They just sent me an update to my DSL terms of service, generously telling me that if I commit to two years of service and within that two years they stop offering DSL service in my neighborhood, I won't be charged an early termination fee! So, it's a good news/bad news kind of situation.
Translation: I'd like to cash in on Arrington's hard work.
I have no reason to doubt that Arrington is being screwed here, and that he does in fact have intellectual property rights that are being trampled on, but how much hard work did he actually do on this thing? My understanding is that he mostly said, "I want this thing with these specs at this price, make it happen" and his manufacturing partner is the one that actually built it.
Arrington is providing (a) his services as a sort of ideal end-user (i.e. if this one tech-savvy guy really, really wants a thing that works exactly like this, there's probably a market for it) and (b) a ready-made market in the shape of his extensive and influential (in tech circles) audience. The latter indeed took hard work to amass, but he's not the one who actually built the CrunchPad.
Apple isn't telling you you aren't allowed to do this, in the sense that they're siccing the power of the state on you to stop you from doing it. They're just making their products such that you can't do this, or at least that it's more difficult. This may make their products less valuable to you, and make you less likely to purchase them! Presumably they have weighed this lost of revenue against the revenue stream they get from selling hardware and have decided they like the latter better.
I imagine that there might be interesting results that come from putting objects into an environment where you don't control all the variables. I've heard of cases where the robots end up using features of their own hardware (which is generally cobbled together from off the shelf parts) that the researchers never anticipated.
One question that intrigues me is just how human-readable the code produced by such genetic algorithms is. Some of the practical promise of this work is that it produces problem-solving code in ways very difficult from that of human programmers -- but how can such code be maintained by humans? It's a bit like making an engineer try to figure out how your lower intestine works.
There are already compiled-from-Flash iPhone OS apps available in the app store. Apple has a deserved reputation for being hyper-controlling in many areas around the iPhone, but this isn't one of them. They don't care about the history of your code, as long as the final compiled version meets the iPhone requirements. Flash isn't the only language that's been ported, either -- there are tools that will turn your Java and.Net code into iPhone apps as well.
Of course, the ported apps tend to suck, because they don't have access to native iPhone UI widgets, but Apple isn't stopping them or anything.
I think he's actually referring to OS X, which (theoretically, anyway) only runs on Apple hardware? You might not agree that OS X is worth the premium, but most Apple purchasers apparently do.
It's not ludicrously old, but: my DSL modem died a few months ago (my own fault -- if it has air vents in it, they may actually be there for a reason, not just to look cool and futuristic). I went into a bit of a panic, because, really, where does one get a DSL modem, especially if one suddenly has no Internet access? I feared calling Verizon would result in long delays, pricey expenditures, and/or bafflement.
Fortunately, a friend of mine up the street who I knew to be a bit of a tech hoarder still had his, even though he had switched to line-of-site wireless years ago. The modem was nearly 10 years old, and twice as big as the one I'd been using, but sure enough I just plugged it into my phone line and worked great -- same speeds I was getting with the old modem (2.8M down, 600K up). I was sort of shocked that something that old could just plug in to my current set up with no changes, but I suppose there haven't exactly been great strides in DSL technologies over the past decade or so.
Probably blocked everything VoIP related to force airphones on you.
Except that most airplanes removed airphones long ago, since they never really worked economically. Certainly Virgin America's brand-new planes won't have them.
They probably blocked everything VoIP related so that the people next to you don't throttle you for shouting in to your fucking Bluetooth headset while they're trying to read, sleep, or otherwise try to ignore you.
I'm not any kind of gamer, but if you accept that video games are a legitmate form of artistic expression enjoyed by a growing number of people (and you're an idiot if you don't), the idea that interviewing insurgents is somehow sinister is ludicrous. Would it be evil for a filmmaker making a movie about Fallujah to interview people on both sides of the fight?
Plus, I hate to break it to people, but a lot of the guys the Americans were fighting in 2004 and 2005 in the Sunni Triangle were later recruited into the Awakening Movement, which then turned against foreign fighters and our now allies (albeit uneasy ones) with the US military. Enemy of my enemy, shifting alliances, etc.
I interpret that as meaning "can get broadband of some sort if they chose to pay for it"; if that's the case, then the numbers given for cities and suburbs are shockingly low -- so low, in fact, that I don't believe that the phrase means what it appears to mean. I'd guess they mean "actually have broadband in their home," in which case the figure cited for rural areas in meaningless if we're talking about potential broadband penetration.
This is not a recent discovery; you're talking about Amenhotep IV, aka Akhnaten, and his place in Egyptian history has been well understood for centuries. Freud went so far as to theorize that Moses was actually a disgruntled Egyptian follower of Aknaten who left the country when the traditional Egyptian religion was restored.
