The government's purpose is not to provide you with cheap utilities.
Nope, that's exactly a role of government, but strictly for those things that can be truely classified as utilties.
Either the government owns the utility (postal service, sewage systems, etc.) or they regulate the businesses, often monopolies or limited-entry fields, who do provide it (power service, phone service). Running water, electrical service, telephone service, heat, and low-level TV and radio service are all things that our society considers so important that a person is not living in a safe-enough environment if they are being denied access to them. That is to say, these are the true utilties... things you absolutely need for your health, safety, or to have any decent chance of being able to contribute to the economy.
At this point... home Internet access hasn't become quite to that level because public library Internet access can provide the basic access that's needed in order to get to monster.com and hunt for a job. However, if that ever dries up, then Internet access may just start to stray into the utility category. Then again, everybody's got a phone line, and the price of the equipment needed to connect to a phone line to see basic-level Internet service keep on falling, so I don't think there's any need for intervention quite yet.
And, as the Pharma companies are always quick to point out, they need to have some hope of profitablity coming from somewhere in order to justify the research that leads to the creation of any new medicines. If there is strict price controls on patented medication, or very little time that the drug can be sold at an patent-based markup before generic competitors drive the price down, then there's no hope a profit from pharma research, and it'll grind to a halt.
Really, the problem is that places such as Canada and most of the EU have installed price controls and weak patent laws that leave the USA as the only place left where the pharma-research industry can try to make a profit. The rest of the world is copying our research, and not contributing to the costs of that research.
Once the profit-seaking funding for medical research dries up, we're going to see a lot of close-to-cure-but-not-quite-there-yet science projects get stuck in the mud.
I don't know about that. You think a small private company is going to be able to compete with the big boys? Sorry, but I'd rather have a gov't. backed telco at low rates and comparable service than deal with Comcast.
Therefore, you'd rather see the tax rates of your community go up to in part pay for your Internet service, especially because that distributes the cost onto people who don't care about that service?:)
all the soccer mom landowners who want all other development stopped as soon as they move into their subdivision
Think about that situation for a second. The soccer mom wants the new subdivision created because it creates a nice new house for their family to move into, and lowers the price of housing in the area through the nature of increased housing supply. However, they want no further development because such development then devalues their house...:)
No, actually it's NOT a free market decision. It prevents local citizens from using THEIR institutions to band together and fight monopolistic utilities.
Local citizens can band together all they want... but creating an entity that competes with a freestanding business is not a legit use of any local government's power to tax.
That's the key thing here. Anybody but a government with taxing authority can start a competiting telco...
In the way the USA economy is set up, there's only one place for a government-backed company to exist. That's where there's no way any business could provide that service if it had to compete, yet that service is vital to our way of life.
For example, take the US Postal Service. A daily mail pickup and drop-off at every address in the USA (including the most rural) would simply be impossible if there was not one and only one company providing that service. This is a perfect case of a service the rest of the government depends on, that likely would not exist if the free market was left to fend for itself. FedEx and UPS can compete in the high-price overnight market with the USPS, but nobody else has the ability to get a physical document from any point in the USA to any other point in the USA for 37 cents, or less than that even if you have a large volume of mail and pre-sort it properly.
In the case of Amtrak, the government is keeping the national railroad network alive for the sake of transportation redundancy. This came into play after the 9/11 attacks when all air traffic in the USA was grounded... the trains were able to keep running and some people and things were able to reroute themselves to get where they were going.
This is also why the government keeps up the Interstate highways. In theory, in the state of war on the US mainland, the Army could easily control any stretch of Interstate highway so that vital convoys could have a fast and trafic-free mostly-direct path from one metro area to another.
So long as there's still a profit to be made in the ISP business, then the government doesn't belong in it, just to regulate it so things don't get out of hand. If things ever do get totally out of hand (and we're nowher near that yet), then the government should step in to make sure there's affordable Internet access for the sake of keeping the network alive.
Companies are always free to develop their own embedded OS; some do. Back then the hardware wasn't available. So quit the microsoft bashing.
You seem to have forgoten what Wintel is...
OS writers are very much in a co-dependant relationship with the chip makers... the direction that the OS writers take their software and the direction the chip makers take their chips have to be in sync because one will not work without the other.
Thus, research into chip design was up until recently funneled towards keeping up with the Moore's Law pace of faster and faster clock speeds. Research into creating a chip that could run on low power just wasn't done because there wasn't much of a market for it.
