Getting paid for doing something is one thing, being forced to stop monopolistic practices is another. Quite true but then again, its one thing to force a business to stop their harmful monopolistic practices and another to force that same business to give business assets for free. MS by all means must be forced to comply with the law and play nice. But that intellectual property is legally theirs. At least I am unaware of any claims to the contrary, please correct me politely if I'm wrong. It doesn't matter if they paid for it or brewed it in-house, the point is that it's theirs. To break the monopoly they must make it available? fine, but it will be made available to other businesses, why should those get a free ride? They want to build competing products to sell for profit, let them buy the specifications. Sounds fair to me unless I'm missing something. If somebody on the F/OSS community wants access, they too should pay, they can always ask for donations to cover the costs. What would be the flaw on this reasoning?
Well, here's an actual opportunity to use the term "begging the question" properly.
I would agree with you on this (and I do agree on the rest) but my point is not that their rights are unimportant. I merely propose that there are more important things. And I realize what others pointed out about postponing the lesser stuff, the tyranny of the urgent, etc.
I want to be very clear here: I am not saying cows should have the same rights as people. What I am saying is that in the case of any particular animal or species, it is possible to consider the question of what rights, if any, that animal should be granted.
So we are on the same page, only you might have overlooked it because of my wording.
The way we justify or reject rights for animals should use the same rules by which we justify human rights.
I wrote this on that very topic a while ago. If you manage to get past the rambling style you might understand why I place animal rights in an important but lower category of human endeavor. I believe that rights are a fragile thing and we must protect them at all times because they don't exist per se as demonstrated by other humans that constantly trample those "inalienable" rights.
If you do everything which is non-expensive, pushing the expensive stuff to one side (...) you wind up with the expensive stuff sat around waiting
I couldn't agree with you more. But we must use our judgment to tell apart issues that need to be cleared in high courts. It strikes me as a waste of effort and resources that South Koreans are drafting the bill of robotic rights and these guys are trying to declare an animal on par with humans when all that time and money could be used to put human beings out of their misery. And not in the.45mm sense.
Some other poster took issue with the word sentience. We could use the word "awareness", or whatever one suits you. More than 3500 years of philosophy haven't been able to come up with a standard definition of what it actually is to be human, yet we know. We are born into the race and we are biologically hard-wired to know. I don't subscribe to any supremacist theory that makes humans inherently better than, say, slugs. But it is in a human society that I live, and it is only with human beings that I'm able to exchange meaningful, consistent and objective information (up until this is possible, again harks back to oodles of philosophers with oodles of different takes on the subject). So I stand by my opinion, control and even punish those that would treat animals inhumanly but don't go so far as to actually make humans out of those animals.
I do understand that the personal circumstances of some persons make them prefer the company of animals over other people, and it is very human to anthropomorphize (sp???) non-human things —witness the ancient Greek and their pantheon, the mesoamerican cultures and their animism— and that is another reason I think time and money would be better spent educating people so they recognize the humanity on others. But what can I say, I'm a dreamer and I just came back from Lisa Gerrard's concert. Peace!
Quite bluntly put: yes. Like I said, I am in favor of ethical treatment of animals, but that doesn't extend to granting them rights that we can't even assure for other humans. Your empathy and mine are placed on different subjects, you feel for possibly sentient beings which is commendable. I feel for beings known to be sentient beyond doubt. I will never turn into a chimp, but I may very well one day end up being one of the dispossessed.
Not long ago certain former "leader of the free world" took away its citizens' habeas-corpus provision. Every MINUTE a person (in the up-until-now traditional sense) dies of malnutrition or trivially treatable diseases. I'm all for the ethical treatment of animals but we do have more pressing problems.
