If you keep your iPad (or buy a new one), don't count on keeping your Netflix or Kindle apps. Apple is demanding that they sell their movies and books through Apple, and hand over 30% of the revenue. Apple is threatening to pull the apps if they don't get their way. It may end up that you will give up your Netflix streaming if you stay with Apple. Both Netflix and Amazon have annouced that they will release Android versions of their apps this year.
A system like this will indeed have to achieve a phenomenal level of safety, at least in the USA, because of how liability for accidents is assigned. Even if it saved 10,000 lives for every death it caused, on trial for causing that one death the manufacturers and system operators would get precisely zero credit for the lives saved, and would be vilified for causing the one death.
We have already seen this problem with vaccines, and it required special legislation to enable vaccine manufacturers to stay in business. The chances of getting such legislation for road trains are vanishingly small.
The reason for pitiful internet performance in the US is lack of competition. Good infrastructure is expensive, and a rational corporation will not spend money to upgrade infrastructure unless it sees a need to do so. An effective monopoly has little incentive to upgrade.
One of the biggest barriers to broadband competition is local zoning and franchising restrictions.
Once the local government has a juicy deal with one provider, it has little motivation to rock the boat and allow others in.
The federal government has it within its power to fully pre-empt these local restrictions and allow broadband competition to flourish wherever it is economically feasible. So far, the political influence of local governments has precluded such action, and we are stuck with largely non-competitive and expensive markets for broadband.
If someone came up with a search engine that was significantly better than Google, no amount of pre-installed search lock-in could hold them back. Just like Google started way back when, the new search engine would start by attracting the digerati who actually do know how to type in a URL, and it would gradually seep into the consciousness of the computer-illiterate public.
The tricky part is to come up with a new search engine that's better than Google, because lots of smart folks at Google are working at that very thing, all the time.
Both Microsoft and software patents are evil and powerful, but Microsoft's power is ebbing away while the corrosive effects of the patent system are still hurting software developers. I'm rooting for Microsoft 100% in this case since the patent system, much more than Microsoft, is capable of leeching the lifeblood from software development.
Fair Use is, in fact, a product of the US Constitution. There are two separate and somewhat conflicting constitutional provisions in play here:
The guarantee of free Speech in the First Amendment
The power of Congress to grant limited copyright monopolies
Fair Use is a doctrine developed by judges in the 19th century to help resolve the conflict between these two provisions. It was later codified in the 20th century, but with the intent of preserving the existing judge-made law.
Rights enshrined in the Constitution do not enforce themselves.
Some constitutional rights are so well-established that they seem to enforce themselves, but in marginal cases these rights must be asserted in court. In a noted recent case, a group called Citizens United was prohibited from speaking about a presidential candidate during the election, because of the source of some of its funding. Political speech is at the very core of the First Amendment, but the question was a close one, and could only be established by asserting it in court.
The fact that Fair Use must often be defended in court comes from the fact-intensive nature of the doctrine, making it difficult to decide a priori whether Fair Use applies or not. This uncertainty, combined with the American Rule for paying legal fees (each party pays his own lawyers), skews the playing field in favor of the big copyright holders. This is true even though Fair Use is, at bottom, a Constituional right.
While it would be nice to have a phone on which to load your personal Andriod build, the fact that you don't is not an indication that Android is not open.
No guerilla force will survive for a week under those conditions.
This is simply not true. The WWII partisan forces survived the entire war. They were not effective in attacking "significant groups of German soldiers" because they were guerilla forces: that's not what guerilla forces are good at. Such forces are best at sabotage, assassination, and espionage, and were successful in those endeavors.
There are now multiple lines of human cancer cells living and reproducing indefinitely. How do you know that they don't have souls too? They are alive. They have complete sets of human genes. They are just as much 'human life' as a blastocyst is.
All argument in favor of souls for the blastocysts instead of the cancer cells must turn on their potential to become fully-formed human beings. Why then are they not potential people instead of actual people?
The Terrafugia "roadable airplane" (not flying car) is designed principally to make the airplane more practical for trips where either
nearby airports with convenient ground transportation are not available, or
due to weather, it may not be possible to fly the entire route in a light airplane
The Terrafugia does save money on rental cars, but much more importantly, it makes it practical to use small airports where rental cars are difficult or impossible to obtain. On round trips with several days between the outbound and inbound legs, it is difficult or impossible to be sure that the weather will be aceptable for the return flight. With a roadable airplane, if the weather turns bad you just drive home instead of flying.
