Video Press Releases are a way for your local news station to fill a minute or two without spending any money to create content. As such, these for-profit "news" channels love them. They're done by any number of industries. The key is that they have to be very polished. If they don't have the usual TV news production values, the stations won't run them. This means that you need to have at least the same sort of equipment that the local stations have, putting such VPRs out of reach for most organizations that we'd actually WANT to send out such a thing.
But Proctor and Gamble can afford it, as can Conagra, etc.
You want them all the time, if you bother watching local news, and don't even know it. Look for the atractive reporter that you've never seen before, or the reporter who reports on the same subject EVERY SINGLE TIME he or she is on a segment. That's a giveaway that it's outside material.
"Seriously, I could care less about the telecoms. That's not my worry. When government tells you to jump, you jump. Gitmo is an ugly hotel for those who refuse. If the State forced me to release my logs, what can I do to fight it? Call the EFF or the IJ? That'll help, maybe 3 years down the road."
Forced compliance which the Telcos are anxious to productize? And why didn't Qwest wind up in Gitmo when they said "no"?
No, these are sleazy companies who deserve everything we throw at them. Further, the President won't release info on what he did, but we can pull it out of the telecoms. We can then impeach him based on that info. And ultimately, telling companies that they're above the law means that we only get more AT&Ts and fewer Qwests. We need to reward Qwest's behavior, so that we see corporations say "no" more often.
Hey, let's give Qwest Michigan! Merry Christmas, Qwest! You were a good little boy, so you get a present. AT&T, you get a lump of coal.
Ok, since we have a lot of engine/fuel people reading this, let's go slightly off topic.
CO2 is that comes out of the tailpipe. That's easy, no real work needed, aside from a catalytic converter to scrub CO to CO2.
But how much more effort would it be to have something instead of CO2 be the output? Ideally, we're talking carbon brickettes, here, but some other denser carbon construction which could be dumped at the same time as we take up more Hydrocarbons would be fine. (I saw an article a while ago on turning the carbon into Sodium Bicarbonate, but that's just one carbon for three oxygens and a sodium, which means trucking around salt and since we'd be burying this, it's a bit wasteful for space/oxygen.)
I assume there are prodigious barriers to this in terms of energy needs, and extra weight/cost in trucking around extra molecules to bind up the carbon, but are there any good ideas out there? Can we actually isolate the carbon in a carbon-dense molecule which we can accumulate?
Can we put all that waste heat the car puts out to work on a chemistry project?
No, you're missing his point. He's not saying that they are reliable in the class of the Japanese cars. He's saying that A. Japanese cars, when they do fail, are largely disposable. And that B. American cars can be patched, have items replaced, have more "user servicable parts", etc.
Japanese cars are filled with color coded plastic parts to make assembly easier, faster, and more reliable. It makes sense that they'd both be more reliable in the first place, and decay faster. This is NOT true of older American cars. There's more manual work in assembly. There's more you can replace, modify, etc. They're over built, by Japanese standards, at least in certain areas of the car. However, American car companies have been trying to implement the Japanese methods, and have largely succeeded. I don't think his statements are nearly as true of a 2007 American car than they are of a 1970 American car.
There's always a tipping point on this stuff, where it becomes automated enough (because there's enough demand, because the price is low enough) that the price drops through the floor.
When that happens, two things will happen -- yeah, I'll want one, and I'll want everyone in my family to have one, etc, so we can all be better protected and I can know what gene came from where (which is mostly curiosity), and secondly -- medical folks will REQUIRE this.
Want surgery of any kind? You'll need a profile -- to not have one will be begging malpractice suits.
Want to talk to a GP? The first thing he'll order for you will be one of these, so that he knows what to poke you about or what to advise you. Less so that the surgical staff/anesthetist, but he'll also be begging for a malpractice suit if he doesn't push you to get this.
The estate of anyone who dies of something that could have been predicted by a cheap test will have the option of lawyering up, so this will be very, VERY common is just a few years.
Ok, thousands of people were exposed at Hiroshima, and we have a breakdown of what they died of. Boy, these people are healthy. Where's the weird cancers which people die of now and then? Where's the skin cancer? Prostate? I suspect an incredible scrubbing of data. Only cancers they decide are radiation-related are listed. And they're deciding.
