I am an american, and my attitude is not that it's someone else's problem. My attitude is that there's a simple solution (or at least so they'd like us to believe) but unfortunately we can't use it because the government would use the solution in ways that would be worse than the original problem. I am in fact fully aware that i suffer from the idiocy of the government, what else did you think i was complaining about?
You know, perhaps if the government had a better track record of handling privacy issues then we would be willing to grant them exceptions in cases like this, where it actually benefits both the government and the individuals the information concerns. But we all know that if we let them share the information in this one case, no matter how specifically we worded the laws and regulations about it, it wouldn't be a week before the FBI and other agencies were trying to get secret search warrants or some other trickery to access the data for evidence of criminal behaviour.
Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" presented a world in which the government had "grown up" and was given unprecedented access to information in order to fight terrorism and regulate and maintain the internet, but didn't actually use that power to persecute people for minor stuff like drug offenses or to try and control what people said. I actually thought that was the most unreasonable part of the book. The tech was all more or less reasonable, but the idea that the government could actually get that much of a clue seems totally outside of reality.
This is great news, and the change is definitely non-trivial, but saying it's dropping like a rock seems like a bit of an exaggeration. At this rate it's going to be about another 5-10 months before it drops below 50%, and at the current rate it will take Chrome about five and a half _years_ to get above 50%. (Obviously it would pass by IE somewhere in the middle of that time frame, but i don't care to do the math now.)
Look at what happened to Android's market share in the last year or two, and counterpoise it with RIM. That's a bit more like the kind of change you could qualify as "dropping like a rock" or "rising meteorically," and even that's pushing it a bit IMHO.
it doesn't matter how much you don't like it, they public loves it. This is why its still used by so many sites, because it works and the public loves it.
Minor correction, i suspect the public probably doesn't give a damn about flash in particular. Website designer love flash. The public just loves being able to access websites, therefore they need to be able to use flash whether they like it or not.
The data quality and meaning of this summary is rather fuzzy. I have no clue what exactly they're talking about. No, i haven't RTFA yet, but the summary isn't making it very clear if TFA is something i'd be interested in or not.
Perhaps i'm massively confused, but isn't it the consumer who pays the taxes? The online retailer just collects the tax, they don't pay it themselves. (And how are the goods supposed to be delivered without using the roads those taxes help support anyways?)
I'm in almost the exact same boat as you. I've got a PS3 and a Wii. I don't own an XBox of any kind and hope that i never will. I'm very happy about Nintendo's new console (supposedly) being more powerful than the PS3 and 360. If Nintendo manages to attract enough 3rd party developers such that it's the only console i need to buy for the next generation and a half, i will be very happy. However if i have to choose between the PS4 and the XBox 720 (or whatever) then i'll go with the Sony console. I consider Sony to be the marginally lesser of two evils.
Seriously mods? Are you perhaps unaware of the whole recent Geohot thing and Sony's response to it? And how the hacker community _seems_ to have responded to that? Or is it somehow being a troll to wonder if Apple, when confronted with a very similar situation will make a similar decision and be faced with a similar response?
Nobody really thinks about Amazon as a powerhouse.
Seriously? Some of us have been viewing Amazon as a moderately evil powerhouse since the day they got the 1-click patent to stick. The amount of stuff i end up buying from Amazon, even knowing the dangers inherent in that dependency, seriously disturbs me. I try to spread out my shopping to some other stores, but we really need one or two other "sells everything" sites like Amazon so there's some serious competition going on.
Will Apple start issuing lawsuits and court orders left and right to try and stop this? And if so will it distract people from Sony's recent actions along those lines?
That would seriously tempt me to try out Cyanogen if Google doesn't implement something like it in the near future, even though i've already got an unlocked Nexus. There are a number of otherwise great apps that i haven't updated in months because they decided to add Facebook integration, so "of course" they need access to my account details now. Sorry, not gonna happen.
When i checked yesterday "most" critics gave mixed reviews, not that i care a great deal what critics say. I liked her first two albums, so i figured it would be hard to go too wrong for 99 cents. In the worst case scenario i would have wasted.... 99 cents.
