You're talking about a country where cheesecake has to carry a dairy-allergy warning and where chocolate bars that are clearly made with peanuts carry a label that they "may contain nuts."
To be fair, I accidentally included the fee for the static IP address, so a "regular" consumer would be paying about $35 for my link.
$70 will get you 25Mbps downloads, but for what? I could see that for a shared link household, but for one person?
Even if I got back into torrent downloads of everything that looks even remotely interesting, I don't think I could consume enough bandwidth to justify a 25Mbps link.
It's far from the first time someone has been busted for "thrill seeking" by shoplifting or theft.
Wynona Ryder comes to mind. A very pretty lady and talented actress, yet she felt some inexplicable urge to pilfer things she could have paid for with pocket change.
...connectivity costs have been unsustainably low for at least a decade now.
Not at all. Take a look at the price of long distance packages or basic phone service.
The shift to IP based systems has saved the telcos and ISPs billions of dollars, which they've reaped as profits for shareholders instead of investing in infrastructure. The fact that the infrastructure has not kept up is not due to a shortage of profit, but an excess of profit. That money should have been invested in long term growth instead of being paid out.
Take a look at Saskatchewan. We have more miles of cable and wiring per capita than pretty much anywhere else in North America (we only have a little over a million people/potential customers in the whole province.) Due to a government mandate to SaskTel, the "preferred supplier" (and not a monopoly), over 98% of our population has access to high speed internet, whether via landline or wireless services.
Even for a wireless link, you can get unlimited bandwidth for about $60/month for your smart device. I pay about $45-50/month for a 6.5Mbit down/700Kbit up DSL link. There are no caps, no monitoring, and no filtering.
Yet SaskTel turned in one of their most profitable years of all time for 2010, despite the "huge" infrastructure investments they were mandated to make over the years.
The same is not the case in Ontario, for example, where a similiar link would cost me close to $100/month and come with caps. But Ontario is a "free market" province, so the providers cherry-pick the populated centers, screw the rural customers, and reap huge profits at the expense of the people's access.
Check out the results of metered access in the UK. Within 5 years, people were so paranoid about running over their limits that the market collapsed. Even those who were willing to pay for outrageously large bundles were being hit with overage charges, and people became afraid to use their internet access.
Some providers brought back "all you can eat" packages and cleaned up on the market.
The same will happen in the US.
Unless, of course, the oligopoly is strong enough to ensure that no provider runs their links without caps and overage charges. And given the lure of the almighty dollar and the gleam in shareholder's eyes south of the border, I'm pretty sure the oligopoly will hold together well enough to thoroughly screw over the consumer.
As someone else noted, propping up the ISPs and telcos means that other businesses that depend on bandwidth suffer: Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and a bazillion "me too" video and audio streaming services.
Let the telcos who didn't invest die a slow and painful death. It's the only way the market will open up to companies that put a higher priority on planning for the future. If you let the companies who nickeled and dimed on infrastructure gouge you for profit now, you're rewarding their incompetence and poor planning, and you'll only get more of the same.
Last week I did an XP re-install to do the last testing on some mouse/trackball issues I've been having (after the system got nuked by another problem, making it "safe" to do an XP reinstall -- I'd already lost the system.)
It took over 12 hours to install all the updates and service packs, core software, and I was nowhere near done with getting it ready to use.
Having diagnosed and corrected the hardware issue (an infected "smart" device that was using USB protocols to autoload an infection), I gave Ubuntu 12.04 another shot. (I'd previously written it off due to problems that were caused by the infected hardware.)
It took under 4 hours to install and configure everything I need except the database servers.
Now granted, XP is old and there were a lot of patches it had to install, but that's not really what caused the delays. What caused the delays was the endless cycle of reboots during the install process. WIth Ubuntu, I rebooted once -- when the kernel update was installed. I lost count of the XP reboots after 10.
I found Vista to be no better the last time I installed it.
The Windows 7 Ultimate install I did for a customer a few months ago also took a day and a half to go from raw system to fully functional.
Let's face it -- either Windows is horrendously designed and really requires all these reboots, or the third-party product vendors are hell bent on making people HATE windows just for giggles.
Personally, I can't imagine why anything other than a driver update or an anti-virus install should need a reboot. WTF can Adobe Reader POSSIBLY be doing to the system to require a reboot, for example? There is absolutely NO functionality for a PDF viewer that should require kernel-level integration.
