From where I'm sliding, we're sliding into a corporate oligarchy - assuming we're not already there. I think you vastly underestimate how much money affects the outcome of elections.
"You are in competition with everyone, and if you don't get in there and fight, well, you're not gonna get a very big piece of the pie."
The assumptions being made here are where I think you're losing the GGP. It's entirely possible to compete without 'fighting', or more importantly, as you insinuate, 'fight dirty'. And, frankly, having a 'very big piece' of the (mythical) pie is not necessarily the best goal to have in mind. Finally, you are assuming a discrete world with discrete resources - that there is a pie, and that pie is only so big and does not change.
Now, one could argue that the pie is actually shrinking, what with the economic and environmental disasters we're facing. But our ability to increase said pie is not gone. Further, you can act virtuously while you do this. It is not unethical to not tell anyone else about a job you're looking at getting (it would be unethical to hide it from them, though, or lie about it when asked) - but the comparison of doing a job (delivering a service in exchange for money) to sharing code is not there. Simply because code is 'open' does not mean any monkey can use it, or use it well.
In fact, open source very likely expands the pie faster - and while it may seem against the individual best interest to open source, it is very much in the common interest to do so. Code gets better, faster, when it's open. It's far more likely to get into the hands of people passionate about the task at hand, rather than just into the hands of people being paid to do the task. This is good, because ultimately you, as a human being, don't care about the value of the code (which, outside of a context, is equal to nothing). What you care about is the value you get from what the code does.
And, ultimately, what code does is remove redundant tasks that are inefficient to do manually by a human. This removal of redundancy means more things can be made faster, and humans are freed to do more sophisticated tasks - or nothing at all, if they so choose.
In the aggregate, this is a good thing. In the specific, the difficulty is having the end value pass through to the people doing the work. That is one of the sophisticated problems I wish we had more time and energy to address. But deciding to limit open source is to decide to limit the pie growth - and that's ultimately self-defeating, keeping you 'in your place'.
The fact is that the impression you're implying of the 'real world' is one we're habituated to. We expect it to not be all puppies and ponies. But the people who get ahead choose to rework some set of assumptions that free them from a system that is very, very good at keeping wealth and knowledge in the hands of the few upon the backs of the many. The ethical person should start by rejecting those premises and finding ways to accrue wealth, knowledge and anything else of value through means that do not screw the people around them.
Of course, if all you actually care about is the Benjamins, then all of that is meaningless. But I'd posit that such a mindset is actually terribly regressive - it's a primitive thought pattern barely worthy of your average mammal, nevermind humans. There has to be something more to it.
Why even make it an 'Internet Ready' TV? This technology is not poorly understood. Computers have been piping cable into their TV cards for years.
The monitor+computer biome is well understood (*cough*Apple*cough*); all you need is two different connectors. People are likely to have internet, and likely to have cable.
Now you just need to write software to parse between these things and provide an interface people already know. You can even arrange their downloaded media as "channels" that they can watch. Over time, that's all anyone would watch. You could have it remember what you watch and go ahead and download that stuff before you even ask for it. And you can market it as... *gasp* 'A TV'. Because it looks like a TV, works like a TV, and quacks like a TV. But it also has some other stuff.
Cable didn't take off as an industry because it was awesome, but because it was easy. You plug it in. The infrastructure was the hard part - but someone else handled that. There is nothing new here to teach people, just some internals that need reworking.
Times like this, I wish I was out of college and had venture capital.
The problem, of course, is that advertisers want to push their product, and they want to make sure you notice. They can't do that in a show without turning you off of the show... and thus them.
Sperm do not decide anything, never mind that they're going to volunteer for a race up the vaginal canal. That's like saying the Moon decides to orbit the Earth, or that electrons decide to seek positive charge.
Choice - if it exists at all - is very clearly a rare thing in the universe. You may wish to re-examine your argument.
You are entirely correct; Hulu is rolling over for these mysterious and un-named 'content providers' (so much for a transparent culture...). But Boxee is rolling over for Hulu. It's not that Boxee can't get Hulu's feed - it's that Boxee isn't going to, because presumably that would result in forcing Hulu to respond legally, or respond technologically with some arbitrary set of bloated interlocks.
I think, as I noted above, that the real unknown here is who is forcing this move. Of course, it's a bad move, but one does wonder as to the motivation - which is effectively cloaked from the masses. That, I think, is the cardinal sin. There could be good reasons to remove support, but we have no choice now but to assume the malicious reasons.