There might be something to this, but I smell a grossly twisted study which eliminates complexity and debatable data by wiping it away with a sweep of a pen.
Printing ballots has a much higher profit than selling voting machines. If you sell a voting machine, you make a bunch of money, right off, but there's R and D, manufacturing costs, etc.
Printing has a real margin, and the revenue keeps recurring.
The most profitable thing IBM ever made, up until the IBM PC, was their PUNCH CARD.
I think support for the machines might generate enough recurring revenue to beat the paper, but the machines themselves are probably not as good a way of taking money from a government.
Unless, of course, you can get them to buy a voting machine, then chuck it and buy a new one every, say, three years. There's no reason for a properly designed voting machine to be chucked, though. This is probably part of why there's so much work being done to make crappy machines. You want them to be a laughingstock in a few years, so you can get recurring, not one time, revenue.
No, that's an uncontrolled situation without controls. You may be right, or you may not be right. You haven't done any kind of scientific study to reach your conclusions.
The problem here isn't what makes us fat (well, it's not the core problem, anyhow). It's that Americans don't understand science, and that, in particular, Americans with MEDICAL DEGREES don't understand science (or willfully ignore it in their quest for media attention). This, coupled with the urge to publish controversial articles, whether they be good studies or not, by the medical profession's journals, as well as the urge to publish anything juicy at all by the lay media means that we have:
1. A plethora of bad studies.
2. A body politic who can't tell a good study from a bad one.
3. A food industry and media industry who thrive on the confusion and a shifting pattern of "conventional wisdom".
We're badly educated, and we're being farmed.
Oddly, the cure for the above is science, but the people who fund and do such studies are better off when no study is ultimately convincing.
-- Learn what a bad study is. Try to teach those around you what science is. Make noise and don't buy what bad studies sell.
Um, well, yeah, that's a good idea, though it's not going to kill the iPhone. But what could cause such a thing to be launched IS a way to kill the iPhone. A really open platform that's easy to develop on. A plethora of free, fun, useful apps, some of which will be amazing and an overnight success in a way that the phone itself won't be.
Someone here pointed out that Apple is a Prada to Google's Samsonite. As far as people see it that way (and there are lots, I know), Apple has nothing to worry about. But the gPhone will slowly catch up and pass, in terms of functionality, and will develop some incredible applications, because of the sheer number of people who could develop for it.
The iPhone is going to be for people who are willing to pay a LOT more for both a phone and for phone calls, in return for status and slick user interface. But the gPhone will be what they're forced to use so they can get applications they need, either for business or just life.
Remember, these are typical Walmart customers here. \ That is important, they are not like Slasdot readers. Unlike business users or college students, M$ has done no favors for these people and they have zero loyalty.
How many are going to be returned because they don't have MS Office pre-installed on them? \ None. Open Office is more than enough for the average school paper.
Microsoft may not have done them any favors, but neither has Linux, yet, and most won't know how MS has screwed 'em. They may not know anything about MS, but they know what they use already. I think a lot of these computer will be sold because they are the cheapest computer Walmart offers. You go in to buy a computer, and you get the cheapest one. Heck yeah, there are going to be returns. People will be surprised and won't like that it's different, and some will return it. Some will see that it's different and love that, I'm sure -- especially the younger folks who wind up with them. But to assume there won't be returns because they're different is a little myopic.
We would do better to be able to explain why there are more returns on this than the usual machine, and to prepare for the fact that Walmart might drop it because of that. The thing is, we want people to buy this "by mistake" -- We want them to be surprised. But then, we want them to pass through that surprise and appreciate it. We want the Linux base to expand. Well, many of us do, anyhow. And this offering is GREAT for that.
But we need to be realistic and prepared for reality.
There might be a market for an evangelistic "new to Linux" publication -- maybe even one aimed at kids -- to be free-six-month-subscription bundled with the box. The demographic, past the first wave of Linux folks who are excited about the machine, might be homogeneous enough to warrant that, and it would help them get excited about the new system.
If you draw lines across the last supper, you see places where people line up. It's VERY exact. Take a ruler and pass it over you screen. There's something going on there. This is why people get hepped up about it.
Musical notes? I doubt it. A hidden message? emphatically yes. The most likely message: "DaVinci was really, really ANAL."