In order to justify writing an OS for a handheld, you need to know what chip you're going to be running on. In order to build a chip geared for handheld use, you need to be sure somebody's actually going to make handhelds.... it's a classic catch 22, and Microsoft appears to have blocked the Go-Motorola partnership that would have made those advances a decade or so before they actually happened.
NBC is the major user of that automatic scheduling capability. However, in order to see it, you must be looking at a promo for an upcoming show that hasn't already aired yet. Most TiVo users are more than a couple days behind in their TV viewing and therefore are too late to have the automatic scheduler work, the show being promoted is already in the past.
Actually, TiVo has figured out that it's much easier for them to throw out data over the broadcast airwaves. DirecTV-tied units get almost all of their data via download of a datastream on the satellites, and only use the modem call to send upbound reports. TiVo presently sends out software updates via the modem because they perfer to slowly roll out new versions to randomly selected customers before pushing them to the general population.
Which, in reality, is exactly how TV ads were at the start. Originally, nearly every show had a name-in-the-title sponsor who was worked into the show in other ways. That's starting to make a comeback, such as on the WB's summer music show called "Pepsi Smash" which had Pepsi logos all over the set. Other sponsors would also be scene during ads in the show, but one could not even say the title of the show without mentioning Pepsi.
DirecTiVo's already have a video on demand feature for Starz movie channel subscribers... basically it automatically records all first-run movies on Starz and places them in a special section of the interface.
It's much easier for TiVo to broadcast content than to stream it over the Internet... just like how they push the Showcases out over a late-night infomerical on the Discovery Channel.
There's already a trend where advertisers create a commercial that starts as a 30-second TV spot, and then ends with a "To be continued at..." sign that directs viewers to their web site for the remaining minutes. The "Ballroom Blitz" car ad is one such example.
What TiVo's basically offering is a way for the sponsor to have the longform ad sitting on the TiVo and one thumb-click away so the viewer can instantly see the rest on demand...
TiVo actually has research to prove that people will actually rewatch a Pepsi comercial if Britney Spears is performing a dance routine while singing the soda company's jingle.
So it's not fair to say that nobody watches comercials with a TiVo... it's just that the ad sponsors have to come up with comercials people will want to watch when given the ability to "gong" them off the stage with a fast forward button.
Is anyone else reminded of the blipverts from the Max Headroom series?" No, because this is the inverse of a blipvert. A blipvert was a split-second commerical inserted into Network XXIII programs, which had the unfortunate side effect of causing overweight viewers to explode.
This feature actually requires user input (a confirming click of the green Thumbs Up key during the conventional 30-second ad) in order to jump to a 3-minute presentation that has been stored on the TiVo harddrive. The user can bail out of the 3-minute presentation at any time and return to their "live" stream whenever they want. TiVo will do the favor of pausing the program at exactly the point they left it, where the user can fast-forward to catch up as much as they want.
This is not a new TiVo feature, it's an underused one at this point. There are a few car company ads that are presently use it.
The way it works is that the sponsors purchase a TiVo Showcase package, which is an advertising section that has always been part of TiVo. The Showcases can be filled with video content that is spliced out of the "Teleworld Infomercial"... a quasi-weekly program that TiVo purchases during the early morning hours on the Discovery Channel that all TiVos are programmed to return.
The sponsors then purchase a typical campaign's worth standard 30-second TV spots, and they encode in the VBI (the same place where Closed Captioning hides) a signals that all TiVos understand. This signal tells the TiVo that whenever this spot is encountered, to display a "Press Thumbs Up For More Information" icon while it is playing. If the user gives the confirming thumbs up signal on their remote, they're transported directly to the Showcase section for that sponsor. Whenever the user chooses to leave the Showcase, they'll be returned to exactly where they were in whatever program they were viewing.
You might be surprised to know that TiVo is recording this Teleworld Infomercial program, because it's never directly displayed in the user interface. You also might think that TiVo is kidnapping some of your diskspace... but in fact they're saving the ad content to the "reserved section" of TiVo's funky Linux-based OS. You never had access to that disk volume, and they already subtracted this space from the advertised hour-wise capacity of a unit. If you upgrade your TiVo's HD size, all of the additional space created goes to user recordings, the reserved space stays the same size.
Gotta give TiVo credit, they're finding a revenue model that actually issues a challenge to advertisers... come up with some ad content that makes people want to watch it.
You seem to be confused, you're sending mail that is prompting users to click on the "This is Spam!" button even though your readers tell you they want to hear from you.
