(3) The following expressions form the first group for the purposes of sub paragraph (2)--
"games", "Two Thousand and Twelve", "2012", and "twenty twelve".
The following expressions form the second group for the purposes of sub-paragraph (2)--
gold, silver, bronze, London, medals, sponsor, and summer.
(Edited for less obnoxious formatting).
Basically, yeah, it lets the advertisers conclude what they want to conclude, that it's a badly written law that does forbid saying "summer 2012" in any advertising. But the intent is clearly marked in paragraph 2 that it only applies to advertising "likely to create [an assocation] in the public mind".
Which kind of means it's up to a judge whether your advertising is infringing, and it gives the Olympic committee a stick with which to beat you over the head if they decide they don't like you, even if you're just advertising "Voted Best Barbecue of the Summer by the 2012 Restaurant Guide". Whether they actually will be litigious twits I can't say, but to me it just underscored the impossibility of writing truly fair legislation.
Because what the guys in the article want is to get "halo effect" from the games. An example they cited in the article, "Get bronze in London with X suntan lotion", is clearly trying to benefit from the Olympics. Whether they should be allowed to is a whole separate issue, but I still say that they're blowing this out of proportion so that they can benefit from the games without paying (or at least, paying more than they have, since London is spending a buttload of money. I think spending all that money on sporting events is always stupid, but that's just me.)
I wish they'd linked to the exact text of the bill. I'm a bit reluctant to say "No matter how you look at it this is a very bad law" because I can't help but think that from the description it's so WILDLY bad that it must have been mis-described.
According to somebody opposing the bill, "You won't even be able to say 'come to London in 2012' because it will infringe the act." But that's not a lawyer or other objective observer; that's coming from an advertiser who wants to take advantage of the fact that the Olympics are in London. Her complaint is not so much about the free speech aspects in general as the fact that only official sponsors are going to be able to use the Olympics in advertising, so other London businesses aren't getting any benefit.
I can't help but think that the article is slanted. I find it very odd that the article's description of the banned words lists (comparatively) uncontroversial ones like "Olympiad" first, but lumps the really scary ones like "summer" and "2012" into the bottom bucket. Yes, I realize that there will be plenty of people who will say that they have no business restricting words like "Olympics" either, but I think we can all agree that claiming to own the word "summer" is truly outrageous.
It's so outrageous that I feel that I'm not being told something. I suspect that the bill probably contains more detailed language than "You can't use the word 'summer' in any advertising", and it's impossible for me to evaluate the bill knowing only what its opponents say about it.
Reading between the lines as best I can, it does sound like a badly-written bill that covers far more than they really need. Presumably they have no intent of actually preventing people from combining clearly public-domain terms, and the bill probably doesn't make that clear. But those are the outrageous aspects, and need to be cleaned up. We should be arguing about the free-speech aspects of the less outrageous parts, but we can't until we've finished arguing about the silly ones. Or having dismissed those claims as a deliberate misreading by those with a financial interest in doing so. Without the bill I can't say.
Ordinarily I expect better from the BBC, so perhaps I'm wrong. Or perhaps the BBC was hoping to benefit from some "halo effect" as well.
Since Virgin Galactic isn't a US company, the Department of Defense has a say in whether Scaled Composites can send them certain technological information, under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (the same rules that make those crypto t-shirts "munitions").
It's not surprising that they passed, since VG is a British company, and the Brits are the good guys. Presumably some guarantees have been made that this isn't going to turn into plans for cruise missiles for Iranians.
So they haven't been given the go-ahead to fly, just to begin collaboration. They still have to come up with the actual spacecraft, and then there's a whole new set of approvals before they can fly the things.
Mostly I suspect that they're pitching to their friends. If you're a technophobe and a conservative (as opposed to the liberal technophobes who want to return to a preindustrial era) it looks like the Bush administration isn't being "soft on porn".
They don't understand filtering, but then, they don't understand the Net anyway. So the Bush administration can pitch any hissy fit it likes. The new domain is a dumb idea anyway, since there's no chance of them forcing porn into the.xxx domain without risking a Supreme Court smackdown on free speech grounds. Their base is happy; ICANN passes the domain anyway (since it makes money for registrars, which is the only reason for this anyway); and you ignore both ICANN and the Bush administration.
Primarily, yes: it's an opportunity for the registrars to make money.