I think the future of advertisement is in two different approaches: 1) for standard, fixed advertisement use product placement. A growing segment of people is going out of their way to avoid ads, so make them unavoidable. Characters wearing prominent labels of sponsors. Characters talking about the sponsor. 2) Dynamic targeted advertising ala Google. If in the not too distant future they could shot over bluescreens and just dynamically place the ads in the background of the film/series to match the demographic group you are in, that would be heaven for them, and less intrusive in terms of time wasted for us. But it will be more invasive.
I beg to differ. I live in Australia, you would hardly call that a densely populated area, and while the natives complain somewhat about their transport system when compared to Europe, it is awesome. And they do have train stations and light train that does connect very remote cities because like they say here, its a bloody long way. To absolutely anywhere. I agree that not everybody wants to live in a big city, that happens to be the case here. So they build excellent and comprehensive train systems to connect everything. And they have clean gas-powered buses that travel the freeways too, that's how I commute to work. I don't know where you pull that prohibitively expensive claim but if these guys can do it with their dollar being eighty cents US, I adventure the hypothesis that it can in fact be done. It is, again, a matter of perception. Aussies believe they want this, so they go ahead and build it. People from the US believe they want cars, so they build automobile-centric infrastructure.
I do not say one is better than other (although I do like Oz better in that regard), I just say that in order to do things differently you have to see things differently. One thinks one wants a muscle car that looks like so-and-so because one has been told that. No, wait, hear me out. You have been told you want that car, because the companies that produce it invest millions of dollars in advertisement. There is marketing research devoted to finding a way of presenting us a product in a way we will find attractive so we ultimately buy it. If the whole industry shifted overnight to emphasizing fuel economy and advertised that, you wouldn't change your mind overnight with them. But eventually you would.
Just think it through. Why do you like, say, a 300ZX? Let's say its because its "cool", and "powerful" and "sleek" and "modern". But how did you come to attach those characteristics to that particular model? Because the industry strives to portray it in a particular way. You will read about it in magazines that those corporations sponsor through advertising. You will see rich and beautiful people paid to drive them. And they will be young and active and will display all sorts of characteristics that an everyday person associates to success and desirability. And they will use clever sound design, clever wording, whatever. The point of this rant is to say that society influences an individual's tastes. Some more than others, and one big way the general public knows something is desirable is because they way they are told it is. If car manufacturers decide to start pushing a new paradigm, if they chose well their target audience, they will make it happen. Not because they have powerful mind-control machines but because we are social animals and very easily hearded. Or I could just be full of hot air, your take =)
As time goes by new stuff comes out. We've know for a while that newer generations don't like SW as much as those of us that got to watch it when released. SW set a lot of precedents and helped shape the future of the genere whether one likes the storyline or not. Which means that there is a truckload of derivative works out there, so anybody that's been exposed to those first and then watches SW will think, oh that dude in the black mask is just more of the same. Plus Serenity being a new show brings newer and better special effects than the original trilogy even after the botox that it got on the 20th anniversary. And it also tried to depart a bit from the standard set by the likes of SW and ST, its a different animal that apparently appeals to different tastes. That said I positively hated all that business about Mr Universe, it was plain dumb. Other than that I do think its a great movie but in my book the Episode IV will always be better. Not that my opinion or the survey matter in the great scheme of things;)
I think both Parent and GP have valid points that do not necessarily negate each other. I happen to fall in both categories, I used to own a Peugeot 206 SX which I loved and I often modified adding little tune ups like changing the air intake and filters to a more elevated position, whatever. I used to live in a city where I had to drive 30 to 40 minutes from home to work, and if I happened to hit a bottleneck the time would often go to almost an hour and a half. But I had a really nice sound system and AC and I didn't mind.
