I think he was referring to Windows computers, which run iTunes, and thus will play iTMS-derived songs, or burn them to a CD so that any old CD player can use them. They're (for the most part) not particularly portable devices, but there are probably more of them than iPods.
It would be interesting for Apple to make the argument that the burn-to-CD option is the "openness" in their DRM system, but I doubt that would satisfy anyone.
Frankly I think Europe would be better off -- and Apple might be, too -- if they just shut off the iTMS store there, and told people to go and buy CDs to get their music. I don't know what Apple's iTMS revenue is versus its iPod-sales revenue, but I'm willing to bet the latter is much greater than the former, and if push came to shove, they'd kill the Store to keep iPod sales up. (This is assuming that they thought that opening the iTMS up to other players would threaten iPod sales, which I'm not sure it would.)
IMO, the original purpose of the iTMS wasn't a revenue generator, but simply as an excuse for the existence of iPods. The RIAA was about ready to sue Apple (maybe they did?) for contributory infringement, because according to them, iPods were basically little 'piracy machines' whose only purpose was to carry around unauthorizedly-copied music. With the introduction of the iTMS, Apple could argue that there was a legitimate sales model for loading music onto the players, and the revenue basically was used to buy off the RIAA's sponsor companies, and remove the threat to Apple's actual profit, the iPods themselves.
So why not just eliminate them completely in the first place thus saving time and aggravation for all parties?
Because having external links in WP articles is helpful to readers of said articles.
If I go to a Wikipedia article on a particular subject, I expect a general overview of the topic, with some links that I can follow if I want more in-depth or primary-source information. This isn't a new concept, it's the same kind of thing you'd find in the back of any non-fiction book, usually called "Further Reading."
I think adding 'nofollow' is the solution here. It just takes WP out of the PageRank game. Having your site linked to in Wikipedia doesn't help your rank, but it doesn't hurt it either. It makes sense: why should a link that anyone can add be worth anything? It shouldn't. In that same vein, it shouldn't be worth a negative value either, because otherwise you could suppress a site's PageRank at will, just by creating WP links to it. Both positive and negative values would create an incentive to linkspam. A value of zero doesn't, and thus seems like a fairly safe path to take.
If an article in Wikipedia benefits by having an external link to some site, then the link ought to be there; "what makes the article better" ought to be the only motivation anyone should have for adding links. The closer WP and Google can get to that, the better.
Actually the situation you're describing gets dangerously close to Wikipedia's prohibition of "original research." If you wrote an article, whether for the Journal of Applied Physics or the New York Times, you probably should not use it as a source while editing Wikipedia. Someone else could use it as a source, or you could go into the discussion page and suggest that it be used as a source, but adding information to the article itself and then providing your own article as a reference, strikes me as a conflict of interest.
Otherwise, everyone and their cousin who's ever had a paper published on anything, would be editing their point of view into Wikipedia and using their own research to back up their edits. While that might be interesting, and appropriate for another kind of Wiki (say a wiki dedicated to new findings in that particular subject), it's not in Wikipedia.
I don't live in Chicago. I sure as hell don't want to pay for their highway. Therefore, having toll roads so that it doesn't cost me more in tax dollars sounds like a really good idea.
After all, having the government pay for something doesn't make it "free" it just distributes the cost among a whole lot more people; people whom, in many cases, will never see the benefit of what they're paying for.
If you want to show that government funding for something is a good idea, you have to be able to demonstrate that it's good for everyone who's going to end up footing the bill, not just the metaphorical Chicagoan who doesn't want to pay a toll.
Nobody likes paying tolls, but I think a lot of people like paying for roads they don't use and which may be on the other side of the country even less. That's why you have toll roads: it spreads the cost of a project across the people who actually use it, and assumedly who derive some benefit from it. (The arguments against tolls usually take the form of demonstrating that "people who use" and "people who benefit from" are not the same.) While a toll-free highway in Chicago would be understandably popular to residents there (just like the Gravina Island Bridge is popular with residents of Ketchican), I doubt you'll find a lot of support for it in Honolulu or Miami: after all, those people are going to ask, what are they getting by footing Chicago's bill?
The argument people are making against network neutrality is similar. Someone who doesn't use much bandwidth, and sticks mostly to services provided by their ISP, isn't going to like a 'neutral' net, because to them, it means a higher bottom-line cost than a tiered service might. In other words, they're basically subsidizing heavier users, or users of content that would cost more on a non-neutral net.
If you want to argue against the opponents of network neutrality, you have to come up with some sort of salient argument why it benefits the user who just wants a minimum level of service for the cheapest possible price. What does the $12.95/mo. DSL user, who does nothing but check email and look at things that are on the Comcast portal page, going to get from network neutrality, other than the possibility of higher rates?
Now, for the record, I support network neutrality, but comparing it to toll roads isn't going to help the cause any. If anything, "toll roads" are exactly the argument that the telcos and big ISPs are going to make. You don't want to go down that path.
And Apple might want to take advantage of the 4 security layers of the x86 processor, something Linux doesn't do.
I thought I read something recently that modern x86 processors actually didn't implement the additional security layers anymore, since basically no operating system in wide use takes advantage of them?
The author was incorrect to use it, particularly in quotes, because they were talking about a U.S.-based company and U.S. law. In the United States, the term is "fair use," not "fair dealing," so the former would have been the correct term.
Alternately, the author could have not put the term in quotes, which would have made it acceptable, or better yet, used the correct term in quotes and then followed it with the term that would have explained it to the casual non-U.S. reader. However, he or she did neither.
By putting the U.K. term in quotes, it made it seem as if "fair dealing" was a term in U.S. law, which it is not (at least not in that context -- 'fair dealing' in the U.S. jurisprudential system means something else entirely).