And by the way, Akhnaten's God was embodied by the sun, not the son. The pun only works in English, which the Egyptians, you know, didn't speak.
I'm not one to worship at the altar of the mainstream media, nor do I think that the mainstream media always does its job. That being said... there is a big difference between immediate stories where people most want to see what's happening now (e.g., Where in Mumbai are terror attacks occurring? What does New Orleans or Sumatra look like as the floodwaters rush in?) and more in-depth reporting on how and why the events happen (e.g., could FEMA have taken a stronger hand in the days after the hurricane hit? Were those who attacked Mumbai trained in Pakistan or home-grown?). The latter types of stories immensely benefit from the experience of a reporter who has extensive contacts in the area under question, who knows who to call and what the background is for events, and who doesn't have to deal with some other day job while tracking down the story.
They didn't file a criminal tresspass complaint; they sued them for civil damages. You can see why, though; presumably fines for tresspassing are relatively negligable, probably in the range of three or four digits, so it's not like they'd change Google's behavior. Of course, $25K is equally peanuts for them.
Off-topic, but... does anyone know if there's any such thing as a notebook that has basic netbook specs, but is a bit bigger? Yeah, I know, the smallness is supposed to be the whole point, but... my second laptop (an IBM-era ThinkPad) is getting a bit long in the tooth and somewhat flaky. All it's ever used for these days is Web surfing and occasional word processing, and I'd love to replace it with a sub-$500 machine... but my wife watches video on it quite a bit and doesn't particularly want to squint at a 9- or 10-inch screen (the current laptop is 14 inch). I know that LCD prices add some to the final cost, but is there a netbook-quality 13- or 14-inch laptop out there for not too much more than a netbook?
The problem is that in deflationary periods incomes drop as well as prices, either by direct cuts in salaries or layoffs followed by new jobs that don't pay as well; otherwise everyone would be rich, by magic, which never happens. Thus my family's outstanding mortgage -- currently a fairly reasonable 120 percent or so of our annual income -- would become more and more of a burden.
Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion and prosperity due to the dominance of the knowledge content of products and services. The greatest gains continue to be in the value of the stock market. Price deflation concerned economists in the early '00 years, but they quickly realized it was a good thing. The high-tech community pointed out that significant deflation had existed in the computer hardware and software industries for many years earlier without detriment.
The Dow Jones is currently a bit below where it was in '99; even before the recent crash (which may turn out to be one of these "occasional corrections", who knows) it was only up about 20 percent, which is a pretty poor 10-year investment. But heck, I'll forgive the usual techie stock market triumphalism. What I want to know is, does any sane person think that overall price deflation isn't terrible for the economy? It's crushing to anyone in any significant amount of debt (i.e. anyone who holds a mortgage).
Re:Something wrong with the movie
on
New Star Trek Trailer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
God, I can't believe I'm replying to a Slashdot post about Star Trek chronology (it's like a black hole of nerdery) but the Trek series producers have always said that only stuff that's actually referenced on-screen is canon, and actual A.D. dates were never referenced on screen during the Original Series era. I'm not sure where you got those dates from, but I'll bet they're from books or some other non-canon source.
In Star Trek III, a Starfleet Admiral, explaining why the ship is being mothballed, says that the Enterprise is "over twenty years old" or something along those lines. Assuming that Kirk is 50 or so at that point, and 25 in this movie, that works well enough.
Yeah, but that's insider stuff for geeks. As far as Microsoft's branding was concerned, they were three separate OSes. Importantly, if I'm remembering right Windows 98 wasn't a free upgrade from Windows 95, for example.
Um, dude, all this happened under the (Republican) Ehrlich Administration. The head of the state police is a political appointee, and the policies were put into place under Gov. Ehrlich's pick for the post.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but the state police (which was doing the monitoring discussed here) is under the control of the state governor's office, and during the period under question the governor was a republican. The state police is not under the control of city governments, and does not have to consult with the Baltimore City government even if it's operating in Baltimore.
It's not the content that put me to sleep, it was the delivery style. The exact same sentences, maybe with minor modification, could have been delivered like someone talking, not someone reading off of a page. There was just a certain unpunctuated "dot-de-dot-de-dot-de-daaaah, dot-de-dot-de-dot-de-DAAAHHH" quality to it that actually made it harder for me to focus.
It is of course just possible that people's expectations of public oration have changed so radically that what would have seemed electrifying then seems bland to me. That's one of the interesting things about these early sound recordings, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
They just sent me an update to my DSL terms of service, generously telling me that if I commit to two years of service and within that two years they stop offering DSL service in my neighborhood, I won't be charged an early termination fee! So, it's a good news/bad news kind of situation.
