The existence of the NSA was an official secret for quite a while after it became common knowledge. This is where the backronym No Such Agency comes from.
How long does it take to read a 500 page bill? Probably at least a day. Even if you don't force attendance, the senate can't do anything until the person reading the bill finishes reading it.
The problem is, Nokia did have a decent platform. The Symbian kernel is a great design for mobile devices. Unfortunately, pretty much everything above the kernel sucked (or, to be a bit more fair, was well designed for a set of requirements that no longer applied). Their solution? Replace the kernel with Linux. It's easy to see why the managers of the people who made such a decision thought that outsourcing their software development to Microsoft - or to anyone except Nokia - was a good idea.
A sabre fencing style would have worked just as well, and this was supposed to Sulu's weapon of choice (although we only see him waving a foil around in TOS). There's nothing wrong with him knowing multiple styles, but I'd expect him to prefer the one that he competed in at a professional level.
I believe that it only works for optical drives. My point was that users typically only care about filesystems on media that are handed to them. Windows users are likely to come across FAT on SD cards, ISO9660 on CDs, UDF on DVDs, and exFAT on SDXC (I said SDHC, but on further checking this was wrong) cards. Support for other filesystems is completely irrelevant to most users. Conversely, support for these is very important to users and it's quite frustrating that exFAT was accepted as part of the SDXC spec because this means that only operating systems that pay a Microsoft tax can implement it.
The problem doesn't seem to appear anywhere except the USA, so maybe look at other parliamentary systems? I think the big difference is that every amendment to a bill elsewhere has to be debated and voted on separately. This means that it's not much easier to get an amendment passed than it is to get a separate bill passed, and if an amendment is not related to the bill it will typically just be rejected immediately - someone will call for a vote as soon as it's proposed. I thought this was meant to happen in the US too, but it seems that you can just tack things onto a bill.
The real problem is that there is no requirement for laws to be read out before they are enacted. This means that a typical bill is 500+ pages and no one voting on it has actually read it all of the way through.
Most users really only care about a dozen (or fewer) applications. You don't need to have a massive pile of applications to be successful, you just have to have the ones users actually want. And that, it turns out, is much harder than just having lots...
How does this translate for most people? I've not used Windows for some years, but this is what I remember:
No SSH support;
PuTTY seems to work fine. It's not bundled, but it is free.
no support for filesystems other than NTFS and FAT;
Except exFAT, UDF and ISO9660. You know, the filesystems that people are actually likely to find on removable media. I love ZFS as much as the next FreeBSD user and cheap snapshots do make a huge difference, but most of the time people only care about filesystems when they come across a disk or flash card with that filesystem. Here, the most likely ones are the ones I listed and of these Windows and OS X are the only ones that support exFAT, which is the standard format for SDHC cards (even though it's patented and not publicly documented), although there is a vaguely-working FUSE exFAT implementation.
no low level disk tools (dd);
How often do you actually need to use dd as a typical user?
poor NFS support;
But great CIFS support, and I've seen a lot more CIFS deployments than NFS.
doesn't come with a decent text editor
Gvim works fine on Windows, and there's a port of EMACS too - both are free. Most users, however, are more likely to care about MS Word, which does run on Windows.
I don't know what the revenue breakdown is between consumer and pro markets, but HP's printer division also produces really high-end devices. The sorts of printers that print huge banners and posters - they'll take paper a couple of metres wide and of any length. These are really expensive, but you buy the ink in huge bottles for about the same price as a tiny cartridge for their consumer printers.
Why? What would you rather they did with the money? When someone puts money in the bank it is just removed from the economy until they withdraw it? I'm sure that'll work well...
It's the Lost style of drama, also found in Heroes and a few other series: make it up as you go along. Contrast this with Babylon 5, where the executive producer knew the entire 5-years story arc in advance. There were some things that needed to be tweaked (actors left and were not-so-subtly replaced by very similar characters, they thought they would be cancelled after 4 years, so they threw a lot of the year-five arc into year four and then had quite a weak fifth year), but the episode writers were told 'you have to fit this event in somehow' and they did. This would often be something quite simple, like one character has to say something to another, but when you watch them all together you realise that it's foreshadowing for something that happened 2-3 years later. They didn't need to retcon things - the foreshadowing was all in place and the scene had been set. If you watch BSG and B5 you can clearly see the difference.