It might work better if you provided useful content "above the fold" of every message you send, then follow it with "Today's content was sponsored by...". If you're sending a pure ad in e-mail, it smells like Spam and users are going to turn it in...
Recently, ICANN announced it would add some additional TLDs to their root. However, they neglected to mention that they will deliberately duplicate existing TLDs and cause collisions in the name space. It is important to understand what that means.
Of course, that's YouCANN's side of the story. But the thing is, YouCANN's domains have never been recognized by the "root nameservers" like all ICANN-approved domain names are.
The problem here is that the ICANN root nameservers derive their authority from, uh, being the ICANN root nameservers. Several other pretenders to the title have created their own nameservers, that you can configure your PC to check as well. Most offer a simple configuration program to do that for users.
So, what happens when two sets of root nameservers both claim to be the authoritative servers over the same namespace... I think that's a lawsuit.
ICANN is taking applications for registratars to oversee newly created TLDs again. However, a "parallel universe" of "unofficial registrars" already exists consisting of registration services that use various tricks to get their TLDs to be recognized by some subset of the browsing universe. The question is, if ICANN certifies a TLD that already exists "unofficially" to a different registrar, what will happen to the already existing namespace?...
It seems to be two overlapping namespaces headed for a train wreck... leading to questions over how much authority ICANN really has, and what will become of the pretenders to ICANN's throne. We're likely going to end up with multiple domain sellers claiming the root title over the same namespace, and that'll make a mockery of the whole DNS system.
Simply put, if ICANN adopts a TLD that duplicates a TLD that "unofficially" is being registered by another registration system, then we'll have a fracturing in the standards just like in the way that it's almost impossible to tell who the heavyweight boxing champion is. Whenever you have multiple self-appointed authorities, you're bound to have conflicts.
At the technical level, most users see the domain-name world through the eyes of the DNS servers at their ISP, so in order for a new TLD to be valid for that user the ISP must honor it. However, this can be overridden by using a secondary DNS server or modifying the hosts file on the users side, so we may end up seeing a wave of malware trying to monkey with a users DNS settings so that their sponsor's regisitry becomes the first one consulted. Some of the other registrars have already resorted to distributing such software in order for their domains to be valid for anybody.
At the legal level, an "I got here first" principle will be claimed in trademark lawsuits by the business interest behind these rogue TLD operations. That's going to be a bit of an iffy question, if trademark law really applies to an entire TLD, especially when ICANN is the generally accepted certifying body for TLDs.
So in the end, businesses who don't want a domain name to "fall into enemy hands" are going to have to register the same domain twice, because when this dispute is finally settled, one of the two registrations will be null and void, but it'll be hard to tell which.
Seems to me like the domain name system may get pushed over the edge on this one. It was bad enough when US businesses started to buy up top-level domains from countries that were lucky enough to have two-letter TLDs that had cute meanings to US audiences. This would even further create a "wild west" nature for domain names. ICANN's authority is downright questionable at times, and now they're about to have conflicts with pretenders to the throne.
But AOL's ScreenName service doesn't have my credit card number. Neither does Yahoo - they don't even have a valid email address for the account I use, because I still use the one I made for testing Java applets when I worked at Apple.
Yahoo Wallet will gladly store your credit card number if you want it to. No, wait, you have to use Yahoo Wallet to buy anything through Yahoo.
And if you have AOL's online service, they've got a credit card number or a bank account number there too...
There are many words in the English language that have homophones. Google being a text-based search interface is smart enough to not mix up "four" and "for", "too" and "two", or "plane" and "plain". There's no way for voice recognition technology to tell the difference between those words in a search query, there simply isn't enough context...
The key thing about PowerPoint presentations is that it's supposed to be a visual backdrop that you can control without disrupting your presentation. What a powerpoint presenter really wants is a simple wireless device to advance to the next slide, and maybe a back button in case of a mis-click. Any additional buttons beyond two are annoying.
Come on, this technology has existed for the TV weatherman for years. Why hasn't anybody gotten it right for PowerPoint users yet?
Just how many Google logons do I need?
on
Passport to Nowhere
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Every registration-requiring service of Google nicely collects no more infomation than it needs to, but there also seems to be very little support for cross-linking registrations from one service to another. As a result, they have distinct logon screens for...
- AdWords - AdSense - Google API - SiteSearch / Websearch - Blogger
They just keep adding new services, but there's no sign of any unity coming...
Slashdot Mirror
The government's purpose is not to provide you with cheap utilities.