After buying it my conclusion was that it's certainly not as good as those first two albums i really liked. Was it a waste of money? Well there are a couple good tracks, so for the price of 99 cents i certainly feel i got my money's worth. Is it worth buying for $10 or whatever the "regular" price is? I probably wouldn't get it at that rate, not unless some of the other songs start growing on me after listening to them some more.
Word of advice, don't use a debit card for anything online. In fact ideally you shouldn't use a debit card for anything that doesn't absolutely require it. (For me that's the ATM itself and Arco gas stations which don't take credit cards.)
Unless you've got some amazing deal with a bank that i'm not aware of, debit cards offer little to no fraud protection, if money gets stolen from it you're SOL. With credit cards you can always challenge fraudulent transactions, and the credit card company will watch out for any especially unusual activity for you. (I've had that bite me in the ass a couple times, but they also caught the only case of real fraud i've had so far, so despite some grumbling i'm okay with the false positives.)
Credit cards are great as long as you use them responsibly. Don't ever charge more than you can pay back at the end of the month and you won't have to pay any interest. (You _can_ use them for emergencies as well, though if it will take you more than a month or two to make up the debt you should look into some other form of long term loan with a more reasonable interest rate.) As long as you follow that rule you'll only be putting money on them that you were going to spend anyways, you get free fraud protection, and you can take advantage of the points systems offered by various cards. I've gotten several hundred dollars back that way that i never would have gotten using cash, debit cards or checks.
Sony claimed they would be sending out email about the AllClear identify theft protection service they're planning to offer. I haven't gotten any email from them since the original announcement of the breach, which only contains information about the usual "one free credit report per year" resources which are available to everyone.
Except if you're Nintendo, who can come out with four year old tech (in terms of consoles) and market it as amazingly better than the Wii and marginally better than the PS3 and 360, and since the tech is four years old they can put it at a fairly reasonably price point instead of the $500 or $600 a new PS3 or 360 equivalent might be at. What you say _does_ apply to Sony and Microsoft however, who have to wait until they can produce something significantly more powerful than their previous hardware at a price the current economy can support.
After the eruption of Eyajawhatever people were theorizing that it would be followed by an eruption of Katla based on records of past eruptions. But instead of Katla, Grimsvotn lit off instead. I wonder if there's any relation between the two, and if so if this means that the pressure has been relieved and Katla isn't going to do anything, or if we're building up to a spectacularly huge Katla eruption,
Is there some way to make such things simple enough for the elderly without detracting from the functionality for younger people? iPhones are far from the only thing that the elderly have trouble with, but it doesn't seem wise to tailor everything in the world to cater specifically to them. If designers can't find a way to make a device useable by both the young and the old without compromising on the usability for either group then there really ought to be two separate devices. I've certainly seen enough infomercials to know there's certainly a large market of elderly people out there you can market to directly.
I'm certainly sympathetic since i plan to be elderly myself one day, but i'd like to hope when that day arrives i'll either try to learn how to use whatever new-fangled thing the kids are into, or use alternative devices/software/whatever that fits my needs. (Kind of like how the first thing i do after installing Windows 7 is make extensive modifications to give it a "Windows Classic" theme.)
We haven't had a terrorist attack in this country since the law came into effect.
So if we do suffer another terrorist attack will they give up the Patriot Act as something that didn't work? Or will they demand more concessions? Are you suggesting that we can never regain lost rights, only lose more of them? (And i realize that that might be a political reality, but it seems like you may think that's the way it ought to be, which i disagree with.)
Sure they may be snooping your traffic but the law says they can so any claims you make about it being a violation of your constitutional rights are useless.
Uh, are you confused about your nomenclature, or are you actually unaware that a law can not circumvent a constitutional right? If i claim it's a violation of my constitutional rights and a lawyer can convince the Supreme Court that i'm correct, it doesn't matter how many laws have been passed about it. (Well, barring another Andrew Jackson of course.)
So when do we get to question the necessity of this thing? The war in Iraq has been over for awhile (more or less, in theory, not that that had anything to do with the origins of the Patriot Act anyways) and now Osama bin Laden is dead. I realize that the government would like to keep it in effect forever just because of the power it grants them, but shouldn't they at least have to come up with some kind of new excuse by now?