When I first heard the form that Google's entry into the mobile phone market would take, I was disappointed. But after seeing this reaction, and to a much lesser extent Symbian's, I'm all of a sudden thinking there must be something to Android.
Things won't get better until we get a President that considers the Constitution more than "just a goddamned piece of paper
And when do you think that will be? Not the next president. He or she will come from a group of people who haven't impeached a man who amassed all that power. Maybe the next. Or the Next.
Let's go all the way with this. Nero fiddled (or lyred, whatever). There's no proof the he did it while Rome burned. There IS proof that the burning of the part of Rome that did burn benefited him. He wanted to build a palace there. Lucky huh? And his men were there at the fires, contracts in hand, to buy the flaming houses from Roman citizens whose lives were going up in smoke. In days when there was no insurance, and firemen (the vigiles) sometimes waited around outside the house until the money men gave them the nod to go in and put the fire out, there was a powerful motivation to sign.
Nero used the fire to expand his holdings, preyed on the citizens he was supposed to be ruling, and probably had the fires set in the first place.
Doesn't THAT resemble two branches of government doing absolutely nothing about energy because the status quo benefits their benefactors a little more than simple neglect does? This is the same group of people who embrace Ethanol, that won't move forward with CAFE standards, that sign the checks for a war over a dubious possibility of holding oil, and don't spend much at all on alternative energy, for goodness sake, they won't even stand behind habeas corpus.
They aren't fiddling. They're burning our homes to make a buck.
The problem with public transportation is that poor people use it. This system would be more expensive -- probably wildly so -- and thus would mean that you could get where you want to get without owning a car, and without seeing (or sitting next to) poor people.
This system is a great idea. It will move people around who contribute money to campaigns, and have political clout, compared to real mass transit, and can be paid for with the same money we currently put into mass transit. Then the rich people who use mass transit can use this, and the poor people will have more trouble getting to work and will therefore move. Tada -- you've got yerself a way to turn Boston, MA into Boulder, CO.
"Man, the irony is that so many people would've voted for him."
That's not the irony, that's the REASON. The last thing the Democratic party (or any party) wants is someone like Colbert on any podium with their guys. This campaign was a serious threat to the status quo -- not earth shattering stuff, but it would have made people look stupid, shown people to be liars, made people think -- this is not desired by either of our two political parties.
"If I were Colbert, I'd be seeking justice from the courts on this one. Show them just how serious a candidate he is."
We vote for candidates from two parties to run our government, but the parties are NOT the government. He may have far less rights to get those parties to do anything they don't want to than you realize.
We've already had a joke here saying Vista won't run at full speed, but I think there's a kernel of truth, there.
If you can put a supercomputer in your hand, it's not a supercomputer. A week ago, we had an article here on a guy who'd wired several PS3s together and called it a supercomputer. Folks didn't agree with the supercomputer designation, even though he was getting flops that would clearly have been supercomputer speed just five or six years ago. It's not speed that defines a supercomputer, it's speed relative to what's commonly available.
If we crunch down machines to incredibly small size, then research institutions will buy one 50 times that size. Every time. What will happen is that that tech (if it's not expensive) will drive PC speeds up, perhaps phenomenally, software development tools will make use of the extra speed to make programming easier at the expense of run-time, and we won't see significant speed increases in the user experience. The user will be able to do more, of course, but he'll be complaining "When I speak into the microphone to tell it to write a three page synopsis of this book in it's library, it stalls and lags, and sometimes I tell it twice, before I get a response, and then it gives me two outputs. This thing is SLOW."
"Guys, if we want to win the argument on Net Neutrality, we can't keep confusing QOS with NN."
If we want to be able to have a conversation at all, we need to stop confusing QOS with fraud. QOS sets attributes in packets which are designed to establish priority. Fraud (in this case) means posing as the customer and sending a fake message, then lying about sending the fake message.
For example, if a telco decided to cut sampling rates on telephone calls from 8khz to 7.6khz for residential service to customers of other carriers, that would be quality of service (QOS). If, on the other hand, the carrier were to use their equipment to dial everyone who called you who was not a customer of the same carrier, spoofing your phone number on caller ID, and using a voice filter which made their voice sound enough like yours to be convincing, and telling them "Don't call me anymore. Stop. I don't want to hear from you for at least a week. Got it? Yeah, I mean it. Stop calling for a while. Don't take that tone with me. Just stop calling. Yes, this is me. Who else would I be? Now Stop Calling." And then told you that they would NEVER do such a thing. That would be fraud.
