So your premise is that if you like a product, you will use it without regard to the implications of your support for its manufacturer?
No; I just happen to believe that Google's transgressions are relatively minor, so they don't qualify as "evil".
I do avoid using products produced by companies I think are bad. I use organic animal products because I don't like the way the animals are treated by the large agribusinesses. I usually pay three times as much for the privilege. I drive a high-gas-mileage car because I don't like oil companies, despite the inconvenience of not being able to carry my friends around.
Thanks for the pointer on the search engine; I'll give it a spin.
Hell, I live with a cheapo.25G player, and a badly designed one at that. It's what I can afford. I stave off boredom by listening to books rather than music, and they can be ripped at a reasonably low bit rate, so I can cram several hours on at a time.
It takes some management to ensure that I always have enough, and it's nice to have the radio as a backup in case I've screwed up.
I support the idea of getting engines to compete against each other to force them to continue to innovate, but from what I've seen google just wins hands down.
When I bring up their page, I get the results I want, on the first try, without being irritated by clunky pages full of flashy advertising. None of the other major engines do that nearly as well. I keep hearing about other engines that promise better results, but the best I've seen is "as good", which isn't enough to outweigh the goodwill Google has built up by being the first engine to be fun to use.
Google continues to innovate: froogle, maps, calculator... Whether they're driven by competition or by an open-source-esque drive to be the best, they keep coming up with new and useful ideas. I love ad-words, which is a way to keep other web sites free with unobtrusive and relevant advertising without requiring a major marketing effort at each site. So I'm not going to use a different engine just to support some abstract idea of the value of competition.
Unless, that is, you've got a strong recommendation. In which case, fire away.
Back when I was running with a tape player, it was nice to have a backup thing to listen to if I ran out of tape (training for a marathon means long, long runs, and bouncing spare tapes around in a pocket was very bad for them.) A 5 gig player pretty much eliminates that.
It's nice to be able to get the news, too, which is something you can't program into your MP3 player. But since switching to an MP3 player I've almost never used its built-in radio.
Radio makes a good addition, since it can be crammed in without significantly raising the price or the weight.
A camera added to my phone is less good, since it adds both price and weight, but for those willing to make the tradeoff it's nice to have a snapshot camera that happens to be with me whenever I feel like it. But it's not going to be a great camera, with fancy lenses and sophisticated controls.
But I'd just as soon not try to converge my PDA with my cell phone, since they operate in totally different modes (one against my ear, the other in my hand). I'd consider a PDA with headphones to be better, but it requires either wearing the headset all the time or putting it on whenever you want to make a call.
It requires a little attachment cable between the device and the headphones. I believe it requires extra antenna; the phone itself works on a totally different frequency. The radio on my little MP3 player doesn't work without it.
Because Slashdot isn't some guy with a penchant for open source. Your Slashdot ID is seven figures. With that many people you're gonna get fans of just about everything.
In addition, even individual people can value good design while disliking the way that design is produced and marketed.
So basically don't look for consistency from Slashdot; you're not gonna get it.
Oh, I'm not complaining about the fact that companies charge what they can get away with. I'm a fan of free-market capitalism. I'd hate to live in a world where you had to price things based solely on what you paid to make them; it makes it hard to put a price (and therefore a value) on innovation.
Free market capitalism, as long as the excesses are reined in (externalities and the anti-free-market forces that unscrupulous people use in pursuit of money) strikes me as eminently fair. If somebody can make a computer as good as a Mac and sell it cheaper and still make a profit, feel free.
You should take a look at some of the sibling posts the parent. One of them talks about why the manufacturing of those parts is so expensive, if not necessarily the materials.
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple spends extra on ultra-quiet fans. So yeah, the grandparent is rather devoid of useful numbers, but he's not necessarily wrong, either.
Oh, boy, do I know how you feel. Every time I say anything on Slashdot and fail to turn in a disseration exploring all the details I'll get corrections up the wazoo.
And I overreacted a bit; I should have read "design" for "designers". There was an interesting reply to my post about how much those fancy cases cost to make. I apologize for being pedantic.
I still think that the economic forces of what people are willing to pay are a bigger determinant of the price than the cost to manufacture. In some ways the critical measure is the price to manufacture a cheapo PC. Unlike Apple, Dell has competition, and the price they charge is perilously close to the minimum. I can't build a PC cheaper than Dell can. I think the differences in the economics have interesting consequences.
I suspect that the broadcasters would be reasonably content, at least for a while, to let you go ahead and tape the analog output. It's fuzzier than the digital signal. It's also harder to control: in order to tape Jeopardy at 7:30 and then Law and Order on a different channel at 9, you'd have to have some way to control both the tuner and the analog recorder, which would be separate boxes.
I'm sure somebody would eventually come up with a hack around it, like those VCR+ remote controls that you left pointed at the tuner box and the VCR. (I don't know if they make those any more.)
You, slashdot hacker, will be perfectly capable of cobbling something together and feel all proud of watching Battlestar Galactica at 5:37 the following afternoon, gleefully fast-forwarding over the commercials. Most people won't do it.
