I don't hear either candidate campaigning on a cut-spam platform. I think this is just the Justice Department finally doing its job. Though I wonder how much effort is being redirected from anti-terrorism efforts to achieve that.
(None, actually; the Justice Department has many jobs, of which counterterrorism is only a recent priority.)
Interesting. Because working from the other end of the problem (psychology and game theory) it's been shown that a tit-for-tat strategy (basically, revenge) is by far the most effective way to ensure compliance.
That demonstrates the effect on individuals, not on outsiders observing the individuals, so perhaps the effect doesn't scale. Perhaps criminals are those people who assume that they won't be caught, or if they are that the sentence isn't so bad compared with the costs of not committing crimes.
Some drugs present a slightly different case, in that addiction is an insanely powerful motivator. Addicts will continue to do those drugs no matter how high you set the sentence; that's what "addiction" means. But one has to take drugs for the first time to become an addict, and that's an unaddicted choice to risk heavy sentences.
As you say, it's complex. I haven't got any solutions myself.
If they don't, it's because by "cultural icon" you mean something with extremely broad appeal. The Internet makes media accessible to everybody, but that means it's accessible to everybody.
To stand out above that noise you have to be absolutely huge. Which means use of a far more limited medium, like television or movies or radio, where only "mercantile elites" are capable of putting out a message.
There are many who would say that's a good thing. You'll see that every time we have an RIAA thread on Slashdot: "Good riddance to Brittney Spears; up with indie bands." Indie bands will never become cultural icons, unless they're picked up and mass marketed using conventional media.
The fact that Internet bandwidth is still pretty limited doesn't help. Even with broadband, only low-resolution, jerky movies are available, or quirky Flash animations like Odd Todd or HomeStarRunner. That doesn't hinder the music creators, but in order to become a cultural icon in music people still want to see you: one slot on American Idol is worth tens of trillions of megabits of download.
Some day a few web sites may have enough eyeballs to generate cultural icons of their own. A few news blogs are gradually working their way to cultural icon status, but they're not media.
As for the founding fathers, in their days they didn't have anything corresponding to the cultural icons you're talking about. Those that they did were usually spread by newspapers, whose printing presses were usually controlled by the same mercantile elites. And in fact, the founding fathers often were those same mercantile elites.
So I'd say they'd be thrilled that we haven't seen "serious cultural icons" that way. It's precisely because of the democratization of the Internet that we get lots of little icons instead of huge ones.
Word's grammar checker actually pretty much likes my work. I've always tried to speak in active-voice sentences; they really do sound better to me.
But a faintly amusing story: a few years ago I wrote a book using Word, around 500 pages long (technical book, not fiction). Word liked it, except for my habit of using "which" where technically "that" is called for: "Press the button which is labelled xxx" should really be "Press the button that is labelled xxx", according to Strunk & White and a bunch of other style guides. Something about restrictive clauses.
Personally, I prefer "which" in those cases, so I ignored Word's suggestion. That is, until I got the book back from the professional copy editor, whose job is to know such things, and all of the restrictive clauses were corrected.
I know many of you will probably fault both Word and the copy editor for their grammar naziism, but I try to follow the rules as much as possible, if only to avoid distracting readers with potential grammar problems, which are not the point of the book. That's especially true in professional writing: I do the technically correct thing as long as it's not obviously worse than the natural thing.
If the natural thing and the technically correct thing conflict, I'll often rewrite sentences. For example, another change the copy editor had me make was to never start a sentence with a variable from the code, which would necessitate either mis-capitalizing a piece of code or distracting the reader with a sentence that doesn't begin with a capital letter.
Ultimately I've come to bury Word, not to praise it: if I had the book to write over again I swear to God I'd do it in emacs. I'd tried very hard to format the book as it would be published, only to have them do it all over again in professional typesetting software. Then I reviewed a manuscript by a famous design writer who'd written the whole thing in double-spaced Courier with hand-drawn pictures.
To conclude: Word blows! But I've seen far, far worse things than the grammar checker.
You don't know some of my friends. Lovely people who can't spell to save their lives (or their email.)
Though perhaps if they knew that their emails did depend on it, perhaps they'd at least run a spell checker. Irritating, I'm sure, but better than the alternative.
Bayesian filters pretty much do that, at least for the versions they've already seen. So they start sticking in extra s.p.a.c.e.s and punctuation, but it doesn't help.
Bayesian filters are far from perfect, but they're a pretty good start. I lose perhaps one valid email a week to the spam bucket, which is fortunately not so huge for me that I can't rescue it.
Actually, for me the worst failure of CAN-SPAM is its failure to distinguish between bulk and personal messages.
I am a theater producer. If I write an email to a theater in the area and say, "My troupe would like to perform at your location; what are your terms?", as far as I can tell I've just sent a unsolicited, commercial email. "Commercial" is undeniable, and "unsolicited" is arguable if I've written to a general info address rather than a specific email address designed for such communications (which often don't exist.)
I don't believe that's what we think of as spam. To me, spam has a scattershot effect: not just unsolicited but almost certainly unwanted, because they make no effort to tailor the mailing list. Their "target market" is fools who will r e f i n a n c e their m0r+g4g3.
I believe that the act is deeply flawed, but I still think the real problem is enforcement. A few public drawings-and-quarterings of convicted spammers would make me a hell of a lot happier. I'll worry about refining the definitions, and cutting out the spam-spewers from overseas, once the closest, most obvious offenders have been either jailed or filtered out.
I disagree with the article's assertion that "the CAN-SPAM Act, which legalises spamming, is turning the US into the spam haven of the world." The US was the spam capital before that: it's where everybody has access to a computer, cheap.
