I don't know about the Renaissance, but if you've looked at old magazine's with "cars of the future" predictions, it's pretty amusing. I can't remember where I saw one recently...probably an old Popular Mechanics. They literally look like a cross between what we still percieve of as futuristic (wheel covors and smooth rounded corners) and what we perceive of as old fashion (50s style big fins, gigantic bodies). It's just kind of an amusing reminder that nobody has any idea what technology we'll have at our disposal in the future.
To answer your point a little more on-topic, though, I would bet most people in the Renaissance didn't think about how advanced technology would get. And not just the illiterate masses, but even probably most of the educated members of society. Leonardo De Vinci obviously is famous for all sorts of interesting inventions, but I wonder if he even suspected how much technology would change society as a whole. I think it was the Enlightenment (at least in European history)...around 1700s when science as we know it today really started developping. Maybe not until the industrial revolution (1800s) would people really be cognizant of technological advances occuring during their own lifetimes. Once you start to see changes on that time scale it's a lot easier to imagine the advancement continuing past your lifetime.
But of course, IANAHOAS (I am not a Historian or a sociologist) and I have no links to back it up...this is just stuff dredged out of the depths of my past education.
Hardly...You know blind devotion to the principle that everything that benefits Corporate America(TM) is good thing is not the same thing as favoring capitolism or laissez-faire economics or libertarianism or whatever you presumably identify yourself as? When the government steps in and takes an active role in helping corporations advance their goals at the expense of society, they're not supporting a free economy. You want the government all the way out of the business of redistributing wealth? Fine..I can respect that opinion even if I disagree with it, but at least have the balls to be consistant and advocate banning the entire patent system, whose sole justification for existance is the concept of 'benefiting society.'
Well that's sort of what I was getting at. It's not that I can't imagine a problem that can be solved systematically and therefore without "insight"...like an algebra problem. It's that I can't see how to solve the example word-play problem without insight...or external help from say a dictionary or a computer. I mean sure, there was some systematic effort to it: I looked at one of the three clue words, came up with a word that made a pair, and then checked it with the other two words. I think it took me four or five guesses before I came up with "apple". Sure there was some systematic plodding in doing the cross checking, but actually coming up with the pair word was somewhat random (or at least I can't explain the order I came up with them). As far as I can describe, "It just popped in there." And had "apple" been my first attempt, I don't think I would have felt like I had an insight: I just would have felt like it was an easy question.
Well...I may have read to much into the description, but it sounded like the whole test was like that example problem. I think the whole thing is still pretty interesting, but I just thought the example problem was curious.
What is a non-insightful answer?
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Those Eureka Moments
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, besides the obvious jokes about Modding...
Subjects pressed a button to indicate whether they had solved the problem using insight, which they had been told leads to an Aha! experience characterized by suddenness and obviousness.
So really, how would one solve a word problem without insight? Did any of the participants solve it by writing a dictionary searching algorithm into their PDA? Did they open a dictionary and start checking answers systematically? ("Bart, Cart, Dart, Eart... Nope, can't see any problem with that!")
In my own experience it just seems like it's the obscurity of the answer that makes it seem insightful or not. If I had read the three words and instantly known the answer I don't think I would have felt the Aha! moment that I felt after staring at it for a minute. So am I less insightful if I solve it faster?
This may be getting off-topic a little, but I learned this tip when I was in charge of my lab's PCs. One huge difference I noticed in Norton AV is under the advanced settings for real time file protection, there are two options: "Scan on modify (create)" and "Scan on Accessed or modify (create, open, move, copy or run)". For a while when I would install a new copy of Norton the second was the default setting, and it made a world of difference switching to the first. I have no benchmark numbers to back it up, but qualitatively I would say I couldn't tell the difference in performance between the first option and not having Norton installed at all, while checking the second option it was pretty easy to see the effect. It just kills any program that accesses data files and settings files as it goes because it interupts and scans the files every time they are needed. I assume the first option is sufficient to protect against downloading a new virus, while the second may actually help with damage control if you're already infected, but at some point you do have to decide the performance hit just isn't worth it.