The gp was modded flamebait no doubt because he's attacking the idea because it's been strongly associated with the stereotypical 'liberal' mindset, not because it's a bad idea.
Your argument against said modding is a bit incoherent. Gates was not using an appeal to pity, nor was he threatening the audience. Rather, he invoked the audience's imagination, which would better describe what it's like to live under such a threat. Simultaneously, he drew attention to the fact that this a problem poor people have, because they're forced to live in disease-ridden areas. To say the rich and the poor are equally affected by disease is like saying that a man behind a bullet proof piece of glass and one who is not is equally affected by a bullet fired at them. You have to take away the context in which they exist for that to hold.
The ultimate point is that the efforts to reduce Malaria are not misguided - and to score cheap points off their similarity to environmentalism in this country is flamebaiting. It assumes the precondition that the 'liberal' mindset is not only wrong but the cause for any issue we've seen in the past - which is a ridiculous assertion.
And as long as we're racking up ridiculous assertions, let's try this one; that because something provides a short term gain one should use it if nothing better is available, regardless of the side effects. To make an exaggerated point - one could dose the malaria affected regions with radiation; spread around uranium or something else radioactive enough to kill the mosquitos - and everything else - dead. Even if you remove the humans beforehand, that land becomes unusable.
One should be mighty cautious when intoxicating an environment, even if it saves some from a present threat. The lives saved in the meantime aren't going to mean much if they're also cancer-ridden, or have other diseases. There is a real cost there. This is not an issue of 'needing to be ecologically correct'. It's an issue of understanding that humans are impacted by their environment, and that environment is hard to control. Willy-nilly short-term attempts to do so can and regularly do end in disaster.
In any event, the solution is pretty simple; we have a non-toxic medicine that will inoculate people. The issue is simply cost. So, to propose DDT as a cheap solution is basically saying that it's acceptable to kill people slowly rather than saving them. Yes, it may be better than killing them outright - but then you get no points for humanity, ethical behavior or moral righteousness.
They did use to use - and in some cases still do use - mercury as a preservative for immunizations. There is no direct evidence that it does anything, but it's not a myth.
But yeah, anyone who doesn't know anything about the ban on DDT shouldn't be using it as an excuse to claim that some liberal conspiracy is destroying the world through inanity. Any claim that disease affects the rich and poor equally is ridiculous.
7. Offer extremely expensive anti-malarial drugs for sale.
Yeah... because you should totally attribute the expense of drugs to 'those liberals'. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with so-called conservatives in this country and their desire to segment markets to drive up the price - the side effects be damned.
You lend people books and you can no longer use the book until they give it back. You don't make a copy of the book and give it to them. That's why it's a problem - it's copyright infringement.
You're assuming that being able to easily copy something is a bad thing. It's not! The Christian Church didn't like the printing press, because it meant that the masses suddenly didn't need priests to access God. Books were suddenly worth less, too - probably not good for the bookmaker business. But the thing is that, in the long run, having more access for more people of these things is good.
I'm not going to cry about a company who is unable to reap 100% profit from a game, because it can be pirated. They can choose to stop making the game, but I bet then other companies with a different viewpoint would fill that market. There are better ways to tackle the problem.
Someone brought up spawned copies... brilliant! Make it easier to get a copy of the game if your friend has it. Make it a communal activity. Make it so that groups of people have incentive to buy it - because it's just plain easier. Sure, you'll have cheapskates and malcontents copying it without ever paying into the system... but so what? Are you really losing anything?
Because the simple truth is that DRM does lose us something. It loses us time and resources for doing things that are meaningful, rather than arguing over who gets what. Rise above that, and move beyond DRM.
I don't think that you should claim fallacy in my statement given your really bad writing. You cannot both claim that incandescents "produce 100% less mercury than CFLs" and that you were including the power requirement's production in that statement. Because it is, flat out, not true. If that isn't what you meant to say, you should have thought a bit more before spouting off.
I also have to reject the idea that you're using 'playful namecalling' as a 'joke'. In fact, you're either consciously or unconsciously using a rhetorical device - in fact, a propaganda device. You're associating a modern movement of people interested in x with the secret police of a fallen fascism. By doing so you cast aspersion on that point of view, without actually providing any basis.
As a 'competing viewpoint' that is weak. You're relying on denigrating the side you're against in order to advance your view - which doesn't speak much for the strength of your point of view.