Yes, they do have the right to send spam in this country, but only under certain conditions. Very little spam (effectively none) is in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act. If it was, we'd be filtering it out.
The problem isn't the CAN-SPAM act itself but the fact that there has been almost no enforcement. Well, that and the fact that act prevents people from pursuing it individually, but I haven't seen ISPs pursuing it much, either.
I'd really love to see the FBI nail a few dirtbag spammers, watch 'em spend a few years in prison, and then see if people start complying with the act (and promptly get their spam filtered out).
But it probably won't happen, because the real problem is that the FBI has far more important things to worry about than spam. Terrorism, for example. I work with the FBI and I can tell you nobody there gives a rat's ass about how clogged your inbox is. They'd much rather get the guy trying to kill you.
So the legislation could provide executions for anybody selling v1@gra, and it still wouldn't make any difference. No legislative solution is going to work as long as the executive branch has zero interest in enforcing it.
It's clear that it's run by Real, so no, I wouldn't call it astroturfing in the strictest sense.
But it doesn't call so much attention to the fact that it's RealNetworks that I'd call it totally above-board either. Real's site doesn't point to it, at least not on the front page. It uses a different visual scheme from Real. The web site is called "Freedom of Music Choice", which doesn't mention Real by name. More to the point, it's not _really_ about "Freedom of Music Choice". They're not trying to get Apple to open up to, say, WMV files. And they're not campaigning to have Real support the Macintosh.
So I'd say it's a little misleading, albeit not true astroturfing.
This news article isn't about astroturfing. Or rather, it's about astroturfing backfiring. RealNetworks is astroturfing by putting up the petition, which isn't really news. What is news is that people are using the petition to complain about what Real is doing.
So yeah, we can all say "astroturfing". But that's not what this news article is about, unless you want to claim that the counter-astroturfers are being put up to it by Apple.
The lack of outbound port control is perhaps not as bad as the article makes it sound, especially since it demands more input from the user, but I've found it to be very helpful.
I use ZoneAlarm, which tells me when I've accidentally gotten a Trojan. (It only happened once, and that's plenty). It was also very handy in controlling the wealth of junkware that came on my new Dell. (Why is this program attempting to use the Internet? Do I want it to?)
But that's the standpoint of a fairly advanced user. Just getting Windows to block unnecessary incoming traffic (like, say, that controlling zombie computers) would be a good start for those users who don't want fine-grained control (and would likely screw it up if they had it.)
True, but the hope is that centrally-generated hydrogen will be more efficient overall than hundreds of millions of small internal-combusion engines. You can run them at high speed continuously, rather than at variable speeds and having to start and stop them. You get a guy to maintain them in top form all the time.
In addition, at least in the US the central power plants generally use coal rather than oil, which is at least a domestically produced resource. (At the moment I'm more concerned about the fact that Americans send their fuel dollars to the same places that terrorists come from than about the environmental implications, though those are important as well.)
I am not certain whether the tradeoffs balance: fossil fuel-to-hydrogen-to-fuel-cell-to-motor vs. fossil-fuel-to-heat-to-engine. One may be more efficient than the other, or they may be roughly equivalent (or, as in the case of hybrids, it may depend heavily on the kind of driving you do.)
I'd love to believe that somebody with more knowledge than me did these calculations before pushing the fuel cells. Or some engineer may have blue-sky'ed it to some politician who promptly decided to sell it to the American people as a solution (or more to the point, to sell himself).
But my rough back-of-the-envelope calculations about moving the energy costs to a central location, even if ultimately fossil fuel based, mean that the efficiencies may work out despite the extra transition step. They certainly give more flexibility by reducing the number of engines that absolutely must have gasoline and potentially replacing them with nuclear/coal/wind/house-based solar/hydro/etc, which have the advantage that they don't have to move. Hydrogen solves (maybe) the mobility problem, not the energy crisis, but it gives more options on the energy crisis.
Nah. Halliburton's physical infrastructure; Diebold is voting machines.
This one will go to one of the Beltway Bandits: SAIC, IBM, Booz-Allen, CSC, that sort of thing. There may actually even be a good idea by the lead architect, but implementation will turn into a 70-member team (lead architect, physical infrastructure architect, networking team, authenitcation team, 8 member database team, 5-member testing team, 20 member rollout team, QA, CM, security, managers). There will be at least four subcontractors. Everybody will have a clearance, making them twice as expensive. It will all be conducted in a secure building, which costs ten times as much.
I wish I were joking. I've seen this literally hundreds of times. The sort of thing that one smart guy could bang out in a few weeks becomes a five-year-long, hundred-million-dollar event which produces worse results. The contractors want to use "ordinary" developers rather than one super-smart guy. The contracting officer knows that one super-smart guy operating on his own doesn't have all the pieces, but he's not going to force the big contractors to use his smarter design.
The worst part is that many of these projects simply fail. The software gets written and it never gets used. Either it doesn't work well enough, or it turns out to be a bad idea. And often, the government just recompetes the contract, and often the original contractor wins the contract again, since they're the expert now! Its disgusting.
Spectrum auctions would be a way for the government to make money, without having to raise taxes directly. Something like this:
* There is a valuable (limited) resource that we own in common
* The government parcels out the resource to whoever is willing to pay the most for it
* That money goes "to the people". In reality it goes to the government, who uses it to buy an army, interstate highways, mink farm subsidies, whatever your representatives have put into the budget.
* The buyer makes the money back by selling you something you want (TV, cell phones, garage door openers, etc.)
