Costing more money and having less storage space are technical disadvantages that will disappear over the next few years. As for cell phone contracts, the vast majority of people already have those, so sticking all this other stuff in their cellphone doesn't add much complexity to their existing cellphone contract.
There will be a market for stand-alone MP3 players for a long time, just like you can still buy a Walkman at Walmart. But the combined devices will soon dominate the market. The only thing holding them back is technology. Once they can put a phone, internet appliance, PDA, camera, camcorder, GPS/navigation system, and high-capacity MP3 player into a sleek, light, cheap package, they're going to be everywhere, and will eviscerate the markets for the stand-alone units. Yes, there will be demand for each type of stand-alone unit, but it'll fall precipitously.
The ones that will fall the least are cameras and camcorders, because there are huge constraints on the quality of camera you can pack into anything that small, and there's no technological solution on the horizon. They'll be handy for snapshots, but the significant portion of consumers who like to take nice, clear pictures or video that look at least as good as film from the 50's are going to want a real camera too. Sure, they can cram lots of megapixels into a camera phone sensor, but megapixels != good pixtures. The chip will be so small each pixel division on the sensor can't gather much light, yielding crappy ISO's and grainy pictures. The lens is so small it can't resolve as many megapixels as the sensor, meaning you're just throwing away storage space storing image information that was never clear. The tiny lenses have tiny apertures that don't let through enough light, especially for the tiny, low-ISO chip. And forget about a decent zoom. Some day, maybe they'll be able to put the equivalent of a decent consumer camera, or maybe even a good SLR, into a tiny phone. But barring a total revolution in camera technology, those days area long way off. The crappy cameras in phones will be good enough for some people, but I don't think Canon and Nikon need to worry about them eating into any of their medium to high-end camera lines anytime soon.
Technological constraints apply much less to the other functions these devices will subsume- for most purposes, the MP3 Player, GPS, etc in the phones will be as good as the stand alone devices.
When creating laws with horrific effects, always make sure that one of the provisions of the law makes it illegal for anyone with first-hand experience regarding how horrible the law is to testify, discuss, or even acknowledge any involvement or problems with said law.
Given the vitriol I've witnessed, I have no doubt that people doing work that might contradict greenhouse-gas driven anthropogenic global warming receive all sorts of threats and probably funding problems. Surely anyone who put their name out there as an anthropogenic global warming critic is going to receive threats from loonies, and surely there are at least some anthropogenic global warming critics who's research is being de-funded, but that doesn't mean the two are related. Their research could be being de-funded because it's bad research.
It seems to me that anyone who wants to be civil about the debate over global warming (rather than taking up arms in a useless flame-war) needs to look at one thing; peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Likewise, to make the case regarding political bias affecting research into global warming, what one needs to look at is submitted papers and grant proposals. Let's not hear one side complain about how they're being repressed; let's see evidence of repression. Do you have a history of quality research, and had your quality grant proposal rejected because the research you proposed could contradict the theory of anthropogenic global warming? If so, put the information out there for people to judge. Did you submit a quality research paper to journals, only to have it rejected due to political bias, not the quality of the paper? Put it out there. The laymen might not be able to evaluate all this on their own, but there are still plenty of unbiased scientists and organizations that would review these cases carefully if these claims were advanced with appropriate evidence.
Is research being suppressed? I don't know, it wouldn't surprise me either way, given how politicized this topic is. But if they want to make a case for it, the thing that they need that's been lacking so far is substantial evidence.
That's great. IBM's going to have trouble overcoming "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" syndrome. I'm not arguing against your point, just pointing out the irony, since the origin of the expression is "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Apple believes they sell superior hardware. Apple believes they sell superior software. If follows, if these things are true, and you ignore any mitigating factors, that Apple stands to make the most money by decoupling the sales of these things. Break down barriers to entry for your superior products. Let PC users buy the superior OSX without having to invest in Apple hardware at the same time. Let Windows users buy superior Mac hardware to run Windows. Let people who want the best of both buy Macs and run OSX on them.
Previously, the mitigating factor in running Windows on a Mac was that Macs ran on PPC processors, and other than Windows NT 3.51, Microsoft didn't make any OS that could run on them. Slashdot posters frequently said how Apple runs a closed system and would never let other OS's, especially Windows, compete on Mac. But as soon as Macs went x86, Apple didn't just allow Windows on Macs, the released Bootcamp.
Apple doesn't sell OSX for PC's, but it has nothing to do with being scared of the competition or being addicted to consumer lock-in. Apple doesn't want the hardware or technical support headache that would come with trying to support every one of thousands of x86 machines on the market. Yes, this is an issue of control- Apple's main selling point in OSX is user-friendliness, and they don't think they can maintain that if they had to deal with the sort of driver issues Windows and Linux have. But they don't try all that hard to lock OSX out of other platforms. They just don't support it. With no hacks or tricks, OSX will install on some Thinkpads just by inserting the disc and clicking "install." Maybe clicking the "install" button constitutes "serious hacking" to you, but to most of us, it's Apple's regular user-friendliness. The peripherals pretty much all work by default too, unless you get the Intel wireless card. Don't configure your laptop with that, and buy any one of a dozen third party wireless cards, plug it in, and you'd be all set with a fully functional non-Apple OSX machine running the latest release of Tiger. If Apple were serious about blocking OSX PC use, they'd be using the trusted computing module to lock down the OS to their hardware. At the very least, they'd keep up on news, know that OSX installs on Thinkpads, and they would have crippled that with any one of the last 7 OS updates since it became public information. But they don't; instead, they put a note that says Please don't steal.
There's no analog mitigating factors for music sales. Apple thinks they have the best music management program with the best store, and the best players. Again, they'd like the revenue of selling music to people with other players, and they'd like to sell players to people who use other stores- sales of popular products do best when you reduce barriers to entry, not when you increase them by locking products together. There's no fear of difficulty supporting MP3's on other players, and there's no difficulty playing other MP3's on the iPod. You say Apple wants to lock-in people who bought Fairplay music? The iPod's still gaining market- why wouldn't Apple want to be able to go after customers who were already locked-in to other stores more that they'd fear losing customers they already had? That's the way things go when you reduce barriers for the market leading product.