I'm very interested in competing viewpoints on that topic. What I'm not interested in is an echoing of long-heard conservative punditry that lacks any regard for human intelligence or civilized discourse. It may have been that, once upon a time, the most 'environmentalist' folks out there were anti-nuclear power. But you don't see those demonstrations anymore. You really don't hear about it too much. It's because nuclear power has come a very long way. It's simply not as dangerous. Not as dangerous, certainly, as coal. That dependency on coal is the heart of the desire to move to CFLs and LEDs and other energy-light appliances; in short nothing those alternatives provide even nearly rival the equivalent damage being done in our current system.
That said, there is a valid argument against CFLs based on mercury - but it's not production. It's where it's concentrated. It's not inconceivable someone would choose against them because they bring the mercury into direct contact with you. Personally, I think that is a narrow, self-serving point of view that only helps in the near term, but it has far more substantiation than "If only the Greenstapo weren't so unreasonable, we could have our incandescent bulbs in a paradise of nuclear power!" Because, guess what? That's patently false.
The thing is, most browsers display stuff differently because they're not adhering to a common standard. There is less reason for me to develop for IE if they're going to belligerently never fix a compatibility issue with their browser.
But, on the other hand, most browsers are moving to a common standard. Ultimately speaking, needing to cross-platform a webapp is going to be eliminated - or all but. Robustness is a useful quality, but spending time on something now that is going to not be an issue in the future is not a useful pursuit. In most cases, designing for these compatibility issues falls into that category.
In short; you easily could be relying on a common bug, but you just as easily might not be. There is no reason to second guess yourself for such a small return.
I think you're going to see an explosion of standalone applications tethered to a web-based datasource or back-end. iPhone and Android basically do this already - taking their cue from email programs since the dawn of the internet. Programs like Steam allow you to install local, fat clients through a thin client interface. Each of those pieces has a reason for being fat or thin, and you want to take advantage of that.
I think, in the end, the point is that you want to be confident your interface is usable where-ever, and that your backend can be swapped up without version issues, and that either way the program can do everything it needs to. The web is very good at the first two, it's just that the domain of problems it can manage has not yet expanded to the third. Is that anything but a matter of time?
Note that a lot of companies (*cough*AOL*cough*) do this already. It was all the rage in the very late 90s to create your company-specific browser; precisely because stand-alone apps were well known, and web apps were a disorientingly new domain.
Why is it worth their time? Most game companies build games for Windows - why not also OSX? They even port to consoles more often than they do OSX. Simply put; you put the most work into where there is most gain. You might get around to smaller markets later, but likely only if there is a convenient way to do so.
The fact that the different browsers render basic sites differently should be warning enough. Add to that different versions etc; You will never have a standardised audience to utilise these. It will always be lowest common denominator.
By the same logic, one shouldn't program at all. After all, different operating systems handle the same source code differently. Add into that different versions, etc; you'll never have a standard audience and therefore all programs everywhere will always be the lowest common denominator.
Srsly, browser rendering is a well specified standard. To claim it's a barrier to good software is silly.
Quite honestly, if the law cannot be made to serve against literally any citizen that breaks it, then we are all diminished in our freedoms. Even if he made decisions with the best of intentions, if he chose to break the law, he should be held accountable.
If the right thing to do was break the law - that is what appeal is for, so that we can examine the law and decide if it is just. But to avoid the judicial process entirely - regardless of it's length or apparent vindictiveness - is to remove a primary protection that each of us, as citizens, count up to sustain our freedoms.
It is neither petty nor irresponsible. It is quite the opposite; it is the only way we have to shed light on the truth, be that what it may. In what other manner are we to operate this democracy? Or are some truly more equal than others?
I think it's a highly erroneous policy stance to say that once someone is removed from office, we should let slide their misdeeds. If Bush committed felonies - or warcrimes - while in office, or anyone in the administration did, then they should like everyone else be judged in a court of law by a jury of their peers.
Note that for Clinton, we didn't move on. We dragged an ultimately silly sexual interaction out for years - and he still gets crap about it. We like to pretend, though, that Bush didn't authorize illegal wiretaps, didn't authorize torture, didn't authorize a war and cover it with false evidence. Frankly, I think people are too afraid to face the fact we, as a nation, aren't perfect. But we all need to get over that, and deal out justice where justice is due.
Well, an ip address only requires four bytes - say another one for a port number. That gives you ten bytes, or five characters to code additional data in. Yeah, that's not very much. You could work with it, but it'd be more than trivially difficult.