The fraud problem is also a government problem. It's most easily fixed by demanding the money up front, though that tends to lock small bidders out of it. There are other ways that involve instituting various regulations. Just because the government has been stupid doesn't mean it has to be. (Or maybe it _does_ have to be, in which case the problem becomes insoluble and we're all screwed, and we'll just take guesses because that's the best we can do.)
Now, the point of the article is that spectrum isn't really a limited resource at all. Obviously that's not entirely true, otherwise we'd use just one frequency and we'd all be happy. Certainly the lower frequencies (to a point) are more valuable than the multi-GHz ones, because it travels better. But they claim that technology allows spectrum to do far, far more than we're doing with it. In that case we may not have to auction it at all, not because it's subject to speculation and fraud, but because it's not worth very much.
It would be lovely, but I don't think that the tech is right yet. LCD screens are heavy, power-hungry, and not very attractive when compared to a paper book. In addition, no matter how cheap you make them, the up-front price will be high compared to a book, unless you plan to subsidize them (which would drive the price of the books up). They've got computers inside of them, even if small ones, so they can only get so cheap.
Not to mention that e-book readers are more fragile than paper books and more expensive to lose, which means people would be reluctant to invest. They're more likely to buy software for the laptop or PDA they're already carrying around, if the visual were pleasant enough to read. PDA screens are generally considered too small, and even good laptops get only the equivalent of 4" wide (at the 300 dpi you'd consider pleasant to read on paper.)
That's just the tech end. The other side is the business case, by which I mean DRM. It's a touchy issue in music, but digitized music already existed on CDs before people could readily make copies of them. Books don't exist in digital form, so copies are hard to make. Nobody wants to read a photocopy, and it's usually pricier than just buying the book. The publisher has the digital form, but they keep it to themselves, and they'll continue to do so until they believe they have a pricing model that allows them to make their money back. Most of them believe, like the music industry, that that model depends on DRM to ensure that each person buys a separate copy. There are other models, but none is an obvious knock-out-of-the-park win.
They're probably waiting on the music industry to see how they fare with the DRM. The hackers take it as a point of pride to work around it; at least one prominent e-book DRM has already been hacked. So the publishers would be reluctant to e-publish even if there were significant numbers of e-book readers.
Apple would probably love to take your advice, but it's my guess that the tech won't support it just yet.
Actually, I think the big question would be "features". Tablets are pricey because they don't have very wide acceptance; people who buy them really, really want them.
Apple's stock-in-trade has always been innovative, functional, attractive designs that make people feel comfortable. People pay a $50 premium for the iPod because its design just works for them. They like using it.
Apple has always charged a bit more for its products, though some of that has been staying away from the most bottom level. You can pick up a bottom-of-the-line Dell for half the price of a bottom-of-the-line Mac, but a comparable Dell is usually only slightly less than the equivalent Mac. (Much of that, of course, depends on what you consider "comparable", since the systems use resources in very different ways.)
The question for me is, does Apple have enough clever ideas to make a tablet computer really work? Can they make a tablet that pushes some laptops out of the market? Perhaps they can make the bridge between the power of a laptop and the convenience of a PDA that it becomes an indispensible item.
Or they may end up with a cumbersome PDA/underpowered laptop combination that nobody wants. It'll all depend on the features. If they can get them right, they'll probably charge twice as much as a laptop and sell as many as they can make. Either way, I bet it'll be higher than the price you're comfortable paying, like the iPod, which has managed to be a breakout hit despite its high price by being exactly the right combination of features for people.
Thing is, they're not "finding a way around the law". They're just ignoring it. Compliance was always negligible. People had expected spammers to be forced to move overseas, but there's been so little prosecution that the domestic spammers have nothing to fear. (It doesn't help that a lot of them are disguising their identity by using compromised drones.)
I had some hopes that sooner or later the FBI would bust some of the big spammers and hit them really, really hard. That sure wouldn't end it, but if it at least drove the spam overseas, that would be one more thing your spamfilter could look it. Since most of my friends are American, it's a lot easier to whitelist them if I knew that purely domestic email was less likely to be spam.
It may be that the FBI is too busy rounding up terrorists to bother with spammers, and frankly I can't disagree with those priorities. Even so, it does make the law a bust: we cannot enforce spam regulations, whether for technical reasons or because the law enforcement authorities have better things to do.
So we just keep on doing what we've always done: bayesian filter, black list, white list, and put the smackdown on any people we know who actually buy from spammers.
The big push for electronic ballots came because some Americans were making mistakes: undervoting, overvoting, not making their marks clear enough (or failing to punch cleanly through a hole). Not to mention badly designed paper ballots which some people found confusing. Those things are prevented with electronic voting. The percentages were small, but the election was really, really close.
I'd still prefer paper ballots, exactly as you suggest: cheap, efficient, and easy if the voter and the ballot designer aren't dumb. I'd rather risk losing a few votes, even in a close election, than risk wholesale vote theft. But you can see how the last election caused people to look for ways to solve those problems, even if they bring up a host of new ones. Americans can be pretty bad at "I've got to do something, even if it's the wrong thing!"
From which point you look at it, their claims are simply insane and ridiculous!
In general, when you find yourself saying this, you may need to reconsider the issue. They may be fools, but it's more likely that they have a different, potentially valid, opinion on something. If you think they're stupid, odds are good that they may have a point you have missed.
In this case, Virgin (the record store) and Virgin (the record label) are different companies; the record label was spun off some years ago.
Even besides that, it is still in the interests of Virgin (the record store) to sell DRM content. They wish to sell stuff to you, and to each of your friends. They believe that the best way to do that is to prevent you from giving it away to your friends for free. Thus, DRM.
