Microsoft (aka his company) was convicted of operating as an illegal monopoly. They broke the law, knowingly and willingly, and they continue to do so.
Jobs is touting the ever-so-famous, "Oh woe is us" record label line. If the music industry is so volatile and costs so much, then why are record labels pulling in billions of dollars each year? Reality seems to disagree. The record labels make more than enough profit to cover all their costs, so they can afford lower CD prices. That's the bottom line. This "1 in 10" crap doesn't change that.
EDIT: Apparently, these glasses measure things like frequency in voice and other details. Even so, I'm still skeptical, not to mention the constitutional implications of the use of these glasses at airports. This is like sitting every person down at a polygraph before letting them on the plane; it reeks of civil rights violations.
Polygraph tests, and probably these glasses, too, make far too many assumptions about certain physiological responses which occur when someone is not being truthful. Firstly, they assume that a raise in heart rate or pulse can only mean that the person is lying, which is simply untrue. Secondly, unlike polygraphs, there's no way for these glasses to perform a control on the person being examined (meaning that you measure what a person's "normal" physiological patterns are like). And even those controls performed are dubious, at best, because there are simply too many variables to consider. Even in basic psychology classes, they go into the problems with polygraphs in detail, and it's not hard to deconstruct the test's assumptions, even for first-year university students.
Suppose you went up to a girl and asked her when the last time she gave a blow job was, and she answers you (hypothetically, she'd probably slap you in reality). You'd probably register a raise in blood pressure and heart rate. Are you to conclude that she lied to you? No, that's simply absurd. You asked her a personal question, out of the blue. Of course she'd be surprised. Furthermore, are you going to act normally and cooly when someone with glasses that can supposedly tell whether you're lying or not is asking you questions? Probably not. If you're an innocent man being polygraphed to see if you've committed a relatively serious crime, you're not exactly going to be acting normally, either.
Polygraph results are inadmissible in court for a good reason. I have a very hard time buying their "96% accurate" figure.
Maybe this will let Berman and Braga know that they're complete fucking failures who shouldn't have been allowed to touch Star Trek in the first place. I'd rather see the series die than continue on as it has been ever since Voyager.
It's bad enough that I'm forced to look at video I don't want to see, but now I have to look at full-screen video encoded at less than 3 kB/s? Ahem, I'd rather not look at that blocky, pixilated mess.
...
any IP addresses related to any of the Valve internal or external networks... Valve passwords and/or usernames... any and all items... related to Valve Software, Half-Life, Half-Life 2
They were looking for IP addresses? What does that mean? I can find any IP address I want from any machine connected to the internet.
I can just imagine some clueless FBI agent rifling through the poor guy's Rolodex and demanding that he tell them where his IP addresses are. "Sir, where do you keep your IP addresses sir?! This isn't a joke, son! You think this is funny?! Keep it up punk! You can laugh at the judge when we tell him that you wouldn't tell us where your IP addresses were!"
If it wasn't for OS X, I'd be a Windows or Linux user. OS 9 was becoming increasingly bloated, unstable and shitty overall. The only reason I tolerated it was because I was used to it. So I bought a QuickSilver G4, and it came with OS X v10.0.0. I was a little resistant to using it, at first. I had waded into OS X with the Public Beta, and I was thoroughly confused by it. But, I decided that it was the future, and that I'd best adopt it and learn to use it as soon as possible.
Haven't looked back since. Now, with Panther, OS X is easily the best OS on the market. Sure, it has its faults (the Finder, the Dock, both uber pieces of shit), but I remedy them with the innovative and awesome products that the Mac shareware community creates (Path Finder, DragThing, et cetera). Using Windows is like a chore. The OS is just ugly, not just from an aesthetic standpoint, but everything seems disproportioned and poorly laid-out. My computing experience has dramatically improved with OS X, and with Expose on 10.3, I'm wondering what the Hell I ever did before to manage my windows. And we get new releases every 14 months or so that offer huge improvements in usability and OS behavior. Panther is to Jaguar was Windows 98 was to 95. It took Microsoft 3 years; it took Apple about 1. The OS X team is truly busting their asses.
