Ahead of her time, she insisted that games would be most enjoyable when they involved social interactions rather than just flashy single-player action and graphics
I must be behind my time, I still prefer flashy action games over those involving social interactions.
I suppose, multi-player is preferable over single-layer, but nobody can say Counter-Strike involves social interactions...
All you need is to hook up a camerea up do an artificial neural net and spend a couple hours teaching/progamming it to steer and throw in a cpu and run a rule based system with a well defined set of rules(for navigation,traffic laws, etc) and we're set. Piece of cake.
Sorry, neural networks are not that magic. It is one thing to teach a network, say, this combination of color pixels is probably a rock surface. It is a completely different matter to feed a video picture, and then conclude that this and this collection of pixels represent a rock; th rock is deliminated as so; this is a dirtroad; it goes from here to there; this is an acclivity it starts at this point. These are problems that essentially have not been solved satisfactory.
Most robot experts interviewed on the topic believe the no one will complete the race. A relevant comparison is that of the rovers they sent to Mars a few years ago. The researchers would have killed for a machine that could drive around and between rocks at a hundredth of the speed necessary to complete this race. This was not accomplished, despite research budgets many times larger than the price money in this competition.
"The space shuttle is the only heavy freighter and the only means of putting a new ISS component in space."
I mean no insult to the story's submitter, but that kind of thinking is the heart of the problem. NASA is not a freight service - they're a space program, dammit. Their job is not hauling stuff into orbit, but doing real, hard science.
Well, in order for the ISS to do any useful work they need lot of unromantic supplies. For one thing, the whole things is "falling" a few 100 m per day, and needs fuel to keep it in orbit.
Well, I have occasionaly written simple web pages for people. I just use a text editor to code and IE to see that it works. I do it mostly as a favor to friends, sometimes I charge a very modest fee.
I am well aware that these pages may not display correctly on all systems.
Unfortuantely, a growing number of web designers are incompetent and/or just plain lazy when it comes to building sites that work with browsers other than IE.
There is no excuse for building a site that won't at least provide basic navigation and information with even the simplest of browsers.
I seem to fit your description pretty neatly. But I disagree on the 'no excuse' part. If I help somebody with a simple page that reaches 80% of all Internet users, why does that oblige me to figure out how to make it work for the other 20%?
In can imagine telling a friend this. 'I could make this work for 80% of all users pretty easily. If you want it to work on 100% of systems, then I would have to study some protocols and install some alternative browsers to test it. It would probably take twice as long.' I think most of them would just say 'Don't bother. Go for the quick one, that will reach most people anyway.'
For many providers, the goal is not to reach everyone. The goal is to reach as many as possible at the lowest possible cost per user. And then a quick implementation for the most widely used browser may very well be the best way to go.
Similarly, just by mimicking the signal of the military radar you could launch a Denial of Service attack against anyone trying to use Wi-Fi.
It would seem this compromise results in a serious trade-off of National security versus the security of the users' own systems. It could end up being a nasty tool for industrial sabotage if you could shut down networking at competitor's facility from a van parked outside. As a result, it could limit the acceptance of Wi-Fi as a replaced for wired LANs - and keep it as a mobile only technology
As opposed to driving up a van jamming the traditional mobile frequencies...?
I don't see why jamming the shared frequencies should have any better or worse consequences than jamming the traditional ones. Possibly better, if the system adapts well around jammed frequencies. Possibly worse, if it overreacts and turns off a broad spectrum because of a small jam presence.
A cop can't just stop me on the street and demand ID or a SSN (he can, but he can't arrest me for not producing it). That's the difference between a national ID and a driver's liscence.
Not necessarily. The fact that a national ID is mandatory to own does does not necessarily mean that the cops will get the right to demand it at any time.
Just as while the cops can force you to submit DNA samples etc, but only if there is a warrant of some kind.