They may be wrong that DRM is necessary, and it may even be detrimental, but it's not ludicrous to think that some sort of mechanism of limiting copying would increase their profits over allow you to give it away to all of your friends, or the entire world, for free.
Unfortunately for them, they don't have the DRM that can play on iPods. What they want from Apple is to "open" the DRM in the sense of allowing Virgin (the record store) to encode music so that they can sell to iPod owners. That would allow Virgin (the record store) to sell music from their suppliers (including, but not limited to, Virgin [the record label]) to iPod owners.
Thing is, that may be best for Apple, too, since Apple makes next to nothing on the music they sell; the whole thing is a ploy to sell iPods. If Virgin could sell to iPod owners, that makes iPods more valuable, which means more profit for Apple.
I'm not sure what Apple's strategy is, but I assume they have one. It may be "brand unity"; they like to own the entire process, just like they are the only vendor of Mac computers for the MacOS operating system.
But I doubt Virgin-the-record-store would find it profitable to sell DRM-less music, even if they did own Virgin-the-record-label (and even though they receive less of the sale than the record labels do). They don't wish to break Apple's DRM; they want to get in on it.
They can't, for the most part, sell unprotected MP3s or AACs; the content owners (read: RIAA in the US, and others in Europe) won't let them.
Whether they should let them, P2P trading improves record sales, information wants to be free, I bought it so I can do what I want to with it, yadda yadda, isn't my point. Virgin can't sell unprotected MP3s, so they can't sell to that valuable market ofiPod owners.
I'm afraid I have no clue as to French monopoly laws. Actually, I'm not an expert on anybody's business laws, but I gather that this wouldn't work in the US: you have to abuse your monopoly position; for example, by selling things under cost to drive competitors out of business, then raise rates. Actually, arguably iTunes Music Store does just that, so they may have a case.
I don't consider its use of ATRAC3 internally inherently a problem. If it allows me to seamlessly dump files from my computer onto the player, it doesn't really matter how they're represented in the device itself, since I only care that it plays the music.
HOWEVER, converting from one lossy format to another will cause artifacts (which I don't believe the article mentioned). And just as bad, it had better happen zippy-quick, at least on a relatively new computer. If the limiting factor is the speed of my CPU, then I don't want it.
And here's what I don't get. They're converting it to a format which is DRM'ed, but because they're converting it from MP3s you can't tell who owns it in the first place. That is, they can limit the distribution, but limit it to who? They can't tell if you own it or not.
Presumably the goal is to say, "You can use your MP3s, but they're slower to download. You'd rather get ATRACs from our spiffy music store!"
That could happen, I suppose. If the device is substantially cheaper than an iPod, then people will buy it on the shelves, and it's not clear until they get home that it's not compatible with the #1 music store. Or the #2 music store.
So it's a tactically bold maneuver, and it might work. Online music stores still account for a small percentage of music sales. Most people still buy CDs, with which this thing is compatible (albeit slowly). I'm not sure how much people would miss being able to buy stuff from iTunes Music Store and Napster and whatever Microsoft's version is going to be.
In the end, there's a lot said for being able to hit a lower price point for the same number of megs. Microsoft makes a huge living off the fact that people would rather buy a Dell/HP/etc. for a few hundred bucks less than the equivalent Macintosh, even if many people would prefer the Mac. (Not a religious war here, just pointing out that many people never look past the price tag.)
But this time, Apple already owns big market share, and compatibility with it may be the biggest problem for Sony here. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
The concern isn't so much for the difficulty and expense of adding a paper receipt as for the confusion it would cause among voters.
No, not widespread confusion. Maybe just the most confused 1% of voters. How many of them would just take the receipts home, throwing off the recount? Or fold, spindle, and mutilate it to hide their vote?
That makes the paper count a different thing from the electronic count. Which means that every candidate who's unhappy with the outcome could request a recount, and be assured of getting a different (if not necessarily better) answer. The result is no better than the old paper ballots, but more expensive and with a higher chance of tampering.
Remember, these are the same people who couldn't figure out the butterfly ballots four years ago. In this election, 1% will make a huge difference.
I think this line of argument is rubbish. Sure, 1% of the voters would botch it. 1% is still probably less than the number of hanging chads, mis-filled butterfly ballots, etc. And most importantly, it is a solid checksum on the potentially massive miscounts caused by invalid, incorrect, or tampered-with software.
So there is at least one semi-valid reason to reject the paper backup. It's important to know that, so you can refute it. Even if you think your opponents in a debate are completely dumb, or motivated solely by malice, you are still obligated to understand what valid arguments they could be making, and then refute them.
Ya know, I actually did that one for a Prolog class. We just translated the song into Prolog. You have to define one rule I consider weird (something like "your mother's husband is your father", or some variant) but it does work.
I'm not a fan of controlled English systems, because they're misleading. They are computer languages, not natural languages, and people often misunderstand the semantics. They are as exacting to write as code, but more verbose. If the controlled English isn't quite working, it can be intensely difficult to debug.
I've seen efforts where knowledge representation languages (CycL and Prolog come to mind) are translated into English for validation. That's not a perfect tool, but it's actually not dissimilar from what I do in my mind when I read these languages: translate
grandparent(X, Y):- parent(X,Z), parent(Z,Y).
into
X is the grandparentof Y if X is the parent of Z and Z is the parent of Y.
or even:
Y is X's grandparent if X is Z's parent and Z is Y's parent.
So you write code, concisely and precisely, and translate it into easier-to-read but less precise English. I'm not sure if this technique has been adapted to "business rule" systems like iLog, but it might work well there.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't hear either candidate campaigning on a cut-spam platform. I think this is just the Justice Department finally doing its job. Though I wonder how much effort is being redirected from anti-terrorism efforts to achieve that.