Now I live in a different city that has an integral and working public transportation system that takes me virtually anywhere I want to go, and I've found that I don't really need to have a car, don't even want one very much. So I'm putting off buying one until I've saved enough to get one of those nifty CC models, but even if I had it I'm sure I'd be taking the train/bus to work just as I do now because I can read a book or get up to speed on the latest manuals during the trip. And many of my co workers do just that. Yes, there is a point to the anecdote and its that I too used to believe all that stuff about a car being an extension of one's personality etc. And I was able to change my mind when presented with a viable alternative. Owning a car is convenient and if I did I'd like it to be the car that I want, but its not impossible to get by without one. I guess its another of those pesky chicken and egg problems, people won't build the infrastructure if they don't see the need, and they won't see it if they can't use the infrastructure and compare. But it is indeed possible.[/RAMBLE]
It does have a neat feature that I swear I was thinking about some time ago. That spare battery that charges the phone while in the walled. I should have patented it =( I think its biggest downside would be that flip thingamabob, it just to much annoyance potential. IANAAF (I am not an Apple Fanboy) but I read that Jobs supposedly sent designers back to the drawing board because he was unhappy with the usability of the iPhone. I wonder if the Samsung engineers actually spent any time playing with a functional prototype. I feel it would be pretty hard to use this device the way I use my Nokia 6820: play song - text some SMS - read email - pause music - consult the time. If I had to Flip back and forth all the time for half of this things it would certainly make ME flip:P
That sounds pretty cool, I would! But.. I'm afraid of viruses. CD-s are scary... Aw come on! Its not like some evil corporation would embed them with rootkits. Oh wait... =)
P.S. The title for your post is "Labels are bad news". Believe it or not, all words are labels. I would have pointed out that bad newsis a label hung on "Labels", just a comment, not that I disagree with the AC's post =)
Dude, you have it backwards. Its people that have a priori agendas that turn religion into the disgusting mess that it gets turned into occasionally. Yes, occasionally, religion is not always Teh Eevol as its neither always the one-shop-salvation it aims to be. But religion is a very tasty morsel, a very convenient prepackaged delivery medium for ideas and that is the reason it is poisoned to infect "the people" with nasty notion. The general idea of religion is not so bad if you look at it: basically be in harmony with yourself, with your neighbor and with the universe at large. They happen to give the universe a name and grant it the title of God, fine let them. But religion is not bad in itself, its the people that run the show that often make it deviate from its raison d'être. to manipulate the masses for their own ends. The fact that religious people also tend to be the type of persons that prefer prepackaged solutions over doing their own thinking doesn't help either.
The problem is that you don't always know. There are tons of people that get diagnosed with fatal deceases every day. Some of them get better. There are studies that underline the importance of your mindset when fighting any severe illness and statistics show that people with a good disposition fare better than those that just lay down and take it or worse, get depressed and sink. Every person is different and your values may make choose what you said, other may choose to take provisions and preventive measures, and yet others upon finding out that they have a predisposition to develop x-type-of-cancer would just take it as a given that they will and may end up turning a mere possibility into reality. I would suggest that in order to be eligible to take such tests people should first undergo psychological evaluation to find out if they can cope with a bad outcome and if not, postpone it until they have taken some measures to develop a stronger psyche. Of course some people here will disagree as many are as opposed as psychologists as they are to Microsoft and The Man in general =)
I'd be more concerned about the potential for abuse by the already abusive and power-hungry government. They are already installing black boxes in automobiles, I see this system ratting out to your friendly highway cruiser that you were speeding a few kms back. [/tinfoil]
Also they would have to have pretty strong and resilient wireless. Right now its a Major PITA to use my Bluetooth stereo headphones to listen music in the mobile for long periods without the connection breaking, and the handset is in my pocket not more than a meter away! I know, I need to upgrade the firmware on the H/S, but that would be the same with the car system. And most likely you'd have to get it done at the dealer, most corner garages won't have the tools to do this just as most repair shops can't upgrade my phones software.
Why listen to what "The Man" tells you, when you can listen to what you want, when you want?