With advances in medicine, regeneration, nanotech, and cybernetic replacements/augmentations, I fully expect to live at least 200 years. Did you take that into consideration when making your prediction?:)
What you fail to realize that these replacement/ augumentations will not be possible until research labs have access to 128- or 512- bit general purpose computers.
While I totally agree with your conclusions, I would like to argue a little bit about your methodology.
All water propulsion systems convert energy to water heat by friction (if there were no friction, it would require no energy to travel through the water). This means that the water heating properties of any water engine is corresponding to the energy it consumes. Thus all you have to do is take the energy of the fuel you consumed and divide it with the heat capacity of water. In other words, how much water gets heated is just a function of the efficiency of the engine. This disregards heating of the air around the engine, but this is probably an OK approximation, considering how much better water conducts heat than air.
I think the main problem with integration is size. I want my integrated device to
1 Fit comfortably in a front pocket of my pants
2 Have a screen that is big enough to write on and that is comfortable to look at
I think I will have to stay without my desired device for some time, but perhaps not forever. Sooner or later we will have foldable screens or some other workaround.
Impressive, when teachers have the integrity to do this. But not too common.
When I went to high school in Sweden, all students in the country took key exams at the same time. Then everyone was given a grade exactly according to a bell curve. In fact, that was how the grades where defined; an A was two standard deviations (or possibly one and a half) above average. After that the teachers could modify the stundents' final grades based on other (non-national) exams. However, the average of the class had to stay very close to what the class scored on average on the national exam. This way, students could be fairly compared all over the country, but at the same time some of the pitfalls of big national exams (extreme attention to a single event) were avoided.
But these days, the system is abandonded. There is now a more American system with rampant grade inflation and very different grade criteria among schools.
Dear Admiral,
our scientists have just developed a new communication device they call the 'radio'. It is said that with these new tools our ships can communicate faster and more efficiently with each other. However, I recommend against starting to use these new tools. It would seem, even with encryption, to leave things open to electronic countermeasures. Or imagine this scenario: some terrorist who jams things or sends confusing orders to the ship. The crew is trying to figure out what is going on when WHAM the strike takes place. No clearly, new technologies such as these should be avoided at all costs, and we should keep using flags and pigeons which are all but impossible to interrupt and intercept.
There is a good reason why warships have more people then are strictly necessacry to run them on board.
Simply, if a whole bunch of people get killed on the ship, then there are still enough left to run it. This is not insignifigant, after all who wants to have an undermanned ship after 1/4-1/2 the crew dies?
The point is that they are reducing the people that are "strictly necessary". They can then reduce the manpower, and still have a reserve.
Do you know why warships are expensive? No, the main part is actually not building them. Over the life-time of the ship, the far biggest cost is salaries to the people on board. The navy has realized this and it is very wise to reduce the number of sailors and increase automation.
Furthermore, in these days the public is very sensitive about casualties (rightly so); it is thus good to reduce the numnber of people exposed to risk.
Considering that Slashdotters will hear this story on the third iteration it should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but it is quite entertaining.
So this guy, my friends brother, was a high school kid at the time (a few years ago). Being relatively bored in school, he lived for making music.
One day, he visited a large career fair; and in some lottery he won a state of the art laptop computer. He sold the computer immediately and bought a snazzy synthesizer.
Later that year he was approached by some girl at school who dreamed of stardom; she was singing and asked him to provide the background music. He agreed, and wrote some standard background stuff for her song. The girl took her song to a record company, and hoped that she would be 'discovered' and get to sing with a real band.
The record companies called her a few days later. They did not care for her song; but they wanted to know who had written the music. Soon enough a limousine pulled up outside my friend's house and took this guy to the recording company.
Now, most people don't know this but a good chunk of all that poppy boy band music is actually made by one or two fat guys in Sweden. My friends brother apparently had a talent for making that kind of stuff, and furthermore he had experienced with the synthesizers and music equipment. So he was asked to join a small team of these pop music writers.