Nope, that's exactly a role of government, but strictly for those things that can be truely classified as utilties.
Either the government owns the utility (postal service, sewage systems, etc.) or they regulate the businesses, often monopolies or limited-entry fields, who do provide it (power service, phone service). Running water, electrical service, telephone service, heat, and low-level TV and radio service are all things that our society considers so important that a person is not living in a safe-enough environment if they are being denied access to them. That is to say, these are the true utilties... things you absolutely need for your health, safety, or to have any decent chance of being able to contribute to the economy.
At this point... home Internet access hasn't become quite to that level because public library Internet access can provide the basic access that's needed in order to get to monster.com and hunt for a job. However, if that ever dries up, then Internet access may just start to stray into the utility category. Then again, everybody's got a phone line, and the price of the equipment needed to connect to a phone line to see basic-level Internet service keep on falling, so I don't think there's any need for intervention quite yet.
And, as the Pharma companies are always quick to point out, they need to have some hope of profitablity coming from somewhere in order to justify the research that leads to the creation of any new medicines. If there is strict price controls on patented medication, or very little time that the drug can be sold at an patent-based markup before generic competitors drive the price down, then there's no hope a profit from pharma research, and it'll grind to a halt.
Really, the problem is that places such as Canada and most of the EU have installed price controls and weak patent laws that leave the USA as the only place left where the pharma-research industry can try to make a profit. The rest of the world is copying our research, and not contributing to the costs of that research.
Once the profit-seaking funding for medical research dries up, we're going to see a lot of close-to-cure-but-not-quite-there-yet science projects get stuck in the mud.
I don't know about that. You think a small private company is going to be able to compete with the big boys? Sorry, but I'd rather have a gov't. backed telco at low rates and comparable service than deal with Comcast.
:)
Therefore, you'd rather see the tax rates of your community go up to in part pay for your Internet service, especially because that distributes the cost onto people who don't care about that service?
all the soccer mom landowners who want all other development stopped as soon as they move into their subdivision
:)
Think about that situation for a second. The soccer mom wants the new subdivision created because it creates a nice new house for their family to move into, and lowers the price of housing in the area through the nature of increased housing supply. However, they want no further development because such development then devalues their house...
No, actually it's NOT a free market decision. It prevents local citizens from using THEIR institutions to band together and fight monopolistic utilities.
Local citizens can band together all they want... but creating an entity that competes with a freestanding business is not a legit use of any local government's power to tax.
That's the key thing here. Anybody but a government with taxing authority can start a competiting telco...
In the way the USA economy is set up, there's only one place for a government-backed company to exist. That's where there's no way any business could provide that service if it had to compete, yet that service is vital to our way of life.
For example, take the US Postal Service. A daily mail pickup and drop-off at every address in the USA (including the most rural) would simply be impossible if there was not one and only one company providing that service. This is a perfect case of a service the rest of the government depends on, that likely would not exist if the free market was left to fend for itself. FedEx and UPS can compete in the high-price overnight market with the USPS, but nobody else has the ability to get a physical document from any point in the USA to any other point in the USA for 37 cents, or less than that even if you have a large volume of mail and pre-sort it properly.
In the case of Amtrak, the government is keeping the national railroad network alive for the sake of transportation redundancy. This came into play after the 9/11 attacks when all air traffic in the USA was grounded... the trains were able to keep running and some people and things were able to reroute themselves to get where they were going.
This is also why the government keeps up the Interstate highways. In theory, in the state of war on the US mainland, the Army could easily control any stretch of Interstate highway so that vital convoys could have a fast and trafic-free mostly-direct path from one metro area to another.
So long as there's still a profit to be made in the ISP business, then the government doesn't belong in it, just to regulate it so things don't get out of hand. If things ever do get totally out of hand (and we're nowher near that yet), then the government should step in to make sure there's affordable Internet access for the sake of keeping the network alive.
Companies are always free to develop their own embedded OS; some do. Back then the hardware wasn't available. So quit the microsoft bashing.
You seem to have forgoten what Wintel is...
OS writers are very much in a co-dependant relationship with the chip makers... the direction that the OS writers take their software and the direction the chip makers take their chips have to be in sync because one will not work without the other.
Thus, research into chip design was up until recently funneled towards keeping up with the Moore's Law pace of faster and faster clock speeds. Research into creating a chip that could run on low power just wasn't done because there wasn't much of a market for it.