Ugh. If you like traveling with a bunch of jewel cases, that's fine, but I, too, remember The Time Before iPods, and I didn't like it one bit.
First, those jewel cases suck. I'd never manage to go more than a few days without cracking one, or breaking the hinge pins so the covers would fall off, or any number of other things. They were just a bad design from the beginning.
Plus, whenever I went anywhere and brought a handful of CDs, I'd always end up wishing "gee, too bad I didn't bring CD x, that would have been fun," where x was always some CD I didn't bring.
Sure, both these problems are solvable: friends of mine used to tote big binders of CDs around, with the discs and their liners tucked into pages, sometimes 300 or 400 discs to a book. But in addition to just being heavy and a pain to move around, they were even bigger theft targets and worth more money than iPods are. I wouldn't want to carry my actual collection of CDs around with me -- not only would 300 discs probably be worth upwards of $400, that's not counting the time and effort that went into amassing the collection in the first place. An iPod, on the other hand, isn't cheap, but if it gets stolen, replacing it is straightforward: buy a new one and re-sync it. (N.b., I didn't buy an iPod when they were new and cost $500, I waited until they were down around $200.)
But the real problem in comparing MP3 players to eBook readers, as others have pointed out -- and I think this is where most companies attempting to market them have fallen short -- is the number of books you can consume in a span of time versus MP3s. If I go on vacation for a few weeks, I can easily listen to dozens of CDs worth of music, hundreds of individual songs (and I'm sure some people could probably listen to thousands, but I'm not a true member of the Cult of the White Earbuds yet). But the books I'd read in the same time would easily fit into the bottom of my suitcase.
If I was going to be marooned on a desert island (which somehow had a mains outlet and other infrastructure on it), I'd definitely want an ebook reader instead of paper books. But as a portable device for vacation or other short periods, it's tough to beat that "charming little clothy box."
Yeah it's a little embarrassing that they don't have the English version.
A few seconds of Googling turns up the standard English language translation by Sir Richard Burton, available here. Seeing as it was translated in 1883, I think it's suitably out of copyright.
Anyone have any idea how you go about submitting something to Project Gutenberg?
I looked at his newly acquired red Razor, and it has so much crap on it that apparently the only place they could find for the SD card was under the battery.
It's there because they're probably putting it in place of the SIM card slot. If the phone is the one I'm thinking of, it's from Sprint, which being a CDMA network doesn't use SIMs. So rather than just leave a nonfunctional slot there, under the battery, they turned it into a MicroSD/TransFlash card slot for loading additional music.
I think it's a case of the card being shoehorned into a design that really wasn't made for it, thus you end up with it in a very strange place. The design of the Razr, externally at least, hasn't changed much from its very first version.
I recently saw an ad in US News & World Reports that was for a very basic, phone-only cellphone, just like the kind that I hear people begging for all the time on Slashdot.
It looked like they were going for the older demographic, because of the emphasis on large print and big keys, but it seemed like something that would appeal to anyone who wanted a very simple phone (but not as dumbed-down as the one-button children's cellphones).
It's apparently called the Jitterbug, and is made by Samsung. It seems to be marketed by a network or virtual network called "Greatcall," but perhaps it's possible to buy the phone elsewhere and use it on a different network. I assume the plans that they're pushing with it are similarly basic.
What would be nice would be if you could get it as an unlocked GSM phone, and then pop in a T-Mobile SIM (last time I checked, TMobile had the least-expensive voice-only plans, in cost per minute).
I can think of some special circumstances here in the U.S. where you wouldn't be allowed to take pictures (privately owned clubs or beaches could prohibit photography, although I think only nudist/naturist ones probably would bother), but in general any place in public is fair game. And it's more or less expected that any place where you have parents and children, there are going to be (lots and lots of) photos taken.
That's not to say that you can use photos of random people taken in public places for commercial purposes, because then you get into their control over the use of their "image," but the photography per se is protected.
There are certainly situations which are legal, but might cause you to be harassed by the police -- standing on the sidewalk outside an elementary school and photographing the children, when it was clear you weren't a parent might draw unwelcome attention, but if it went to court you'd probably be vindicated.
The quality is less important than its omnipresence.
I used to keep a single-use 35mm camera in my car. Those things are not known for taking quality pictures, least of all when they've been alternately baked and frozen in a car for a few seasons. However, this didn't really bother me, because I could imagine times when just having any camera at all, regardless of how bad the pictures or how washed-out the colors would be, would be a Good Thing.
That's the role I see cellphone cameras filling. I don't think they're really going to cut into the standalone camera market (at least, not more than disposables cut into the film-based standalone camera market), but I can see them totally taking up the disposable-camera one.
The benefit of such an omnipresent technology isn't that people will be able to not bring regular cameras where they did before, but that they'll be able to take photos of events where they traditionally have not brought bigger cameras.
Of course it is a funny statement to see coming from Microsoft.
Well, what did you expect? "We think we have some overall marketshare, but we can't say for sure, because the figure is lower than the error in the survey"?
Nothing about having the right to do something, means you have to do it.
E.g., I think a woman should be able to have an abortion, even though I am not a woman and therefore cannot ever exercise that right. Just because it would seem on the surface not to be a particularly useful right to me, personally, doesn't change the fact that I think it ought to exist.
Saying 'well, I wouldn't use it, therefore why care if I have the right to do it?' is both narrow-minded and dangerous.
The difference between a useful recording package and a relatively useless one, has to do with what hardware it will work with. (This is slightly offtopic, since the OP was asking about sequencing and not DAW, but it's related.)