To a lesser degree, it's an opportunity for the porn purveyors to get a domain that suits them. Playboy could put its softcore stuff on playboy.com, and its hardcore stuff on playboy.xxx. That's fairly negligible.
It also serves as a hint to consumers. If I were after porn I'd know that a.xxx domain is likely to have some; if I want to avoid it filtering out.xxx does a very tiny bit of good.
It does provide one further amusing property, that anti-porn activists could do some squatting themselves. Why not buy up "fucking.xxx" and point it to an anti-porn web site?
The only good reason for any new TLD is when there is somebody minding the passing out of names. The.edu domain, for example, works because you know that the registrars are going to allow only real educational institutions to have one. If somebody restricted.xxx to real porn, it might have some tiny benefit.
That said, it's mostly stupid, because you know there won't be any such gatekeeper on the doman. It's a huge opportunity for trademark infringement. Somebody will register walmart.xxx and start selling porn there, which is illegal but they'll do it anyway.
In the end, the registrars make money, the porn purveyors get a tiny opportunity, and everybody else ignores it in droves.
And the Bush administration is wasting its time opposing it, because it doesn't do any harm, either. It's mostly an opportunity to play to their base, who get to interpret it as "Bush is doing something about Internet porn!" without actually doing anything.
How can the ROM know that it got a valid user response (or that the user even saw the ROM's request) unless 100% of the UI is in ROM?
I was proposing a limited UI that could ask the question without any help from the rest of the OS. Basically, what happens in BIOS today on Intel architectures: there's enough for a text-based UI right on the chip.
Or do it the way some routers do, with a web-based UI, again right on the chip. That would enable remote upgrades. Authentication would be tricky, but not impossible.
There is a middle path, where perhaps the ROM can be modified only with very particular acknowledgement from the user. Say, the mod has to be burned onto a CD and booted, and before overwriting itself the existing ROM asks, "Are you 100% sure you got this from a reliable source?" It could even check the Net to check the signature, if it had sufficient IP stack built in.
This works best with microkernel architecture, which lets out Linux and Windows but OS X could conceivably go there. (And Windows actually could do it as well, since it is built around a kind of overblown microkernel.)
But still, the protected kernel isn't really the problem. You can't really hard-code detection software into it because there are always new rootkits that would require mods to the protected kernel. I just showed that it could be done, but it would be deliberately awkward, and so there's plenty of time for a new flaw to be exploited.
It would make it easier to clean the infection off your system without reinstalling, but if you're wiping out everything above the microkernel, you're effectively reinstalling anyway. During a regular reinstall, the BIOS acts as the micro-microkernel. So it's all the same.
Re:Gotta use it right
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Ending Spam
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· Score: 2, Insightful
We'll probably still end up with some IP-based blacklists. You can imagine a spammer who spews out an infinite number of verified IDs. You can't blacklist just the IDs because they're one-shots. Instead, eventually you'll end up saying, "Hey, this server seems perfectly willing to grant IDs to any jackass; let's blacklist the IPs and encourage non-jackasses on that server to get a new one."
Basically, there will have to be layers of responsibility, and we can encourage the various layers to be responsible for the layers below them. Otherwise, a layer which mixes legitimate and asinine uses will risk having its legitimate users tarred with the same brush. The legitimate users will flee, and the spammers will no longer be able to hide among them.
Why is it I never have mod points when somebody actually useful shows up? Thanks for the answer. Just for good measure, what are the electronegativaties and how much electricity do you get out of it?
Gotta use it right
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Ending Spam
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If they're adopting SenderID, it makes it easy to filter them. You can't filter just on the existence of SenderID; you need to check who the sender is and ignore email from known spammers.
That's a good thing. It lets them spew all of the email they want; let's call it freedom of speech (since I don't want any legal limitations on spam also being used to prevent legitimate speech). And I get to ignore them; I can filter them at the SMTP layer even before they get to send the whole message.
It may not be successful yet, if people are misusing the technology by trusting the existence of a Sender ID record to mean it's not spam. But don't blame the technology for being misused.
Actually, I think it'll be easier for music than for software.
Open-source software exists against a background of closed-source software. Many people who work on open source have day jobs writing closed-source software, or get to open-source part of their work while closing the parts that are specific to their clients. The most successful bits of open source, Apache and Linux, are heavily subsidized by large corporations that also write closed-source software.