This makes me think about the internet before Yahoo, Altavista and ye olde search engines came along. Usenet forums were abuzz with the dozens of new sites popping up every day and later-on almost hourly, and it began to be very difficult to know what was out there. And don't get me started on that gopher crap. Anyway, you may have an idea about what you want, but you need a starting point to look for it. I somehow managed to get my fix of alternative music when it was underground and really alternative, same for industrial and noise. But the vast majority of people don't have the time or inclination to spend time on that. Forget about the fast-food mindset, there are simply too many choices of everything to keep up. I may have two or sixteen hobbies, there will always be something I may like but simply not have the time to pursue beyond a quick browse-over.
So how will you know what you want when you don't have the time to research? You go to some hub and browse a little and hopefully something will catch your eye. Remember kids, there are six and a half bloody THOUSAND MILLION people alive in the world at this moment, around three hundred million on the US alone. Some of them are bound to have different things in which to spend their time;)
I was thinking along the same lines. I'm don't get why this payola thing is illegal. If I understand it right, in TV some company produces a show, let's say Firefly. The producers of Firefly go door to door selling their product until a network picks it up. The network pays the producers for their product and then charges money to advertisers to cover that money plus some profit.
Radio doesn't pay to the producers, instead it charges them to carry their product. So basically they treat musicians as another category of advertisers. This may be unsavory but why is it illegal? I must note I'm not from the US so I have no background on this.
At my work they have this combination and its a huge snail crawling pathetically IMHO. The problem is that security is paramount so there is no way in hell they will be switching to 3rd party hosting of email or desktop applications. Information is just too sensitive. But I can see how this may be feasible for organizations that do not have such stringent security concerns.
OTOH, even though I'm a slight Google fanboy I'm quite sure that very soon we'll start reading horror stories about data loss and security breaches due to user carelessness. Organizations should make sure their employees understand the risks involved in handling company information over the internet, particularly when working off-site. But educating the user requires resources (i.e. Money) and a company switching to this model seems to have in mind spending less, not more.
Plus, no amount of money/training is going to fix the attitude of many people that just don't care. They'd have to overhaul the whole HR process and screen very carefully the people they are going to bring on board. Which again, costs money. Or maybe I just had too many bad experiences in this regard at my previous job:P
IMHO this kind of crimes shouldn't be punishable by imprisonment... but I guess indenture isn't such a hot alternative either. Anyway, 10 years for replicating electrical signals in a magnetic medium (nit pickers go away!)... basically he "stole" an idea, hot air. He *should* be punished for breaking the law, but wasn't there something against disproportionate punishment in western codes?
I wonder if they came up with the idea themselves or may have learned about it by imitating humans? Or maybe they were even taught by one... I remember reading some studies where some researched taught a chimp to use sign language and then they observed that chimp spontaneously teaching it to other chimps. The first thing that came to my mind was that if they ever released it on the wild and it survived one day we may encounter some tribe of chimps with their own sing language and culture.
Also, I just saw a documentary by the BBC about the rainforests, and in the last bit they were talking about huge organized groups of chimps somewhere in Uganda. It was pretty impressive to watch them march in formation and stalk their enemies in territorial fights. They looked pretty much like tribal wars to me. Just remember your own schoolyard days, we are really not so far removed.
It looks like it's worked out great for Mexico. Leader of the free world, and all.
The system works great and is one of the best in the world. It's been praised several times by the UN and the EU (I think, not too sure about the latter). Now, the politicians...