Perhaps I'm wrong on that score. The broadcasters seem kinda pissed about low-res fuzzy episodes of South Park posted on FTP servers all over the world. For me, it's easier to wait until they come out on DVD.
They may eventually try to require digital signals and content control all the way to the CRT, but such transitions take a long time. Look how long it's taking to get HDTV accepted. I hope by then we've found better ways aroud it, like ignoring the crap the broadcasters are spewing in the first place.
How much does design cost? Pulling a few numbers out of my ass, let's say that this took a team of 20 people to design, test, fabricate, etc. this design. Let's say it took them a year, at $100k. (Engineers make more, secretaries make less). That's two million bucks.
According to some news sources, Apple plans to sell around a million of the things. The cost of the design comes out to two bucks a unit.
Supposing I'm off by an order of magnitude, we're still talking about $20 per unit paid to the designers. So I really don't think that it's the design driving the price of the units.
I think that the price of Apple computers is generally driven by basic economics: how much are people willing to pay for them? If that number is greater than the cost to manufacture (including the $2 to $20 for the fancy design), then they do it; otherwise, they don't. The manufacturing cost only sets a lower limit on the price, but it doesn't set it.
People are willing to pay more for Apples, because they like the design and reliability. Some of that comes from spending more on designers; some comes from more expensive components (Apple for years insisted on using pricey SCSI before finally joining the rest of the world in IDE, for example).
A lot of it comes from the price of alternatives; Apple almost certainly looks at the price of a Dell marketed to the same audience and adds 20% or so. People are willing to pay a premium because they're getting a better piece of equipment. Apple has a tendency to tell people that they want a better computer than the one Dell is marketing to them.
Dell will happily sell you the cheapest machine they think you'll buy; Apple would rather sell you a computer that would make you happy. That gives them only a portion of the market, but it's a very cheerful market segment.
Design is the reason they can charge more, but it's not to pay the designers. Designers are cheap compared to the rest of the process. There might be some room for a competitor to Dell to arise with the same philosophy in the Wintel platform, but they'll be stuck with the same small market share Apple gets from seeking the high end, and they'll still be stuck with Windows as the OS, which will limit how much users like the product no matter how spiffy the physical design.
The police have not done a very good job of preventing me from being robbed, burgled, assaulted, having my car stolen, etc.
I'd argue that if the police didn't exist, you'd have been robbed, burgled, and assaulted more frequently than you have been. You probably pay something on the order of $2,500 a year in state taxes (where the police budget comes from), and perhaps $1,000 of that goes to the police (rather than roads and schools). If the crime rate went up to the point where you had one car stolen every 2 years, rather than every 10 years, you'd probably break even.
Those numbers are rubbish, since I'm talking about state taxes and not federal taxes (not to mention that I don't know how much you make and where you live, and I've excluded sales taxes, blah blah blah), and a considerable chunk of your federal taxes comes back to your state for police protection among other things, so you may well be paying more for your police protection. Still, the point is the same: there would be a lot more crime if the criminals didn't fear the police.
Maybe that's not true: get rid of government entirely and you could buy your own guns, and nobody would arrest you if you shot a burglar coming into your house. However, I'd want cover fire if I went to the ATM.
In this country I'm more worried about the rich business interests taking over the government than the military, though of course some of the richest business interests are the military contractors.
Corruption sucks. I say we make me absolute dictator and I'll be really good. Promise.
Cheaper, hell yeah. But I gotta admit that I'm really fond of the fact that if I get robbed I can call 911 (on the publicly-supported phone) to call the publicly-supported police, who can get to my house pretty quick on the publicly-supported roads.
I suppose I could just hire somebody to do all that, but it would be cheaper to buy it in bulk with all my neighbors. How would we decide which one to get? We'd probably vote on it. What would we call the resulting organization? We'd probably call it a government.
Perhaps it'll be a less crappy government than the one I have now, but it's like code: old and badly-maintained code could always do with a scrap and rewrite. But it's hard to get customers to pay for that, and they get really upset if you don't maintain the old code base in the meantime. So we usually just end up muddling along with what we had.
You're absolutely correct. But the corollary of Justice Marshall's statement is that to injure nothing, the state must collect no taxes whatsoever. You thus end up with a state which does no harm, but doesn't do a whole hell of a lot of good, either.
In a perfect world you tax things which you wish to discourage; cigarettes and gasoline are heavily taxed in most places in the US. Fortunately, we don't have enough vices to run things solely off of sin taxes; unfortunately, that means we have to also tax things we wish to encourage, like "income" and "sales" and "property".
The money always comes from somewhere, and whenever we tax a Good Thing, people will complain about it. And they'll be right, except that the money does have to come from somewhere. (Assuming that we agree that the various government mandates, from police to roads to universal telephone service, are a good thing; if not we're having a rather different discussion.)
So yeah, this strikes at the heart of the internet, and so it may ultimately be futile. It's hard to regulate Internet connections, what with the satellites and wireless and such. But it's not the speech they're trying to limit; they're just trying to make sure that crucial infrastructure gets funded somehow. In the limit case, rich Costa Ricans will have VOIP (free with their Internet, which they want anyway), and poor Costa Ricans, unable to afford computers, will do without phone service entirely since there will no longer be enough people on it to pay the overhead.