Wishful thinking Arnold, but I think you're going to need to squeeze a few more drops out of something else to fix the budget. I swear I paid sales tax for every damn thing I ever bought online when I lived in California...because every online company was based in California and the website charged the tax to begin with. What is the rule on that anyway? Is it where the coorporate headquarters are will you get charged just because they ship it from a warehouse in your home state?
Apparently only those wealthy enough can afford to be saved while the rest of the 1500 people a year that croak because of drowsy driving have to suffer.
No it's more like trickle down protection: While it's true that initially the wealthy will see more benefit than the poor, some of those current fatalaties were people hit by the driver of the other car falling asleep and crossing the median. So while it may be a long time before I can afford a car with sleep protection in it, my chances of dying in an "asleep at the wheel" incident will still be reduced. Meanwhile, if the technology is effective and becomes standard, it will eventually work its way into the used car population and everyone will benefit. If it's not effective, it will go the way of automatic seatbelts.
I would assume that's the long-term goal...it's not there yet, but eventually they would not want to be limited to helping just those people who can still move their eyes. New technologies typically start out unable to beat (in terms of speed, reliability or ease of use) the older more entrenched technologies they will eventually replace.
The interesting thing to me was that the boxes are flashing at different frequencies. I suspect their machine is not picking up anything that could be positively identified as "thinking about a particular box" but simply picking up a frequency (or a harmonic) in the brain-wave that matches the frequency of the box you're looking at. It might not even be reacting to conscious thoughts per-se but neural signals in the visual pathway. Does this machine work if you close your eyes and try to picture one the flashing boxes in your head? You might have to train yourself to think of a box flashing at a particular frequency, but if you could, it's a start. No answer on the news site of course.
Even if it never gets to the point where it can tell you're thinking of a dog or a car, it could be useful. Even if paraplegics have to train themselves to think at a few different frequencies to communicate by "20 questions" (since this is/., think Capt. Pike here), if that's all they've got, it beats the hell out of having nothing at all.
They all say the same BS
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Spam Bits
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· Score: 1
"I always honor my unsubscribe requests."
"I never send porn."
Suuurrre.... But my favorite is when they complain about about the [baby voice]Big Bad Mean Old People On the Intewnet[/baby voice]. I mean duh! They know damn well they only make money because they're playing the odds. Mail a million people and you'll find a few stupid enough to buy your product and make you money. Well guess what goes hand in hand with that? Piss off a million people in one mass mailing, and you'll also find a few psychopathic enough to do what most of us just fantasize about. Suddenly the numbers game isn't such an advantage.
I think the OP had a good point...the problem as I understand it isn't limited to IE users who can't view compliant web pages. It's also lazy web developpers who use a M$ products to produce a web page that only renders well in IE...complete with the "This page best viewed using Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher" to make it all okay.
So your analogy would be more accurate if you said "Here's a dictionary so you can read the signs around town. If you want to talk to a native, though, I recommend you continue shouting slowly in English."
It's not useless, but it's also not a complete solution to the fact that IE isn't standards compliant.
Well, I'd admit the OP is assuming too much counting all of that $11.7 billion as a loss, but you are assuming too much saying it's good for the economy. The main point being who's to say that $11.7 billion couldn't have been spent better elsewhere? Those people who spent that money weren't going to bury it in the backyard like a dog bone...they probably would have spent it one something else that would be good for the economy. In fact that $11.7 billion is BAD for the economy if it's being spent on fraudulent or overpriced goods. It's taking business away from legitimate marketers who try to maintain customer loyalty by producing a good product and not overcharging for it.
Telemarketeers and spammers are the same breed: overcharge, knock an arbitrary amount off the price such that the sale price is still to high, and then try to trick people into thinking they're getting some kind of "SPECIAL OFFER JUST FOR YOU!!!"
Am I being unfair characterizing all spam advertised goods and services as fraudulent or overpriced? Sure...but I have no doubt it's true on average.
OFFERING BAD CONTRACTS TO PEOPLE (without misrepesenting them) WHO ARE DUMB ENOUGH TO SIGN THEM IS IMMORAL - NOT ILLEGAL.