Open source has done well, but it's far from replacing closed-source, and I believe it would slit its own throat if it did.
Music, on the other hand, requires no support network. Go out and download music from iRate or any of the other myriad places you can find free music. Even better, find a band you like and actually buy their CD.
Finding a band you like is a challenge, but it always has been. The RIAA has made it easy on you by buying up all the radio time and making huge marketing efforts. The ideas you mention are good starts, but the best advertising for a band is always word of mouth.
There are several alternative business models being tried. Apple's iTMS is one, though I have yet to see a major artist try the iTunes-only route. Even those songs have a "CD hole", but the first step to eliminating the CD hole is releasing music only in its DRM'ed form. I betcha that sooner or later Apple will reveal that there are songs you can download that it will refuse to let you burn. That's one new business model.
I didn't say you were going to like it. I just said they were working on it.
There's also a lot of music released without the RIAA, from local and regional bands. You can get that stuff from myspace, from CDs sold on their web sites and at concerts, and even with their blessing from P2P. (I have it straight from a musician friend of mine that you shouldn't have to pay to download one song.)
Of course you've never heard of any of these, because the RIAA's business model depends on you accepting what they advertise to you. If you want to deal a blow to the RIAA's business model, go out to your local club or browse the web for a while. And you can do it legally, too.
A bad business model is its own punishment. Let them flounder. Unless you happen to like what they're feeding you and you just don't feel like paying for it, in which case I call you "hypocrite". Opting out of the RIAA's business model isn't at all hard.
If the situation has stabilized with an 85% market share for Microsoft, that's very bad, because it means that Firefox will continue to be a niche. Developers will continue to test their apps against IE and then tell you it's your own stupid fault for running a "nonstandard" browser.
This is supposed to be Firefox's easy time, when IE hasn't been updated in a while and is still obviously full of bugs. If IE 7 comes out and is less buggy and less dangerous, it'll get even harder to convince users to switch to Firefox.
This should be an inflection point, where we see if people are willing to do the minimal but nonzero effort to get a browser other than IE on their computers. If that number turns out to be 10%, that's too bad. I'd really hoped for something closer to 40%, given how terrible IE is.
The only good news is that I don't trust these studies very far, so I'll hold out until at least next month before getting depressed.
There are frequent postings to Slashdot of the "Hey, let's go take over Mars!" variety, and the crowd always seems pretty enthusiastic about completely wiping out any chance of learning what the surface might have to teach us.
I'll complain, and they'll respond with something about a "backup planet", and I'll say that we've made it this far, we can wait a few hundred more years, and they'll say it has to happen RIGHT NOW because ya don't believe, we're on the eve of destruction. But you just know that they really just want to go there themselves, even though this couldn't possibly happen before they got too old, or dead.
So I'll just let it all go with a sigh and be thankful that this isn't actually going to happen.
Interesting. Without dates on the pages I can't tell how long the iTunes/Google Ad-words deal has been in effect. Could that be the news? Or has it been around for a while?
This implication of TheStreet.com is that there may be something even tighter, perhaps along the lines of "Look up a song, receive a link to iTunes at the top of the page (rather than in the adwords ads)". Sort of like Google's other special features (offering business info, almanac, calculator, etc. for certain queries.)
If so that would be hot, but very unusual for Google; they're usually determinedly non-partisan.
It does say that somebody did, but it gave absolutely no details on how he did it, which suggests that what he did is wildly impractical.
For starters he probably saved a lot of weight. I bet he removed the engine from the "hybrid", de-hybridizing it (perhaps using the gasoline engine at home to charge the batteries). And he probably removed a lot of extra things we like to call "safety features"; he may even have completely swapped out the body.
He may have used comically-expensive ultra-light-weight batteries, since the extra batteries add weight. Or perhaps he REMOVED batteries; perhaps the car doesn't even go 250 miles on a single charge. That's cheating, to me: if you can't actually fit the equivalent of a gallon of gas in the car you shouldn't express your terms in miles-per-gallon, but rather miles-per-tank/charge.
On top of that, the lack of details suggests that it probably achieves 250 MPG only under highly specific conditions. One passenger, for certain; maybe even no passengers.
