Side note: Thieves are seldom savvy. If they had any brains they would get a less risky job. So chances of them disabling any counter measures are fairly slim.
Thievery is an industry. The car thief doesn't keep the car and drive it himself, or park it in his front yard with a "for sale" sign. He sells it to a chop shop. And the chop shop guys don't even tell the thief where the chop shop is to drive it to- they tell the thief to meet them in a vacant lot somewhere, and they bring an oxy-acetylene torch and a pair of ramps with them and locate and fry a lojack and disable Onstar before they take the car.
Thieves who steal laptops don't have to be "savvy" to bypass your counter-measures, they just have to be not dumb-as-a-rock. Why? Because thieves use division of labor, like in any other line of work. The thief never turns the laptop on, they take it to the back room of the pawn shop that they know deals in stolen goods. They'll buy the laptop off the thief for "a steal" compared to it's used price on Ebay. The pawn shop guy probably won't turn it on either, he'll resell it (with a markup) to a guy he knows who's professionally in the business of stripping and cleaning stolen computers for resale. That guy'll ebay it or even resell it again to another pawn shop or another ebayer, or even sell stacks of computers in "surplus lots" to ebayers or such.
Sure, some thieves are just plain dumber than a box of hammers, and are desperate and stupid with no connections, and they'll just open your laptop and play around with it, and trip any system you've got. Some thieves who stole laptops started using the email account and email address of the previous owner out of ignorance. But most stolen laptops are stolen by thieves who know how to fence goods. You can't assume your laptop will be handled incompetently because the guy who swiped it is a moron any more than you can assume McDonalds is poorly run because some random fry jockey's shoe size is higher than his IQ.
Most people may not need the specific professional programs he mentions, but I think that, in a lot of cases, it still comes down to software. For me, it came down to Photoshop (I tried GIMP, it did not meet my needs) and some other graphics programs. I also NEEDED color management (ICC based CMM) in the operating system, which Linux certainly didn't have last time I evaluated it.
When we moved my Mom off WIndows, we looked at Linux, but it was software that made us write it off. She uses Turbo Tax to do complicated personal and business taxes. At the time, we couldn't find a Linux competitor that sells updated tax forms for each year's tax code, with walk-you-through-it, plug-in-the-numbers wizards ad support. Being able to import previous years Turbo Tax files from the PC was a plus too. And iPhoto, at that time, seemed to be significantly better than its Linux (or Windows) competitors, although I expect they've caught up now.
When we were getting my step mother a new computer, we didn't really see anything at that time that was a viable replacement for iTunes for her on Linux. Also, she uses some music writing software, which I couldn't readily find a similar replacement for at the time, although I quite possibly didn't look enough.
With my Girlfriend, there's Endnote (I understand there are some competitors now), iTunes, and some some lab/research software.
That's four people who didn't really see Linux as viable because of the available software. Only one of the four of us needed the pro aps mentioned above, and the other three people are all in pretty normal settings. There may be a lot of people who really ONLY use the basic three or four common applications, but there are a lot of people with pretty basic needs, including grandmothers, who want some little thing that Linux doesn't have, or doesn't do quite as well.
And I didn't even touch upon drivers for our existing peripherals, which appeared to be a mixed bag under Linux.
I'm sure people will reply with how I'm just wrong or lazy and Linux can do everything I mentioned perfectly well; but if so, then I couldn't find it. Realistically, if I couldn't find it, I suspect other users trying to switch couldn't find it either.
That's the first thing I thought. I thought "alligators made it for about 80 million years little changed, and now we're going to kill 'em off." We're going to steal their secret survival weapon and spray it all over the place until the pathogens are all immune, and then that'll be it for the alligators.
We rewired the computer lab so that all the computers were wired through one of two clappers, which were on extension cords, hidden up inside the lowered ceiling beside a vent. We left one clapper turned on and one turned off and both of them on the most sensitive setting. So any time there was much of a noise, half the computers in the lab would suddenly shut off, and the other half would simultaneously turn on, but there was no way to have more than half of them on at a time, and which half was on kept changing based on random noises in the lab. Teachers who taught computer classes gave up early, but half the lab was for kids on study hall, etc, and no one really warned them, so a hellacious amount of work was lost that day when people's computers suddenly turned off. They'd swear for a while, try to turn it back on, give up, and move to one of the other computers that was now on... repeat process. Of course, that wouldn't work these days, because most computers don't start themselves up when the power comes back on, but these had hard power switches, so simultaneously half the computers would go dark and the others would emit a chorus of Mac startup sounds.
We also put some annoyance programs on them, like a program called "boing" that made your mouse pointer behave, in relationship to how it should behave, as if it were attached to the actual mouse location by a spring. We also installed a background program that would make computers randomly, at various times, start singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall." Except that we used "99,999 bottles of beer on the wall." In a really painful early 1990's Macintosh voice.
"Service is available in parts of Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Airport Express buses to SFO, plus scattered locations around the bay area."
I wonder what brand of wireless router they use to provide service on the Airport Express buses? Because for some reason, a particular model comes to mind.
