Exactly. This would be a prime target for a computer virus. Politics is very high stakes. Especially deciding who runs a country. With the number of viruses present on the average person's computer, I wouldn't trust it for voting. Maybe an iPhone App though (joking, but it would probably be more secure).
This argument always comes up when talking about smart phones. My Nokia C5 may be low powered by iPhone or HTC Desire standards, but still does just about everything I want out of a smart phone. I can send and receive email, browse the web, listen to music, watch videos, download podcasts, play some simple games, use GPS navigation, use a touch interface. It run Symbian, which isn't even mentioned in most talks about smartphones, but as far as I'm concerned it works great. I could pay $400 for a phone, but I feel like that's stepping into the realm of diminishing returns. Why pay more than twice as much for something that only provides 10% better functionality.
Very much agree with you there. I often find it more likely that people without money end up spending their money on frivolous things to make it look like they have more money then they do. It's not uncommon to see people without much money (or very much in debt) for the simple fact that they can't give up their fancy cell phone, computer, car, house or other luxury item. Think about the first expensive thing you bought with your money when you got a real job. Likely it was something frivolous. Many people don't grow out of this.
I'm at the point where I'll probably never buy a desktop again. I've been using a laptop solely for the last year. I still have my old desktop, as it hasn't broken yet, but I think that when it breaks, I won't replace it. That being said, I can't really see going from using a laptop to using a tablet for most tasks. It's so much nicer to type on a real keyboard. And the extra screen space really does help. Sure a tablet would be a little more portable, but it's not like you can just fold it up and put it in your pocket. You still need to carry some kind of backpack or shoulder bag to bring the thing with you. Once you're doing that, you might as well bring a laptop. If I had the funds, I would just get a Mac Book Air, or a Lenovo X1 and be done with it.
I agree. MS isn't supporting Windows XP anymore, but that doesn't mean it's "unsupported". Most people or even organizations have never contacted MS for support for Windows anyway. As long as there are people that know the system well enough, which is very true for Windows XP, it doesn't matter that MS isn't issuing patches anymore. Any remaining security problems can most likely be fixed by firewalls and other third party solutions. Although one small point. With many software packages written for Windows XP. Not running as administrator is often not an option.
I just got a Nokia a couple months ago. For the price, it's a really good unit. I'm with a cell phone company that doesn't do subsidized phones (and in the process have much cheaper rates). So I could spend $400 on a nice Android phone, or $150 on a great Nokia Symbian phone. There's $150 Android phones, but I haven't heard anything but terrible reviews about them. I think this is the reason that they've given up on the American market for Symbian. Almost everyone is on a subsidized plan, and therefore don't see the full price of your phone. When a $400 phone only costs $50 (plus huge monthly bill). You can't sell "cheap" smart phones, because people aren't paying money for them anyway.
which you can't really have anyway, as no two people are alike
The point of sport is that no two people are alike. The point is to test people against people, not to test technological advancements against other technological advancements. Maybe we should go back to the way the Greeks did it, and have everybody race naked. Some sports even with lots of technology have kept things pretty fair. Look at cycling. They make the rules strict enough such that everyone is basically riding the exact same bike. That way it's kept way more about the riders, and not about the bike.
But with software, the inventions are still taken to the grave, because there is no full source code that is required as part of the patent submission. And since the patent doesn't include the source code, and the source code is copyrighted (and kept secret) it doesn't matter what happens when the patent expires because somebody will just have to figure it out again anyway, because the material contained in the patent isn't sufficient to have a working model (source code) produced in a meaningful amount of time.
I'm of the opinion that software already has too many other protections and doesn't need patents. Firstly, the source code and binaries are protected by copyright. Meaning that someone can't just take your product, copy it outright, and sell it for a profit. Secondly, many employees who write software have non-compete agreements in their contracts, meaning you don't have to worry about people who are developing your software taking all your ideas and running away with them to another company. Thirdly, there's trademarks for the name of your software product. Believe it or not, the name goes a long way in selling software, probably because there's a lot of bad systems out there, and companies want someone to support the software. If your software is sufficiently complex, even if a bunch of your developers move over to some other company, it's going to be a long time before they can develop a sale-able product unless they are taking the source code with them, which is a non-problem I've already covered in this answer. Not only that, but in the time that they've taken just to copy the system you had before, you would be able to advance your system to a point where the system they copied would now be inferior. Short answer, we don't need patents as an extra layer of protection. Software is sufficiently complex that trying to replicate the functionality without actually reusing the source code is difficult enough that patent protection is unnecessary.
The problem is, that it isn't consistent with the movies that already exist. OK, so the apes become super smart, even smarter than humans. They somehow manage to kill all the humans, and then somehow revert to some less advanced farming civilization and are able to somehow cover up that humans were once the more advanced species.