Isn't that the whole point? I agree that unfair contracts are legal, but it's still illegal to misrepresent the facts in order to get them signed. SCO stands to gain money from convincing people that Linux is corrupted with their IP, both in terms of selling liscences for IP in Linux, and from creating enough uncertainty in Linux's future that new businesses will consider just starting out with Unix...and a liscence purchased, of course, from SCO.
If I tell you I own the Brooklyn Bridge, am planning to provide evidence of such ownership any day now, then tell you you can drive over my bridge any time you want for a mere $100 unlimited liscence... Aren't I commiting fraud? What if I add to that that the price will go up exhorbitantly once I've established my ownership in the courts, but you can get it on the ground floor now while it's still a good deal?
Well calling it racketeering is probably a little overboard, but I think something in there has to be actually ILLEGAL as opposed to merely IMMORAL.
Re:Privacy invasion OK as long as it's for sales?
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The Trouble with RFID
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Interesting viewpoint, but it's actually the retailers more than the government that have me worried. I'm all for retailers tailloring their inventory/options/ whatever they make or do to my interests. That's what capitalism is all about. My purchase of a product is a vote for the continued production of that product. But you don't need to know my name to consider that. I worry about the scenario presented in "Minority Report" (as another poster pointed out)...where advertisements tailored to ME shout at me as a walk by. Or as I walk by a store I once purchased something in my cell phone gets called by a computer telling me the "THESE RELATED ITEMS THAT MIGHT INTEREST YOU ARE ON SALE..." I'm also reasonably convinced that the only thing stopping this behavior by retailers/advertisers is the lack of technology. If advertisers could beam ads right into your brain, they wouldn't even think twice about it. The fact that the behavior annoys most people apparently doesn't hurt sales, as evidenced by Spam and Old Navy ads.
As for government oppression...I dunno. If they CIA/NSA/FBI say they won't try to abuse to the technology, I won't believe them for a second. But at the end of the day, they don't have a financial incentive to make our lives miserable, and I think what they'll end up with is Terabytes upon Terabytes of almost entirely useless information. I suppose blackmail opportunities are a real threat (So, senator...in light of our recent discovery that you do in fact frequent adult book stores, do you still want to cut our funding?) but even those kinds of activities would have to be tempered by the consequences. Yes Nixon sent his boyz to break into Watergate...and look how it turned out.
What if it's embedded in something useful/hard to remove? How many people want to rip a button off their new shirt because that's where the RFID tag is?
What about when you buy a new car...they're already using RFID for the keyless ignition. It's just a matter of time before they install EZPass/FastLane/WhateverItsCalledInYourArea in every new car without asking you. It won't be an obvious device in the corner of your windshield like it is now, it'll be hidden somewhere it's a pain to get to. Of course, the govt. will only track your whereabouts for free. You'll still have to pay the monthly fee if you want to zip through the toll-booths without stopping.
I'm surprised the article didn't emphasize the size difference as another factor. Miniaturizing hard-drives and batteries is a large reason both the iPod and iPod-mini cost what they do. If you compare them, you really have to say "you can get 15 gB more for only another $50 and having a larger mp3 player." Not that there is a huge difference size, nor would I consider the iPod to be inconveniently large, but I think Apple is correctly surmising that what difference there is may be enough to convince some people the iPod-mini is the way to go.
"Actually considering both apple and microsoft stole the GUI from Xerox Parc (go look it up) I don't think you could call either innovative."
You know I've heard this point made a number of times through the years, but I think you have still have to give Apple credit for recognizing a good idea. Xerox Parc's reason d'etre is to come up with somewhat "out there" ideas and do some pretty near basic, not-necessarily applicable/profitable research on the chance of hitting a really good idea, but it's understood that a lot of these ideas will never go anywhere. Xerox apparently didn't do much with this idea. Some suit probably said "eh...that's neat, but can we really make a profit with it? Shelve it.." Steve Jobs, on the other hand, saw it and said "I'm going to bank the future of my company on the idea that people will like this interface so much more than text-based I can create a whole market for it." He may not have had the original inspiration to conceive of a GUI, and kudos to the Parc researcher who did, but I think you could still call Steve Jobs and Apple computers innovative for recognizing a good idea when they saw one. Ballsy if nothing else.
Third reason is I've seen a decent number of sites that do browser detection and won't let you in if your browser isn't on their list. Firebird rarely is on the list, however, Mozilla usually is.