Any time Steve Jobs comes up on Slashdot, someone gets moded +5 for saying that he's lying, and he secretly has evil intentions opposite to what he stated, and that this is secretly in Apple's favor because they want bad things. Others get moded up for saying that, sure, Steve Jobs is on the right side of this issue, but that he has no morals and doesn't believe in what he's saying, he's just doing it because it's in Apple's, and thus his, financial interest. If so, why does he also take moral stands in public statements that are patently against Apple's interests?
Hey, preaching to the choir here, I do professional printing on Epsons with their pigmented ink sets- metameric mismatches are my worst enemy, and fluorescents are way worse than incandescents when it comes to creating those. But unlike a lot of color professionals, I don't keep a D50 source at my desk for checking this stuff- because it's going to hang in someone's home, and they're not going to light it with a D50 source there. I generally don't know if it'll be lit with incandescent, fluorescent, halogen, or daylight, or light from any of those reflected off of any color of wall paint, or any combination of any of those. I just have to do my best rendition for any light source, so I check my prints under fluorescent, incandescent, and daylight for any gross anomolies. No complaints so far, but there's no doubt that fluorescent is usually the worst viewing environment for any given print.
Still, in most of my house, I'm not spending much time concentrating on the finer details of color rendition, I'm trying to read a book or do the dishes. GE's "daylight" fluorescents are fine with me for most tasks, especially consider the money savings. I don't see any point in discouraging their use for the 99.9% of society who doesn't know or care about the spectral distribution of their light sources. For the few who do know, and care, I've already come out against banning incandescents. Those who care can put them in the places that matter to them.
That's right that we should account for externalities, or suffer the consequences of them. However, it would be a ridiculous and pointless plan to try to keep track of the externalities on individual products based on the electricity they use, they should account for externalities at the most basic level- the sale of the electricity. That is, trying to assume how much electricity every lightbulb, toaster, digital camera (only assuming it's using rechargeable batteries, otherwise it's exempt), power tool, etc. uses, and then taxing it for the carbon missions associated with that, is ridiculous, when it would be immeasurably simpler and more accurate to just tax the electricity in the first place.
It's probably better to take another step back and tax the sale of the hydrocarbons intended for burning- coal, oil, etc, so you don't have to try to differentiate electricity taxes based on sources, plant efficiencies, etc.
Backing off another step, it's probably better to avoid the tax altogether, and avoid externalities by creating a hydrocarbon marketplace, and simply regulate that all hydrocarbons intended for burning must be offset by the free market purchase of hydrocarbon sequestration credits sufficient to neutralize all the fuel they purchased. This would entirely remove the global-warming externality from fuels. There'd still be a particulate pollution externality to deal with, but this scheme would entirely negate greenhouse gas externalities in an efficient manner without any politicians criminalizing light-bulb sales, or doing anything else to control what kind of products you can buy. Note it would probably yield a similar result- forcing energy companies to account for externalities would probably raise the cost of electricity enough to make most people significantly decrease usage, including shifting to more efficient lighting. It would also encourage them to be more efficient in hundreds of other ways- how about not leaving the lights on? Installing an efficient amount of insulation? Etc.
I agree with all of that 100%. If they want to reduce electricity consumption, why not raise the tax on electricity until people cut back however much they want? If they're doing this to save the environment, spend the extra tax revenues on buying up and retiring carbon permits (once we have a carbon trading system), or some other environmental protection/remediation scheme. When people's electric bills go up, the government might point out that they could bring them back down by using more efficient bulbs, but let the consumer decide how to bring it down.
I switched over 90% of the bulbs in my house to compact fluorescents five years ago. But making me switch over the other 10% just makes me mad. None of them get used much. And there are three fixtures where, despite looking, I've never been able to find any CF bulbs that fit in them. One of these is an antique brass lamp I inherited. What am I supposed to do, throw it away? I'd like to point out that, if I were to buy a new big, heavy, nice brass lamp to replace it, there is an energy cost to mining, refining, shipping, casting, assembling, and re-shipping that new lamp. A new lamp a lot like it costs about $800. It would never save that much energy, or that much money.
Additionally, my father was in vision research. Their entire vision research lab ran on incandescent bulbs for experiments. On the one hand, they don't want to toss a $10,000 experimental apparatus it took a year to build because they can't buy the bulbs anymore. And on the other hand, they can't very easily redesign these things to use CF bulbs, because they treat the clear incandescent bulbs as point-sources. They do have one easy solution, though, if replacement incandescents were difficult/illegal to obtain. They can place their xenon arc by the experiment, and run a thin beam of arc light through a gradient mirror (to adjust the brightness to match) to a small mirror where the bulb used to be. In this respect, they would replace a 40-watt bulb with a 10,000-watt bulb.
CF bulbs already make economic sense for consumers to buy- they save a whole lot of money over their lifespan. The main reason they haven't been adopted is consumer inertia. Most people don't really know about them, or how much they'll save, or how similar their light is to normal incandescents. This problem is better fixed with a marketing campaign then a ban. This marketing campaign is already underway, by the likes of Walmart, NPR, GE, and others.
Economic incentives result in more efficient solutions to problems than command and control. If their goal is to reduce electricity usage, why don't they try to reduce electricity usage, instead of mandating people buy a particular kind of light bulb? The Playstation 3 runs 380 watts, while the Wii only consumes 53 watts. Why not ban the Playstation 3?
It can not be as general as "all websites have common carrier status," like all phone companies and all package carriers receive, because there are plenty of legitimate web business models that work on the opposite presumption. For example, this is more or less the case with true.com. Their whole thing is that they are trying to check people's identities to prevent jerking around with fake identities on dating sites. Now, I"m not saying they should be liable, but suppose that at some point the problem on myspace grows and becomes more serious, and some startup comes along with the business plan that they'll attract business, particularly from minors who's parents point them there, by guaranteeing the authenticity of their account holders. The whole point is that they check all of this for the safety of users who cant or won't take appropriate precautions and watch out for themselves, making it a safe, or at least safer, community. You can't let them be automatically exempted from responsibility for user verification too just because they're a website, if they're selling user verification as a product. Common carrier status for all websites would amount to legalizing breach of contract, or at least false advertising, for this kind of company, basically making their potentially useful business model worthless because it would be unenforceable.
