All one has to do is look at all the relatively useless flash-driven drivel on the web, and realize that artists and graphic designers are not all acquainted with the notion of usability.
Agreed. I think this is a case of everything looking like nails when the only tool (or mindset) you have is a hammer. Graphic designers are used to controlling EVERYTHING about presentation - hence their fatalistic fascination with flash, which allows them to rob the end user of any control over presentation (ie, font size, colors, page width, etc.) Problem is, HTML is by design, meant to be interpreted by the browser - whether it be lynx, a PDA browser, explorer, mozilla, webtv, etc.
The other issue is that HTML is meant as a text markup language. This isn't fixed text, but living, flowing text, that can be wrapped at unpredictable places, set in any font style and size, viewed at 512 x 384 or 1600 x 1200, and the leaner the underlying code is, the faster it transmits and loads.
The problem is that telling the public what your site is about is equivalent to telling search engines what your page is about. Aside from meta-tags (which should really be all you need in order to communicate "additional" info to search engines), any change to your website to "optimize" for a specific type of search engine, and not for the general public, has the effect upgrading your page ranking AT THE EXPENSE OF NON-OPTIMIZED SITES.
Here we go into the slippery slope that leads to situations like the tradgedy of the commons (where people tend to use up a resource because it isn't theirs), the hiring of lawyers (statistically, if one side hires a lawyer, they get better results, but if both sides hire lawyers they get the same settlement, only smaller because of lawyers fees), etc. It's the prisoner's dilemma - defect (ie, optimize) to improve my position, at the risk of everybody else defecting and earning worse returns than non defecting in the first place (ie, everybody stops using google because the rankings are screwed up and are no longer trustworthy.)
Put simply, the moment any site tries to game the system, even just a little bit, they ruin the usefulness of Google. As it stands, I'm getting better results with Metacrawler now than with Google - something I wouldn't have said just a year ago. Don't even get me started on websites with javascript-redirect gateway pages, or the ones that scrape search-engine/newsgroup/eBay pages for text in order to boost hit counts, and then link back to similar pages in order to get higher link relevancy, OR the ones that take over abandoned domains in order to exploit the ranking generated by pre-existing links that point to the domain name...
The license you're referring to (performance in an audio-visual work) is known as a sync license. Compulsory license is only for mechanical reproduction for a re-recording of the song (ie, you can take a known song, get some no-names to perform it, pay the mechanical reproduction fee, and put out a karaoke cd, perfectly legal.) If you try and set that same karaoke cd to video without getting a sync license, you'd be in violation of the original copyrights.
In this case, what I'm hearing is that the ad (an audio-visual work) featured someone performing someone else's work. You might be able to argue two causes of action - use of the work without a sync license, and public performance without use rights.
Yes, you're right, since the original Eminem recording was not aired, this is strictly a matter for whoever owns the song rights (probably Eminem and his publisher.)
BTW, I am Not A Lawer, so please don't construe any of the above as legal advice...
The problems are early adoption, and lock-in due to purchased equipment and established standards. The US issued tons of mag-stripe cards early on, and almost all of our established infrastructure for processing payments is based on mag-stripes and centralized servers. This isn't to say that Mastercard and Visa don't want to go to smart cards - they've been trying to get everyone to switch for the last 10 years. It's just that there hasn't been a reason that will outweigh the costs of having to replace all that equipment (which nobody will buy anymore if we dump mag-stripe cards.)
At least we've started changing the money (rather radically, from our point of view - Americans tend to associate colored currency with Monopoly money, and currencies that don't hold their value against the US Dollar...)
But as other have pointed out in the past, if those frequencies don't work NORMALLY, there won't be a population of hams, in the area, trained up and ready to go, in the event of an emergencies. Ham radio isn't somthing you can put away for a number of years, pull out of the closet, and dust off. If nothing else, as older hams pass on, there won't be any new operators, because there won't be any reason to pursue ham radio as a hobby.
Properly stored original film negatives last decades, whereas digital media is gone in a blink of an eye when your harddrive/memory card breaks down or you accidentally erase your media.
Ahhh, but like all analog media, when it comes time to copy the originals in order to preserve them, you lose information. Plus, you need a lot of room, and a controlled environment in order to really take care of film.
With digital, just keep multiple copies, and dup them, with no generation loss, as each new high-density storage media comes out.
I'm not saying digital is better - just that you're not using the benefits of digital to your advantage. Besides, it's kind of hard to erase write only media (ie, CD-Rs or WORMs, if you're really paranoid.)