In order to justify writing an OS for a handheld, you need to know what chip you're going to be running on. In order to build a chip geared for handheld use, you need to be sure somebody's actually going to make handhelds.... it's a classic catch 22, and Microsoft appears to have blocked the Go-Motorola partnership that would have made those advances a decade or so before they actually happened.
NBC is the major user of that automatic scheduling capability. However, in order to see it, you must be looking at a promo for an upcoming show that hasn't already aired yet. Most TiVo users are more than a couple days behind in their TV viewing and therefore are too late to have the automatic scheduler work, the show being promoted is already in the past.
Actually, TiVo has figured out that it's much easier for them to throw out data over the broadcast airwaves. DirecTV-tied units get almost all of their data via download of a datastream on the satellites, and only use the modem call to send upbound reports. TiVo presently sends out software updates via the modem because they perfer to slowly roll out new versions to randomly selected customers before pushing them to the general population.
Which, in reality, is exactly how TV ads were at the start. Originally, nearly every show had a name-in-the-title sponsor who was worked into the show in other ways. That's starting to make a comeback, such as on the WB's summer music show called "Pepsi Smash" which had Pepsi logos all over the set. Other sponsors would also be scene during ads in the show, but one could not even say the title of the show without mentioning Pepsi.
DirecTiVo's already have a video on demand feature for Starz movie channel subscribers... basically it automatically records all first-run movies on Starz and places them in a special section of the interface.
It's much easier for TiVo to broadcast content than to stream it over the Internet... just like how they push the Showcases out over a late-night infomerical on the Discovery Channel.
There's already a trend where advertisers create a commercial that starts as a 30-second TV spot, and then ends with a "To be continued at..." sign that directs viewers to their web site for the remaining minutes. The "Ballroom Blitz" car ad is one such example.
What TiVo's basically offering is a way for the sponsor to have the longform ad sitting on the TiVo and one thumb-click away so the viewer can instantly see the rest on demand...
Last Fall, TiVo had an exclusive movie-trailer like preview of the upcoming season of "24" before the show's season started.
TiVo actually has research to prove that people will actually rewatch a Pepsi comercial if Britney Spears is performing a dance routine while singing the soda company's jingle.
So it's not fair to say that nobody watches comercials with a TiVo... it's just that the ad sponsors have to come up with comercials people will want to watch when given the ability to "gong" them off the stage with a fast forward button.
Is anyone else reminded of the blipverts from the Max Headroom series?"
No, because this is the inverse of a blipvert. A blipvert was a split-second commerical inserted into Network XXIII programs, which had the unfortunate side effect of causing overweight viewers to explode.
This feature actually requires user input (a confirming click of the green Thumbs Up key during the conventional 30-second ad) in order to jump to a 3-minute presentation that has been stored on the TiVo harddrive. The user can bail out of the 3-minute presentation at any time and return to their "live" stream whenever they want. TiVo will do the favor of pausing the program at exactly the point they left it, where the user can fast-forward to catch up as much as they want.
This is not a new TiVo feature, it's an underused one at this point. There are a few car company ads that are presently use it.
The way it works is that the sponsors purchase a TiVo Showcase package, which is an advertising section that has always been part of TiVo. The Showcases can be filled with video content that is spliced out of the "Teleworld Infomercial"... a quasi-weekly program that TiVo purchases during the early morning hours on the Discovery Channel that all TiVos are programmed to return.
The sponsors then purchase a typical campaign's worth standard 30-second TV spots, and they encode in the VBI (the same place where Closed Captioning hides) a signals that all TiVos understand. This signal tells the TiVo that whenever this spot is encountered, to display a "Press Thumbs Up For More Information" icon while it is playing. If the user gives the confirming thumbs up signal on their remote, they're transported directly to the Showcase section for that sponsor. Whenever the user chooses to leave the Showcase, they'll be returned to exactly where they were in whatever program they were viewing.
You might be surprised to know that TiVo is recording this Teleworld Infomercial program, because it's never directly displayed in the user interface. You also might think that TiVo is kidnapping some of your diskspace... but in fact they're saving the ad content to the "reserved section" of TiVo's funky Linux-based OS. You never had access to that disk volume, and they already subtracted this space from the advertised hour-wise capacity of a unit. If you upgrade your TiVo's HD size, all of the additional space created goes to user recordings, the reserved space stays the same size.
Gotta give TiVo credit, they're finding a revenue model that actually issues a challenge to advertisers... come up with some ad content that makes people want to watch it.
You seem to be confused, you're sending mail that is prompting users to click on the "This is Spam!" button even though your readers tell you they want to hear from you.