As long as websites aren't advancing claims regarding user authenticity, then I think they should have common carrier status. But the entire web shouldn't automatically receive it, it depends on the context. Caveat Emptor for any site that's not making specific claims regarding the authenticity of their content. For sites making claims, it would be taken on a case-by-case basis, and there may well be reasonable grounds for complaints and lawsuits.
The surest way to be sure DRM never goes away is for there to be no pressure to make it go away. Before, very few people knew what it was, or were mad about it, and of them, many (most?) blamed it on Apple and Microsoft, not the recording companies. Putting public pressure on them and making people aware of the issues and the origins of the problems is the only thing that will ever give them the impetus to strike these backroom deals you're talking about.
The day after Jobs' Blog Post, the Wall Street Journal had two front page stories above the crease about it. That introduced this issue to probably a hundred thousand people who weren't previously aware of it, and they're overwhelmingly the important, moneyed, influential movers and shakers who it's most important to make aware of it. I was visiting my mother the next weekend, and that WSJ was lying around, and she asked me what it was all about. It was the first she'd heard of any of it. She only had a rudimentary idea of what a Media Player is. I'd tried to tell her about DRM before, but she never listened. Now she knows.
Jobs' Blog Post may be the event that precipitates an interest in this issue that will eventually lead to change. The backroom deals are the conclusion of the change process, not the origin. You're right that won't happen in "the tech press," but for the first time I've seen, this story was just blown a mile outside the tech press.
I entirely agree with all of that. Record companies used to provide a valuable service by fronting the high costs of recording, copying, distributing, and promoting music. By the very nature of the business, they had to pick and choose between bands and decide which music would be heard. The entire model is obsolete. It's a broken paradigm for information distribution.
But I don't see how it's relevant to this discussion. We were talking about what the RIAA companies have done with the price of CD's. They're claiming they went down, based on invalid data. As you said, the up and coming model of internet distribution has so far, for the most part, been priced about the same as CD's, so it's not a form of competition driving the price down on CD's, yet. I don't see how similarly priced digital music distribution relates to an argument about whether the price of CD's has gone up or down. But you're right that the price of internet downloaded music should sooner or later fall off a cliff, as the studios, who currently get over $0.90 on the dollar of the money, become entirely excluded from the process.
It's clear that no one would pay $1300 for a C64 these days because computers have gotten so much faster for the money. But what's the comparison with music? You cite an example of how old computers aren't worth much because new computers are so much better, so what are you implying, that old music was worth a lot more because new music isn't anywhere near as good? Is new music so much worse than older music that it's not worth paying that much anymore, and the price had to fall on the new stuff, like prices fall on old computers? Obviously not, because a lot of these CD's being sold now have the same music on them that they had in 1983. The march of technology and Moore's law doesn't really say anything about the price of music over time.
The only reason I expect a CD to be inflation-adjusted cheaper today than in 1983 is that in 1983 they were still selling primarily tapes and some vinyl, and the only people with CD players were mostly audiophiles and early adopters, and the CD players had cost them a fortune and were part of premium stereo systems. No one had CD players in their cars, or portable ones, CD players were big, expensive components for rich high-end audio enthusiasts, who were clearly willing to pay a huge premium for the CD experience. The price of a CD in 1983 should be inflation adjusted and compared with the price of an SACD today. CD's are now the lowest-common-denominator standard format for the masses and should be priced as such. Had the price of CD's not fallen dramatically since the 1983 price, they would never have gotten popular and remained inaccessible, which would be an example of the RIAA companies shooting themselves in the foot, reducing profits trough overly high prices and small unit sales.
So pricing changes since '83 are a silly comparison, because the product's placement in the market changed entirely since '83. CD's have been the de facto audio standard now since at least 2000, I'd like to see what inflation adjusted prices have done from 2000-2007. That would indicate what CD prices have been doing.
If you don't use Windows or Mac, I'm guessing you're a Linux user. If you're technically competent to use Linux as your primary OS, I doubt you'd have any trouble installing and using Rockbox, which is OSS that would make an iPod behave the way you want it to.
Of course, if you don't see any other advantages to iPods, then there's no point. A lot of people like their price/form factor/clickwheel/battery life/reliability/style/customer service.
OK, it may be bad form, but I realized I needed to reply to my own post.
I was giving more thought to the question "can affecting a change in the cost of gathering publicly available information lead to an invasion of privacy?" and I've found that I had to reconsider my premise in rejecting these photographs as a privacy invasion.
For example, before the internet, if you had someone's name, you could get listed phone numbers and addresses from phone books, but you couldn't reverse search- if you saw a phone number you couldn't get the name and address; if you saw a house, you couldn't look up the name and phone number from the address. Of course, technically, you could, because you could go through the entire phone book, or go to the library and go through all the phone books in the country and still "do" a reverse search. It just wasn't feasible for most people, the difficulty of performing this search of publicly available information was so significant it amounted to a wall of privacy. Same with all the available satellite and aerial imagery these days- sure, you don't own the airspace over your house (or the light bouncing off it) and anyone could have hired a plane to fly over your house and photograph it in great detail 20 years ago. But the costs, again, would prohibit almost anyone from doing that. Now anyone can use Google Earth or myriad similar utilities to learn a lot about almost anyone's private property. Along the same lines, you can find many people's address history for free now on things like Zabasearch, which could facilitate stalking or identity theft, where previously the costs of obtaining that information by hiring a private investigator, and the trail left by doing so, made obtaining this information practically prohibitive for most people. So my reasoning was wrong; changing the costs of accessing publicly available information can cause significant degradation of one's privacy.
All that said, my gut still tells me that this photographing your house thing isn't any big deal; I just no longer have a good argument for why.
I'm a proponent of strong privacy rights, but if they're just photographing the view of your house from the street, I fail to see how they're doing anything invasive of one's privacy, they're simply cataloging trivially publicly available information. Anyone can drive down the street and see the house. Presumably, on any given day, on most of these streets, hundreds or thousands of people drive down the street and see the house anyway.
Using something like a high-powered zoom lens to try to shoot pictures inside the house through the window, or trespassing on the property to better see the house, or driving a cherry picker down the street to take hard-to-get views over privacy fences and such would be different. But I don't see how the regular pedestrian view from the street can be considered "private." Presumably anybody with your address could get the same view by going there anytime. And to look it up in this company's database, presumably they've already got your address or could easily retrieve it from other sources. They're just changing the ease of access to this information, they aren't making any "private" information that wasn't previously accessible available, they're just changing the costs of accessing publicly available information.