Ironically, Kodak recently came out with a write-once storage unit for digital information (meant to safeguard data against tampering, by generating a read-only version) by using film...
Yeah, I'm hitting 400 pieces of spam per day now. It's actually causing problems for my provider - SA is taking up a LOT of CPU time now, especially when it comes time to expire all of those poison tokens that spammers have been stuffing their spam with. As was previously mentioned, all thes spammers have to do is redouble their effort, and we'll get hammered:(
What amazes me is these vermin are going to all this effort to push crap that people are ACTIVELY trying to ignore. Any salesman in real life going to these extremes would have long been charged with assault, battery, harassment... and yet the spammers are running around free.
I think you can safely rule out any more attempts at creativity from Warners - they laid most of their feature animation division off after Osmosis Jones, sold off their furniture, etc. Besides, Brad Bird, director of The Iron Giant, is at Pixar now.
Who did the animation for that latest, forgettable Looney Tunes/Live action feature? I believe a lot of that work was outsourced, just as they did in Space Jam...
Because nobody has beaten them in the head with a cluestick yet. Seriously - until the candidate experiences the direct NEGATIVE effects of spamming people, they will apply the rules that they know for telemarketing/junk mail to e-mail. I've already gotten recorded messages over the phone from the local bozo running for assembly (my only regret was hanging up so fast that the name wasn't mentioned - I'll need to get that down next time so I know who NOT to vote for), and the junk mail has already started arriving (including credit card offers from the Democrats - jeez, are they that hard up for money?)
Dean, I think, had the only team that really understood the internet - that it was a 2 way street. Most of the other candidates, I suspect, will treat e-mail and the web as "delivery" devices - I wouldn't be surprised if they tried e-mailing 30 second ad clips originally produced for TV. If they understood how much people revile spam, of ANY stripe, they'd think twice about triggering mass spam filters that will nullify important e-mails to staffers and die-hard party members. It's like triggering an immune response - a dose of political spam will innoculate the distributed filters maintained by admins and users alike, and future political e-mails will likely be rejected, whether they're legit or not.
Gold and diamonds have industrial uses as conductors and abrasives. While having a large amount of either would depress the commodity markets (and send many speculators to the depths of dispair) it would bolster the industries that utilize these items for manufacturing.
Imagine if gold were cheaper than lead - we could market environmentally friendly "lead-free" ammunition. If we had access to diamond sheets large enough, perhaps we could construct windows out of it. Instead of copper wiring, we'd have gold wiring instead. Circuit boards would be plated with gold, and maybe we'd see the return of $20 gold coins that are actually worth $20.
What would REALLY be valuable would be catalytic elements like platinum or palladium. Bring back enough of those and whole new industries could be built around them...
How hard is it really, to put together a little app that sits between the USB port and some generic calendaring application, that passes info back and forth, applying simple rules as whether to delete, duplicate, or change a database record?
The fact that some small third-party developer has been able to do this in the past (and probably will do so in the future) points to the fact that this is a trivial thing to do. The only cost to Palm is in tech support (which may be the real reason they dropped support, not the development costs.)
Assuming that Palm really can save maybe a million dollars a year by not developing for the Mac, and in doing so, they alienate about 50% of their future Mac business, AND that Mac users are represented in their customer base at about 5%:
$80Mil sales/yr *.05 (mac user) = 4Mil/yr old mac revenue
4Mil *.5 (loss in customers) = 2 Mil/yr new mac revenue
Assumed cost savings by laying off Mac engineers: 1 Mil/yr Projected loss by laying off Mac engineers: 1Mil/yr - 2Mil/yr = (1 Mil/yr) decrease in gross sales revenue.
Like I said, the real cost probably isn't in the engineering, even if you're real conservative about the cost of the engineering talent. It's probably in the tech support (Palm has outsourced their tech help line to India, so this probably has something to do with it...)
I've been saving a bunch of old batteries for toxic waste disposal (you're not supposed to toss em in the trash) so I suspect I have a number that still have the little strip on them. Time to reuse them prior to recycling...
One of the problems is that at a certain level of unspamminess (nega-spamminess?), you do almost as much work as you did prior to bayes, sorting messages and fine-tuning filters. I review all incoming good, and all trapped bad to cull items for fine-tuning. This amounts to about 5 pieces of spam a day on average, and 1 or two false positives (misclassified ham) that I have to re-run through the bayes learner. I often have to insert custom rules in order to kick the bayes score over the threshold for spam that doesn't trigger any of SA's rules except for the bayes rule (I don't like relying soley on bayes for reporting.)