The problem Barton complained of was not that BP had to pay for damage it caused, but rather the extra-legal medium for compelling the payments. The USA is (or was) governed by the rule of law, and obligations such as BP's are judged and enforced by the courts. Obama has peformed an end run around the courts by pressuring BP to set up this $20b fund. That, not the underlying obligation of BP to pay, was the sustance of Barton's complaint.
In disputed elections, it if found time and again that voters have cast ambiguous ballots, with the mark or marks in the wrong place, or too many marks, or too few. Especially with the relatively complex ballots commonly used in the USA, electronic verification of the voter's choices is a good thing. There is no reason to allow a voter to cast a self-defeating ballot, (The voter should still be able to abstain from one or more races, but the system should verify that this is really what he or she wants to do.)
An electronic system that verifies the voter's choices and then prints them on paper in a format that's easily readable by both humans and computers should not be difficult to implement, and will bring benefits to the voters and to the election authorities.
If you pay for the official NHL internet feed, you get "out-of-market" games only. They won't sell you an internet feed of your local team for love or money. We know how the cable companies hate competition.
You really wouldn't want to be buying your car directly from Ford or GM. It'd be a horrible experience. The car dealers -- comparatively small enterprises -- are the customer's last line of defense in making car companies do a relatively good job.
In the US, car dealers have huge political influence, so dealers have been able to purchase state laws that make it illegal to buy cars directly from the manufacturer. It might be that customers would prefer the current system of car sales, but we may never know. I, for one, wouldn't mind being able to arrange a test drive and then order a new car all on the internet, and have it delivered to my door, without having to deal with some slick salesman at the local dealership.
You're lucky. Now that the FIOS rollout has ended, if you don't have FIOS now you're not likely to have it for a very long time. For those of us in the FIOS dead zone, it's pretty much a choice between cable or satellite, and a lot of people can't get satellite due to line-of-sight issues.
I'm happy that you could cut the cable. Unfortunately, as a baseball fan that's not an option for me. Local TV broadcasts of major league baseball are largely a thing of the past. MLB.tv offers out-of-market coverage via internet, but local teams are blacked-out in order to preserve the local cable monopoly. To see local major-league baseball on TV, you pretty much have to pay a cable bill or a satellite bill, or content yourself with a handful of nationally-televised games on broadcast.
Since history is not your strong suit let me help you with this.
Since humility is not your strong suit, let me help you with this.
While the founding fathers were religious men, and largely Christian of one sort or another, they expressly rejected the idea of the United States being founded on the Christian religion, by rejecting any national Established Church. The founders were well aware that they could have established a national church, since most of the colonies had their own Established Churches at the time the Bill or Rights was ratified, or had only disestablished them recently.
SInce the founders expressly rejected establishment of a national church, and indeed eschewed reference to any specific religion in the Constitution (compare, for example, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut), the assertion that "the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..." makes perfect sense. It is no "misinterpretation" to take the treaty's words at face value, since they are fully supported by the text of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
It seems to me that the audience the telecoms are addressing are the European regulators. What the telecoms want is for government to set a price for the bandwidth Google is "using", and to force Google to continue "using" this bandwidth and to pay the government-set price. The key is to get a mandate both that google owes the telecoms (and not the other way around), and that Google is obliged both to continue providing its services and to pay for the privilege.
From the telecom's point of view, it's a neat trick if they can pull it off.
But this president was going to usher in a new age of transparency, and produce "change we can believe in". Obama has the power to order the US negotiators to push for more transparency, but he has done nothing (or worse than nothing) to open up the process. At least we were able to see the final health-care negotiations televised on C-SPAN, as Obama promised. Oh, wait...
Too many people drank the Obama kool-aid during the campaign and can't bring themselves to see that he's just another lying politician, from the left this time instead of the right.
There seems to be a common understanding around Slashdot that domestic warrantless wiretapping is always unconstitutional.
Wiretapping is not mentioned in the Constitution, but one's "persons, houses, papers, and effects" have been interpreted in many but not all cases to include electronic communications. Some of the cases where the courts have not extended constitutional protection in this way are for foreign communications and for domestic communications with agents of foreign powers.