By the way, beware the "restore" drive images on machines. As I've learned (the painful way), doing a restore with such an image also restores all the crapware you spent a day removing...
Hmm. It seems I misunderstood what the patent is trying to do.
Rather than embed popups and stuff in the video stream, they're trying to associate what you've watched with products that were placed in those particular shows.
I have to admit I've never seen anyone try to do that before. Largely, I think, because most advertisers and retailers realize consumers would hit the roof to have their viewing habits tracked and correlated in such a fashion.
Talk about an invasion of privacy! This makes tracking cookies almost palatable in comparison.
There has long been a push by the media companies to find a way to tie in product placement advertising from shows to real product sales options. I believe there have even been a few attempts when internet-enabled TVs first came out to pop up "click here for more info" notices during the product placements, similar to what was shown on various science fiction movies in the '80s (e.g. Total Recall.)
I suppose if they have a specific technology for delivering a side-band information payload, they might have grounds for a patent.
Some developers need specs that are so detailed you may as well just write the code. When I work with a developer, whether in-house or outsourced, I expect them to come up with the implementation algorithms from high level specifications. The only time I've ever included a detailed algorithm specification was when there was a legal requirement for a particular style of calculation to be used (the financial services industry.)
However, my experience has been that most outsourcers will send their senior staff to your meetings and to collect requirements, and then turn loose a horde of poorly trained junior programmers when it comes time to write the actual code. The senior people you respected at the design meetings are "too valuable" to write code, and rarely get involved beyond the specifications.
But this isn't a new problem. Just look at the long and failure-littered path of large projects over the years that have hit the news involving firms like EDS or Anderson Consulting. Offshoring adds time zone and language barriers, but the whole consulting industry has a history of bilking customers by billing out intermediate and senior rates while paying juniors to do the work.
Several posters say "You get what you pay for."
That's not necessarily true. That's why such firms have been sued for failure to deliver in the past.
There is an easy way to implement such algorithms if you're manufacturing your own equipment: include a tube circuit in the pre-amp. Tubes naturally have electric "mass" that has to be "moved" by the changing signal strength, smoothing out the raw digitial samples into a proper analogue curve. There used to be a few high-end CD players that incorporated mini tubes, and they sounded far more natural and less harsh than pure digital signals.
When dealing with digital inputs, too much accuracy in the audio stream produces harshness and digital fatigue.
If you treat the incoming 44.1 or 48 KHz stream of incoming signals as points on a curve, and apply Curve Fitting calculations to interpolate the intervening data points, you can mathematically recreate some of the detail.
However, this isn't necessarily accurate data -- it's just recreated, the same as when you expand a picture. But like a picture, there are different algorithms and techniques for doing the upsampling, and they "colour" the sound much as an upscaled photo may have jaggies or appear a little blurry.
What I find more interesting is the idea of combining curve approximation with a point mass. You treat the current sample as a point in time, and use acceleration curves to make the "mass" travel a path that intersects all the sample points. If your calculated mass correlates to the actual mass of the drivers in your speakers and the air they move, it should result in a more accurate recreation of the original sound curve.
In fact, I believe Mobile Fidelity got in some hot water with the USG for using just such an approach to encoding 44.1 audio disks, and had to sign a non-disclosure promising they wouldn't use the algorithms for anything other than audio processing. Apparently the USG developed similar algorithms for cruise missile guidance (missiles have mass), so even though it's an obvious and purely physical phenomena being modelled, it's a "military secret.":D
It'll be interesting to see if the various DVD ripping, copying, and resizing tools sold in stores today are still legal for sale post-C-11.
Our rights in Canada to transcode and back up media have been enshrined by the courts for decades (I remember hearing about cases when I was still in high school, and that's well over 30 years ago now.) The very idea that it's "illegal" to decrypt data in order to back it up goes against our established rights to transcode.
Search for the cases in the 70's and 80's involving people making cassettes of vinyl records to use in their cars and walkmans. It may not be digital transcoding, but those were the cases that established our rights.
And look into the CDR levy in Canada -- the "deal" that the music industry made to "tax" blank media in order to recoup their "losses" due to piracy. The net result of that sign-on was to make it legally acceptable for people to make copies of CDs for their own use, the same as had been previously the case for cassettes.
