I suspect, however, that the fanbois are the ones most likely to decide that it's faster/better/cheaper to download it than to watch it on some mechanism that creates revenue. ("I'd make a donation, but I don't want them tracking me.") To judge from comments around here, there are some who seem to take tremendous pride in it. I bet we're just not a very attractive market, despite being a fairly wealthy demographic.
Of the suggestions you make, the only one with a "let's do it and figure out how to monetize it later" attitude is Google, so perhaps they're the most likely, though they don't seem to be into content creation.
No, that's what retarded people think "understanding baseball" means. The rule book is actually littered with dozens of complications: ground rule double, infield fly rule, fourth-out rule, etc. The basics of the game are simple, but there are a lot of corner cases in unusual situations, including the one this article is talking about.
Thanks. I got about 90 seconds into the video and saw absolutely nothing of interest.
My standard advice for anybody wanting to show me a video: edit it to half its length. Sight unseen, knowing nothing about you, I know that you're going to be too attached to the sound of your own authorial voice. It sounds like in this case that advice needed to be given 3 or 4 times.
I'm a marathon runner, and the first I heard about this was from friends inquiring if I knew anybody there. I can't conceive of what earthly good this information would have done them (perhaps they wanted to offer me some sort of comfort if I had) but I do know that whatever it is, people are fascinated by the tragedies and want to know everything they can the soonest they can.
So I can hardly blame news companies for giving people the fastest information that they can. They're not so much "exploiting" the tragedy as giving people what it is they're craving (or at least, the closest substitute they can get to it, the unverified raw data stream). I don't think it's doing them any good (that's a different rant) but they're not forcing this on people. They're doing what people ask them to do.
They don't appear to be 100% strict in their "no bumpers" policy, then. I've been watching a TV show ("Awkward") which always begins with a short (5 second) bump for the upcoming season of the show on MTV. I suppose MTV has convinced them that it's part of the show, but it seems kind of dubious to me.
I don't really mind the bump all that much, though if it's a prelude to real advertising in the Netflix streaming, it's potentially worrying.
The summary is confusingly written. That "25 inch screen at 8 feet" refers to the camera, which isn't particularly high resolution for a camera, but it's also not all that relevant to augmented reality.
The field of view is 100%: it covers your whole eye. The relevant resolution isn't that of the camera, but that of the screen, which is a cell-phone-level 640x360. So they can overlay everything, but they won't be able to say all that much with the overlay.
Still... it's enough to label stuff (assuming that the 720p camera is sufficiently high-res, and the processor fast enough, to find something to label in a timely fashion), and give a glimpse of what the technology might be good for some day. The original Glass video gave some hints, though they're really hoping that it really create markets nobody's ever imagined. It is, indeed, a solution in search of a problem, though there are sufficient hints that a problem might exist.
They might actually appreciate that: the top umps in Major League Baseball make $300k, while SCOTUS salaries top out at $223k (and that's for the Chief; the others make $10k less).
It actually specifically disclaims any interest in dispensing justice. Ask any lawyer or judge: they'll make clear that their goal is to ensure compliance with the law, and that there is little to no room for being "just".
The Supreme Court "Justices", in particular, like to imagine themselves as "calling balls and strikes", regardless of whether the resulting judgment matches anybody's notion of justice.
There is one dimension of justice in everybody following the same law, but only one of many. And given that the law is frequently vague or contradictory, such that even the judges disagree on the "balls and strikes" they're supposedly calling, it seems to me that in many cases it's the least just of those dimensions.
I would propose that the next time a "Justice" declares himself to be "calling balls and strikes", that we rename his title to "Umpire", as "justice" is orthogonal to his self-defined description.
For instance, email that is stored on a third party's server for more than 180 days is considered by the law to be abandoned
A lot of the thread above has been predicated on the idea that they get this right because email is more of an e-postcard, but if that article is correct, that's not it at all. That explains why this is acceptable but wiretapping a phone conversation isn't: phone conversations are expected to evaporate.
Presumably that means that you're expected to delete your emails from the server if you really consider it private, which doesn't actually seem entirely unreasonable. Or at least, it didn't in 1986. Now we consider our GMail accounts a personal, private chunk of the universe, more akin to our homes even if they're sitting out on some server somewhere.
