There had been previous steam-powered cars -- at least three decades before Stanley -- but they seemed to be taking off at right around the same time people like Benz (in Germany) and Daimler (in France) were coming out with gas internal combustion models.
As far as the tradeoffs, Stanley's assessment is described this way by About.com:
Setting to work in a friend's garage, F.E. pondered the merits of gasoline versus steam. Gasoline engines were considered smelly, oily, noisy and difficult to start. They also required cumbersome clutches and transmissions. Steam, on the other hand, had a long record as a reliable means of propulsion...Steam was a universal, performance-proven power source.
Holy cow, does that post need editing. It's like the long, loopy passages from Moby Dick about how white is usually associated with goodness. I mean:
helping to fuel the rumors of an upcoming Nintendo 64 Final Fantasy title......Most of these claims were nothing more than rumors that were spawned as the result of some shoddy journalism; however, many people accepted these rumors as fact, and these faux facts were perpetuated as being truths. But many rumors are based in fact, and the rumors surrounding Final Fantasy 64 are no exception.
Most of the claims were nothing more than rumors, which some people accepted as fact, which was then perpetuated as truth? How many ways do we need to say "rumor"?
Translation: Rumors started based on the tech demo, but the final game never got released on N64.
I think you give the standard American viewer far too much credit. The same people that watch "American Idol" and "Wifeswapping" have no interest in the NASA space program.
You may be right, but tell me which show you think more people would watch:
A contest in which people went through the legitimate training regimen of elite fighter pilots, with emotions running high and extreme physical demands on them; or
A show about nitwits who get tricked into thinking a flight sim is real and that they're zooming around fighting all sorts of implausible dogfights?
The flight sim show would lose its appeal after one episode.
"A Christmas Story" has returned many times its original investment. "Jingle All the Way," by contrast, is mean and stupid and failed miserably. People do recognize decent stuff.
Since 1996, though, video games have collected more revenue than is made on ticket sales for movie theaters. However, movies sell a lot of ancillary stuff like TV broadcast rights and DVDs, and as an industry the movie studios still take in more money.
Basically this story's one more drip in the "games as an offshoot of movie sales" bucket. I guess my reaction is that the tie-in games are a pretty serious source of revenue that's underdeveloped. Mediocre shooters that get released along with movies aren't the blockbusters in the game world. You need to do more than drop some new textures into a Quake engine to make a decent game. Hey, my kids loved "The Incredibles" but haven't said anything about the games.
Apparently, any prospective 'astronaut' who showed even the slightest glimmer of comprehension of the [rudiments] of physics was automatically disqualified.
No kidding. We don't need to watch the Capricorn One sequences in which these nitwits are faked out by the producers; just show us the moments when a prospective "space tourist" showed that glimmer of intelligence and skepticism, only to be promptly whisked from the room to avoid contaminating the other hopefuls. As with American Idol (supposedly), the early elimination rounds would be the most watchable.
But I never watched "Idol" because the idea of the early shows bugs me, and I hate this, actually.
A show in which people volunteered to go through a *real* space training program, say the equivalent of NASA shuttle crew training, could have been interesting and would have taught the audience something. It also could easily have put the audience through the same voyeuristic "look at human nature" experience reality shows are supposed to be good for. (Whatever.)
Instead we get yet another show by, for, and about mean and stupid people. What's the point of tricking the dufuses this way, other than to ridicule them and to show you can do it? That's sociopathic programming. Oh, wait... Maybe that's the "reality" part.
I hate all one-sided arguments, [even] especially when I agree with them.
For us it's just unnerving to agree with an argument that's weak and malformed because it doesn't face any real criticism or opposition. For an awful lot of people, though, it's comforting to resort to a news source that reinforces their own biases and presents opposing views disingenuously as "straw men." Rupert Murdoch has made his empire by pandering to those who can't stomach anything like open discourse.
I don't know, though: when the simple notion of a "crime rate" adjusted by population, as opposed to a raw count of violent crimes, is supposedly hard for people to follow, how much legitimate debate can people stomach before they mutter the word "nuance" to themselves and flip the channel?
No question, "laptop" isn't the right term. "Suitcase," more like.
