Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 2, Informative
This is totally false. Not only are opera's mouse gestures configurable, they're considerably more configurable than Firefox's. My gesture left action opens up the history for that single tab. (Show popup menu, "Internal Back History")
Preferences->Advanced->Shortcuts
You can modify the keyboard and mouse setup from there, something that no other browser that I know of currently offers out of the box. One of the things that I hate is that I can't re-bind my keys without some hassle in any browser that isn't Opera.
I'm Canadian, of mixed Polish and Chinese descent, and I stand by what I said. It was largely tongue in cheek, but my sentiment is true. Your country has gone from being a scientific powerhouse to having upstarts in China and India beating on your door. It wasn't meant to be purely inflammatory so much as a comment on what other countries are going to think. The Chinese population is well over a billion -- four times yours -- and they teach their kids an enormous amount of math and science. You can bet evolution is in there, too. I'm not saying the Chinese are a bunch of nice guys, or their country is perfect because they do, but you have to be aware that one of these days, they're going to have more scientists than you. They've already got better funding than American scientists could hope for; Chinese grants are luring US scientists across the ocean already.
This is a serious topic, and nothing less than the future of your science programs is at stake. Don't take me as a hater just because I'm pointing it out to you in the most direct way possible.
The rest of the world doesn't care that you're stupiding up your children. It just makes it easier for us to crush you scientifically. Trust me when I say that the increasingly low standards for your science education just make us feel like there are more opportunities for us. I'm sure the Chinese, Japanese and Indians feel the same. The less you know, the easier it makes it for the rest of us to make stuff and sell it to you.
Thanks,
The Rest of the World (specifically those of us teaching our children proper scientific theory)
I'd like to point out that it's not illegal to download or fileshare music, and it's not because of the levy. It's because it's not illegal. There's no provision under the law that makes filesharing illegal in Canada. It's even been to court. The law all stands up fairly strongly in favour of the individual.
For everyone reading this, I'll repeat what I say every time this stupid levy comes up: the levy doesn't change anything. It doesn't make something that was illegal now legal, and it doesn't even make the act of downloading music MORAL. What it is is a transparent money grab from people that don't deserve to be persecuted and an unreasonable tax because they can't actually sue in court or pursue other legal means to get money from you. If you buy CDs to burn your home movies on to, or you're a small business that burns data to CDs for backup, you pay the same stupid levy for blank media with no recourse.
It's also worth noting that Chess and Checkers and all games of that type which claim to be in the field of 'AI' are really just extensions in the field of deep search. Deep Blue doesn't REASON about chess, it consults a giant play book. If it's outside of the playbook, it actually just runs through millions of possibilities, as deep as it can. Even still, there was always a team of master chess players keeping watch over Deep Blue's actions.
Deep Blue has never had anything to do with AI, despite hype to the contrary. It has chips specially designed to search chess moves faster. I'm no more impressed by this than by a person that can look up names in a phone book, and failing that, call 411.
At least this urban challenge is trying to get the systems to react to a changing and complex environment. This stuff is ten times the AI research that Deep Blue was.
It's the courts that have decided this, based on current copyright law. The Liberal government tried to pass bill C-60, which would have made it illegal, but it failed, fortunately.
It's legal to download music because it's legal, not because of the blank media levy. Whether or not the industry is bilking you of that money, you have that right. It's not illegal. The media levy doesn't make it any more or less legal, though it may assuage some of the guilt people feel.
If you put a levy on bullets to ease the pain and suffering of families that are broken apart by gun violence, it doesn't make shooting people legal. It's an illegal activity no matter what.
The levy is a smoke screen so that we don't notice if they try and legislate our IP rights away. It's a random and immoral money grab. It presupposes guilt when you buy media for any purpose, even if the media has non-infringing purposes. We should all hate the levy.