Still, that's not very much right now. I suppose I could accept the idea that the service would serve a purpose for a short period of time - but I do worry about lock-in if the technology took off and the resolution became better. As an open protocol this seems much more useful to me.
In fact, I think the real place to monetize this is in the applications provided. Take, for instance, parking meter situation. Microsoft serves as the quick middleman in the transaction; but your phone's program needs to know how to make the transaction, even once it's been connected to the service. That software is worth something to you as a consumer - perhaps even as a service itself.
You might note that I, in fact, suggested the pay-to-park scheme, and the subway ticket scheme. It's actually quite simple a concept; you scan the 'meter', and that tells your device to connect with the metering company, give it the meter data and your car data, which of course is connected to some account or bill. Perhaps more easily, your car could have a tag on it that the meter reads.
Practical digital subway tokens seem harder to implement.
Note, too, that in the GP post of mine, I noted after my first use of "Microsoft"; (or other service provider). Props to MS and any of the other half dozen companies who have been working on the implementation, but I can still question it's design. Simply put, there are several layers to this; one is the scanning of the image, being able to do it accurately and precisely under a wide variety of conditions. Another is the creation of the tag. Another is using tag data to reach a digital resource.
I'm simply trying to posit that maybe there is no service to be offered here. If the tag can contain a GUID, then software ought to be able to use that to find the resource in question. That software could, in theory, be written by anyone, and have any number of additional features. I see no theoretical reason it needs to talk to a server to achieve this. The server seems extraneous to me. I don't see what function it is providing, and if it is providing none, you don't need to keep anything 'up'. All you have to do is write (and sell) the software that lets you connect a 2D tag to a data resource.
Security wise, well, I could care less. But in theory, MS would know. Of course your ISP also has this data - but in that case it hasn't stated up front it is collecting your data to sell. Google sells it's data, and some people are unhappy about that. It feels wrong somehow, on a gut level. But I'm not sure, as you say, that that is important.
Anyway; I can see your frustration that people are being naysayers, but don't take it out on poor ol' me! I'm with you on the front that the company, regardless of who they are, that can bring this to market is doing something neat. I do, however, see this particular implementation as having an extraneous revenue stream - and by that I mean 'cost to the end user'. With a public protocol the businesses using tags wouldn't need to pay for the server to route traffic. (Assuming that is all it does.) They don't have to increase their prices to the end user. MS isn't doing a service to society in general here, it's generating cash - and it's not clear to me that it's generating it by providing a service to a legitimate need. It's creating a need by wiring the technology a particular way. That doesn't seem cool. *shrug*
Anyway, I think the use of this is pretty comprehensive. Professors can encourage kids to show up to class, because then they get their 'reading material tag', that they scan to see their books on their iPhone. Putting a tag on historical sites is a far less obtrusive way of making data about that site available. You could use a tag as a timecard for sites for which that infrastructure would be cumbersome; the supervisor or whatever just 'takes a photo' of your card, and the phone checks in with the accounting software. School teachers can make sure their kids are all together on their field trips by scanning their tags. Virtual graffiti can be left by having locational tags link to forums. You could use them in third world countries with limited infrastructure (limited bureaucracy tracking you) to identify people, or things that they should get. (Food, medicine, money, what have you.) But mostly I think it would make parking easier.;)
Anyway, good point; naysaying gets you nowhere. But feel free to take a breath.
On the other hand, if I go to Delta's website to see my flight information, only Delta really knows I did so - and may not know it's me specifically if I'm not required to log in. In this case, though, Microsoft (or other service provider) knows I 'went to Delta's website' - or whatever else the tag-shortcut did for me.
On the whole, I think that the ability to have real-world hyperlinks (because, face it, that's what they are) is really valuable. On the other hand, I don't think that it needs to be a monetized service. I can't think of a reason that a protocol couldn't be developed that scanning apps would implement; for that matter, given text recognition software, how hard is it to program a phone to read in a url and tell it's onboard browser to go to it? Or any of the other diverse possible applications?
Essentially; what is Microsoft's role in this? Is it a critical role (you *need* the centralized server for some reason), or are they creating a false market segment?
Slashdot Mirror
But it's also funny. Wasn't it Heinlein who posited that all humor is based in pain?
From where I'm sliding, we're sliding into a corporate oligarchy - assuming we're not already there. I think you vastly underestimate how much money affects the outcome of elections.