Of course, that amount of work pales to what you'd have to do manually against ALL types of spam, but at a certain point you have to draw the line, and get back to doing useful things. Spammers are stealing our time, and until we can track them down, and take our time out of their hides (and bank accounts), the best we can do is minimize the amount of damage that they do.
Regarding whitelisting, my rules are already set that if an incoming mail is less than a certain number of points, (ie -1) it gets fed to the autolearner. Spam that is culled is automatically learned, and it's up to me to retrain false positives. Even so, there's spam that slips through, and every once in a while, some eBay seller tries sending me a message that looks too much like spam for SA to cope.
Plus, no amount of whitelisting helps if your whitelisted sender manages gets spoofed. To guard against that, you'll need some sort of signature verification...
I welcome the day when Verisign pulls this stunt. At that point, the admins (who control all the IP blocks) will simply reassign ALL of their DNS servers to point somewhere else. Verisign becomes moot, goes out of business, and good riddance! In the same way that the human brain reroutes around tissue damaged by trauma, the internet will reroute around these braindead marketing droids, and leave them twisting in the wind...
If Verisign tries to poision the.com registry with false IPs, well, at some point.com will stop working, and Verisign will have their monopoly revoked by force. I think a public flogging for the idiots responsible will serve as a fair warning not to monkey around with critical infrastructure for personal gain.
How long do you think it would take Disney to setup a Pixar knock-off?
Much longer than they'd be comfortable with. Disney's seen this coming for a LONG time. They bought out DreamQuest back in 1999 for their Secret Lab computer FX unit, and put the animators to work on Dinosaur to capitalize on the 3D trend. Much of that unit was laid off in 2001.
Interestingly enough, there were charges, even then, that Disney was attempting to circumvent the Animator's Union (formerly the Motion Pictures Screen Cartoonists Local 839) by classifying the 3D animators working on Dinosaur as special effect computer operators - who got paid less, and who weren't covered under the union contract.
Basically, Disney's problem isn't technology, or even the quality of animation. Disney's problem is producing stories that will get people to plunk down $9 to go see a movie - REPEATEDLY. That's the definition of a blockbuster in the movie business today, and ain't what Disney's been delivering.
Disney wasn't on the decline in the 80's. It was on its DEATHBED. Michael Eiser and the late Frank Wells were brought in to help rescue the company back in 1984, which evidently was a takeover target. Animation, which they finally killed off this past year, almost died then, after The Black Cauldron. The Little Mermaid turned things around, of course, shepherding an almost decade-long era of big profits.
The point is, back in 1984, when Disney almost ceased being Disney, they had theme parks and the merchandising, and that would have done was provide the corporate raiders with more pieces to break off after buying the company. Unless Disney can continue producing more properties for its library and for the distribution channels that it paid so much money for (cable and ABC) its future growth is in question. Look at MGM as an example of where Disney does not want to end up - anemic, and perpetually on the auction block.
"The team hopes to send the mice into orbit in 2006 with a Falcon spacecraft, currently under development by SpaceX, a Californian company."
Assuming that the X-Prize launches stay suborbital, this could be the first new privately-built orbital launcher, excluding the old corporate launchers from Boeing/Lockheed, and rockets sourced from the Russians.
That being said, why stop at 5 weeks? Why not send up a rocket capable of holding supplies for the mice for months, with extra room for the inevitable population explosion? You could try to implement features of a self-sustaining ecosystem (a hydroponics tank, for example) to reduce the need to supply oxygen and water for the entire time period.
Of course, if you just wanted to test low-grav, we could probably build a special simulator on earth to spin the rodents up, with the floors sloped just enough to counteract earth's gravity (although you wouldn't be able to eliminate the interaction between the coriolis forces generated by the spin of the Earth and the spin of the simulator.) Doesn't generate cool press like 'Mouse-tronauts', but it could be cheaper for longer-term studies than having to loft orbital payloads on a regular basis.
Actually, most jobs are created by small and medium-sized businesses. Large companies are usually in mature markets where the opportunities for growth are limited. So dropping taxes for the rich who have most of their money invested in large companies does not encourage growth as much. Dropping taxes for small entrepreneurs does.
Define small, medium, and large. The differences between medium and large, in terms of employees, may not be as large as you'd think. Besides, if a medium sized business is growing in a hot sector, wouldn't it soon become a large business? Even small businesses, although they create a lot of jobs, still may be extremely price sensitive (ie, manufacturing).