If you care about people not obtaining information they can get from glancing at your house from the street, then you need a privacy fence or something to conceal that information.
Actually, I'm bit confused on the whole "Apple Records" vs. "Sony/Michael Jackson" thing and what the difference is between "ownership" and "publishing rights" for music. Anyone want to clear this up?
"We will never, ever return to single processor computers"
Does anyone think that's anything other than a stupid thing to say?
I mean, maybe we never will, and maybe it's really unlikely that we will anytime soon. But it seems that anytime there's a real revolutionary (rather than evolutionary) jump in processors, we may well go back to a single "core." For example, if they invented a fully optical processor that was insanely faster than anything in silicon, but they were very expensive to produce per core, and the price scaled linearly with the number of cores... sounds like we'd have single core computers around again for a while. And what about quantum computers? I don't even know what a "core" would be for a quantum computer, but are they by nature going to have a design that works on multiple problems simultaneously without being able to use that capacity to work on an individual problem faster? Even if that is the case, does the author know that, or are they just ignoring any possibility of non-silicon architectures?
Even within silicon, is it out of the realm of conceivability that someone will develop a radical new architecture that can use more transistors to make a single core faster such that it's competitive with using the same transistor count for multiple cores?
Considering how computers have spent a good 40 years continuously changing more quickly than any other technology in history, I'd be a bit more reserved in making sweeping generalizations about all possible future developments that might occur in the next forever.
Still, computer scientists seem to be in rough agreement that current software development models mostly don't produce programs that are multi-threaded enough to take optimal advantage of the current trend toward increased cores. maybe it just sounds too boring when worded that way.
That's a lot of data, but it's less than 1/10 as much data as the Large Hadron Collider will put out, and the LHC is supposed to be coming online within a year, not in six years. By the time the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope comes online, the LHC may have produced more data than the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will over the life of the project.
I'd be interested to know more about the data handling methods they have in place for the LHC. I don't think they'll be using Excel.
*Note the correct, non-Frudian-Slip spelling of "hadron"
That reminds me of the opposite- a similar chain made for idiotic reasons out of expensive hardware. In high school, we had a Mac Lab with a daisy-chained localtalk network using node-boxes and telephone cords from one computer to another. The intelligent physics and math teacher who had been running the lab was too busy, so the school put an unqualified elementary teacher in charge of the lab. The yearbook staff was just moving to desktop publishing, and needed to be able to print. Some of their documents were too big to move on one floppy disk, and segmenting and rejoining files to print a test page is a serious pain in the ass. They didn't have the budget to buy themselves a laser printer (remember, it was either laser or dot matrix at the time, and dot matrix wouldn't handle their layouts), but the computer lab manager said he could connect them to the network so they could print on the shared printer. And he networked them exactly the same way the other machines in the lab were networked- with short, pre-made phone cords and node boxes. That's right- he chained about 12 node boxes in a row with phone cords to get a long enough chain to stretch through the lowered ceiling to the yearbook room.
This wasn't obsolete equipment- node boxes were $50 each. He spent $600 of the computer lab budget on node boxes to add one computer to the network. He could have just bought them a laser printer for that.
My friends and I found out he'd done it that way, and went out to Radio Shack and bought a 100-ft roll of telephone cord and some crimp-on ends and made a 100' cord, and replaced the chain of short cords and node-boxes in the ceiling. He was none the wiser, and we ended up with $600 worth of node boxes and about $50 in short, pre-made phone cables.
That's when we started having LAN parties. Previously, we couldn't afford the node boxes. After that, it was Bolo, Scepter, and other early network games all night.
Profit Yaweh Can Summon UFO's On Command
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UFOs In the News
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· Score: 3, Interesting
My favorite UFO in the news was when a local news station was doing a human interest series on local nut-jobs who made claims about the paranormal. They were very skeptical and generally debunking these people by showing up with a camera and recording it when the nut-jobs failed to produce anything paranormal, without actually confronting or insulting the people. They'd just done a bunch of ghost hunters the night before.
Then they interview "Prophet Yaweh" from Las Vegas who says that by reading the Old Testament of the Bible in Hebrew, he learned a secret that allows him to summon UFO's on command. So the news channel picked a date, time, and location, and Prophet Yaweh shows up, and immediately summons a UFO, throwing the story rather off track.
I wonder if they're really buying a single solution to use on ALL their computers- I mean, I wonder how the NSA would feel about that. I have the feeling that they feel they're secure enough already and aren't going to weaken their security using some off-the-shelf product instead of whatever they're using now. I wonder if this will pass quietly, or if anyone will try to force this prescribed method of security on them.
In general, this is another piece of typical monolithic bureaucracy command and control. Something the size of the federal government would probably be better off NOT going with a single mandated vendor. Just mandate the security policy- all government computers must have fully encrypted hard drives- along with sufficient stipulations to define what that means and how it works. Let branches find their own solution providers. If they want economies of scale, they're free to band together to research and purchase solutions. Or they can do it by branch, or a branch can just set the requirements and let each of their departments work it out. But let them try something different if they want to.
It maintains more competition in the marketplace. If some department is unhappy, they can switch without trying to get the entire federal government to switch. If a department's unhappy, the ask other departments about their providers and implementations. Get some freedom, variation, and competition into the process. Also, one crack wouldn't simultaneously render all government computers vulnerable.
I have no affiliation with lala, except for that I joined last week, and have since shipped one old CD I don't want, and received two shiny new ones I did want, for a grand total of $3.50.
You may not be able to get everything you want right away, but hey, you can't beat the price.
And although they don't have to, they still pay musicians.
And their emailed Christmas card said "Fa la la la la... lala.com." Gotta love it.
OK, OK, you don't have to love it. I thought it was funny. Leave me alone.
Yes, and the price he was quoted is 20,000 times more expensive than the price of my landline. The price they charged was 2,000,000 times more expensive than my landline.
What's you're point? Is everyone supposed to know off the top of their head that two million times the price per bit of a landline is reasonable, but twenty thousand times the price is just way too cheap?
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Costing more money and having less storage space are technical disadvantages that will disappear over the next few years. As for cell phone contracts, the vast majority of people already have those, so sticking all this other stuff in their cellphone doesn't add much complexity to their existing cellphone contract.