"You are in competition with everyone, and if you don't get in there and fight, well, you're not gonna get a very big piece of the pie."
The assumptions being made here are where I think you're losing the GGP. It's entirely possible to compete without 'fighting', or more importantly, as you insinuate, 'fight dirty'. And, frankly, having a 'very big piece' of the (mythical) pie is not necessarily the best goal to have in mind. Finally, you are assuming a discrete world with discrete resources - that there is a pie, and that pie is only so big and does not change.
Now, one could argue that the pie is actually shrinking, what with the economic and environmental disasters we're facing. But our ability to increase said pie is not gone. Further, you can act virtuously while you do this. It is not unethical to not tell anyone else about a job you're looking at getting (it would be unethical to hide it from them, though, or lie about it when asked) - but the comparison of doing a job (delivering a service in exchange for money) to sharing code is not there. Simply because code is 'open' does not mean any monkey can use it, or use it well.
In fact, open source very likely expands the pie faster - and while it may seem against the individual best interest to open source, it is very much in the common interest to do so. Code gets better, faster, when it's open. It's far more likely to get into the hands of people passionate about the task at hand, rather than just into the hands of people being paid to do the task. This is good, because ultimately you, as a human being, don't care about the value of the code (which, outside of a context, is equal to nothing). What you care about is the value you get from what the code does.
And, ultimately, what code does is remove redundant tasks that are inefficient to do manually by a human. This removal of redundancy means more things can be made faster, and humans are freed to do more sophisticated tasks - or nothing at all, if they so choose.
In the aggregate, this is a good thing. In the specific, the difficulty is having the end value pass through to the people doing the work. That is one of the sophisticated problems I wish we had more time and energy to address. But deciding to limit open source is to decide to limit the pie growth - and that's ultimately self-defeating, keeping you 'in your place'.
The fact is that the impression you're implying of the 'real world' is one we're habituated to. We expect it to not be all puppies and ponies. But the people who get ahead choose to rework some set of assumptions that free them from a system that is very, very good at keeping wealth and knowledge in the hands of the few upon the backs of the many. The ethical person should start by rejecting those premises and finding ways to accrue wealth, knowledge and anything else of value through means that do not screw the people around them.
Of course, if all you actually care about is the Benjamins, then all of that is meaningless. But I'd posit that such a mindset is actually terribly regressive - it's a primitive thought pattern barely worthy of your average mammal, nevermind humans. There has to be something more to it.
Why even make it an 'Internet Ready' TV? This technology is not poorly understood. Computers have been piping cable into their TV cards for years.
The monitor+computer biome is well understood (*cough*Apple*cough*); all you need is two different connectors. People are likely to have internet, and likely to have cable.
Now you just need to write software to parse between these things and provide an interface people already know. You can even arrange their downloaded media as "channels" that they can watch. Over time, that's all anyone would watch. You could have it remember what you watch and go ahead and download that stuff before you even ask for it. And you can market it as... *gasp* 'A TV'. Because it looks like a TV, works like a TV, and quacks like a TV. But it also has some other stuff.
Cable didn't take off as an industry because it was awesome, but because it was easy. You plug it in. The infrastructure was the hard part - but someone else handled that. There is nothing new here to teach people, just some internals that need reworking.
Times like this, I wish I was out of college and had venture capital.
Ha! You should be modded funny.
The problem, of course, is that advertisers want to push their product, and they want to make sure you notice. They can't do that in a show without turning you off of the show... and thus them.
Sperm do not decide anything, never mind that they're going to volunteer for a race up the vaginal canal. That's like saying the Moon decides to orbit the Earth, or that electrons decide to seek positive charge.
Choice - if it exists at all - is very clearly a rare thing in the universe. You may wish to re-examine your argument.
You are entirely correct; Hulu is rolling over for these mysterious and un-named 'content providers' (so much for a transparent culture...). But Boxee is rolling over for Hulu. It's not that Boxee can't get Hulu's feed - it's that Boxee isn't going to, because presumably that would result in forcing Hulu to respond legally, or respond technologically with some arbitrary set of bloated interlocks.
I think, as I noted above, that the real unknown here is who is forcing this move. Of course, it's a bad move, but one does wonder as to the motivation - which is effectively cloaked from the masses. That, I think, is the cardinal sin. There could be good reasons to remove support, but we have no choice now but to assume the malicious reasons.