Are you even familiar with the reasons machines were invented in the first place? A big one is because humans are imprecise. There's a reason we use printers instead of just hand-writing everything.
Actually the power plants in cells are WAY more efficient than mechanical engines.
BTW, not all organic materials are weak and flimsy. Creatures can secrete armour and do all kinds of wonderful things. The idea that these things could be engineered isn't bizarre.
Biological materials are chemically reactive and structurally weak compared to inert pieces of metal. We started out with "bio armor," remember? It was called wood and leather. We then moved to steel because it was better. The cells making up biological materials must be permeable by definition in order to function properly. I challenge you to find a purely biological material that has the specific heat capacity of ordinary steel.
There's also the question of computing to consider. Our current computers operate on smaller scales than biological computers ever could. If you ever make a transistor out of living cells, let me know.
You mean Kevin "All My Stories Must Involve Superweapons Because I'm Not Original In Any Sense At All" J. Anderson? Give me a break. If you think Episodes I and II are bad, Jedi Academy as a movie would be even worse than those two.
There are a couple good books in NJO, but overall, it's crap. I was really hoping that Star Wars would resist the whole "organic technology" fad in sci-fi, whereby all organic technology is inherently superior, despite the fact that living cells must be more permeable than a simple metal plate and that biological processes are inefficient and imprecise compared to finely-tuned mechanical ones. I guess it was a fool's hope, though. Most sci-fi authors are just fools when it comes to science.
All SCO has to do is say to the judge "Look, these Linux hippies have already stolen our IP - If we allowed them to see anything elss, they'd try to steal that too!"
And any competent judge would tell them to get lost. You can't assume the conclusion (the Linux hippies stole our code) as part of your argument.
AAC is open; you just have to pay licensing fees for it. In other words, third parties can make AAC encoders which yield different results (it looks like Apple's AAC encoder is the best at the moment), but they have to pay royalties. The same is not true of WMA.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft (aka his company) was convicted of operating as an illegal monopoly. They broke the law, knowingly and willingly, and they continue to do so.
Jobs is touting the ever-so-famous, "Oh woe is us" record label line. If the music industry is so volatile and costs so much, then why are record labels pulling in billions of dollars each year? Reality seems to disagree. The record labels make more than enough profit to cover all their costs, so they can afford lower CD prices. That's the bottom line. This "1 in 10" crap doesn't change that.
Too bad the average sustained transfer rates for USB 2.0 are far lower than those of FireWire, despite the peak rate being higher.
EDIT: Apparently, these glasses measure things like frequency in voice and other details. Even so, I'm still skeptical, not to mention the constitutional implications of the use of these glasses at airports. This is like sitting every person down at a polygraph before letting them on the plane; it reeks of civil rights violations.
Polygraph tests, and probably these glasses, too, make far too many assumptions about certain physiological responses which occur when someone is not being truthful. Firstly, they assume that a raise in heart rate or pulse can only mean that the person is lying, which is simply untrue. Secondly, unlike polygraphs, there's no way for these glasses to perform a control on the person being examined (meaning that you measure what a person's "normal" physiological patterns are like). And even those controls performed are dubious, at best, because there are simply too many variables to consider. Even in basic psychology classes, they go into the problems with polygraphs in detail, and it's not hard to deconstruct the test's assumptions, even for first-year university students.
Suppose you went up to a girl and asked her when the last time she gave a blow job was, and she answers you (hypothetically, she'd probably slap you in reality). You'd probably register a raise in blood pressure and heart rate. Are you to conclude that she lied to you? No, that's simply absurd. You asked her a personal question, out of the blue. Of course she'd be surprised. Furthermore, are you going to act normally and cooly when someone with glasses that can supposedly tell whether you're lying or not is asking you questions? Probably not. If you're an innocent man being polygraphed to see if you've committed a relatively serious crime, you're not exactly going to be acting normally, either.