Why isn't military spending referred to as 'the socialized military'? It's tax dollars being spent on a government program, right? You hear people go on about socialized medicine or socialized housing, but nobody says anything about the socialized military.:P
(Steven Brust brought it up in his blog. I think he's got a good point.)
A friend of mine recently bought a 60" TV at Best Buy. When he questioned the staff on the much lower US prices, they immediately dropped the price to match.
Companies that are based in the US and buy everything in US dollars anyway aren't going to care that much. Of course, they'll fleece you if you give them the opportunity, but if you threaten to walk out or import it from somewhere in the US, they'll match the US price.
Quite a few people there have implants (horns, weird shapes in the forearm, etc.) and there hasn't been any warning there of increased cancer risk. The body-mod crowd is generally about doing crazy and interesting stuff that's ultimately safe.
Of course, these things are inert in EM fields, unlike RFID chips. I know they don't transmit, but absorbing energy from a field has to generate a small amount of heat that's channelled or dissipated into the surrounding tissue, right?
Actually, we're consistently ripped off. Right now, we're being told that despite the fact that the Canadian dollar trades at between $0.93USD - $0.96USD, prices for goods are still high because inventory was bought when the dollar was low. It's complete BS. High price electronics, for instance, are still several hundred dollars more than in the US. (The only reason I know this is because a friend of mine is aghast that a TV that he wants is almost $800 cheaper in the states. And he can't buy it there and have it imported; nobody will sell to a shipping company. After tax and shipping, the TV is still cheaper, but it's not worth the time anymore.:P)
Prices should have come down a long time ago. These are not the days of the $0.65 Canadian dollar anymore.
Unreal -- the first one -- surprisingly had lots of really scary moments. In the first few areas, there's a place where you have to shut the power down. You start hearing a loud 'thunk' noise, but it's hard to tell where it's coming from. When you start to leave, the way is barred, and you start wondering if you took a wrong turn.
Then the light start going out.
Pretty soon, you're in the dark, and you realize that there's no music or sound or anything. If you've still got your wits about you, you'll toss a couple of flares out, but man, who remembers to do that the first time.
Then the emergency lights come on, the music and sound start pounding, and there's a green thing leaping out of the wall at you and you flail around and blast away blast away oh god what the hell is it dead?
Then the lights come on and you reload the game so you can do it again without losing half your life, but DAMN, that was a hell of a thing.
System Shock 2 was creepy as hell; I couldn't finish it. BioShock is many kinds of awesome.
The thing that all the games have in common is ATMOSPHERE. They've got a particular kind of ambiance that really draws you in. The music and the sounds are all part of it. Water drips, things are in disarray, and you're constantly set upon by low moaning caricatures of humanity. Hearing a zombie in SS2 moan, "I'm sorry," before clubbing you is creepy. Hearing a slicer mumble to himself about how he JUST NEEDS SOMEONE TO TALK TO is really creepy.
The whole package is amazing if it's put together right. The visuals, setting, and sound all come together and leave you to fill in the action. How in the world could a movie be as scary? It's not you being attacked. Your own self-preservation kicks in because you're role-playing someone in a desperate situation.
It's fantastic. I'm so glad BioShock came out. I'm gonna play it to death.
I don't think she needs any more cash cows. Rowling has the distinct honour of being the first author to make $1 billion selling books.
Now she can just write because she likes writing.
Now, she may well pick up in the same universe, which would be lovely. As an article that I read pointed out, if you had the choice of being a character from the books or going to Hogwarts, what would most people pick? Hogwarts, probably. More books in that Universe would certainly keep the audience that she's made.
C'mon, every guy has at least one hot redhead on his list. And it's not so unbelievable when you think that he traded the weepy HAB for the redhead that watches sports with him.
