The rumor is that George Lucas had nothing to do with the Star Wars Holiday Special and had just licensed it, and when he saw how terrible it was, he stormed around Hollywood personally destroying every copy. Well, in light of the second trilogy and especially the reviews of the new cartoon, I'm beginning to suspect that the old rumors need to be reexamined.
Doesn't it now seem more plausible in hindsight that through some incredible stroke of luck, Episode IV was brilliant, and then the next thing Lucas did himself was The Star Wars Holiday Special, and that was his real vision for the future direction of the series? Concerned people who revered the first movie managed to pry the writing and direction of the next two entries out of his hands following the total rejection of The Star Wars Holiday Special, and thus we ended up with Leigh Brackett (screenplay)/Irvin Kershner (director) on Episode V and Lawrence Kasdan (screenplay) and Richard Marquand (director) on Episode VI. But after many years, Lucas's friends and colleagues weren't still around and pressing so hard to try to beat some sense into him and maintain the quality they'd fought for following Lucas's first brilliant fluke and amazing failure. Thus came the second trilogy, where Lucas at least attempted to go more the first series route than the Holiday Special route due to memories of critical reception of Episode IV vs. Holiday Special, but still couldn't help himself from doing things like Jar Jar. And now he's almost into full relapse, with Baby Jaba sounding an awful lot like Lumpy.
Yes, I know the "Episode IV was a fluke" theory doesn't square so well with Lucas's pre-Star Wars movies being pretty good. Maybe we need to modify the theory- maybe sometime between Episode IV and The Holiday Special Lucas got hit on the head, or OD'd on something, or was deeply influenced by seeing The Care Bears or such (yes, I know they didn't come out for a few years after TSWHS, but maybe something similar). Anyway, just one interpretation.
I usually know what's going on here on Slashdot. Linux, Windows, OSX, internet memes, hardware, software, geek culture, etc, I usually understand the gist of the summary.
I have absolutely no idea what this story is about. Might as well be in Farsi. How many nerd points do I loose? Anyone want to fill me in for the benefit of anybody else in my shoes?
Yes, setting up manufacturing to make helical keys and the locks would be expensive. But copying helical keys, or picking helical locks, is orders of magnitude more difficult than straight keys. It's a really significant barrier.
They may be somewhat longer with more pins and have a couple of minor "security" features, but the main reason Medeco keys are "high security" as opposed to any regular key/lock you'd pick up at Home Depot is that Medeco has patents on their keys and they enforce those to make it illegal for standard key copiers at the local hardware store to carry blanks. To buy legal copies of Medeco keys, you have to go to Medeco, and they supposedly check to make sure they're selling the keys to authorized people. So "borrowing" the key for half an hour doesn't allow you to get copies made commercially. But that's the primary thing that's "high security" about them- otherwise they're about as copyable and pickable as most standard locks- and those are pretty low security.
Yeah, the Foxconn worker's single largest complaint was not being able to schedule enough overtime hours. Slaves have it rough, not being allowed to work as long as they want to.
I'm not seriously arguing they don't have it rough; it's just that there's fierce competition to get jobs at Foxconn, it's a desirable employer. It seems like very little pay to us, but it's enough for people to get ahead- to afford a better standard of living than their parents had, and to pay for their kids to be in school instead of laboring in a field, so they can go on to have a yet better standard of living. You usually don't find fierce competition to get into slavery. That's why I have little patience for the slavery comparison. Hard life? Yes. But what Apple's providing is an opportunity that's better than the even harder life these people would have had if Apple weren't hiring them. If it wasn't, these people wouldn't be doing it; while they don't live in a "free country" they are free to choose their jobs. Slavery rather implies involuntary servitude.
I agree that the unions have had a devastating impact on the American auto manufacturers. The unions shoot themselves in the foot, insuring that jobs will be lost in the future by radically increasing costs for American auto manufacturers, in an industry that already has really high pay and benefits.
But I'm not sure the term "mostly" is fair when describing the unions share of American auto manufacturing's woes. They've made plenty of huge mistakes at a management level. For one, they keep digging their own financial holes by running non-funded generous retirement programs. In other words, they're constantly committing to huge cash obligations in the future- a huge amount of the total compensation package they offer they don't actually pay out when the employee does the work, its' a promise of payments that will come in the future out of future revenues. Thus the American manufacturers have humongous costs in paying employees who retired 30 years ago. It's hard on the companies, and it's also scary for those employees, because if the company goes under, there goes their retirement, and scary for us taxpayers, because guess who bails out the retirement program? There's no reason to run it that way- retirement programs should be fully funded- that is, the money for retirement is payed into a retirement fund at the same time as the employee's wages.
They also routinely get their clocks cleaned by the Japanese on automotive trends and engineering- fuel economy, size, and reliability in the 80's, reliability and a total reformulation of luxury cars in the 90's, and fuel economy and size all over again in the 00's.
Results were as expected: the TSA operates a security theater.
Anyway, while us über-rational Slashdotters disdain security theater because we only care about real security, Bruce Schneier, who coined the term "security theater," points out that security theater can help bring inaccurate perceptions of security closer inline with reality. It's not an entirely worthless effort, if it helps misinformed people make more efficient tradeoffs by bringing their mistaken perceptions closer inline with reality. Even if we could force everyone to study statistics and learn the real dangers in their lives so that they could act in better accordance with reality, it's not clear that's necessarily a good thing. There are significant costs involved with education and information that would have to be weighed against the benefits of modifying people's behavior to act more rationally when considering danger.