A supernova a few dozen light years away isn't going to break your planet up, but it will cook it nicely with cosmic radiation. Yeah, it would probably be an extinction level event no matter how tough your planet's magnetic field is
Except that this is Star Trek, where they have deflector shields that allow a star ship to survive in a star's corona. The radiation from a supernova some light years away would be much weaker. Given a few years to prepare (which they'd have - the shock wave isn't moving at warp speed), any of the major empires should have been able to deploy planetary-scale radiation shields. In fact, in Star Trek II (set over 100 years earlier), they mentioned that Earth had planetary shields already. Given that the Romulans are a lot more warlike than the Federation, it would be pretty shocking if they didn't have them. Tuning these to block excess radiation wouldn't be a major feat...
A few other things that were groundbreaking in Star Trek:
A (black!) female officer as a member of the bridge crew.
A Russian officer, at the height of the cold war (okay, a lot of the writers used him as comic relief, but even so...)
An intelligent asian who was an expert in a European sword fighting style (asian actors at the time were mostly comic relief, eastern martial artists - as Sulu was in the 2009 film, or other stereotypes in US TV)
It wasn't just portraying technical developments in the future, it was portraying social changes. In the 2009 films, Sulu fought with a katana in a Japanese style, Kirk was a frat boy, Spock was a geek, and, aside from the space ships, it could easily have been set in the USA today.
It's the difference between a book with a good author, and a book with a good author and a good editor. There were some things that weren't bad, but could have been tightened up. A couple of examples:
Sulu's sword fighting style. In the original, he was a fencer. In the new one, he fights in a Japanese style because, you know, he's asian and that's how asians fight. It was just lazy stereotyping. Fixing it just required tweaking the fight choreography a bit.
Then there was the whole thing about where Spock was waiting. Somewhere where Vulcan was visible in the sky? That basically means a sister planet or a moon. There are some vague references to Vulcan having a sister planet (but no moon), so making this explicit would have been easy. But if it was a sister planet to Vulcan, why was it so hard to get supplies? A shuttle could easily have popped up from Vulcan regularly. Again, easy to fix: make it a science outpost measuring some gravitational effects so no ship could approach the planet without affecting the readings, and make young Spock send Kirk there knowing that he wouldn't be able to get off the planet until the next supply run. Put this in the dialog.
Someone reading the script could easily have made these changes early on, but they didn't. That's why Star Trek was so frustrating: it was a good film, but it could easily have been a great film.
Someone getting paid millions of dollars should damn well look ideal
I disagree. Someone getting paid millions of dollars should convincingly portray their character. I find the appearance of Hollywood actors to be one of the things that most often destroys my suspension of disbelief in US-produced TV shows these days. When the ugly geeky characters look as if they've spent three hours a day with a personal trainer for the past few years and two hours with a makeup artist then it detracts a lot from the reality of the situation. This is even true in science fiction and fantasy things: somehow it's easier to accept aliens in the setting than that all of the humans look like fashion models.
Contrast this with, say, a BBC production, where the actors look like humans and can (mostly) actually act.
There is a difference between selling your art and selling the brand to go on someone else's tangentially related creation. Michelangelo may have hated the Medici, but he didn't let them direct his style. He even snuck some quite subtle jibes directed at them into the paintings that they commissioned. It's not like he took a big pile of money for someone to publish a book of pornographic etchings by someone else with the title 'Michelangelo's David'...
I quite enjoyed Transformers 2. The trick is to watch it just after the Robot Chicken sketch, so in your head you have a voiceover shouting 'Michael Bay: Explosions!' throughout the whole thing. That said, unlike the first and third ones in the series, I honestly couldn't tell you what happened in it. Except baysplosions!
I'm not boycotting music buying, but I am boycotting RIAA-affiliated labels. I still buy a reasonable amount of music, but I always check the publisher first and make sure that they're not a member of the RIAA, or owned by a company that is. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a large overlap between people who like music enough to spend money on it and people who are aware of the RIAA's actions and avoid them...
Very good point. Of course, the bank won't just be sitting on the money, they'll be investing it. Some of it in mortgages, but a significant fraction in stocks and shares. This means that option 2 means pulling some fraction of $40K out of investment in another industry, which makes it harder for other companies to grow and reduces the number of people who can afford to spend $40K on music.
CDs were probably partially to blame too. With CDs, you can visually inspect the surface and if it's not too scratched then you know that it will probably sound just as good as when it was new. In contrast vinyl gets slightly worse every time it's played (a lot worse every time it's played on a player that doesn't have the arm balanced correctly) and so buying records second hand is a bit more of a lottery. Around here, there are a lot of second-hand shops that sell CDs for under a tenth the price of a new one. They very often have recent releases as well as classics (and, of course, trash that no one wants to buy), so there is now an alternative to buying music new that simply wasn't there before.