The nice thing about POTS is that the hardware on the consumer end is incredibly cheap. Sports Illustrated will kick in a phone free when you buy their magazine. There's a lot of overhead already in place, but it requires maintenance, as do the expensive switches in the middle. If only the poor were to use it, it would probably collapse.
Maybe that's a good thing. The Internet infrastructure is more flexible. Perhaps what they need instead is to abandon their POTS system and subsidize VOIP phones and IP service for the poor people if they (the voters) decide universal service is something they want. In which case they couldn't tax the phones, so they'd tax something else an equivalent amount (or more, since I'm suggesting expensive subsidies). Either way the phone tax gets paid, it's just a question of how much for what kind of phone system you want and whom you wish to have it.
Perhaps economically speaking that would cost less overall and/or do more good, helping put Internet in every house. I dunno; I'm not an economist, nor an expert in Central American economies.
The entire discussion on Slashdot has centered around a substantial misreading of the article.
The real point of the article is that the Costa Rican national telephone company wants VOIP regulated as a service, like the other phone lines are. We are having the same debate in the United States. The phone company here was originally designed as a monopoly, and universal service meant subsidies. Find a way around the monopoly, and there's no way to fund the subsidies. So you either regulate it enough to collect taxes or do away with the phone service in rural areas (which is often the basis of internet service in those areas as well.)
Costa Rica has similar regulatory issues. So they're in the phase of "Hey, this ought to be regulated." The regulations are completely undefined as yet, so some reporter speculates that they could in some ludicrous limit case result in criminalizing VOIP and then mentions it in the headline, the lead line, and then precisely once in the actual body of the article.
Whereupon Slashdot copies the headline, and focuses the summary on it. Read into the rest of the article and you might find that most of the time when the Slashdot response to an article is "How could anybody be so incredibly stupid?" the answer is usually, "They're not, they've just been taken out of context."
It may well be that any regulation of VOIP is a bad idea, that the Internet wants to be free, and if it outcompetes the old regime then we'll have to come up with a new plan. In Costa Rica's case, if they lose too much tax money from POTS to VOIP, they'll have to raise taxes elsewhere. Perhaps they'd raise a sales tax or income tax. But talk of criminalizing VOIP strikes me as a hysterical response to a subject that requires actual thought.
I certainly didn't mean to say anything bad about The Hindu. I didn't look at the rest of the paper but the reporting level was suprisingly technical for what appeared to be a general-consumption paper. I assumed that the mistake that the great-grandparent post was pointing out is just a mistake in the process of re-writing a press release. Or it may even come straight from the press release, which is usually written by the marketing staff not the technical staff.
I'd love to see general journalism in the US do as well with technical articles. Generally when a science story comes out I glance at the headline and make a note to myself to wait for Science News to come out with it. Just today I saw an article in the Washington Post (my hometown newspaper but also a major journal of record) claiming that 16% of children were above the 95th percentile in some category.
Often I assume that when Slashdot references a paper like The Hindu, it's usually a wire story or press release that got picked up and could have come from anywyere. We get the reference to whatever paper the submitter happens to read.
But, for example, I'll feel a lot more strongly about the accusations of secret laws in the John Gilmore article when they're picked up by a more reputable paper than the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It's not that it's a bad paper so much as that I don't know its reputation and so I can't evaluate the quality of its claims. When only a single paper reports an issue I tend to dismiss it (not being of the mind that the government is deliberately, but not entirely effectively, clamping down.)
Yep. I think Raskin would analyze it in terms of "What does it mean to log out? Why do you want to log out? What if you don't log out?"
Well, you log out to (a) prevent anybody else from messing with your files (since "logging in" is a mode which gives you access to things you wouldn't get as a different user), (b) free up the computer so somebody else could use it, and (c) as preparation for shutting down.
For the first two, he might prefer some sort of lock mode which maintains your state but frees up the computer for other people. I gather OS X has a feature rather like that. In the end it's not unlike logging out in a window manager that saves your state.
For the last, shutting down the computer is an operation that's really hard to undo. He recommended something more like hibernation, where the power goes out but it comes back up in precisely the state that it went down in.
I'd belive 120 watts all told, which I believe would actually be a pretty good output; as stated it's ludicrous. Sadly, their website doesn't say; it hasn't been updated since November.
The article is reasonably well written, though I'm not used to getting major engineering announcements from The Hindu. (Presumably an Indian paper is reporting on events in Palo Alto because of the number of Indians working on the project.) Maybe they just botched the rewrite of the press release. Odd that I can't find the original press release on the web site, though. Fishy, as you say. Maybe they're better solar engineers than they are web site managers.
Well, that was kind of the point. You're a fan; many of your friends turn into fans. I just wanted to know what it was I was missing. Was it a joke that I wasn't in on, or was there something subtle I was too dumb to get. Nobody's forcing me, but I hate to be left out of something good. If it's a taste worth acquiring, I needed a few pointers.
The answers seem to come out to a combination of "Yeah, it's dumb, but it's also a unique kind of sci-fi" with "You need to gloss over the bad parts because the good parts really are worth it". Good enough for me.