Finally, there are many small businesses that are run by people who make a lot of money. I personally know of one who is moving his operations out of California and into Nevada because of taxes - and the hundred jobs in his factory will be going with him. Sure, drop his taxes since he's a "small business" - how many more employees will he have to hire, or how much more will he have to make, before he's back in the same boat? If I were him, I'd rather just move to some place where they just tax you less all across the board, otherwise I'd be cutting my throat as far as future growth is concerned
Now instead of getting run over by somebody yakking on their cell phone, pedestrians can now get run over by people watching TV on their cell phones...
Humor aside, it's kind of weird to see people take more and more steps into a kind of nomadic existence - cellphones displacing landlines, PDAs and notebooks displacing desktops, huge-ass SUVs replacing small studio apartments...
Even if it cost us $0 per gallon to pump it out of the ground in Iraq (which it doesn't), it still takes money to transport it to the US. Currently, the world's tanker fleets are totally at capacity, due to demand not only from the US, but from China as well. Then you have to store it, transport it again (either in tanker trucks or pipelines) to generating/refining facilities, which then produce power, feedstocks, etc.
Not to mention, the "we" is the Iraqi resconstruction govt. and co, not us, the American people. We, as in the American people, still have to pay taxes to fix what we broke over there...
Whoever modded the above comment flamebait should be ashamed. The BBC has historically been a good source of news, but has been roundly criticized in recent years for taking a more commercial (and, as some have indicated, sensationalist) slant to its coverage. The resignation of 3 BBC principals in the past few weeks are an indication what this new direction has cost the BBC.
Fact of the matter is, where is the proof? The correspondent himself says "There's no proof, of course, but it must be one of the theories at the top of any investigator's list.", referring to the thesis of his article, that "The MyDoom virus represents a new level of sophistication in attacks on company websites. It is also a new front in a war waged by those who want to preserve the open-source Linux operating system."
On one hand, he says there's no proof. On the other hand, the tagline accuses open source as the origination of the MyDoom worm, and slyly insinuates that the reason for this worm is revenge against SCO. This isn't investigative journalism. This isn't even biased reporting of somebody's opinion. This is rumor-mill gossip, and somebody ought to call the BBC on it.
Through the power of lending we can increase our GNP completely through services.
And what happens when the Indians and the Chinese have absorbed so much of our know how through on-hands tech-transfer, that they don't need us anymore? Indian firms are already partnering with US drug companies, not as low-cost manufacturers, but as co-developers. Chinese firms are already buying whole US plants, lock, stock, and barrel, AND the company name/brands (ie, DustDevil). It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine a future where the US is nothing more than a stock market, and a few banks - and what happens when foreign banks/stock markets adopt US style accounting/regulation, and start undercutting us?
I think the key problem is that to meet the future you envision (ie, pure knowledge/research/services), we need to train people who are technically and creatively competent to work and innovate in those fields. I don't see that product coming out of our school system, which keeps churning out workers fit for that was hot 5-10 years ago, and not for what will be hot 5-10 years from now.
We might benefit from deflationary pressures on foreign-made products and services for a long time. But we'll have become a nation of extreme debtors, with a bedrock in agriculture and finance, and everything else outsourced.
While best will survive (ie, small machine shops, small coding shops, etc.), where will everyone else go? Unless we develop completely new industries that will require jobs in the US, we're going to have a large surplus of labor, just as we did in the 80's during the last big transition. Space exploitation maybe, or maybe US migratory workers going to Mexico and Canada, instead of the other way around?
Ironically, I'd suggest that manufacturing might be the salvation of the US economy - provided that we can lower the cost of raw materials and energy. With mechanization reducing labor costs, cheap energy and raw materials would allow the US to compete with foreign manufacturers, and allow the employment of more US sale agents, distributors, transporters (ie, truck drivers and train engineers), and lower the cost of shipping those goods.
In other words, you want more jobs in the US? Then we either need more nuclear power plants, or we need to invent working sustainable, net energy out fusion, quick.
Change your eBay contact address on a regular basis, and filter based on that (or rather, filter everything else, and whitelist what the current address is.) I haven't had to resort to this step yet, but I've planned for it. Right now, I'm getting alot of paypal-style scams, but it doesn't affect me as much because my official paypal address isn't filtered, and for some reason THAT address isn't getting spammed.
If the more spam looks like a casual e-mail the less effective baysian filtering is.
Spammers are already going this route, writing one or two paragraph spams that actually resemble real e-mail between two parties that know each other.
The way around this is to train the Bayes filter on this junk, and to prevent false positives, whitelist everybody you know.
Remember, at the end of the day, spam can only annoy you if you're still accepting mail from strangers. No matter what the spammers do, we can alway pull the trump card and just use whitelisting.