One of the reason ProTools is the de facto standard is because it's compatible with virtually all the hardware available. There are lots of tools for free that will work with one or two channels pushed through a soundcard, which might be enough for guitar+vocals, but it's a bit short of what most people want to mic a band. Real problems start to happen when you get into FireWire audio interfaces or ADAT cards. They're expensive enough that generally, what hardware you have available is going to drive the software, and they're mostly made to work with ProTools, either on Mac or Windows.
The hardware manufacturers, MOTU in particular, are basically hostile towards Linux, which means that the interfaces aren't well supported in Ardour, which means most people are going to look elsewhere for software. The hardware is expensive enough that it drives everything else.
Here's what you really need to look out for: what's the NSA's reaction?
In the past, it was widely understood that the NSA was well ahead of the private sector in terms of both encryption and decryption. During the 70s and 80s, the private sector basically closed the "encryption gap" and produced some ciphers that (at least most people suspect) are as secure as those used by the NSA.
What's still an open question, is how far ahead the NSA is of the private/corporate sector in terms of breaking other people's ciphers.
Depending on the NSA's reaction, it might be possible to know whether or not this break was anticipated. If they're using SHA-1 internally, one can assume they didn't know about this discovery already, and they've fallen behind of the position many folks assumed they had. If they just shrug and smile, then they may have already known about this (and possibly been using it) for some time now.
Are you sure you are getting that on *word processing* documents? I think that I may have seen that when I've been sent a spreadsheet...but it's definitely not there on some DOC files that I've got in my Inbox.
I'd really like to believe this, but I just can't.
Whether or not people are "fundamentally" good or evil isn't an argument worth having, in a way, because it's impossible (or nearly so) to take a person completely out of their environment and away from the threat or fear of consequences. However, I suspect that if you gave the 'average Joe' a Ring of Gyges, that he wouldn't help himself to the contents of the local bank/liquor-store/etc. (at least until the novelty of being able to possess anything wore off).
While you, in fact, may be so constrained by morality -- and if that is the case, I salute you -- but to assume that most people are, seems a bit of a stretch. Most people don't commit crimes, because the perceived risk/reward doesn't work out in their favor. I could go out tonight and hold up the 7-11 on the corner, but I'm not going to; the few hundred bucks it might gain me (at best) wouldn't be worth the strong possibility of spending the next decade or so in prison. However, to someone who was poorer, or strung out on crack, that equation might come out differently; the possibility of a small amount of cash might be more than enough to make the risk worthwhile.
We can argue about the fundamental nature of humanity all day -- after all, if it was good enough a subject for Plato, it's good enough for me -- but in the end, what matters is whether your philosophy produces a model that predicts how people actually act, rather than how they wish they acted, or how they justify their own actions to themselves. The risk/reward model does this fairly well, at least with economic and property crimes, and therefore seems far more likely.
Problem One is how do you get to all your data, when you might use five or six computers during the course of a week? Rather than having to carry around a laptop/keychain-drive/floppy, D&S lets you sit down at any internet-enabled computer and access all your stuff. You don't need to worry about having the applications installed, or the right copy of that document; it's all on the server, along with the applications.
Problem Two is collaboration. There are some existing solutions for working on documents collaboratively, but generally they're either complicated to set up, inelegant (no WYSIWIG editing, e.g., most Wikis), expensive (MS SharePoint), or all of the above. Google provides a way for geographically separated people to work on the same document, without having to roll out any infrastructure.
As a trivial example, I used a Google document a few months ago to put together my family's gift list for the holidays. (Leaving the obvious neuroses of my family out of this, suffice it to say that we're big on lists.) I created a list, and then sent invitations to various people, who added items to their section of the list. At the end, anyone could look and see what everyone else wanted. Doing that over email would have been a huge mess; I would have had to send out multiple copies and carefully re-merge them with a master, in order to maintain the versioning and make sure information didn't get lost.
Although I wouldn't be comfortable putting corporate proprietary information on a service like Google's, but for Christmas and grocery lists, it's pretty neat. It's far from perfect (see my previous comment in this thread), but it's one of the best no-setup, free-as-in-beer collaborative systems I've found.
The ability to integrate Gmail and D&S could be a big advantage, but frankly I've been a bit disappointed that they haven't leveraged it more obviously.
Case in point: a few days ago someone emailed me a DOC file. Why isn't there an option to open it in D&S? It'll view it as HTML, or Download it, but what I'd really like would be one-click to turn it into an editable, publishable document. As it was, I had to download it, then re-upload it to D&S in order to produce an editable version. Not a huge problem, but if I had been on a computer where I wasn't allowed to save documents, it would have been. It's just stupid to make me pull a document down to my local machine from one Google server, only to upload it back to another Google server a minute later.
Also, when you do have a document open in D&S, why isn't there an option to email a copy to someone? Okay, I know I can invite them to edit it online, and I could always publish it and send them an invite, but why not something where I can send them a DOC version as an email attachment? That's a lot easier for many people to deal with. And while we're at it, how about some form of change tracking that would let me email a copy to someone, let them edit it offline, and then a way to re-import it to D&S (via the one-click, above) so that it would be change-tracked, as if they had logged-in to edit it? Expecting everyone to have a Google ID to edit documents is ridiculous. I can't convince everyone in my family to get Google IDs, much less everyone I'd like to share documents with, everywhere.
I think it's a great service, and a great start. But it has a long way to go, even within becoming part of Google's "suite" of services.
Where do you get that from? The cassette recorder on my home stereo has no such feature neither does the VCR in the attic.
I think the assumption was that cassette recorders were inherently such a lossy, low-quality recording, that their "copy protection" was in the generation loss that would naturally occur if a person made a copy of a recorded tape. Within a few generations, it would become unlistenable, or at least severely degraded.