Our rights are inalienable. Not just inalienable by the government, but by anyone.
Name any right that the government does not abridge in certain cases. Going down The Bill Of Rights, the Third Amendment is the only one where I'm not aware of the government revoking it.
Nothing like blanket statements like "all cops would have an issue with being videotaped"
There is, in fact, nothing like a blanket statement of that sort in my post that you replied too.
I know at least one nice, honest, hardworking cop whom I'd trust, and he ran for Sheriff and won, so that's promising.
But one of the worst, most evil bullies I knew in school grew up to become a cop; a racist, hate-filled person who was also sniveling and cowered in fear at anything that presented danger to himself or appeared strong, but loved to torture the weak- beat up and terrorized much younger kids. Later, he dealt drugs. When he made friends, he'd double cross them and steal from them. I shudder to think what he does as a cop.
Another cop in the community has repeatedly refused to put it in his police reports when battered women want to press charges against their abusers. He puts down that they don't want to press charges when they tell him that they do. Later, his wife was hospitalized when he beat her within an inch of her life. She finally filed for divorce, but he'd been beating her for years, all of which time he'd been a cop. It wasn't just sudden fits of rage or such that he then regretted, he was basically of the opinion that all men should beat their wives, and if he was out on a spousal abuse call, he'd just tell the women to shut up abut it if they knew what was good for them. He wouldn't arrest abusers, would hide attempts to press charges, and would deliver abused women who had escaped back to the abusers in his police car.
I'm sure there are honest cops out there, and as I said, I knew one. Some people go into policing because they really care, they really want to see the right thing done, like an unglorified, mini-super hero, who just wants to do their part for justice. That's great, and I really respect those people. But my overwhelming experience with cops is the exact opposite; the people - whom I suspect are a majority - who go into policing because they crave power over others, and want to be above the law themselves.
You certainly need a hidden camera. If you inform them of your camera (or it's obvious), then as others have stated, it'll probably get smashed and any recordings destroyed. And if they were already doing something wrong, if they destroy your camera, then they're probably about to do something a lot more wrong to you.
On my street (not a particularly good part of town; old, blue-collar, and multi-ethnic, though not particularly run-down or dangerous) the cops came to arrest someone, and when they got him out of his house, he was making some noises about resisting arrest and being somewhat disorderly. If I were a cop, I'd certainly have been prepared for trouble, the way he was acting. But one of the cops came over and told everyone who had gathered on the opposing sidewalk, about 30 feet away, that we had to disperse and couldn't watch. My landlord argued with him, asking why he couldn't stand on a public sidewalk near his house, well away from what was going on, and watch what happened in his neighborhood. The cop told him that if he didn't walk out of viewing distance, they'd arrest him. The cop said it was for the privacy of the person being arrested. Yea, right. The cops didn't want any witnesses around before they went to town on this guy. First person experience.
Even when the cops have been required by law to keep everything on camera and keep the footage, they'll still go turn the camera off illegally and beat the #*$ out of someone. Who's going to arrest them, they're a cop? More info on that one here At least the cop was fired, eventually, but not prosecuted or anything. He's appealing the decision.
And this guy has a whole series of videos he posts online catching cops doing illegal things. I wonder how long until he get his camera confiscated and nasty things happen to him off film? Also, see this.
That, plus the possible development of various "bug eye" type non-lensed photography methods could be bad news for the long-term viability of lens manufacturers. It may be sort of like Kodak in the early 90's- the vast majority of their profits came from film, and it was obvious film was rapidly heading towards obsolescence. The verdict's certainly not in yet on lenses the way it was on film. But what do you do, if you're a giant, successful corporation, but it's clear you're basically a modern-day buggy manufacturer; your primary market and core competency as a company may become obsolete.
Everyone in this forum seems to keep discussing legal barriers to clones, but I think Apple's much more likely to introduce software barriers in reaction to this.
Steve's fine with random nerds playing around with his OS and building their own hackintoshes. I expect Steve wouldn't mind at all if everyone in the market for building their own computer builds a hackintosh, Apple doesn't care about the sales from that market segment, and Jobs likes hackers playing around with his OS and submitting bug reports, writing clever tools, etc.
Selling computers that run OSX off the shelf isn't even new- plenty of Thinkpads could run OSX simply by inserting an OSX installation CD and clicking "install." Apple never went after them. The thing is, they didn't advertise it, and it wasn't every model.
Click-here-to-buy, off-the-shelf, advertised clones are another matter entirely. Psystar painted a giant legal target on their own back, so if Apple wanted them to go away, that was an easy way to make it happen. But Apple's not going to bother pressing a hard to win EULA legal case that they could actually lose. They'll just make OSX's future iterations not work on the clones. And if the clone makers adapt, they'll do it over and over again. And if that keeps happening, Apple might get really obnoxious about using "secure computing" hardware lockdown tools. But who's going to put up with clones if every software update Apple releases breaks your computer again?
Yes, I know Darwin's open source, but there's a lot more than Darwin on an OSX install CD. It won't seem like a usable version of OSX to most people even with just the closed-source components locked down.