Does make me wonder, though... I'm sure Google and other email providers have thought of ways to encrypt email end to end, doing the decryption on the client side, and making encryption the default (or at least easily accessible). I wonder if DoJ and others have asked them not to.
But it does prevent people from saying, "You made this gun, with the intention of killing people, often wrongfully. You knew that it would be used for that purpose, and you negligently failed to take action to prevent it. You may even have made designs that made it more suited to criminal activity, or sold it via distribution channels that you knew (or should have known) would make it likely to end up in criminal hands." That would make a civil case for negligence, which manufacturers of other products would be subject to, even though none of those activities are illegal.
I don't know what the courts would have decided in these cases. Congress intervened to prevent us from finding out.
This prevents civil torts, rather than criminal. People sued on the basis that they suffered harm (being shot) because of a product that the manufacturer knew was designed for that purpose. The manufacturer may be civilly liable without having broken any laws.
Somebody tried suing the gun manufacturers, so Congress passed a law to prevent it, the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act". (Yet another in a long tradition of legislative names that are clearly trying too hard, and at least to my ears end up sounding suspicious in the process.)
The question is whether more piracy would help the show more. He presumably would like somebody to actually pay for what appears to be a fairly expensive show to produce. A little piracy is free advertising; universal piracy kills the bottom line.
So he may well decide that the current amount of piracy is a boon, but would continue to suppress pirates to the full extent of his ability and the law, to keep it from being any bigger than it is. He could easily eliminate piracy by seeding the torrents himself, and telling everybody that it was OK to take it from there. But I doubt that even this "enlightened" suit will do that, nor would he if he were permitted to.
I suppose he might try to depend on subscriptions from people who decided they wanted to get it via HBO's regular distribution channels anyway, though it seems unlikely.
I'm perplexed as to how that was supposed to work, though. Is there a pile marked "packages we want to delay"? If the atheist-hating zealot encounters the package, where does it go?
I could see the zealot throwing it away in his rage, but then it would never get there at all.
Perhaps there's just a giant pile, and the zealot is deliberately putting it off to the end? I suppose that's possible, but it seems like a very inefficient way to run the post office.
I'm not disputing their data; it seems solid enough. But it seems to be telling us as much about postal operations as it does about anti-atheist zeal.
Yahoo already has a way to make money off delivering content, one that yields $5B in revenue per year. Several other major companies use the same strategy.
This product may not have a separate monetization strategy of its own, but if it provides a competitive advantage to Yahoo, then it may well provide value to them in excess of the $.03B they paid for it. That's not a bubble; that's paying for an innovation (and one they hope to have a patent on, giving it an even big advantage over its competitors).
This will probably help drive the bubble, as Yahoo's stock price goes up and everybody figures that "buying out some tech guy" is all they need to get rich. But this doesn't seem like bubble behavior in and of itself.
I'd guess not, since the ~1 implies that there was more stuff there that got cut so that it could fit into 8 characters, a requirement for older Windows systems.
So it might be somebody with a name like Brazile, who just happens to be a local politician in DC. It's not her (her first name is Donna, and she works in local politics, not on Capitol Hill). It could conceivably be a relative, though it's more likely that it's somebody else whose name begins with "braz".
Since it's just a draft, I'm not actually certain who wrote it. It doesn't have a tracking number yet. This being the House, we can infer that the chairman is OK with it, and he's a Republican, but he's not necessarily the author.
The only clue I can find is in a file name included in the document:
but I don't see anybody on the committee whose name fits "HRBRAZ~1" (and it's probable that it's somebody's secretary or legislative assistant; it might even be the staffer who's responsible for maintaining the XML [via Softquad, on an elderly Windows installation]).
Sounds like it's pretty redundant, though if you cook a lot you might find there are days when you need a second large pot.
I don't have a slow cooker, but I'll often use my large cast iron dutch oven in the oven set to a low temperature (150 or 180). That accomplishes much the same purpose, with the bonus that I could start it on the stove top (say, for browning meat or sweating onions).
That takes up oven space, of course. One great thing about a slow cooker is that it works off an electric outlet, and it doesn't even have to be in the kitchen. A big win on days when I'm using every burner on a large project.