Of course if you have it always on you're wasting even more space than the URL box takes up, and if you don't have it on you have to click the tool icon thing, then click on the "Bookmark manager" option, which opens the bookmarks in a new tab, and then double-click on the bookmark you want to open it.
Perhaps they should consider adding some kind of button you could click that would temporarily open the bookmarks bar and let you single click on a bookmark and then it would immediately open that page and the bookmarks bar would go away.
And you know what would make it even better? If they made the bar vertical instead of horizontal, so you could actually see a decent number of bookmarks at one time. I guess it wouldn't be a bar at that point though, it would be like, a list i guess, that would kind of... drop down when you clicked the button. In fact they already have that button at the end of the bookmark bar when you get "too many" bookmarks, so they'd just need to move it up to the top instead of making it a part of the bookmarks bar.
That would be convenient _and_ not waste screen space all the time, perhaps Google should start doing research into how such a thing could be developed?
I really like what the guy who wrote this article had to say: "Government Says Video Games are Art....Yeah, Thanks" In short, that's great and all, but we already knew games were art. We never needed your approval in the first place, and anyone who still doesn't agree (*cough* Ebert,) well that's your loss. (Except he said it a lot better in the long version.)
For me and my circle of friends it started with AIM and mailing lists. _After_ that we started an IRC channel, at which point the mailing list started withering away. Then everyone got LiveJournal accounts, which finished off the mailing list and mostly killed off IRC as well. Then Facebook came along and mostly killed off LJ. For my AIM usage (and its much younger cousin gtalk) have been in steady decline during that whole process, though given what i see on my friends' feeds Twitter has taken up some of that role.
I'm really hoping that eventually something new will come along to knock out Facebook in turn, hopefully even something that will at least pretend to let me have a little privacy/anonymity. I can't say that that last hope is especially high however.
Hack Targets NASA's Earth Observation System [...] The hack comes exactly a month after the same hacker exposed a similar hole in a server operated by the European Space Agency.
Hey! That's not how we do things in AMERICA! In America we have one giant plastic cup of "expresso" (really? you go overboard with the superlatives but don't even know how to spell it?) in the morning, a second big giant plastic cup of espresso in the afternoon, and top it off with a Monster energy drink in the evening! Some people use "5 hour energy" instead, but that's for WUSSES because those bottles are small and small things are for WUSSES!!!!
Okay, seriously, i can't tell if the original statement was sarcastic or just totally out of touch. Six cups a day? I've lost track of the number of people in my office who have some method of making their own coffee in one cup batches (usually a french press or a one cup filter) bring in the their own coffee rather than using the office supply and have one or two cups a day at most.
Or maybe i'm the one who's out touch, but i suspect the people who go to Starbucks for breakfast lunch and dinner are like all stereotypes, seen a lot more in movies, TV and bad jokes than they are in real life.
(Although what's with the "dirty water" as opposed to "strong coffee" thing? The problem with Starbucks isn't that they make it too weak, the problem is that they burn the beans to a crisp. Weakness is about the last thing i'd complain about with their coffee.)
But with a 3D printer you don't need all those normal machine tools. If it's a part that the 3D printer is capable of printing at high enough tolerances and in the right material (and as the technology continues to involved the quality of both the printing process and the materials used will improve) then it will be cheaper to print it yourself than to order it from someplace using old style mass production techniques. The cost of the equipment that needs to be amortized is far less that way, and there are less people involved in the chain who need to make a profit.
Of course in reality at least some companies will switch from custom dies and CNC and such and just print the parts out themselves, lowering the cost. Others may decide it's cheaper to sell you the plans and let you print it out yourself (either on your own printer or at the local Kinko's.) And of course some companies will switch to the new production method, keep charging just as much as they did for the old production method, and sue anyone who tries to print out the parts themselves.
Like the other commenter pointed out, this is just like the switch from large scale printing presses to personal printers. You can still save money in some circumstances (very large print runs) but most of the time it will be cheaper to use your own printer for single copies and small batches rather than dealing with a whole supply chain.
Arguing that the _old_ cost of printing is justified because of the amount of labor involved in carving out the woodblocks for the images is.... kinda irrelevant?