Sure seems like you'd use this almost exclusively for the LAN party circuit. It's pitched at the niche market of gamers too. I guess we're sick of toting our cables and whatnot around by now.
I wanted more Narnia stories, and here they were, ended. But now that I'm older, I actually like it quite a bit.
Ending the stories is one thing, and Cella would have been okay with that. Ending them with an incredibly lame "They'd all died in a train accident, it was all a dream" analog to Revelations was, well, incredibly unsatisfying and frustrating for her.
There are the people acquiescing in great evil... because they think it's Aslan's will and are too foolish to see that it couldn't be...(J)ust as there will be those who think they are doing God's Will when they do evil.
You know, actually the book does sound like it has something to say about exactly the sorts of literalist Fundamentalists who are now so excited to attend the Narnia movie. But then, they don't seem to have "gotten" the one about the Pharisees in the Bible itself, so maybe there's no hope.
As literature, though, I pretty well trust my daughter's reaction.
As if the average person wasn't already running under the assumption that they were somehow anonmyous in their electronic communications.
Assuming they do include photos in a bit, just think of the various "send your husband a hot image" ads we'll see for it. Polaroid cameras tried to pitch themselves that way based on the supposed privacy of not needing to develop anything, at least back in the day, and I've seen at least one video-enabled phone commercial in which someone picked up someone else's call and gawked at the other guy's wife. Yeck.
As a service this would sell to a) bad managers and b) people who make videotapes of themselves... Wait a second, how do I invest again? That seems to be a fair-sized market.
If you have doubts, reread The Last Battle, in which we get the Narnian version of Judgment Day, complete with Antichrist figure.
Oh yes, it's ever so plain by then. And my daughter, a few years back, detested that last book, for reasons that had to do with that unsubtle religious allegory. She didn't recognize the connection -- I'm not much of a backer of the 19th-century ideas about revelations that we accept as the standard take among literalists nowadays, and would never have pushed that self-aggrandizing dreck on my young kids. She just thought the whole method of ending the Narnian world felt like the cheapest and least satisfying of all possible Deus Ex Machina devices...
Which does, to my mind, say something about the essentially puerile and vindictive world view of those who do thrill to the supposedly "literal" interpretation of Revelations. A nine-year-old thought it was cheap and senseless. She thought Lewis had just gotten tired and wanted to kill the series off, actually, and that he'd done a hack job of it.;-)
Macro lenses can focus on things very close or very small - in the 1' range... Note that many recent digitals offer moderate macro functions and do not require a macro lens.
A foot away is just tremendous distance for a modern mid-priced digital camera. I have a Minolta-Konica Dimage Z5 whose "super macro" mode, while somewhat depth-of-field challenged, can take pictures within a centimeter of the lens. That's on a camera with an image-stabilized 12x optical zoom, too, so it's not like it's the intended strong point of the model. IIRC there's a slightly more recent Canon, also with a longer-than-normal optical zoom, that can take snaps of stuff that's essentially touching the face of the lens.
That's on your $500-USD tier of cameras. Granted, the DOF is not perfect, and I'm sure it's less than a flat field, but the newest midlevel consumer digicams are lots better than a reflective Pringles can...
This is both an example of the "cheaper faster" model and of a mission under Japanese control.
It's had some serious systems problems -- but the whole idea of these sorts of mission development cycles is that you put together the machines much faster and with (relatively) modern hardware. Used to be you paid a ton for extreme redundancy in your systems, and ended up with much more expensive probes with 10- or 20-year old systems. This is the Spirit and Opportunity model, not the Cassini model. You expect to lose some of your bets that way, but to be able to build and launch faster for much cheaper, and to therefore get more for your cash.
The relative inexperience of the people running the show has been a secondary factor in my book. They've been resourceful once the problems were coming in; it was more the build quality and the basic idea of using unprecedented technology like their (botched at the wrong moment) altimeter system that went bad. The ground controllers are taking some heat, but maybe a little too much, for their attempts to cope with a series of system failures.
Neither one of those is a serious long-term problem. The shorter-build-cycle model isn't going to stop soon, and for every Beagle you get a Spirit-Opportunity success story that makes it worthwhile. I'd bet the Japanese developers try to bite off a little less on the ground in terms of breaking-edge technology next time, and in any case they'll have more experience.