It wasn't always so, we had rigged elections and a one party system for some seventy years, but its slowly and painfully been fixed just recently and its still being worked out. Mexico has other problems such as uneven education quality levels and a huge gap between the rich and the dispossesed, with the north doing much better than the south. So you get a great system for the people to choose whomever they like, but if those people are not well educated, well informed, even well fed, then they end up voting for the guy that offers them the prettiest pipe dreams. Which only goes to show that democracy does work but it's not perfect, big surprise =)
You make a very good job of explaining the differences between both political systems, but I have to disagree on whether that has any bearing whatsoever on the difficulty of the election over the internet. I mean, internet voting means using computers!. I admit I have no idea how do you go about identifying voters on the US but surely there must be a voter's register somewhere or otherwise I'd be able to vote if I happened to be visiting over on vacation on an electoral date. So (and I'm gonna defeat myself automatically but what the hell) IF the system was well designed it should know that Mr. Whoever with address on Middle-of-nowhere 22, TX belongs to a given county, state, etc. And it should pull from the database all the pertaining questions and present them to him with nice friendly letters that say Don't Panic and clearly labeled YES / NO buttons for each option. I would think that computers are suited for such a task. I mean, if bloody Amazon can do it... the only tricky part I can think of is how to preserve voter's anonymity.
Slashdot Mirror
I would agree with you on this (and I do agree on the rest) but my point is not that their rights are unimportant. I merely propose that there are more important things. And I realize what others pointed out about postponing the lesser stuff, the tyranny of the urgent, etc.
I want to be very clear here: I am not saying cows should have the same rights as people. What I am saying is that in the case of any particular animal or species, it is possible to consider the question of what rights, if any, that animal should be granted.So we are on the same page, only you might have overlooked it because of my wording.
The way we justify or reject rights for animals should use the same rules by which we justify human rights.I wrote this on that very topic a while ago. If you manage to get past the rambling style you might understand why I place animal rights in an important but lower category of human endeavor. I believe that rights are a fragile thing and we must protect them at all times because they don't exist per se as demonstrated by other humans that constantly trample those "inalienable" rights.
I couldn't agree with you more. But we must use our judgment to tell apart issues that need to be cleared in high courts. It strikes me as a waste of effort and resources that South Koreans are drafting the bill of robotic rights and these guys are trying to declare an animal on par with humans when all that time and money could be used to put human beings out of their misery. And not in the .45mm sense.
Some other poster took issue with the word sentience. We could use the word "awareness", or whatever one suits you. More than 3500 years of philosophy haven't been able to come up with a standard definition of what it actually is to be human, yet we know. We are born into the race and we are biologically hard-wired to know. I don't subscribe to any supremacist theory that makes humans inherently better than, say, slugs. But it is in a human society that I live, and it is only with human beings that I'm able to exchange meaningful, consistent and objective information (up until this is possible, again harks back to oodles of philosophers with oodles of different takes on the subject). So I stand by my opinion, control and even punish those that would treat animals inhumanly but don't go so far as to actually make humans out of those animals.
I do understand that the personal circumstances of some persons make them prefer the company of animals over other people, and it is very human to anthropomorphize (sp???) non-human things —witness the ancient Greek and their pantheon, the mesoamerican cultures and their animism— and that is another reason I think time and money would be better spent educating people so they recognize the humanity on others. But what can I say, I'm a dreamer and I just came back from Lisa Gerrard's concert. Peace!
Quite bluntly put: yes. Like I said, I am in favor of ethical treatment of animals, but that doesn't extend to granting them rights that we can't even assure for other humans. Your empathy and mine are placed on different subjects, you feel for possibly sentient beings which is commendable. I feel for beings known to be sentient beyond doubt. I will never turn into a chimp, but I may very well one day end up being one of the dispossessed.
Not long ago certain former "leader of the free world" took away its citizens' habeas-corpus provision. Every MINUTE a person (in the up-until-now traditional sense) dies of malnutrition or trivially treatable diseases. I'm all for the ethical treatment of animals but we do have more pressing problems.
I think the future of advertisement is in two different approaches: 1) for standard, fixed advertisement use product placement. A growing segment of people is going out of their way to avoid ads, so make them unavoidable. Characters wearing prominent labels of sponsors. Characters talking about the sponsor. 2) Dynamic targeted advertising ala Google. If in the not too distant future they could shot over bluescreens and just dynamically place the ads in the background of the film/series to match the demographic group you are in, that would be heaven for them, and less intrusive in terms of time wasted for us. But it will be more invasive.