Polygraph results are inadmissible in court for a good reason. I have a very hard time buying their "96% accurate" figure.
Maybe this will let Berman and Braga know that they're complete fucking failures who shouldn't have been allowed to touch Star Trek in the first place. I'd rather see the series die than continue on as it has been ever since Voyager.
Unless, of course, the Windows Media plug-in is required to view the site.
It's bad enough that I'm forced to look at video I don't want to see, but now I have to look at full-screen video encoded at less than 3 kB/s? Ahem, I'd rather not look at that blocky, pixilated mess.
There goes my software company which specializes in crows .. My Crow Soft.
I can just imagine some clueless FBI agent rifling through the poor guy's Rolodex and demanding that he tell them where his IP addresses are. "Sir, where do you keep your IP addresses sir?! This isn't a joke, son! You think this is funny?! Keep it up punk! You can laugh at the judge when we tell him that you wouldn't tell us where your IP addresses were!"
If it wasn't for OS X, I'd be a Windows or Linux user. OS 9 was becoming increasingly bloated, unstable and shitty overall. The only reason I tolerated it was because I was used to it. So I bought a QuickSilver G4, and it came with OS X v10.0.0. I was a little resistant to using it, at first. I had waded into OS X with the Public Beta, and I was thoroughly confused by it. But, I decided that it was the future, and that I'd best adopt it and learn to use it as soon as possible.
Haven't looked back since. Now, with Panther, OS X is easily the best OS on the market. Sure, it has its faults (the Finder, the Dock, both uber pieces of shit), but I remedy them with the innovative and awesome products that the Mac shareware community creates (Path Finder, DragThing, et cetera). Using Windows is like a chore. The OS is just ugly, not just from an aesthetic standpoint, but everything seems disproportioned and poorly laid-out. My computing experience has dramatically improved with OS X, and with Expose on 10.3, I'm wondering what the Hell I ever did before to manage my windows. And we get new releases every 14 months or so that offer huge improvements in usability and OS behavior. Panther is to Jaguar was Windows 98 was to 95. It took Microsoft 3 years; it took Apple about 1. The OS X team is truly busting their asses.
Are you even familiar with the reasons machines were invented in the first place? A big one is because humans are imprecise. There's a reason we use printers instead of just hand-writing everything.
Yeah, because we all know the brain is capable of billions of calculations per second. Oh, wait ...
There's also the question of computing to consider. Our current computers operate on smaller scales than biological computers ever could. If you ever make a transistor out of living cells, let me know.
You mean Kevin "All My Stories Must Involve Superweapons Because I'm Not Original In Any Sense At All" J. Anderson? Give me a break. If you think Episodes I and II are bad, Jedi Academy as a movie would be even worse than those two.
There are a couple good books in NJO, but overall, it's crap. I was really hoping that Star Wars would resist the whole "organic technology" fad in sci-fi, whereby all organic technology is inherently superior, despite the fact that living cells must be more permeable than a simple metal plate and that biological processes are inefficient and imprecise compared to finely-tuned mechanical ones. I guess it was a fool's hope, though. Most sci-fi authors are just fools when it comes to science.
Again, in 60 pages? I don't think so.
So they'd simply write a preface saying, "Trust us, these lines offend. We don't need to provide any justification for our claim that they do"?
The AAC spec includes DRM, just like the MPEG-2 spec does.
DRM is a part of the MPEG-4 spec. Apple isn't Microsofting the standard, if that's what you're implying.
Why would Apple work with HP to add WMA support to the iPod? Wouldn't they work with ... um, Microsoft? You know, the guys who made the WMA format?
AAC is open; you just have to pay licensing fees for it. In other words, third parties can make AAC encoders which yield different results (it looks like Apple's AAC encoder is the best at the moment), but they have to pay royalties. The same is not true of WMA.
I wouldn't get too excited. The WMA icon has been there since v2.0 for OS X, and we've seen nothing.