Now, that's not exactly a "second generation" block, but it seemed to suit the courts and the music industry fine.
As far as video, there they were more stringent. Depending on how old that VCR is, it probably has Macrovision, which is essentially a mandatory "analog DRM" (ARM?) system that causes the recorder's tracking to go haywire if it detects a copyrighted signal. It's admittedly not present on early VCRs, but most of them don't produce a particularly good recording (don't have HiFi sound, etc.) unless they're professional models, so it's not a big risk.
Not sure either of those cases are really good ones to be bringing up.
It's not "standard," but there are places that do it. Generally small campuses, or ones that didn't build-out wired infrastructure when they should have, and are now trying to catch up and be 'wired' using 802.11 as a substitute for a real copper network.
I know there are quite a few schools deploying it strategically, which seems like a good plan. It only takes a few minutes walking around a college campus to realize that there are a few key places where wireless would be most useful, and a lot of places where it would probably be underutilized. Libraries are huge -- go into any uni library and you'll see rows of people typing away on laptops. If you can't afford to put an Ethernet drop at every study carroll, wireless is the next best thing. (Well, actually, both would be best.) Study lounges and communal spaces are probably next, followed by cafeterias and big lecture halls (if you want to encourage people to use laptops in class; some schools might have faculty that would rather discourage that). In warm climates, outdoor locations can be great locations for Wifi, too.
But deploying it all over a large campus would, for most schools, be impractical. It would take too many base stations and would cost too much for the number of users you'd probably have at a time on most of them. I think if you did roll it out everywhere, you'd probably find pretty quickly that some nodes took huge amounts of load, while others were basically never used. For this reason, most large places with a competent IT staff don't just shotgun it all over campus, but are more selective.
sorry, dude(?) but corporations have been afforded personhood due to rulings on the 14th ammendment
Er, no. Corporations have some of the same rights as natural persons, but they're not legally the same thing. They're entities insofar as the ownership of property and taxes are concerned, but they can't vote.
Neither Sam Palmisano nor Bill Gates can walk down to the polls on November 2nd and vote twice, once for themselves and once as a proxy for the corporations they run; it just doesn't work that way. (And for obvious good reason.)
That's not to say that corporations cannot benefit from government; if a corporation has a positive impact on a great number of people, it makes sense that those people might vote in a way that's helpful to a corporation. This is totally fair, and there's nothing undemocratic about it. But when you let corporations begin to influence the political process directly, you start going down a dangerous path: it gives some people what amounts to a double vote -- once as individual citizens (natural persons) and again via the corporation they control. It would be trivial, if we allowed corporations to vote, to set up hundreds of shell corporations and multiply your power, at the cost of $500 a pop (or whatever the registration fee is in states like Nevada that have lax regulations for incorporation).
So there are good and obvious reasons why we create a distinction between natural persons and the legal entities of corporations; allowing them to play politics is anathema to the very concept of one-person-one-vote democracy.
Political action committees, which are strictly not-for-profit and take donations from individuals, pool them, and use them to influence public policy, are another thing entirely. They are the essence of democracy, and really should be thought of as miniature, single-issue political parties. Anything that individual, natural persons are allowed to do, they should be allowed to do.
Actually, there was a third issue that didn't get talked about very much this week, and was being pushed by the Democrats. I think it might have gotten passed, too. (No surprise there; it's not like the Republicans really have any backbone, or scruples, either.)
The issue is about the definition of a "lobbyist." The Democrats started off from a good premise -- something needs to be done about lobbying and the corporate/big-money influence on politics. Fair enough. However, where you should probably start getting skeptical is when you hear a bunch of people who were just elected due to the help of said corporate cash seemingly railing against it. Something just ain't kosher there.
Below the surface of the "lobbying reform" was a pretty obvious goal: it was all about chiseling away at the Republican power base -- big, ideologically driven social organizations, churches in particular -- while leaving Democratic ones (smaller PACs, unions) intact. The new law puts the same limits on a volunteer- and donation-driven organizations, which represent people with a certain set of beliefs, as K Street lobbying firms for corporations.
Now, I don't necessarily agree with their agenda, but there is a vast difference between a Tobacco-Industry lobbyist, and the Southern Baptist Convention. The former doesn't represent the views of any actual people, only a corporation -- an entity which, for good reason, doesn't vote and shouldn't have any direct involvement in the political process -- while the latter is simply a group of interested persons attempting to influence policy in the manner they see fit.
By painting both groups with the same brush, the Democrats completely missed the boat, and have probably created more harm than good. They had an opportunity to push corporations out of politics, while allowing regular people to stay in, but they ignored it. Rather than calling both groups "lobbyists," it would have been just as easy to create a distinction between a "lobbyist" who works for hire and can take funding from anywhere, and a "Political Action Committee," who is funded by donations from private individuals and exists for the sole purpose of furthering their views. This would have the effect of regulating corporate cash and campaign contributions, but also not impinging on people's rights to pool their resources in order to have a say in government.
Instead, the Democrats used their new-found power as an opportunity to gerrymander on a grand scale, and proved that they are no better than the Republicans; the only reason they seemed like it over the past few years, is because they weren't in position to do as much damage.
Well assumedly this is what Sun would like -- if Solaris became the dominant kernel, rather than Linux, by moving to GPLv3 when Linux is stuck with v2.
In reality I think the opposite is more likely, Solaris Tools + GNU userland on a Linux kernel, but it's still fun to speculate. I don't really know enough about the Solaris kernel to make any claims of technical superiority or inferiority either way. I do think it would be neat, in some geek-ish way, to have another kernel...but most users are going to stick with whatever the majority uses.