I agree with all the replies that state the same thing the summary said- there's so much competition to using satellite radio at all that you don't need competition within satellite radio. But I also wanted to point out your example's pretty bad- how many markets are there where Time Warner and Comcast actually compete? I'm not aware of any. They're two companies that mostly own a whole bunch of geographically distinct local cable monopolies. They'd actually be an example of two companies where there isn't much economic basis for restricting a merger between them, because they aren't in competition with each other. Or at least they aren't competing for customers in many markets. They do compete to acquire other cable companies and such.
Examples of their competition are satellite TV, broadcast TV, and to a lesser extent Netflix, Blockbuster, Youtube, Tivo, iTunes, Bittorrent, movie theaters, etc. Because they aren't geographically constrained, Sirius and XM are actually in much greater competition than your example of Time Warner/Comcast, who barely compete at all.
Those who are creating DRM are trying to take away my rights. What right are they trying to take away?
If they are abridging your rights, why don't you, or one of the many other people who hate DRM, or the EFF, sue them for abridging your rights?
The bill of rights doesn't say "The government shall make no law abridging the rights of the people to transfer video content from their TV set to their computer or portable media player." Perhaps it would have if they could have conceived of such problems.
If you're referring to fair use, that's for purposes of criticism, not for purposes of changing devices. I'm not aware of any right of yours that DRM abridges.
I hate DRM and find it both annoying and yet still ineffectual, but I don't think it's abridging my rights.
Now, laws that institutionalize DRM and make circumvention illegal, like the DMCA, I believe those ARE abridging my rights. They abridge my right to private property by telling me what I can and can't do with something I purchased and own. It's abridging my freedoms without my consent.
Unfortunately, private property rights are, as far as I can tell, more of a common law tradition in the US that an explicit legal guarantee. The existence of private property is implied, but not spelled out at all, in the 14th amendment.
I think DRM is a stupid and annoying waste, but I don't think I have some sort of right to prevent them from trying it; quite the opposite, they have the right to develop and sell whatever products they wish, I can't tell them what sort of programs or encryption or compatibility they should put into their products, and short of copyright violations (distributing their copyrighted works), I'm free to do whatever I want with the stuff I bought from them. It's freedom that I don't want to see abridged; their freedom to make and sell products as they see fit, and our freedom to do as we like with the things we own.
Transmetta had radically better power consumption for a while and might have some day come to dominate the portables market, had they retained an advantage like the one they had at their debut. Transemetta's problem was underestimating how rapidly Intel could improve the power efficiency of their chips. In response to Transmetta, Intel suddenly got serious about power consumption and got competitive so fast it left Transmetta with little to differentiate their chips from the competition.
Like anything, the commercial viability of this doesn't just depend on how much better it is than what's already out there, but on how long it'll take their competitors to catch up.
Transmetta didn't do so well, but the real winner of Transmetta's actions was the consumer. Transmetta drove Intel and AMD to improve efficiency much more rapidly than they had been. Let's hope this new technology makes it into production and does the same.
It doesn't give me much confidence that we're heading towards applications and operating systems that won't crash anytime soon when we can't even get something this important right.
It really makes me curious about the whole software quality assurance program at NASA these days. I'd like to know what their procedures are for code writing, debugging, and testing, that we're spending millions to conduct this research and apparently missing our opportunities due to software bugs.
If you want the context that would make it surprising if the white house did anything other than hide every aspect of what they did, take a look at the book Worse Than Watergate. Or get it on audio book and listen to it. It certainly contains some bias, but that's an unfortunate and unnecessary detriment to a text that very thoroughly documents numerous counts of unreasonable and often illegal attempts to maintain a monumental shroud of secrecy over everything this administration does.
I found the bit about him blatantly violating Texas law by keeping all his gubernatorial records completely sealed very interesting. This was well documented and easy to find out about before he was elected in 2000, but the media barely touched it. It turns out it was a pretty good indicator of future performance.
Speaking of automated networks for distributing physical goods: Pneumatic tubes used to be "the future," and were actually pretty popular for a while. Some buildings were wired pretty well with pneumatic tubes, and there was talk about running them to every house and receiving and sending your mail, etc. through them. This never happened, and I believe the main reason it didn't was that, at the time, there was no such thing as automated switching that could work quickly enough. The pneumatic tube systems that were installed mostly had a point-to-point continuous tube for each route. For a bigger, more complex system where they couldn't do a point-to-point separate tube for every point, the switching station was a big hub where all the tubes thunked out and operators read a written label for where each one was going and went and stuck it into the right tube.
Of course, these days, all the technology for a managed packet switching network is dirt cheap. (Well, except for the pneumatic physical switches, but that's just an engineering problem.) These days, a pneumatic tube network could just have something like an RFID in each tube that gets the destination written to it, which gets read well before each switch as it flies along, so the switch is flipped before it arrives, and the packages never need to slow down. We really could do an automated system for the delivery of physical goods, and receive and send mail, order stuff from the convenience store, etc. I'm sure if a network like this existed in big cities, all sorts of businesses would build connected hubs, so you could order small stuff from Amazon and Best Buy and Walmart, etc., online and have it show up in your tube box in an hour or whatever.