He's talking about enamel-covered iron Dutch ovens. They're nice in that they don't rust and can be thrown in a dishwasher. They're generally white inside, which can be an advantage over the black cast iron ones, especially in a recipe like this where it helps to see the brown stuff sticking to the bottom of the pan.
The best-known ones run $200+ from La Creuset, but I picked up one by Tramontina for under $40 and it does a fine job. It's a nice item to have on hand, and you can also use it for general large-pot purposes (making pasta, soups, etc.) You could use a plain cast-iron pot about as well, and considerably cheaper, though honestly if all you have is your basic six-quart steel pot, it would also serve for this recipe. (Do avoid the ultra-cheap flimsy aluminum ones, which will burn your food, and then the handles will fall off.)
For many news sites, comments are one of their key value-adds. For news beyond the local level, they're generally not doing original reporting, but merely aggregating news from other places. Including, um, Slashdot.
(In fact, on Slashdot I find the comments often more revealing than the articles, since they can generally de-spin the puffery that is required to turn marginal news into something that feeds the maw of a 24x7 news cycle.)
News sites would often like to seem themselves as the town hall/water cooler/public forum of the 21st century. It attracts returning eyeballs, giving the page multiple views from the same reader who tunes back in to the ongoing conversation. I think they'd like to present themselves as having a broader perspective on the news, rather than as mere conduits for it.
Unfortunately, that means running a community, and that turns out to be a non-trivial job. It certainly won't run itself; they need to actively curate it. (Translation: it's not the free money you were hoping for.) The social sites generally do a better job of it, since it's what they specialize in.
There may still be a niche for them, in areas where they actually have expertise, such as local news or niche news (like Slashdot). It helps to have citizen curators doing the job for free, though the smaller the niche, the harder it is to get critical mass.
Indeed; one expects that once the new Pope actually starts doing something, there will be legitimate sites springing up to criticize him.
But when the sites spring up within hours after his having been appointed, anybody with a well-founded opinion is more likely to be doing research than grabbing a domain name. Who's going to grab domain names that quickly? People who grab domain names for a living, and hope to sell them at an enormous markup to people who research their opinions before starting blogs about them.
I suppose it's possible that not all of the 600+ domains were profiteers. Some may well be Catholic groups (or anti-Catholic groups, or other interested parties) who know they'll have something to say and expect to use the domain name. But I feel fairly certain that one year from now, at least 90% of these domain names will either be transferred or be languishing as a parked domain.
Seems to me that this is like asking for a truce when we're losing. They've got no reason to say yes.
Fortunately, this isn't a battle we have to lose. Yeah, I think we have to admit that every grandma-box running Windows 98 is going to be a spam-spewing zombie for the foreseeable future, but the corporations that make the juiciest targets should also be capable of at least some self-defense. If thy IP block offends thee, cut it off. Social engineering is always going to trump user education, but we can at least make it an arms race.
At least it's not nukes, which are harder to walk away from. That means we also don't have Mutually Assured Destruction. They're going to do it even if they sign a treaty saying that they won't, so we're going to have to hunker down and deal. Asking them to call it a draw isn't going to get us anywhere.
The advantage of the audio is that it allows you to say who you're pushing it to. If the service is running on some server somewhere, even if the two devices say, "I would like to push my identifier out", you still have the problem of how to specify to whom. You only need a few bits of information to go direct from device to device, but you do need them.
Audio's kind of obvious for that, since you know that the devices have speakers and mics. If you assume they have cameras, you could display a QR code on one screen and read it with the other device. (A sticker on the back of the phone would also do it, but that involves a hardware mod, albeit a trivial one.)
NFCs do the job nicely, but they're also specialized hardware that not every device has. Audio, on the other hand, is pretty near universal. It's not secure, so I wouldn't use it if I were a celebrity afraid of having my phone number get out, but NFC isn't completely secure either, and for that matter, publicly-dialable phone numbers are problematic no matter what for that scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect, however, that the fanbois are the ones most likely to decide that it's faster/better/cheaper to download it than to watch it on some mechanism that creates revenue. ("I'd make a donation, but I don't want them tracking me.") To judge from comments around here, there are some who seem to take tremendous pride in it. I bet we're just not a very attractive market, despite being a fairly wealthy demographic.