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All one has to do is look at all the relatively useless flash-driven drivel on the web, and realize that artists and graphic designers are not all acquainted with the notion of usability.
Agreed. I think this is a case of everything looking like nails when the only tool (or mindset) you have is a hammer. Graphic designers are used to controlling EVERYTHING about presentation - hence their fatalistic fascination with flash, which allows them to rob the end user of any control over presentation (ie, font size, colors, page width, etc.) Problem is, HTML is by design, meant to be interpreted by the browser - whether it be lynx, a PDA browser, explorer, mozilla, webtv, etc.
The other issue is that HTML is meant as a text markup language. This isn't fixed text, but living, flowing text, that can be wrapped at unpredictable places, set in any font style and size, viewed at 512 x 384 or 1600 x 1200, and the leaner the underlying code is, the faster it transmits and loads.
The problem is that telling the public what your site is about is equivalent to telling search engines what your page is about. Aside from meta-tags (which should really be all you need in order to communicate "additional" info to search engines), any change to your website to "optimize" for a specific type of search engine, and not for the general public, has the effect upgrading your page ranking AT THE EXPENSE OF NON-OPTIMIZED SITES.
Here we go into the slippery slope that leads to situations like the tradgedy of the commons (where people tend to use up a resource because it isn't theirs), the hiring of lawyers (statistically, if one side hires a lawyer, they get better results, but if both sides hire lawyers they get the same settlement, only smaller because of lawyers fees), etc. It's the prisoner's dilemma - defect (ie, optimize) to improve my position, at the risk of everybody else defecting and earning worse returns than non defecting in the first place (ie, everybody stops using google because the rankings are screwed up and are no longer trustworthy.)
Put simply, the moment any site tries to game the system, even just a little bit, they ruin the usefulness of Google. As it stands, I'm getting better results with Metacrawler now than with Google - something I wouldn't have said just a year ago. Don't even get me started on websites with javascript-redirect gateway pages, or the ones that scrape search-engine/newsgroup/eBay pages for text in order to boost hit counts, and then link back to similar pages in order to get higher link relevancy, OR the ones that take over abandoned domains in order to exploit the ranking generated by pre-existing links that point to the domain name...
The license you're referring to (performance in an audio-visual work) is known as a sync license. Compulsory license is only for mechanical reproduction for a re-recording of the song (ie, you can take a known song, get some no-names to perform it, pay the mechanical reproduction fee, and put out a karaoke cd, perfectly legal.) If you try and set that same karaoke cd to video without getting a sync license, you'd be in violation of the original copyrights.
In this case, what I'm hearing is that the ad (an audio-visual work) featured someone performing someone else's work. You might be able to argue two causes of action - use of the work without a sync license, and public performance without use rights.
Yes, you're right, since the original Eminem recording was not aired, this is strictly a matter for whoever owns the song rights (probably Eminem and his publisher.)
BTW, I am Not A Lawer, so please don't construe any of the above as legal advice...
The problems are early adoption, and lock-in due to purchased equipment and established standards. The US issued tons of mag-stripe cards early on, and almost all of our established infrastructure for processing payments is based on mag-stripes and centralized servers. This isn't to say that Mastercard and Visa don't want to go to smart cards - they've been trying to get everyone to switch for the last 10 years. It's just that there hasn't been a reason that will outweigh the costs of having to replace all that equipment (which nobody will buy anymore if we dump mag-stripe cards.)
At least we've started changing the money (rather radically, from our point of view - Americans tend to associate colored currency with Monopoly money, and currencies that don't hold their value against the US Dollar...)
But as other have pointed out in the past, if those frequencies don't work NORMALLY, there won't be a population of hams, in the area, trained up and ready to go, in the event of an emergencies. Ham radio isn't somthing you can put away for a number of years, pull out of the closet, and dust off. If nothing else, as older hams pass on, there won't be any new operators, because there won't be any reason to pursue ham radio as a hobby.
Properly stored original film negatives last decades, whereas digital media is gone in a blink of an eye when your harddrive/memory card breaks down or you accidentally erase your media.
Ahhh, but like all analog media, when it comes time to copy the originals in order to preserve them, you lose information. Plus, you need a lot of room, and a controlled environment in order to really take care of film.
With digital, just keep multiple copies, and dup them, with no generation loss, as each new high-density storage media comes out.
I'm not saying digital is better - just that you're not using the benefits of digital to your advantage. Besides, it's kind of hard to erase write only media (ie, CD-Rs or WORMs, if you're really paranoid.)
Ironically, Kodak recently came out with a write-once storage unit for digital information (meant to safeguard data against tampering, by generating a read-only version) by using film...