I can see the issue for shared resources like wireless transmissions or cable SHUBS, but with DSL I feel absolutely no guilt about "torrenting all night" or downloading and uploading gobs of software and data.
With my land link, I pay for a data pipe. Period. I chose the package based on it's speed and capacity. Some months I'd go way over the 250G cap that seems common with many ISPs (I can pull down a good 10G in a day at times), other months I'd be way under.
I can't imagine ever opting for a "capped" plan that arbitrarily decides that I'm a "bad" user that needs to be screwed in the wallet unless I had absolutely no other choice.
Fortunately I'm not aware of any ISPs in Saskatchewan that implement caps. SaskTel even offers unlimited wireless device data for less than $60/month. I don't think they even have a package with a cap.
But that's what happens when you have a government-sponsored "monopoly" that is mandated with providing access to the whole province. In order to stay in business at all under provincial regulations, SaskTel has to provide equal access to everyone in the province. And that implies that their wireless customers have the same "all you can eat" rights (and yes, it is a provincial right!) as the land-line customers.
There are competitors to SaskTel, but SaskTel owns the market in the province because they provide the coverage and bandwidth to earn the market. They may have been dragged kicking and screaming into providing that access to the province, but they're reaping the benefits now -- they're a consistently profitable company and they don't have thousands of customers up in arms and screaming about being "raped" by their providers as seems to be so common elsewhere.
Saskatchewan has long taken the attitude that some services and resources are natural monopolies. Rather than fight against the idea of there being anything resembling a monopoly, we created government sponsored monopolies and regulated the shit out of them instead of letting corporations cherry-pick the most profitable market segments and leave the rest of the province screwed.
I can't think of any "meritocratic" groups in existence that don't have the US and sometimes Russia or Canada with a veto over the decisions of the body, ala the UN. We don't know if a meritocratic group could or would function, because we've never had one. The US and others have always insisted on having a "final say" through a veto, as if their form of "democracy" is inherently better than others despite the wide spread and blatant corruption caused by lobbying and well-heeled lobbyists.
There is one difference between US and Indian attempts to censor the internet. The USG is clearly in the pockets of big media and industry, targetting sites which distribute "pirated" materials and "fake" products.
On December 5, 2011, The New York Times' India Ink reported that the Indian government had asked several social media sites and internet companies, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo, to "prescreen user content from India and to remove disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory content before it goes online."[26] Top officials from the Indian units of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook had several meetings with Kapil Sibal, India’s acting telecommunications minister to discuss the issue in recent months, India Ink reported. In one meeting, Mr. Sibal asked these companies "to use human beings to screen content, not technology," the article said.
In other words, the US "censors" activities and sites that it considers to be illegal.
India wants to censor all speech that some in their nation find "offensive."
Worse, India doesn't seem to have any sane way of describing what "offensive" speech is, leaving the entire community of barn doors open for abuse, not just their own.
Not that I'm at all impressed with US corporate/media run censorship, either. But at least the USG seems to have some rules about what they censor.
I challenge you to write the requirements for rangeCheck without the specifications ending up looking almost exactly like the code itself. You might spell out "less than" and "greater than", but other than that, a range checking function is so trivial and obvious that I've been amazed to this day that Oracle actually thought any creativity was involved in it's creativity.
Next up: Oracle claims that "for( i = 0; i < upperLimit; i++ )" is actually worthy of copyright and/or patent...
I don't think it's a problem with Facebook. I think it's a general issue of society being over-saturated with ads.
Take GM for example. They advertise on TV, radio, in magazines, in newspapers, and online through every venue available, including Facebook and YouTube. Everywhere you turn, you will see GM advertising.
People are burned out.
They don't care about supposedly "new" products that are more of the same with minor tweaks and new version numbers or names.
GM's real failure is not in their advertising, but in their products. With the sole exception of the Volt, every single vehicle they sell could be rubberstamped from a Ford, Chrysler, Honda, or other factory and the customer wouldn't know the difference if there was a GM logo on the front.
Welcome to the mainstream, GM. You're a commodity, indistinguishable from a horde of "me, too" vendors.
Please feel free to blow a few million more on another Superbowl ad that will garner you maybe a few thousand actual unit sales.