(None, actually; the Justice Department has many jobs, of which counterterrorism is only a recent priority.)
Interesting. Because working from the other end of the problem (psychology and game theory) it's been shown that a tit-for-tat strategy (basically, revenge) is by far the most effective way to ensure compliance.
That demonstrates the effect on individuals, not on outsiders observing the individuals, so perhaps the effect doesn't scale. Perhaps criminals are those people who assume that they won't be caught, or if they are that the sentence isn't so bad compared with the costs of not committing crimes.
Some drugs present a slightly different case, in that addiction is an insanely powerful motivator. Addicts will continue to do those drugs no matter how high you set the sentence; that's what "addiction" means. But one has to take drugs for the first time to become an addict, and that's an unaddicted choice to risk heavy sentences.
As you say, it's complex. I haven't got any solutions myself.
OddTodd and All Your Base don't count?
If they don't, it's because by "cultural icon" you mean something with extremely broad appeal. The Internet makes media accessible to everybody, but that means it's accessible to everybody.
To stand out above that noise you have to be absolutely huge. Which means use of a far more limited medium, like television or movies or radio, where only "mercantile elites" are capable of putting out a message.
There are many who would say that's a good thing. You'll see that every time we have an RIAA thread on Slashdot: "Good riddance to Brittney Spears; up with indie bands." Indie bands will never become cultural icons, unless they're picked up and mass marketed using conventional media.
The fact that Internet bandwidth is still pretty limited doesn't help. Even with broadband, only low-resolution, jerky movies are available, or quirky Flash animations like Odd Todd or HomeStarRunner. That doesn't hinder the music creators, but in order to become a cultural icon in music people still want to see you: one slot on American Idol is worth tens of trillions of megabits of download.
Some day a few web sites may have enough eyeballs to generate cultural icons of their own. A few news blogs are gradually working their way to cultural icon status, but they're not media.
As for the founding fathers, in their days they didn't have anything corresponding to the cultural icons you're talking about. Those that they did were usually spread by newspapers, whose printing presses were usually controlled by the same mercantile elites. And in fact, the founding fathers often were those same mercantile elites.
So I'd say they'd be thrilled that we haven't seen "serious cultural icons" that way. It's precisely because of the democratization of the Internet that we get lots of little icons instead of huge ones.
Word's grammar checker actually pretty much likes my work. I've always tried to speak in active-voice sentences; they really do sound better to me.
But a faintly amusing story: a few years ago I wrote a book using Word, around 500 pages long (technical book, not fiction). Word liked it, except for my habit of using "which" where technically "that" is called for: "Press the button which is labelled xxx" should really be "Press the button that is labelled xxx", according to Strunk & White and a bunch of other style guides. Something about restrictive clauses.
Personally, I prefer "which" in those cases, so I ignored Word's suggestion. That is, until I got the book back from the professional copy editor, whose job is to know such things, and all of the restrictive clauses were corrected.
I know many of you will probably fault both Word and the copy editor for their grammar naziism, but I try to follow the rules as much as possible, if only to avoid distracting readers with potential grammar problems, which are not the point of the book. That's especially true in professional writing: I do the technically correct thing as long as it's not obviously worse than the natural thing.
If the natural thing and the technically correct thing conflict, I'll often rewrite sentences. For example, another change the copy editor had me make was to never start a sentence with a variable from the code, which would necessitate either mis-capitalizing a piece of code or distracting the reader with a sentence that doesn't begin with a capital letter.
Ultimately I've come to bury Word, not to praise it: if I had the book to write over again I swear to God I'd do it in emacs. I'd tried very hard to format the book as it would be published, only to have them do it all over again in professional typesetting software. Then I reviewed a manuscript by a famous design writer who'd written the whole thing in double-spaced Courier with hand-drawn pictures.
To conclude: Word blows! But I've seen far, far worse things than the grammar checker.
You don't know some of my friends. Lovely people who can't spell to save their lives (or their email.)
Though perhaps if they knew that their emails did depend on it, perhaps they'd at least run a spell checker. Irritating, I'm sure, but better than the alternative.
Bayesian filters pretty much do that, at least for the versions they've already seen. So they start sticking in extra s.p.a.c.e.s and punctuation, but it doesn't help.
Bayesian filters are far from perfect, but they're a pretty good start. I lose perhaps one valid email a week to the spam bucket, which is fortunately not so huge for me that I can't rescue it.
Of all the days not to have mod points... I guess gratitude will have to do. Nice explanation. Thanks.
Actually, for me the worst failure of CAN-SPAM is its failure to distinguish between bulk and personal messages.
I am a theater producer. If I write an email to a theater in the area and say, "My troupe would like to perform at your location; what are your terms?", as far as I can tell I've just sent a unsolicited, commercial email. "Commercial" is undeniable, and "unsolicited" is arguable if I've written to a general info address rather than a specific email address designed for such communications (which often don't exist.)
I don't believe that's what we think of as spam. To me, spam has a scattershot effect: not just unsolicited but almost certainly unwanted, because they make no effort to tailor the mailing list. Their "target market" is fools who will r e f i n a n c e their m0r+g4g3.
I believe that the act is deeply flawed, but I still think the real problem is enforcement. A few public drawings-and-quarterings of convicted spammers would make me a hell of a lot happier. I'll worry about refining the definitions, and cutting out the spam-spewers from overseas, once the closest, most obvious offenders have been either jailed or filtered out.