Yeah, I'm hitting 400 pieces of spam per day now. It's actually causing problems for my provider - SA is taking up a LOT of CPU time now, especially when it comes time to expire all of those poison tokens that spammers have been stuffing their spam with. As was previously mentioned, all thes spammers have to do is redouble their effort, and we'll get hammered :(
What amazes me is these vermin are going to all this effort to push crap that people are ACTIVELY trying to ignore. Any salesman in real life going to these extremes would have long been charged with assault, battery, harassment... and yet the spammers are running around free.
I think you can safely rule out any more attempts at creativity from Warners - they laid most of their feature animation division off after Osmosis Jones, sold off their furniture, etc. Besides, Brad Bird, director of The Iron Giant, is at Pixar now.
Who did the animation for that latest, forgettable Looney Tunes/Live action feature? I believe a lot of that work was outsourced, just as they did in Space Jam...
Because nobody has beaten them in the head with a cluestick yet. Seriously - until the candidate experiences the direct NEGATIVE effects of spamming people, they will apply the rules that they know for telemarketing/junk mail to e-mail. I've already gotten recorded messages over the phone from the local bozo running for assembly (my only regret was hanging up so fast that the name wasn't mentioned - I'll need to get that down next time so I know who NOT to vote for), and the junk mail has already started arriving (including credit card offers from the Democrats - jeez, are they that hard up for money?)
Dean, I think, had the only team that really understood the internet - that it was a 2 way street. Most of the other candidates, I suspect, will treat e-mail and the web as "delivery" devices - I wouldn't be surprised if they tried e-mailing 30 second ad clips originally produced for TV. If they understood how much people revile spam, of ANY stripe, they'd think twice about triggering mass spam filters that will nullify important e-mails to staffers and die-hard party members. It's like triggering an immune response - a dose of political spam will innoculate the distributed filters maintained by admins and users alike, and future political e-mails will likely be rejected, whether they're legit or not.
Gold and diamonds have industrial uses as conductors and abrasives. While having a large amount of either would depress the commodity markets (and send many speculators to the depths of dispair) it would bolster the industries that utilize these items for manufacturing.
Imagine if gold were cheaper than lead - we could market environmentally friendly "lead-free" ammunition. If we had access to diamond sheets large enough, perhaps we could construct windows out of it. Instead of copper wiring, we'd have gold wiring instead. Circuit boards would be plated with gold, and maybe we'd see the return of $20 gold coins that are actually worth $20.
What would REALLY be valuable would be catalytic elements like platinum or palladium. Bring back enough of those and whole new industries could be built around them...
How hard is it really, to put together a little app that sits between the USB port and some generic calendaring application, that passes info back and forth, applying simple rules as whether to delete, duplicate, or change a database record?
.05 (mac user) = 4Mil/yr old mac revenue
.5 (loss in customers) = 2 Mil/yr new mac revenue
The fact that some small third-party developer has been able to do this in the past (and probably will do so in the future) points to the fact that this is a trivial thing to do. The only cost to Palm is in tech support (which may be the real reason they dropped support, not the development costs.)
Assuming that Palm really can save maybe a million dollars a year by not developing for the Mac, and in doing so, they alienate about 50% of their future Mac business, AND that Mac users are represented in their customer base at about 5%:
$80Mil sales/yr *
4Mil *
Assumed cost savings by laying off Mac engineers: 1 Mil/yr
Projected loss by laying off Mac engineers: 1Mil/yr - 2Mil/yr = (1 Mil/yr) decrease in gross sales revenue.
Like I said, the real cost probably isn't in the engineering, even if you're real conservative about the cost of the engineering talent. It's probably in the tech support (Palm has outsourced their tech help line to India, so this probably has something to do with it...)
I've been saving a bunch of old batteries for toxic waste disposal (you're not supposed to toss em in the trash) so I suspect I have a number that still have the little strip on them. Time to reuse them prior to recycling...
One of the problems is that at a certain level of unspamminess (nega-spamminess?), you do almost as much work as you did prior to bayes, sorting messages and fine-tuning filters. I review all incoming good, and all trapped bad to cull items for fine-tuning. This amounts to about 5 pieces of spam a day on average, and 1 or two false positives (misclassified ham) that I have to re-run through the bayes learner. I often have to insert custom rules in order to kick the bayes score over the threshold for spam that doesn't trigger any of SA's rules except for the bayes rule (I don't like relying soley on bayes for reporting.)