The 250 MPG figure makes headlines, but when something appears in the headline without details in the body, I get very, very suspicious. There is clearly important work being done, perhaps even by this guy, but the implication that 250 MPG is practical sounds unwarranted. Possible, perhaps, but not practical.
That's the byline: "Written by Advertising". Don't believe everything you read, especially if it comes from a web site with an obvious axe to grind.
It doesn't pass the sniff test to me. Death threats against the inventor won't work: information wants to be free and they can't kill everybody who comes up with the idea.
More to the point, compressed air isn't an energy source, it's just a fuel medium, like hydrogen or electricity. The energy still comes from somewhere. His car is energy-efficient only if the means of producing compressed air are efficient, and I'm not convinced of the energy budget here. Compressing air evolves a lot of waste heat, which is currently just discarded. And unless you're planning to compress it at a factory and sent out tubes of compressed air, it's going to be hard to use that waste heat at a local level.
Maybe this is ultimately brilliant, but it sounds to me more like a man trying to attract attention with spurious "death threats" than somebody who's really improved the state of the art. I could be wrong. If he's right, we'll find out some day, even if they kill him. If he's wrong... well, all we'll have is people who read press releases claiming that he's being suppressed.
August is traditionally a slow news month. The US Congress is out of session. A lot of people are on vacation. People don't usually make major announcements. Maybe tech could be different, but as the article says, "News for Nerds" is a little thin on the ground.
The other key word is "Sunday", meaning no companies issued press releases yesterday or today. If a company has done something interesting (and face it: in the tech world a lot of stuff gets done by companies) it comes out either as a press release or a leak. Slashdot usually runs a lot of "just amusing" stuff on Sundays.
Yeah, it's a years-old Flash animation (which is really cute, but still... who even cares about the iMac ads that it's parodying?). So it's August. Take a breather.
Tesla, on the other hand, had the opposite problem: he'd theorize and never bother to test his theories. So a lot of Tesla's work is half-baked (or less). Much of his work can't be reproduced, meaning either (a) he was so amazingly, stunningly smart that the combined work of tens of thousands of other extemely smart people can't figure it out even after decades, or (b) he was completely wrong.
The world needs experimenters and theorists. They keep each other honest.
Because of their stupidity, we've ended up with a bastard hybrid of denying people fair use and still allowing people to violate copyright.
Ain't it always the way?
Whenever somebody is stupid, it's usually an opportunity for somebody else. I've been hanging out with a musician lately and she's just thrilled about P2P (though not entirely comfortable with the fact that a lot of people would be copying her music even if she weren't happy about it).
As long as the RIAA keeps cranking out music which is simultaneously boring and DRM'ed, it's a huge opening for her and the thousands of bands like hers. They'll never get as big as RIAA backed, overmarketed hyper-groups, but when those fail under their own weight it could eventually turn a lose-lose scenario into a win-win one. (Well, win-win-lose for the RIAA, which is even better to my mind.)
So they're spending 100 times as much money to make 100 little shows, and taking in 2 to 3 times as much revenue?
Even if a "little" show costs 1/10 as much, they're still losing money like crazy.
TV shows are expensive. Renting a studio space will run tens of thousands a month, and that's before you rent cameras, buy costumes, and pay actors, writers, electricians, set dressers, makeup artists, and a small army of other people. And if you want to do a show like Battlestar Galactica, with special effects and really complicated sets, you're spending several million dollars before the first episode airs.
Slashdot Mirror
The big genre film around that time is the next Harry Potter movie. But that's not the reason. The reason is almost certainly that the film sucks.
March is a terrible time to release movies, at least according to Hollywood wisdom; people are huddled at home rather than watching movies. March is a good time to dump big movies that didn't turn out well.
The article just says "conspiracy", which is pretty vague. I suspect that it means "conspiracy to commit fraud", 18 USC 371, punishable by up to 5 years.
Sounds entirely reasonable to me. I have no idea how the money flows, but I assume that McDonalds' spends $100M to be the Official Fat Bomb and NBC spends $1B to be the official coverage, how much (if any) of that does London see?
I suspect it's none, and that money goes to paying officials, feeding athletes, etc., but I have no idea if the balance works out. The IOC is presumably turning a profit, since it never has beg-a-thons the way charities do (or if it does I'm not aware.)
Cities appear to want the games for the prestige of having them, no matter what they cost. That's idiotic, but I've never heard of anybody organizing a campaign to stop a city from bidding.