A few years after the Ford memo mentioned above, Congress passed the FISA statute, in an attempt to somewhat restrict these constitutionally-permitted warrantless wiretaps. However, it is not a settled question whether the Congress has the right, through legislation, to restrict the President's authority, as Commander-in-Chief, to conduct otherwise-constitutional foreign intelligence operations.
The bottom line is that the issue is not as clear as you might think.
The literal words of the Constitution do not cover electronic communications. It's only judicial interpretation over the years that has established the idea that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" implies electronic communication as well. However, this judicial interpretation has not included constitutional protection of many international communications or domestic communications with agents of foreign powers. (Think about it: why was the FISA statute needed to protect these communications if they were already protected by the Constitution?)
The legal question that Obama (following in Bush's footsteps) is posing is this: does the Congress, through the FISA legislation, have the right to restrict the President's power, as Commander-in-Chief, to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance? It's really not as obvious a question as many people think.
Quoting the Constitution, far from ending the discussion, actually points out the inherent problem: how should an 18th-century document be applied in the 21st century? Supreme Court precedent (which, we know from the campaign-finance case, must never, ever be changed) provides much less Constitutional protection from electronic intercepts than most people realize.
Here come the feature bullet-point whiners, again
on
Apple iPad Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
The iPad complaints above give me a feeling of deja vu: we saw the exact same type of (unfavorable) bullet-point feature comparison here when the iPhone first came out. It was obvious to some that the iPhone was not worth the price, since it lost the bullet-point spec competition.
Then as now, the whiners are totally missing the point: Apple is not selling a bullet-point list, they are selling a user experience. Apple did a marvelous job with the iPhone UI, and the reviews lead me to expect that they have done a similarly good job with the iPad.
If you don't value the Apple user experience, then don't buy Apple (for you, it is not worth the money). Lots of people do value the Apple user experience, and will pay for it; the iPad promises to extend this experience to a new level.
I'm really sick of supercilious observers proclaiming that THEY know the one, true, reality and can therefore detect that the mainstream media are leading the masses by the nose. Those ineffably superior observers are, of course, immune to manipulation, and demonstrate their superiority by pointing out that fact. Give me a break.
The real beauty of free speech is that every point of view, distorted this way and that, to a greater or lesser degree, is available for people to compare and choose from. That is TOTALLY different from censorship, which restricts the spectrum of views available.
I suspect that the real problem these stuck-up observers have is that the masses disagree with their infallible judgement, and therefore the masses must have been manipulated and misled.
Slashdot Mirror
If you keep your iPad (or buy a new one), don't count on keeping your Netflix or Kindle apps. Apple is demanding that they sell their movies and books through Apple, and hand over 30% of the revenue. Apple is threatening to pull the apps if they don't get their way. It may end up that you will give up your Netflix streaming if you stay with Apple. Both Netflix and Amazon have annouced that they will release Android versions of their apps this year.
You also can't feel a promised oil famine.
A system like this will indeed have to achieve a phenomenal level of safety, at least in the USA, because of how liability for accidents is assigned. Even if it saved 10,000 lives for every death it caused, on trial for causing that one death the manufacturers and system operators would get precisely zero credit for the lives saved, and would be vilified for causing the one death.
We have already seen this problem with vaccines, and it required special legislation to enable vaccine manufacturers to stay in business. The chances of getting such legislation for road trains are vanishingly small.
The reason for pitiful internet performance in the US is lack of competition. Good infrastructure is expensive, and a rational corporation will not spend money to upgrade infrastructure unless it sees a need to do so. An effective monopoly has little incentive to upgrade.
One of the biggest barriers to broadband competition is local zoning and franchising restrictions. Once the local government has a juicy deal with one provider, it has little motivation to rock the boat and allow others in. The federal government has it within its power to fully pre-empt these local restrictions and allow broadband competition to flourish wherever it is economically feasible. So far, the political influence of local governments has precluded such action, and we are stuck with largely non-competitive and expensive markets for broadband.
If someone came up with a search engine that was significantly better than Google, no amount of pre-installed search lock-in could hold them back. Just like Google started way back when, the new search engine would start by attracting the digerati who actually do know how to type in a URL, and it would gradually seep into the consciousness of the computer-illiterate public. The tricky part is to come up with a new search engine that's better than Google, because lots of smart folks at Google are working at that very thing, all the time.