You didn't ask, but here's my semi-professional opinion of the performances of the ambassadors.
I should note that it's really hard to evaluate an actor from the finished product, which is why I brought it up in the first place. There's so much between the performance and you (the writing, the direction, even the lighting and music can dramatically alter your impression of a performance). To the untrained eye, and even to professionals, what you're looking at is a performance and saying whether you enjoy it or not; whether a different actor would have been more enjoyable is a very difficult judgment to make. I try not to judge an actor from a single role, especially if I didn't like it.
For example, I saw an episode the other night with the extremely talented Michael York, and I'd have thought he was a rank amateur because of the way that cruddy dialogue sounded. I like to believe that I was really seeing that "spark" underneath the performance, but I could just be biased because I've seen the actor before. The scene with G'Kar was splendid, two actors working well together, though a better director would have had them work on the same definition of "drunk". Not that two people get drunk the same way, but there are core elements that are interesting when they're in common. Eh, enough directing jib-jab; once you've directed you never stop looking at it that way.
In this case it's even harder, because they're playing aliens. If you're not enjoying something, it's hard to tell if it's because it's a very talented actor giving you an expert performance of a character who's not very human, or just crap.
Aliens are most interesting when they're really human underneath; you have to be very delicate in constructing non-human traits. They have to feel like something a human could be, or it just feels random. Ultimately we're really seeing stories about people.
That said, I thought Andreas Katsulas did an unbelievably bang-up job as G'Kar. It was "open"; you felt he was really being honest on stage (which is an interesting use of acting terminology, since the character was frequently lying. Katsulas was lying, openly and honestly.) For all the makeup, his character was the most human. His was the best example of an alien with alien traits who also explored what it was to be human.
Peter Jurasik as Londo I've seen before doing much better work on Hill Street Blues. In his case I felt he was substantially hampered by a corny accent, which made every word come out as overplayed. He was meant to explore certain negative human impulses, but the writing too often made them feel thinly drawn, a greed without real impulse. Still, when he was conflicted about it, it came out very human and interesting. Stephen Furst is Vir came out rather better, I felt, and I think it was because he didn't attempt the accent.
Similarly, I didn't much care for Mira Furlan as Delenn, but I think that was due more to her "alien" reserve, which came out to me more as "flat" than "reserved". I thought Bill Mumy's Lennier was a far more open and interesting version of the same thing. That may be chauvinism on my part, willing to tolerate more reserve from a male character than a female one. Still, I've greatly enjoyed reserved female characters in other series (like Majel Barret's Number One in the Star Trek pilot).
These are just my judgments, and I can very much respect different opinions on those performances.
One other thing, if you've bothered to read this far: I felt that there were a number of episodes that didn't significantly advance the story a whole; one-offs that could be discarded. On other long-term series those are often the most fun episodes, like when the Deep Space Nine crew revisited the Tribbles episode, or the musical episode of Buffy (though that one even managed to advance its long-term story line as well).
But on B5, I found them to be generally less interesting (I really didn't need to see Jack the Ripper In Space.) The show is much more interesting when the large-scale politics were involved. I think the writer did better with less human-scale and more global-scale events.
Well, that's one answer: I can't judge until I've invested 40 minutes * 24 episodes/season * 5 seasons = 80 hours. Unfortunately, I really don't have that kind of time to devote. Generally, I expect series television to reward the journey, not just the end.
No, I'm not in the IMDB; I'm a stage actor. I've performed in New York City, but you still wouldn't have heard of me. Still, after six years of training and several dozen shows I have some experience that lets me try to prise apart the differences between acting, directing, and writing in the finished product.
A friend of mine has loaned me B5 on DVD, and I keep at it, but I'm not entirely sure why.
The most interesting thing about it is the long story arc. There's a lot good to be said about it, though I've seen others do it better. The costuming and sets are nicely done.
But other than that I just can't find anything to like. The acting is generally incompetent; it looks for all the world like the actors are only barely off book. Or maybe it's because the dialogue is so stilted nobody could make it sound good. A few of the regulars manage to carry it off; one or two even mange to look good.
But many of the regulars, nearly all of the non-famous guest stars, and even a few very talented guests sound completely incompetent. I just watched an episode with the hugely talented Michael York, and he chewed his way through the scenery as though it were chocolate.
I'm an actor and director myself. It's hard to separate out blame in the finished product without being on set, but it seems to be the fault of the writing and directing even more than the actors themselves. But I've heard people praise Straczynski's writing to the high heavens. I just don't get it. I don't care about the cheesy CG effects or corny music; it's the parts between the interstitials that set my teeth on edge.
Yeah, I already skipped through most of the first season. I'm now well into the third season, which was supposed to be pretty good. If it weren't for the fact that I'm trying to figure out why it's so important that it makes the front page of Slashdot, I'd long have given up.
So I don't believe I'm trolling when I ask: can somebody explain to me why I shouldn't consider the failure of this to become a movie anything other than a benefit to mankind?
Slashdot Mirror
So your premise is that if you like a product, you will use it without regard to the implications of your support for its manufacturer?