Weeping and carrying on trump hotness any day. Doesn't get more true than that.:D
Yeah, that's fine. I use Opera at work on my Windows PC and Safari at home on my Mac, so I don't need them to be exactly the same. Just some of the more coarse features need to be the same.:)
Not that it's a bad piece of software, but I dislike almost all the interface elements after having gotten used to Opera. The problem is that I can't do any useful key rebinding to make Firefox like I'd like it work. "Ctrl-N" for me has always been 'new tab' and I'm not going to train myself out of it. (Actually, I've tried, and it's not worth my time.:P)
I THINK I'd be able to rebind the keys at home with Firefox and OS X, since that's the sort of thing that OS X does for you, instead of forcing every application to handle it itself.
There may even be a plug-in that does it, but I haven't been able to find one. I suppose I could write one (could I?), but Opera on Windows and Safari on OS X just work so well, I have no reason to switch.
Maybe that's it: I already have really good tools, so why switch? For the sake of switching? What do I get by moving to Firefox? It's not like moving from IE to Firefox, where there's an obvious technology gap.
It's all in the post that I first responded to. Somewhere in the middle it starts talking about OS X.
Re:Why DRM and Locks on Apple Stores are Dumb, Job
on
Apple, the New Microsoft?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not sure what your point is. Why not dig up what the Microsoft terms of license are. OS X isn't Linux and they don't give it away for free, but the fact of the matter is that they still don't assume that you're a criminal out to steal everything in sight, and ask politely that you follow the rules of their unenforceable agreement. Nothing prevents me from installing that software on 25 machines instead of 1 other than my conscience. All things considered these days, that's pretty nice of them.
Re:Why DRM and Locks on Apple Stores are Dumb, Job
on
Apple, the New Microsoft?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
OS X already doesn't require a key to activate. You put it in and go.
Steve never says that we should do away with intellectual property; his essay boils down to saying DRM is counter-productive and doesn't actually do anything other than piss people off. You can buy unDRMed music if you want, but for online distribution, we're needlessly hindered, and he's right.
That a big leap to implying that he's a hypocrite because he won't give away the company.
Also, I rather think that whoever writes this sort of thing should use the products, or research the company at least a little. I've NEVER used a key to activate OS X, all the way back to 10.0. Don't criticize the company for things they already do right.
While I agree with the three things that you say a voting system should have, these problems are not inherent to e-voting anymore than the solutions are inherent to paper ballot voting. It still takes a system, people and a proper framework to get a paper ballot system to be fair. Just because it's more EASILY secured doesn't mean that it's the only way.
Do I believe that these problems can be solved for e-voting? Over time, I don't see why not. Soon? Well, probably not soon, no.
Problems have solutions. It's just a matter of time and money. If we can put people into space and bring them back without killing them -- even with the current success rate, which does have some risk -- we can certainly provide an e-voting system that meets your criteria. What we lack is the will and the resources to do it. Practically speaking, it's not going to happen for now.
And that's what I mean by saying e-voting *in and of itself* doesn't threaten democracy. A poor e-voting system -- like a poor paper ballot system -- would cause problems, but that's the fault of the implementation, not the idea.
I already get out and vote; a more convenient way to vote wouldn't be objectionable to me. I think we can do it.
In fact, I have a problem with this: 'E-voting threatens the integrity of our elections and we oppose its use in our democracy.'
E-voting threatens nothing in and of itself. The lack of voting threatens democracies just as much, I think. The problem is that e-voting has been a complete fiasco up until now because it lacks transparency to the people it's meant to serve. Voters should be able to know what's going on in the machine if they want to. There should be independent agencies devoted to inspecting the machines and certifying them. I should be able to read the code that the machine is running if I want to, and I would require a receipt of some kind to verify my vote.
None of this is beyond our abilities; I bank online and use ATMs frequently and my money is still where I expect it.
We should not, however, be allowed to vote on every bit of legislation. Constitutional Republics suit me just fine. I don't want my voice drowned out by a biased majority.
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This is totally false. Not only are opera's mouse gestures configurable, they're considerably more configurable than Firefox's. My gesture left action opens up the history for that single tab. (Show popup menu, "Internal Back History")
Preferences->Advanced->Shortcuts
You can modify the keyboard and mouse setup from there, something that no other browser that I know of currently offers out of the box. One of the things that I hate is that I can't re-bind my keys without some hassle in any browser that isn't Opera.