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I am an american, and my attitude is not that it's someone else's problem. My attitude is that there's a simple solution (or at least so they'd like us to believe) but unfortunately we can't use it because the government would use the solution in ways that would be worse than the original problem. I am in fact fully aware that i suffer from the idiocy of the government, what else did you think i was complaining about?
You know, perhaps if the government had a better track record of handling privacy issues then we would be willing to grant them exceptions in cases like this, where it actually benefits both the government and the individuals the information concerns. But we all know that if we let them share the information in this one case, no matter how specifically we worded the laws and regulations about it, it wouldn't be a week before the FBI and other agencies were trying to get secret search warrants or some other trickery to access the data for evidence of criminal behaviour.
Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End" presented a world in which the government had "grown up" and was given unprecedented access to information in order to fight terrorism and regulate and maintain the internet, but didn't actually use that power to persecute people for minor stuff like drug offenses or to try and control what people said. I actually thought that was the most unreasonable part of the book. The tech was all more or less reasonable, but the idea that the government could actually get that much of a clue seems totally outside of reality.
This is great news, and the change is definitely non-trivial, but saying it's dropping like a rock seems like a bit of an exaggeration. At this rate it's going to be about another 5-10 months before it drops below 50%, and at the current rate it will take Chrome about five and a half _years_ to get above 50%. (Obviously it would pass by IE somewhere in the middle of that time frame, but i don't care to do the math now.)
Look at what happened to Android's market share in the last year or two, and counterpoise it with RIM. That's a bit more like the kind of change you could qualify as "dropping like a rock" or "rising meteorically," and even that's pushing it a bit IMHO.
it doesn't matter how much you don't like it, they public loves it. This is why its still used by so many sites, because it works and the public loves it.
Minor correction, i suspect the public probably doesn't give a damn about flash in particular. Website designer love flash. The public just loves being able to access websites, therefore they need to be able to use flash whether they like it or not.
The data quality and meaning of this summary is rather fuzzy. I have no clue what exactly they're talking about. No, i haven't RTFA yet, but the summary isn't making it very clear if TFA is something i'd be interested in or not.
Perhaps i'm massively confused, but isn't it the consumer who pays the taxes? The online retailer just collects the tax, they don't pay it themselves. (And how are the goods supposed to be delivered without using the roads those taxes help support anyways?)
I'm in almost the exact same boat as you. I've got a PS3 and a Wii. I don't own an XBox of any kind and hope that i never will. I'm very happy about Nintendo's new console (supposedly) being more powerful than the PS3 and 360. If Nintendo manages to attract enough 3rd party developers such that it's the only console i need to buy for the next generation and a half, i will be very happy. However if i have to choose between the PS4 and the XBox 720 (or whatever) then i'll go with the Sony console. I consider Sony to be the marginally lesser of two evils.
Seriously mods? Are you perhaps unaware of the whole recent Geohot thing and Sony's response to it? And how the hacker community _seems_ to have responded to that? Or is it somehow being a troll to wonder if Apple, when confronted with a very similar situation will make a similar decision and be faced with a similar response?
Nobody really thinks about Amazon as a powerhouse.
Seriously? Some of us have been viewing Amazon as a moderately evil powerhouse since the day they got the 1-click patent to stick. The amount of stuff i end up buying from Amazon, even knowing the dangers inherent in that dependency, seriously disturbs me. I try to spread out my shopping to some other stores, but we really need one or two other "sells everything" sites like Amazon so there's some serious competition going on.
Will Apple start issuing lawsuits and court orders left and right to try and stop this? And if so will it distract people from Sony's recent actions along those lines?
That would seriously tempt me to try out Cyanogen if Google doesn't implement something like it in the near future, even though i've already got an unlocked Nexus. There are a number of otherwise great apps that i haven't updated in months because they decided to add Facebook integration, so "of course" they need access to my account details now. Sorry, not gonna happen.
When i checked yesterday "most" critics gave mixed reviews, not that i care a great deal what critics say. I liked her first two albums, so i figured it would be hard to go too wrong for 99 cents. In the worst case scenario i would have wasted.... 99 cents.