Both Microsoft and software patents are evil and powerful, but Microsoft's power is ebbing away while the corrosive effects of the patent system are still hurting software developers. I'm rooting for Microsoft 100% in this case since the patent system, much more than Microsoft, is capable of leeching the lifeblood from software development.
Fair Use is, in fact, a product of the US Constitution. There are two separate and somewhat conflicting constitutional provisions in play here:
Fair Use is a doctrine developed by judges in the 19th century to help resolve the conflict between these two provisions. It was later codified in the 20th century, but with the intent of preserving the existing judge-made law.
Rights enshrined in the Constitution do not enforce themselves. Some constitutional rights are so well-established that they seem to enforce themselves, but in marginal cases these rights must be asserted in court. In a noted recent case, a group called Citizens United was prohibited from speaking about a presidential candidate during the election, because of the source of some of its funding. Political speech is at the very core of the First Amendment, but the question was a close one, and could only be established by asserting it in court.
The fact that Fair Use must often be defended in court comes from the fact-intensive nature of the doctrine, making it difficult to decide a priori whether Fair Use applies or not. This uncertainty, combined with the American Rule for paying legal fees (each party pays his own lawyers), skews the playing field in favor of the big copyright holders. This is true even though Fair Use is, at bottom, a Constituional right.
While it would be nice to have a phone on which to load your personal Andriod build, the fact that you don't is not an indication that Android is not open.
Sorry, but "Quebecois" is the French spelling. "Quebecker" is the English one. There are still a few anglophones left in Quebec.
What you said was:
This is simply not true. The WWII partisan forces survived the entire war. They were not effective in attacking "significant groups of German soldiers" because they were guerilla forces: that's not what guerilla forces are good at. Such forces are best at sabotage, assassination, and espionage, and were successful in those endeavors.
There are now multiple lines of human cancer cells living and reproducing indefinitely. How do you know that they don't have souls too? They are alive. They have complete sets of human genes. They are just as much 'human life' as a blastocyst is.
All argument in favor of souls for the blastocysts instead of the cancer cells must turn on their potential to become fully-formed human beings. Why then are they not potential people instead of actual people?
The Terrafugia does save money on rental cars, but much more importantly, it makes it practical to use small airports where rental cars are difficult or impossible to obtain. On round trips with several days between the outbound and inbound legs, it is difficult or impossible to be sure that the weather will be aceptable for the return flight. With a roadable airplane, if the weather turns bad you just drive home instead of flying.
The problem Barton complained of was not that BP had to pay for damage it caused, but rather the extra-legal medium for compelling the payments. The USA is (or was) governed by the rule of law, and obligations such as BP's are judged and enforced by the courts. Obama has peformed an end run around the courts by pressuring BP to set up this $20b fund. That, not the underlying obligation of BP to pay, was the sustance of Barton's complaint.
In disputed elections, it if found time and again that voters have cast ambiguous ballots, with the mark or marks in the wrong place, or too many marks, or too few. Especially with the relatively complex ballots commonly used in the USA, electronic verification of the voter's choices is a good thing. There is no reason to allow a voter to cast a self-defeating ballot, (The voter should still be able to abstain from one or more races, but the system should verify that this is really what he or she wants to do.)
An electronic system that verifies the voter's choices and then prints them on paper in a format that's easily readable by both humans and computers should not be difficult to implement, and will bring benefits to the voters and to the election authorities.
If you pay for the official NHL internet feed, you get "out-of-market" games only. They won't sell you an internet feed of your local team for love or money. We know how the cable companies hate competition.
In the US, car dealers have huge political influence, so dealers have been able to purchase state laws that make it illegal to buy cars directly from the manufacturer. It might be that customers would prefer the current system of car sales, but we may never know. I, for one, wouldn't mind being able to arrange a test drive and then order a new car all on the internet, and have it delivered to my door, without having to deal with some slick salesman at the local dealership.
You're lucky. Now that the FIOS rollout has ended, if you don't have FIOS now you're not likely to have it for a very long time. For those of us in the FIOS dead zone, it's pretty much a choice between cable or satellite, and a lot of people can't get satellite due to line-of-sight issues.