The article states that there was a check, but that it got ignored.
I'd be really curious to know how something so dramatic could possibly be written with a "check" that could be ignored with trivial effort or due to plain inattention. Yes, it's human nature to ignore "Confirm" dialogs, and efforts to explain things to the user within the standard Windows API so often end up like the "Do you really want to save this as a CSV" dialogs in Excel. But c'mon -- no single point of failure should result in something like this happening.
There has to be an escalation process in place to bounce serious problems up a review tree for others to scope out. You'd think bankers, of all people, would demand that from their software. I can't even post a news item on our intranet without legal reviewing it, for goodness' sake.
If the Iraqis had the capability to knock out a GPS satellite, and degrade the system upon which their enemy's most effective weapons relied, don't you think they would have done that too?
Sure. My only observation was how fast the document went from "They tried to jam our GPS and we had to swat that down" to "We will also have to be prepared to disable opponents' GPS (and like technologies), whether defensively or aggressively, in space." The sentence involved said "when American lives are at stake" which I imagine could justify anything -- it's always defensive when our people in uniform are in danger, right?
Back in the days of the cold war, the expansion of warfare (as opposed to classic surveillance) into space was regarded as a potentially huge escalation of the conflict. If we sent up "hunter" satellites to disable Soviet surveillance systems, it was kept pretty black ops at least. This unclassified document uses basically ineffectual attempts by the Iraqis to defend themselves as justification for aggressive actions analogous to those the Iraqis themselves used... I'm not dismissing the argument, just observing how easily the doctrine slides over it.
The other day in my son's karate class, they played a balance game. The last four kids (out of 15 or so, it was a busy day) standing on one leg in a certain posture got to choose a number of pushups for the other kids in the class to do.
When it came time to dole out the pushups, the teacher asked each winner for a number from one to three. Every one of the winners chose to make the other kids do three pushups. Nobody said "one" to make friends, nobody chose the middle route with "two." All the kids went for as much punishment as they could inflict.
I blame Grand Theft Auto, of course.
(What does it say about my son that he said he'd deliberately stopped balancing because he wanted to do some pushups? Too much "Animal Crossing"?)
It's a great game, I own it, but for them to claim it's the driving force behind DS sales is sheer arrogance.
This is also maybe the fourth or fifth supposed "breakout" DS hit I've read about in a week. Each one gets described as driving sales and so on. (Apparently Nintendo Kool Aid sales are also being driven in a similar manner.)
No way does Castlevania make as big a splash that way as Nintendogs. Nintendogs cuts across gender and age lines better than the others, and the fact it's getting bundled so conspicuously would go to the "driving sales" part. Probably it's that followed by the new Animal Crossing right now -- though how many people have sampled the peculiar charm of the original AC, I don't know.
Next to those, "Castlevania" is securely within a genre that people either like or don't like already. Mario Kart networked (for free) is fun, but it's not like racing games are going to win grandma over. I know at least two grandmas who adore the little virtual puppies...
Personally, I'd be perfectly happy with normal old CRT resolution on a wider-aspect-ratio screen.
Standard DVDs are nice and sharp, and that resolution sure comes cheaper and lower-maintenance than the current generation of HD sets. I'm a movie buff and the HD thing doesn't do that much for me; it's the wide screen I would care about.
Kind of interesting that the document starts with a rationale based on the Iraqis having tried to jam GPS during Gulf War II -- "adversaries will target space capabilities" -- and then quickly moves on to a "We've got to be ready to do that to our opponents" stance that's openly aggressive.
Lots of interesting details in there. A sidebar says over 80% of US military satellite communications during GW II used commercial satellites.
Page 49 of the 63 has a scant paragraph about legal considerations. Basically the M.O. is "check with a judge advocate to make sure it's okay."
Instead of critically analyzing AA, why not look at the fruit of the program.
Old post, I know -- but this argument basically fails for me. It's used to support basically every sort of world view, from Moonies to Mormons to the Nazi party. (Hey, they may be a little nuts, but look at the fine upstanding blonde athletes coming out!)