After buying it my conclusion was that it's certainly not as good as those first two albums i really liked. Was it a waste of money? Well there are a couple good tracks, so for the price of 99 cents i certainly feel i got my money's worth. Is it worth buying for $10 or whatever the "regular" price is? I probably wouldn't get it at that rate, not unless some of the other songs start growing on me after listening to them some more.
Word of advice, don't use a debit card for anything online. In fact ideally you shouldn't use a debit card for anything that doesn't absolutely require it. (For me that's the ATM itself and Arco gas stations which don't take credit cards.)
Unless you've got some amazing deal with a bank that i'm not aware of, debit cards offer little to no fraud protection, if money gets stolen from it you're SOL. With credit cards you can always challenge fraudulent transactions, and the credit card company will watch out for any especially unusual activity for you. (I've had that bite me in the ass a couple times, but they also caught the only case of real fraud i've had so far, so despite some grumbling i'm okay with the false positives.)
Credit cards are great as long as you use them responsibly. Don't ever charge more than you can pay back at the end of the month and you won't have to pay any interest. (You _can_ use them for emergencies as well, though if it will take you more than a month or two to make up the debt you should look into some other form of long term loan with a more reasonable interest rate.) As long as you follow that rule you'll only be putting money on them that you were going to spend anyways, you get free fraud protection, and you can take advantage of the points systems offered by various cards. I've gotten several hundred dollars back that way that i never would have gotten using cash, debit cards or checks.
Sony claimed they would be sending out email about the AllClear identify theft protection service they're planning to offer. I haven't gotten any email from them since the original announcement of the breach, which only contains information about the usual "one free credit report per year" resources which are available to everyone.
Except if you're Nintendo, who can come out with four year old tech (in terms of consoles) and market it as amazingly better than the Wii and marginally better than the PS3 and 360, and since the tech is four years old they can put it at a fairly reasonably price point instead of the $500 or $600 a new PS3 or 360 equivalent might be at. What you say _does_ apply to Sony and Microsoft however, who have to wait until they can produce something significantly more powerful than their previous hardware at a price the current economy can support.
After the eruption of Eyajawhatever people were theorizing that it would be followed by an eruption of Katla based on records of past eruptions. But instead of Katla, Grimsvotn lit off instead. I wonder if there's any relation between the two, and if so if this means that the pressure has been relieved and Katla isn't going to do anything, or if we're building up to a spectacularly huge Katla eruption,
Is there some way to make such things simple enough for the elderly without detracting from the functionality for younger people? iPhones are far from the only thing that the elderly have trouble with, but it doesn't seem wise to tailor everything in the world to cater specifically to them. If designers can't find a way to make a device useable by both the young and the old without compromising on the usability for either group then there really ought to be two separate devices. I've certainly seen enough infomercials to know there's certainly a large market of elderly people out there you can market to directly.
I'm certainly sympathetic since i plan to be elderly myself one day, but i'd like to hope when that day arrives i'll either try to learn how to use whatever new-fangled thing the kids are into, or use alternative devices/software/whatever that fits my needs. (Kind of like how the first thing i do after installing Windows 7 is make extensive modifications to give it a "Windows Classic" theme.)
We haven't had a terrorist attack in this country since the law came into effect.
So if we do suffer another terrorist attack will they give up the Patriot Act as something that didn't work? Or will they demand more concessions? Are you suggesting that we can never regain lost rights, only lose more of them? (And i realize that that might be a political reality, but it seems like you may think that's the way it ought to be, which i disagree with.)
Sure they may be snooping your traffic but the law says they can so any claims you make about it being a violation of your constitutional rights are useless.
Uh, are you confused about your nomenclature, or are you actually unaware that a law can not circumvent a constitutional right? If i claim it's a violation of my constitutional rights and a lawyer can convince the Supreme Court that i'm correct, it doesn't matter how many laws have been passed about it. (Well, barring another Andrew Jackson of course.)
So when do we get to question the necessity of this thing? The war in Iraq has been over for awhile (more or less, in theory, not that that had anything to do with the origins of the Patriot Act anyways) and now Osama bin Laden is dead. I realize that the government would like to keep it in effect forever just because of the power it grants them, but shouldn't they at least have to come up with some kind of new excuse by now?