You make it sound like "features" exist on some continuum, where you can always add more, but stability, security, and optimization are some binary quantities where the OS either has them or does not. If it doesn't, then you're getting ripped off. If they say they're going to improve the features of the OS, you say "OK, that's worth paying for," but if they say they're going to improve one of the other three things, than you take that as evidence hat it didn't have those to begin with. Why not say "whoa, why should I pay for new features- it's just admitting that there were useful features that should have been here in the last release."
In reality, all four of these things exist on a continuum. OSX Leopard is very stable, hasn't had any serious security compromises in the wild, and isn't particularly slow either. It stacks up well against the competition. Yet, there have been things around before like BeOS- sure, it had its problems, but it was just blazingly, impressively fast, and it was beautifully, wonderfully responsive. OSX could be like that. And while OSX hasn't been the subject of major security exploits, researchers say the vulnerabilities are out there. And while it rarely kernel crashes, it certainly does sometimes.
So Apple sells an OS with a nice, competitive feature set, great stability, apparently effective security, and decent optimization. They need to decide what to do with their developer time for the next release. If they concentrate on features, they can make approximately $300 million dollars off it in the first week of selling it. If they concentrate on making it super stable, blazingly fast and responsive, or having security like a hardened SELinux or OpenBSD installation, then the attitude is "Why didn't they do that already for free? I'm not paying for that."
That attitude makes short-term profit motivation favor lots of new features with half-assed security, stability, and optimization. It takes someone visionary like Jobs to back of and say "look, we can't make a quick buck off this other stuff like we can some shiny new widgets, but these things have a big impact on user experience, which will affect the long-term viability of our platform, so we're spending money on it anyway."
But if users would just consider features, security, stability, and optimization all as things worth paying for, there'd be a lot more competition to deliver them.
Autostitch looks interesting for stitching, but unless you used your phone cam with forethought of stitching a panorama, and shot your subject with a dozen overlapping closeups carefully arranged to cover your intended field for panorama stitching, it's not going to help here. I take it the grandparent poster has a bunch of pictures of essentially the same composition, that are all blurry. Photoshop will auto-align these for you, but adjusting a bunch of aligned blurry pictures to increase the apparent resolution isn't so easy.
No, it means you're finally in a class that the government is going to pile regulations, restrictions, and blame upon. Like smokers, you were already "raising our healthcare costs," and now you're supposedly being a public nuisance by using up all of our fuel too. Expect a big Surgeon General's Warning on the top of your Monster Thickburger, a $9 per package tax on your Twinkies (or you can risk arrest for buying black-market Twinkies smuggled in from West Virginia), a ban on fat people eating unhealthy foods in public places because it may encourage other people to do the same, and a ban on advertising unhealthy foods. Expect the government's definition of "unhealthy" to have an amazing correlation with how much the industry giant that manufacturers a food donates to politicians, and little correlation with any controlled scientific studies of the effects of eating it.
You may get some subsidies, though. Medicare will probably pay for a dietician to tell you what some corporation paid them to tell you to eat. If you're really lucky, the government will take your tax money and buy that food for you with your own money.
There's no problem or "epidemic" that's so bad that it can't be made worse by having the government try to fix it.
Richard Feynman was on to this patent-troll problem with the system back in the early 1940's. He recounts his experience with patenting the obvious while working at Los Alamos on pg.181 of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
What had happened was, during the war at Los Alamos, there was a very
nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain
Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, "We
in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United
States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on
nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about,
everybody doesn't know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea."
I see Smith at lunch, and as we're walking back to the technical area,
I say to him, "That note you sent around: That's kind of crazy to have us
come in and tell you every idea."
We discussed it back and forth -- by this time we're in his office --
and I say, "There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so
perfectly obvious, that I'd be here all day telling you stuff."
"LIKE WHAT?"
"Nothin' to it!" I say. "Example: nuclear reactor... under water...
water goes in... steam goes out the other side... Pshshshsht -- it's a
submarine. Or: nuclear reactor... air comes rushing in the front... heated
up by nuclear reaction... out the back it goes... Boom! Through the air --
it's an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor... you have hydrogen go through the
thing... Zoom! -- it's a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor... only instead of
using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium, with beryllium oxide at
high temperature to make it more efficient... It's an electrical power
plant. There's a million ideas!" I said, as I went out the door. Nothing
happened.
About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says,
"Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are
yours." So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning
their laboratory, and try to find out who's an expert in rocket-propelled
whatnots, there's nothing to it: They look at who's got the patent on it!
Any smart person could sit around a brainstorm up a hundred obvious things that were patentable in a day, and then when someone else actually wanted to do it, they were held up by the existing patent. It was all the same back then. Except now, the patent office lets you patent even more ludicrous things, like business methods and software code implementations.
There are plenty of other replies pointing out that you're wrong about USB (the beige G3 desktop & tower that came before the iMac did NOT have firewire, and the blue & white G3 tower with USB came AFTER the iMac) but you're also wrong about SCSI. Yes, computers like the Quadra 630 & it's ilk had internal IDE instead of SCSI so they could use cheaper hard drives and CD drives, but they ALL still had the same 25-pin SCSI connector, like all Macs going back to the Mac Plus from 1986, for all your old Mac SCSI peripherals.
Yes, the "all in one," "works out of the box" aspect was important, but don't underestimate the iMac's incisive break of backwards compatibility with the past 11 years of Apple peripherals. It was unprecedented.