I'm not really that doggedly against A.A., but it doesn't impress me much. Not from the first-hand experience I have while waiting for my son's viola lessons. (Several times fetching young things out for their smoke during a break have basically tried to pick me up, and that's the best side of the experience.)
The extra-pathetic part is, that's the software that the people who don't understand computers and cameras and how they go together are going to use.
Man, hadn't thought of that, but it's scarily true. My dad's just going to walk through the steps in the manual, installing whatever software came with it. Even if he had an iPhoto, even if that smooth little Mac automatically booted iPhoto and offered to download images when he plugged in the cable, he'd still doggedly try to follow directions and use the one described in the manual.
Another lovely aspect is the high chance that, when you call HP to say "My scanner is incredibly dusty inside right out of the box," they will charmingly imply that because you haven't installed the included software they can't say what the problem is. So now you're on a tech support call installing crap software you have no intention of using, just to get them to admit it's a quality control problem. Because, partly, the half-written software forces them, in turn, to be rigid about what they can support.
No way are the "obviously fake" records they're looking at spammers. If you're a spammer or a phisher, you can pretty easily use some of the many available plausible addresses to throw into your registration. You don't need to fill the phone number with nines. Criminy. The (999)-999-999s are all people like you and me registering small sites. Like everyone is saying here, we just want to avoid the spam and physical junk mail from whois harvesters.
If the GAO's inquiry here results in some sort of crackdown, it's not like spammers aren't going to just provide more plausible false information. They probably already are, by way of covering their tracks, today.
The problem lies in gathering this info in an accessible spot that's obviously open to abuses. They want to fix something, fix that; don't twist my arm and claim you're intimidating the bad guys by doing it.
I really only accept a corporate "apology" if it means they take a financial hit worse than what they gained through the improper behaviour in the first place.
That was what the punitive damages turned out to be in the "scalding coffee in the lap" case against Mickey-D's. McDonalds was originally assigned damages equal to a few days (IIRC) profit from their coffee sales. The company's own doctors had described the temp the coffee was served at as undrinkable and dangerous given the cups. McD's execs said the higher temperature was a competitive advantage thing, that they'd gained an edge over their competition serving it noticeably hotter. So the jury assigned damages that went to that issue: removing the cash they'd made via that competitive advantage. (After the settlement that followed, we won't know what McDonald's really paid, though.)
Not sure how you feel about that one. It's often used as an example of a frivolous lawsuit, though I think that's a knee-jerk reaction taken from pop media accounts. But it's a decent example of what you say you want...
No kidding. My three digital cameras have come from Canon, Sony, and Konica Minolta. Each came with image editing software that defies any similarities with the UI of anything other than maybe Lotus Notes... and that's not a good thing.
Scanner software for each of the handful of flatbeds I've had has been atrocious. Really, really bad.
Cell phone interfaces -- hoo boy.
(Woz may or may not be bitter. His Apple cracks mostly just read like he's trying to innoculate himself against charges of bias.)
Nintendo has just owned, owned the portable market with the GB line, so it's got the established base of developers for that.
Nintendo pays attention to its customer base about things like backward compatibility. The GBA could also play GBColor games. The Revolution supposedly will play Gamecube titles. (Gamecube couldn't pull this off, because N64 games were cartridges and anyway N64 was already suffering from too few titles.) In general Nintendo just does pay attention to things like this, which helps users and "leverage" (ugh) that established base of older games.
Nintendo is also the only company that's trying something a little different with its systems right now. The stylus doesn't exactly change anyone's life, but this Christmas my kids are getting "Trauma Center" and stitching up patients with the thing, which is new. (Honest to God, I know system specs will crawl up over time, but what makes game play any different with the Xbox 360? Anything at all?? The number of polygons in Alonzo Mourning's beard doesn't fix the rebounding problems in NBALive.)
Sony, though, is just entering this market. It'd be wise to think of the PSP as their way of breaking the ice and gaining market share, but it's an immature product for them.
Kind of an interesting chess match, with Sony playing conservative with the PSP features in order to get ports from the console onto the system, and Nintendo hoping their developer base will travel to the DS...