Wow, who does this? That is so completely counter to the entire point of HTML standards...the entire concept of any kind of standards really. It's nice to see Mozilla gaining acceptance, but if it's okay for websites to dictate which browsers we can use, it's going to become an all IE all the time world.
I understand that practically speaking we can't always boycott websites that don't "play nice" but it should certainly be considered for websites where you have an alternative, or at least complain about how they're missing the point of standards in the first place.
As so many others have pointed out driving dangerously and speeding are not the same thing. It's ridiculuous that there is one speed limit that is always applicable. So grandma with a screaming kid in the car, in rush hour traffic driving into the setting sun should be allowed to drive the same speed as me with my better reflexes, better eyesight, at 2am on the same stretch of highway now completely deserted?
Maybe we only put up with an antiquated speed limit system because there is a certain amount of discretion you can "get away with", albeit there's a bit of an unlucky lottery system to it if you happen to be driving safely but over the speed limit when and where Joe Cop is trying to finish his monthly quota. I'd be less offended by this system if there was a little more case specific algorithm for determining the speed limit.
Conversely, when conditions are poor enough, a cop can and should pull you over for reckless driving even if you are going less than the posted speed limit. Will this system issue tickets for people who don't slow down when they enter a patch of fog?
So basically this thing outperformed graduate students on what amounts to a beefed up multiple choice test. Overhyped. I could train a highschool dropout how to do everything this machine does in a fraction of the time it took them to program their robot, but that doesn't mean I'd be training a great scientist. I'd just be training a lab technician to do a few specific tasks. It is true that what was once a difficult task (identifying a gene) is now being accomplished by a machine, but that's only because the process of solving that problem has been so thoroughly worked that it can be boiled down to a series of decisions and steps. And Mathematica has been able to solve integrals symbolically for years. Whoop dee doo.
What I'd really like to know is if this robotic scientist knows how to:
clean the lab after a flood?
Kiss up to the senior scientist by tying every result back to his/her favorite theory?
Finding those tenuous connections that justify citing its own unrelated work as much as possible?
Translate between "Journal Speak" and English (i.e. numerous trials = we tried it twice; obviously = so I've heard, but I couldn't say why)?
Ask a poiniant question in seminar, like "Sir, your work on high temperature superconducters is very interesting, and there seem to be some obvious implications to my own work on yeast gene sequencing, which I'm sure you're completely familiar with. Would you care to comment on a few of the most important ones, or should I just keep talking about myself for the next ten minutes?"
...as far as I'm concerned, if Real can learn from their mistakes and bad PR to turn around and do the right thing, they should be proud of what they're doing, the editors of Slashdot should be proud of having made a positive difference, and we should be applauding them, not denigrating them.
I applaud your sentiment for forgiveness, but capitalism is a cold hard world...most new businesses fail despite not having treated their customers like cattle, and if RealNetworks goes out of business, we won't even notice the absence. There are already plenty of replacements, and there's sure to be plenty more. If RealNetworks finds it impossible to regain the trust and good will of burned ex-users (and even non-ex-users who were warned away by pissed off ex-users) I can't say I feel that sorry for them. They knew their actions would piss people off but they're gambling that benefits outweigh the costs. They made a decision and now they can live with it. If you feel sorry for the employees who will lose their jobs if RealNetworks folds, just remember it's a zero sum game. Some other internet/media company will fold instead if RealNetworks doesn't, and feel sorry for those employees as well.
But really my point is...it's a bummer if companies feel like there's no point in trying to fix a damaged reputation, but at the same time it's a good thing if they get the message to make sure they don't let their reputation get sullied in the first place. Maybe the next coorporate bean counter to try to estimate the impact of pissed off consumers on the bottom line will give it a little more weight and recommend the kinder, gentler business model.
That's pretty cool, but seems a little over-specialized. I could give up the integrated control and charging although I'd admit both are useful and convenient (I can see the news stories in the next few years about distracted drivers causing crashes while picking the next song on their mp3 player...) I just want my next car stereo to have a normal stereo jack input. No matter how much the technology advances in protables, people are still always going to want to use them with headphones, and there hasn't been much change in headphone jacks over the last 20 years. Sound quality may suffer a little compared to digital, but come on...I'm listening to it with my engine running 99% of the time.