I agree. I didn't see the movie but I saw the Trailer. Instantly didn't want to see it. We were better off without an explanation of how the apes rose up. I always thought it was something along the lines of, humans destroy themselves through war or some environmental catastrophe, and apes rise up in their place. Remaining humans are taken as slaves by apes. The story in the movie has no plausibility. If apes were given super intelligence and revolted against humans, they would be quickly contained. Non only that, even if they did, they wouldn't revert back to ancient technology as is the case in the planet of the apes original movie.
Well, I wouldn't run a business on it. But using it for personal projects and a personal site is fine. Yes you get what you pay for, but you shouldn't expect to be able to run a business for $10 a month. Also, I find they are a lot better than some of the other "discount" hosting services who offer $5 to $10 services. They also have VPS service if you want to run a business. That's probably a more sane option if you are doing something that you are trying to make money off of.
I was talking about this the other day with a co-worker. They could make the Android an even more serious contender to the PSP/ Nintendo DS if they had some kind of gamepad you could use with any old Android phone. I know that a lot of people complain about using the touch input on their phone for games. Especially if you have one of the cheaper phones with resistive display. I'm sure a bluetooth controller could be made, possibly with some kind of adjustable piece which could hold onto the phone. This would make gaming on Android devices much more enjoyable.
Canada you can get similar. But the you still can't get a $10 package. Nobody offers anything like that. So for $35 you can get 3 mbit, for $45 you can get 12 mbit, for $55 you can get 24 Mbit and so on. But there is no $10 plan for people who just don't have any money at all to spend on internet.
Actually, for $10 a month you can get a Dreamhost account which I find is very reliable. They actually give you 50 GB of backup space to do whatever you want to with, which is completely separate from your web space. They have "unlimited" space and transfer on your http directory, but they frown on using that for backup. Which is why they give you the secondary backup location.
One wonders why it has to be so public though. You can easily set up secure login and data transfer to your own servers. I would wonder why email servers wouldn't be able to set up secure services for sending mail between them. Sure at one time encryption may have been too much extra work, but now it seems like it would be quite advantageous without having too much extra load on the systems. It would be really nice if you could request a message to be sent using encryption between your mail host and the destination of the mail. Sure, it may or may not be encrypted when it is stored (it could be) but at least nobody could read it as it goes over the wire. They could use the existing ssl infrastructure to easily accomodate secure communication between email servers.
Would work fine in places with nice weather year round, but I'd like to see a computer controlled car handle the Canadian winter, before the plows have a chance to get out. Or when the snow is falling so hard, it doesn't matter that the plow just went by an hour ago.
Because in a plane you have a whole lot more time to react and fix something if the autopilot starts going wonky. When you're going down the freeway at 100 KM/h and the car suddenly veers left, you probably won't even have time to know what happened before you are knocked unconscious by the collision with the car in the next lane.
I didn't say black slaves. I just said slaves, and also mentioned people working in abhorrent conditions. People who built the railroads, people who worked in coal mines. Chinese slaves who built the railroads and worked in mines were very common. There's still a lot of work in the US done by illegal immigrants, who, while they aren't slaves aren't subject to the same working conditions and pay as american citizens would be.
The US only became as big as it was because of slavery. Pretty much any powerful nation at one time had either slavery or abhorrent working conditions. The Chinese are now rising up in economic standpoint due to exploiting people and ignoring the environmental impacts of their operations. Eventually once they reach a more equal place with countries like the US they will get rid of these practices, or at least that's the hope. It's very hard to increase your place in the world without exploiting either people or the environment.
My local utility already has something like this. They install a special thermostat, which they can control remotely. They are allowed to increase the thermostat by 1 degree during peak usage. You of course (if you even notice) can set it back down 1 degree after it changes. This is a volutary program, and the local utility even pays you and installs the thermostat free of charge. So while I think that people wouldn't want the local utility deciding when they can charge their car and do laundry, most people wouldn't mind their A/C getting turned up a single degree, especially since they can set it back.
Similar thing for my city. They had a big campaign to get people to use less water. Well, it worked. So well in fact that they had to raise the cost of water so that they could make enough to keep the water services adequately funded. Turns out that for water, the cost to operate the services has very little to do with the amount of water consumed. For example, it takes about the same amount of money to operate whether they have to process 5 million cubic metres or 10 million cubic metres (made up numbers). Basically they had a such a reduction in usage that rates doubled to make up for the difference in usage. Internet, Water, and to some extent electricity work this way. The main cost is in getting the system abel to handle peak load. And using the system at less than peak load is basically just wasted capacity. Electricity (at least coal, nuclear natural gas, and other fuel based methods) have an input required so they don't suffer from this as much. But if you look at solar, wind, hyrdoelectric, then they have to be built to the maximum capacity, and anything not used basically is wasted.