Of course Apple's going to push the iPhone as a gaming platform- they'd be stupid not to. Why? Because it already IS the platform- they're already selling a mobile device with the form factor, screen, and processing power required for a good handheld gaming system. So failing to make it into one simply due to lack of the games themselves would basically be silly. I don't think Apple set out to build a competitor for the DS & PSP, but if they're selling competitive hardware anyway, why on earth wouldn't they want to make it compete? Especially if doing so is as simple as beefing up the SDK with gaming API's and encouraging independent developers to do the rest. And there's really not any question about that, because Apple's already done that. They invited in game developers to use their new SDK, and the game developers say they're impressed with what a great game development platform Apple's made the iPhone. It seems that this is yesterday's news; Apple already announced the iPhone as a portable gaming platform, and already has major game developers on board. This article is speculating that Apple might do something that Steve said they've already done in his last keynote.
If you want crazy theories about what Apple could do as far as gaming goes... how about, instead of selling Mac Pros with two quad-core Xeons, they start making them with one quad-core Xeon and one Cell. Sure, it would take a mountain of work to make Xcode optimize its compiler to execute code for running on two different architectures simultaneously, especially one as odd as the Cell, but Xcode already generates universal binaries for x86 and PPC at the click of a button, and Apple's got the resources these days to make Xcode optimize as much as possible for the Cell, and make decisions about which code to run on the cell and which to run on the Xeon.
Why would they try a crazy architecture like that? Well, in the markets Mac Pros are aimed at; video editing, rendering, Photoshop, scientific computing- Cells can, in certain circumstances, run circles around the competition. It could grant a speed advantage for certain tasks that Windows PC's would have no hope of matching. Throw in a quad Xeon, a Cell, and finish up making the OS offload some processing to the graphics card, and you've got a computer with three extremely different and very fast processors to throw at different sorts of problems.
But wait, didn't I say something about games? Well, if you're selling a computer with a Cell in it already, along with a graphics card, (how long could it be before Apple starts offering Blu-ray on Mac Pros...), could they license PS3 compatibility from Sony? They wouldn't even have to license it, Sony could sell a PS3 compatibility client for Mac Pros. Before you say "Sony would never do that," remember that Sony loses money on each PS3- they're in this for market dominance, not hardware profits.
Anyway, that's my crazy conspiracy theory regarding Apple gaming, to go with the "already happened so it's not even news" theory regarding iPhone gaming above.
Out of millions of high-school age couples around the world who are sexually active, you find a single instance where an even younger couple was prosecuted. I think you'll find the investigation and prosecution rate for known child pornographers to be significantly different from the investigation and prosecution rate for people under 18 who are known or suspected of having lost their virginity. In fact, these rates are so very significantly different, I'd say that my point stands.
The common act of underage sex is tolerated by our society, where the act of filming and selling it is vigorously prosecuted. Finding a single underage couple who actually was prosecuted no more defeats my argument than finding a single child pornographer who wasn't convicted would.
Lord Wallace's assertion currently runs counter to the biggest, most vigorously prosecuted class of illegal pornography: underage pornography.
"If no sexual offence is being committed it seems very odd indeed that there should be an offence for having an image of something which was not an offence... Having engaged in it consensually would not be a crime, but to have a photograph of it in one's possession would be a crime. That does not seem to make sense to me."
This is true for porn involving only minors. If two sixteen year olds (or something under the consent age wherever you are) have consensual sex with each other, that's effectively legal, at least to the extent neither of them are going to be prosecuted. What, did they each commit statutory rape by having sex with a minor? Do you prosecute them both for raping each other? In reality, if this is even illegal at all, it's ignored. But taking pictures of it, having those pictures, selling those pictures, that's highly illegal. So we already have the situation he's describing as "very odd indeed."
I think the current laws operate on the presumption that, if you're photographing it, you "put them up to it." While this would, in most cases regarding underage pornography, be true, I don't think there's any sort of legal distinction being made here. That is, if you're trafficking in underage pornography, I don't think the prosecutors care whether you recruited kids and put them up to it, or whether you used a hidden camera to unknowingly capture what kids were doing entirely on their own. In the former case, you probably can be charged with corrupting a minor or such if you encourage or facilitate sex between minors regardless of the pornography aspect, so Lord Wallace's assertion doesn't apply to that scenario, the act itself is illegal. But in the later case, we're dealing with exactly the same situation as the one they're currently trying to criminalize- an act where it's not illegal for the minors to engage in sex, but it's hellaciously illegal to document and sell it.
I'm certainly NOT arguing in favor of this new law- I think that pretty much any act taking place between and affecting only consenting adults should be legal. I'm also not arguing againts the existing laws categorically banning underage pornography. I'm just pointing out that Lord Wallace's objection makes it sound like this would create an unusual and novel situation because it would be illegal to record an otherwise legal act. This is not the case, it's already illegal to record otherwise legal sexual acts.
That's great, except that to the extent that it is gradually broken down by bacteria, in a dump, it's done anaerobically, which releases methane gas instead of just carbon dioxide. And methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Dumps emit a whole lot of methane, which more than offsets any carbon sequestration going on there.
Slashdot Mirror
The rumor is that George Lucas had nothing to do with the Star Wars Holiday Special and had just licensed it, and when he saw how terrible it was, he stormed around Hollywood personally destroying every copy. Well, in light of the second trilogy and especially the reviews of the new cartoon, I'm beginning to suspect that the old rumors need to be reexamined.