I haven't looked into it yet (but am now wishing I'd bought a tape player with adapter years ago instead of the CD player that now can't play my iPod) but I'm curious how hard it is to find a car stereo with this option. It's so easy to implement, and could be so useful, I would expect this to be a standard feature now or in the near future.
And on the other hand, what this guy tried to do was establish a "business relationship" -- notice that he did try to contact them first with the offer to help them:
Don't be naive. This dude had blackmail on his mind the whole time. If he was a genuine "white hat" hacker who finds security holes for the fun of hit, he could have:
A. Shared the info with BB for free.
B. Not told anyone about it, but relished in knowing how smart he is.
C. Contacted BB before trying anything and said "I'm a professional security expert. Would you like me to examine your network for security flaws for a fee?". (They would have laughed at him for that one admitedly, but then that's why reputation matters in business).
If I (being a complete stranger whom you know nothing about) knocked on your front door and told you "I know how to break into your apartment(house). Would you like to set up a business relationship with me whereby you learn how to prevent this security hole?" don't you think you'd call the cops? Even if it wasn't your home...if it was your physical place of business and I was threatening to break into the safe where you keep confidential client info.
Not that I don't think Best Buy has an obligation to be careful with security re: users' credit card numbers, and I hope they have examined their web security carefully after this incident, but if they start rewarding extortion they're just going to encourage it.
So if I get woken up in the middle of the night only to hear a bunch of whistles when I pick up my phone I get nothing. But I plug a fax machine in and I can claim $500 each time it happens?
If you haven't figured out how to change a battery by now pay the 5 year old next door to do it for you
Have you ever seen an iPod? A 5 year old would admittedly be less discouraged by the lack of an "open here" latch to replace the battery, but I doubt either the "bang repeatedly with a heavy object" or "jam a screwdriver into the recharge port and pry" methods of getting the cover open adequately address the previous poster's third question.
Well I'll probably get a RTFA because I'm not sure this would work, but fundamentally, the more a p2p protocall/program/implementation maintains anonymity and encryption, isn't it just that much easier for the RIAA to pollute it with bogus mp3s? Couldn't they "log-out" and "log back in" or whatever the equivalent concept is, with different handles/user names/whatever each time? If this technique can't track a file source's IP address, which would seem to be the whole point of going through all the obfuscation so the RIAA can't figure out who you are and sue you, then how would you be able to "blacklist" anybody who's collection is full of bogus tracks...like say some server the RIAA sets up to pretend to be 100s of users. In fact, if the "neighbor encryption" concept is good enough that you can't tell which users are near which other users, it wouldn't even matter if the RIAA used a block of 100s of IPs all in the same domain. As long as they log-out and log back in say every 10 minutes, you'll never be able to keep your search from finding them again. You could download one test file before downloading a whole album, but 10 minutes later, you might find the same bogus user again on a new search.
Slashdot Mirror
To answer your point a little more on-topic, though, I would bet most people in the Renaissance didn't think about how advanced technology would get. And not just the illiterate masses, but even probably most of the educated members of society. Leonardo De Vinci obviously is famous for all sorts of interesting inventions, but I wonder if he even suspected how much technology would change society as a whole. I think it was the Enlightenment (at least in European history)...around 1700s when science as we know it today really started developping. Maybe not until the industrial revolution (1800s) would people really be cognizant of technological advances occuring during their own lifetimes. Once you start to see changes on that time scale it's a lot easier to imagine the advancement continuing past your lifetime.
But of course, IANAHOAS (I am not a Historian or a sociologist) and I have no links to back it up...this is just stuff dredged out of the depths of my past education.
Hardly...You know blind devotion to the principle that everything that benefits Corporate America(TM) is good thing is not the same thing as favoring capitolism or laissez-faire economics or libertarianism or whatever you presumably identify yourself as? When the government steps in and takes an active role in helping corporations advance their goals at the expense of society, they're not supporting a free economy. You want the government all the way out of the business of redistributing wealth? Fine..I can respect that opinion even if I disagree with it, but at least have the balls to be consistant and advocate banning the entire patent system, whose sole justification for existance is the concept of 'benefiting society.'