In the meantime, I will not share your YouTube videos on Facebook or "like" your page because I don't like advertising, and the only thing I get by "liking" a vendor's page is advertising posts thinly disguised as "information" that doesn't actually tell me anything useful. If you want me to shill, pay me.:P
Only a fool would astroturf for a vendor without compensation. You'd lose all your friends and get nothing in return.
And personally, the respect of friends and family is worth far more to me than you'd be willing to pay me to shill your crap.
And how many people stay up 24 hours at a stretch using a battery powered device?
Sure I can see the need for longer than a 12 hour lifetime in a few cases, like someone who's "off roading" and can't plug in while they're sleeping, but for the vast majority of the population they just need it to function while they're awake, charge while they're sleeping, and that's more than they need.
As I've never seen a battery powered portable device that requires you to shut down in order to plug in the power supply to recharge, and I've never seen one that couldn't charge while still running, your complaint is pointless nitpicking about numbers that have no practical meaning in the real world.
Unfortunately most tests aren't covering anything business related like calculating join tables and processing large volumes of relational data. Instead, they report on things business could care less about, like the time it takes to transcode a video file or it's ability to render videogame graphics.
The simple truth is that there are very few CPUs currently on the market which aren't perfectly capable of handling business application processing like document editing in a very acceptable fashion. In fact, the issue with even the "slow" CPUs is the time it takes to load and initialize an application, not in it's responsiveness once the application is loaded. That would seem to be more of a question of storage bandwidth than it would be of processor horsepower, but reviewers still blame the CPU for the performance.
For that matter, even the video playback reviews are kind of pointless. Once you have enough snort to render video without dropping frames or tearing, any extra power is pretty much pointless for video processing. While you can start turning on options in the video pipeline, the truth is the effects of those options are virtually unnoticeable unless you use a super-high resolution screen to display expanded video.
I think Windows RT is going to wake up a significant portion of the population to the benefits of low-power ARM processors in the real world.
The business market requirements are not the same as the general gaming/video market's requirements.
Mice may not live long, but genetic damage will still take the as long to occur in mice as in humans. The fact that humans live longer means the damage has longer to accumulate.
So while 5 weeks may be "20 years" for a mouse's life span, it's still only a miniscule fraction of a human's lifetime in terms of how long damage has been accumulating.
The results of this study aren't merely questionable, they're completely useless.
We have similar rights to record, transcode, and back up media in Canada.
The Harpercrite goobermint is trying to enact a DMCA-type clause, which violates our rights to make backups and to transcode media. The argument against the legislation is that even the use of encryption violates our rights to record and transcode data, never mind how much more of a violation it would be to make it illegal to break the encryption.
Here's hoping both our nations can kick big media's arse once again as we have done repeatedly in the cases over the years that enshrined our existing rights.
Not every legal system on the planet is willing to suck up to big media like the USG.
Harper wanted to deregulate our banks, which would have left us in the same mess as the US. He was stopped because he had a minority government at the time, not because he made a good decision.
Harper has consistently kow-towed to the oilpatch in Alberta at the expense of other industries in the country.
I'm going to shut up at those two points, because I have a laundry list of issues detailing how he's a failure and how the country has weathered a potential recession despite Harper, not because of him. My blood pressure doesn't need the boosting.
The '88 software didn't require any cheating like using a bright pink shirt so it would stand out from the background, either. It would track anything human-shaped that crossed it's path, and was "smart" enough to reject other 4-limbed creatures like cats or dogs.
Rather than centering on "the pink blob", it used some interesting algorithms to build up a stick figure of the object, identify the torso stick, and aim for the middle of the torso stick.
They had a lot of fun on that project. Pretty much everything except the software used to drive the graphics terminal and do the image capture had to be custom coded.
I agree. Way back in 1988, one of my university cohorts developed image analysis and recognition software that would identify a target and paint a crosshair mid-torso. Of course in the age of the VAX 780, it was far from real-time processing. But given that even "slow" computers are over 1000 times as fast nowadays, there is absolutely no excuse for the apparent processing delays in this project. (It used to take an hour to do the analysis and paint the crosshair on a graphics terminal, so with 1000 times the processing power it should be able to do it at least 16 times a second on even a P4.)
Maybe they made some bad choices for their software. My friend's work had been raw C code, not a higher level package or interpreter like MatLab.