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Exactly. This would be a prime target for a computer virus. Politics is very high stakes. Especially deciding who runs a country. With the number of viruses present on the average person's computer, I wouldn't trust it for voting. Maybe an iPhone App though (joking, but it would probably be more secure).
Way too complicated for the average person to grasp.
This argument always comes up when talking about smart phones. My Nokia C5 may be low powered by iPhone or HTC Desire standards, but still does just about everything I want out of a smart phone. I can send and receive email, browse the web, listen to music, watch videos, download podcasts, play some simple games, use GPS navigation, use a touch interface. It run Symbian, which isn't even mentioned in most talks about smartphones, but as far as I'm concerned it works great. I could pay $400 for a phone, but I feel like that's stepping into the realm of diminishing returns. Why pay more than twice as much for something that only provides 10% better functionality.
Very much agree with you there. I often find it more likely that people without money end up spending their money on frivolous things to make it look like they have more money then they do. It's not uncommon to see people without much money (or very much in debt) for the simple fact that they can't give up their fancy cell phone, computer, car, house or other luxury item. Think about the first expensive thing you bought with your money when you got a real job. Likely it was something frivolous. Many people don't grow out of this.
I'm at the point where I'll probably never buy a desktop again. I've been using a laptop solely for the last year. I still have my old desktop, as it hasn't broken yet, but I think that when it breaks, I won't replace it. That being said, I can't really see going from using a laptop to using a tablet for most tasks. It's so much nicer to type on a real keyboard. And the extra screen space really does help. Sure a tablet would be a little more portable, but it's not like you can just fold it up and put it in your pocket. You still need to carry some kind of backpack or shoulder bag to bring the thing with you. Once you're doing that, you might as well bring a laptop. If I had the funds, I would just get a Mac Book Air, or a Lenovo X1 and be done with it.
If it doesn't fold in half at least 8 times, I don't want it.
I agree. MS isn't supporting Windows XP anymore, but that doesn't mean it's "unsupported". Most people or even organizations have never contacted MS for support for Windows anyway. As long as there are people that know the system well enough, which is very true for Windows XP, it doesn't matter that MS isn't issuing patches anymore. Any remaining security problems can most likely be fixed by firewalls and other third party solutions. Although one small point. With many software packages written for Windows XP. Not running as administrator is often not an option.
But how much time do you seriously spend in the GUI of the emulator? As long as it plays the game, I would be happy running it from the command line.
I just got a Nokia a couple months ago. For the price, it's a really good unit. I'm with a cell phone company that doesn't do subsidized phones (and in the process have much cheaper rates). So I could spend $400 on a nice Android phone, or $150 on a great Nokia Symbian phone. There's $150 Android phones, but I haven't heard anything but terrible reviews about them. I think this is the reason that they've given up on the American market for Symbian. Almost everyone is on a subsidized plan, and therefore don't see the full price of your phone. When a $400 phone only costs $50 (plus huge monthly bill). You can't sell "cheap" smart phones, because people aren't paying money for them anyway.
The point of sport is that no two people are alike. The point is to test people against people, not to test technological advancements against other technological advancements. Maybe we should go back to the way the Greeks did it, and have everybody race naked. Some sports even with lots of technology have kept things pretty fair. Look at cycling. They make the rules strict enough such that everyone is basically riding the exact same bike. That way it's kept way more about the riders, and not about the bike.
But with software, the inventions are still taken to the grave, because there is no full source code that is required as part of the patent submission. And since the patent doesn't include the source code, and the source code is copyrighted (and kept secret) it doesn't matter what happens when the patent expires because somebody will just have to figure it out again anyway, because the material contained in the patent isn't sufficient to have a working model (source code) produced in a meaningful amount of time.
I'm of the opinion that software already has too many other protections and doesn't need patents. Firstly, the source code and binaries are protected by copyright. Meaning that someone can't just take your product, copy it outright, and sell it for a profit. Secondly, many employees who write software have non-compete agreements in their contracts, meaning you don't have to worry about people who are developing your software taking all your ideas and running away with them to another company. Thirdly, there's trademarks for the name of your software product. Believe it or not, the name goes a long way in selling software, probably because there's a lot of bad systems out there, and companies want someone to support the software. If your software is sufficiently complex, even if a bunch of your developers move over to some other company, it's going to be a long time before they can develop a sale-able product unless they are taking the source code with them, which is a non-problem I've already covered in this answer. Not only that, but in the time that they've taken just to copy the system you had before, you would be able to advance your system to a point where the system they copied would now be inferior. Short answer, we don't need patents as an extra layer of protection. Software is sufficiently complex that trying to replicate the functionality without actually reusing the source code is difficult enough that patent protection is unnecessary.
The problem is, that it isn't consistent with the movies that already exist. OK, so the apes become super smart, even smarter than humans. They somehow manage to kill all the humans, and then somehow revert to some less advanced farming civilization and are able to somehow cover up that humans were once the more advanced species.