Well...I may have read to much into the description, but it sounded like the whole test was like that example problem. I think the whole thing is still pretty interesting, but I just thought the example problem was curious.
Subjects pressed a button to indicate whether they had solved the problem using insight, which they had been told leads to an Aha! experience characterized by suddenness and obviousness.
So really, how would one solve a word problem without insight? Did any of the participants solve it by writing a dictionary searching algorithm into their PDA? Did they open a dictionary and start checking answers systematically? ("Bart, Cart, Dart, Eart... Nope, can't see any problem with that!")
In my own experience it just seems like it's the obscurity of the answer that makes it seem insightful or not. If I had read the three words and instantly known the answer I don't think I would have felt the Aha! moment that I felt after staring at it for a minute. So am I less insightful if I solve it faster?
This may be getting off-topic a little, but I learned this tip when I was in charge of my lab's PCs. One huge difference I noticed in Norton AV is under the advanced settings for real time file protection, there are two options: "Scan on modify (create)" and "Scan on Accessed or modify (create, open, move, copy or run)". For a while when I would install a new copy of Norton the second was the default setting, and it made a world of difference switching to the first. I have no benchmark numbers to back it up, but qualitatively I would say I couldn't tell the difference in performance between the first option and not having Norton installed at all, while checking the second option it was pretty easy to see the effect. It just kills any program that accesses data files and settings files as it goes because it interupts and scans the files every time they are needed. I assume the first option is sufficient to protect against downloading a new virus, while the second may actually help with damage control if you're already infected, but at some point you do have to decide the performance hit just isn't worth it.
Wishful thinking Arnold, but I think you're going to need to squeeze a few more drops out of something else to fix the budget. I swear I paid sales tax for every damn thing I ever bought online when I lived in California...because every online company was based in California and the website charged the tax to begin with. What is the rule on that anyway? Is it where the coorporate headquarters are will you get charged just because they ship it from a warehouse in your home state?
No it's more like trickle down protection: While it's true that initially the wealthy will see more benefit than the poor, some of those current fatalaties were people hit by the driver of the other car falling asleep and crossing the median. So while it may be a long time before I can afford a car with sleep protection in it, my chances of dying in an "asleep at the wheel" incident will still be reduced. Meanwhile, if the technology is effective and becomes standard, it will eventually work its way into the used car population and everyone will benefit. If it's not effective, it will go the way of automatic seatbelts.
The interesting thing to me was that the boxes are flashing at different frequencies. I suspect their machine is not picking up anything that could be positively identified as "thinking about a particular box" but simply picking up a frequency (or a harmonic) in the brain-wave that matches the frequency of the box you're looking at. It might not even be reacting to conscious thoughts per-se but neural signals in the visual pathway. Does this machine work if you close your eyes and try to picture one the flashing boxes in your head? You might have to train yourself to think of a box flashing at a particular frequency, but if you could, it's a start. No answer on the news site of course.
Even if it never gets to the point where it can tell you're thinking of a dog or a car, it could be useful. Even if paraplegics have to train themselves to think at a few different frequencies to communicate by "20 questions" (since this is /., think Capt. Pike here), if that's all they've got, it beats the hell out of having nothing at all.
"I never send porn."
Suuurrre.... But my favorite is when they complain about about the [baby voice]Big Bad Mean Old People On the Intewnet[/baby voice]. I mean duh! They know damn well they only make money because they're playing the odds. Mail a million people and you'll find a few stupid enough to buy your product and make you money. Well guess what goes hand in hand with that? Piss off a million people in one mass mailing, and you'll also find a few psychopathic enough to do what most of us just fantasize about. Suddenly the numbers game isn't such an advantage.
So your analogy would be more accurate if you said "Here's a dictionary so you can read the signs around town. If you want to talk to a native, though, I recommend you continue shouting slowly in English."
It's not useless, but it's also not a complete solution to the fact that IE isn't standards compliant.
Telemarketeers and spammers are the same breed: overcharge, knock an arbitrary amount off the price such that the sale price is still to high, and then try to trick people into thinking they're getting some kind of "SPECIAL OFFER JUST FOR YOU!!!"