Since telcos are being trusted with our identities (phone numbers, IPs, etc), our privacy (which they'd never violate without a warrant, as we've seen), and the functioning, as generally intended and advertised, of the Internet, character means something in this context.
I hope this helps us get our terms in agreement, so that we can have an argument, or even a conversation, on NN.
Patterns? Screw that -- I'm gonna show Blade Runner on mine. Since it won't have speakers, you won't be able to hear the voice-overs by Harrison Ford that were put in at the last minute to save Ridley Scott's ass! Woot!!!!
I don't think 95% of Windows users care if Microsoft is untrustworthy or not, know who Microsoft is beyond a name, don't feel violates, and have barely any clue that things are updating, at all.
There's no trust gap. Most of their users are essentially sheep. And I don't mean that in a "Hey, Wake Up, Sheep!" way, I mean that that is what that segment of the market is. On some level, that's a good thing. Computers should be more ubiquitous and require less inspection and understanding, not less.
But there's no point blowing this whole thing up about trust. Technical folks don't trust them, but will have to do updates anyhow. The sheep don't care. The upper-level managers making bad decisions about software because they blindly trust Microsoft aren't going to change their tune because of this.
It's just not a big deal. They're weasels, yes, we knew that. So?
"If the US wasn't flushing money down the toilet in Iraq, you could fund public health care and have money left over for a decent education system without a running a deficit."
Are you kidding? Screw health care. If the US wasn't flushing money down the toilet in Iraq, we'd be able to afford a constitution! Now that'd really be something!
We have the morons at Homeland Security telling us to be afraid of anything at ALL, no matter how impossible or silly, and at the opposite end, the morons at the Pentagon who want to put an incredibly expensive target into space which their soldiers will depend on and which can be cheaply taken out by anyone with access to what the commercialization of space folks have learned in the past decade (and will in the next).
So what this will need, in order to work, is Star Wars missile defense, which is in trouble now. We'd have to start funding that again....Ah, not so stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Video Press Releases are a way for your local news station to fill a minute or two without spending any money to create content. As such, these for-profit "news" channels love them. They're done by any number of industries. The key is that they have to be very polished. If they don't have the usual TV news production values, the stations won't run them. This means that you need to have at least the same sort of equipment that the local stations have, putting such VPRs out of reach for most organizations that we'd actually WANT to send out such a thing.
But Proctor and Gamble can afford it, as can Conagra, etc.
You want them all the time, if you bother watching local news, and don't even know it. Look for the atractive reporter that you've never seen before, or the reporter who reports on the same subject EVERY SINGLE TIME he or she is on a segment. That's a giveaway that it's outside material.
"Seriously, I could care less about the telecoms. That's not my worry. When government tells you to jump, you jump. Gitmo is an ugly hotel for those who refuse. If the State forced me to release my logs, what can I do to fight it? Call the EFF or the IJ? That'll help, maybe 3 years down the road."
Forced compliance which the Telcos are anxious to productize? And why didn't Qwest wind up in Gitmo when they said "no"?
No, these are sleazy companies who deserve everything we throw at them. Further, the President won't release info on what he did, but we can pull it out of the telecoms. We can then impeach him based on that info. And ultimately, telling companies that they're above the law means that we only get more AT&Ts and fewer Qwests. We need to reward Qwest's behavior, so that we see corporations say "no" more often.
Hey, let's give Qwest Michigan! Merry Christmas, Qwest! You were a good little boy, so you get a present. AT&T, you get a lump of coal.
Ok, since we have a lot of engine/fuel people reading this, let's go slightly off topic.
CO2 is that comes out of the tailpipe. That's easy, no real work needed, aside from a catalytic converter to scrub CO to CO2.
But how much more effort would it be to have something instead of CO2 be the output? Ideally, we're talking carbon brickettes, here, but some other denser carbon construction which could be dumped at the same time as we take up more Hydrocarbons would be fine. (I saw an article a while ago on turning the carbon into Sodium Bicarbonate, but that's just one carbon for three oxygens and a sodium, which means trucking around salt and since we'd be burying this, it's a bit wasteful for space/oxygen.)