Doesn't it now seem more plausible in hindsight that through some incredible stroke of luck, Episode IV was brilliant, and then the next thing Lucas did himself was The Star Wars Holiday Special, and that was his real vision for the future direction of the series? Concerned people who revered the first movie managed to pry the writing and direction of the next two entries out of his hands following the total rejection of The Star Wars Holiday Special, and thus we ended up with Leigh Brackett (screenplay)/Irvin Kershner (director) on Episode V and Lawrence Kasdan (screenplay) and Richard Marquand (director) on Episode VI. But after many years, Lucas's friends and colleagues weren't still around and pressing so hard to try to beat some sense into him and maintain the quality they'd fought for following Lucas's first brilliant fluke and amazing failure. Thus came the second trilogy, where Lucas at least attempted to go more the first series route than the Holiday Special route due to memories of critical reception of Episode IV vs. Holiday Special, but still couldn't help himself from doing things like Jar Jar. And now he's almost into full relapse, with Baby Jaba sounding an awful lot like Lumpy.
Yes, I know the "Episode IV was a fluke" theory doesn't square so well with Lucas's pre-Star Wars movies being pretty good. Maybe we need to modify the theory- maybe sometime between Episode IV and The Holiday Special Lucas got hit on the head, or OD'd on something, or was deeply influenced by seeing The Care Bears or such (yes, I know they didn't come out for a few years after TSWHS, but maybe something similar). Anyway, just one interpretation.
I usually know what's going on here on Slashdot. Linux, Windows, OSX, internet memes, hardware, software, geek culture, etc, I usually understand the gist of the summary.
I have absolutely no idea what this story is about. Might as well be in Farsi. How many nerd points do I loose? Anyone want to fill me in for the benefit of anybody else in my shoes?
Yes, setting up manufacturing to make helical keys and the locks would be expensive. But copying helical keys, or picking helical locks, is orders of magnitude more difficult than straight keys. It's a really significant barrier.
They may be somewhat longer with more pins and have a couple of minor "security" features, but the main reason Medeco keys are "high security" as opposed to any regular key/lock you'd pick up at Home Depot is that Medeco has patents on their keys and they enforce those to make it illegal for standard key copiers at the local hardware store to carry blanks. To buy legal copies of Medeco keys, you have to go to Medeco, and they supposedly check to make sure they're selling the keys to authorized people. So "borrowing" the key for half an hour doesn't allow you to get copies made commercially. But that's the primary thing that's "high security" about them- otherwise they're about as copyable and pickable as most standard locks- and those are pretty low security.
Yeah, the Foxconn worker's single largest complaint was not being able to schedule enough overtime hours. Slaves have it rough, not being allowed to work as long as they want to.
I'm not seriously arguing they don't have it rough; it's just that there's fierce competition to get jobs at Foxconn, it's a desirable employer. It seems like very little pay to us, but it's enough for people to get ahead- to afford a better standard of living than their parents had, and to pay for their kids to be in school instead of laboring in a field, so they can go on to have a yet better standard of living. You usually don't find fierce competition to get into slavery. That's why I have little patience for the slavery comparison. Hard life? Yes. But what Apple's providing is an opportunity that's better than the even harder life these people would have had if Apple weren't hiring them. If it wasn't, these people wouldn't be doing it; while they don't live in a "free country" they are free to choose their jobs. Slavery rather implies involuntary servitude.
mostly because of overbearing union activity
I agree that the unions have had a devastating impact on the American auto manufacturers. The unions shoot themselves in the foot, insuring that jobs will be lost in the future by radically increasing costs for American auto manufacturers, in an industry that already has really high pay and benefits.
But I'm not sure the term "mostly" is fair when describing the unions share of American auto manufacturing's woes. They've made plenty of huge mistakes at a management level. For one, they keep digging their own financial holes by running non-funded generous retirement programs. In other words, they're constantly committing to huge cash obligations in the future- a huge amount of the total compensation package they offer they don't actually pay out when the employee does the work, its' a promise of payments that will come in the future out of future revenues. Thus the American manufacturers have humongous costs in paying employees who retired 30 years ago. It's hard on the companies, and it's also scary for those employees, because if the company goes under, there goes their retirement, and scary for us taxpayers, because guess who bails out the retirement program? There's no reason to run it that way- retirement programs should be fully funded- that is, the money for retirement is payed into a retirement fund at the same time as the employee's wages.
They also routinely get their clocks cleaned by the Japanese on automotive trends and engineering- fuel economy, size, and reliability in the 80's, reliability and a total reformulation of luxury cars in the 90's, and fuel economy and size all over again in the 00's.
But anyone who showed that it could be done would be arrested and spend serious jail time.
Not anyone. The GAO already did this.
Results were as expected: the TSA operates a security theater.
Anyway, while us über-rational Slashdotters disdain security theater because we only care about real security, Bruce Schneier, who coined the term "security theater," points out that security theater can help bring inaccurate perceptions of security closer inline with reality. It's not an entirely worthless effort, if it helps misinformed people make more efficient tradeoffs by bringing their mistaken perceptions closer inline with reality. Even if we could force everyone to study statistics and learn the real dangers in their lives so that they could act in better accordance with reality, it's not clear that's necessarily a good thing. There are significant costs involved with education and information that would have to be weighed against the benefits of modifying people's behavior to act more rationally when considering danger.