It would probably also have the side benefit that a lot more small electronics would be shock rated. And a whole lot of goods would be in (presumably round) packaging that just fit in a tube. I imagine milk and cereal would all come in cylindrical packaging like a tube of quaker oats. But alas, it's one of those directions we just didn't take. An automated physical delivery system is just one of many places where maybe a lot of money on R&D and infrastructure could have gone that way, but it just never quite fell into place and worked out. It could be cool, though. Just because it's pneumatic, it doesn't have to end up like Brazil.
At some point I picked up in slashdot comments about the whole antisocialmedia.net/Gary Weiss/Judd Bagley/Overstock.com mess and decided I was interested enough to spend the time (several hours) reading everything I could about it and trying to figure out what the heck was going on. I haven't got the several hours more it would take to try to recreate and document my findings here in a slashdot post, but I came into this with no preconceived notions, and if I had any leanings, I really like wikipedia and wanted it to be in the right. But I mostly concluded otherwise. Yes, Judd Bagley took many inappropriate actions- but who cares, he's just some guy. It looks like Wikipedia took many more incorrect actions, and it's a foundation that is supposed to behave appropriately.
I found the documentation of rampant editorial abuse to pursue personal agendas, going all the way up the support of Jimbo, to be very convincing. Read anitsocialmedia.net, examine the documentation, look at attempts to counter Bagley's arguments on the web, and draw your own conclusions, but I came off extremely disappointed in Wikipedia, and will be even more suspicious of its content in the future. I already was prepared to take Wikipedia content with a grain of salt because it can be edited by anyone, but it's much worse to know that an editor can have their own petty dictatorial custodianship of an article where they deliberately delete well documented and referenced relevant facts, perpetuate falsehoods, don't let anyone else edit it or even discuss it on the discussion page, ban even extremely well-established editors with good reputations if they try to touch these articles, and even delete the history of the article and the history of their own edits and contributions. I still think wikipedia's valuable, because most articles aren't run this way, but I always have to keep in mind that some are, and I don't really know if I'm looking at something people were free to edit and debate on the talk page and try to work towards a consensus on, or the biased opinions of a single dictatorial editor.
Maybe if we taught African kids to write software, they could start businesses that would make their lives better. Education may improve their lives, but it will not allow them to start businesses. The reason they are so poor and have no successful businesses to work at isn't because they lack the education, it is because the countries are essentially ruled by thugs. Anyone who does anything successful will face thugs- whether they be politicians, police, regulators, warlords, or just local thugs, or even the neighbors, these people will demand bribes or steal the profits and even your capital. This is the root cause of the lack of success in these countries- not lack of knowledge, lack of entrepreneurial spirit, or lack of motivation, but lack of a system that will allow people to get ahead through honest hard work, because if you try, a dishonest person with more power will come take whatever you have.
I'm not trying to say your mission isn't worthwhile. You may be able to improve these people's lives by teaching them to code- they may be able to take small foreign programming jobs online and keep their additional fund hidden and stay under the radar. They may be able to get VISAs for skilled workers and move to somewhere where they can have a much better life. They may see more possibilities and it will create greater motivation to take political action and try to form a non-corrupt system. And it may improve people's lives simply thorough delight in learning. But don't expect it to allow them to start successful businesses; lack of programming knowledge isn't what's holding them back from doing that. It's primarily the state of corruption. Yes, there are problems with lack of capital, infrastructure, education, etc., but several countries have shown that you can start
to build those things up once you've got rule of law and some basic economic freedoms. Other countries have shown that huge amounts of foreign aid will still mostly serve to line the pockets of those who's suppression is what makes their people worthy of our aid.
I've often heard this referred to as a "mysterious" phenomena and the summary calls it "inexplicable." TFA chimes in:
The mathematical theory behind these so-called "shockwave" jams was developed more than 15 years ago
as if it's some relatively new mathematical breakthrough understanding why this happens.
I just don't get what's odd, mysterious, or difficult to understand about this. Obviously, the carrying capacity of something is proportional to the speed that stuff travels along it. So if you have something that's already at capacity at a certain speed, then slow it down just a little bit, suddenly it's over capacity. We all know what happens when a road's over capacity.
The phenomenon is very similar to when a super-saturated solution precipitates. The roads really do get super-saturated, because when they're moving fast and very busy, more and more people tailgate, which really does put the road above its safe maximum throughput load. In that case, the tiniest addition to load (precipitation by dropping in another crystal, or at an on-ramp dropping in more cars) or reduction in capacity (sudden crystallization by cooling, which reduced the carrying capacity of a liquid, or slowing, which reduces the carrying capacity of a road) causes a "crystallization event."
Re: The article quote above- perhaps the mathematical models behind "shockwave" jams were only developed about 15 years ago, but I've got to thing that the "theory," - that a reduction in bandwidth on a carrier working at capacity causes a jam - must have been obvious to many people since the origin of traffic. Probably even long before then, I've seen it in person and seen videos from overhead of this happen in crowds of people walking, too. I suspect a clever person standing on a roof in Babylon watching a crowded street three thousand years ago could have had a good understanding of this phenomenon.
They also state that there is little difference between 128-bit and 256-bit AES encryption because neither has been broken yet.
Maybe not yet, but presumably, when they are broken, they're likely to be broken in such a manner that 128-bit falls way before 256-bit. So if you only care about someone not stealing your data right now, they might both be equivalent, but if you're worried about someone stealing your data at any time and then reading it further down the road, one is likely to be much better than the other.