Of course if you have it always on you're wasting even more space than the URL box takes up, and if you don't have it on you have to click the tool icon thing, then click on the "Bookmark manager" option, which opens the bookmarks in a new tab, and then double-click on the bookmark you want to open it.
Perhaps they should consider adding some kind of button you could click that would temporarily open the bookmarks bar and let you single click on a bookmark and then it would immediately open that page and the bookmarks bar would go away.
And you know what would make it even better? If they made the bar vertical instead of horizontal, so you could actually see a decent number of bookmarks at one time. I guess it wouldn't be a bar at that point though, it would be like, a list i guess, that would kind of... drop down when you clicked the button. In fact they already have that button at the end of the bookmark bar when you get "too many" bookmarks, so they'd just need to move it up to the top instead of making it a part of the bookmarks bar.
That would be convenient _and_ not waste screen space all the time, perhaps Google should start doing research into how such a thing could be developed?
I really like what the guy who wrote this article had to say: "Government Says Video Games are Art....Yeah, Thanks" In short, that's great and all, but we already knew games were art. We never needed your approval in the first place, and anyone who still doesn't agree (*cough* Ebert,) well that's your loss. (Except he said it a lot better in the long version.)
For me and my circle of friends it started with AIM and mailing lists. _After_ that we started an IRC channel, at which point the mailing list started withering away. Then everyone got LiveJournal accounts, which finished off the mailing list and mostly killed off IRC as well. Then Facebook came along and mostly killed off LJ. For my AIM usage (and its much younger cousin gtalk) have been in steady decline during that whole process, though given what i see on my friends' feeds Twitter has taken up some of that role.
I'm really hoping that eventually something new will come along to knock out Facebook in turn, hopefully even something that will at least pretend to let me have a little privacy/anonymity. I can't say that that last hope is especially high however.
Hack Targets NASA's Earth Observation System [...] The hack comes exactly a month after the same hacker exposed a similar hole in a server operated by the European Space Agency.
Now _this_ is a hacker who knows how to aim high!
Hey! That's not how we do things in AMERICA! In America we have one giant plastic cup of "expresso" (really? you go overboard with the superlatives but don't even know how to spell it?) in the morning, a second big giant plastic cup of espresso in the afternoon, and top it off with a Monster energy drink in the evening! Some people use "5 hour energy" instead, but that's for WUSSES because those bottles are small and small things are for WUSSES!!!!
Okay, seriously, i can't tell if the original statement was sarcastic or just totally out of touch. Six cups a day? I've lost track of the number of people in my office who have some method of making their own coffee in one cup batches (usually a french press or a one cup filter) bring in the their own coffee rather than using the office supply and have one or two cups a day at most.
Or maybe i'm the one who's out touch, but i suspect the people who go to Starbucks for breakfast lunch and dinner are like all stereotypes, seen a lot more in movies, TV and bad jokes than they are in real life.
(Although what's with the "dirty water" as opposed to "strong coffee" thing? The problem with Starbucks isn't that they make it too weak, the problem is that they burn the beans to a crisp. Weakness is about the last thing i'd complain about with their coffee.)
But with a 3D printer you don't need all those normal machine tools. If it's a part that the 3D printer is capable of printing at high enough tolerances and in the right material (and as the technology continues to involved the quality of both the printing process and the materials used will improve) then it will be cheaper to print it yourself than to order it from someplace using old style mass production techniques. The cost of the equipment that needs to be amortized is far less that way, and there are less people involved in the chain who need to make a profit.
Of course in reality at least some companies will switch from custom dies and CNC and such and just print the parts out themselves, lowering the cost. Others may decide it's cheaper to sell you the plans and let you print it out yourself (either on your own printer or at the local Kinko's.) And of course some companies will switch to the new production method, keep charging just as much as they did for the old production method, and sue anyone who tries to print out the parts themselves.
Like the other commenter pointed out, this is just like the switch from large scale printing presses to personal printers. You can still save money in some circumstances (very large print runs) but most of the time it will be cheaper to use your own printer for single copies and small batches rather than dealing with a whole supply chain.
Arguing that the _old_ cost of printing is justified because of the amount of labor involved in carving out the woodblocks for the images is.... kinda irrelevant?