Slashdot Mirror
There had been previous steam-powered cars -- at least three decades before Stanley -- but they seemed to be taking off at right around the same time people like Benz (in Germany) and Daimler (in France) were coming out with gas internal combustion models.
As far as the tradeoffs, Stanley's assessment is described this way by About.com:
Most of the claims were nothing more than rumors, which some people accepted as fact, which was then perpetuated as truth? How many ways do we need to say "rumor"?
Translation: Rumors started based on the tech demo, but the final game never got released on N64.
You may be right, but tell me which show you think more people would watch:
The flight sim show would lose its appeal after one episode.
"A Christmas Story" has returned many times its original investment. "Jingle All the Way," by contrast, is mean and stupid and failed miserably. People do recognize decent stuff.
True in terms of the number of people, okay.
Since 1996, though, video games have collected more revenue than is made on ticket sales for movie theaters. However, movies sell a lot of ancillary stuff like TV broadcast rights and DVDs, and as an industry the movie studios still take in more money.
Basically this story's one more drip in the "games as an offshoot of movie sales" bucket. I guess my reaction is that the tie-in games are a pretty serious source of revenue that's underdeveloped. Mediocre shooters that get released along with movies aren't the blockbusters in the game world. You need to do more than drop some new textures into a Quake engine to make a decent game. Hey, my kids loved "The Incredibles" but haven't said anything about the games.
No kidding. We don't need to watch the Capricorn One sequences in which these nitwits are faked out by the producers; just show us the moments when a prospective "space tourist" showed that glimmer of intelligence and skepticism, only to be promptly whisked from the room to avoid contaminating the other hopefuls. As with American Idol (supposedly), the early elimination rounds would be the most watchable.
But I never watched "Idol" because the idea of the early shows bugs me, and I hate this, actually.
A show in which people volunteered to go through a *real* space training program, say the equivalent of NASA shuttle crew training, could have been interesting and would have taught the audience something. It also could easily have put the audience through the same voyeuristic "look at human nature" experience reality shows are supposed to be good for. (Whatever.)
Instead we get yet another show by, for, and about mean and stupid people. What's the point of tricking the dufuses this way, other than to ridicule them and to show you can do it? That's sociopathic programming. Oh, wait... Maybe that's the "reality" part.
I hate all one-sided arguments, [even] especially when I agree with them.
For us it's just unnerving to agree with an argument that's weak and malformed because it doesn't face any real criticism or opposition. For an awful lot of people, though, it's comforting to resort to a news source that reinforces their own biases and presents opposing views disingenuously as "straw men." Rupert Murdoch has made his empire by pandering to those who can't stomach anything like open discourse.
I don't know, though: when the simple notion of a "crime rate" adjusted by population, as opposed to a raw count of violent crimes, is supposedly hard for people to follow, how much legitimate debate can people stomach before they mutter the word "nuance" to themselves and flip the channel?
Sure seems like you'd use this almost exclusively for the LAN party circuit. It's pitched at the niche market of gamers too. I guess we're sick of toting our cables and whatnot around by now.
Ending the stories is one thing, and Cella would have been okay with that. Ending them with an incredibly lame "They'd all died in a train accident, it was all a dream" analog to Revelations was, well, incredibly unsatisfying and frustrating for her.
You know, actually the book does sound like it has something to say about exactly the sorts of literalist Fundamentalists who are now so excited to attend the Narnia movie. But then, they don't seem to have "gotten" the one about the Pharisees in the Bible itself, so maybe there's no hope.
As literature, though, I pretty well trust my daughter's reaction.
Assuming they do include photos in a bit, just think of the various "send your husband a hot image" ads we'll see for it. Polaroid cameras tried to pitch themselves that way based on the supposed privacy of not needing to develop anything, at least back in the day, and I've seen at least one video-enabled phone commercial in which someone picked up someone else's call and gawked at the other guy's wife. Yeck.
As a service this would sell to a) bad managers and b) people who make videotapes of themselves... Wait a second, how do I invest again? That seems to be a fair-sized market.