Our rights are inalienable. Not just inalienable by the government, but by anyone.
Name any right that the government does not abridge in certain cases. Going down The Bill Of Rights, the Third Amendment is the only one where I'm not aware of the government revoking it.
Nothing like blanket statements like "all cops would have an issue with being videotaped"
There is, in fact, nothing like a blanket statement of that sort in my post that you replied too.
I know at least one nice, honest, hardworking cop whom I'd trust, and he ran for Sheriff and won, so that's promising.
But one of the worst, most evil bullies I knew in school grew up to become a cop; a racist, hate-filled person who was also sniveling and cowered in fear at anything that presented danger to himself or appeared strong, but loved to torture the weak- beat up and terrorized much younger kids. Later, he dealt drugs. When he made friends, he'd double cross them and steal from them. I shudder to think what he does as a cop.
Another cop in the community has repeatedly refused to put it in his police reports when battered women want to press charges against their abusers. He puts down that they don't want to press charges when they tell him that they do. Later, his wife was hospitalized when he beat her within an inch of her life. She finally filed for divorce, but he'd been beating her for years, all of which time he'd been a cop. It wasn't just sudden fits of rage or such that he then regretted, he was basically of the opinion that all men should beat their wives, and if he was out on a spousal abuse call, he'd just tell the women to shut up abut it if they knew what was good for them. He wouldn't arrest abusers, would hide attempts to press charges, and would deliver abused women who had escaped back to the abusers in his police car.
I'm sure there are honest cops out there, and as I said, I knew one. Some people go into policing because they really care, they really want to see the right thing done, like an unglorified, mini-super hero, who just wants to do their part for justice. That's great, and I really respect those people. But my overwhelming experience with cops is the exact opposite; the people - whom I suspect are a majority - who go into policing because they crave power over others, and want to be above the law themselves.
I think they should turn the new network on on April 19th, 2011.
You certainly need a hidden camera. If you inform them of your camera (or it's obvious), then as others have stated, it'll probably get smashed and any recordings destroyed. And if they were already doing something wrong, if they destroy your camera, then they're probably about to do something a lot more wrong to you.
On my street (not a particularly good part of town; old, blue-collar, and multi-ethnic, though not particularly run-down or dangerous) the cops came to arrest someone, and when they got him out of his house, he was making some noises about resisting arrest and being somewhat disorderly. If I were a cop, I'd certainly have been prepared for trouble, the way he was acting. But one of the cops came over and told everyone who had gathered on the opposing sidewalk, about 30 feet away, that we had to disperse and couldn't watch. My landlord argued with him, asking why he couldn't stand on a public sidewalk near his house, well away from what was going on, and watch what happened in his neighborhood. The cop told him that if he didn't walk out of viewing distance, they'd arrest him. The cop said it was for the privacy of the person being arrested. Yea, right. The cops didn't want any witnesses around before they went to town on this guy. First person experience.
Even when the cops have been required by law to keep everything on camera and keep the footage, they'll still go turn the camera off illegally and beat the #*$ out of someone. Who's going to arrest them, they're a cop? More info on that one here At least the cop was fired, eventually, but not prosecuted or anything. He's appealing the decision.
Although sometimes, they don't destroy the evidence. And other times, people do get away with videos of cops being idiots unmolested.
And this guy has a whole series of videos he posts online catching cops doing illegal things. I wonder how long until he get his camera confiscated and nasty things happen to him off film? Also, see this.
Well, my first thought was "bad news for Nikon"
That, plus the possible development of various "bug eye" type non-lensed photography methods could be bad news for the long-term viability of lens manufacturers. It may be sort of like Kodak in the early 90's- the vast majority of their profits came from film, and it was obvious film was rapidly heading towards obsolescence. The verdict's certainly not in yet on lenses the way it was on film. But what do you do, if you're a giant, successful corporation, but it's clear you're basically a modern-day buggy manufacturer; your primary market and core competency as a company may become obsolete.
Everyone in this forum seems to keep discussing legal barriers to clones, but I think Apple's much more likely to introduce software barriers in reaction to this.
Steve's fine with random nerds playing around with his OS and building their own hackintoshes. I expect Steve wouldn't mind at all if everyone in the market for building their own computer builds a hackintosh, Apple doesn't care about the sales from that market segment, and Jobs likes hackers playing around with his OS and submitting bug reports, writing clever tools, etc.
Selling computers that run OSX off the shelf isn't even new- plenty of Thinkpads could run OSX simply by inserting an OSX installation CD and clicking "install." Apple never went after them. The thing is, they didn't advertise it, and it wasn't every model.
Click-here-to-buy, off-the-shelf, advertised clones are another matter entirely. Psystar painted a giant legal target on their own back, so if Apple wanted them to go away, that was an easy way to make it happen. But Apple's not going to bother pressing a hard to win EULA legal case that they could actually lose. They'll just make OSX's future iterations not work on the clones. And if the clone makers adapt, they'll do it over and over again. And if that keeps happening, Apple might get really obnoxious about using "secure computing" hardware lockdown tools. But who's going to put up with clones if every software update Apple releases breaks your computer again?
Yes, I know Darwin's open source, but there's a lot more than Darwin on an OSX install CD. It won't seem like a usable version of OSX to most people even with just the closed-source components locked down.