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I think he was referring to Windows computers, which run iTunes, and thus will play iTMS-derived songs, or burn them to a CD so that any old CD player can use them. They're (for the most part) not particularly portable devices, but there are probably more of them than iPods.
It would be interesting for Apple to make the argument that the burn-to-CD option is the "openness" in their DRM system, but I doubt that would satisfy anyone.
Frankly I think Europe would be better off -- and Apple might be, too -- if they just shut off the iTMS store there, and told people to go and buy CDs to get their music. I don't know what Apple's iTMS revenue is versus its iPod-sales revenue, but I'm willing to bet the latter is much greater than the former, and if push came to shove, they'd kill the Store to keep iPod sales up. (This is assuming that they thought that opening the iTMS up to other players would threaten iPod sales, which I'm not sure it would.)
IMO, the original purpose of the iTMS wasn't a revenue generator, but simply as an excuse for the existence of iPods. The RIAA was about ready to sue Apple (maybe they did?) for contributory infringement, because according to them, iPods were basically little 'piracy machines' whose only purpose was to carry around unauthorizedly-copied music. With the introduction of the iTMS, Apple could argue that there was a legitimate sales model for loading music onto the players, and the revenue basically was used to buy off the RIAA's sponsor companies, and remove the threat to Apple's actual profit, the iPods themselves.
So why not just eliminate them completely in the first place thus saving time and aggravation for all parties?
Because having external links in WP articles is helpful to readers of said articles.
If I go to a Wikipedia article on a particular subject, I expect a general overview of the topic, with some links that I can follow if I want more in-depth or primary-source information. This isn't a new concept, it's the same kind of thing you'd find in the back of any non-fiction book, usually called "Further Reading."
I think adding 'nofollow' is the solution here. It just takes WP out of the PageRank game. Having your site linked to in Wikipedia doesn't help your rank, but it doesn't hurt it either. It makes sense: why should a link that anyone can add be worth anything? It shouldn't. In that same vein, it shouldn't be worth a negative value either, because otherwise you could suppress a site's PageRank at will, just by creating WP links to it. Both positive and negative values would create an incentive to linkspam. A value of zero doesn't, and thus seems like a fairly safe path to take.
If an article in Wikipedia benefits by having an external link to some site, then the link ought to be there; "what makes the article better" ought to be the only motivation anyone should have for adding links. The closer WP and Google can get to that, the better.
Actually the situation you're describing gets dangerously close to Wikipedia's prohibition of "original research." If you wrote an article, whether for the Journal of Applied Physics or the New York Times, you probably should not use it as a source while editing Wikipedia. Someone else could use it as a source, or you could go into the discussion page and suggest that it be used as a source, but adding information to the article itself and then providing your own article as a reference, strikes me as a conflict of interest.
Otherwise, everyone and their cousin who's ever had a paper published on anything, would be editing their point of view into Wikipedia and using their own research to back up their edits. While that might be interesting, and appropriate for another kind of Wiki (say a wiki dedicated to new findings in that particular subject), it's not in Wikipedia.
Not sure that's a very convincing argument.
I don't live in Chicago. I sure as hell don't want to pay for their highway. Therefore, having toll roads so that it doesn't cost me more in tax dollars sounds like a really good idea.
After all, having the government pay for something doesn't make it "free" it just distributes the cost among a whole lot more people; people whom, in many cases, will never see the benefit of what they're paying for.
If you want to show that government funding for something is a good idea, you have to be able to demonstrate that it's good for everyone who's going to end up footing the bill, not just the metaphorical Chicagoan who doesn't want to pay a toll.
Nobody likes paying tolls, but I think a lot of people like paying for roads they don't use and which may be on the other side of the country even less. That's why you have toll roads: it spreads the cost of a project across the people who actually use it, and assumedly who derive some benefit from it. (The arguments against tolls usually take the form of demonstrating that "people who use" and "people who benefit from" are not the same.) While a toll-free highway in Chicago would be understandably popular to residents there (just like the Gravina Island Bridge is popular with residents of Ketchican), I doubt you'll find a lot of support for it in Honolulu or Miami: after all, those people are going to ask, what are they getting by footing Chicago's bill?
The argument people are making against network neutrality is similar. Someone who doesn't use much bandwidth, and sticks mostly to services provided by their ISP, isn't going to like a 'neutral' net, because to them, it means a higher bottom-line cost than a tiered service might. In other words, they're basically subsidizing heavier users, or users of content that would cost more on a non-neutral net.
If you want to argue against the opponents of network neutrality, you have to come up with some sort of salient argument why it benefits the user who just wants a minimum level of service for the cheapest possible price. What does the $12.95/mo. DSL user, who does nothing but check email and look at things that are on the Comcast portal page, going to get from network neutrality, other than the possibility of higher rates?
Now, for the record, I support network neutrality, but comparing it to toll roads isn't going to help the cause any. If anything, "toll roads" are exactly the argument that the telcos and big ISPs are going to make. You don't want to go down that path.
And Apple might want to take advantage of the 4 security layers of the x86 processor, something Linux doesn't do.
I thought I read something recently that modern x86 processors actually didn't implement the additional security layers anymore, since basically no operating system in wide use takes advantage of them?
The author was incorrect to use it, particularly in quotes, because they were talking about a U.S.-based company and U.S. law. In the United States, the term is "fair use," not "fair dealing," so the former would have been the correct term.
Alternately, the author could have not put the term in quotes, which would have made it acceptable, or better yet, used the correct term in quotes and then followed it with the term that would have explained it to the casual non-U.S. reader. However, he or she did neither.
By putting the U.K. term in quotes, it made it seem as if "fair dealing" was a term in U.S. law, which it is not (at least not in that context -- 'fair dealing' in the U.S. jurisprudential system means something else entirely).