I disagree with the article's assertion that "the CAN-SPAM Act, which legalises spamming, is turning the US into the spam haven of the world." The US was the spam capital before that: it's where everybody has access to a computer, cheap.
Yes, they do have the right to send spam in this country, but only under certain conditions. Very little spam (effectively none) is in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act. If it was, we'd be filtering it out.
The problem isn't the CAN-SPAM act itself but the fact that there has been almost no enforcement. Well, that and the fact that act prevents people from pursuing it individually, but I haven't seen ISPs pursuing it much, either.
I'd really love to see the FBI nail a few dirtbag spammers, watch 'em spend a few years in prison, and then see if people start complying with the act (and promptly get their spam filtered out).
But it probably won't happen, because the real problem is that the FBI has far more important things to worry about than spam. Terrorism, for example. I work with the FBI and I can tell you nobody there gives a rat's ass about how clogged your inbox is. They'd much rather get the guy trying to kill you.
So the legislation could provide executions for anybody selling v1@gra, and it still wouldn't make any difference. No legislative solution is going to work as long as the executive branch has zero interest in enforcing it.
It's clear that it's run by Real, so no, I wouldn't call it astroturfing in the strictest sense.
But it doesn't call so much attention to the fact that it's RealNetworks that I'd call it totally above-board either. Real's site doesn't point to it, at least not on the front page. It uses a different visual scheme from Real. The web site is called "Freedom of Music Choice", which doesn't mention Real by name. More to the point, it's not _really_ about "Freedom of Music Choice". They're not trying to get Apple to open up to, say, WMV files. And they're not campaigning to have Real support the Macintosh.
So I'd say it's a little misleading, albeit not true astroturfing.
This news article isn't about astroturfing. Or rather, it's about astroturfing backfiring. RealNetworks is astroturfing by putting up the petition, which isn't really news. What is news is that people are using the petition to complain about what Real is doing.
So yeah, we can all say "astroturfing". But that's not what this news article is about, unless you want to claim that the counter-astroturfers are being put up to it by Apple.
The lack of outbound port control is perhaps not as bad as the article makes it sound, especially since it demands more input from the user, but I've found it to be very helpful.
I use ZoneAlarm, which tells me when I've accidentally gotten a Trojan. (It only happened once, and that's plenty). It was also very handy in controlling the wealth of junkware that came on my new Dell. (Why is this program attempting to use the Internet? Do I want it to?)
But that's the standpoint of a fairly advanced user. Just getting Windows to block unnecessary incoming traffic (like, say, that controlling zombie computers) would be a good start for those users who don't want fine-grained control (and would likely screw it up if they had it.)
True, but the hope is that centrally-generated hydrogen will be more efficient overall than hundreds of millions of small internal-combusion engines. You can run them at high speed continuously, rather than at variable speeds and having to start and stop them. You get a guy to maintain them in top form all the time.
In addition, at least in the US the central power plants generally use coal rather than oil, which is at least a domestically produced resource. (At the moment I'm more concerned about the fact that Americans send their fuel dollars to the same places that terrorists come from than about the environmental implications, though those are important as well.)
I am not certain whether the tradeoffs balance: fossil fuel-to-hydrogen-to-fuel-cell-to-motor vs. fossil-fuel-to-heat-to-engine. One may be more efficient than the other, or they may be roughly equivalent (or, as in the case of hybrids, it may depend heavily on the kind of driving you do.)
I'd love to believe that somebody with more knowledge than me did these calculations before pushing the fuel cells. Or some engineer may have blue-sky'ed it to some politician who promptly decided to sell it to the American people as a solution (or more to the point, to sell himself).
But my rough back-of-the-envelope calculations about moving the energy costs to a central location, even if ultimately fossil fuel based, mean that the efficiencies may work out despite the extra transition step. They certainly give more flexibility by reducing the number of engines that absolutely must have gasoline and potentially replacing them with nuclear/coal/wind/house-based solar/hydro/etc, which have the advantage that they don't have to move. Hydrogen solves (maybe) the mobility problem, not the energy crisis, but it gives more options on the energy crisis.
Nah. Halliburton's physical infrastructure; Diebold is voting machines.
This one will go to one of the Beltway Bandits: SAIC, IBM, Booz-Allen, CSC, that sort of thing. There may actually even be a good idea by the lead architect, but implementation will turn into a 70-member team (lead architect, physical infrastructure architect, networking team, authenitcation team, 8 member database team, 5-member testing team, 20 member rollout team, QA, CM, security, managers). There will be at least four subcontractors. Everybody will have a clearance, making them twice as expensive. It will all be conducted in a secure building, which costs ten times as much.
I wish I were joking. I've seen this literally hundreds of times. The sort of thing that one smart guy could bang out in a few weeks becomes a five-year-long, hundred-million-dollar event which produces worse results. The contractors want to use "ordinary" developers rather than one super-smart guy. The contracting officer knows that one super-smart guy operating on his own doesn't have all the pieces, but he's not going to force the big contractors to use his smarter design.
The worst part is that many of these projects simply fail. The software gets written and it never gets used. Either it doesn't work well enough, or it turns out to be a bad idea. And often, the government just recompetes the contract, and often the original contractor wins the contract again, since they're the expert now! Its disgusting.
Spectrum auctions would be a way for the government to make money, without having to raise taxes directly. Something like this:
* There is a valuable (limited) resource that we own in common
* The government parcels out the resource to whoever is willing to pay the most for it
* That money goes "to the people". In reality it goes to the government, who uses it to buy an army, interstate highways, mink farm subsidies, whatever your representatives have put into the budget.
* The buyer makes the money back by selling you something you want (TV, cell phones, garage door openers, etc.)