I'm happy that you could cut the cable. Unfortunately, as a baseball fan that's not an option for me. Local TV broadcasts of major league baseball are largely a thing of the past. MLB.tv offers out-of-market coverage via internet, but local teams are blacked-out in order to preserve the local cable monopoly. To see local major-league baseball on TV, you pretty much have to pay a cable bill or a satellite bill, or content yourself with a handful of nationally-televised games on broadcast.
Since humility is not your strong suit, let me help you with this.
While the founding fathers were religious men, and largely Christian of one sort or another, they expressly rejected the idea of the United States being founded on the Christian religion, by rejecting any national Established Church. The founders were well aware that they could have established a national church, since most of the colonies had their own Established Churches at the time the Bill or Rights was ratified, or had only disestablished them recently.
SInce the founders expressly rejected establishment of a national church, and indeed eschewed reference to any specific religion in the Constitution (compare, for example, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut), the assertion that "the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..." makes perfect sense. It is no "misinterpretation" to take the treaty's words at face value, since they are fully supported by the text of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
It seems to me that the audience the telecoms are addressing are the European regulators. What the telecoms want is for government to set a price for the bandwidth Google is "using", and to force Google to continue "using" this bandwidth and to pay the government-set price. The key is to get a mandate both that google owes the telecoms (and not the other way around), and that Google is obliged both to continue providing its services and to pay for the privilege.
From the telecom's point of view, it's a neat trick if they can pull it off.
But this president was going to usher in a new age of transparency, and produce "change we can believe in". Obama has the power to order the US negotiators to push for more transparency, but he has done nothing (or worse than nothing) to open up the process. At least we were able to see the final health-care negotiations televised on C-SPAN, as Obama promised. Oh, wait...
Too many people drank the Obama kool-aid during the campaign and can't bring themselves to see that he's just another lying politician, from the left this time instead of the right.
Wiretapping is not mentioned in the Constitution, but one's "persons, houses, papers, and effects" have been interpreted in many but not all cases to include electronic communications. Some of the cases where the courts have not extended constitutional protection in this way are for foreign communications and for domestic communications with agents of foreign powers.
A few years after the Ford memo mentioned above, Congress passed the FISA statute, in an attempt to somewhat restrict these constitutionally-permitted warrantless wiretaps. However, it is not a settled question whether the Congress has the right, through legislation, to restrict the President's authority, as Commander-in-Chief, to conduct otherwise-constitutional foreign intelligence operations.
The bottom line is that the issue is not as clear as you might think.
The literal words of the Constitution do not cover electronic communications. It's only judicial interpretation over the years that has established the idea that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" implies electronic communication as well. However, this judicial interpretation has not included constitutional protection of many international communications or domestic communications with agents of foreign powers. (Think about it: why was the FISA statute needed to protect these communications if they were already protected by the Constitution?)
The legal question that Obama (following in Bush's footsteps) is posing is this: does the Congress, through the FISA legislation, have the right to restrict the President's power, as Commander-in-Chief, to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance? It's really not as obvious a question as many people think.
Quoting the Constitution, far from ending the discussion, actually points out the inherent problem: how should an 18th-century document be applied in the 21st century? Supreme Court precedent (which, we know from the campaign-finance case, must never, ever be changed) provides much less Constitutional protection from electronic intercepts than most people realize.
The iPad complaints above give me a feeling of deja vu: we saw the exact same type of (unfavorable) bullet-point feature comparison here when the iPhone first came out. It was obvious to some that the iPhone was not worth the price, since it lost the bullet-point spec competition.
Then as now, the whiners are totally missing the point: Apple is not selling a bullet-point list, they are selling a user experience. Apple did a marvelous job with the iPhone UI, and the reviews lead me to expect that they have done a similarly good job with the iPad. If you don't value the Apple user experience, then don't buy Apple (for you, it is not worth the money). Lots of people do value the Apple user experience, and will pay for it; the iPad promises to extend this experience to a new level.
I'm really sick of supercilious observers proclaiming that THEY know the one, true, reality and can therefore detect that the mainstream media are leading the masses by the nose. Those ineffably superior observers are, of course, immune to manipulation, and demonstrate their superiority by pointing out that fact. Give me a break.
The real beauty of free speech is that every point of view, distorted this way and that, to a greater or lesser degree, is available for people to compare and choose from. That is TOTALLY different from censorship, which restricts the spectrum of views available.
I suspect that the real problem these stuck-up observers have is that the masses disagree with their infallible judgement, and therefore the masses must have been manipulated and misled.