Translation: I'd like to cash in on Arrington's hard work.
I have no reason to doubt that Arrington is being screwed here, and that he does in fact have intellectual property rights that are being trampled on, but how much hard work did he actually do on this thing? My understanding is that he mostly said, "I want this thing with these specs at this price, make it happen" and his manufacturing partner is the one that actually built it.
Arrington is providing (a) his services as a sort of ideal end-user (i.e. if this one tech-savvy guy really, really wants a thing that works exactly like this, there's probably a market for it) and (b) a ready-made market in the shape of his extensive and influential (in tech circles) audience. The latter indeed took hard work to amass, but he's not the one who actually built the CrunchPad.
"the Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX)"
I wasn't aware that defense contractors were mostly staffed by 12-year-olds.
Apple isn't telling you you aren't allowed to do this, in the sense that they're siccing the power of the state on you to stop you from doing it. They're just making their products such that you can't do this, or at least that it's more difficult. This may make their products less valuable to you, and make you less likely to purchase them! Presumably they have weighed this lost of revenue against the revenue stream they get from selling hardware and have decided they like the latter better.
I imagine that there might be interesting results that come from putting objects into an environment where you don't control all the variables. I've heard of cases where the robots end up using features of their own hardware (which is generally cobbled together from off the shelf parts) that the researchers never anticipated.
One question that intrigues me is just how human-readable the code produced by such genetic algorithms is. Some of the practical promise of this work is that it produces problem-solving code in ways very difficult from that of human programmers -- but how can such code be maintained by humans? It's a bit like making an engineer try to figure out how your lower intestine works.
There are already compiled-from-Flash iPhone OS apps available in the app store. Apple has a deserved reputation for being hyper-controlling in many areas around the iPhone, but this isn't one of them. They don't care about the history of your code, as long as the final compiled version meets the iPhone requirements. Flash isn't the only language that's been ported, either -- there are tools that will turn your Java and .Net code into iPhone apps as well.
Of course, the ported apps tend to suck, because they don't have access to native iPhone UI widgets, but Apple isn't stopping them or anything.
I think he's actually referring to OS X, which (theoretically, anyway) only runs on Apple hardware? You might not agree that OS X is worth the premium, but most Apple purchasers apparently do.
Gladwell's article has been pretty thorougly debunked by people who actually know about sports.
http://deadspin.com/5239721/malcolm-gladwell-wants-to-know-why-your-team-doesnt-press-more
Only on Slashdot would this be modded +5 Insightful.
It's not ludicrously old, but: my DSL modem died a few months ago (my own fault -- if it has air vents in it, they may actually be there for a reason, not just to look cool and futuristic). I went into a bit of a panic, because, really, where does one get a DSL modem, especially if one suddenly has no Internet access? I feared calling Verizon would result in long delays, pricey expenditures, and/or bafflement.
Fortunately, a friend of mine up the street who I knew to be a bit of a tech hoarder still had his, even though he had switched to line-of-site wireless years ago. The modem was nearly 10 years old, and twice as big as the one I'd been using, but sure enough I just plugged it into my phone line and worked great -- same speeds I was getting with the old modem (2.8M down, 600K up). I was sort of shocked that something that old could just plug in to my current set up with no changes, but I suppose there haven't exactly been great strides in DSL technologies over the past decade or so.
Probably blocked everything VoIP related to force airphones on you.
Except that most airplanes removed airphones long ago, since they never really worked economically. Certainly Virgin America's brand-new planes won't have them.
They probably blocked everything VoIP related so that the people next to you don't throttle you for shouting in to your fucking Bluetooth headset while they're trying to read, sleep, or otherwise try to ignore you.
I'm not any kind of gamer, but if you accept that video games are a legitmate form of artistic expression enjoyed by a growing number of people (and you're an idiot if you don't), the idea that interviewing insurgents is somehow sinister is ludicrous. Would it be evil for a filmmaker making a movie about Fallujah to interview people on both sides of the fight?
Plus, I hate to break it to people, but a lot of the guys the Americans were fighting in 2004 and 2005 in the Sunni Triangle were later recruited into the Awakening Movement, which then turned against foreign fighters and our now allies (albeit uneasy ones) with the US military. Enemy of my enemy, shifting alliances, etc.
I interpret that as meaning "can get broadband of some sort if they chose to pay for it"; if that's the case, then the numbers given for cities and suburbs are shockingly low -- so low, in fact, that I don't believe that the phrase means what it appears to mean. I'd guess they mean "actually have broadband in their home," in which case the figure cited for rural areas in meaningless if we're talking about potential broadband penetration.
This is not a recent discovery; you're talking about Amenhotep IV, aka Akhnaten, and his place in Egyptian history has been well understood for centuries. Freud went so far as to theorize that Moses was actually a disgruntled Egyptian follower of Aknaten who left the country when the traditional Egyptian religion was restored.