I don't know how the story ended, but last thing I heard was that the guy noticed how his friends complained over having to shuffle 6 figures of Krona (5 figures of $) from their check accounts each month. Of course, if you get a quarter or so for each Back Street Boys record and say a penny for each time your hit song plays on any radio station in the world it adds up...
I think the artist and writer ususally get around $1 each ($2 if it is the same).
As for the studios costs, it must vary enormously between records. Many releases (if not most) are just compilations of previous work and thus have no recording costs. For others there must be large variations between the garage band and the Madonna.
Store markup is around 50%; I saw the figure for a gas station that sold some CDs.
I predict that population will increase, technology will become more refined, space travel will become more of a focus as the result of both of those. Oh yeah, and I firmly predict an ice age in the next 10K years
Seems reasonable. But not inevitible; populations are decreasing in industrial countries and could start doing so elsewhere as well. And then we have my earlier examples of comet collisions and nuclear war, they could happen and put an end to it all.
Okay. Predictions are in. It's *your* job to prove me wrong. Good luck.:)
I think you missed my point; I don't claim to be able to make these predictions - I think it is impossible. The only way to tell is to wait for a couple of thousands of years and see what happens.:)
If you consistently make correct and useful predictions then I will start to listen. Call me skeptic, but getting it right once in a very general prediction is not enough for me.
100 or 200 years is a myopic view of history. Larger factors like nationalism, resource pressures, population expansion, steady trends in technology, industrialism, and so on drive history -- not individuals. Taking the longer view, psychohistory (acting in hindsight) may have predicted that near 100 BCE a large seafaring empire covering the entire Mediterranian, with effective military technology, efficient government structure, rigid social classes, and a strong military influence over government would have risen.
Well, we seem to agree that on the time scales of hundreds if not thousands of years the history of man is essentially chaotic and thus impossible to predict.
Personally I think this is true for larger time scales as well. Events like nuclear war, or Earth colliding with a big comet could change everything and cannot be predicted.
For anyone who thinks differently, the burden of proof is on you to make correct predictions for tens of thousands of years into the future. Saying that in hindsight something was inevitible will not do.
The fact that there have been frauds does not change the overall picture: rich finds in northern China have revolutionlazied our understanding of late dinosaurs and birds.
It is now quite clear that the latter are the decendants of the former; or technically speaking bird are birds.
If this is a fake no doubt it would have been uncovered by the scientific community, as happened with the NG one.
Tor, eagerly awaiting $20
So I buy an X-BOX, buy the chip, and then install a linux based bios.... on what amounts to a shitty celeron based machine? I don't know... seems kind of weird.
I'd rather get a good machine, install linux... and NOT pay microsoft 300 bucks for sub-standard equipment.
I'm gussing most people who do this sort of thing are the types who would love to see Microsoft fall... if that is the case, don't give them your money.... no matter how cool your modded X-BOX will be
I think you missed the point. Like everyone in the business, MS loses money on each console they sell. The business plan is to get it back in games.
Someone who buys an XBox and mods it to a computer gets a great deal. The equipment may not be state of the art, but it has been significantly subsidied by MS and is thus cheaper than regular hardware with similar performance. It also follows that they are not 'giving' their money to MS, quite the contrary. MS will have to give more money to the hardware vendors.
Tor
Peter Parker dolls definitely should have been subject to the tax, according to the (admittedly very dumb) rules
Yes, the rules are very dumb. The more different tariff levels you have, the more you are going to have cases like this. If there are different levels for toys and dolls (!) then you can rest assured that any money generated by the tariff will go directly to feed the bureaucracy that is going to examine the products and fight all the battles.
Oh, one more thing. Given that they have these stupid rules, it is probably best to rule by apperances, and not by the story told behind each item.
"No, this is not a sheet of steel, it is a doll of a human who can transform himself, according to this story I have written"
Keeping the press out of the courtroom is a good idea, IMO. The 3 ring circus' that plays out in big American trials is an absolute joke. I'm absolutely convinced OJ would have been convicted in a Canadian court.