Ugh. If you like traveling with a bunch of jewel cases, that's fine, but I, too, remember The Time Before iPods, and I didn't like it one bit.
First, those jewel cases suck. I'd never manage to go more than a few days without cracking one, or breaking the hinge pins so the covers would fall off, or any number of other things. They were just a bad design from the beginning.
Plus, whenever I went anywhere and brought a handful of CDs, I'd always end up wishing "gee, too bad I didn't bring CD x, that would have been fun," where x was always some CD I didn't bring.
Sure, both these problems are solvable: friends of mine used to tote big binders of CDs around, with the discs and their liners tucked into pages, sometimes 300 or 400 discs to a book. But in addition to just being heavy and a pain to move around, they were even bigger theft targets and worth more money than iPods are. I wouldn't want to carry my actual collection of CDs around with me -- not only would 300 discs probably be worth upwards of $400, that's not counting the time and effort that went into amassing the collection in the first place. An iPod, on the other hand, isn't cheap, but if it gets stolen, replacing it is straightforward: buy a new one and re-sync it. (N.b., I didn't buy an iPod when they were new and cost $500, I waited until they were down around $200.)
But the real problem in comparing MP3 players to eBook readers, as others have pointed out -- and I think this is where most companies attempting to market them have fallen short -- is the number of books you can consume in a span of time versus MP3s. If I go on vacation for a few weeks, I can easily listen to dozens of CDs worth of music, hundreds of individual songs (and I'm sure some people could probably listen to thousands, but I'm not a true member of the Cult of the White Earbuds yet). But the books I'd read in the same time would easily fit into the bottom of my suitcase.
If I was going to be marooned on a desert island (which somehow had a mains outlet and other infrastructure on it), I'd definitely want an ebook reader instead of paper books. But as a portable device for vacation or other short periods, it's tough to beat that "charming little clothy box."
Yeah it's a little embarrassing that they don't have the English version.
A few seconds of Googling turns up the standard English language translation by Sir Richard Burton, available here. Seeing as it was translated in 1883, I think it's suitably out of copyright.
Anyone have any idea how you go about submitting something to Project Gutenberg?
I looked at his newly acquired red Razor, and it has so much crap on it that apparently the only place they could find for the SD card was under the battery.
It's there because they're probably putting it in place of the SIM card slot. If the phone is the one I'm thinking of, it's from Sprint, which being a CDMA network doesn't use SIMs. So rather than just leave a nonfunctional slot there, under the battery, they turned it into a MicroSD/TransFlash card slot for loading additional music.
I think it's a case of the card being shoehorned into a design that really wasn't made for it, thus you end up with it in a very strange place. The design of the Razr, externally at least, hasn't changed much from its very first version.
I recently saw an ad in US News & World Reports that was for a very basic, phone-only cellphone, just like the kind that I hear people begging for all the time on Slashdot.
It looked like they were going for the older demographic, because of the emphasis on large print and big keys, but it seemed like something that would appeal to anyone who wanted a very simple phone (but not as dumbed-down as the one-button children's cellphones).
It's apparently called the Jitterbug, and is made by Samsung. It seems to be marketed by a network or virtual network called "Greatcall," but perhaps it's possible to buy the phone elsewhere and use it on a different network. I assume the plans that they're pushing with it are similarly basic.
What would be nice would be if you could get it as an unlocked GSM phone, and then pop in a T-Mobile SIM (last time I checked, TMobile had the least-expensive voice-only plans, in cost per minute).
That's rather bizarre.
I can think of some special circumstances here in the U.S. where you wouldn't be allowed to take pictures (privately owned clubs or beaches could prohibit photography, although I think only nudist/naturist ones probably would bother), but in general any place in public is fair game. And it's more or less expected that any place where you have parents and children, there are going to be (lots and lots of) photos taken.
That's not to say that you can use photos of random people taken in public places for commercial purposes, because then you get into their control over the use of their "image," but the photography per se is protected.
There are certainly situations which are legal, but might cause you to be harassed by the police -- standing on the sidewalk outside an elementary school and photographing the children, when it was clear you weren't a parent might draw unwelcome attention, but if it went to court you'd probably be vindicated.
The quality is less important than its omnipresence.
I used to keep a single-use 35mm camera in my car. Those things are not known for taking quality pictures, least of all when they've been alternately baked and frozen in a car for a few seasons. However, this didn't really bother me, because I could imagine times when just having any camera at all, regardless of how bad the pictures or how washed-out the colors would be, would be a Good Thing.
That's the role I see cellphone cameras filling. I don't think they're really going to cut into the standalone camera market (at least, not more than disposables cut into the film-based standalone camera market), but I can see them totally taking up the disposable-camera one.
The benefit of such an omnipresent technology isn't that people will be able to not bring regular cameras where they did before, but that they'll be able to take photos of events where they traditionally have not brought bigger cameras.
Of course it is a funny statement to see coming from Microsoft.
Well, what did you expect? "We think we have some overall marketshare, but we can't say for sure, because the figure is lower than the error in the survey"?
Nothing about having the right to do something, means you have to do it.
E.g., I think a woman should be able to have an abortion, even though I am not a woman and therefore cannot ever exercise that right. Just because it would seem on the surface not to be a particularly useful right to me, personally, doesn't change the fact that I think it ought to exist.
Saying 'well, I wouldn't use it, therefore why care if I have the right to do it?' is both narrow-minded and dangerous.
The difference between a useful recording package and a relatively useless one, has to do with what hardware it will work with. (This is slightly offtopic, since the OP was asking about sequencing and not DAW, but it's related.)