The fraud problem is also a government problem. It's most easily fixed by demanding the money up front, though that tends to lock small bidders out of it. There are other ways that involve instituting various regulations. Just because the government has been stupid doesn't mean it has to be. (Or maybe it _does_ have to be, in which case the problem becomes insoluble and we're all screwed, and we'll just take guesses because that's the best we can do.)
Now, the point of the article is that spectrum isn't really a limited resource at all. Obviously that's not entirely true, otherwise we'd use just one frequency and we'd all be happy. Certainly the lower frequencies (to a point) are more valuable than the multi-GHz ones, because it travels better. But they claim that technology allows spectrum to do far, far more than we're doing with it. In that case we may not have to auction it at all, not because it's subject to speculation and fraud, but because it's not worth very much.
It would be lovely, but I don't think that the tech is right yet. LCD screens are heavy, power-hungry, and not very attractive when compared to a paper book. In addition, no matter how cheap you make them, the up-front price will be high compared to a book, unless you plan to subsidize them (which would drive the price of the books up). They've got computers inside of them, even if small ones, so they can only get so cheap.
Not to mention that e-book readers are more fragile than paper books and more expensive to lose, which means people would be reluctant to invest. They're more likely to buy software for the laptop or PDA they're already carrying around, if the visual were pleasant enough to read. PDA screens are generally considered too small, and even good laptops get only the equivalent of 4" wide (at the 300 dpi you'd consider pleasant to read on paper.)
That's just the tech end. The other side is the business case, by which I mean DRM. It's a touchy issue in music, but digitized music already existed on CDs before people could readily make copies of them. Books don't exist in digital form, so copies are hard to make. Nobody wants to read a photocopy, and it's usually pricier than just buying the book. The publisher has the digital form, but they keep it to themselves, and they'll continue to do so until they believe they have a pricing model that allows them to make their money back. Most of them believe, like the music industry, that that model depends on DRM to ensure that each person buys a separate copy. There are other models, but none is an obvious knock-out-of-the-park win.
They're probably waiting on the music industry to see how they fare with the DRM. The hackers take it as a point of pride to work around it; at least one prominent e-book DRM has already been hacked. So the publishers would be reluctant to e-publish even if there were significant numbers of e-book readers.
Apple would probably love to take your advice, but it's my guess that the tech won't support it just yet.
Actually, I think the big question would be "features". Tablets are pricey because they don't have very wide acceptance; people who buy them really, really want them.
Apple's stock-in-trade has always been innovative, functional, attractive designs that make people feel comfortable. People pay a $50 premium for the iPod because its design just works for them. They like using it.
Apple has always charged a bit more for its products, though some of that has been staying away from the most bottom level. You can pick up a bottom-of-the-line Dell for half the price of a bottom-of-the-line Mac, but a comparable Dell is usually only slightly less than the equivalent Mac. (Much of that, of course, depends on what you consider "comparable", since the systems use resources in very different ways.)
The question for me is, does Apple have enough clever ideas to make a tablet computer really work? Can they make a tablet that pushes some laptops out of the market? Perhaps they can make the bridge between the power of a laptop and the convenience of a PDA that it becomes an indispensible item.
Or they may end up with a cumbersome PDA/underpowered laptop combination that nobody wants. It'll all depend on the features. If they can get them right, they'll probably charge twice as much as a laptop and sell as many as they can make. Either way, I bet it'll be higher than the price you're comfortable paying, like the iPod, which has managed to be a breakout hit despite its high price by being exactly the right combination of features for people.
Thing is, they're not "finding a way around the law". They're just ignoring it. Compliance was always negligible. People had expected spammers to be forced to move overseas, but there's been so little prosecution that the domestic spammers have nothing to fear. (It doesn't help that a lot of them are disguising their identity by using compromised drones.)
I had some hopes that sooner or later the FBI would bust some of the big spammers and hit them really, really hard. That sure wouldn't end it, but if it at least drove the spam overseas, that would be one more thing your spamfilter could look it. Since most of my friends are American, it's a lot easier to whitelist them if I knew that purely domestic email was less likely to be spam.
It may be that the FBI is too busy rounding up terrorists to bother with spammers, and frankly I can't disagree with those priorities. Even so, it does make the law a bust: we cannot enforce spam regulations, whether for technical reasons or because the law enforcement authorities have better things to do.
So we just keep on doing what we've always done: bayesian filter, black list, white list, and put the smackdown on any people we know who actually buy from spammers.
The big push for electronic ballots came because some Americans were making mistakes: undervoting, overvoting, not making their marks clear enough (or failing to punch cleanly through a hole). Not to mention badly designed paper ballots which some people found confusing. Those things are prevented with electronic voting. The percentages were small, but the election was really, really close.
I'd still prefer paper ballots, exactly as you suggest: cheap, efficient, and easy if the voter and the ballot designer aren't dumb. I'd rather risk losing a few votes, even in a close election, than risk wholesale vote theft. But you can see how the last election caused people to look for ways to solve those problems, even if they bring up a host of new ones. Americans can be pretty bad at "I've got to do something, even if it's the wrong thing!"
From which point you look at it, their claims are simply insane and ridiculous!
In general, when you find yourself saying this, you may need to reconsider the issue. They may be fools, but it's more likely that they have a different, potentially valid, opinion on something. If you think they're stupid, odds are good that they may have a point you have missed.
In this case, Virgin (the record store) and Virgin (the record label) are different companies; the record label was spun off some years ago.
Even besides that, it is still in the interests of Virgin (the record store) to sell DRM content. They wish to sell stuff to you, and to each of your friends. They believe that the best way to do that is to prevent you from giving it away to your friends for free. Thus, DRM.