Perhaps you are right, but the OJ outcome was not because of the media, but rather because the jurors were completely uneducated. After the trial, it became clear that they had not understood the very basics of DNA, and thus completely disregarded these arguments.
Unfortunately, this is quite typical because people that are smart and/or educated are usually the first to be thrown out when the lawyers examine potential candidates. I was called once but when I told them I went to Caltech it took them about 0.3 s of deliberations to conclude that I was not the right person to have anything to say about a patent dispute.
If we compare the two it should probably be mentioned that they have different audio encoding technology. XM claims that their is superior. This would not be noteworthy except for the fact that they can
quote a few independent tests.
I don't know.... it just doesn't work to have one station that you can listen to all the time. You miss locality... and people like that.
Well, the customer who wants local stuff will clearly not be statisfied by XM. But I think that there is a significant customer segment, myself included, that does not care about local stuff. Personally I don't want to hear people talking, (be it local or not) and I think that the selection of music I get on FM is very limited.
With XM I could get a much better selection of different music types, not to mention clearer sound and no commercials. I'll wait for the prices to fall a little further though...
And if he kept sneaking into my business to do his musical number, I have the right to have him charged for trespassing
Yes, and I think the key point is that if they want to sue him it has to be on the basis of sneaking in without permission, not on the basis of his troll comments. This seems to be what they have done, I quote from the article:
GIE is alleging trespassing, breach of contract and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Of course, this could be quite complicated, legally speaking. While you can stop the homeless guy at the door, what to do you do with this online troll? If you block his user ID, then he can create another. This is hardly illegal. If you make users register their true name and address, then he can state a false name; I am not sure whether this would be illegal or not. I guess you could say that the business has to demonstrate that they had clearly communicated to him the fact that he was not welcome, and that he came anyway afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahead of her time, she insisted that games would be most enjoyable when they involved social interactions rather than just flashy single-player action and graphics
I must be behind my time, I still prefer flashy action games over those involving social interactions.
I suppose, multi-player is preferable over single-layer, but nobody can say Counter-Strike involves social interactions...
Tor
All you need is to hook up a camerea up do an artificial neural net and spend a couple hours teaching/progamming it to steer and throw in a cpu and run a rule based system with a well defined set of rules(for navigation,traffic laws, etc) and we're set. Piece of cake.
Sorry, neural networks are not that magic. It is one thing to teach a network, say, this combination of color pixels is probably a rock surface. It is a completely different matter to feed a video picture, and then conclude that this and this collection of pixels represent a rock; th rock is deliminated as so; this is a dirtroad; it goes from here to there; this is an acclivity it starts at this point. These are problems that essentially have not been solved satisfactory.
Most robot experts interviewed on the topic believe the no one will complete the race. A relevant comparison is that of the rovers they sent to Mars a few years ago. The researchers would have killed for a machine that could drive around and between rocks at a hundredth of the speed necessary to complete this race. This was not accomplished, despite research budgets many times larger than the price money in this competition.
Tor
I wonder whether they'll finally be able to disprove the six (or however many) degrees of separation.
Hum, the hypothesis that everybody knows everybody else within 6 degrees of separation.
Clearly, this is false because some people know no others.
Tor
"The space shuttle is the only heavy freighter and the only means of putting a new ISS component in space."
I mean no insult to the story's submitter, but that kind of thinking is the heart of the problem. NASA is not a freight service - they're a space program, dammit. Their job is not hauling stuff into orbit, but doing real, hard science.
Well, in order for the ISS to do any useful work they need lot of unromantic supplies. For one thing, the whole things is "falling" a few 100 m per day, and needs fuel to keep it in orbit.
Tor
Well, I have occasionaly written simple web pages for people. I just use a text editor to code and IE to see that it works. I do it mostly as a favor to friends, sometimes I charge a very modest fee.
I am well aware that these pages may not display correctly on all systems.
Unfortuantely, a growing number of web designers are incompetent and/or just plain lazy when it comes to building sites that work with browsers other than IE. There is no excuse for building a site that won't at least provide basic navigation and information with even the simplest of browsers.