I beg to differ. I live in Australia, you would hardly call that a densely populated area, and while the natives complain somewhat about their transport system when compared to Europe, it is awesome. And they do have train stations and light train that does connect very remote cities because like they say here, its a bloody long way. To absolutely anywhere. I agree that not everybody wants to live in a big city, that happens to be the case here. So they build excellent and comprehensive train systems to connect everything. And they have clean gas-powered buses that travel the freeways too, that's how I commute to work. I don't know where you pull that prohibitively expensive claim but if these guys can do it with their dollar being eighty cents US, I adventure the hypothesis that it can in fact be done. It is, again, a matter of perception. Aussies believe they want this, so they go ahead and build it. People from the US believe they want cars, so they build automobile-centric infrastructure.
I do not say one is better than other (although I do like Oz better in that regard), I just say that in order to do things differently you have to see things differently. One thinks one wants a muscle car that looks like so-and-so because one has been told that. No, wait, hear me out. You have been told you want that car, because the companies that produce it invest millions of dollars in advertisement. There is marketing research devoted to finding a way of presenting us a product in a way we will find attractive so we ultimately buy it. If the whole industry shifted overnight to emphasizing fuel economy and advertised that, you wouldn't change your mind overnight with them. But eventually you would.
Just think it through. Why do you like, say, a 300ZX? Let's say its because its "cool", and "powerful" and "sleek" and "modern". But how did you come to attach those characteristics to that particular model? Because the industry strives to portray it in a particular way. You will read about it in magazines that those corporations sponsor through advertising. You will see rich and beautiful people paid to drive them. And they will be young and active and will display all sorts of characteristics that an everyday person associates to success and desirability. And they will use clever sound design, clever wording, whatever. The point of this rant is to say that society influences an individual's tastes. Some more than others, and one big way the general public knows something is desirable is because they way they are told it is. If car manufacturers decide to start pushing a new paradigm, if they chose well their target audience, they will make it happen. Not because they have powerful mind-control machines but because we are social animals and very easily hearded. Or I could just be full of hot air, your take =)
As time goes by new stuff comes out. We've know for a while that newer generations don't like SW as much as those of us that got to watch it when released. SW set a lot of precedents and helped shape the future of the genere whether one likes the storyline or not. Which means that there is a truckload of derivative works out there, so anybody that's been exposed to those first and then watches SW will think, oh that dude in the black mask is just more of the same. Plus Serenity being a new show brings newer and better special effects than the original trilogy even after the botox that it got on the 20th anniversary. And it also tried to depart a bit from the standard set by the likes of SW and ST, its a different animal that apparently appeals to different tastes. That said I positively hated all that business about Mr Universe, it was plain dumb. Other than that I do think its a great movie but in my book the Episode IV will always be better. Not that my opinion or the survey matter in the great scheme of things ;)
I think both Parent and GP have valid points that do not necessarily negate each other. I happen to fall in both categories, I used to own a Peugeot 206 SX which I loved and I often modified adding little tune ups like changing the air intake and filters to a more elevated position, whatever. I used to live in a city where I had to drive 30 to 40 minutes from home to work, and if I happened to hit a bottleneck the time would often go to almost an hour and a half. But I had a really nice sound system and AC and I didn't mind.