I'm Canadian, of mixed Polish and Chinese descent, and I stand by what I said. It was largely tongue in cheek, but my sentiment is true. Your country has gone from being a scientific powerhouse to having upstarts in China and India beating on your door. It wasn't meant to be purely inflammatory so much as a comment on what other countries are going to think. The Chinese population is well over a billion -- four times yours -- and they teach their kids an enormous amount of math and science. You can bet evolution is in there, too. I'm not saying the Chinese are a bunch of nice guys, or their country is perfect because they do, but you have to be aware that one of these days, they're going to have more scientists than you. They've already got better funding than American scientists could hope for; Chinese grants are luring US scientists across the ocean already.
This is a serious topic, and nothing less than the future of your science programs is at stake. Don't take me as a hater just because I'm pointing it out to you in the most direct way possible.
The rest of the world doesn't care that you're stupiding up your children. It just makes it easier for us to crush you scientifically. Trust me when I say that the increasingly low standards for your science education just make us feel like there are more opportunities for us. I'm sure the Chinese, Japanese and Indians feel the same. The less you know, the easier it makes it for the rest of us to make stuff and sell it to you.
Thanks,
The Rest of the World (specifically those of us teaching our children proper scientific theory)
From what I understand, the diesel VWs are built in Europe, which leads to considerably fewer problems than the ones built in Mexico or China.
There's a $50 (CDN) adaptor for airline power. If you're on a flight, just plug in. And it's cheaper than an extra battery.
Another lame lawsuit. :/
I'd like to point out that it's not illegal to download or fileshare music, and it's not because of the levy. It's because it's not illegal. There's no provision under the law that makes filesharing illegal in Canada. It's even been to court. The law all stands up fairly strongly in favour of the individual.
For everyone reading this, I'll repeat what I say every time this stupid levy comes up: the levy doesn't change anything. It doesn't make something that was illegal now legal, and it doesn't even make the act of downloading music MORAL. What it is is a transparent money grab from people that don't deserve to be persecuted and an unreasonable tax because they can't actually sue in court or pursue other legal means to get money from you. If you buy CDs to burn your home movies on to, or you're a small business that burns data to CDs for backup, you pay the same stupid levy for blank media with no recourse.
It's also worth noting that Chess and Checkers and all games of that type which claim to be in the field of 'AI' are really just extensions in the field of deep search. Deep Blue doesn't REASON about chess, it consults a giant play book. If it's outside of the playbook, it actually just runs through millions of possibilities, as deep as it can. Even still, there was always a team of master chess players keeping watch over Deep Blue's actions.
Deep Blue has never had anything to do with AI, despite hype to the contrary. It has chips specially designed to search chess moves faster. I'm no more impressed by this than by a person that can look up names in a phone book, and failing that, call 411.
At least this urban challenge is trying to get the systems to react to a changing and complex environment. This stuff is ten times the AI research that Deep Blue was.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/internet/downloading_music.html
http://www.news.com/2100-1027_3-5182641.html
It's the courts that have decided this, based on current copyright law. The Liberal government tried to pass bill C-60, which would have made it illegal, but it failed, fortunately.
NO. STOP IT.
It's legal to download music because it's legal, not because of the blank media levy. Whether or not the industry is bilking you of that money, you have that right. It's not illegal. The media levy doesn't make it any more or less legal, though it may assuage some of the guilt people feel.
If you put a levy on bullets to ease the pain and suffering of families that are broken apart by gun violence, it doesn't make shooting people legal. It's an illegal activity no matter what.
The levy is a smoke screen so that we don't notice if they try and legislate our IP rights away. It's a random and immoral money grab. It presupposes guilt when you buy media for any purpose, even if the media has non-infringing purposes. We should all hate the levy.