The gp was modded flamebait no doubt because he's attacking the idea because it's been strongly associated with the stereotypical 'liberal' mindset, not because it's a bad idea.
Your argument against said modding is a bit incoherent. Gates was not using an appeal to pity, nor was he threatening the audience. Rather, he invoked the audience's imagination, which would better describe what it's like to live under such a threat. Simultaneously, he drew attention to the fact that this a problem poor people have, because they're forced to live in disease-ridden areas. To say the rich and the poor are equally affected by disease is like saying that a man behind a bullet proof piece of glass and one who is not is equally affected by a bullet fired at them. You have to take away the context in which they exist for that to hold.
The ultimate point is that the efforts to reduce Malaria are not misguided - and to score cheap points off their similarity to environmentalism in this country is flamebaiting. It assumes the precondition that the 'liberal' mindset is not only wrong but the cause for any issue we've seen in the past - which is a ridiculous assertion.
And as long as we're racking up ridiculous assertions, let's try this one; that because something provides a short term gain one should use it if nothing better is available, regardless of the side effects. To make an exaggerated point - one could dose the malaria affected regions with radiation; spread around uranium or something else radioactive enough to kill the mosquitos - and everything else - dead. Even if you remove the humans beforehand, that land becomes unusable.
One should be mighty cautious when intoxicating an environment, even if it saves some from a present threat. The lives saved in the meantime aren't going to mean much if they're also cancer-ridden, or have other diseases. There is a real cost there. This is not an issue of 'needing to be ecologically correct'. It's an issue of understanding that humans are impacted by their environment, and that environment is hard to control. Willy-nilly short-term attempts to do so can and regularly do end in disaster.
In any event, the solution is pretty simple; we have a non-toxic medicine that will inoculate people. The issue is simply cost. So, to propose DDT as a cheap solution is basically saying that it's acceptable to kill people slowly rather than saving them. Yes, it may be better than killing them outright - but then you get no points for humanity, ethical behavior or moral righteousness.
They did use to use - and in some cases still do use - mercury as a preservative for immunizations. There is no direct evidence that it does anything, but it's not a myth.
But yeah, anyone who doesn't know anything about the ban on DDT shouldn't be using it as an excuse to claim that some liberal conspiracy is destroying the world through inanity. Any claim that disease affects the rich and poor equally is ridiculous.
7. Offer extremely expensive anti-malarial drugs for sale.
Yeah... because you should totally attribute the expense of drugs to 'those liberals'. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with so-called conservatives in this country and their desire to segment markets to drive up the price - the side effects be damned.
You lend people books and you can no longer use the book until they give it back. You don't make a copy of the book and give it to them. That's why it's a problem - it's copyright infringement.
You're assuming that being able to easily copy something is a bad thing. It's not! The Christian Church didn't like the printing press, because it meant that the masses suddenly didn't need priests to access God. Books were suddenly worth less, too - probably not good for the bookmaker business. But the thing is that, in the long run, having more access for more people of these things is good.
I'm not going to cry about a company who is unable to reap 100% profit from a game, because it can be pirated. They can choose to stop making the game, but I bet then other companies with a different viewpoint would fill that market. There are better ways to tackle the problem.
Someone brought up spawned copies... brilliant! Make it easier to get a copy of the game if your friend has it. Make it a communal activity. Make it so that groups of people have incentive to buy it - because it's just plain easier. Sure, you'll have cheapskates and malcontents copying it without ever paying into the system... but so what? Are you really losing anything?
Because the simple truth is that DRM does lose us something. It loses us time and resources for doing things that are meaningful, rather than arguing over who gets what. Rise above that, and move beyond DRM.
I don't think that you should claim fallacy in my statement given your really bad writing. You cannot both claim that incandescents "produce 100% less mercury than CFLs" and that you were including the power requirement's production in that statement. Because it is, flat out, not true. If that isn't what you meant to say, you should have thought a bit more before spouting off.
I also have to reject the idea that you're using 'playful namecalling' as a 'joke'. In fact, you're either consciously or unconsciously using a rhetorical device - in fact, a propaganda device. You're associating a modern movement of people interested in x with the secret police of a fallen fascism. By doing so you cast aspersion on that point of view, without actually providing any basis.
As a 'competing viewpoint' that is weak. You're relying on denigrating the side you're against in order to advance your view - which doesn't speak much for the strength of your point of view.