Am I being unfair characterizing all spam advertised goods and services as fraudulent or overpriced? Sure...but I have no doubt it's true on average.
Isn't that the whole point? I agree that unfair contracts are legal, but it's still illegal to misrepresent the facts in order to get them signed. SCO stands to gain money from convincing people that Linux is corrupted with their IP, both in terms of selling liscences for IP in Linux, and from creating enough uncertainty in Linux's future that new businesses will consider just starting out with Unix...and a liscence purchased, of course, from SCO.
If I tell you I own the Brooklyn Bridge, am planning to provide evidence of such ownership any day now, then tell you you can drive over my bridge any time you want for a mere $100 unlimited liscence... Aren't I commiting fraud? What if I add to that that the price will go up exhorbitantly once I've established my ownership in the courts, but you can get it on the ground floor now while it's still a good deal?
Well calling it racketeering is probably a little overboard, but I think something in there has to be actually ILLEGAL as opposed to merely IMMORAL.
As for government oppression...I dunno. If they CIA/NSA/FBI say they won't try to abuse to the technology, I won't believe them for a second. But at the end of the day, they don't have a financial incentive to make our lives miserable, and I think what they'll end up with is Terabytes upon Terabytes of almost entirely useless information. I suppose blackmail opportunities are a real threat (So, senator...in light of our recent discovery that you do in fact frequent adult book stores, do you still want to cut our funding?) but even those kinds of activities would have to be tempered by the consequences. Yes Nixon sent his boyz to break into Watergate...and look how it turned out.
What about when you buy a new car...they're already using RFID for the keyless ignition. It's just a matter of time before they install EZPass/FastLane/WhateverItsCalledInYourArea in every new car without asking you. It won't be an obvious device in the corner of your windshield like it is now, it'll be hidden somewhere it's a pain to get to. Of course, the govt. will only track your whereabouts for free. You'll still have to pay the monthly fee if you want to zip through the toll-booths without stopping.
I'm surprised the article didn't emphasize the size difference as another factor. Miniaturizing hard-drives and batteries is a large reason both the iPod and iPod-mini cost what they do. If you compare them, you really have to say "you can get 15 gB more for only another $50 and having a larger mp3 player." Not that there is a huge difference size, nor would I consider the iPod to be inconveniently large, but I think Apple is correctly surmising that what difference there is may be enough to convince some people the iPod-mini is the way to go.
You know I've heard this point made a number of times through the years, but I think you have still have to give Apple credit for recognizing a good idea. Xerox Parc's reason d'etre is to come up with somewhat "out there" ideas and do some pretty near basic, not-necessarily applicable/profitable research on the chance of hitting a really good idea, but it's understood that a lot of these ideas will never go anywhere. Xerox apparently didn't do much with this idea. Some suit probably said "eh...that's neat, but can we really make a profit with it? Shelve it.." Steve Jobs, on the other hand, saw it and said "I'm going to bank the future of my company on the idea that people will like this interface so much more than text-based I can create a whole market for it." He may not have had the original inspiration to conceive of a GUI, and kudos to the Parc researcher who did, but I think you could still call Steve Jobs and Apple computers innovative for recognizing a good idea when they saw one. Ballsy if nothing else.
Wow, who does this? That is so completely counter to the entire point of HTML standards...the entire concept of any kind of standards really. It's nice to see Mozilla gaining acceptance, but if it's okay for websites to dictate which browsers we can use, it's going to become an all IE all the time world.
I understand that practically speaking we can't always boycott websites that don't "play nice" but it should certainly be considered for websites where you have an alternative, or at least complain about how they're missing the point of standards in the first place.
Maybe we only put up with an antiquated speed limit system because there is a certain amount of discretion you can "get away with", albeit there's a bit of an unlucky lottery system to it if you happen to be driving safely but over the speed limit when and where Joe Cop is trying to finish his monthly quota. I'd be less offended by this system if there was a little more case specific algorithm for determining the speed limit.
Conversely, when conditions are poor enough, a cop can and should pull you over for reckless driving even if you are going less than the posted speed limit. Will this system issue tickets for people who don't slow down when they enter a patch of fog?