There will be a market for stand-alone MP3 players for a long time, just like you can still buy a Walkman at Walmart. But the combined devices will soon dominate the market. The only thing holding them back is technology. Once they can put a phone, internet appliance, PDA, camera, camcorder, GPS/navigation system, and high-capacity MP3 player into a sleek, light, cheap package, they're going to be everywhere, and will eviscerate the markets for the stand-alone units. Yes, there will be demand for each type of stand-alone unit, but it'll fall precipitously.
The ones that will fall the least are cameras and camcorders, because there are huge constraints on the quality of camera you can pack into anything that small, and there's no technological solution on the horizon. They'll be handy for snapshots, but the significant portion of consumers who like to take nice, clear pictures or video that look at least as good as film from the 50's are going to want a real camera too. Sure, they can cram lots of megapixels into a camera phone sensor, but megapixels != good pixtures. The chip will be so small each pixel division on the sensor can't gather much light, yielding crappy ISO's and grainy pictures. The lens is so small it can't resolve as many megapixels as the sensor, meaning you're just throwing away storage space storing image information that was never clear. The tiny lenses have tiny apertures that don't let through enough light, especially for the tiny, low-ISO chip. And forget about a decent zoom. Some day, maybe they'll be able to put the equivalent of a decent consumer camera, or maybe even a good SLR, into a tiny phone. But barring a total revolution in camera technology, those days area long way off. The crappy cameras in phones will be good enough for some people, but I don't think Canon and Nikon need to worry about them eating into any of their medium to high-end camera lines anytime soon.
Technological constraints apply much less to the other functions these devices will subsume- for most purposes, the MP3 Player, GPS, etc in the phones will be as good as the stand alone devices.
This law sets a valuable example for tyrants.
When creating laws with horrific effects, always make sure that one of the provisions of the law makes it illegal for anyone with first-hand experience regarding how horrible the law is to testify, discuss, or even acknowledge any involvement or problems with said law.
Given the vitriol I've witnessed, I have no doubt that people doing work that might contradict greenhouse-gas driven anthropogenic global warming receive all sorts of threats and probably funding problems. Surely anyone who put their name out there as an anthropogenic global warming critic is going to receive threats from loonies, and surely there are at least some anthropogenic global warming critics who's research is being de-funded, but that doesn't mean the two are related. Their research could be being de-funded because it's bad research.
It seems to me that anyone who wants to be civil about the debate over global warming (rather than taking up arms in a useless flame-war) needs to look at one thing; peer-reviewed scientific literature.
Likewise, to make the case regarding political bias affecting research into global warming, what one needs to look at is submitted papers and grant proposals. Let's not hear one side complain about how they're being repressed; let's see evidence of repression. Do you have a history of quality research, and had your quality grant proposal rejected because the research you proposed could contradict the theory of anthropogenic global warming? If so, put the information out there for people to judge. Did you submit a quality research paper to journals, only to have it rejected due to political bias, not the quality of the paper? Put it out there. The laymen might not be able to evaluate all this on their own, but there are still plenty of unbiased scientists and organizations that would review these cases carefully if these claims were advanced with appropriate evidence.
Is research being suppressed? I don't know, it wouldn't surprise me either way, given how politicized this topic is. But if they want to make a case for it, the thing that they need that's been lacking so far is substantial evidence.
That's great. IBM's going to have trouble overcoming "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" syndrome. I'm not arguing against your point, just pointing out the irony, since the origin of the expression is "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
And Lexus is the Cadillac of automobiles.
Apple believes they sell superior hardware. Apple believes they sell superior software. If follows, if these things are true, and you ignore any mitigating factors, that Apple stands to make the most money by decoupling the sales of these things. Break down barriers to entry for your superior products. Let PC users buy the superior OSX without having to invest in Apple hardware at the same time. Let Windows users buy superior Mac hardware to run Windows. Let people who want the best of both buy Macs and run OSX on them.
Previously, the mitigating factor in running Windows on a Mac was that Macs ran on PPC processors, and other than Windows NT 3.51, Microsoft didn't make any OS that could run on them. Slashdot posters frequently said how Apple runs a closed system and would never let other OS's, especially Windows, compete on Mac. But as soon as Macs went x86, Apple didn't just allow Windows on Macs, the released Bootcamp.
Apple doesn't sell OSX for PC's, but it has nothing to do with being scared of the competition or being addicted to consumer lock-in. Apple doesn't want the hardware or technical support headache that would come with trying to support every one of thousands of x86 machines on the market. Yes, this is an issue of control- Apple's main selling point in OSX is user-friendliness, and they don't think they can maintain that if they had to deal with the sort of driver issues Windows and Linux have. But they don't try all that hard to lock OSX out of other platforms. They just don't support it. With no hacks or tricks, OSX will install on some Thinkpads just by inserting the disc and clicking "install." Maybe clicking the "install" button constitutes "serious hacking" to you, but to most of us, it's Apple's regular user-friendliness. The peripherals pretty much all work by default too, unless you get the Intel wireless card. Don't configure your laptop with that, and buy any one of a dozen third party wireless cards, plug it in, and you'd be all set with a fully functional non-Apple OSX machine running the latest release of Tiger. If Apple were serious about blocking OSX PC use, they'd be using the trusted computing module to lock down the OS to their hardware. At the very least, they'd keep up on news, know that OSX installs on Thinkpads, and they would have crippled that with any one of the last 7 OS updates since it became public information. But they don't; instead, they put a note that says Please don't steal.
There's no analog mitigating factors for music sales. Apple thinks they have the best music management program with the best store, and the best players. Again, they'd like the revenue of selling music to people with other players, and they'd like to sell players to people who use other stores- sales of popular products do best when you reduce barriers to entry, not when you increase them by locking products together. There's no fear of difficulty supporting MP3's on other players, and there's no difficulty playing other MP3's on the iPod. You say Apple wants to lock-in people who bought Fairplay music? The iPod's still gaining market- why wouldn't Apple want to be able to go after customers who were already locked-in to other stores more that they'd fear losing customers they already had? That's the way things go when you reduce barriers for the market leading product.