I'm very interested in competing viewpoints on that topic. What I'm not interested in is an echoing of long-heard conservative punditry that lacks any regard for human intelligence or civilized discourse. It may have been that, once upon a time, the most 'environmentalist' folks out there were anti-nuclear power. But you don't see those demonstrations anymore. You really don't hear about it too much. It's because nuclear power has come a very long way. It's simply not as dangerous. Not as dangerous, certainly, as coal. That dependency on coal is the heart of the desire to move to CFLs and LEDs and other energy-light appliances; in short nothing those alternatives provide even nearly rival the equivalent damage being done in our current system.
That said, there is a valid argument against CFLs based on mercury - but it's not production. It's where it's concentrated. It's not inconceivable someone would choose against them because they bring the mercury into direct contact with you. Personally, I think that is a narrow, self-serving point of view that only helps in the near term, but it has far more substantiation than "If only the Greenstapo weren't so unreasonable, we could have our incandescent bulbs in a paradise of nuclear power!" Because, guess what? That's patently false.
The thing is, most browsers display stuff differently because they're not adhering to a common standard. There is less reason for me to develop for IE if they're going to belligerently never fix a compatibility issue with their browser.
But, on the other hand, most browsers are moving to a common standard. Ultimately speaking, needing to cross-platform a webapp is going to be eliminated - or all but. Robustness is a useful quality, but spending time on something now that is going to not be an issue in the future is not a useful pursuit. In most cases, designing for these compatibility issues falls into that category.
In short; you easily could be relying on a common bug, but you just as easily might not be. There is no reason to second guess yourself for such a small return.
I think you're going to see an explosion of standalone applications tethered to a web-based datasource or back-end. iPhone and Android basically do this already - taking their cue from email programs since the dawn of the internet. Programs like Steam allow you to install local, fat clients through a thin client interface. Each of those pieces has a reason for being fat or thin, and you want to take advantage of that.
I think, in the end, the point is that you want to be confident your interface is usable where-ever, and that your backend can be swapped up without version issues, and that either way the program can do everything it needs to. The web is very good at the first two, it's just that the domain of problems it can manage has not yet expanded to the third. Is that anything but a matter of time?
Note that a lot of companies (*cough*AOL*cough*) do this already. It was all the rage in the very late 90s to create your company-specific browser; precisely because stand-alone apps were well known, and web apps were a disorientingly new domain.
Fair enough. I misread. Take it, then, as a reinforcement of what you were saying. ;)
Why is it worth their time? Most game companies build games for Windows - why not also OSX? They even port to consoles more often than they do OSX. Simply put; you put the most work into where there is most gain. You might get around to smaller markets later, but likely only if there is a convenient way to do so.
The fact that the different browsers render basic sites differently should be warning enough. Add to that different versions etc; You will never have a standardised audience to utilise these. It will always be lowest common denominator.
By the same logic, one shouldn't program at all. After all, different operating systems handle the same source code differently. Add into that different versions, etc; you'll never have a standard audience and therefore all programs everywhere will always be the lowest common denominator.
Srsly, browser rendering is a well specified standard. To claim it's a barrier to good software is silly.
You're flat out wrong, unless the incandescent bulbs you buy were created in a factory that didn't use electricity, and you never plugged them in.
But, given your generalized name-calling, I suspect you don't bother to really understand how anything works.
Quite honestly, if the law cannot be made to serve against literally any citizen that breaks it, then we are all diminished in our freedoms. Even if he made decisions with the best of intentions, if he chose to break the law, he should be held accountable.
If the right thing to do was break the law - that is what appeal is for, so that we can examine the law and decide if it is just. But to avoid the judicial process entirely - regardless of it's length or apparent vindictiveness - is to remove a primary protection that each of us, as citizens, count up to sustain our freedoms.
It is neither petty nor irresponsible. It is quite the opposite; it is the only way we have to shed light on the truth, be that what it may. In what other manner are we to operate this democracy? Or are some truly more equal than others?
I think it's a highly erroneous policy stance to say that once someone is removed from office, we should let slide their misdeeds. If Bush committed felonies - or warcrimes - while in office, or anyone in the administration did, then they should like everyone else be judged in a court of law by a jury of their peers.
Note that for Clinton, we didn't move on. We dragged an ultimately silly sexual interaction out for years - and he still gets crap about it. We like to pretend, though, that Bush didn't authorize illegal wiretaps, didn't authorize torture, didn't authorize a war and cover it with false evidence. Frankly, I think people are too afraid to face the fact we, as a nation, aren't perfect. But we all need to get over that, and deal out justice where justice is due.