Oh yes, it's ever so plain by then. And my daughter, a few years back, detested that last book, for reasons that had to do with that unsubtle religious allegory. She didn't recognize the connection -- I'm not much of a backer of the 19th-century ideas about revelations that we accept as the standard take among literalists nowadays, and would never have pushed that self-aggrandizing dreck on my young kids. She just thought the whole method of ending the Narnian world felt like the cheapest and least satisfying of all possible Deus Ex Machina devices...
Which does, to my mind, say something about the essentially puerile and vindictive world view of those who do thrill to the supposedly "literal" interpretation of Revelations. A nine-year-old thought it was cheap and senseless. She thought Lewis had just gotten tired and wanted to kill the series off, actually, and that he'd done a hack job of it. ;-)
A foot away is just tremendous distance for a modern mid-priced digital camera. I have a Minolta-Konica Dimage Z5 whose "super macro" mode, while somewhat depth-of-field challenged, can take pictures within a centimeter of the lens. That's on a camera with an image-stabilized 12x optical zoom, too, so it's not like it's the intended strong point of the model. IIRC there's a slightly more recent Canon, also with a longer-than-normal optical zoom, that can take snaps of stuff that's essentially touching the face of the lens.
That's on your $500-USD tier of cameras. Granted, the DOF is not perfect, and I'm sure it's less than a flat field, but the newest midlevel consumer digicams are lots better than a reflective Pringles can...
It's had some serious systems problems -- but the whole idea of these sorts of mission development cycles is that you put together the machines much faster and with (relatively) modern hardware. Used to be you paid a ton for extreme redundancy in your systems, and ended up with much more expensive probes with 10- or 20-year old systems. This is the Spirit and Opportunity model, not the Cassini model. You expect to lose some of your bets that way, but to be able to build and launch faster for much cheaper, and to therefore get more for your cash.
The relative inexperience of the people running the show has been a secondary factor in my book. They've been resourceful once the problems were coming in; it was more the build quality and the basic idea of using unprecedented technology like their (botched at the wrong moment) altimeter system that went bad. The ground controllers are taking some heat, but maybe a little too much, for their attempts to cope with a series of system failures.
Neither one of those is a serious long-term problem. The shorter-build-cycle model isn't going to stop soon, and for every Beagle you get a Spirit-Opportunity success story that makes it worthwhile. I'd bet the Japanese developers try to bite off a little less on the ground in terms of breaking-edge technology next time, and in any case they'll have more experience.
I'd be really curious to know how something so dramatic could possibly be written with a "check" that could be ignored with trivial effort or due to plain inattention. Yes, it's human nature to ignore "Confirm" dialogs, and efforts to explain things to the user within the standard Windows API so often end up like the "Do you really want to save this as a CSV" dialogs in Excel. But c'mon -- no single point of failure should result in something like this happening.
There has to be an escalation process in place to bounce serious problems up a review tree for others to scope out. You'd think bankers, of all people, would demand that from their software. I can't even post a news item on our intranet without legal reviewing it, for goodness' sake.
Sure. My only observation was how fast the document went from "They tried to jam our GPS and we had to swat that down" to "We will also have to be prepared to disable opponents' GPS (and like technologies), whether defensively or aggressively, in space." The sentence involved said "when American lives are at stake" which I imagine could justify anything -- it's always defensive when our people in uniform are in danger, right?
Back in the days of the cold war, the expansion of warfare (as opposed to classic surveillance) into space was regarded as a potentially huge escalation of the conflict. If we sent up "hunter" satellites to disable Soviet surveillance systems, it was kept pretty black ops at least. This unclassified document uses basically ineffectual attempts by the Iraqis to defend themselves as justification for aggressive actions analogous to those the Iraqis themselves used... I'm not dismissing the argument, just observing how easily the doctrine slides over it.
When it came time to dole out the pushups, the teacher asked each winner for a number from one to three. Every one of the winners chose to make the other kids do three pushups. Nobody said "one" to make friends, nobody chose the middle route with "two." All the kids went for as much punishment as they could inflict.
I blame Grand Theft Auto, of course.
(What does it say about my son that he said he'd deliberately stopped balancing because he wanted to do some pushups? Too much "Animal Crossing"?)