Why isn't military spending referred to as 'the socialized military'? It's tax dollars being spent on a government program, right? You hear people go on about socialized medicine or socialized housing, but nobody says anything about the socialized military. :P
(Steven Brust brought it up in his blog. I think he's got a good point.)
A friend of mine recently bought a 60" TV at Best Buy. When he questioned the staff on the much lower US prices, they immediately dropped the price to match.
Companies that are based in the US and buy everything in US dollars anyway aren't going to care that much. Of course, they'll fleece you if you give them the opportunity, but if you threaten to walk out or import it from somewhere in the US, they'll match the US price.
http://modblog.bmezine.com/
Quite a few people there have implants (horns, weird shapes in the forearm, etc.) and there hasn't been any warning there of increased cancer risk. The body-mod crowd is generally about doing crazy and interesting stuff that's ultimately safe.
Of course, these things are inert in EM fields, unlike RFID chips. I know they don't transmit, but absorbing energy from a field has to generate a small amount of heat that's channelled or dissipated into the surrounding tissue, right?
Smaller electronics don't suffer from this effect since it's easy to get someone to ship an iPod from the states if it's way out of line.
All the same, it's worth doing your internet shopping around if you can. You may get a deal by buying over the border goods.
Actually, we're consistently ripped off. Right now, we're being told that despite the fact that the Canadian dollar trades at between $0.93USD - $0.96USD, prices for goods are still high because inventory was bought when the dollar was low. It's complete BS. High price electronics, for instance, are still several hundred dollars more than in the US. (The only reason I know this is because a friend of mine is aghast that a TV that he wants is almost $800 cheaper in the states. And he can't buy it there and have it imported; nobody will sell to a shipping company. After tax and shipping, the TV is still cheaper, but it's not worth the time anymore. :P)
Prices should have come down a long time ago. These are not the days of the $0.65 Canadian dollar anymore.
Unreal -- the first one -- surprisingly had lots of really scary moments. In the first few areas, there's a place where you have to shut the power down. You start hearing a loud 'thunk' noise, but it's hard to tell where it's coming from. When you start to leave, the way is barred, and you start wondering if you took a wrong turn.
Then the light start going out.
Pretty soon, you're in the dark, and you realize that there's no music or sound or anything. If you've still got your wits about you, you'll toss a couple of flares out, but man, who remembers to do that the first time.
Then the emergency lights come on, the music and sound start pounding, and there's a green thing leaping out of the wall at you and you flail around and blast away blast away oh god what the hell is it dead?
Then the lights come on and you reload the game so you can do it again without losing half your life, but DAMN, that was a hell of a thing.
System Shock 2 was creepy as hell; I couldn't finish it. BioShock is many kinds of awesome.
The thing that all the games have in common is ATMOSPHERE. They've got a particular kind of ambiance that really draws you in. The music and the sounds are all part of it. Water drips, things are in disarray, and you're constantly set upon by low moaning caricatures of humanity. Hearing a zombie in SS2 moan, "I'm sorry," before clubbing you is creepy. Hearing a slicer mumble to himself about how he JUST NEEDS SOMEONE TO TALK TO is really creepy.
The whole package is amazing if it's put together right. The visuals, setting, and sound all come together and leave you to fill in the action. How in the world could a movie be as scary? It's not you being attacked. Your own self-preservation kicks in because you're role-playing someone in a desperate situation.
It's fantastic. I'm so glad BioShock came out. I'm gonna play it to death.
I don't think she needs any more cash cows. Rowling has the distinct honour of being the first author to make $1 billion selling books.
Now she can just write because she likes writing.
Now, she may well pick up in the same universe, which would be lovely. As an article that I read pointed out, if you had the choice of being a character from the books or going to Hogwarts, what would most people pick? Hogwarts, probably. More books in that Universe would certainly keep the audience that she's made.