I assume there are prodigious barriers to this in terms of energy needs, and extra weight/cost in trucking around extra molecules to bind up the carbon, but are there any good ideas out there? Can we actually isolate the carbon in a carbon-dense molecule which we can accumulate?
Can we put all that waste heat the car puts out to work on a chemistry project?
No, you're missing his point. He's not saying that they are reliable in the class of the Japanese cars. He's saying that A. Japanese cars, when they do fail, are largely disposable. And that B. American cars can be patched, have items replaced, have more "user servicable parts", etc.
Japanese cars are filled with color coded plastic parts to make assembly easier, faster, and more reliable. It makes sense that they'd both be more reliable in the first place, and decay faster. This is NOT true of older American cars. There's more manual work in assembly. There's more you can replace, modify, etc. They're over built, by Japanese standards, at least in certain areas of the car. However, American car companies have been trying to implement the Japanese methods, and have largely succeeded. I don't think his statements are nearly as true of a 2007 American car than they are of a 1970 American car.
There's always a tipping point on this stuff, where it becomes automated enough (because there's enough demand, because the price is low enough) that the price drops through the floor.
When that happens, two things will happen -- yeah, I'll want one, and I'll want everyone in my family to have one, etc, so we can all be better protected and I can know what gene came from where (which is mostly curiosity), and secondly -- medical folks will REQUIRE this.
Want surgery of any kind? You'll need a profile -- to not have one will be begging malpractice suits.
Want to talk to a GP? The first thing he'll order for you will be one of these, so that he knows what to poke you about or what to advise you. Less so that the surgical staff/anesthetist, but he'll also be begging for a malpractice suit if he doesn't push you to get this.
The estate of anyone who dies of something that could have been predicted by a cheap test will have the option of lawyering up, so this will be very, VERY common is just a few years.
Ok, thousands of people were exposed at Hiroshima, and we have a breakdown of what they died of. Boy, these people are healthy. Where's the weird cancers which people die of now and then? Where's the skin cancer? Prostate? I suspect an incredible scrubbing of data. Only cancers they decide are radiation-related are listed. And they're deciding.
There might be something to this, but I smell a grossly twisted study which eliminates complexity and debatable data by wiping it away with a sweep of a pen.
It's like he's looking in a mirror.
This doesn't jive with their plugin download page which demands Windows.
I suspect that the Linux and Mac stuff is a phase two thing.
And a bigger screen. And a lower price. I agree.
If everyone agrees, though, such a successor would take a long time.
Printing ballots has a much higher profit than selling voting machines. If you sell a voting machine, you make a bunch of money, right off, but there's R and D, manufacturing costs, etc.
Printing has a real margin, and the revenue keeps recurring.
The most profitable thing IBM ever made, up until the IBM PC, was their PUNCH CARD.
I think support for the machines might generate enough recurring revenue to beat the paper, but the machines themselves are probably not as good a way of taking money from a government.
Unless, of course, you can get them to buy a voting machine, then chuck it and buy a new one every, say, three years. There's no reason for a properly designed voting machine to be chucked, though. This is probably part of why there's so much work being done to make crappy machines. You want them to be a laughingstock in a few years, so you can get recurring, not one time, revenue.
"Ok, here's your scientific study:"
No, that's an uncontrolled situation without controls. You may be right, or you may not be right. You haven't done any kind of scientific study to reach your conclusions.
The problem here isn't what makes us fat (well, it's not the core problem, anyhow). It's that Americans don't understand science, and that, in particular, Americans with MEDICAL DEGREES don't understand science (or willfully ignore it in their quest for media attention). This, coupled with the urge to publish controversial articles, whether they be good studies or not, by the medical profession's journals, as well as the urge to publish anything juicy at all by the lay media means that we have:
1. A plethora of bad studies.
2. A body politic who can't tell a good study from a bad one.
3. A food industry and media industry who thrive on the confusion and a shifting pattern of "conventional wisdom".
We're badly educated, and we're being farmed.
Oddly, the cure for the above is science, but the people who fund and do such studies are better off when no study is ultimately convincing.
--
Learn what a bad study is. Try to teach those around you what science is. Make noise and don't buy what bad studies sell.