This is also maybe the fourth or fifth supposed "breakout" DS hit I've read about in a week. Each one gets described as driving sales and so on. (Apparently Nintendo Kool Aid sales are also being driven in a similar manner.)
No way does Castlevania make as big a splash that way as Nintendogs. Nintendogs cuts across gender and age lines better than the others, and the fact it's getting bundled so conspicuously would go to the "driving sales" part. Probably it's that followed by the new Animal Crossing right now -- though how many people have sampled the peculiar charm of the original AC, I don't know.
Next to those, "Castlevania" is securely within a genre that people either like or don't like already. Mario Kart networked (for free) is fun, but it's not like racing games are going to win grandma over. I know at least two grandmas who adore the little virtual puppies...
Standard DVDs are nice and sharp, and that resolution sure comes cheaper and lower-maintenance than the current generation of HD sets. I'm a movie buff and the HD thing doesn't do that much for me; it's the wide screen I would care about.
Kind of interesting that the document starts with a rationale based on the Iraqis having tried to jam GPS during Gulf War II -- "adversaries will target space capabilities" -- and then quickly moves on to a "We've got to be ready to do that to our opponents" stance that's openly aggressive.
Lots of interesting details in there. A sidebar says over 80% of US military satellite communications during GW II used commercial satellites.
Page 49 of the 63 has a scant paragraph about legal considerations. Basically the M.O. is "check with a judge advocate to make sure it's okay."
Old post, I know -- but this argument basically fails for me. It's used to support basically every sort of world view, from Moonies to Mormons to the Nazi party. (Hey, they may be a little nuts, but look at the fine upstanding blonde athletes coming out!)
I'm not really that doggedly against A.A., but it doesn't impress me much. Not from the first-hand experience I have while waiting for my son's viola lessons. (Several times fetching young things out for their smoke during a break have basically tried to pick me up, and that's the best side of the experience.)
Man, hadn't thought of that, but it's scarily true. My dad's just going to walk through the steps in the manual, installing whatever software came with it. Even if he had an iPhoto, even if that smooth little Mac automatically booted iPhoto and offered to download images when he plugged in the cable, he'd still doggedly try to follow directions and use the one described in the manual.
Another lovely aspect is the high chance that, when you call HP to say "My scanner is incredibly dusty inside right out of the box," they will charmingly imply that because you haven't installed the included software they can't say what the problem is. So now you're on a tech support call installing crap software you have no intention of using, just to get them to admit it's a quality control problem. Because, partly, the half-written software forces them, in turn, to be rigid about what they can support.
If the GAO's inquiry here results in some sort of crackdown, it's not like spammers aren't going to just provide more plausible false information. They probably already are, by way of covering their tracks, today.
The problem lies in gathering this info in an accessible spot that's obviously open to abuses. They want to fix something, fix that; don't twist my arm and claim you're intimidating the bad guys by doing it.
That was what the punitive damages turned out to be in the "scalding coffee in the lap" case against Mickey-D's. McDonalds was originally assigned damages equal to a few days (IIRC) profit from their coffee sales. The company's own doctors had described the temp the coffee was served at as undrinkable and dangerous given the cups. McD's execs said the higher temperature was a competitive advantage thing, that they'd gained an edge over their competition serving it noticeably hotter. So the jury assigned damages that went to that issue: removing the cash they'd made via that competitive advantage. (After the settlement that followed, we won't know what McDonald's really paid, though.)
Not sure how you feel about that one. It's often used as an example of a frivolous lawsuit, though I think that's a knee-jerk reaction taken from pop media accounts. But it's a decent example of what you say you want...
Scanner software for each of the handful of flatbeds I've had has been atrocious. Really, really bad.
Cell phone interfaces -- hoo boy.
(Woz may or may not be bitter. His Apple cracks mostly just read like he's trying to innoculate himself against charges of bias.)
Sony, though, is just entering this market. It'd be wise to think of the PSP as their way of breaking the ice and gaining market share, but it's an immature product for them.
Kind of an interesting chess match, with Sony playing conservative with the PSP features in order to get ports from the console onto the system, and Nintendo hoping their developer base will travel to the DS...
Uh... Which answer was correct? Because I have no way of knowing, and now things are starting to seem all self-referential...