C'mon, every guy has at least one hot redhead on his list. And it's not so unbelievable when you think that he traded the weepy HAB for the redhead that watches sports with him.
:D
Weeping and carrying on trump hotness any day. Doesn't get more true than that.
Yeah, that's fine. I use Opera at work on my Windows PC and Safari at home on my Mac, so I don't need them to be exactly the same. Just some of the more coarse features need to be the same. :)
:)
Thanks for the tip; I'll take a look at it.
Not that it's a bad piece of software, but I dislike almost all the interface elements after having gotten used to Opera. The problem is that I can't do any useful key rebinding to make Firefox like I'd like it work. "Ctrl-N" for me has always been 'new tab' and I'm not going to train myself out of it. (Actually, I've tried, and it's not worth my time. :P)
I THINK I'd be able to rebind the keys at home with Firefox and OS X, since that's the sort of thing that OS X does for you, instead of forcing every application to handle it itself.
There may even be a plug-in that does it, but I haven't been able to find one. I suppose I could write one (could I?), but Opera on Windows and Safari on OS X just work so well, I have no reason to switch.
Maybe that's it: I already have really good tools, so why switch? For the sake of switching? What do I get by moving to Firefox? It's not like moving from IE to Firefox, where there's an obvious technology gap.
It's all in the post that I first responded to. Somewhere in the middle it starts talking about OS X.
I'm not sure what your point is. Why not dig up what the Microsoft terms of license are. OS X isn't Linux and they don't give it away for free, but the fact of the matter is that they still don't assume that you're a criminal out to steal everything in sight, and ask politely that you follow the rules of their unenforceable agreement. Nothing prevents me from installing that software on 25 machines instead of 1 other than my conscience. All things considered these days, that's pretty nice of them.
OS X already doesn't require a key to activate. You put it in and go.
Steve never says that we should do away with intellectual property; his essay boils down to saying DRM is counter-productive and doesn't actually do anything other than piss people off. You can buy unDRMed music if you want, but for online distribution, we're needlessly hindered, and he's right.
That a big leap to implying that he's a hypocrite because he won't give away the company.
Also, I rather think that whoever writes this sort of thing should use the products, or research the company at least a little. I've NEVER used a key to activate OS X, all the way back to 10.0. Don't criticize the company for things they already do right.
While I agree with the three things that you say a voting system should have, these problems are not inherent to e-voting anymore than the solutions are inherent to paper ballot voting. It still takes a system, people and a proper framework to get a paper ballot system to be fair. Just because it's more EASILY secured doesn't mean that it's the only way.
Do I believe that these problems can be solved for e-voting? Over time, I don't see why not. Soon? Well, probably not soon, no.
Problems have solutions. It's just a matter of time and money. If we can put people into space and bring them back without killing them -- even with the current success rate, which does have some risk -- we can certainly provide an e-voting system that meets your criteria. What we lack is the will and the resources to do it. Practically speaking, it's not going to happen for now.
And that's what I mean by saying e-voting *in and of itself* doesn't threaten democracy. A poor e-voting system -- like a poor paper ballot system -- would cause problems, but that's the fault of the implementation, not the idea.
I already get out and vote; a more convenient way to vote wouldn't be objectionable to me. I think we can do it.
In fact, I have a problem with this: 'E-voting threatens the integrity of our elections and we oppose its use in our democracy.'
E-voting threatens nothing in and of itself. The lack of voting threatens democracies just as much, I think. The problem is that e-voting has been a complete fiasco up until now because it lacks transparency to the people it's meant to serve. Voters should be able to know what's going on in the machine if they want to. There should be independent agencies devoted to inspecting the machines and certifying them. I should be able to read the code that the machine is running if I want to, and I would require a receipt of some kind to verify my vote.
None of this is beyond our abilities; I bank online and use ATMs frequently and my money is still where I expect it.
We should not, however, be allowed to vote on every bit of legislation. Constitutional Republics suit me just fine. I don't want my voice drowned out by a biased majority.