And by the way, Akhnaten's God was embodied by the sun, not the son. The pun only works in English, which the Egyptians, you know, didn't speak.
And do you have to explain how sex works to a nine-year-old every time they encounter a straight couple?
A simple "most boys want to marry girls, but some want to marry boys" will probably do the trick. It's about relationships, not body parts.
I'm not one to worship at the altar of the mainstream media, nor do I think that the mainstream media always does its job. That being said ... there is a big difference between immediate stories where people most want to see what's happening now (e.g., Where in Mumbai are terror attacks occurring? What does New Orleans or Sumatra look like as the floodwaters rush in?) and more in-depth reporting on how and why the events happen (e.g., could FEMA have taken a stronger hand in the days after the hurricane hit? Were those who attacked Mumbai trained in Pakistan or home-grown?). The latter types of stories immensely benefit from the experience of a reporter who has extensive contacts in the area under question, who knows who to call and what the background is for events, and who doesn't have to deal with some other day job while tracking down the story.
They didn't file a criminal tresspass complaint; they sued them for civil damages. You can see why, though; presumably fines for tresspassing are relatively negligable, probably in the range of three or four digits, so it's not like they'd change Google's behavior. Of course, $25K is equally peanuts for them.
Off-topic, but ... does anyone know if there's any such thing as a notebook that has basic netbook specs, but is a bit bigger? Yeah, I know, the smallness is supposed to be the whole point, but ... my second laptop (an IBM-era ThinkPad) is getting a bit long in the tooth and somewhat flaky. All it's ever used for these days is Web surfing and occasional word processing, and I'd love to replace it with a sub-$500 machine ... but my wife watches video on it quite a bit and doesn't particularly want to squint at a 9- or 10-inch screen (the current laptop is 14 inch). I know that LCD prices add some to the final cost, but is there a netbook-quality 13- or 14-inch laptop out there for not too much more than a netbook?
The problem is that in deflationary periods incomes drop as well as prices, either by direct cuts in salaries or layoffs followed by new jobs that don't pay as well; otherwise everyone would be rich, by magic, which never happens. Thus my family's outstanding mortgage -- currently a fairly reasonable 120 percent or so of our annual income -- would become more and more of a burden.
Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion and prosperity due to the dominance of the knowledge content of products and services. The greatest gains continue to be in the value of the stock market. Price deflation concerned economists in the early '00 years, but they quickly realized it was a good thing. The high-tech community pointed out that significant deflation had existed in the computer hardware and software industries for many years earlier without detriment.
The Dow Jones is currently a bit below where it was in '99; even before the recent crash (which may turn out to be one of these "occasional corrections", who knows) it was only up about 20 percent, which is a pretty poor 10-year investment. But heck, I'll forgive the usual techie stock market triumphalism. What I want to know is, does any sane person think that overall price deflation isn't terrible for the economy? It's crushing to anyone in any significant amount of debt (i.e. anyone who holds a mortgage).
God, I can't believe I'm replying to a Slashdot post about Star Trek chronology (it's like a black hole of nerdery) but the Trek series producers have always said that only stuff that's actually referenced on-screen is canon, and actual A.D. dates were never referenced on screen during the Original Series era. I'm not sure where you got those dates from, but I'll bet they're from books or some other non-canon source.
In Star Trek III, a Starfleet Admiral, explaining why the ship is being mothballed, says that the Enterprise is "over twenty years old" or something along those lines. Assuming that Kirk is 50 or so at that point, and 25 in this movie, that works well enough.
Yeah, but that's insider stuff for geeks. As far as Microsoft's branding was concerned, they were three separate OSes. Importantly, if I'm remembering right Windows 98 wasn't a free upgrade from Windows 95, for example.
Um, dude, all this happened under the (Republican) Ehrlich Administration. The head of the state police is a political appointee, and the policies were put into place under Gov. Ehrlich's pick for the post.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but the state police (which was doing the monitoring discussed here) is under the control of the state governor's office, and during the period under question the governor was a republican. The state police is not under the control of city governments, and does not have to consult with the Baltimore City government even if it's operating in Baltimore.
It's not the content that put me to sleep, it was the delivery style. The exact same sentences, maybe with minor modification, could have been delivered like someone talking, not someone reading off of a page. There was just a certain unpunctuated "dot-de-dot-de-dot-de-daaaah, dot-de-dot-de-dot-de-DAAAHHH" quality to it that actually made it harder for me to focus.
It is of course just possible that people's expectations of public oration have changed so radically that what would have seemed electrifying then seems bland to me. That's one of the interesting things about these early sound recordings, I guess.