Slashdot Mirror
You're talking about a country where cheesecake has to carry a dairy-allergy warning and where chocolate bars that are clearly made with peanuts carry a label that they "may contain nuts."
To be fair, I accidentally included the fee for the static IP address, so a "regular" consumer would be paying about $35 for my link.
$70 will get you 25Mbps downloads, but for what? I could see that for a shared link household, but for one person?
Even if I got back into torrent downloads of everything that looks even remotely interesting, I don't think I could consume enough bandwidth to justify a 25Mbps link.
It's far from the first time someone has been busted for "thrill seeking" by shoplifting or theft.
Wynona Ryder comes to mind. A very pretty lady and talented actress, yet she felt some inexplicable urge to pilfer things she could have paid for with pocket change.
Why am I not surprised it's vapourware?
Even the article's link is to a preorder info page that tells you nothing useful about this theoretical device.
Somebody spank the editors!
Not at all. Take a look at the price of long distance packages or basic phone service.
The shift to IP based systems has saved the telcos and ISPs billions of dollars, which they've reaped as profits for shareholders instead of investing in infrastructure. The fact that the infrastructure has not kept up is not due to a shortage of profit, but an excess of profit. That money should have been invested in long term growth instead of being paid out.
Take a look at Saskatchewan. We have more miles of cable and wiring per capita than pretty much anywhere else in North America (we only have a little over a million people/potential customers in the whole province.) Due to a government mandate to SaskTel, the "preferred supplier" (and not a monopoly), over 98% of our population has access to high speed internet, whether via landline or wireless services.
Even for a wireless link, you can get unlimited bandwidth for about $60/month for your smart device. I pay about $45-50/month for a 6.5Mbit down/700Kbit up DSL link. There are no caps, no monitoring, and no filtering.
Yet SaskTel turned in one of their most profitable years of all time for 2010, despite the "huge" infrastructure investments they were mandated to make over the years.
The same is not the case in Ontario, for example, where a similiar link would cost me close to $100/month and come with caps. But Ontario is a "free market" province, so the providers cherry-pick the populated centers, screw the rural customers, and reap huge profits at the expense of the people's access.
Check out the results of metered access in the UK. Within 5 years, people were so paranoid about running over their limits that the market collapsed. Even those who were willing to pay for outrageously large bundles were being hit with overage charges, and people became afraid to use their internet access.
Some providers brought back "all you can eat" packages and cleaned up on the market.
The same will happen in the US.
Unless, of course, the oligopoly is strong enough to ensure that no provider runs their links without caps and overage charges. And given the lure of the almighty dollar and the gleam in shareholder's eyes south of the border, I'm pretty sure the oligopoly will hold together well enough to thoroughly screw over the consumer.
As someone else noted, propping up the ISPs and telcos means that other businesses that depend on bandwidth suffer: Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and a bazillion "me too" video and audio streaming services.
Let the telcos who didn't invest die a slow and painful death. It's the only way the market will open up to companies that put a higher priority on planning for the future. If you let the companies who nickeled and dimed on infrastructure gouge you for profit now, you're rewarding their incompetence and poor planning, and you'll only get more of the same.
Last week I did an XP re-install to do the last testing on some mouse/trackball issues I've been having (after the system got nuked by another problem, making it "safe" to do an XP reinstall -- I'd already lost the system.)
It took over 12 hours to install all the updates and service packs, core software, and I was nowhere near done with getting it ready to use.
Having diagnosed and corrected the hardware issue (an infected "smart" device that was using USB protocols to autoload an infection), I gave Ubuntu 12.04 another shot. (I'd previously written it off due to problems that were caused by the infected hardware.)
It took under 4 hours to install and configure everything I need except the database servers.
Now granted, XP is old and there were a lot of patches it had to install, but that's not really what caused the delays. What caused the delays was the endless cycle of reboots during the install process. WIth Ubuntu, I rebooted once -- when the kernel update was installed. I lost count of the XP reboots after 10.
I found Vista to be no better the last time I installed it.
The Windows 7 Ultimate install I did for a customer a few months ago also took a day and a half to go from raw system to fully functional.
Let's face it -- either Windows is horrendously designed and really requires all these reboots, or the third-party product vendors are hell bent on making people HATE windows just for giggles.