Of course, that amount of work pales to what you'd have to do manually against ALL types of spam, but at a certain point you have to draw the line, and get back to doing useful things. Spammers are stealing our time, and until we can track them down, and take our time out of their hides (and bank accounts), the best we can do is minimize the amount of damage that they do.
Regarding whitelisting, my rules are already set that if an incoming mail is less than a certain number of points, (ie -1) it gets fed to the autolearner. Spam that is culled is automatically learned, and it's up to me to retrain false positives. Even so, there's spam that slips through, and every once in a while, some eBay seller tries sending me a message that looks too much like spam for SA to cope.
Plus, no amount of whitelisting helps if your whitelisted sender manages gets spoofed. To guard against that, you'll need some sort of signature verification...
I welcome the day when Verisign pulls this stunt. At that point, the admins (who control all the IP blocks) will simply reassign ALL of their DNS servers to point somewhere else. Verisign becomes moot, goes out of business, and good riddance! In the same way that the human brain reroutes around tissue damaged by trauma, the internet will reroute around these braindead marketing droids, and leave them twisting in the wind...
.com registry with false IPs, well, at some point .com will stop working, and Verisign will have their monopoly revoked by force. I think a public flogging for the idiots responsible will serve as a fair warning not to monkey around with critical infrastructure for personal gain.
If Verisign tries to poision the
How long do you think it would take Disney to setup a Pixar knock-off?
Much longer than they'd be comfortable with. Disney's seen this coming for a LONG time. They bought out DreamQuest back in 1999 for their Secret Lab computer FX unit, and put the animators to work on Dinosaur to capitalize on the 3D trend. Much of that unit was laid off in 2001.
Interestingly enough, there were charges, even then, that Disney was attempting to circumvent the Animator's Union (formerly the Motion Pictures Screen Cartoonists Local 839) by classifying the 3D animators working on Dinosaur as special effect computer operators - who got paid less, and who weren't covered under the union contract.
Basically, Disney's problem isn't technology, or even the quality of animation. Disney's problem is producing stories that will get people to plunk down $9 to go see a movie - REPEATEDLY. That's the definition of a blockbuster in the movie business today, and ain't what Disney's been delivering.
Disney wasn't on the decline in the 80's. It was on its DEATHBED. Michael Eiser and the late Frank Wells were brought in to help rescue the company back in 1984, which evidently was a takeover target. Animation, which they finally killed off this past year, almost died then, after The Black Cauldron. The Little Mermaid turned things around, of course, shepherding an almost decade-long era of big profits.
The point is, back in 1984, when Disney almost ceased being Disney, they had theme parks and the merchandising, and that would have done was provide the corporate raiders with more pieces to break off after buying the company. Unless Disney can continue producing more properties for its library and for the distribution channels that it paid so much money for (cable and ABC) its future growth is in question. Look at MGM as an example of where Disney does not want to end up - anemic, and perpetually on the auction block.
coriolis effects, not forces. doh!
I'm surprised nobody has brought this up:
"The team hopes to send the mice into orbit in 2006 with a Falcon spacecraft, currently under development by SpaceX, a Californian company."
Assuming that the X-Prize launches stay suborbital, this could be the first new privately-built orbital launcher, excluding the old corporate launchers from Boeing/Lockheed, and rockets sourced from the Russians.
That being said, why stop at 5 weeks? Why not send up a rocket capable of holding supplies for the mice for months, with extra room for the inevitable population explosion? You could try to implement features of a self-sustaining ecosystem (a hydroponics tank, for example) to reduce the need to supply oxygen and water for the entire time period.
Of course, if you just wanted to test low-grav, we could probably build a special simulator on earth to spin the rodents up, with the floors sloped just enough to counteract earth's gravity (although you wouldn't be able to eliminate the interaction between the coriolis forces generated by the spin of the Earth and the spin of the simulator.) Doesn't generate cool press like 'Mouse-tronauts', but it could be cheaper for longer-term studies than having to loft orbital payloads on a regular basis.
Actually, most jobs are created by small and medium-sized businesses. Large companies are usually in mature markets where the opportunities for growth are limited. So dropping taxes for the rich who have most of their money invested in large companies does not encourage growth as much. Dropping taxes for small entrepreneurs does.
Define small, medium, and large. The differences between medium and large, in terms of employees, may not be as large as you'd think. Besides, if a medium sized business is growing in a hot sector, wouldn't it soon become a large business? Even small businesses, although they create a lot of jobs, still may be extremely price sensitive (ie, manufacturing).