I seem to fit your description pretty neatly. But I disagree on the 'no excuse' part. If I help somebody with a simple page that reaches 80% of all Internet users, why does that oblige me to figure out how to make it work for the other 20%?
In can imagine telling a friend this. 'I could make this work for 80% of all users pretty easily. If you want it to work on 100% of systems, then I would have to study some protocols and install some alternative browsers to test it. It would probably take twice as long.' I think most of them would just say 'Don't bother. Go for the quick one, that will reach most people anyway.'
For many providers, the goal is not to reach everyone. The goal is to reach as many as possible at the lowest possible cost per user. And then a quick implementation for the most widely used browser may very well be the best way to go.
Tor
Similarly, just by mimicking the signal of the military radar you could launch a Denial of Service attack against anyone trying to use Wi-Fi. It would seem this compromise results in a serious trade-off of National security versus the security of the users' own systems. It could end up being a nasty tool for industrial sabotage if you could shut down networking at competitor's facility from a van parked outside. As a result, it could limit the acceptance of Wi-Fi as a replaced for wired LANs - and keep it as a mobile only technology
As opposed to driving up a van jamming the traditional mobile frequencies...?
I don't see why jamming the shared frequencies should have any better or worse consequences than jamming the traditional ones. Possibly better, if the system adapts well around jammed frequencies. Possibly worse, if it overreacts and turns off a broad spectrum because of a small jam presence.
Tor
A cop can't just stop me on the street and demand ID or a SSN (he can, but he can't arrest me for not producing it). That's the difference between a national ID and a driver's liscence.
Not necessarily. The fact that a national ID is mandatory to own does does not necessarily mean that the cops will get the right to demand it at any time.
Just as while the cops can force you to submit DNA samples etc, but only if there is a warrant of some kind.
Tor
With advances in medicine, regeneration, nanotech, and cybernetic replacements/augmentations, I fully expect to live at least 200 years. Did you take that into consideration when making your prediction? :)
What you fail to realize that these replacement/ augumentations will not be possible until research labs have access to 128- or 512- bit general purpose computers.
Tor
While I totally agree with your conclusions, I would like to argue a little bit about your methodology.
All water propulsion systems convert energy to water heat by friction (if there were no friction, it would require no energy to travel through the water). This means that the water heating properties of any water engine is corresponding to the energy it consumes. Thus all you have to do is take the energy of the fuel you consumed and divide it with the heat capacity of water. In other words, how much water gets heated is just a function of the efficiency of the engine. This disregards heating of the air around the engine, but this is probably an OK approximation, considering how much better water conducts heat than air.
Tor
I think the main problem with integration is size. I want my integrated device to
1 Fit comfortably in a front pocket of my pants
2 Have a screen that is big enough to write on and that is comfortable to look at
I think I will have to stay without my desired device for some time, but perhaps not forever. Sooner or later we will have foldable screens or some other workaround.
Tor
Impressive, when teachers have the integrity to do this. But not too common.
When I went to high school in Sweden, all students in the country took key exams at the same time. Then everyone was given a grade exactly according to a bell curve. In fact, that was how the grades where defined; an A was two standard deviations (or possibly one and a half) above average. After that the teachers could modify the stundents' final grades based on other (non-national) exams. However, the average of the class had to stay very close to what the class scored on average on the national exam. This way, students could be fairly compared all over the country, but at the same time some of the pitfalls of big national exams (extreme attention to a single event) were avoided.
But these days, the system is abandonded. There is now a more American system with rampant grade inflation and very different grade criteria among schools.
Tor
Dear Admiral, our scientists have just developed a new communication device they call the 'radio'. It is said that with these new tools our ships can communicate faster and more efficiently with each other. However, I recommend against starting to use these new tools. It would seem, even with encryption, to leave things open to electronic countermeasures. Or imagine this scenario: some terrorist who jams things or sends confusing orders to the ship. The crew is trying to figure out what is going on when WHAM the strike takes place. No clearly, new technologies such as these should be avoided at all costs, and we should keep using flags and pigeons which are all but impossible to interrupt and intercept.