Personally, I can't imagine why anything other than a driver update or an anti-virus install should need a reboot. WTF can Adobe Reader POSSIBLY be doing to the system to require a reboot, for example? There is absolutely NO functionality for a PDF viewer that should require kernel-level integration.
By the way, beware the "restore" drive images on machines. As I've learned (the painful way), doing a restore with such an image also restores all the crapware you spent a day removing...
Hmm. It seems I misunderstood what the patent is trying to do.
Rather than embed popups and stuff in the video stream, they're trying to associate what you've watched with products that were placed in those particular shows.
I have to admit I've never seen anyone try to do that before. Largely, I think, because most advertisers and retailers realize consumers would hit the roof to have their viewing habits tracked and correlated in such a fashion.
Talk about an invasion of privacy! This makes tracking cookies almost palatable in comparison.
There has long been a push by the media companies to find a way to tie in product placement advertising from shows to real product sales options. I believe there have even been a few attempts when internet-enabled TVs first came out to pop up "click here for more info" notices during the product placements, similar to what was shown on various science fiction movies in the '80s (e.g. Total Recall.)
I suppose if they have a specific technology for delivering a side-band information payload, they might have grounds for a patent.
But the general concept is far from original.
Some developers need specs that are so detailed you may as well just write the code. When I work with a developer, whether in-house or outsourced, I expect them to come up with the implementation algorithms from high level specifications. The only time I've ever included a detailed algorithm specification was when there was a legal requirement for a particular style of calculation to be used (the financial services industry.)
However, my experience has been that most outsourcers will send their senior staff to your meetings and to collect requirements, and then turn loose a horde of poorly trained junior programmers when it comes time to write the actual code. The senior people you respected at the design meetings are "too valuable" to write code, and rarely get involved beyond the specifications.
But this isn't a new problem. Just look at the long and failure-littered path of large projects over the years that have hit the news involving firms like EDS or Anderson Consulting. Offshoring adds time zone and language barriers, but the whole consulting industry has a history of bilking customers by billing out intermediate and senior rates while paying juniors to do the work.
Several posters say "You get what you pay for."
That's not necessarily true. That's why such firms have been sued for failure to deliver in the past.
There is an easy way to implement such algorithms if you're manufacturing your own equipment: include a tube circuit in the pre-amp. Tubes naturally have electric "mass" that has to be "moved" by the changing signal strength, smoothing out the raw digitial samples into a proper analogue curve. There used to be a few high-end CD players that incorporated mini tubes, and they sounded far more natural and less harsh than pure digital signals.
When dealing with digital inputs, too much accuracy in the audio stream produces harshness and digital fatigue.
If you treat the incoming 44.1 or 48 KHz stream of incoming signals as points on a curve, and apply Curve Fitting calculations to interpolate the intervening data points, you can mathematically recreate some of the detail.
However, this isn't necessarily accurate data -- it's just recreated, the same as when you expand a picture. But like a picture, there are different algorithms and techniques for doing the upsampling, and they "colour" the sound much as an upscaled photo may have jaggies or appear a little blurry.
What I find more interesting is the idea of combining curve approximation with a point mass. You treat the current sample as a point in time, and use acceleration curves to make the "mass" travel a path that intersects all the sample points. If your calculated mass correlates to the actual mass of the drivers in your speakers and the air they move, it should result in a more accurate recreation of the original sound curve.
In fact, I believe Mobile Fidelity got in some hot water with the USG for using just such an approach to encoding 44.1 audio disks, and had to sign a non-disclosure promising they wouldn't use the algorithms for anything other than audio processing. Apparently the USG developed similar algorithms for cruise missile guidance (missiles have mass), so even though it's an obvious and purely physical phenomena being modelled, it's a "military secret." :D
It'll be interesting to see if the various DVD ripping, copying, and resizing tools sold in stores today are still legal for sale post-C-11.
Our rights in Canada to transcode and back up media have been enshrined by the courts for decades (I remember hearing about cases when I was still in high school, and that's well over 30 years ago now.) The very idea that it's "illegal" to decrypt data in order to back it up goes against our established rights to transcode.
Search for the cases in the 70's and 80's involving people making cassettes of vinyl records to use in their cars and walkmans. It may not be digital transcoding, but those were the cases that established our rights.