Also, I'm sure there will be some debate on this, but I'm not entirely convinced that if someone like the NSA has thrown a few billion dollars at the problem including having a custom-made super computer with their own unique, dedicated processors that are highly optimized for cracking encryption, that perhaps 128-bit AES is already compromised and we simply don't know. The relative advantages of 128 vs 256 bit might depend both on how long you want to keep your data secure, and on who you're trying to keep it secure from.
No, gene therapy doesn't work well at all yet. However, this can be a big step forward even without gene therapy.
Once you identify a gene that can prevent AIDS, you start figuring out what that gene actually does in the body. It'll code for some proteins- when and under what circumstances is the gene active? What proteins does it make? What do they do? Perhaps it will lead to a medicine that accomplished whatever it is that the gene's doing.
You're on to something with the placebo effect. This points out that anti-depressents aren't significantly better in alleviating depression than a placebo. What they fail to point out is that
1. placebos are highly effective in alleviating depression, and
2. it's illegal to prescribe placebos
In fact, it's probably immoral for a doctor to prescribe anything where the subject doesn't know what they're taking, and if they know they're taking a placebo, they'll lose the placebo effect. Even if Prozac et all are no better than "all-new extra-strength double-acting placebo plus," it doesn't mean they're not effective. How else are we going to get people to take these critical, life-saving placebos, if we don't spend billions developing them, give them cool names, spend billions more marketing them, and pretend they work [wink wink nudge nudge say-no-more].
- Anything with more than 5 megapixels needs digital image stabilization - otherwise your extra resolution will be smeared out by natural shaking of your hands (or even your tripod - but this takes effect later).
- Similarly large "tele" zoom is useless - if you zoomed in 10x closer to your subject you have 10 times the effect of shaking (and thus need a good tripod or very short exposure time).
This is a huge oversimplification of camera shake. Megapixels is one of the least significant factors here. The factors that affect whether a given amount of camera shake causes a significant detriment to clarity for handheld work are, in order of importance, shutter speed, zoom, and resolution. A good rule of thumb photographers tend to use is "The Reciprocal Rule," which is that your shutter speed should be at least the reciprocal of your focal length (in mm, converted to 35mm equivalent zoom) if you've got decent, steady hands. So if you're shooting handheld zoomed in to 200 mm, you should have a shutter speed of at least 1/200 second. This is a to set the slowest shutter speed that's likely not to be detrimental, and as a barrier condition, it's good to have some margin of safety. Most photographers don't even take the resolution of their film or sensor into account when calculating their minimum acceptable shutter speed.
For a given field of view, shutter speed, and amount of camera shake, you always suffer the same amount of degradation to the quality of the image presented to the sensor, regardless of the resolution of your film/sensor. You're right that resolution is relevant here, because if you've got, say, an 8 megapixel camera, the quality degradation due to shake will impact your resultant image quality more than it would that of a 2 megapixel camera. But unless you plan to always shoot at a shutter speed under the camera shake limit, it's still worth having the higher resolution camera for the instances where you are shooting over the limit.
To visualize this in a simplified case, imagine two cameras strapped to a board, so they move in tandem, with Mr. Shaky-hands holding the board, and both cameras zoomed to cover the same field of view and set to the same shutter speed. One camera's got a 2 megapixel sensor, the other's got an 8 megapizel sensor. Mr. Shaky hands rotates the camera enough that in the time the shutters are open, the cameras covers an arc that's the width of a pixel on the camera with the 8 megapixel sensor. This is half the width of a pixel on the camera with a 2 megapixel sensor.
That means that every pixel recorded by both cameras is really an average of the light present at what should have been two distinct pixel locations. Lets say his hands arced the camera to the right. On the two megapixel camera, each pixel recorded 3/4 of the light that was meant for it, and 1/4 the light that was meant for the pixel to the right of it. On the 8 megapixel camera, each pixel is a 50/50 mix of the light meant for a pixel, and the light meant for the pixel to the right of it. So on the 2 megapixel camera, you expect a loss of clarity of (.25 x [the difference in illuminant per adjacent pixel])/pixels, and on the 8 megapixel you expect a loss of (.5 times [the difference in average illuminant per adjacent pixel]/pixels). The overall amount of quality loss will be highly dependent on what you're shooting. If you're taking macros of bar codes, it might be a big deal. If you're taking pictures of smooth gradients, the loss will be imperceptible. But either way, a camera with four times the resolution will suffer only twice the loss, so you still win on the higher resolution camera. And if you'd just doubled the shutter speeds on both cameras, the loss would be quite minimal, and if you'd quadrupled the shutter speed, it would be imperceptible and you'd be capable of getting the full 8 megapixels of resolution, other factors being sufficient. (Such as having a lens of sufficient quality to resolve 8 megapixels, etc.)
Ulysses may have done a great job studying the sun, and may think it's hard work is over. But I suspect Ulysses is going to have a long and difficult 10-year journey home, for which it will eventually become better known than for its actual work it went out there for.
Watch out other NASA satellites (I'm looking at you, Cassini): I'd advise not making any moves on Penelope.