Tor
There is a good reason why warships have more people then are strictly necessacry to run them on board. Simply, if a whole bunch of people get killed on the ship, then there are still enough left to run it. This is not insignifigant, after all who wants to have an undermanned ship after 1/4-1/2 the crew dies?
The point is that they are reducing the people that are "strictly necessary". They can then reduce the manpower, and still have a reserve.
Do you know why warships are expensive? No, the main part is actually not building them. Over the life-time of the ship, the far biggest cost is salaries to the people on board. The navy has realized this and it is very wise to reduce the number of sailors and increase automation.
Furthermore, in these days the public is very sensitive about casualties (rightly so); it is thus good to reduce the numnber of people exposed to risk.
Tor
I am out travelling. While I could not care less about the game, I do appreciate the commercials. I found them all online
Tor
Considering that Slashdotters will hear this story on the third iteration it should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but it is quite entertaining.
So this guy, my friends brother, was a high school kid at the time (a few years ago). Being relatively bored in school, he lived for making music.
One day, he visited a large career fair; and in some lottery he won a state of the art laptop computer. He sold the computer immediately and bought a snazzy synthesizer.
Later that year he was approached by some girl at school who dreamed of stardom; she was singing and asked him to provide the background music. He agreed, and wrote some standard background stuff for her song. The girl took her song to a record company, and hoped that she would be 'discovered' and get to sing with a real band.
The record companies called her a few days later. They did not care for her song; but they wanted to know who had written the music. Soon enough a limousine pulled up outside my friend's house and took this guy to the recording company.
Now, most people don't know this but a good chunk of all that poppy boy band music is actually made by one or two fat guys in Sweden. My friends brother apparently had a talent for making that kind of stuff, and furthermore he had experienced with the synthesizers and music equipment. So he was asked to join a small team of these pop music writers.
I don't know how the story ended, but last thing I heard was that the guy noticed how his friends complained over having to shuffle 6 figures of Krona (5 figures of $) from their check accounts each month. Of course, if you get a quarter or so for each Back Street Boys record and say a penny for each time your hit song plays on any radio station in the world it adds up...
Tor
I think the artist and writer ususally get around $1 each ($2 if it is the same).
As for the studios costs, it must vary enormously between records. Many releases (if not most) are just compilations of previous work and thus have no recording costs. For others there must be large variations between the garage band and the Madonna.
Store markup is around 50%; I saw the figure for a gas station that sold some CDs.
Tor
I predict that population will increase, technology will become more refined, space travel will become more of a focus as the result of both of those. Oh yeah, and I firmly predict an ice age in the next 10K years
:)
:)
Seems reasonable. But not inevitible; populations are decreasing in industrial countries and could start doing so elsewhere as well. And then we have my earlier examples of comet collisions and nuclear war, they could happen and put an end to it all.
Okay. Predictions are in. It's *your* job to prove me wrong. Good luck.
I think you missed my point; I don't claim to be able to make these predictions - I think it is impossible. The only way to tell is to wait for a couple of thousands of years and see what happens.
If you consistently make correct and useful predictions then I will start to listen. Call me skeptic, but getting it right once in a very general prediction is not enough for me.
Tor
100 or 200 years is a myopic view of history. Larger factors like nationalism, resource pressures, population expansion, steady trends in technology, industrialism, and so on drive history -- not individuals. Taking the longer view, psychohistory (acting in hindsight) may have predicted that near 100 BCE a large seafaring empire covering the entire Mediterranian, with effective military technology, efficient government structure, rigid social classes, and a strong military influence over government would have risen.
Well, we seem to agree that on the time scales of hundreds if not thousands of years the history of man is essentially chaotic and thus impossible to predict.
Personally I think this is true for larger time scales as well. Events like nuclear war, or Earth colliding with a big comet could change everything and cannot be predicted.