Perhaps when it comes time to bid for the 2016 Olympics, we'll hear from local businesses in some cities begging the city not to spend so much money on games they won't profit from, and cite the Londoners.
A recent article points out that the sky is actually a range of wavelengths which we perceive as "blue" because of color mixing in the eye. So it's not just a special property of that frequency of blue, but rather an illusion that nets out to that blue.
Son of a gun... Thanks!
The text of the relevant passage is:
2. A person infringes the London Olympics association right if in the course of trade he uses in relation to goods or services any visual or verbal representation (of any kind) in a manner likely to create in the public mind an association between the London Olympics and...the goods or services
3 (1) For the purposes of paragraph 2 (and without prejudice to its generality) the use by a person of a combination of expressions of a kind specified in sub-paragraph (2) shall be treated, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, as being likely to create in the public mind an association with the London Olympics.
(2) The combinations referred to in sub-paragraph (1) are combinations of--any of the expressions in the first group, with any of the expressions in the second group or any of the other expressions in the first group.
(3) The following expressions form the first group for the purposes of sub paragraph (2)--
"games", "Two Thousand and Twelve", "2012", and "twenty twelve".
The following expressions form the second group for the purposes of sub-paragraph (2)--
gold, silver, bronze, London, medals, sponsor, and summer.
(Edited for less obnoxious formatting).
Basically, yeah, it lets the advertisers conclude what they want to conclude, that it's a badly written law that does forbid saying "summer 2012" in any advertising. But the intent is clearly marked in paragraph 2 that it only applies to advertising "likely to create [an assocation] in the public mind".
Which kind of means it's up to a judge whether your advertising is infringing, and it gives the Olympic committee a stick with which to beat you over the head if they decide they don't like you, even if you're just advertising "Voted Best Barbecue of the Summer by the 2012 Restaurant Guide". Whether they actually will be litigious twits I can't say, but to me it just underscored the impossibility of writing truly fair legislation.
Because what the guys in the article want is to get "halo effect" from the games. An example they cited in the article, "Get bronze in London with X suntan lotion", is clearly trying to benefit from the Olympics. Whether they should be allowed to is a whole separate issue, but I still say that they're blowing this out of proportion so that they can benefit from the games without paying (or at least, paying more than they have, since London is spending a buttload of money. I think spending all that money on sporting events is always stupid, but that's just me.)
I wish they'd linked to the exact text of the bill. I'm a bit reluctant to say "No matter how you look at it this is a very bad law" because I can't help but think that from the description it's so WILDLY bad that it must have been mis-described.
According to somebody opposing the bill, "You won't even be able to say 'come to London in 2012' because it will infringe the act." But that's not a lawyer or other objective observer; that's coming from an advertiser who wants to take advantage of the fact that the Olympics are in London. Her complaint is not so much about the free speech aspects in general as the fact that only official sponsors are going to be able to use the Olympics in advertising, so other London businesses aren't getting any benefit.
I can't help but think that the article is slanted. I find it very odd that the article's description of the banned words lists (comparatively) uncontroversial ones like "Olympiad" first, but lumps the really scary ones like "summer" and "2012" into the bottom bucket. Yes, I realize that there will be plenty of people who will say that they have no business restricting words like "Olympics" either, but I think we can all agree that claiming to own the word "summer" is truly outrageous.
It's so outrageous that I feel that I'm not being told something. I suspect that the bill probably contains more detailed language than "You can't use the word 'summer' in any advertising", and it's impossible for me to evaluate the bill knowing only what its opponents say about it.
Reading between the lines as best I can, it does sound like a badly-written bill that covers far more than they really need. Presumably they have no intent of actually preventing people from combining clearly public-domain terms, and the bill probably doesn't make that clear. But those are the outrageous aspects, and need to be cleaned up. We should be arguing about the free-speech aspects of the less outrageous parts, but we can't until we've finished arguing about the silly ones. Or having dismissed those claims as a deliberate misreading by those with a financial interest in doing so. Without the bill I can't say.
Ordinarily I expect better from the BBC, so perhaps I'm wrong. Or perhaps the BBC was hoping to benefit from some "halo effect" as well.
Since Virgin Galactic isn't a US company, the Department of Defense has a say in whether Scaled Composites can send them certain technological information, under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (the same rules that make those crypto t-shirts "munitions").