Or at least I think it's in our favor that he exists. The gaming community is lucky to have as its biggest opponent a raving lunatic. If there were someone calm, reasonable, and sensible, someone who could get along with others, build coalitions, and speak convincingly, the gaming industry would be in much more danger of facing stifling, free-speech curbing legislation. Jack Thompson is the gamer's standard refrain for pointing out that the anti-video-game movement is a crusade lead by nuts. Perhaps more importantly, Lieberman and any other "think of the children" politicians with an anti-free-speech history who might have gotten together to regulate video game content probably don't bother trying to build coalitions to get anything done because of the inevitable presence of Jack Thompson on any such committee.
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Thievery is an industry. The car thief doesn't keep the car and drive it himself, or park it in his front yard with a "for sale" sign. He sells it to a chop shop. And the chop shop guys don't even tell the thief where the chop shop is to drive it to- they tell the thief to meet them in a vacant lot somewhere, and they bring an oxy-acetylene torch and a pair of ramps with them and locate and fry a lojack and disable Onstar before they take the car.
Thieves who steal laptops don't have to be "savvy" to bypass your counter-measures, they just have to be not dumb-as-a-rock. Why? Because thieves use division of labor, like in any other line of work. The thief never turns the laptop on, they take it to the back room of the pawn shop that they know deals in stolen goods. They'll buy the laptop off the thief for "a steal" compared to it's used price on Ebay. The pawn shop guy probably won't turn it on either, he'll resell it (with a markup) to a guy he knows who's professionally in the business of stripping and cleaning stolen computers for resale. That guy'll ebay it or even resell it again to another pawn shop or another ebayer, or even sell stacks of computers in "surplus lots" to ebayers or such.
Sure, some thieves are just plain dumber than a box of hammers, and are desperate and stupid with no connections, and they'll just open your laptop and play around with it, and trip any system you've got. Some thieves who stole laptops started using the email account and email address of the previous owner out of ignorance. But most stolen laptops are stolen by thieves who know how to fence goods. You can't assume your laptop will be handled incompetently because the guy who swiped it is a moron any more than you can assume McDonalds is poorly run because some random fry jockey's shoe size is higher than his IQ.
Most people may not need the specific professional programs he mentions, but I think that, in a lot of cases, it still comes down to software. For me, it came down to Photoshop (I tried GIMP, it did not meet my needs) and some other graphics programs. I also NEEDED color management (ICC based CMM) in the operating system, which Linux certainly didn't have last time I evaluated it.
When we moved my Mom off WIndows, we looked at Linux, but it was software that made us write it off. She uses Turbo Tax to do complicated personal and business taxes. At the time, we couldn't find a Linux competitor that sells updated tax forms for each year's tax code, with walk-you-through-it, plug-in-the-numbers wizards ad support. Being able to import previous years Turbo Tax files from the PC was a plus too. And iPhoto, at that time, seemed to be significantly better than its Linux (or Windows) competitors, although I expect they've caught up now.
When we were getting my step mother a new computer, we didn't really see anything at that time that was a viable replacement for iTunes for her on Linux. Also, she uses some music writing software, which I couldn't readily find a similar replacement for at the time, although I quite possibly didn't look enough.
With my Girlfriend, there's Endnote (I understand there are some competitors now), iTunes, and some some lab/research software.
That's four people who didn't really see Linux as viable because of the available software. Only one of the four of us needed the pro aps mentioned above, and the other three people are all in pretty normal settings. There may be a lot of people who really ONLY use the basic three or four common applications, but there are a lot of people with pretty basic needs, including grandmothers, who want some little thing that Linux doesn't have, or doesn't do quite as well.
And I didn't even touch upon drivers for our existing peripherals, which appeared to be a mixed bag under Linux.
I'm sure people will reply with how I'm just wrong or lazy and Linux can do everything I mentioned perfectly well; but if so, then I couldn't find it. Realistically, if I couldn't find it, I suspect other users trying to switch couldn't find it either.
That's the first thing I thought. I thought "alligators made it for about 80 million years little changed, and now we're going to kill 'em off." We're going to steal their secret survival weapon and spray it all over the place until the pathogens are all immune, and then that'll be it for the alligators.
And I didn't even get modded up back when I said that.
We rewired the computer lab so that all the computers were wired through one of two clappers, which were on extension cords, hidden up inside the lowered ceiling beside a vent. We left one clapper turned on and one turned off and both of them on the most sensitive setting. So any time there was much of a noise, half the computers in the lab would suddenly shut off, and the other half would simultaneously turn on, but there was no way to have more than half of them on at a time, and which half was on kept changing based on random noises in the lab. Teachers who taught computer classes gave up early, but half the lab was for kids on study hall, etc, and no one really warned them, so a hellacious amount of work was lost that day when people's computers suddenly turned off. They'd swear for a while, try to turn it back on, give up, and move to one of the other computers that was now on... repeat process. Of course, that wouldn't work these days, because most computers don't start themselves up when the power comes back on, but these had hard power switches, so simultaneously half the computers would go dark and the others would emit a chorus of Mac startup sounds.
We also put some annoyance programs on them, like a program called "boing" that made your mouse pointer behave, in relationship to how it should behave, as if it were attached to the actual mouse location by a spring. We also installed a background program that would make computers randomly, at various times, start singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall." Except that we used "99,999 bottles of beer on the wall." In a really painful early 1990's Macintosh voice.