Um, well, yeah, that's a good idea, though it's not going to kill the iPhone. But what could cause such a thing to be launched IS a way to kill the iPhone. A really open platform that's easy to develop on. A plethora of free, fun, useful apps, some of which will be amazing and an overnight success in a way that the phone itself won't be.
Someone here pointed out that Apple is a Prada to Google's Samsonite. As far as people see it that way (and there are lots, I know), Apple has nothing to worry about. But the gPhone will slowly catch up and pass, in terms of functionality, and will develop some incredible applications, because of the sheer number of people who could develop for it.
The iPhone is going to be for people who are willing to pay a LOT more for both a phone and for phone calls, in return for status and slick user interface. But the gPhone will be what they're forced to use so they can get applications they need, either for business or just life.
How many are going to be returned because they don't have MS Office pre-installed on them? \ None. Open Office is more than enough for the average school paper.
Microsoft may not have done them any favors, but neither has Linux, yet, and most won't know how MS has screwed 'em. They may not know anything about MS, but they know what they use already. I think a lot of these computer will be sold because they are the cheapest computer Walmart offers. You go in to buy a computer, and you get the cheapest one. Heck yeah, there are going to be returns. People will be surprised and won't like that it's different, and some will return it. Some will see that it's different and love that, I'm sure -- especially the younger folks who wind up with them. But to assume there won't be returns because they're different is a little myopic.
We would do better to be able to explain why there are more returns on this than the usual machine, and to prepare for the fact that Walmart might drop it because of that. The thing is, we want people to buy this "by mistake" -- We want them to be surprised. But then, we want them to pass through that surprise and appreciate it. We want the Linux base to expand. Well, many of us do, anyhow. And this offering is GREAT for that.
But we need to be realistic and prepared for reality.
There might be a market for an evangelistic "new to Linux" publication -- maybe even one aimed at kids -- to be free-six-month-subscription bundled with the box. The demographic, past the first wave of Linux folks who are excited about the machine, might be homogeneous enough to warrant that, and it would help them get excited about the new system.
If you draw lines across the last supper, you see places where people line up. It's VERY exact. Take a ruler and pass it over you screen. There's something going on there. This is why people get hepped up about it.
Musical notes? I doubt it. A hidden message? emphatically yes. The most likely message: "DaVinci was really, really ANAL."
When I first heard the form that Google's entry into the mobile phone market would take, I was disappointed. But after seeing this reaction, and to a much lesser extent Symbian's, I'm all of a sudden thinking there must be something to Android.
And when do you think that will be? Not the next president. He or she will come from a group of people who haven't impeached a man who amassed all that power. Maybe the next. Or the Next.
Let's go all the way with this. Nero fiddled (or lyred, whatever). There's no proof the he did it while Rome burned. There IS proof that the burning of the part of Rome that did burn benefited him. He wanted to build a palace there. Lucky huh? And his men were there at the fires, contracts in hand, to buy the flaming houses from Roman citizens whose lives were going up in smoke. In days when there was no insurance, and firemen (the vigiles) sometimes waited around outside the house until the money men gave them the nod to go in and put the fire out, there was a powerful motivation to sign.
Nero used the fire to expand his holdings, preyed on the citizens he was supposed to be ruling, and probably had the fires set in the first place.
Doesn't THAT resemble two branches of government doing absolutely nothing about energy because the status quo benefits their benefactors a little more than simple neglect does? This is the same group of people who embrace Ethanol, that won't move forward with CAFE standards, that sign the checks for a war over a dubious possibility of holding oil, and don't spend much at all on alternative energy, for goodness sake, they won't even stand behind habeas corpus.
They aren't fiddling. They're burning our homes to make a buck.
The problem with public transportation is that poor people use it. This system would be more expensive -- probably wildly so -- and thus would mean that you could get where you want to get without owning a car, and without seeing (or sitting next to) poor people.
This system is a great idea. It will move people around who contribute money to campaigns, and have political clout, compared to real mass transit, and can be paid for with the same money we currently put into mass transit. Then the rich people who use mass transit can use this, and the poor people will have more trouble getting to work and will therefore move. Tada -- you've got yerself a way to turn Boston, MA into Boulder, CO.
"Man, the irony is that so many people would've voted for him."