It's not surprising that they passed, since VG is a British company, and the Brits are the good guys. Presumably some guarantees have been made that this isn't going to turn into plans for cruise missiles for Iranians.
So they haven't been given the go-ahead to fly, just to begin collaboration. They still have to come up with the actual spacecraft, and then there's a whole new set of approvals before they can fly the things.
Mostly I suspect that they're pitching to their friends. If you're a technophobe and a conservative (as opposed to the liberal technophobes who want to return to a preindustrial era) it looks like the Bush administration isn't being "soft on porn".
.xxx domain without risking a Supreme Court smackdown on free speech grounds. Their base is happy; ICANN passes the domain anyway (since it makes money for registrars, which is the only reason for this anyway); and you ignore both ICANN and the Bush administration.
They don't understand filtering, but then, they don't understand the Net anyway. So the Bush administration can pitch any hissy fit it likes. The new domain is a dumb idea anyway, since there's no chance of them forcing porn into the
Sounds like a win-win to me.
Primarily, yes: it's an opportunity for the registrars to make money.
.xxx domain is likely to have some; if I want to avoid it filtering out .xxx does a very tiny bit of good.
.edu domain, for example, works because you know that the registrars are going to allow only real educational institutions to have one. If somebody restricted .xxx to real porn, it might have some tiny benefit.
To a lesser degree, it's an opportunity for the porn purveyors to get a domain that suits them. Playboy could put its softcore stuff on playboy.com, and its hardcore stuff on playboy.xxx. That's fairly negligible.
It also serves as a hint to consumers. If I were after porn I'd know that a
It does provide one further amusing property, that anti-porn activists could do some squatting themselves. Why not buy up "fucking.xxx" and point it to an anti-porn web site?
The only good reason for any new TLD is when there is somebody minding the passing out of names. The
That said, it's mostly stupid, because you know there won't be any such gatekeeper on the doman. It's a huge opportunity for trademark infringement. Somebody will register walmart.xxx and start selling porn there, which is illegal but they'll do it anyway.
In the end, the registrars make money, the porn purveyors get a tiny opportunity, and everybody else ignores it in droves.
And the Bush administration is wasting its time opposing it, because it doesn't do any harm, either. It's mostly an opportunity to play to their base, who get to interpret it as "Bush is doing something about Internet porn!" without actually doing anything.
How can the ROM know that it got a valid user response (or that the user even saw the ROM's request) unless 100% of the UI is in ROM?
I was proposing a limited UI that could ask the question without any help from the rest of the OS. Basically, what happens in BIOS today on Intel architectures: there's enough for a text-based UI right on the chip.
Or do it the way some routers do, with a web-based UI, again right on the chip. That would enable remote upgrades. Authentication would be tricky, but not impossible.
There is a middle path, where perhaps the ROM can be modified only with very particular acknowledgement from the user. Say, the mod has to be burned onto a CD and booted, and before overwriting itself the existing ROM asks, "Are you 100% sure you got this from a reliable source?" It could even check the Net to check the signature, if it had sufficient IP stack built in.
This works best with microkernel architecture, which lets out Linux and Windows but OS X could conceivably go there. (And Windows actually could do it as well, since it is built around a kind of overblown microkernel.)
But still, the protected kernel isn't really the problem. You can't really hard-code detection software into it because there are always new rootkits that would require mods to the protected kernel. I just showed that it could be done, but it would be deliberately awkward, and so there's plenty of time for a new flaw to be exploited.
It would make it easier to clean the infection off your system without reinstalling, but if you're wiping out everything above the microkernel, you're effectively reinstalling anyway. During a regular reinstall, the BIOS acts as the micro-microkernel. So it's all the same.
We'll probably still end up with some IP-based blacklists. You can imagine a spammer who spews out an infinite number of verified IDs. You can't blacklist just the IDs because they're one-shots. Instead, eventually you'll end up saying, "Hey, this server seems perfectly willing to grant IDs to any jackass; let's blacklist the IPs and encourage non-jackasses on that server to get a new one."
Basically, there will have to be layers of responsibility, and we can encourage the various layers to be responsible for the layers below them. Otherwise, a layer which mixes legitimate and asinine uses will risk having its legitimate users tarred with the same brush. The legitimate users will flee, and the spammers will no longer be able to hide among them.