Any time Steve Jobs comes up on Slashdot, someone gets moded +5 for saying that he's lying, and he secretly has evil intentions opposite to what he stated, and that this is secretly in Apple's favor because they want bad things. Others get moded up for saying that, sure, Steve Jobs is on the right side of this issue, but that he has no morals and doesn't believe in what he's saying, he's just doing it because it's in Apple's, and thus his, financial interest. If so, why does he also take moral stands in public statements that are patently against Apple's interests?
Hey, preaching to the choir here, I do professional printing on Epsons with their pigmented ink sets- metameric mismatches are my worst enemy, and fluorescents are way worse than incandescents when it comes to creating those. But unlike a lot of color professionals, I don't keep a D50 source at my desk for checking this stuff- because it's going to hang in someone's home, and they're not going to light it with a D50 source there. I generally don't know if it'll be lit with incandescent, fluorescent, halogen, or daylight, or light from any of those reflected off of any color of wall paint, or any combination of any of those. I just have to do my best rendition for any light source, so I check my prints under fluorescent, incandescent, and daylight for any gross anomolies. No complaints so far, but there's no doubt that fluorescent is usually the worst viewing environment for any given print.
Still, in most of my house, I'm not spending much time concentrating on the finer details of color rendition, I'm trying to read a book or do the dishes. GE's "daylight" fluorescents are fine with me for most tasks, especially consider the money savings. I don't see any point in discouraging their use for the 99.9% of society who doesn't know or care about the spectral distribution of their light sources. For the few who do know, and care, I've already come out against banning incandescents. Those who care can put them in the places that matter to them.
That's right that we should account for externalities, or suffer the consequences of them. However, it would be a ridiculous and pointless plan to try to keep track of the externalities on individual products based on the electricity they use, they should account for externalities at the most basic level- the sale of the electricity. That is, trying to assume how much electricity every lightbulb, toaster, digital camera (only assuming it's using rechargeable batteries, otherwise it's exempt), power tool, etc. uses, and then taxing it for the carbon missions associated with that, is ridiculous, when it would be immeasurably simpler and more accurate to just tax the electricity in the first place.
It's probably better to take another step back and tax the sale of the hydrocarbons intended for burning- coal, oil, etc, so you don't have to try to differentiate electricity taxes based on sources, plant efficiencies, etc.
Backing off another step, it's probably better to avoid the tax altogether, and avoid externalities by creating a hydrocarbon marketplace, and simply regulate that all hydrocarbons intended for burning must be offset by the free market purchase of hydrocarbon sequestration credits sufficient to neutralize all the fuel they purchased. This would entirely remove the global-warming externality from fuels. There'd still be a particulate pollution externality to deal with, but this scheme would entirely negate greenhouse gas externalities in an efficient manner without any politicians criminalizing light-bulb sales, or doing anything else to control what kind of products you can buy. Note it would probably yield a similar result- forcing energy companies to account for externalities would probably raise the cost of electricity enough to make most people significantly decrease usage, including shifting to more efficient lighting. It would also encourage them to be more efficient in hundreds of other ways- how about not leaving the lights on? Installing an efficient amount of insulation? Etc.
I agree with all of that 100%. If they want to reduce electricity consumption, why not raise the tax on electricity until people cut back however much they want? If they're doing this to save the environment, spend the extra tax revenues on buying up and retiring carbon permits (once we have a carbon trading system), or some other environmental protection/remediation scheme. When people's electric bills go up, the government might point out that they could bring them back down by using more efficient bulbs, but let the consumer decide how to bring it down.
I switched over 90% of the bulbs in my house to compact fluorescents five years ago. But making me switch over the other 10% just makes me mad. None of them get used much. And there are three fixtures where, despite looking, I've never been able to find any CF bulbs that fit in them. One of these is an antique brass lamp I inherited. What am I supposed to do, throw it away? I'd like to point out that, if I were to buy a new big, heavy, nice brass lamp to replace it, there is an energy cost to mining, refining, shipping, casting, assembling, and re-shipping that new lamp. A new lamp a lot like it costs about $800. It would never save that much energy, or that much money.
Additionally, my father was in vision research. Their entire vision research lab ran on incandescent bulbs for experiments. On the one hand, they don't want to toss a $10,000 experimental apparatus it took a year to build because they can't buy the bulbs anymore. And on the other hand, they can't very easily redesign these things to use CF bulbs, because they treat the clear incandescent bulbs as point-sources. They do have one easy solution, though, if replacement incandescents were difficult/illegal to obtain. They can place their xenon arc by the experiment, and run a thin beam of arc light through a gradient mirror (to adjust the brightness to match) to a small mirror where the bulb used to be. In this respect, they would replace a 40-watt bulb with a 10,000-watt bulb.
CF bulbs already make economic sense for consumers to buy- they save a whole lot of money over their lifespan. The main reason they haven't been adopted is consumer inertia. Most people don't really know about them, or how much they'll save, or how similar their light is to normal incandescents. This problem is better fixed with a marketing campaign then a ban. This marketing campaign is already underway, by the likes of Walmart, NPR, GE, and others.
Economic incentives result in more efficient solutions to problems than command and control. If their goal is to reduce electricity usage, why don't they try to reduce electricity usage, instead of mandating people buy a particular kind of light bulb? The Playstation 3 runs 380 watts, while the Wii only consumes 53 watts. Why not ban the Playstation 3?
It can not be as general as "all websites have common carrier status," like all phone companies and all package carriers receive, because there are plenty of legitimate web business models that work on the opposite presumption. For example, this is more or less the case with true.com. Their whole thing is that they are trying to check people's identities to prevent jerking around with fake identities on dating sites. Now, I"m not saying they should be liable, but suppose that at some point the problem on myspace grows and becomes more serious, and some startup comes along with the business plan that they'll attract business, particularly from minors who's parents point them there, by guaranteeing the authenticity of their account holders. The whole point is that they check all of this for the safety of users who cant or won't take appropriate precautions and watch out for themselves, making it a safe, or at least safer, community. You can't let them be automatically exempted from responsibility for user verification too just because they're a website, if they're selling user verification as a product. Common carrier status for all websites would amount to legalizing breach of contract, or at least false advertising, for this kind of company, basically making their potentially useful business model worthless because it would be unenforceable.
As long as websites aren't advancing claims regarding user authenticity, then I think they should have common carrier status. But the entire web shouldn't automatically receive it, it depends on the context. Caveat Emptor for any site that's not making specific claims regarding the authenticity of their content. For sites making claims, it would be taken on a case-by-case basis, and there may well be reasonable grounds for complaints and lawsuits.