And look into the CDR levy in Canada -- the "deal" that the music industry made to "tax" blank media in order to recoup their "losses" due to piracy. The net result of that sign-on was to make it legally acceptable for people to make copies of CDs for their own use, the same as had been previously the case for cassettes.
I can see the issue for shared resources like wireless transmissions or cable SHUBS, but with DSL I feel absolutely no guilt about "torrenting all night" or downloading and uploading gobs of software and data.
With my land link, I pay for a data pipe. Period. I chose the package based on it's speed and capacity. Some months I'd go way over the 250G cap that seems common with many ISPs (I can pull down a good 10G in a day at times), other months I'd be way under.
I can't imagine ever opting for a "capped" plan that arbitrarily decides that I'm a "bad" user that needs to be screwed in the wallet unless I had absolutely no other choice.
Fortunately I'm not aware of any ISPs in Saskatchewan that implement caps. SaskTel even offers unlimited wireless device data for less than $60/month. I don't think they even have a package with a cap.
But that's what happens when you have a government-sponsored "monopoly" that is mandated with providing access to the whole province. In order to stay in business at all under provincial regulations, SaskTel has to provide equal access to everyone in the province. And that implies that their wireless customers have the same "all you can eat" rights (and yes, it is a provincial right!) as the land-line customers.
There are competitors to SaskTel, but SaskTel owns the market in the province because they provide the coverage and bandwidth to earn the market. They may have been dragged kicking and screaming into providing that access to the province, but they're reaping the benefits now -- they're a consistently profitable company and they don't have thousands of customers up in arms and screaming about being "raped" by their providers as seems to be so common elsewhere.
Saskatchewan has long taken the attitude that some services and resources are natural monopolies. Rather than fight against the idea of there being anything resembling a monopoly, we created government sponsored monopolies and regulated the shit out of them instead of letting corporations cherry-pick the most profitable market segments and leave the rest of the province screwed.
I can't think of any "meritocratic" groups in existence that don't have the US and sometimes Russia or Canada with a veto over the decisions of the body, ala the UN. We don't know if a meritocratic group could or would function, because we've never had one. The US and others have always insisted on having a "final say" through a veto, as if their form of "democracy" is inherently better than others despite the wide spread and blatant corruption caused by lobbying and well-heeled lobbyists.
There is one difference between US and Indian attempts to censor the internet. The USG is clearly in the pockets of big media and industry, targetting sites which distribute "pirated" materials and "fake" products.
India, on the other hand wants Pre-screening of Internet content:
In other words, the US "censors" activities and sites that it considers to be illegal.
India wants to censor all speech that some in their nation find "offensive."
Worse, India doesn't seem to have any sane way of describing what "offensive" speech is, leaving the entire community of barn doors open for abuse, not just their own.
Not that I'm at all impressed with US corporate/media run censorship, either. But at least the USG seems to have some rules about what they censor.
I challenge you to write the requirements for rangeCheck without the specifications ending up looking almost exactly like the code itself. You might spell out "less than" and "greater than", but other than that, a range checking function is so trivial and obvious that I've been amazed to this day that Oracle actually thought any creativity was involved in it's creativity.
Next up: Oracle claims that "for( i = 0; i < upperLimit; i++ )" is actually worthy of copyright and/or patent...
I don't think it's a problem with Facebook. I think it's a general issue of society being over-saturated with ads.
Take GM for example. They advertise on TV, radio, in magazines, in newspapers, and online through every venue available, including Facebook and YouTube. Everywhere you turn, you will see GM advertising.
People are burned out.
They don't care about supposedly "new" products that are more of the same with minor tweaks and new version numbers or names.
GM's real failure is not in their advertising, but in their products. With the sole exception of the Volt, every single vehicle they sell could be rubberstamped from a Ford, Chrysler, Honda, or other factory and the customer wouldn't know the difference if there was a GM logo on the front.
Welcome to the mainstream, GM. You're a commodity, indistinguishable from a horde of "me, too" vendors.
Please feel free to blow a few million more on another Superbowl ad that will garner you maybe a few thousand actual unit sales.
In the meantime, I will not share your YouTube videos on Facebook or "like" your page because I don't like advertising, and the only thing I get by "liking" a vendor's page is advertising posts thinly disguised as "information" that doesn't actually tell me anything useful. If you want me to shill, pay me. :P
Only a fool would astroturf for a vendor without compensation. You'd lose all your friends and get nothing in return.