It might work better if you provided useful content "above the fold" of every message you send, then follow it with "Today's content was sponsored by...". If you're sending a pure ad in e-mail, it smells like Spam and users are going to turn it in...
Recently, ICANN announced it would add some additional TLDs to their root. However, they neglected to mention that they will deliberately duplicate existing TLDs and cause collisions in the name space. It is important to understand what that means.
Of course, that's YouCANN's side of the story. But the thing is, YouCANN's domains have never been recognized by the "root nameservers" like all ICANN-approved domain names are.
The problem here is that the ICANN root nameservers derive their authority from, uh, being the ICANN root nameservers. Several other pretenders to the title have created their own nameservers, that you can configure your PC to check as well. Most offer a simple configuration program to do that for users.
So, what happens when two sets of root nameservers both claim to be the authoritative servers over the same namespace... I think that's a lawsuit.
This is such a big issue, it make take several meetings. Anybody care to make a list of the tourist traps ICANN hasn't visited yet?
What the hell is this even talking about?
ICANN is taking applications for registratars to oversee newly created TLDs again. However, a "parallel universe" of "unofficial registrars" already exists consisting of registration services that use various tricks to get their TLDs to be recognized by some subset of the browsing universe. The question is, if ICANN certifies a TLD that already exists "unofficially" to a different registrar, what will happen to the already existing namespace?...
It seems to be two overlapping namespaces headed for a train wreck... leading to questions over how much authority ICANN really has, and what will become of the pretenders to ICANN's throne. We're likely going to end up with multiple domain sellers claiming the root title over the same namespace, and that'll make a mockery of the whole DNS system.
Simply put, if ICANN adopts a TLD that duplicates a TLD that "unofficially" is being registered by another registration system, then we'll have a fracturing in the standards just like in the way that it's almost impossible to tell who the heavyweight boxing champion is. Whenever you have multiple self-appointed authorities, you're bound to have conflicts.
At the technical level, most users see the domain-name world through the eyes of the DNS servers at their ISP, so in order for a new TLD to be valid for that user the ISP must honor it. However, this can be overridden by using a secondary DNS server or modifying the hosts file on the users side, so we may end up seeing a wave of malware trying to monkey with a users DNS settings so that their sponsor's regisitry becomes the first one consulted. Some of the other registrars have already resorted to distributing such software in order for their domains to be valid for anybody.
At the legal level, an "I got here first" principle will be claimed in trademark lawsuits by the business interest behind these rogue TLD operations. That's going to be a bit of an iffy question, if trademark law really applies to an entire TLD, especially when ICANN is the generally accepted certifying body for TLDs.
So in the end, businesses who don't want a domain name to "fall into enemy hands" are going to have to register the same domain twice, because when this dispute is finally settled, one of the two registrations will be null and void, but it'll be hard to tell which.
Seems to me like the domain name system may get pushed over the edge on this one. It was bad enough when US businesses started to buy up top-level domains from countries that were lucky enough to have two-letter TLDs that had cute meanings to US audiences. This would even further create a "wild west" nature for domain names. ICANN's authority is downright questionable at times, and now they're about to have conflicts with pretenders to the throne.
But AOL's ScreenName service doesn't have my credit card number. Neither does Yahoo - they don't even have a valid email address for the account I use, because I still use the one I made for testing Java applets when I worked at Apple.
Yahoo Wallet will gladly store your credit card number if you want it to. No, wait, you have to use Yahoo Wallet to buy anything through Yahoo.
And if you have AOL's online service, they've got a credit card number or a bank account number there too...
There are many words in the English language that have homophones. Google being a text-based search interface is smart enough to not mix up "four" and "for", "too" and "two", or "plane" and "plain". There's no way for voice recognition technology to tell the difference between those words in a search query, there simply isn't enough context...
The key thing about PowerPoint presentations is that it's supposed to be a visual backdrop that you can control without disrupting your presentation. What a powerpoint presenter really wants is a simple wireless device to advance to the next slide, and maybe a back button in case of a mis-click. Any additional buttons beyond two are annoying.
Come on, this technology has existed for the TV weatherman for years. Why hasn't anybody gotten it right for PowerPoint users yet?
Every registration-requiring service of Google nicely collects no more infomation than it needs to, but there also seems to be very little support for cross-linking registrations from one service to another. As a result, they have distinct logon screens for...
- AdWords
- AdSense
- Google API
- SiteSearch / Websearch
- Blogger
They just keep adding new services, but there's no sign of any unity coming...