Now I live in a different city that has an integral and working public transportation system that takes me virtually anywhere I want to go, and I've found that I don't really need to have a car, don't even want one very much. So I'm putting off buying one until I've saved enough to get one of those nifty CC models, but even if I had it I'm sure I'd be taking the train/bus to work just as I do now because I can read a book or get up to speed on the latest manuals during the trip. And many of my co workers do just that. Yes, there is a point to the anecdote and its that I too used to believe all that stuff about a car being an extension of one's personality etc. And I was able to change my mind when presented with a viable alternative. Owning a car is convenient and if I did I'd like it to be the car that I want, but its not impossible to get by without one. I guess its another of those pesky chicken and egg problems, people won't build the infrastructure if they don't see the need, and they won't see it if they can't use the infrastructure and compare. But it is indeed possible.[/RAMBLE]
It does have a neat feature that I swear I was thinking about some time ago. That spare battery that charges the phone while in the walled. I should have patented it =( I think its biggest downside would be that flip thingamabob, it just to much annoyance potential. IANAAF (I am not an Apple Fanboy) but I read that Jobs supposedly sent designers back to the drawing board because he was unhappy with the usability of the iPhone. I wonder if the Samsung engineers actually spent any time playing with a functional prototype. I feel it would be pretty hard to use this device the way I use my Nokia 6820: play song - text some SMS - read email - pause music - consult the time. If I had to Flip back and forth all the time for half of this things it would certainly make ME flip :P
Dude, you have it backwards. Its people that have a priori agendas that turn religion into the disgusting mess that it gets turned into occasionally. Yes, occasionally, religion is not always Teh Eevol as its neither always the one-shop-salvation it aims to be. But religion is a very tasty morsel, a very convenient prepackaged delivery medium for ideas and that is the reason it is poisoned to infect "the people" with nasty notion. The general idea of religion is not so bad if you look at it: basically be in harmony with yourself, with your neighbor and with the universe at large. They happen to give the universe a name and grant it the title of God, fine let them. But religion is not bad in itself, its the people that run the show that often make it deviate from its raison d'être. to manipulate the masses for their own ends. The fact that religious people also tend to be the type of persons that prefer prepackaged solutions over doing their own thinking doesn't help either.
The problem is that you don't always know. There are tons of people that get diagnosed with fatal deceases every day. Some of them get better. There are studies that underline the importance of your mindset when fighting any severe illness and statistics show that people with a good disposition fare better than those that just lay down and take it or worse, get depressed and sink. Every person is different and your values may make choose what you said, other may choose to take provisions and preventive measures, and yet others upon finding out that they have a predisposition to develop x-type-of-cancer would just take it as a given that they will and may end up turning a mere possibility into reality. I would suggest that in order to be eligible to take such tests people should first undergo psychological evaluation to find out if they can cope with a bad outcome and if not, postpone it until they have taken some measures to develop a stronger psyche. Of course some people here will disagree as many are as opposed as psychologists as they are to Microsoft and The Man in general =)
In other words, Do Unto Others... ;)
I'd be more concerned about the potential for abuse by the already abusive and power-hungry government. They are already installing black boxes in automobiles, I see this system ratting out to your friendly highway cruiser that you were speeding a few kms back. [/tinfoil]
Also they would have to have pretty strong and resilient wireless. Right now its a Major PITA to use my Bluetooth stereo headphones to listen music in the mobile for long periods without the connection breaking, and the handset is in my pocket not more than a meter away! I know, I need to upgrade the firmware on the H/S, but that would be the same with the car system. And most likely you'd have to get it done at the dealer, most corner garages won't have the tools to do this just as most repair shops can't upgrade my phones software.
This makes me think about the internet before Yahoo, Altavista and ye olde search engines came along. Usenet forums were abuzz with the dozens of new sites popping up every day and later-on almost hourly, and it began to be very difficult to know what was out there. And don't get me started on that gopher crap. Anyway, you may have an idea about what you want, but you need a starting point to look for it. I somehow managed to get my fix of alternative music when it was underground and really alternative, same for industrial and noise. But the vast majority of people don't have the time or inclination to spend time on that. Forget about the fast-food mindset, there are simply too many choices of everything to keep up. I may have two or sixteen hobbies, there will always be something I may like but simply not have the time to pursue beyond a quick browse-over.