Why is it I never have mod points when somebody actually useful shows up? Thanks for the answer. Just for good measure, what are the electronegativaties and how much electricity do you get out of it?
If they're adopting SenderID, it makes it easy to filter them. You can't filter just on the existence of SenderID; you need to check who the sender is and ignore email from known spammers.
That's a good thing. It lets them spew all of the email they want; let's call it freedom of speech (since I don't want any legal limitations on spam also being used to prevent legitimate speech). And I get to ignore them; I can filter them at the SMTP layer even before they get to send the whole message.
It may not be successful yet, if people are misusing the technology by trusting the existence of a Sender ID record to mean it's not spam. But don't blame the technology for being misused.
Actually, I think it'll be easier for music than for software.
Open-source software exists against a background of closed-source software. Many people who work on open source have day jobs writing closed-source software, or get to open-source part of their work while closing the parts that are specific to their clients. The most successful bits of open source, Apache and Linux, are heavily subsidized by large corporations that also write closed-source software.
Open source has done well, but it's far from replacing closed-source, and I believe it would slit its own throat if it did.
Music, on the other hand, requires no support network. Go out and download music from iRate or any of the other myriad places you can find free music. Even better, find a band you like and actually buy their CD.
Finding a band you like is a challenge, but it always has been. The RIAA has made it easy on you by buying up all the radio time and making huge marketing efforts. The ideas you mention are good starts, but the best advertising for a band is always word of mouth.
There are several alternative business models being tried. Apple's iTMS is one, though I have yet to see a major artist try the iTunes-only route. Even those songs have a "CD hole", but the first step to eliminating the CD hole is releasing music only in its DRM'ed form. I betcha that sooner or later Apple will reveal that there are songs you can download that it will refuse to let you burn. That's one new business model.
I didn't say you were going to like it. I just said they were working on it.
There's also a lot of music released without the RIAA, from local and regional bands. You can get that stuff from myspace, from CDs sold on their web sites and at concerts, and even with their blessing from P2P. (I have it straight from a musician friend of mine that you shouldn't have to pay to download one song.)
Of course you've never heard of any of these, because the RIAA's business model depends on you accepting what they advertise to you. If you want to deal a blow to the RIAA's business model, go out to your local club or browse the web for a while. And you can do it legally, too.
A bad business model is its own punishment. Let them flounder. Unless you happen to like what they're feeding you and you just don't feel like paying for it, in which case I call you "hypocrite". Opting out of the RIAA's business model isn't at all hard.
If the situation has stabilized with an 85% market share for Microsoft, that's very bad, because it means that Firefox will continue to be a niche. Developers will continue to test their apps against IE and then tell you it's your own stupid fault for running a "nonstandard" browser.
This is supposed to be Firefox's easy time, when IE hasn't been updated in a while and is still obviously full of bugs. If IE 7 comes out and is less buggy and less dangerous, it'll get even harder to convince users to switch to Firefox.
This should be an inflection point, where we see if people are willing to do the minimal but nonzero effort to get a browser other than IE on their computers. If that number turns out to be 10%, that's too bad. I'd really hoped for something closer to 40%, given how terrible IE is.
The only good news is that I don't trust these studies very far, so I'll hold out until at least next month before getting depressed.
There are frequent postings to Slashdot of the "Hey, let's go take over Mars!" variety, and the crowd always seems pretty enthusiastic about completely wiping out any chance of learning what the surface might have to teach us.
I'll complain, and they'll respond with something about a "backup planet", and I'll say that we've made it this far, we can wait a few hundred more years, and they'll say it has to happen RIGHT NOW because ya don't believe, we're on the eve of destruction. But you just know that they really just want to go there themselves, even though this couldn't possibly happen before they got too old, or dead.
So I'll just let it all go with a sigh and be thankful that this isn't actually going to happen.
Interesting. Without dates on the pages I can't tell how long the iTunes/Google Ad-words deal has been in effect. Could that be the news? Or has it been around for a while?
This implication of TheStreet.com is that there may be something even tighter, perhaps along the lines of "Look up a song, receive a link to iTunes at the top of the page (rather than in the adwords ads)". Sort of like Google's other special features (offering business info, almanac, calculator, etc. for certain queries.)
If so that would be hot, but very unusual for Google; they're usually determinedly non-partisan.