The surest way to be sure DRM never goes away is for there to be no pressure to make it go away. Before, very few people knew what it was, or were mad about it, and of them, many (most?) blamed it on Apple and Microsoft, not the recording companies. Putting public pressure on them and making people aware of the issues and the origins of the problems is the only thing that will ever give them the impetus to strike these backroom deals you're talking about.
The day after Jobs' Blog Post, the Wall Street Journal had two front page stories above the crease about it. That introduced this issue to probably a hundred thousand people who weren't previously aware of it, and they're overwhelmingly the important, moneyed, influential movers and shakers who it's most important to make aware of it. I was visiting my mother the next weekend, and that WSJ was lying around, and she asked me what it was all about. It was the first she'd heard of any of it. She only had a rudimentary idea of what a Media Player is. I'd tried to tell her about DRM before, but she never listened. Now she knows.
Jobs' Blog Post may be the event that precipitates an interest in this issue that will eventually lead to change. The backroom deals are the conclusion of the change process, not the origin. You're right that won't happen in "the tech press," but for the first time I've seen, this story was just blown a mile outside the tech press.
I entirely agree with all of that. Record companies used to provide a valuable service by fronting the high costs of recording, copying, distributing, and promoting music. By the very nature of the business, they had to pick and choose between bands and decide which music would be heard. The entire model is obsolete. It's a broken paradigm for information distribution.
But I don't see how it's relevant to this discussion. We were talking about what the RIAA companies have done with the price of CD's. They're claiming they went down, based on invalid data. As you said, the up and coming model of internet distribution has so far, for the most part, been priced about the same as CD's, so it's not a form of competition driving the price down on CD's, yet. I don't see how similarly priced digital music distribution relates to an argument about whether the price of CD's has gone up or down. But you're right that the price of internet downloaded music should sooner or later fall off a cliff, as the studios, who currently get over $0.90 on the dollar of the money, become entirely excluded from the process.
It's clear that no one would pay $1300 for a C64 these days because computers have gotten so much faster for the money. But what's the comparison with music? You cite an example of how old computers aren't worth much because new computers are so much better, so what are you implying, that old music was worth a lot more because new music isn't anywhere near as good? Is new music so much worse than older music that it's not worth paying that much anymore, and the price had to fall on the new stuff, like prices fall on old computers? Obviously not, because a lot of these CD's being sold now have the same music on them that they had in 1983. The march of technology and Moore's law doesn't really say anything about the price of music over time.
The only reason I expect a CD to be inflation-adjusted cheaper today than in 1983 is that in 1983 they were still selling primarily tapes and some vinyl, and the only people with CD players were mostly audiophiles and early adopters, and the CD players had cost them a fortune and were part of premium stereo systems. No one had CD players in their cars, or portable ones, CD players were big, expensive components for rich high-end audio enthusiasts, who were clearly willing to pay a huge premium for the CD experience. The price of a CD in 1983 should be inflation adjusted and compared with the price of an SACD today. CD's are now the lowest-common-denominator standard format for the masses and should be priced as such. Had the price of CD's not fallen dramatically since the 1983 price, they would never have gotten popular and remained inaccessible, which would be an example of the RIAA companies shooting themselves in the foot, reducing profits trough overly high prices and small unit sales.
So pricing changes since '83 are a silly comparison, because the product's placement in the market changed entirely since '83. CD's have been the de facto audio standard now since at least 2000, I'd like to see what inflation adjusted prices have done from 2000-2007. That would indicate what CD prices have been doing.
If you don't use Windows or Mac, I'm guessing you're a Linux user. If you're technically competent to use Linux as your primary OS, I doubt you'd have any trouble installing and using Rockbox, which is OSS that would make an iPod behave the way you want it to.
Of course, if you don't see any other advantages to iPods, then there's no point. A lot of people like their price/form factor/clickwheel/battery life/reliability/style/customer service.
OK, it may be bad form, but I realized I needed to reply to my own post.
I was giving more thought to the question "can affecting a change in the cost of gathering publicly available information lead to an invasion of privacy?" and I've found that I had to reconsider my premise in rejecting these photographs as a privacy invasion.
For example, before the internet, if you had someone's name, you could get listed phone numbers and addresses from phone books, but you couldn't reverse search- if you saw a phone number you couldn't get the name and address; if you saw a house, you couldn't look up the name and phone number from the address. Of course, technically, you could, because you could go through the entire phone book, or go to the library and go through all the phone books in the country and still "do" a reverse search. It just wasn't feasible for most people, the difficulty of performing this search of publicly available information was so significant it amounted to a wall of privacy. Same with all the available satellite and aerial imagery these days- sure, you don't own the airspace over your house (or the light bouncing off it) and anyone could have hired a plane to fly over your house and photograph it in great detail 20 years ago. But the costs, again, would prohibit almost anyone from doing that. Now anyone can use Google Earth or myriad similar utilities to learn a lot about almost anyone's private property. Along the same lines, you can find many people's address history for free now on things like Zabasearch, which could facilitate stalking or identity theft, where previously the costs of obtaining that information by hiring a private investigator, and the trail left by doing so, made obtaining this information practically prohibitive for most people. So my reasoning was wrong; changing the costs of accessing publicly available information can cause significant degradation of one's privacy.
All that said, my gut still tells me that this photographing your house thing isn't any big deal; I just no longer have a good argument for why.
I'm a proponent of strong privacy rights, but if they're just photographing the view of your house from the street, I fail to see how they're doing anything invasive of one's privacy, they're simply cataloging trivially publicly available information. Anyone can drive down the street and see the house. Presumably, on any given day, on most of these streets, hundreds or thousands of people drive down the street and see the house anyway.
Using something like a high-powered zoom lens to try to shoot pictures inside the house through the window, or trespassing on the property to better see the house, or driving a cherry picker down the street to take hard-to-get views over privacy fences and such would be different. But I don't see how the regular pedestrian view from the street can be considered "private." Presumably anybody with your address could get the same view by going there anytime. And to look it up in this company's database, presumably they've already got your address or could easily retrieve it from other sources. They're just changing the ease of access to this information, they aren't making any "private" information that wasn't previously accessible available, they're just changing the costs of accessing publicly available information.