For anyone who thinks differently, the burden of proof is on you to make correct predictions for tens of thousands of years into the future. Saying that in hindsight something was inevitible will not do.
Tor
The fact that there have been frauds does not change the overall picture: rich finds in northern China have revolutionlazied our understanding of late dinosaurs and birds. It is now quite clear that the latter are the decendants of the former; or technically speaking bird are birds. If this is a fake no doubt it would have been uncovered by the scientific community, as happened with the NG one. Tor, eagerly awaiting $20
So I buy an X-BOX, buy the chip, and then install a linux based bios.... on what amounts to a shitty celeron based machine? I don't know... seems kind of weird. I'd rather get a good machine, install linux... and NOT pay microsoft 300 bucks for sub-standard equipment. I'm gussing most people who do this sort of thing are the types who would love to see Microsoft fall... if that is the case, don't give them your money.... no matter how cool your modded X-BOX will be I think you missed the point. Like everyone in the business, MS loses money on each console they sell. The business plan is to get it back in games.
Someone who buys an XBox and mods it to a computer gets a great deal. The equipment may not be state of the art, but it has been significantly subsidied by MS and is thus cheaper than regular hardware with similar performance. It also follows that they are not 'giving' their money to MS, quite the contrary. MS will have to give more money to the hardware vendors. Tor
Peter Parker dolls definitely should have been subject to the tax, according to the (admittedly very dumb) rules
Yes, the rules are very dumb. The more different tariff levels you have, the more you are going to have cases like this. If there are different levels for toys and dolls (!) then you can rest assured that any money generated by the tariff will go directly to feed the bureaucracy that is going to examine the products and fight all the battles.
Oh, one more thing. Given that they have these stupid rules, it is probably best to rule by apperances, and not by the story told behind each item.
"No, this is not a sheet of steel, it is a doll of a human who can transform himself, according to this story I have written"
Tor
Keeping the press out of the courtroom is a good idea, IMO. The 3 ring circus' that plays out in big American trials is an absolute joke. I'm absolutely convinced OJ would have been convicted in a Canadian court.
Perhaps you are right, but the OJ outcome was not because of the media, but rather because the jurors were completely uneducated. After the trial, it became clear that they had not understood the very basics of DNA, and thus completely disregarded these arguments.
Unfortunately, this is quite typical because people that are smart and/or educated are usually the first to be thrown out when the lawyers examine potential candidates. I was called once but when I told them I went to Caltech it took them about 0.3 s of deliberations to conclude that I was not the right person to have anything to say about a patent dispute.
Tor
If we compare the two it should probably be mentioned that they have different audio encoding technology. XM claims that their is superior. This would not be noteworthy except for the fact that they can quote a few independent tests.
Tor
I don't know.... it just doesn't work to have one station that you can listen to all the time. You miss locality... and people like that.
Well, the customer who wants local stuff will clearly not be statisfied by XM. But I think that there is a significant customer segment, myself included, that does not care about local stuff. Personally I don't want to hear people talking, (be it local or not) and I think that the selection of music I get on FM is very limited.
With XM I could get a much better selection of different music types, not to mention clearer sound and no commercials. I'll wait for the prices to fall a little further though...
Tor
And if he kept sneaking into my business to do his musical number, I have the right to have him charged for trespassing
Yes, and I think the key point is that if they want to sue him it has to be on the basis of sneaking in without permission, not on the basis of his troll comments. This seems to be what they have done, I quote from the article:
GIE is alleging trespassing, breach of contract and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
Of course, this could be quite complicated, legally speaking. While you can stop the homeless guy at the door, what to do you do with this online troll? If you block his user ID, then he can create another. This is hardly illegal. If you make users register their true name and address, then he can state a false name; I am not sure whether this would be illegal or not. I guess you could say that the business has to demonstrate that they had clearly communicated to him the fact that he was not welcome, and that he came anyway afterwards.
Tor