Honestly, me too. ;)
Well, an ip address only requires four bytes - say another one for a port number. That gives you ten bytes, or five characters to code additional data in. Yeah, that's not very much. You could work with it, but it'd be more than trivially difficult.
Still, that's not very much right now. I suppose I could accept the idea that the service would serve a purpose for a short period of time - but I do worry about lock-in if the technology took off and the resolution became better. As an open protocol this seems much more useful to me.
In fact, I think the real place to monetize this is in the applications provided. Take, for instance, parking meter situation. Microsoft serves as the quick middleman in the transaction; but your phone's program needs to know how to make the transaction, even once it's been connected to the service. That software is worth something to you as a consumer - perhaps even as a service itself.
You might note that I, in fact, suggested the pay-to-park scheme, and the subway ticket scheme. It's actually quite simple a concept; you scan the 'meter', and that tells your device to connect with the metering company, give it the meter data and your car data, which of course is connected to some account or bill. Perhaps more easily, your car could have a tag on it that the meter reads.
Practical digital subway tokens seem harder to implement.
Note, too, that in the GP post of mine, I noted after my first use of "Microsoft"; (or other service provider). Props to MS and any of the other half dozen companies who have been working on the implementation, but I can still question it's design. Simply put, there are several layers to this; one is the scanning of the image, being able to do it accurately and precisely under a wide variety of conditions. Another is the creation of the tag. Another is using tag data to reach a digital resource.
I'm simply trying to posit that maybe there is no service to be offered here. If the tag can contain a GUID, then software ought to be able to use that to find the resource in question. That software could, in theory, be written by anyone, and have any number of additional features. I see no theoretical reason it needs to talk to a server to achieve this. The server seems extraneous to me. I don't see what function it is providing, and if it is providing none, you don't need to keep anything 'up'. All you have to do is write (and sell) the software that lets you connect a 2D tag to a data resource.
Security wise, well, I could care less. But in theory, MS would know. Of course your ISP also has this data - but in that case it hasn't stated up front it is collecting your data to sell. Google sells it's data, and some people are unhappy about that. It feels wrong somehow, on a gut level. But I'm not sure, as you say, that that is important.
Anyway; I can see your frustration that people are being naysayers, but don't take it out on poor ol' me! I'm with you on the front that the company, regardless of who they are, that can bring this to market is doing something neat. I do, however, see this particular implementation as having an extraneous revenue stream - and by that I mean 'cost to the end user'. With a public protocol the businesses using tags wouldn't need to pay for the server to route traffic. (Assuming that is all it does.) They don't have to increase their prices to the end user. MS isn't doing a service to society in general here, it's generating cash - and it's not clear to me that it's generating it by providing a service to a legitimate need. It's creating a need by wiring the technology a particular way. That doesn't seem cool. *shrug*
Anyway, I think the use of this is pretty comprehensive. Professors can encourage kids to show up to class, because then they get their 'reading material tag', that they scan to see their books on their iPhone. Putting a tag on historical sites is a far less obtrusive way of making data about that site available. You could use a tag as a timecard for sites for which that infrastructure would be cumbersome; the supervisor or whatever just 'takes a photo' of your card, and the phone checks in with the accounting software. School teachers can make sure their kids are all together on their field trips by scanning their tags. Virtual graffiti can be left by having locational tags link to forums. You could use them in third world countries with limited infrastructure (limited bureaucracy tracking you) to identify people, or things that they should get. (Food, medicine, money, what have you.) But mostly I think it would make parking easier. ;)
Anyway, good point; naysaying gets you nowhere. But feel free to take a breath.
On the other hand, if I go to Delta's website to see my flight information, only Delta really knows I did so - and may not know it's me specifically if I'm not required to log in. In this case, though, Microsoft (or other service provider) knows I 'went to Delta's website' - or whatever else the tag-shortcut did for me.
On the whole, I think that the ability to have real-world hyperlinks (because, face it, that's what they are) is really valuable. On the other hand, I don't think that it needs to be a monetized service. I can't think of a reason that a protocol couldn't be developed that scanning apps would implement; for that matter, given text recognition software, how hard is it to program a phone to read in a url and tell it's onboard browser to go to it? Or any of the other diverse possible applications?
Essentially; what is Microsoft's role in this? Is it a critical role (you *need* the centralized server for some reason), or are they creating a false market segment?