No; I just happen to believe that Google's transgressions are relatively minor, so they don't qualify as "evil".
I do avoid using products produced by companies I think are bad. I use organic animal products because I don't like the way the animals are treated by the large agribusinesses. I usually pay three times as much for the privilege. I drive a high-gas-mileage car because I don't like oil companies, despite the inconvenience of not being able to carry my friends around.
Thanks for the pointer on the search engine; I'll give it a spin.
Preaching to the choir. My radio has six buttons. Two are set to NPR, the third to C-SPAN, and the other three are blank.
Hell, I live with a cheapo .25G player, and a badly designed one at that. It's what I can afford. I stave off boredom by listening to books rather than music, and they can be ripped at a reasonably low bit rate, so I can cram several hours on at a time.
It takes some management to ensure that I always have enough, and it's nice to have the radio as a backup in case I've screwed up.
I support the idea of getting engines to compete against each other to force them to continue to innovate, but from what I've seen google just wins hands down.
When I bring up their page, I get the results I want, on the first try, without being irritated by clunky pages full of flashy advertising. None of the other major engines do that nearly as well. I keep hearing about other engines that promise better results, but the best I've seen is "as good", which isn't enough to outweigh the goodwill Google has built up by being the first engine to be fun to use.
Google continues to innovate: froogle, maps, calculator... Whether they're driven by competition or by an open-source-esque drive to be the best, they keep coming up with new and useful ideas. I love ad-words, which is a way to keep other web sites free with unobtrusive and relevant advertising without requiring a major marketing effort at each site. So I'm not going to use a different engine just to support some abstract idea of the value of competition.
Unless, that is, you've got a strong recommendation. In which case, fire away.
Back when I was running with a tape player, it was nice to have a backup thing to listen to if I ran out of tape (training for a marathon means long, long runs, and bouncing spare tapes around in a pocket was very bad for them.) A 5 gig player pretty much eliminates that.
It's nice to be able to get the news, too, which is something you can't program into your MP3 player. But since switching to an MP3 player I've almost never used its built-in radio.
Radio makes a good addition, since it can be crammed in without significantly raising the price or the weight.
A camera added to my phone is less good, since it adds both price and weight, but for those willing to make the tradeoff it's nice to have a snapshot camera that happens to be with me whenever I feel like it. But it's not going to be a great camera, with fancy lenses and sophisticated controls.
But I'd just as soon not try to converge my PDA with my cell phone, since they operate in totally different modes (one against my ear, the other in my hand). I'd consider a PDA with headphones to be better, but it requires either wearing the headset all the time or putting it on whenever you want to make a call.
My Motorola had one, too, though I never used it.
It requires a little attachment cable between the device and the headphones. I believe it requires extra antenna; the phone itself works on a totally different frequency. The radio on my little MP3 player doesn't work without it.
Because Slashdot isn't some guy with a penchant for open source. Your Slashdot ID is seven figures. With that many people you're gonna get fans of just about everything.
In addition, even individual people can value good design while disliking the way that design is produced and marketed.
So basically don't look for consistency from Slashdot; you're not gonna get it.
Oh, I'm not complaining about the fact that companies charge what they can get away with. I'm a fan of free-market capitalism. I'd hate to live in a world where you had to price things based solely on what you paid to make them; it makes it hard to put a price (and therefore a value) on innovation.
Free market capitalism, as long as the excesses are reined in (externalities and the anti-free-market forces that unscrupulous people use in pursuit of money) strikes me as eminently fair. If somebody can make a computer as good as a Mac and sell it cheaper and still make a profit, feel free.
You should take a look at some of the sibling posts the parent. One of them talks about why the manufacturing of those parts is so expensive, if not necessarily the materials.
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple spends extra on ultra-quiet fans. So yeah, the grandparent is rather devoid of useful numbers, but he's not necessarily wrong, either.
Oh, boy, do I know how you feel. Every time I say anything on Slashdot and fail to turn in a disseration exploring all the details I'll get corrections up the wazoo.
And I overreacted a bit; I should have read "design" for "designers". There was an interesting reply to my post about how much those fancy cases cost to make. I apologize for being pedantic.
I still think that the economic forces of what people are willing to pay are a bigger determinant of the price than the cost to manufacture. In some ways the critical measure is the price to manufacture a cheapo PC. Unlike Apple, Dell has competition, and the price they charge is perilously close to the minimum. I can't build a PC cheaper than Dell can. I think the differences in the economics have interesting consequences.
I suspect that the broadcasters would be reasonably content, at least for a while, to let you go ahead and tape the analog output. It's fuzzier than the digital signal. It's also harder to control: in order to tape Jeopardy at 7:30 and then Law and Order on a different channel at 9, you'd have to have some way to control both the tuner and the analog recorder, which would be separate boxes.
I'm sure somebody would eventually come up with a hack around it, like those VCR+ remote controls that you left pointed at the tuner box and the VCR. (I don't know if they make those any more.)
You, slashdot hacker, will be perfectly capable of cobbling something together and feel all proud of watching Battlestar Galactica at 5:37 the following afternoon, gleefully fast-forwarding over the commercials. Most people won't do it.