That's not the irony, that's the REASON. The last thing the Democratic party (or any party) wants is someone like Colbert on any podium with their guys. This campaign was a serious threat to the status quo -- not earth shattering stuff, but it would have made people look stupid, shown people to be liars, made people think -- this is not desired by either of our two political parties.
"If I were Colbert, I'd be seeking justice from the courts on this one. Show them just how serious a candidate he is."
We vote for candidates from two parties to run our government, but the parties are NOT the government. He may have far less rights to get those parties to do anything they don't want to than you realize.
We've already had a joke here saying Vista won't run at full speed, but I think there's a kernel of truth, there.
If you can put a supercomputer in your hand, it's not a supercomputer. A week ago, we had an article here on a guy who'd wired several PS3s together and called it a supercomputer. Folks didn't agree with the supercomputer designation, even though he was getting flops that would clearly have been supercomputer speed just five or six years ago. It's not speed that defines a supercomputer, it's speed relative to what's commonly available.
If we crunch down machines to incredibly small size, then research institutions will buy one 50 times that size. Every time. What will happen is that that tech (if it's not expensive) will drive PC speeds up, perhaps phenomenally, software development tools will make use of the extra speed to make programming easier at the expense of run-time, and we won't see significant speed increases in the user experience. The user will be able to do more, of course, but he'll be complaining "When I speak into the microphone to tell it to write a three page synopsis of this book in it's library, it stalls and lags, and sometimes I tell it twice, before I get a response, and then it gives me two outputs. This thing is SLOW."
If we want to be able to have a conversation at all, we need to stop confusing QOS with fraud. QOS sets attributes in packets which are designed to establish priority. Fraud (in this case) means posing as the customer and sending a fake message, then lying about sending the fake message.
For example, if a telco decided to cut sampling rates on telephone calls from 8khz to 7.6khz for residential service to customers of other carriers, that would be quality of service (QOS). If, on the other hand, the carrier were to use their equipment to dial everyone who called you who was not a customer of the same carrier, spoofing your phone number on caller ID, and using a voice filter which made their voice sound enough like yours to be convincing, and telling them "Don't call me anymore. Stop. I don't want to hear from you for at least a week. Got it? Yeah, I mean it. Stop calling for a while. Don't take that tone with me. Just stop calling. Yes, this is me. Who else would I be? Now Stop Calling." And then told you that they would NEVER do such a thing. That would be fraud.
Since telcos are being trusted with our identities (phone numbers, IPs, etc), our privacy (which they'd never violate without a warrant, as we've seen), and the functioning, as generally intended and advertised, of the Internet, character means something in this context.
I hope this helps us get our terms in agreement, so that we can have an argument, or even a conversation, on NN.
Patterns? Screw that -- I'm gonna show Blade Runner on mine. Since it won't have speakers, you won't be able to hear the voice-overs by Harrison Ford that were put in at the last minute to save Ridley Scott's ass! Woot!!!!
I don't think 95% of Windows users care if Microsoft is untrustworthy or not, know who Microsoft is beyond a name, don't feel violates, and have barely any clue that things are updating, at all.
There's no trust gap. Most of their users are essentially sheep. And I don't mean that in a "Hey, Wake Up, Sheep!" way, I mean that that is what that segment of the market is. On some level, that's a good thing. Computers should be more ubiquitous and require less inspection and understanding, not less.
But there's no point blowing this whole thing up about trust. Technical folks don't trust them, but will have to do updates anyhow. The sheep don't care. The upper-level managers making bad decisions about software because they blindly trust Microsoft aren't going to change their tune because of this.
It's just not a big deal. They're weasels, yes, we knew that. So?
"If the US wasn't flushing money down the toilet in Iraq, you could fund public health care and have money left over for a decent education system without a running a deficit."
Are you kidding? Screw health care. If the US wasn't flushing money down the toilet in Iraq, we'd be able to afford a constitution! Now that'd really be something!
We have the morons at Homeland Security telling us to be afraid of anything at ALL, no matter how impossible or silly, and at the opposite end, the morons at the Pentagon who want to put an incredibly expensive target into space which their soldiers will depend on and which can be cheaply taken out by anyone with access to what the commercialization of space folks have learned in the past decade (and will in the next).
...Ah, not so stupid.
So what this will need, in order to work, is Star Wars missile defense, which is in trouble now. We'd have to start funding that again.