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So has Britain.
"Service is available in parts of Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Airport Express buses to SFO, plus scattered locations around the bay area."
I wonder what brand of wireless router they use to provide service on the Airport Express buses? Because for some reason, a particular model comes to mind.
I agree with all the replies that state the same thing the summary said- there's so much competition to using satellite radio at all that you don't need competition within satellite radio. But I also wanted to point out your example's pretty bad- how many markets are there where Time Warner and Comcast actually compete? I'm not aware of any. They're two companies that mostly own a whole bunch of geographically distinct local cable monopolies. They'd actually be an example of two companies where there isn't much economic basis for restricting a merger between them, because they aren't in competition with each other. Or at least they aren't competing for customers in many markets. They do compete to acquire other cable companies and such.
Examples of their competition are satellite TV, broadcast TV, and to a lesser extent Netflix, Blockbuster, Youtube, Tivo, iTunes, Bittorrent, movie theaters, etc. Because they aren't geographically constrained, Sirius and XM are actually in much greater competition than your example of Time Warner/Comcast, who barely compete at all.
If they are abridging your rights, why don't you, or one of the many other people who hate DRM, or the EFF, sue them for abridging your rights?
The bill of rights doesn't say "The government shall make no law abridging the rights of the people to transfer video content from their TV set to their computer or portable media player." Perhaps it would have if they could have conceived of such problems.
If you're referring to fair use, that's for purposes of criticism, not for purposes of changing devices. I'm not aware of any right of yours that DRM abridges.
I hate DRM and find it both annoying and yet still ineffectual, but I don't think it's abridging my rights.
Now, laws that institutionalize DRM and make circumvention illegal, like the DMCA, I believe those ARE abridging my rights. They abridge my right to private property by telling me what I can and can't do with something I purchased and own. It's abridging my freedoms without my consent.
Unfortunately, private property rights are, as far as I can tell, more of a common law tradition in the US that an explicit legal guarantee. The existence of private property is implied, but not spelled out at all, in the 14th amendment.
I think DRM is a stupid and annoying waste, but I don't think I have some sort of right to prevent them from trying it; quite the opposite, they have the right to develop and sell whatever products they wish, I can't tell them what sort of programs or encryption or compatibility they should put into their products, and short of copyright violations (distributing their copyrighted works), I'm free to do whatever I want with the stuff I bought from them. It's freedom that I don't want to see abridged; their freedom to make and sell products as they see fit, and our freedom to do as we like with the things we own.
Transmetta had radically better power consumption for a while and might have some day come to dominate the portables market, had they retained an advantage like the one they had at their debut. Transemetta's problem was underestimating how rapidly Intel could improve the power efficiency of their chips. In response to Transmetta, Intel suddenly got serious about power consumption and got competitive so fast it left Transmetta with little to differentiate their chips from the competition.
Like anything, the commercial viability of this doesn't just depend on how much better it is than what's already out there, but on how long it'll take their competitors to catch up.
Transmetta didn't do so well, but the real winner of Transmetta's actions was the consumer. Transmetta drove Intel and AMD to improve efficiency much more rapidly than they had been. Let's hope this new technology makes it into production and does the same.
It doesn't give me much confidence that we're heading towards applications and operating systems that won't crash anytime soon when we can't even get something this important right.
It really makes me curious about the whole software quality assurance program at NASA these days. I'd like to know what their procedures are for code writing, debugging, and testing, that we're spending millions to conduct this research and apparently missing our opportunities due to software bugs.
If you want the context that would make it surprising if the white house did anything other than hide every aspect of what they did, take a look at the book Worse Than Watergate. Or get it on audio book and listen to it. It certainly contains some bias, but that's an unfortunate and unnecessary detriment to a text that very thoroughly documents numerous counts of unreasonable and often illegal attempts to maintain a monumental shroud of secrecy over everything this administration does.
I found the bit about him blatantly violating Texas law by keeping all his gubernatorial records completely sealed very interesting. This was well documented and easy to find out about before he was elected in 2000, but the media barely touched it. It turns out it was a pretty good indicator of future performance.
Speaking of automated networks for distributing physical goods: Pneumatic tubes used to be "the future," and were actually pretty popular for a while. Some buildings were wired pretty well with pneumatic tubes, and there was talk about running them to every house and receiving and sending your mail, etc. through them. This never happened, and I believe the main reason it didn't was that, at the time, there was no such thing as automated switching that could work quickly enough. The pneumatic tube systems that were installed mostly had a point-to-point continuous tube for each route. For a bigger, more complex system where they couldn't do a point-to-point separate tube for every point, the switching station was a big hub where all the tubes thunked out and operators read a written label for where each one was going and went and stuck it into the right tube.
Of course, these days, all the technology for a managed packet switching network is dirt cheap. (Well, except for the pneumatic physical switches, but that's just an engineering problem.) These days, a pneumatic tube network could just have something like an RFID in each tube that gets the destination written to it, which gets read well before each switch as it flies along, so the switch is flipped before it arrives, and the packages never need to slow down. We really could do an automated system for the delivery of physical goods, and receive and send mail, order stuff from the convenience store, etc. I'm sure if a network like this existed in big cities, all sorts of businesses would build connected hubs, so you could order small stuff from Amazon and Best Buy and Walmart, etc., online and have it show up in your tube box in an hour or whatever.