Slashdot Mirror
The existence of the NSA was an official secret for quite a while after it became common knowledge. This is where the backronym No Such Agency comes from.
'When Goebbels says something clever, pretend you said it' - Adolf Hitler.
How long does it take to read a 500 page bill? Probably at least a day. Even if you don't force attendance, the senate can't do anything until the person reading the bill finishes reading it.
The problem is, Nokia did have a decent platform. The Symbian kernel is a great design for mobile devices. Unfortunately, pretty much everything above the kernel sucked (or, to be a bit more fair, was well designed for a set of requirements that no longer applied). Their solution? Replace the kernel with Linux. It's easy to see why the managers of the people who made such a decision thought that outsourcing their software development to Microsoft - or to anyone except Nokia - was a good idea.
There is another episode where some dialog mentions that Sulu is off competing in a fencing tournament.
A sabre fencing style would have worked just as well, and this was supposed to Sulu's weapon of choice (although we only see him waving a foil around in TOS). There's nothing wrong with him knowing multiple styles, but I'd expect him to prefer the one that he competed in at a professional level.
I believe that it only works for optical drives. My point was that users typically only care about filesystems on media that are handed to them. Windows users are likely to come across FAT on SD cards, ISO9660 on CDs, UDF on DVDs, and exFAT on SDXC (I said SDHC, but on further checking this was wrong) cards. Support for other filesystems is completely irrelevant to most users. Conversely, support for these is very important to users and it's quite frustrating that exFAT was accepted as part of the SDXC spec because this means that only operating systems that pay a Microsoft tax can implement it.
The problem doesn't seem to appear anywhere except the USA, so maybe look at other parliamentary systems? I think the big difference is that every amendment to a bill elsewhere has to be debated and voted on separately. This means that it's not much easier to get an amendment passed than it is to get a separate bill passed, and if an amendment is not related to the bill it will typically just be rejected immediately - someone will call for a vote as soon as it's proposed. I thought this was meant to happen in the US too, but it seems that you can just tack things onto a bill.
The real problem is that there is no requirement for laws to be read out before they are enacted. This means that a typical bill is 500+ pages and no one voting on it has actually read it all of the way through.
have a massive pile of good applications
Most users really only care about a dozen (or fewer) applications. You don't need to have a massive pile of applications to be successful, you just have to have the ones users actually want. And that, it turns out, is much harder than just having lots...
No SSH support;
PuTTY seems to work fine. It's not bundled, but it is free.
no support for filesystems other than NTFS and FAT;
Except exFAT, UDF and ISO9660. You know, the filesystems that people are actually likely to find on removable media. I love ZFS as much as the next FreeBSD user and cheap snapshots do make a huge difference, but most of the time people only care about filesystems when they come across a disk or flash card with that filesystem. Here, the most likely ones are the ones I listed and of these Windows and OS X are the only ones that support exFAT, which is the standard format for SDHC cards (even though it's patented and not publicly documented), although there is a vaguely-working FUSE exFAT implementation.
no low level disk tools (dd);
How often do you actually need to use dd as a typical user?
poor NFS support;
But great CIFS support, and I've seen a lot more CIFS deployments than NFS.
doesn't come with a decent text editor
Gvim works fine on Windows, and there's a port of EMACS too - both are free. Most users, however, are more likely to care about MS Word, which does run on Windows.
HP still makes some of the best printers in the world. The difference is that they now also make a load of cheap consumer crap.
I don't know what the revenue breakdown is between consumer and pro markets, but HP's printer division also produces really high-end devices. The sorts of printers that print huge banners and posters - they'll take paper a couple of metres wide and of any length. These are really expensive, but you buy the ink in huge bottles for about the same price as a tiny cartridge for their consumer printers.
Why? What would you rather they did with the money? When someone puts money in the bank it is just removed from the economy until they withdraw it? I'm sure that'll work well...
Oh, I don't know, it's still pretty funny
It's the Lost style of drama, also found in Heroes and a few other series: make it up as you go along. Contrast this with Babylon 5, where the executive producer knew the entire 5-years story arc in advance. There were some things that needed to be tweaked (actors left and were not-so-subtly replaced by very similar characters, they thought they would be cancelled after 4 years, so they threw a lot of the year-five arc into year four and then had quite a weak fifth year), but the episode writers were told 'you have to fit this event in somehow' and they did. This would often be something quite simple, like one character has to say something to another, but when you watch them all together you realise that it's foreshadowing for something that happened 2-3 years later. They didn't need to retcon things - the foreshadowing was all in place and the scene had been set. If you watch BSG and B5 you can clearly see the difference.