Of the suggestions you make, the only one with a "let's do it and figure out how to monetize it later" attitude is Google, so perhaps they're the most likely, though they don't seem to be into content creation.
No, that's what retarded people think "understanding baseball" means. The rule book is actually littered with dozens of complications: ground rule double, infield fly rule, fourth-out rule, etc. The basics of the game are simple, but there are a lot of corner cases in unusual situations, including the one this article is talking about.
Thanks. I got about 90 seconds into the video and saw absolutely nothing of interest.
My standard advice for anybody wanting to show me a video: edit it to half its length. Sight unseen, knowing nothing about you, I know that you're going to be too attached to the sound of your own authorial voice. It sounds like in this case that advice needed to be given 3 or 4 times.
I stand corrected. Thank you.
I'm a marathon runner, and the first I heard about this was from friends inquiring if I knew anybody there. I can't conceive of what earthly good this information would have done them (perhaps they wanted to offer me some sort of comfort if I had) but I do know that whatever it is, people are fascinated by the tragedies and want to know everything they can the soonest they can.
So I can hardly blame news companies for giving people the fastest information that they can. They're not so much "exploiting" the tragedy as giving people what it is they're craving (or at least, the closest substitute they can get to it, the unverified raw data stream). I don't think it's doing them any good (that's a different rant) but they're not forcing this on people. They're doing what people ask them to do.
They don't appear to be 100% strict in their "no bumpers" policy, then. I've been watching a TV show ("Awkward") which always begins with a short (5 second) bump for the upcoming season of the show on MTV. I suppose MTV has convinced them that it's part of the show, but it seems kind of dubious to me.
I don't really mind the bump all that much, though if it's a prelude to real advertising in the Netflix streaming, it's potentially worrying.
The summary is confusingly written. That "25 inch screen at 8 feet" refers to the camera, which isn't particularly high resolution for a camera, but it's also not all that relevant to augmented reality.
The field of view is 100%: it covers your whole eye. The relevant resolution isn't that of the camera, but that of the screen, which is a cell-phone-level 640x360. So they can overlay everything, but they won't be able to say all that much with the overlay.
Still... it's enough to label stuff (assuming that the 720p camera is sufficiently high-res, and the processor fast enough, to find something to label in a timely fashion), and give a glimpse of what the technology might be good for some day. The original Glass video gave some hints, though they're really hoping that it really create markets nobody's ever imagined. It is, indeed, a solution in search of a problem, though there are sufficient hints that a problem might exist.
They might actually appreciate that: the top umps in Major League Baseball make $300k, while SCOTUS salaries top out at $223k (and that's for the Chief; the others make $10k less).
It actually specifically disclaims any interest in dispensing justice. Ask any lawyer or judge: they'll make clear that their goal is to ensure compliance with the law, and that there is little to no room for being "just".
The Supreme Court "Justices", in particular, like to imagine themselves as "calling balls and strikes", regardless of whether the resulting judgment matches anybody's notion of justice.
There is one dimension of justice in everybody following the same law, but only one of many. And given that the law is frequently vague or contradictory, such that even the judges disagree on the "balls and strikes" they're supposedly calling, it seems to me that in many cases it's the least just of those dimensions.
I would propose that the next time a "Justice" declares himself to be "calling balls and strikes", that we rename his title to "Umpire", as "justice" is orthogonal to his self-defined description.
Hey, that's interesting:
For instance, email that is stored on a third party's server for more than 180 days is considered by the law to be abandoned
A lot of the thread above has been predicated on the idea that they get this right because email is more of an e-postcard, but if that article is correct, that's not it at all. That explains why this is acceptable but wiretapping a phone conversation isn't: phone conversations are expected to evaporate.
Presumably that means that you're expected to delete your emails from the server if you really consider it private, which doesn't actually seem entirely unreasonable. Or at least, it didn't in 1986. Now we consider our GMail accounts a personal, private chunk of the universe, more akin to our homes even if they're sitting out on some server somewhere.