Perhaps I'm wrong on that score. The broadcasters seem kinda pissed about low-res fuzzy episodes of South Park posted on FTP servers all over the world. For me, it's easier to wait until they come out on DVD.
They may eventually try to require digital signals and content control all the way to the CRT, but such transitions take a long time. Look how long it's taking to get HDTV accepted. I hope by then we've found better ways aroud it, like ignoring the crap the broadcasters are spewing in the first place.
How much does design cost? Pulling a few numbers out of my ass, let's say that this took a team of 20 people to design, test, fabricate, etc. this design. Let's say it took them a year, at $100k. (Engineers make more, secretaries make less). That's two million bucks.
According to some news sources, Apple plans to sell around a million of the things. The cost of the design comes out to two bucks a unit.
Supposing I'm off by an order of magnitude, we're still talking about $20 per unit paid to the designers. So I really don't think that it's the design driving the price of the units.
I think that the price of Apple computers is generally driven by basic economics: how much are people willing to pay for them? If that number is greater than the cost to manufacture (including the $2 to $20 for the fancy design), then they do it; otherwise, they don't. The manufacturing cost only sets a lower limit on the price, but it doesn't set it.
People are willing to pay more for Apples, because they like the design and reliability. Some of that comes from spending more on designers; some comes from more expensive components (Apple for years insisted on using pricey SCSI before finally joining the rest of the world in IDE, for example).
A lot of it comes from the price of alternatives; Apple almost certainly looks at the price of a Dell marketed to the same audience and adds 20% or so. People are willing to pay a premium because they're getting a better piece of equipment. Apple has a tendency to tell people that they want a better computer than the one Dell is marketing to them.
Dell will happily sell you the cheapest machine they think you'll buy; Apple would rather sell you a computer that would make you happy. That gives them only a portion of the market, but it's a very cheerful market segment.
Design is the reason they can charge more, but it's not to pay the designers. Designers are cheap compared to the rest of the process. There might be some room for a competitor to Dell to arise with the same philosophy in the Wintel platform, but they'll be stuck with the same small market share Apple gets from seeking the high end, and they'll still be stuck with Windows as the OS, which will limit how much users like the product no matter how spiffy the physical design.
The police have not done a very good job of preventing me from being robbed, burgled, assaulted, having my car stolen, etc.
I'd argue that if the police didn't exist, you'd have been robbed, burgled, and assaulted more frequently than you have been. You probably pay something on the order of $2,500 a year in state taxes (where the police budget comes from), and perhaps $1,000 of that goes to the police (rather than roads and schools). If the crime rate went up to the point where you had one car stolen every 2 years, rather than every 10 years, you'd probably break even.
Those numbers are rubbish, since I'm talking about state taxes and not federal taxes (not to mention that I don't know how much you make and where you live, and I've excluded sales taxes, blah blah blah), and a considerable chunk of your federal taxes comes back to your state for police protection among other things, so you may well be paying more for your police protection. Still, the point is the same: there would be a lot more crime if the criminals didn't fear the police.
Maybe that's not true: get rid of government entirely and you could buy your own guns, and nobody would arrest you if you shot a burglar coming into your house. However, I'd want cover fire if I went to the ATM.
In this country I'm more worried about the rich business interests taking over the government than the military, though of course some of the richest business interests are the military contractors.
Corruption sucks. I say we make me absolute dictator and I'll be really good. Promise.
Cheaper, hell yeah. But I gotta admit that I'm really fond of the fact that if I get robbed I can call 911 (on the publicly-supported phone) to call the publicly-supported police, who can get to my house pretty quick on the publicly-supported roads.
I suppose I could just hire somebody to do all that, but it would be cheaper to buy it in bulk with all my neighbors. How would we decide which one to get? We'd probably vote on it. What would we call the resulting organization? We'd probably call it a government.
Perhaps it'll be a less crappy government than the one I have now, but it's like code: old and badly-maintained code could always do with a scrap and rewrite. But it's hard to get customers to pay for that, and they get really upset if you don't maintain the old code base in the meantime. So we usually just end up muddling along with what we had.
You're absolutely correct. But the corollary of Justice Marshall's statement is that to injure nothing, the state must collect no taxes whatsoever. You thus end up with a state which does no harm, but doesn't do a whole hell of a lot of good, either.
In a perfect world you tax things which you wish to discourage; cigarettes and gasoline are heavily taxed in most places in the US. Fortunately, we don't have enough vices to run things solely off of sin taxes; unfortunately, that means we have to also tax things we wish to encourage, like "income" and "sales" and "property".
The money always comes from somewhere, and whenever we tax a Good Thing, people will complain about it. And they'll be right, except that the money does have to come from somewhere. (Assuming that we agree that the various government mandates, from police to roads to universal telephone service, are a good thing; if not we're having a rather different discussion.)
So yeah, this strikes at the heart of the internet, and so it may ultimately be futile. It's hard to regulate Internet connections, what with the satellites and wireless and such. But it's not the speech they're trying to limit; they're just trying to make sure that crucial infrastructure gets funded somehow. In the limit case, rich Costa Ricans will have VOIP (free with their Internet, which they want anyway), and poor Costa Ricans, unable to afford computers, will do without phone service entirely since there will no longer be enough people on it to pay the overhead.