And has he said whether or not he's one of them?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
You make it sound like "features" exist on some continuum, where you can always add more, but stability, security, and optimization are some binary quantities where the OS either has them or does not. If it doesn't, then you're getting ripped off. If they say they're going to improve the features of the OS, you say "OK, that's worth paying for," but if they say they're going to improve one of the other three things, than you take that as evidence hat it didn't have those to begin with. Why not say "whoa, why should I pay for new features- it's just admitting that there were useful features that should have been here in the last release."
In reality, all four of these things exist on a continuum. OSX Leopard is very stable, hasn't had any serious security compromises in the wild, and isn't particularly slow either. It stacks up well against the competition. Yet, there have been things around before like BeOS- sure, it had its problems, but it was just blazingly, impressively fast, and it was beautifully, wonderfully responsive. OSX could be like that. And while OSX hasn't been the subject of major security exploits, researchers say the vulnerabilities are out there. And while it rarely kernel crashes, it certainly does sometimes.
So Apple sells an OS with a nice, competitive feature set, great stability, apparently effective security, and decent optimization. They need to decide what to do with their developer time for the next release. If they concentrate on features, they can make approximately $300 million dollars off it in the first week of selling it. If they concentrate on making it super stable, blazingly fast and responsive, or having security like a hardened SELinux or OpenBSD installation, then the attitude is "Why didn't they do that already for free? I'm not paying for that."
That attitude makes short-term profit motivation favor lots of new features with half-assed security, stability, and optimization. It takes someone visionary like Jobs to back of and say "look, we can't make a quick buck off this other stuff like we can some shiny new widgets, but these things have a big impact on user experience, which will affect the long-term viability of our platform, so we're spending money on it anyway."
But if users would just consider features, security, stability, and optimization all as things worth paying for, there'd be a lot more competition to deliver them.
And thus Microsoft dominates. The prevailing attitude is to pay for new features, but not to pay for stability, security, or optimization.
Autostitch looks interesting for stitching, but unless you used your phone cam with forethought of stitching a panorama, and shot your subject with a dozen overlapping closeups carefully arranged to cover your intended field for panorama stitching, it's not going to help here. I take it the grandparent poster has a bunch of pictures of essentially the same composition, that are all blurry. Photoshop will auto-align these for you, but adjusting a bunch of aligned blurry pictures to increase the apparent resolution isn't so easy.
Look at a program called Photoacute>, which is geared specifically toward stacking images with identical framing to increase clarity- by pixel averaging to reduce noise, depth of field stacking to reduce out-of-focus blurriness, or both.
No, it means you're finally in a class that the government is going to pile regulations, restrictions, and blame upon. Like smokers, you were already "raising our healthcare costs," and now you're supposedly being a public nuisance by using up all of our fuel too. Expect a big Surgeon General's Warning on the top of your Monster Thickburger, a $9 per package tax on your Twinkies (or you can risk arrest for buying black-market Twinkies smuggled in from West Virginia), a ban on fat people eating unhealthy foods in public places because it may encourage other people to do the same, and a ban on advertising unhealthy foods. Expect the government's definition of "unhealthy" to have an amazing correlation with how much the industry giant that manufacturers a food donates to politicians, and little correlation with any controlled scientific studies of the effects of eating it.
You may get some subsidies, though. Medicare will probably pay for a dietician to tell you what some corporation paid them to tell you to eat. If you're really lucky, the government will take your tax money and buy that food for you with your own money.
There's no problem or "epidemic" that's so bad that it can't be made worse by having the government try to fix it.
What had happened was, during the war at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, "We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about, everybody doesn't know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea." I see Smith at lunch, and as we're walking back to the technical area, I say to him, "That note you sent around: That's kind of crazy to have us come in and tell you every idea." We discussed it back and forth -- by this time we're in his office -- and I say, "There are so many ideas about nuclear energy that are so perfectly obvious, that I'd be here all day telling you stuff." "LIKE WHAT?" "Nothin' to it!" I say. "Example: nuclear reactor... under water... water goes in... steam goes out the other side... Pshshshsht -- it's a submarine. Or: nuclear reactor... air comes rushing in the front... heated up by nuclear reaction... out the back it goes... Boom! Through the air -- it's an airplane. Or: nuclear reactor... you have hydrogen go through the thing... Zoom! -- it's a rocket. Or: nuclear reactor... only instead of using ordinary uranium, you use enriched uranium, with beryllium oxide at high temperature to make it more efficient... It's an electrical power plant. There's a million ideas!" I said, as I went out the door. Nothing happened. About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, "Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours." So when the guys at the airplane company in California are planning their laboratory, and try to find out who's an expert in rocket-propelled whatnots, there's nothing to it: They look at who's got the patent on it!
Any smart person could sit around a brainstorm up a hundred obvious things that were patentable in a day, and then when someone else actually wanted to do it, they were held up by the existing patent. It was all the same back then. Except now, the patent office lets you patent even more ludicrous things, like business methods and software code implementations.
It was probably named after Pippin as in "Merry & Pippin."
There are plenty of other replies pointing out that you're wrong about USB (the beige G3 desktop & tower that came before the iMac did NOT have firewire, and the blue & white G3 tower with USB came AFTER the iMac) but you're also wrong about SCSI. Yes, computers like the Quadra 630 & it's ilk had internal IDE instead of SCSI so they could use cheaper hard drives and CD drives, but they ALL still had the same 25-pin SCSI connector, like all Macs going back to the Mac Plus from 1986, for all your old Mac SCSI peripherals.