Does make me wonder, though... I'm sure Google and other email providers have thought of ways to encrypt email end to end, doing the decryption on the client side, and making encryption the default (or at least easily accessible). I wonder if DoJ and others have asked them not to.
But it does prevent people from saying, "You made this gun, with the intention of killing people, often wrongfully. You knew that it would be used for that purpose, and you negligently failed to take action to prevent it. You may even have made designs that made it more suited to criminal activity, or sold it via distribution channels that you knew (or should have known) would make it likely to end up in criminal hands." That would make a civil case for negligence, which manufacturers of other products would be subject to, even though none of those activities are illegal.
I don't know what the courts would have decided in these cases. Congress intervened to prevent us from finding out.
If they break the law, it's a criminal matter.
This prevents civil torts, rather than criminal. People sued on the basis that they suffered harm (being shot) because of a product that the manufacturer knew was designed for that purpose. The manufacturer may be civilly liable without having broken any laws.
Somebody tried suing the gun manufacturers, so Congress passed a law to prevent it, the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act". (Yet another in a long tradition of legislative names that are clearly trying too hard, and at least to my ears end up sounding suspicious in the process.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerce_in_Arms_Act
The question is whether more piracy would help the show more. He presumably would like somebody to actually pay for what appears to be a fairly expensive show to produce. A little piracy is free advertising; universal piracy kills the bottom line.
So he may well decide that the current amount of piracy is a boon, but would continue to suppress pirates to the full extent of his ability and the law, to keep it from being any bigger than it is. He could easily eliminate piracy by seeding the torrents himself, and telling everybody that it was OK to take it from there. But I doubt that even this "enlightened" suit will do that, nor would he if he were permitted to.
I suppose he might try to depend on subscriptions from people who decided they wanted to get it via HBO's regular distribution channels anyway, though it seems unlikely.
I'm perplexed as to how that was supposed to work, though. Is there a pile marked "packages we want to delay"? If the atheist-hating zealot encounters the package, where does it go?
I could see the zealot throwing it away in his rage, but then it would never get there at all.
Perhaps there's just a giant pile, and the zealot is deliberately putting it off to the end? I suppose that's possible, but it seems like a very inefficient way to run the post office.
I'm not disputing their data; it seems solid enough. But it seems to be telling us as much about postal operations as it does about anti-atheist zeal.
Yahoo already has a way to make money off delivering content, one that yields $5B in revenue per year. Several other major companies use the same strategy.
This product may not have a separate monetization strategy of its own, but if it provides a competitive advantage to Yahoo, then it may well provide value to them in excess of the $.03B they paid for it. That's not a bubble; that's paying for an innovation (and one they hope to have a patent on, giving it an even big advantage over its competitors).
This will probably help drive the bubble, as Yahoo's stock price goes up and everybody figures that "buying out some tech guy" is all they need to get rich. But this doesn't seem like bubble behavior in and of itself.
I'd guess not, since the ~1 implies that there was more stuff there that got cut so that it could fit into 8 characters, a requirement for older Windows systems.
So it might be somebody with a name like Brazile, who just happens to be a local politician in DC. It's not her (her first name is Donna, and she works in local politics, not on Capitol Hill). It could conceivably be a relative, though it's more likely that it's somebody else whose name begins with "braz".
Since it's just a draft, I'm not actually certain who wrote it. It doesn't have a tracking number yet. This being the House, we can infer that the chairman is OK with it, and he's a Republican, but he's not necessarily the author.
The only clue I can find is in a file name included in the document:
C:\DOCUME~1\HRBRAZ~1\APPLIC~1\SOFTQUAD\XMETAL\5.5\GEN\C\SR_005.XML
but I don't see anybody on the committee whose name fits "HRBRAZ~1" (and it's probable that it's somebody's secretary or legislative assistant; it might even be the staffer who's responsible for maintaining the XML [via Softquad, on an elderly Windows installation]).
Sounds like it's pretty redundant, though if you cook a lot you might find there are days when you need a second large pot.
I don't have a slow cooker, but I'll often use my large cast iron dutch oven in the oven set to a low temperature (150 or 180). That accomplishes much the same purpose, with the bonus that I could start it on the stove top (say, for browning meat or sweating onions).