It does say that somebody did, but it gave absolutely no details on how he did it, which suggests that what he did is wildly impractical.
For starters he probably saved a lot of weight. I bet he removed the engine from the "hybrid", de-hybridizing it (perhaps using the gasoline engine at home to charge the batteries). And he probably removed a lot of extra things we like to call "safety features"; he may even have completely swapped out the body.
He may have used comically-expensive ultra-light-weight batteries, since the extra batteries add weight. Or perhaps he REMOVED batteries; perhaps the car doesn't even go 250 miles on a single charge. That's cheating, to me: if you can't actually fit the equivalent of a gallon of gas in the car you shouldn't express your terms in miles-per-gallon, but rather miles-per-tank/charge.
On top of that, the lack of details suggests that it probably achieves 250 MPG only under highly specific conditions. One passenger, for certain; maybe even no passengers.
The 250 MPG figure makes headlines, but when something appears in the headline without details in the body, I get very, very suspicious. There is clearly important work being done, perhaps even by this guy, but the implication that 250 MPG is practical sounds unwarranted. Possible, perhaps, but not practical.
That's the byline: "Written by Advertising". Don't believe everything you read, especially if it comes from a web site with an obvious axe to grind.
It doesn't pass the sniff test to me. Death threats against the inventor won't work: information wants to be free and they can't kill everybody who comes up with the idea.
More to the point, compressed air isn't an energy source, it's just a fuel medium, like hydrogen or electricity. The energy still comes from somewhere. His car is energy-efficient only if the means of producing compressed air are efficient, and I'm not convinced of the energy budget here. Compressing air evolves a lot of waste heat, which is currently just discarded. And unless you're planning to compress it at a factory and sent out tubes of compressed air, it's going to be hard to use that waste heat at a local level.
Maybe this is ultimately brilliant, but it sounds to me more like a man trying to attract attention with spurious "death threats" than somebody who's really improved the state of the art. I could be wrong. If he's right, we'll find out some day, even if they kill him. If he's wrong... well, all we'll have is people who read press releases claiming that he's being suppressed.
August is traditionally a slow news month. The US Congress is out of session. A lot of people are on vacation. People don't usually make major announcements. Maybe tech could be different, but as the article says, "News for Nerds" is a little thin on the ground.
The other key word is "Sunday", meaning no companies issued press releases yesterday or today. If a company has done something interesting (and face it: in the tech world a lot of stuff gets done by companies) it comes out either as a press release or a leak. Slashdot usually runs a lot of "just amusing" stuff on Sundays.
Yeah, it's a years-old Flash animation (which is really cute, but still... who even cares about the iMac ads that it's parodying?). So it's August. Take a breather.
Tesla, on the other hand, had the opposite problem: he'd theorize and never bother to test his theories. So a lot of Tesla's work is half-baked (or less). Much of his work can't be reproduced, meaning either (a) he was so amazingly, stunningly smart that the combined work of tens of thousands of other extemely smart people can't figure it out even after decades, or (b) he was completely wrong.
The world needs experimenters and theorists. They keep each other honest.
Because of their stupidity, we've ended up with a bastard hybrid of denying people fair use and still allowing people to violate copyright.
Ain't it always the way?
Whenever somebody is stupid, it's usually an opportunity for somebody else. I've been hanging out with a musician lately and she's just thrilled about P2P (though not entirely comfortable with the fact that a lot of people would be copying her music even if she weren't happy about it).
As long as the RIAA keeps cranking out music which is simultaneously boring and DRM'ed, it's a huge opening for her and the thousands of bands like hers. They'll never get as big as RIAA backed, overmarketed hyper-groups, but when those fail under their own weight it could eventually turn a lose-lose scenario into a win-win one. (Well, win-win-lose for the RIAA, which is even better to my mind.)
So they're spending 100 times as much money to make 100 little shows, and taking in 2 to 3 times as much revenue?
Even if a "little" show costs 1/10 as much, they're still losing money like crazy.
TV shows are expensive. Renting a studio space will run tens of thousands a month, and that's before you rent cameras, buy costumes, and pay actors, writers, electricians, set dressers, makeup artists, and a small army of other people. And if you want to do a show like Battlestar Galactica, with special effects and really complicated sets, you're spending several million dollars before the first episode airs.