So how will you know what you want when you don't have the time to research? You go to some hub and browse a little and hopefully something will catch your eye. Remember kids, there are six and a half bloody THOUSAND MILLION people alive in the world at this moment, around three hundred million on the US alone. Some of them are bound to have different things in which to spend their time ;)
I was thinking along the same lines. I'm don't get why this payola thing is illegal. If I understand it right, in TV some company produces a show, let's say Firefly. The producers of Firefly go door to door selling their product until a network picks it up. The network pays the producers for their product and then charges money to advertisers to cover that money plus some profit.
Radio doesn't pay to the producers, instead it charges them to carry their product. So basically they treat musicians as another category of advertisers. This may be unsavory but why is it illegal? I must note I'm not from the US so I have no background on this.
At my work they have this combination and its a huge snail crawling pathetically IMHO. The problem is that security is paramount so there is no way in hell they will be switching to 3rd party hosting of email or desktop applications. Information is just too sensitive. But I can see how this may be feasible for organizations that do not have such stringent security concerns.
OTOH, even though I'm a slight Google fanboy I'm quite sure that very soon we'll start reading horror stories about data loss and security breaches due to user carelessness. Organizations should make sure their employees understand the risks involved in handling company information over the internet, particularly when working off-site. But educating the user requires resources (i.e. Money) and a company switching to this model seems to have in mind spending less, not more.
Plus, no amount of money/training is going to fix the attitude of many people that just don't care. They'd have to overhaul the whole HR process and screen very carefully the people they are going to bring on board. Which again, costs money. Or maybe I just had too many bad experiences in this regard at my previous job :P
IMHO this kind of crimes shouldn't be punishable by imprisonment... but I guess indenture isn't such a hot alternative either. Anyway, 10 years for replicating electrical signals in a magnetic medium (nit pickers go away!)... basically he "stole" an idea, hot air. He *should* be punished for breaking the law, but wasn't there something against disproportionate punishment in western codes?
I wonder if they came up with the idea themselves or may have learned about it by imitating humans? Or maybe they were even taught by one... I remember reading some studies where some researched taught a chimp to use sign language and then they observed that chimp spontaneously teaching it to other chimps. The first thing that came to my mind was that if they ever released it on the wild and it survived one day we may encounter some tribe of chimps with their own sing language and culture.
Also, I just saw a documentary by the BBC about the rainforests, and in the last bit they were talking about huge organized groups of chimps somewhere in Uganda. It was pretty impressive to watch them march in formation and stalk their enemies in territorial fights. They looked pretty much like tribal wars to me. Just remember your own schoolyard days, we are really not so far removed.
The system works great and is one of the best in the world. It's been praised several times by the UN and the EU (I think, not too sure about the latter). Now, the politicians...
It wasn't always so, we had rigged elections and a one party system for some seventy years, but its slowly and painfully been fixed just recently and its still being worked out. Mexico has other problems such as uneven education quality levels and a huge gap between the rich and the dispossesed, with the north doing much better than the south. So you get a great system for the people to choose whomever they like, but if those people are not well educated, well informed, even well fed, then they end up voting for the guy that offers them the prettiest pipe dreams. Which only goes to show that democracy does work but it's not perfect, big surprise =)
Hey now! At least we still have Habeas Corpus enshrined by the constitution and some semblance of respecting it :P
You make a very good job of explaining the differences between both political systems, but I have to disagree on whether that has any bearing whatsoever on the difficulty of the election over the internet. I mean, internet voting means using computers!. I admit I have no idea how do you go about identifying voters on the US but surely there must be a voter's register somewhere or otherwise I'd be able to vote if I happened to be visiting over on vacation on an electoral date. So (and I'm gonna defeat myself automatically but what the hell) IF the system was well designed it should know that Mr. Whoever with address on Middle-of-nowhere 22, TX belongs to a given county, state, etc. And it should pull from the database all the pertaining questions and present them to him with nice friendly letters that say Don't Panic and clearly labeled YES / NO buttons for each option. I would think that computers are suited for such a task. I mean, if bloody Amazon can do it... the only tricky part I can think of is how to preserve voter's anonymity.