The nice thing about POTS is that the hardware on the consumer end is incredibly cheap. Sports Illustrated will kick in a phone free when you buy their magazine. There's a lot of overhead already in place, but it requires maintenance, as do the expensive switches in the middle. If only the poor were to use it, it would probably collapse.
Maybe that's a good thing. The Internet infrastructure is more flexible. Perhaps what they need instead is to abandon their POTS system and subsidize VOIP phones and IP service for the poor people if they (the voters) decide universal service is something they want. In which case they couldn't tax the phones, so they'd tax something else an equivalent amount (or more, since I'm suggesting expensive subsidies). Either way the phone tax gets paid, it's just a question of how much for what kind of phone system you want and whom you wish to have it.
Perhaps economically speaking that would cost less overall and/or do more good, helping put Internet in every house. I dunno; I'm not an economist, nor an expert in Central American economies.
Hah! I've successfully hidden this microscopic object! Nobody can see it!
Harrumph.
The entire discussion on Slashdot has centered around a substantial misreading of the article.
The real point of the article is that the Costa Rican national telephone company wants VOIP regulated as a service, like the other phone lines are. We are having the same debate in the United States. The phone company here was originally designed as a monopoly, and universal service meant subsidies. Find a way around the monopoly, and there's no way to fund the subsidies. So you either regulate it enough to collect taxes or do away with the phone service in rural areas (which is often the basis of internet service in those areas as well.)
Costa Rica has similar regulatory issues. So they're in the phase of "Hey, this ought to be regulated." The regulations are completely undefined as yet, so some reporter speculates that they could in some ludicrous limit case result in criminalizing VOIP and then mentions it in the headline, the lead line, and then precisely once in the actual body of the article.
Whereupon Slashdot copies the headline, and focuses the summary on it. Read into the rest of the article and you might find that most of the time when the Slashdot response to an article is "How could anybody be so incredibly stupid?" the answer is usually, "They're not, they've just been taken out of context."
It may well be that any regulation of VOIP is a bad idea, that the Internet wants to be free, and if it outcompetes the old regime then we'll have to come up with a new plan. In Costa Rica's case, if they lose too much tax money from POTS to VOIP, they'll have to raise taxes elsewhere. Perhaps they'd raise a sales tax or income tax. But talk of criminalizing VOIP strikes me as a hysterical response to a subject that requires actual thought.
I certainly didn't mean to say anything bad about The Hindu. I didn't look at the rest of the paper but the reporting level was suprisingly technical for what appeared to be a general-consumption paper. I assumed that the mistake that the great-grandparent post was pointing out is just a mistake in the process of re-writing a press release. Or it may even come straight from the press release, which is usually written by the marketing staff not the technical staff.
I'd love to see general journalism in the US do as well with technical articles. Generally when a science story comes out I glance at the headline and make a note to myself to wait for Science News to come out with it. Just today I saw an article in the Washington Post (my hometown newspaper but also a major journal of record) claiming that 16% of children were above the 95th percentile in some category.
Often I assume that when Slashdot references a paper like The Hindu, it's usually a wire story or press release that got picked up and could have come from anywyere. We get the reference to whatever paper the submitter happens to read.
But, for example, I'll feel a lot more strongly about the accusations of secret laws in the John Gilmore article when they're picked up by a more reputable paper than the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It's not that it's a bad paper so much as that I don't know its reputation and so I can't evaluate the quality of its claims. When only a single paper reports an issue I tend to dismiss it (not being of the mind that the government is deliberately, but not entirely effectively, clamping down.)
Yep. I think Raskin would analyze it in terms of "What does it mean to log out? Why do you want to log out? What if you don't log out?"
Well, you log out to (a) prevent anybody else from messing with your files (since "logging in" is a mode which gives you access to things you wouldn't get as a different user), (b) free up the computer so somebody else could use it, and (c) as preparation for shutting down.
For the first two, he might prefer some sort of lock mode which maintains your state but frees up the computer for other people. I gather OS X has a feature rather like that. In the end it's not unlike logging out in a window manager that saves your state.
For the last, shutting down the computer is an operation that's really hard to undo. He recommended something more like hibernation, where the power goes out but it comes back up in precisely the state that it went down in.
I'd belive 120 watts all told, which I believe would actually be a pretty good output; as stated it's ludicrous. Sadly, their website doesn't say; it hasn't been updated since November.
The article is reasonably well written, though I'm not used to getting major engineering announcements from The Hindu. (Presumably an Indian paper is reporting on events in Palo Alto because of the number of Indians working on the project.) Maybe they just botched the rewrite of the press release. Odd that I can't find the original press release on the web site, though. Fishy, as you say. Maybe they're better solar engineers than they are web site managers.
Well, that was kind of the point. You're a fan; many of your friends turn into fans. I just wanted to know what it was I was missing. Was it a joke that I wasn't in on, or was there something subtle I was too dumb to get. Nobody's forcing me, but I hate to be left out of something good. If it's a taste worth acquiring, I needed a few pointers.