It would probably also have the side benefit that a lot more small electronics would be shock rated. And a whole lot of goods would be in (presumably round) packaging that just fit in a tube. I imagine milk and cereal would all come in cylindrical packaging like a tube of quaker oats. But alas, it's one of those directions we just didn't take. An automated physical delivery system is just one of many places where maybe a lot of money on R&D and infrastructure could have gone that way, but it just never quite fell into place and worked out. It could be cool, though. Just because it's pneumatic, it doesn't have to end up like Brazil.
At some point I picked up in slashdot comments about the whole antisocialmedia.net/Gary Weiss/Judd Bagley/Overstock.com mess and decided I was interested enough to spend the time (several hours) reading everything I could about it and trying to figure out what the heck was going on. I haven't got the several hours more it would take to try to recreate and document my findings here in a slashdot post, but I came into this with no preconceived notions, and if I had any leanings, I really like wikipedia and wanted it to be in the right. But I mostly concluded otherwise. Yes, Judd Bagley took many inappropriate actions- but who cares, he's just some guy. It looks like Wikipedia took many more incorrect actions, and it's a foundation that is supposed to behave appropriately.
I found the documentation of rampant editorial abuse to pursue personal agendas, going all the way up the support of Jimbo, to be very convincing. Read anitsocialmedia.net, examine the documentation, look at attempts to counter Bagley's arguments on the web, and draw your own conclusions, but I came off extremely disappointed in Wikipedia, and will be even more suspicious of its content in the future. I already was prepared to take Wikipedia content with a grain of salt because it can be edited by anyone, but it's much worse to know that an editor can have their own petty dictatorial custodianship of an article where they deliberately delete well documented and referenced relevant facts, perpetuate falsehoods, don't let anyone else edit it or even discuss it on the discussion page, ban even extremely well-established editors with good reputations if they try to touch these articles, and even delete the history of the article and the history of their own edits and contributions. I still think wikipedia's valuable, because most articles aren't run this way, but I always have to keep in mind that some are, and I don't really know if I'm looking at something people were free to edit and debate on the talk page and try to work towards a consensus on, or the biased opinions of a single dictatorial editor.
I'm not trying to say your mission isn't worthwhile. You may be able to improve these people's lives by teaching them to code- they may be able to take small foreign programming jobs online and keep their additional fund hidden and stay under the radar. They may be able to get VISAs for skilled workers and move to somewhere where they can have a much better life. They may see more possibilities and it will create greater motivation to take political action and try to form a non-corrupt system. And it may improve people's lives simply thorough delight in learning. But don't expect it to allow them to start successful businesses; lack of programming knowledge isn't what's holding them back from doing that. It's primarily the state of corruption. Yes, there are problems with lack of capital, infrastructure, education, etc., but several countries have shown that you can start to build those things up once you've got rule of law and some basic economic freedoms. Other countries have shown that huge amounts of foreign aid will still mostly serve to line the pockets of those who's suppression is what makes their people worthy of our aid.
Just watch this video.
I just don't get what's odd, mysterious, or difficult to understand about this. Obviously, the carrying capacity of something is proportional to the speed that stuff travels along it. So if you have something that's already at capacity at a certain speed, then slow it down just a little bit, suddenly it's over capacity. We all know what happens when a road's over capacity.
The phenomenon is very similar to when a super-saturated solution precipitates. The roads really do get super-saturated, because when they're moving fast and very busy, more and more people tailgate, which really does put the road above its safe maximum throughput load. In that case, the tiniest addition to load (precipitation by dropping in another crystal, or at an on-ramp dropping in more cars) or reduction in capacity (sudden crystallization by cooling, which reduced the carrying capacity of a liquid, or slowing, which reduces the carrying capacity of a road) causes a "crystallization event."
Re: The article quote above- perhaps the mathematical models behind "shockwave" jams were only developed about 15 years ago, but I've got to thing that the "theory," - that a reduction in bandwidth on a carrier working at capacity causes a jam - must have been obvious to many people since the origin of traffic. Probably even long before then, I've seen it in person and seen videos from overhead of this happen in crowds of people walking, too. I suspect a clever person standing on a roof in Babylon watching a crowded street three thousand years ago could have had a good understanding of this phenomenon.
Maybe not yet, but presumably, when they are broken, they're likely to be broken in such a manner that 128-bit falls way before 256-bit. So if you only care about someone not stealing your data right now, they might both be equivalent, but if you're worried about someone stealing your data at any time and then reading it further down the road, one is likely to be much better than the other.
Also, I'm sure there will be some debate on this, but I'm not entirely convinced that if someone like the NSA has thrown a few billion dollars at the problem including having a custom-made super computer with their own unique, dedicated processors that are highly optimized for cracking encryption, that perhaps 128-bit AES is already compromised and we simply don't know. The relative advantages of 128 vs 256 bit might depend both on how long you want to keep your data secure, and on who you're trying to keep it secure from.
No, gene therapy doesn't work well at all yet. However, this can be a big step forward even without gene therapy.