A supernova a few dozen light years away isn't going to break your planet up, but it will cook it nicely with cosmic radiation. Yeah, it would probably be an extinction level event no matter how tough your planet's magnetic field is
Except that this is Star Trek, where they have deflector shields that allow a star ship to survive in a star's corona. The radiation from a supernova some light years away would be much weaker. Given a few years to prepare (which they'd have - the shock wave isn't moving at warp speed), any of the major empires should have been able to deploy planetary-scale radiation shields. In fact, in Star Trek II (set over 100 years earlier), they mentioned that Earth had planetary shields already. Given that the Romulans are a lot more warlike than the Federation, it would be pretty shocking if they didn't have them. Tuning these to block excess radiation wouldn't be a major feat...
A few other things that were groundbreaking in Star Trek:
It wasn't just portraying technical developments in the future, it was portraying social changes. In the 2009 films, Sulu fought with a katana in a Japanese style, Kirk was a frat boy, Spock was a geek, and, aside from the space ships, it could easily have been set in the USA today.
It's the difference between a book with a good author, and a book with a good author and a good editor. There were some things that weren't bad, but could have been tightened up. A couple of examples:
Sulu's sword fighting style. In the original, he was a fencer. In the new one, he fights in a Japanese style because, you know, he's asian and that's how asians fight. It was just lazy stereotyping. Fixing it just required tweaking the fight choreography a bit.
Then there was the whole thing about where Spock was waiting. Somewhere where Vulcan was visible in the sky? That basically means a sister planet or a moon. There are some vague references to Vulcan having a sister planet (but no moon), so making this explicit would have been easy. But if it was a sister planet to Vulcan, why was it so hard to get supplies? A shuttle could easily have popped up from Vulcan regularly. Again, easy to fix: make it a science outpost measuring some gravitational effects so no ship could approach the planet without affecting the readings, and make young Spock send Kirk there knowing that he wouldn't be able to get off the planet until the next supply run. Put this in the dialog.
Someone reading the script could easily have made these changes early on, but they didn't. That's why Star Trek was so frustrating: it was a good film, but it could easily have been a great film.
Someone getting paid millions of dollars should damn well look ideal
I disagree. Someone getting paid millions of dollars should convincingly portray their character. I find the appearance of Hollywood actors to be one of the things that most often destroys my suspension of disbelief in US-produced TV shows these days. When the ugly geeky characters look as if they've spent three hours a day with a personal trainer for the past few years and two hours with a makeup artist then it detracts a lot from the reality of the situation. This is even true in science fiction and fantasy things: somehow it's easier to accept aliens in the setting than that all of the humans look like fashion models.
Contrast this with, say, a BBC production, where the actors look like humans and can (mostly) actually act.
There is a difference between selling your art and selling the brand to go on someone else's tangentially related creation. Michelangelo may have hated the Medici, but he didn't let them direct his style. He even snuck some quite subtle jibes directed at them into the paintings that they commissioned. It's not like he took a big pile of money for someone to publish a book of pornographic etchings by someone else with the title 'Michelangelo's David'...
Transformers 2 is a great example of this
I quite enjoyed Transformers 2. The trick is to watch it just after the Robot Chicken sketch, so in your head you have a voiceover shouting 'Michael Bay: Explosions!' throughout the whole thing. That said, unlike the first and third ones in the series, I honestly couldn't tell you what happened in it. Except baysplosions!
Do you also come out richer every time you buy something using Paypal?
Well, yes, that's the point of trade. I exchange something (in this case money) for something that I perceive to have higher value.
I'm not boycotting music buying, but I am boycotting RIAA-affiliated labels. I still buy a reasonable amount of music, but I always check the publisher first and make sure that they're not a member of the RIAA, or owned by a company that is. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a large overlap between people who like music enough to spend money on it and people who are aware of the RIAA's actions and avoid them...
Very good point. Of course, the bank won't just be sitting on the money, they'll be investing it. Some of it in mortgages, but a significant fraction in stocks and shares. This means that option 2 means pulling some fraction of $40K out of investment in another industry, which makes it harder for other companies to grow and reduces the number of people who can afford to spend $40K on music.
CDs were probably partially to blame too. With CDs, you can visually inspect the surface and if it's not too scratched then you know that it will probably sound just as good as when it was new. In contrast vinyl gets slightly worse every time it's played (a lot worse every time it's played on a player that doesn't have the arm balanced correctly) and so buying records second hand is a bit more of a lottery. Around here, there are a lot of second-hand shops that sell CDs for under a tenth the price of a new one. They very often have recent releases as well as classics (and, of course, trash that no one wants to buy), so there is now an alternative to buying music new that simply wasn't there before.