And personally, the respect of friends and family is worth far more to me than you'd be willing to pay me to shill your crap.
And how many people stay up 24 hours at a stretch using a battery powered device?
Sure I can see the need for longer than a 12 hour lifetime in a few cases, like someone who's "off roading" and can't plug in while they're sleeping, but for the vast majority of the population they just need it to function while they're awake, charge while they're sleeping, and that's more than they need.
As I've never seen a battery powered portable device that requires you to shut down in order to plug in the power supply to recharge, and I've never seen one that couldn't charge while still running, your complaint is pointless nitpicking about numbers that have no practical meaning in the real world.
Unfortunately most tests aren't covering anything business related like calculating join tables and processing large volumes of relational data. Instead, they report on things business could care less about, like the time it takes to transcode a video file or it's ability to render videogame graphics.
The simple truth is that there are very few CPUs currently on the market which aren't perfectly capable of handling business application processing like document editing in a very acceptable fashion. In fact, the issue with even the "slow" CPUs is the time it takes to load and initialize an application, not in it's responsiveness once the application is loaded. That would seem to be more of a question of storage bandwidth than it would be of processor horsepower, but reviewers still blame the CPU for the performance.
For that matter, even the video playback reviews are kind of pointless. Once you have enough snort to render video without dropping frames or tearing, any extra power is pretty much pointless for video processing. While you can start turning on options in the video pipeline, the truth is the effects of those options are virtually unnoticeable unless you use a super-high resolution screen to display expanded video.
I think Windows RT is going to wake up a significant portion of the population to the benefits of low-power ARM processors in the real world.
The business market requirements are not the same as the general gaming/video market's requirements.
Mice may not live long, but genetic damage will still take the as long to occur in mice as in humans. The fact that humans live longer means the damage has longer to accumulate.
So while 5 weeks may be "20 years" for a mouse's life span, it's still only a miniscule fraction of a human's lifetime in terms of how long damage has been accumulating.
The results of this study aren't merely questionable, they're completely useless.
We have similar rights to record, transcode, and back up media in Canada.
The Harpercrite goobermint is trying to enact a DMCA-type clause, which violates our rights to make backups and to transcode media. The argument against the legislation is that even the use of encryption violates our rights to record and transcode data, never mind how much more of a violation it would be to make it illegal to break the encryption.
Here's hoping both our nations can kick big media's arse once again as we have done repeatedly in the cases over the years that enshrined our existing rights.
Not every legal system on the planet is willing to suck up to big media like the USG.
More importantly, everyone I know has been bitten by at least one virus in their lifetime.
I don't know anyone who lost a relative to a terrorist attack, much less who survived a bombing.
Bullshit!
Harper wanted to deregulate our banks, which would have left us in the same mess as the US. He was stopped because he had a minority government at the time, not because he made a good decision.
Harper has consistently kow-towed to the oilpatch in Alberta at the expense of other industries in the country.
I'm going to shut up at those two points, because I have a laundry list of issues detailing how he's a failure and how the country has weathered a potential recession despite Harper, not because of him. My blood pressure doesn't need the boosting.
The '88 software didn't require any cheating like using a bright pink shirt so it would stand out from the background, either. It would track anything human-shaped that crossed it's path, and was "smart" enough to reject other 4-limbed creatures like cats or dogs.
Rather than centering on "the pink blob", it used some interesting algorithms to build up a stick figure of the object, identify the torso stick, and aim for the middle of the torso stick.
They had a lot of fun on that project. Pretty much everything except the software used to drive the graphics terminal and do the image capture had to be custom coded.
I agree. Way back in 1988, one of my university cohorts developed image analysis and recognition software that would identify a target and paint a crosshair mid-torso. Of course in the age of the VAX 780, it was far from real-time processing. But given that even "slow" computers are over 1000 times as fast nowadays, there is absolutely no excuse for the apparent processing delays in this project. (It used to take an hour to do the analysis and paint the crosshair on a graphics terminal, so with 1000 times the processing power it should be able to do it at least 16 times a second on even a P4.)
Maybe they made some bad choices for their software. My friend's work had been raw C code, not a higher level package or interpreter like MatLab.