Once you identify a gene that can prevent AIDS, you start figuring out what that gene actually does in the body. It'll code for some proteins- when and under what circumstances is the gene active? What proteins does it make? What do they do? Perhaps it will lead to a medicine that accomplished whatever it is that the gene's doing.
Well, it's not on Roadrunner in Cleveland yet.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Cleveland's the last place to get everything new.
You're on to something with the placebo effect. This points out that anti-depressents aren't significantly better in alleviating depression than a placebo. What they fail to point out is that
1. placebos are highly effective in alleviating depression, and
2. it's illegal to prescribe placebos
In fact, it's probably immoral for a doctor to prescribe anything where the subject doesn't know what they're taking, and if they know they're taking a placebo, they'll lose the placebo effect. Even if Prozac et all are no better than "all-new extra-strength double-acting placebo plus," it doesn't mean they're not effective. How else are we going to get people to take these critical, life-saving placebos, if we don't spend billions developing them, give them cool names, spend billions more marketing them, and pretend they work [wink wink nudge nudge say-no-more].
- Anything with more than 5 megapixels needs digital image stabilization - otherwise your extra resolution will be smeared out by natural shaking of your hands (or even your tripod - but this takes effect later).
- Similarly large "tele" zoom is useless - if you zoomed in 10x closer to your subject you have 10 times the effect of shaking (and thus need a good tripod or very short exposure time).
This is a huge oversimplification of camera shake. Megapixels is one of the least significant factors here. The factors that affect whether a given amount of camera shake causes a significant detriment to clarity for handheld work are, in order of importance, shutter speed, zoom, and resolution. A good rule of thumb photographers tend to use is "The Reciprocal Rule," which is that your shutter speed should be at least the reciprocal of your focal length (in mm, converted to 35mm equivalent zoom) if you've got decent, steady hands. So if you're shooting handheld zoomed in to 200 mm, you should have a shutter speed of at least 1/200 second. This is a to set the slowest shutter speed that's likely not to be detrimental, and as a barrier condition, it's good to have some margin of safety. Most photographers don't even take the resolution of their film or sensor into account when calculating their minimum acceptable shutter speed.
For a given field of view, shutter speed, and amount of camera shake, you always suffer the same amount of degradation to the quality of the image presented to the sensor, regardless of the resolution of your film/sensor. You're right that resolution is relevant here, because if you've got, say, an 8 megapixel camera, the quality degradation due to shake will impact your resultant image quality more than it would that of a 2 megapixel camera. But unless you plan to always shoot at a shutter speed under the camera shake limit, it's still worth having the higher resolution camera for the instances where you are shooting over the limit.
To visualize this in a simplified case, imagine two cameras strapped to a board, so they move in tandem, with Mr. Shaky-hands holding the board, and both cameras zoomed to cover the same field of view and set to the same shutter speed. One camera's got a 2 megapixel sensor, the other's got an 8 megapizel sensor. Mr. Shaky hands rotates the camera enough that in the time the shutters are open, the cameras covers an arc that's the width of a pixel on the camera with the 8 megapixel sensor. This is half the width of a pixel on the camera with a 2 megapixel sensor.
That means that every pixel recorded by both cameras is really an average of the light present at what should have been two distinct pixel locations. Lets say his hands arced the camera to the right. On the two megapixel camera, each pixel recorded 3/4 of the light that was meant for it, and 1/4 the light that was meant for the pixel to the right of it. On the 8 megapixel camera, each pixel is a 50/50 mix of the light meant for a pixel, and the light meant for the pixel to the right of it. So on the 2 megapixel camera, you expect a loss of clarity of (.25 x [the difference in illuminant per adjacent pixel])/pixels, and on the 8 megapixel you expect a loss of (.5 times [the difference in average illuminant per adjacent pixel]/pixels). The overall amount of quality loss will be highly dependent on what you're shooting. If you're taking macros of bar codes, it might be a big deal. If you're taking pictures of smooth gradients, the loss will be imperceptible. But either way, a camera with four times the resolution will suffer only twice the loss, so you still win on the higher resolution camera. And if you'd just doubled the shutter speeds on both cameras, the loss would be quite minimal, and if you'd quadrupled the shutter speed, it would be imperceptible and you'd be capable of getting the full 8 megapixels of resolution, other factors being sufficient. (Such as having a lens of sufficient quality to resolve 8 megapixels, etc.)
How's all this apply to his
Ulysses may have done a great job studying the sun, and may think it's hard work is over. But I suspect Ulysses is going to have a long and difficult 10-year journey home, for which it will eventually become better known than for its actual work it went out there for.
Watch out other NASA satellites (I'm looking at you, Cassini): I'd advise not making any moves on Penelope.
Or at least I think it's in our favor that he exists. The gaming community is lucky to have as its biggest opponent a raving lunatic. If there were someone calm, reasonable, and sensible, someone who could get along with others, build coalitions, and speak convincingly, the gaming industry would be in much more danger of facing stifling, free-speech curbing legislation. Jack Thompson is the gamer's standard refrain for pointing out that the anti-video-game movement is a crusade lead by nuts. Perhaps more importantly, Lieberman and any other "think of the children" politicians with an anti-free-speech history who might have gotten together to regulate video game content probably don't bother trying to build coalitions to get anything done because of the inevitable presence of Jack Thompson on any such committee.