The answers seem to come out to a combination of "Yeah, it's dumb, but it's also a unique kind of sci-fi" with "You need to gloss over the bad parts because the good parts really are worth it". Good enough for me.
You didn't ask, but here's my semi-professional opinion of the performances of the ambassadors.
I should note that it's really hard to evaluate an actor from the finished product, which is why I brought it up in the first place. There's so much between the performance and you (the writing, the direction, even the lighting and music can dramatically alter your impression of a performance). To the untrained eye, and even to professionals, what you're looking at is a performance and saying whether you enjoy it or not; whether a different actor would have been more enjoyable is a very difficult judgment to make. I try not to judge an actor from a single role, especially if I didn't like it.
For example, I saw an episode the other night with the extremely talented Michael York, and I'd have thought he was a rank amateur because of the way that cruddy dialogue sounded. I like to believe that I was really seeing that "spark" underneath the performance, but I could just be biased because I've seen the actor before. The scene with G'Kar was splendid, two actors working well together, though a better director would have had them work on the same definition of "drunk". Not that two people get drunk the same way, but there are core elements that are interesting when they're in common. Eh, enough directing jib-jab; once you've directed you never stop looking at it that way.
In this case it's even harder, because they're playing aliens. If you're not enjoying something, it's hard to tell if it's because it's a very talented actor giving you an expert performance of a character who's not very human, or just crap.
Aliens are most interesting when they're really human underneath; you have to be very delicate in constructing non-human traits. They have to feel like something a human could be, or it just feels random. Ultimately we're really seeing stories about people.
That said, I thought Andreas Katsulas did an unbelievably bang-up job as G'Kar. It was "open"; you felt he was really being honest on stage (which is an interesting use of acting terminology, since the character was frequently lying. Katsulas was lying, openly and honestly.) For all the makeup, his character was the most human. His was the best example of an alien with alien traits who also explored what it was to be human.
Peter Jurasik as Londo I've seen before doing much better work on Hill Street Blues. In his case I felt he was substantially hampered by a corny accent, which made every word come out as overplayed. He was meant to explore certain negative human impulses, but the writing too often made them feel thinly drawn, a greed without real impulse. Still, when he was conflicted about it, it came out very human and interesting. Stephen Furst is Vir came out rather better, I felt, and I think it was because he didn't attempt the accent.
Similarly, I didn't much care for Mira Furlan as Delenn, but I think that was due more to her "alien" reserve, which came out to me more as "flat" than "reserved". I thought Bill Mumy's Lennier was a far more open and interesting version of the same thing. That may be chauvinism on my part, willing to tolerate more reserve from a male character than a female one. Still, I've greatly enjoyed reserved female characters in other series (like Majel Barret's Number One in the Star Trek pilot).
These are just my judgments, and I can very much respect different opinions on those performances.
One other thing, if you've bothered to read this far: I felt that there were a number of episodes that didn't significantly advance the story a whole; one-offs that could be discarded. On other long-term series those are often the most fun episodes, like when the Deep Space Nine crew revisited the Tribbles episode, or the musical episode of Buffy (though that one even managed to advance its long-term story line as well).
But on B5, I found them to be generally less interesting (I really didn't need to see Jack the Ripper In Space.) The show is much more interesting when the large-scale politics were involved. I think the writer did better with less human-scale and more global-scale events.
Well, that's one answer: I can't judge until I've invested 40 minutes * 24 episodes/season * 5 seasons = 80 hours. Unfortunately, I really don't have that kind of time to devote. Generally, I expect series television to reward the journey, not just the end.
No, I'm not in the IMDB; I'm a stage actor. I've performed in New York City, but you still wouldn't have heard of me. Still, after six years of training and several dozen shows I have some experience that lets me try to prise apart the differences between acting, directing, and writing in the finished product.
A friend of mine has loaned me B5 on DVD, and I keep at it, but I'm not entirely sure why.
The most interesting thing about it is the long story arc. There's a lot good to be said about it, though I've seen others do it better. The costuming and sets are nicely done.
But other than that I just can't find anything to like. The acting is generally incompetent; it looks for all the world like the actors are only barely off book. Or maybe it's because the dialogue is so stilted nobody could make it sound good. A few of the regulars manage to carry it off; one or two even mange to look good.
But many of the regulars, nearly all of the non-famous guest stars, and even a few very talented guests sound completely incompetent. I just watched an episode with the hugely talented Michael York, and he chewed his way through the scenery as though it were chocolate.
I'm an actor and director myself. It's hard to separate out blame in the finished product without being on set, but it seems to be the fault of the writing and directing even more than the actors themselves. But I've heard people praise Straczynski's writing to the high heavens. I just don't get it. I don't care about the cheesy CG effects or corny music; it's the parts between the interstitials that set my teeth on edge.
Yeah, I already skipped through most of the first season. I'm now well into the third season, which was supposed to be pretty good. If it weren't for the fact that I'm trying to figure out why it's so important that it makes the front page of Slashdot, I'd long have given up.
So I don't believe I'm trolling when I ask: can somebody explain to me why I shouldn't consider the failure of this to become a movie anything other than a benefit to mankind?