They may be wrong that DRM is necessary, and it may even be detrimental, but it's not ludicrous to think that some sort of mechanism of limiting copying would increase their profits over allow you to give it away to all of your friends, or the entire world, for free.
Unfortunately for them, they don't have the DRM that can play on iPods. What they want from Apple is to "open" the DRM in the sense of allowing Virgin (the record store) to encode music so that they can sell to iPod owners. That would allow Virgin (the record store) to sell music from their suppliers (including, but not limited to, Virgin [the record label]) to iPod owners.
Thing is, that may be best for Apple, too, since Apple makes next to nothing on the music they sell; the whole thing is a ploy to sell iPods. If Virgin could sell to iPod owners, that makes iPods more valuable, which means more profit for Apple.
I'm not sure what Apple's strategy is, but I assume they have one. It may be "brand unity"; they like to own the entire process, just like they are the only vendor of Mac computers for the MacOS operating system.
But I doubt Virgin-the-record-store would find it profitable to sell DRM-less music, even if they did own Virgin-the-record-label (and even though they receive less of the sale than the record labels do). They don't wish to break Apple's DRM; they want to get in on it.
They can't, for the most part, sell unprotected MP3s or AACs; the content owners (read: RIAA in the US, and others in Europe) won't let them.
Whether they should let them, P2P trading improves record sales, information wants to be free, I bought it so I can do what I want to with it, yadda yadda, isn't my point. Virgin can't sell unprotected MP3s, so they can't sell to that valuable market ofiPod owners.
I'm afraid I have no clue as to French monopoly laws. Actually, I'm not an expert on anybody's business laws, but I gather that this wouldn't work in the US: you have to abuse your monopoly position; for example, by selling things under cost to drive competitors out of business, then raise rates. Actually, arguably iTunes Music Store does just that, so they may have a case.
I don't consider its use of ATRAC3 internally inherently a problem. If it allows me to seamlessly dump files from my computer onto the player, it doesn't really matter how they're represented in the device itself, since I only care that it plays the music.
HOWEVER, converting from one lossy format to another will cause artifacts (which I don't believe the article mentioned). And just as bad, it had better happen zippy-quick, at least on a relatively new computer. If the limiting factor is the speed of my CPU, then I don't want it.
And here's what I don't get. They're converting it to a format which is DRM'ed, but because they're converting it from MP3s you can't tell who owns it in the first place. That is, they can limit the distribution, but limit it to who? They can't tell if you own it or not.
Presumably the goal is to say, "You can use your MP3s, but they're slower to download. You'd rather get ATRACs from our spiffy music store!"
That could happen, I suppose. If the device is substantially cheaper than an iPod, then people will buy it on the shelves, and it's not clear until they get home that it's not compatible with the #1 music store. Or the #2 music store.
So it's a tactically bold maneuver, and it might work. Online music stores still account for a small percentage of music sales. Most people still buy CDs, with which this thing is compatible (albeit slowly). I'm not sure how much people would miss being able to buy stuff from iTunes Music Store and Napster and whatever Microsoft's version is going to be.
In the end, there's a lot said for being able to hit a lower price point for the same number of megs. Microsoft makes a huge living off the fact that people would rather buy a Dell/HP/etc. for a few hundred bucks less than the equivalent Macintosh, even if many people would prefer the Mac. (Not a religious war here, just pointing out that many people never look past the price tag.)
But this time, Apple already owns big market share, and compatibility with it may be the biggest problem for Sony here. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
The concern isn't so much for the difficulty and expense of adding a paper receipt as for the confusion it would cause among voters.
No, not widespread confusion. Maybe just the most confused 1% of voters. How many of them would just take the receipts home, throwing off the recount? Or fold, spindle, and mutilate it to hide their vote?
That makes the paper count a different thing from the electronic count. Which means that every candidate who's unhappy with the outcome could request a recount, and be assured of getting a different (if not necessarily better) answer. The result is no better than the old paper ballots, but more expensive and with a higher chance of tampering.
Remember, these are the same people who couldn't figure out the butterfly ballots four years ago. In this election, 1% will make a huge difference.
I think this line of argument is rubbish. Sure, 1% of the voters would botch it. 1% is still probably less than the number of hanging chads, mis-filled butterfly ballots, etc. And most importantly, it is a solid checksum on the potentially massive miscounts caused by invalid, incorrect, or tampered-with software.
So there is at least one semi-valid reason to reject the paper backup. It's important to know that, so you can refute it. Even if you think your opponents in a debate are completely dumb, or motivated solely by malice, you are still obligated to understand what valid arguments they could be making, and then refute them.
Ya know, I actually did that one for a Prolog class. We just translated the song into Prolog. You have to define one rule I consider weird (something like "your mother's husband is your father", or some variant) but it does work.
I'm not a fan of controlled English systems, because they're misleading. They are computer languages, not natural languages, and people often misunderstand the semantics. They are as exacting to write as code, but more verbose. If the controlled English isn't quite working, it can be intensely difficult to debug.
:- parent(X,Z), parent(Z,Y).
I've seen efforts where knowledge representation languages (CycL and Prolog come to mind) are translated into English for validation. That's not a perfect tool, but it's actually not dissimilar from what I do in my mind when I read these languages: translate
grandparent(X, Y)
into
X is the grandparentof Y if X is the parent of Z and Z is the parent of Y.
or even:
Y is X's grandparent if X is Z's parent and Z is Y's parent.
So you write code, concisely and precisely, and translate it into easier-to-read but less precise English. I'm not sure if this technique has been adapted to "business rule" systems like iLog, but it might work well there.