Finally, there are many small businesses that are run by people who make a lot of money. I personally know of one who is moving his operations out of California and into Nevada because of taxes - and the hundred jobs in his factory will be going with him. Sure, drop his taxes since he's a "small business" - how many more employees will he have to hire, or how much more will he have to make, before he's back in the same boat? If I were him, I'd rather just move to some place where they just tax you less all across the board, otherwise I'd be cutting my throat as far as future growth is concerned
Now instead of getting run over by somebody yakking on their cell phone, pedestrians can now get run over by people watching TV on their cell phones...
Humor aside, it's kind of weird to see people take more and more steps into a kind of nomadic existence - cellphones displacing landlines, PDAs and notebooks displacing desktops, huge-ass SUVs replacing small studio apartments...
Even if it cost us $0 per gallon to pump it out of the ground in Iraq (which it doesn't), it still takes money to transport it to the US. Currently, the world's tanker fleets are totally at capacity, due to demand not only from the US, but from China as well. Then you have to store it, transport it again (either in tanker trucks or pipelines) to generating/refining facilities, which then produce power, feedstocks, etc.
Not to mention, the "we" is the Iraqi resconstruction govt. and co, not us, the American people. We, as in the American people, still have to pay taxes to fix what we broke over there...
Whoever modded the above comment flamebait should be ashamed. The BBC has historically been a good source of news, but has been roundly criticized in recent years for taking a more commercial (and, as some have indicated, sensationalist) slant to its coverage. The resignation of 3 BBC principals in the past few weeks are an indication what this new direction has cost the BBC.
Fact of the matter is, where is the proof? The correspondent himself says "There's no proof, of course, but it must be one of the theories at the top of any investigator's list.", referring to the thesis of his article, that "The MyDoom virus represents a new level of sophistication in attacks on company websites. It is also a new front in a war waged by those who want to preserve the open-source Linux operating system."
On one hand, he says there's no proof. On the other hand, the tagline accuses open source as the origination of the MyDoom worm, and slyly insinuates that the reason for this worm is revenge against SCO. This isn't investigative journalism. This isn't even biased reporting of somebody's opinion. This is rumor-mill gossip, and somebody ought to call the BBC on it.
Through the power of lending we can increase our GNP completely through services.
And what happens when the Indians and the Chinese have absorbed so much of our know how through on-hands tech-transfer, that they don't need us anymore? Indian firms are already partnering with US drug companies, not as low-cost manufacturers, but as co-developers. Chinese firms are already buying whole US plants, lock, stock, and barrel, AND the company name/brands (ie, DustDevil). It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine a future where the US is nothing more than a stock market, and a few banks - and what happens when foreign banks/stock markets adopt US style accounting/regulation, and start undercutting us?
I think the key problem is that to meet the future you envision (ie, pure knowledge/research/services), we need to train people who are technically and creatively competent to work and innovate in those fields. I don't see that product coming out of our school system, which keeps churning out workers fit for that was hot 5-10 years ago, and not for what will be hot 5-10 years from now.
We might benefit from deflationary pressures on foreign-made products and services for a long time. But we'll have become a nation of extreme debtors, with a bedrock in agriculture and finance, and everything else outsourced.
While best will survive (ie, small machine shops, small coding shops, etc.), where will everyone else go? Unless we develop completely new industries that will require jobs in the US, we're going to have a large surplus of labor, just as we did in the 80's during the last big transition. Space exploitation maybe, or maybe US migratory workers going to Mexico and Canada, instead of the other way around?
Ironically, I'd suggest that manufacturing might be the salvation of the US economy - provided that we can lower the cost of raw materials and energy. With mechanization reducing labor costs, cheap energy and raw materials would allow the US to compete with foreign manufacturers, and allow the employment of more US sale agents, distributors, transporters (ie, truck drivers and train engineers), and lower the cost of shipping those goods.
In other words, you want more jobs in the US? Then we either need more nuclear power plants, or we need to invent working sustainable, net energy out fusion, quick.
Change your eBay contact address on a regular basis, and filter based on that (or rather, filter everything else, and whitelist what the current address is.) I haven't had to resort to this step yet, but I've planned for it. Right now, I'm getting alot of paypal-style scams, but it doesn't affect me as much because my official paypal address isn't filtered, and for some reason THAT address isn't getting spammed.
If the more spam looks like a casual e-mail the less effective baysian filtering is.
Spammers are already going this route, writing one or two paragraph spams that actually resemble real e-mail between two parties that know each other.
The way around this is to train the Bayes filter on this junk, and to prevent false positives, whitelist everybody you know.
Remember, at the end of the day, spam can only annoy you if you're still accepting mail from strangers. No matter what the spammers do, we can alway pull the trump card and just use whitelisting.