If you care about people not obtaining information they can get from glancing at your house from the street, then you need a privacy fence or something to conceal that information.
By, "their music," you mean "Michael Jackson and Sony's music," right?
Actually, I'm bit confused on the whole "Apple Records" vs. "Sony/Michael Jackson" thing and what the difference is between "ownership" and "publishing rights" for music. Anyone want to clear this up?
"We will never, ever return to single processor computers"
Does anyone think that's anything other than a stupid thing to say?
I mean, maybe we never will, and maybe it's really unlikely that we will anytime soon. But it seems that anytime there's a real revolutionary (rather than evolutionary) jump in processors, we may well go back to a single "core." For example, if they invented a fully optical processor that was insanely faster than anything in silicon, but they were very expensive to produce per core, and the price scaled linearly with the number of cores... sounds like we'd have single core computers around again for a while. And what about quantum computers? I don't even know what a "core" would be for a quantum computer, but are they by nature going to have a design that works on multiple problems simultaneously without being able to use that capacity to work on an individual problem faster? Even if that is the case, does the author know that, or are they just ignoring any possibility of non-silicon architectures?
Even within silicon, is it out of the realm of conceivability that someone will develop a radical new architecture that can use more transistors to make a single core faster such that it's competitive with using the same transistor count for multiple cores?
Considering how computers have spent a good 40 years continuously changing more quickly than any other technology in history, I'd be a bit more reserved in making sweeping generalizations about all possible future developments that might occur in the next forever.
Still, computer scientists seem to be in rough agreement that current software development models mostly don't produce programs that are multi-threaded enough to take optimal advantage of the current trend toward increased cores. maybe it just sounds too boring when worded that way.
That's a lot of data, but it's less than 1/10 as much data as the Large Hadron Collider will put out, and the LHC is supposed to be coming online within a year, not in six years. By the time the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope comes online, the LHC may have produced more data than the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will over the life of the project.
I'd be interested to know more about the data handling methods they have in place for the LHC. I don't think they'll be using Excel.
*Note the correct, non-Frudian-Slip spelling of "hadron"
That reminds me of the opposite- a similar chain made for idiotic reasons out of expensive hardware. In high school, we had a Mac Lab with a daisy-chained localtalk network using node-boxes and telephone cords from one computer to another. The intelligent physics and math teacher who had been running the lab was too busy, so the school put an unqualified elementary teacher in charge of the lab. The yearbook staff was just moving to desktop publishing, and needed to be able to print. Some of their documents were too big to move on one floppy disk, and segmenting and rejoining files to print a test page is a serious pain in the ass. They didn't have the budget to buy themselves a laser printer (remember, it was either laser or dot matrix at the time, and dot matrix wouldn't handle their layouts), but the computer lab manager said he could connect them to the network so they could print on the shared printer. And he networked them exactly the same way the other machines in the lab were networked- with short, pre-made phone cords and node boxes. That's right- he chained about 12 node boxes in a row with phone cords to get a long enough chain to stretch through the lowered ceiling to the yearbook room.
This wasn't obsolete equipment- node boxes were $50 each. He spent $600 of the computer lab budget on node boxes to add one computer to the network. He could have just bought them a laser printer for that.
My friends and I found out he'd done it that way, and went out to Radio Shack and bought a 100-ft roll of telephone cord and some crimp-on ends and made a 100' cord, and replaced the chain of short cords and node-boxes in the ceiling. He was none the wiser, and we ended up with $600 worth of node boxes and about $50 in short, pre-made phone cables.
That's when we started having LAN parties. Previously, we couldn't afford the node boxes. After that, it was Bolo, Scepter, and other early network games all night.
Better yet, maybe it comes with a real life Clippy.
My favorite UFO in the news was when a local news station was doing a human interest series on local nut-jobs who made claims about the paranormal. They were very skeptical and generally debunking these people by showing up with a camera and recording it when the nut-jobs failed to produce anything paranormal, without actually confronting or insulting the people. They'd just done a bunch of ghost hunters the night before.
Then they interview "Prophet Yaweh" from Las Vegas who says that by reading the Old Testament of the Bible in Hebrew, he learned a secret that allows him to summon UFO's on command. So the news channel picked a date, time, and location, and Prophet Yaweh shows up, and immediately summons a UFO, throwing the story rather off track.
You forgot the word "beleaguered."
It's "Beleaguered Apple will be out of business in X years," with X usually approximately equal to 5.
I wonder if they're really buying a single solution to use on ALL their computers- I mean, I wonder how the NSA would feel about that. I have the feeling that they feel they're secure enough already and aren't going to weaken their security using some off-the-shelf product instead of whatever they're using now. I wonder if this will pass quietly, or if anyone will try to force this prescribed method of security on them.
In general, this is another piece of typical monolithic bureaucracy command and control. Something the size of the federal government would probably be better off NOT going with a single mandated vendor. Just mandate the security policy- all government computers must have fully encrypted hard drives- along with sufficient stipulations to define what that means and how it works. Let branches find their own solution providers. If they want economies of scale, they're free to band together to research and purchase solutions. Or they can do it by branch, or a branch can just set the requirements and let each of their departments work it out. But let them try something different if they want to.
It maintains more competition in the marketplace. If some department is unhappy, they can switch without trying to get the entire federal government to switch. If a department's unhappy, the ask other departments about their providers and implementations. Get some freedom, variation, and competition into the process. Also, one crack wouldn't simultaneously render all government computers vulnerable.
when I can get a real CD on Amazon for $10-12
... lala.com." Gotta love it.
Why not get your real CD's on lala for $1.75?
I have no affiliation with lala, except for that I joined last week, and have since shipped one old CD I don't want, and received two shiny new ones I did want, for a grand total of $3.50.
You may not be able to get everything you want right away, but hey, you can't beat the price.
And although they don't have to, they still pay musicians.
And their emailed Christmas card said "Fa la la la la
OK, OK, you don't have to love it. I thought it was funny. Leave me alone.
Yes, and the price he was quoted is 20,000 times more expensive than the price of my landline. The price they charged was 2,000,000 times more expensive than my landline.
What's you're point? Is everyone supposed to know off the top of their head that two million times the price per bit of a landline is reasonable, but twenty thousand times the price is just way too cheap?