Just one. However, it has to be one that the majority of the USA cares about. Killings, kidnappings, torture? The average American doesn't care, as long as it doesn't happen to them.
I guess you're right. I just checked the CNN quickpoll on their front page.
Question: Should the government have been given the authority to spy on Americans without warrants after the 9/11 attacks?
Answer: 69% no, 31% yes.
A third of the US thinks establishing a secret police force with no judicial oversight is a real good idea.
PayPal made it perfectly clear that as long as the seller sent me something, ANYTHING, then as far as they were concerned, everything was just perfect.
I've always wondered how escrow services get around this same problem.
Since the price of this sort of transparency is probably in server resources, Google might really be competitive with their scalable swarm-like PC hardware and storage, as opposed to eBay's crappy, slow-as-molasses, one-off Sun box.
It has nothing to do with the technical difficulty of the problem or server resources. It's a clear example of the network effect, which basically means the rich get richer, because it only makes sense to sell where everybody else is buying.
That's why sites like pricewatch, froogle, and pricegrabber are an interesting alternative to me. They advertise prices (like ebay), but they're not exclusive, and that is the key. Pricewatch, froogle, and pricegrabber can all list the very same item at the very same store. As a result, instead of EBay's high seller fees, these sites are supported just by advertising. The problem is how to extend this selling model down to individuals.
Interesting, because I noticed different places on the EBay website and email correspondence where they warn you NOT to complete transactions "on the side" because then you won't be under the protection of EBay. (I don't have an example handy, has anybody else noticed these?)
EBay is in a bit of a bind here because they are an active participant in the transaction. Do you think Brahm Cohen would be able to disown illicit file transfers using BitTorrent if he got individually paid for each one?
That's quite amazing. Do you have a link? Are you sure it isn't Apple's total profits (including the iPod) which have doubled? I don't have ill feeling towards Apple, I just think doubling computer sales volume in a year would be amazing.
I think the point of the "Visual" IDEs is that you can (supposedly) do a lot of dragging and dropping and clicking instead of coding, for stuff like designing dialogs and setting up event handlers.
Any idea as to the literacy rates in these areas? Somehow, I find it absolutely absurd that a person who lives in the bush somewhere in Central Africa is going to Google "manual water purification systems", whip out a credit card, and have one sent to them from Amazon.
I think you've got it all wrong. Can we at least agree that literacy and education are the key to a better life? Forget the Internet and credit cards for a moment. People cannot learn to read, or learn anything by reading, if they have nothing to read. Now they will. If nothing else these laptops can hold hundreds of books.
Do you really find it absurd that some African might consult a first aid manual on their laptop to help their ill child?
Or designs for a solar water heater? Or circulate political tracts with the built-in mesh networking?
Accept the (indubitably true) proposition that the fact-to-word ratio in Britannica is higher than in Wikipedia
Ha. Had the people who think that's indubitably true been asked about "errors per article" before this study was done, they indubitably would have bet on a clear victory for Britannica. That's what I think.
Does anybody have a good handle on whether or not it will be easy to convert between the two formats?
Sure, just like you can convert back and forth between C code and assembler automatically. Just try editing that C code after one round trip though!
Complex document format conversion is lossy. Imagine converting a MS Word document to a TIFF image. OK, you'd lose some things (like page breaks) but you could do it. Now imagine trying to convert back to.doc from TIFF. You could sort of do it with OCR, maybe you could automatically recognize noncharacter regions and convert them back to images, but there's no way it would reclaim the structure of the document not to mention change tracking, comments, self-updating cross references, links to embedded spreadsheets, document-specific word lists for the spellchecker...
Two word processor formats will be much more similar than.doc and TIFF, but the same problem exists to a lesser degree. Document formats are not supersets of each other! At some level there are basic incompatibilities.
it could potentially deliver many times more thrust at higher powers of up to 100 kW whilst giving a similar fuel efficiency.
I don't understand this use of the word "efficiency." Are they saying it does much more work with the same amount of fuel? To me that sounds like a great gain in efficiency.
Who even cares about some little "cyberattacks"? Our annual trade deficit is pushing a trillion dollars per year. For good or bad, that's what will even out the global balance of power.
For that matter, if China were planning a cyberattack that might provoke such a response from us, I can't imagine why they wouldn't just send some "students" here ahead of time in preparation. (I'm not saying China has done this, I'm just saying it seems like an obvious thing to do).
No, so long as the hacking remains in the realm of espionage and is not directly offensive. It's like the difference between assasinating the President and "character assasination" against the President - two quite different things.
A real war between China and the US is not in the offing. Our economies are too intertwined. But there's no doubt we spy on each other.
I think you've already cited the relevant counterexample, SACD. Nobody seems to want it. I've never seen any evidence that a person can even tell the difference, let alone under realistic circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
Question: Should the government have been given the authority to spy on Americans without warrants after the 9/11 attacks?
Answer: 69% no, 31% yes.
A third of the US thinks establishing a secret police force with no judicial oversight is a real good idea.
Good point. Maybe naming the OS after a particular UI metaphor wasn't such a great idea after all.
That's why sites like pricewatch, froogle, and pricegrabber are an interesting alternative to me. They advertise prices (like ebay), but they're not exclusive, and that is the key. Pricewatch, froogle, and pricegrabber can all list the very same item at the very same store. As a result, instead of EBay's high seller fees, these sites are supported just by advertising. The problem is how to extend this selling model down to individuals.
EBay is in a bit of a bind here because they are an active participant in the transaction. Do you think Brahm Cohen would be able to disown illicit file transfers using BitTorrent if he got individually paid for each one?
Is that not true?
I thought Apple had something of a resurgence in the last couple years, but I don't see much indication of that.
Wait and see. The RIAA will send them a blank CD with an authentic-looking label, then sue when they get back the music that should have been there :)
Do these tools do that for Perl and Python?
Do you really find it absurd that some African might consult a first aid manual on their laptop to help their ill child? Or designs for a solar water heater? Or circulate political tracts with the built-in mesh networking?
Getting caught blatantly doctoring experiments is career-ending, whether or not the claims turn out to be true.
Complex document format conversion is lossy. Imagine converting a MS Word document to a TIFF image. OK, you'd lose some things (like page breaks) but you could do it. Now imagine trying to convert back to .doc from TIFF. You could sort of do it with OCR, maybe you could automatically recognize noncharacter regions and convert them back to images, but there's no way it would reclaim the structure of the document not to mention change tracking, comments, self-updating cross references, links to embedded spreadsheets, document-specific word lists for the spellchecker...
Two word processor formats will be much more similar than .doc and TIFF, but the same problem exists to a lesser degree. Document formats are not supersets of each other! At some level there are basic incompatibilities.
We might not be able to beat one good format, but we can easily defeat two.
Who even cares about some little "cyberattacks"? Our annual trade deficit is pushing a trillion dollars per year. For good or bad, that's what will even out the global balance of power.
For that matter, if China were planning a cyberattack that might provoke such a response from us, I can't imagine why they wouldn't just send some "students" here ahead of time in preparation. (I'm not saying China has done this, I'm just saying it seems like an obvious thing to do).
A real war between China and the US is not in the offing. Our economies are too intertwined. But there's no doubt we spy on each other.
I think you've already cited the relevant counterexample, SACD. Nobody seems to want it. I've never seen any evidence that a person can even tell the difference, let alone under realistic circumstances.
They're already charging just as much for AAC as for CDDA, so they really have nowhere to go.