I agree. I didn't see the movie but I saw the Trailer. Instantly didn't want to see it. We were better off without an explanation of how the apes rose up. I always thought it was something along the lines of, humans destroy themselves through war or some environmental catastrophe, and apes rise up in their place. Remaining humans are taken as slaves by apes. The story in the movie has no plausibility. If apes were given super intelligence and revolted against humans, they would be quickly contained. Non only that, even if they did, they wouldn't revert back to ancient technology as is the case in the planet of the apes original movie.
Well, I wouldn't run a business on it. But using it for personal projects and a personal site is fine. Yes you get what you pay for, but you shouldn't expect to be able to run a business for $10 a month. Also, I find they are a lot better than some of the other "discount" hosting services who offer $5 to $10 services. They also have VPS service if you want to run a business. That's probably a more sane option if you are doing something that you are trying to make money off of.
I was talking about this the other day with a co-worker. They could make the Android an even more serious contender to the PSP/ Nintendo DS if they had some kind of gamepad you could use with any old Android phone. I know that a lot of people complain about using the touch input on their phone for games. Especially if you have one of the cheaper phones with resistive display. I'm sure a bluetooth controller could be made, possibly with some kind of adjustable piece which could hold onto the phone. This would make gaming on Android devices much more enjoyable.
Canada you can get similar. But the you still can't get a $10 package. Nobody offers anything like that. So for $35 you can get 3 mbit, for $45 you can get 12 mbit, for $55 you can get 24 Mbit and so on. But there is no $10 plan for people who just don't have any money at all to spend on internet.
Actually, for $10 a month you can get a Dreamhost account which I find is very reliable. They actually give you 50 GB of backup space to do whatever you want to with, which is completely separate from your web space. They have "unlimited" space and transfer on your http directory, but they frown on using that for backup. Which is why they give you the secondary backup location.
One wonders why it has to be so public though. You can easily set up secure login and data transfer to your own servers. I would wonder why email servers wouldn't be able to set up secure services for sending mail between them. Sure at one time encryption may have been too much extra work, but now it seems like it would be quite advantageous without having too much extra load on the systems. It would be really nice if you could request a message to be sent using encryption between your mail host and the destination of the mail. Sure, it may or may not be encrypted when it is stored (it could be) but at least nobody could read it as it goes over the wire. They could use the existing ssl infrastructure to easily accomodate secure communication between email servers.
Would work fine in places with nice weather year round, but I'd like to see a computer controlled car handle the Canadian winter, before the plows have a chance to get out. Or when the snow is falling so hard, it doesn't matter that the plow just went by an hour ago.
Because in a plane you have a whole lot more time to react and fix something if the autopilot starts going wonky. When you're going down the freeway at 100 KM/h and the car suddenly veers left, you probably won't even have time to know what happened before you are knocked unconscious by the collision with the car in the next lane.
I didn't say black slaves. I just said slaves, and also mentioned people working in abhorrent conditions. People who built the railroads, people who worked in coal mines. Chinese slaves who built the railroads and worked in mines were very common. There's still a lot of work in the US done by illegal immigrants, who, while they aren't slaves aren't subject to the same working conditions and pay as american citizens would be.
The US only became as big as it was because of slavery. Pretty much any powerful nation at one time had either slavery or abhorrent working conditions. The Chinese are now rising up in economic standpoint due to exploiting people and ignoring the environmental impacts of their operations. Eventually once they reach a more equal place with countries like the US they will get rid of these practices, or at least that's the hope. It's very hard to increase your place in the world without exploiting either people or the environment.
My local utility already has something like this. They install a special thermostat, which they can control remotely. They are allowed to increase the thermostat by 1 degree during peak usage. You of course (if you even notice) can set it back down 1 degree after it changes. This is a volutary program, and the local utility even pays you and installs the thermostat free of charge. So while I think that people wouldn't want the local utility deciding when they can charge their car and do laundry, most people wouldn't mind their A/C getting turned up a single degree, especially since they can set it back.
Similar thing for my city. They had a big campaign to get people to use less water. Well, it worked. So well in fact that they had to raise the cost of water so that they could make enough to keep the water services adequately funded. Turns out that for water, the cost to operate the services has very little to do with the amount of water consumed. For example, it takes about the same amount of money to operate whether they have to process 5 million cubic metres or 10 million cubic metres (made up numbers). Basically they had a such a reduction in usage that rates doubled to make up for the difference in usage. Internet, Water, and to some extent electricity work this way. The main cost is in getting the system abel to handle peak load. And using the system at less than peak load is basically just wasted capacity. Electricity (at least coal, nuclear natural gas, and other fuel based methods) have an input required so they don't suffer from this as much. But if you look at solar, wind, hyrdoelectric, then they have to be built to the maximum capacity, and anything not used basically is wasted.