What I'd really like to know is if this robotic scientist knows how to:
clean the lab after a flood?
Kiss up to the senior scientist by tying every result back to his/her favorite theory?
Finding those tenuous connections that justify citing its own unrelated work as much as possible?
Translate between "Journal Speak" and English (i.e. numerous trials = we tried it twice; obviously = so I've heard, but I couldn't say why)?
Ask a poiniant question in seminar, like "Sir, your work on high temperature superconducters is very interesting, and there seem to be some obvious implications to my own work on yeast gene sequencing, which I'm sure you're completely familiar with. Would you care to comment on a few of the most important ones, or should I just keep talking about myself for the next ten minutes?"
I applaud your sentiment for forgiveness, but capitalism is a cold hard world...most new businesses fail despite not having treated their customers like cattle, and if RealNetworks goes out of business, we won't even notice the absence. There are already plenty of replacements, and there's sure to be plenty more. If RealNetworks finds it impossible to regain the trust and good will of burned ex-users (and even non-ex-users who were warned away by pissed off ex-users) I can't say I feel that sorry for them. They knew their actions would piss people off but they're gambling that benefits outweigh the costs. They made a decision and now they can live with it. If you feel sorry for the employees who will lose their jobs if RealNetworks folds, just remember it's a zero sum game. Some other internet/media company will fold instead if RealNetworks doesn't, and feel sorry for those employees as well.
But really my point is...it's a bummer if companies feel like there's no point in trying to fix a damaged reputation, but at the same time it's a good thing if they get the message to make sure they don't let their reputation get sullied in the first place. Maybe the next coorporate bean counter to try to estimate the impact of pissed off consumers on the bottom line will give it a little more weight and recommend the kinder, gentler business model.
I haven't looked into it yet (but am now wishing I'd bought a tape player with adapter years ago instead of the CD player that now can't play my iPod) but I'm curious how hard it is to find a car stereo with this option. It's so easy to implement, and could be so useful, I would expect this to be a standard feature now or in the near future.
Don't be naive. This dude had blackmail on his mind the whole time. If he was a genuine "white hat" hacker who finds security holes for the fun of hit, he could have:
A. Shared the info with BB for free.
B. Not told anyone about it, but relished in knowing how smart he is.
C. Contacted BB before trying anything and said "I'm a professional security expert. Would you like me to examine your network for security flaws for a fee?". (They would have laughed at him for that one admitedly, but then that's why reputation matters in business).
If I (being a complete stranger whom you know nothing about) knocked on your front door and told you "I know how to break into your apartment(house). Would you like to set up a business relationship with me whereby you learn how to prevent this security hole?" don't you think you'd call the cops? Even if it wasn't your home...if it was your physical place of business and I was threatening to break into the safe where you keep confidential client info.
Not that I don't think Best Buy has an obligation to be careful with security re: users' credit card numbers, and I hope they have examined their web security carefully after this incident, but if they start rewarding extortion they're just going to encourage it.
I need to buy a fax machine...
Have you ever seen an iPod? A 5 year old would admittedly be less discouraged by the lack of an "open here" latch to replace the battery, but I doubt either the "bang repeatedly with a heavy object" or "jam a screwdriver into the recharge port and pry" methods of getting the cover open adequately address the previous poster's third question.
Well I'll probably get a RTFA because I'm not sure this would work, but fundamentally, the more a p2p protocall/program/implementation maintains anonymity and encryption, isn't it just that much easier for the RIAA to pollute it with bogus mp3s? Couldn't they "log-out" and "log back in" or whatever the equivalent concept is, with different handles/user names/whatever each time? If this technique can't track a file source's IP address, which would seem to be the whole point of going through all the obfuscation so the RIAA can't figure out who you are and sue you, then how would you be able to "blacklist" anybody who's collection is full of bogus tracks...like say some server the RIAA sets up to pretend to be 100s of users. In fact, if the "neighbor encryption" concept is good enough that you can't tell which users are near which other users, it wouldn't even matter if the RIAA used a block of 100s of IPs all in the same domain. As long as they log-out and log back in say every 10 minutes, you'll never be able to keep your search from finding them again. You could download one test file before downloading a whole album, but 10 minutes later, you might find the same bogus user again on a new search.