One of the reason ProTools is the de facto standard is because it's compatible with virtually all the hardware available. There are lots of tools for free that will work with one or two channels pushed through a soundcard, which might be enough for guitar+vocals, but it's a bit short of what most people want to mic a band. Real problems start to happen when you get into FireWire audio interfaces or ADAT cards. They're expensive enough that generally, what hardware you have available is going to drive the software, and they're mostly made to work with ProTools, either on Mac or Windows.
The hardware manufacturers, MOTU in particular, are basically hostile towards Linux, which means that the interfaces aren't well supported in Ardour, which means most people are going to look elsewhere for software. The hardware is expensive enough that it drives everything else.
Here's what you really need to look out for: what's the NSA's reaction?
In the past, it was widely understood that the NSA was well ahead of the private sector in terms of both encryption and decryption. During the 70s and 80s, the private sector basically closed the "encryption gap" and produced some ciphers that (at least most people suspect) are as secure as those used by the NSA.
What's still an open question, is how far ahead the NSA is of the private/corporate sector in terms of breaking other people's ciphers.
Depending on the NSA's reaction, it might be possible to know whether or not this break was anticipated. If they're using SHA-1 internally, one can assume they didn't know about this discovery already, and they've fallen behind of the position many folks assumed they had. If they just shrug and smile, then they may have already known about this (and possibly been using it) for some time now.
Are you sure you are getting that on *word processing* documents? I think that I may have seen that when I've been sent a spreadsheet...but it's definitely not there on some DOC files that I've got in my Inbox.
I'd really like to believe this, but I just can't.
Whether or not people are "fundamentally" good or evil isn't an argument worth having, in a way, because it's impossible (or nearly so) to take a person completely out of their environment and away from the threat or fear of consequences. However, I suspect that if you gave the 'average Joe' a Ring of Gyges, that he wouldn't help himself to the contents of the local bank/liquor-store/etc. (at least until the novelty of being able to possess anything wore off).
While you, in fact, may be so constrained by morality -- and if that is the case, I salute you -- but to assume that most people are, seems a bit of a stretch. Most people don't commit crimes, because the perceived risk/reward doesn't work out in their favor. I could go out tonight and hold up the 7-11 on the corner, but I'm not going to; the few hundred bucks it might gain me (at best) wouldn't be worth the strong possibility of spending the next decade or so in prison. However, to someone who was poorer, or strung out on crack, that equation might come out differently; the possibility of a small amount of cash might be more than enough to make the risk worthwhile.
We can argue about the fundamental nature of humanity all day -- after all, if it was good enough a subject for Plato, it's good enough for me -- but in the end, what matters is whether your philosophy produces a model that predicts how people actually act, rather than how they wish they acted, or how they justify their own actions to themselves. The risk/reward model does this fairly well, at least with economic and property crimes, and therefore seems far more likely.
The problem these solve is twofold.
Problem One is how do you get to all your data, when you might use five or six computers during the course of a week? Rather than having to carry around a laptop/keychain-drive/floppy, D&S lets you sit down at any internet-enabled computer and access all your stuff. You don't need to worry about having the applications installed, or the right copy of that document; it's all on the server, along with the applications.
Problem Two is collaboration. There are some existing solutions for working on documents collaboratively, but generally they're either complicated to set up, inelegant (no WYSIWIG editing, e.g., most Wikis), expensive (MS SharePoint), or all of the above. Google provides a way for geographically separated people to work on the same document, without having to roll out any infrastructure.
As a trivial example, I used a Google document a few months ago to put together my family's gift list for the holidays. (Leaving the obvious neuroses of my family out of this, suffice it to say that we're big on lists.) I created a list, and then sent invitations to various people, who added items to their section of the list. At the end, anyone could look and see what everyone else wanted. Doing that over email would have been a huge mess; I would have had to send out multiple copies and carefully re-merge them with a master, in order to maintain the versioning and make sure information didn't get lost.
Although I wouldn't be comfortable putting corporate proprietary information on a service like Google's, but for Christmas and grocery lists, it's pretty neat. It's far from perfect (see my previous comment in this thread), but it's one of the best no-setup, free-as-in-beer collaborative systems I've found.
The ability to integrate Gmail and D&S could be a big advantage, but frankly I've been a bit disappointed that they haven't leveraged it more obviously.
Case in point: a few days ago someone emailed me a DOC file. Why isn't there an option to open it in D&S? It'll view it as HTML, or Download it, but what I'd really like would be one-click to turn it into an editable, publishable document. As it was, I had to download it, then re-upload it to D&S in order to produce an editable version. Not a huge problem, but if I had been on a computer where I wasn't allowed to save documents, it would have been. It's just stupid to make me pull a document down to my local machine from one Google server, only to upload it back to another Google server a minute later.
Also, when you do have a document open in D&S, why isn't there an option to email a copy to someone? Okay, I know I can invite them to edit it online, and I could always publish it and send them an invite, but why not something where I can send them a DOC version as an email attachment? That's a lot easier for many people to deal with. And while we're at it, how about some form of change tracking that would let me email a copy to someone, let them edit it offline, and then a way to re-import it to D&S (via the one-click, above) so that it would be change-tracked, as if they had logged-in to edit it? Expecting everyone to have a Google ID to edit documents is ridiculous. I can't convince everyone in my family to get Google IDs, much less everyone I'd like to share documents with, everywhere.
I think it's a great service, and a great start. But it has a long way to go, even within becoming part of Google's "suite" of services.
Where do you get that from? The cassette recorder on my home stereo has no such feature neither does the VCR in the attic.
I think the assumption was that cassette recorders were inherently such a lossy, low-quality recording, that their "copy protection" was in the generation loss that would naturally occur if a person made a copy of a recorded tape. Within a few generations, it would become unlistenable, or at least severely degraded.