Yes, the "all in one," "works out of the box" aspect was important, but don't underestimate the iMac's incisive break of backwards compatibility with the past 11 years of Apple peripherals. It was unprecedented.
Of course Apple's going to push the iPhone as a gaming platform- they'd be stupid not to. Why? Because it already IS the platform- they're already selling a mobile device with the form factor, screen, and processing power required for a good handheld gaming system. So failing to make it into one simply due to lack of the games themselves would basically be silly. I don't think Apple set out to build a competitor for the DS & PSP, but if they're selling competitive hardware anyway, why on earth wouldn't they want to make it compete? Especially if doing so is as simple as beefing up the SDK with gaming API's and encouraging independent developers to do the rest. And there's really not any question about that, because Apple's already done that. They invited in game developers to use their new SDK, and the game developers say they're impressed with what a great game development platform Apple's made the iPhone. It seems that this is yesterday's news; Apple already announced the iPhone as a portable gaming platform, and already has major game developers on board. This article is speculating that Apple might do something that Steve said they've already done in his last keynote.
If you want crazy theories about what Apple could do as far as gaming goes... how about, instead of selling Mac Pros with two quad-core Xeons, they start making them with one quad-core Xeon and one Cell. Sure, it would take a mountain of work to make Xcode optimize its compiler to execute code for running on two different architectures simultaneously, especially one as odd as the Cell, but Xcode already generates universal binaries for x86 and PPC at the click of a button, and Apple's got the resources these days to make Xcode optimize as much as possible for the Cell, and make decisions about which code to run on the cell and which to run on the Xeon.
Why would they try a crazy architecture like that? Well, in the markets Mac Pros are aimed at; video editing, rendering, Photoshop, scientific computing- Cells can, in certain circumstances, run circles around the competition. It could grant a speed advantage for certain tasks that Windows PC's would have no hope of matching. Throw in a quad Xeon, a Cell, and finish up making the OS offload some processing to the graphics card, and you've got a computer with three extremely different and very fast processors to throw at different sorts of problems.
But wait, didn't I say something about games? Well, if you're selling a computer with a Cell in it already, along with a graphics card, (how long could it be before Apple starts offering Blu-ray on Mac Pros...), could they license PS3 compatibility from Sony? They wouldn't even have to license it, Sony could sell a PS3 compatibility client for Mac Pros. Before you say "Sony would never do that," remember that Sony loses money on each PS3- they're in this for market dominance, not hardware profits.
Anyway, that's my crazy conspiracy theory regarding Apple gaming, to go with the "already happened so it's not even news" theory regarding iPhone gaming above.
Out of millions of high-school age couples around the world who are sexually active, you find a single instance where an even younger couple was prosecuted. I think you'll find the investigation and prosecution rate for known child pornographers to be significantly different from the investigation and prosecution rate for people under 18 who are known or suspected of having lost their virginity. In fact, these rates are so very significantly different, I'd say that my point stands.
The common act of underage sex is tolerated by our society, where the act of filming and selling it is vigorously prosecuted. Finding a single underage couple who actually was prosecuted no more defeats my argument than finding a single child pornographer who wasn't convicted would.
"If no sexual offence is being committed it seems very odd indeed that there should be an offence for having an image of something which was not an offence... Having engaged in it consensually would not be a crime, but to have a photograph of it in one's possession would be a crime. That does not seem to make sense to me."
This is true for porn involving only minors. If two sixteen year olds (or something under the consent age wherever you are) have consensual sex with each other, that's effectively legal, at least to the extent neither of them are going to be prosecuted. What, did they each commit statutory rape by having sex with a minor? Do you prosecute them both for raping each other? In reality, if this is even illegal at all, it's ignored. But taking pictures of it, having those pictures, selling those pictures, that's highly illegal. So we already have the situation he's describing as "very odd indeed."
I think the current laws operate on the presumption that, if you're photographing it, you "put them up to it." While this would, in most cases regarding underage pornography, be true, I don't think there's any sort of legal distinction being made here. That is, if you're trafficking in underage pornography, I don't think the prosecutors care whether you recruited kids and put them up to it, or whether you used a hidden camera to unknowingly capture what kids were doing entirely on their own. In the former case, you probably can be charged with corrupting a minor or such if you encourage or facilitate sex between minors regardless of the pornography aspect, so Lord Wallace's assertion doesn't apply to that scenario, the act itself is illegal. But in the later case, we're dealing with exactly the same situation as the one they're currently trying to criminalize- an act where it's not illegal for the minors to engage in sex, but it's hellaciously illegal to document and sell it.
I'm certainly NOT arguing in favor of this new law- I think that pretty much any act taking place between and affecting only consenting adults should be legal. I'm also not arguing againts the existing laws categorically banning underage pornography. I'm just pointing out that Lord Wallace's objection makes it sound like this would create an unusual and novel situation because it would be illegal to record an otherwise legal act. This is not the case, it's already illegal to record otherwise legal sexual acts.
That's great, except that to the extent that it is gradually broken down by bacteria, in a dump, it's done anaerobically, which releases methane gas instead of just carbon dioxide. And methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Dumps emit a whole lot of methane, which more than offsets any carbon sequestration going on there.