That takes up oven space, of course. One great thing about a slow cooker is that it works off an electric outlet, and it doesn't even have to be in the kitchen. A big win on days when I'm using every burner on a large project.
He's talking about enamel-covered iron Dutch ovens. They're nice in that they don't rust and can be thrown in a dishwasher. They're generally white inside, which can be an advantage over the black cast iron ones, especially in a recipe like this where it helps to see the brown stuff sticking to the bottom of the pan.
The best-known ones run $200+ from La Creuset, but I picked up one by Tramontina for under $40 and it does a fine job. It's a nice item to have on hand, and you can also use it for general large-pot purposes (making pasta, soups, etc.) You could use a plain cast-iron pot about as well, and considerably cheaper, though honestly if all you have is your basic six-quart steel pot, it would also serve for this recipe. (Do avoid the ultra-cheap flimsy aluminum ones, which will burn your food, and then the handles will fall off.)
For many news sites, comments are one of their key value-adds. For news beyond the local level, they're generally not doing original reporting, but merely aggregating news from other places. Including, um, Slashdot.
(In fact, on Slashdot I find the comments often more revealing than the articles, since they can generally de-spin the puffery that is required to turn marginal news into something that feeds the maw of a 24x7 news cycle.)
News sites would often like to seem themselves as the town hall/water cooler/public forum of the 21st century. It attracts returning eyeballs, giving the page multiple views from the same reader who tunes back in to the ongoing conversation. I think they'd like to present themselves as having a broader perspective on the news, rather than as mere conduits for it.
Unfortunately, that means running a community, and that turns out to be a non-trivial job. It certainly won't run itself; they need to actively curate it. (Translation: it's not the free money you were hoping for.) The social sites generally do a better job of it, since it's what they specialize in.
There may still be a niche for them, in areas where they actually have expertise, such as local news or niche news (like Slashdot). It helps to have citizen curators doing the job for free, though the smaller the niche, the harder it is to get critical mass.
Indeed; one expects that once the new Pope actually starts doing something, there will be legitimate sites springing up to criticize him.
But when the sites spring up within hours after his having been appointed, anybody with a well-founded opinion is more likely to be doing research than grabbing a domain name. Who's going to grab domain names that quickly? People who grab domain names for a living, and hope to sell them at an enormous markup to people who research their opinions before starting blogs about them.
I suppose it's possible that not all of the 600+ domains were profiteers. Some may well be Catholic groups (or anti-Catholic groups, or other interested parties) who know they'll have something to say and expect to use the domain name. But I feel fairly certain that one year from now, at least 90% of these domain names will either be transferred or be languishing as a parked domain.
Seems to me that this is like asking for a truce when we're losing. They've got no reason to say yes.
Fortunately, this isn't a battle we have to lose. Yeah, I think we have to admit that every grandma-box running Windows 98 is going to be a spam-spewing zombie for the foreseeable future, but the corporations that make the juiciest targets should also be capable of at least some self-defense. If thy IP block offends thee, cut it off. Social engineering is always going to trump user education, but we can at least make it an arms race.
At least it's not nukes, which are harder to walk away from. That means we also don't have Mutually Assured Destruction. They're going to do it even if they sign a treaty saying that they won't, so we're going to have to hunker down and deal. Asking them to call it a draw isn't going to get us anywhere.
If you've got a phone capable of decoding general speech, you should definitely apply for a patent on it.
The advantage of the audio is that it allows you to say who you're pushing it to. If the service is running on some server somewhere, even if the two devices say, "I would like to push my identifier out", you still have the problem of how to specify to whom. You only need a few bits of information to go direct from device to device, but you do need them.
Audio's kind of obvious for that, since you know that the devices have speakers and mics. If you assume they have cameras, you could display a QR code on one screen and read it with the other device. (A sticker on the back of the phone would also do it, but that involves a hardware mod, albeit a trivial one.)
NFCs do the job nicely, but they're also specialized hardware that not every device has. Audio, on the other hand, is pretty near universal. It's not secure, so I wouldn't use it if I were a celebrity afraid of having my phone number get out, but NFC isn't completely secure either, and for that matter, publicly-dialable phone numbers are problematic no matter what for that scenario.