Now, that's not exactly a "second generation" block, but it seemed to suit the courts and the music industry fine.
As far as video, there they were more stringent. Depending on how old that VCR is, it probably has Macrovision, which is essentially a mandatory "analog DRM" (ARM?) system that causes the recorder's tracking to go haywire if it detects a copyrighted signal. It's admittedly not present on early VCRs, but most of them don't produce a particularly good recording (don't have HiFi sound, etc.) unless they're professional models, so it's not a big risk.
Not sure either of those cases are really good ones to be bringing up.
It's not "standard," but there are places that do it. Generally small campuses, or ones that didn't build-out wired infrastructure when they should have, and are now trying to catch up and be 'wired' using 802.11 as a substitute for a real copper network.
I know there are quite a few schools deploying it strategically, which seems like a good plan. It only takes a few minutes walking around a college campus to realize that there are a few key places where wireless would be most useful, and a lot of places where it would probably be underutilized. Libraries are huge -- go into any uni library and you'll see rows of people typing away on laptops. If you can't afford to put an Ethernet drop at every study carroll, wireless is the next best thing. (Well, actually, both would be best.) Study lounges and communal spaces are probably next, followed by cafeterias and big lecture halls (if you want to encourage people to use laptops in class; some schools might have faculty that would rather discourage that). In warm climates, outdoor locations can be great locations for Wifi, too.
But deploying it all over a large campus would, for most schools, be impractical. It would take too many base stations and would cost too much for the number of users you'd probably have at a time on most of them. I think if you did roll it out everywhere, you'd probably find pretty quickly that some nodes took huge amounts of load, while others were basically never used. For this reason, most large places with a competent IT staff don't just shotgun it all over campus, but are more selective.
sorry, dude(?) but corporations have been afforded personhood due to rulings on the 14th ammendment
Er, no. Corporations have some of the same rights as natural persons, but they're not legally the same thing. They're entities insofar as the ownership of property and taxes are concerned, but they can't vote.
Neither Sam Palmisano nor Bill Gates can walk down to the polls on November 2nd and vote twice, once for themselves and once as a proxy for the corporations they run; it just doesn't work that way. (And for obvious good reason.)
That's not to say that corporations cannot benefit from government; if a corporation has a positive impact on a great number of people, it makes sense that those people might vote in a way that's helpful to a corporation. This is totally fair, and there's nothing undemocratic about it. But when you let corporations begin to influence the political process directly, you start going down a dangerous path: it gives some people what amounts to a double vote -- once as individual citizens (natural persons) and again via the corporation they control. It would be trivial, if we allowed corporations to vote, to set up hundreds of shell corporations and multiply your power, at the cost of $500 a pop (or whatever the registration fee is in states like Nevada that have lax regulations for incorporation).
So there are good and obvious reasons why we create a distinction between natural persons and the legal entities of corporations; allowing them to play politics is anathema to the very concept of one-person-one-vote democracy.
Political action committees, which are strictly not-for-profit and take donations from individuals, pool them, and use them to influence public policy, are another thing entirely. They are the essence of democracy, and really should be thought of as miniature, single-issue political parties. Anything that individual, natural persons are allowed to do, they should be allowed to do.
Actually, there was a third issue that didn't get talked about very much this week, and was being pushed by the Democrats. I think it might have gotten passed, too. (No surprise there; it's not like the Republicans really have any backbone, or scruples, either.)
The issue is about the definition of a "lobbyist." The Democrats started off from a good premise -- something needs to be done about lobbying and the corporate/big-money influence on politics. Fair enough. However, where you should probably start getting skeptical is when you hear a bunch of people who were just elected due to the help of said corporate cash seemingly railing against it. Something just ain't kosher there.
Below the surface of the "lobbying reform" was a pretty obvious goal: it was all about chiseling away at the Republican power base -- big, ideologically driven social organizations, churches in particular -- while leaving Democratic ones (smaller PACs, unions) intact. The new law puts the same limits on a volunteer- and donation-driven organizations, which represent people with a certain set of beliefs, as K Street lobbying firms for corporations.
Now, I don't necessarily agree with their agenda, but there is a vast difference between a Tobacco-Industry lobbyist, and the Southern Baptist Convention. The former doesn't represent the views of any actual people, only a corporation -- an entity which, for good reason, doesn't vote and shouldn't have any direct involvement in the political process -- while the latter is simply a group of interested persons attempting to influence policy in the manner they see fit.
By painting both groups with the same brush, the Democrats completely missed the boat, and have probably created more harm than good. They had an opportunity to push corporations out of politics, while allowing regular people to stay in, but they ignored it. Rather than calling both groups "lobbyists," it would have been just as easy to create a distinction between a "lobbyist" who works for hire and can take funding from anywhere, and a "Political Action Committee," who is funded by donations from private individuals and exists for the sole purpose of furthering their views. This would have the effect of regulating corporate cash and campaign contributions, but also not impinging on people's rights to pool their resources in order to have a say in government.
Instead, the Democrats used their new-found power as an opportunity to gerrymander on a grand scale, and proved that they are no better than the Republicans; the only reason they seemed like it over the past few years, is because they weren't in position to do as much damage.
Well assumedly this is what Sun would like -- if Solaris became the dominant kernel, rather than Linux, by moving to GPLv3 when Linux is stuck with v2.
In reality I think the opposite is more likely, Solaris Tools + GNU userland on a Linux kernel, but it's still fun to speculate. I don't really know enough about the Solaris kernel to make any claims of technical superiority or inferiority either way. I do think it would be neat, in some geek-ish way, to have another kernel...but most users are going to stick with whatever the majority uses.