Re:How long is the iPod thing going to last?
on
60GB iPod Coming?
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· Score: 1
By the time the iPod becomes a commodity, Apple will have moved on to the next big thing, whatever that will be, and they'll own that market for a while, too. That's just what you do if your business model depends on innovation instead of winning price wars on commodity product. (Contrast Dell.)
"The left" is a useful abstraction, nothing more, but nothing less. Are you saying we should abolish all political labels because they can be misleading?
OK, I'll grant you the Patriot Act. But you seem to be implying that people outside America enjoy greater personal freedoms. Where?
Not Spain, which is notorious for banning political parties that push for regional independence. Not France, whose restrictions on journalism have attracted the ire of the European Court on Human Rights (and let's not forget its little headscarf problem). Not Germany, which along with France bans many forms of hate speech and considers the sale of Nazi artifacts a criminal offense. Perhaps one of the Scandinavian countries? After all, they rank at the top of Reporters Sans Frontières' press freedom index. But then again, it's impossible to earn anything there without half of it being taken away by the state. Sure, we could argue about whether taxation really constitutes a violation of "liberty," but then we'd be diving straight into a moral and philosophical bog where semantics float facedown in their own slippery juices and practical justice lies forgotten, suffocating deep beneath the surface.
When it comes to liberty, America's version surely leaves much to be desired. But you're dead wrong when you claim "the good ol' USA isn't even in the running."
Your charge of endemic racism has merit; however, I challenge you to find a society anywhere in the world lucky enough not to count discrimination among its ills. Please don't bother citing places without significant minority populations, as even in these countries racial tensions have become disturbingly apparent, given the relative lack of interracial mixing as compared to American society: Turks in Germany, Muslims in France (that headscarf thing again), non-Japanese in Japan. Across Europe, xenophobia is becoming increasingly evident as nations open their borders to immigrants and foreign workers (remember Pim's legacy!). Things are little better elsewhere in the world; even Brazil's supposed racial harmony is largely mythical. One could argue that at least America's racial tensions are in the open, a matter of public debate--not swept under the carpet and ignored, the way they are in much of Europe and Asia.
Ultimately, liberty is in the eye of the beholder, as is the comfortable balance between chaos and order (which I think is what you were referring to by your "perfect state" comment). Singapore can a great place to live, if you value order and discipline above the personal freedoms you'd have elsewhere. I personally wouldn't want to live there, but I'm sure that many Singaporeans find it liberating to be ensured clean sidewalks and elevators. This opinion based on having been close friends with at least three Singaporeans in my lifetime.
Re:Political showpieces and $$ for supporters
on
Big Screen for NYPD
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Since you seem to be so skeptical about the usefulness of computerized crime tracking technology, I think you might find this article from the Economist an interesting read. I couldn't tell whether it's subscriber-only, so I'll reproduce part of it here:
CRIME maps, which record the locations of incidents in order to help predict where criminals are going to strike next, are used by police throughout the world. But the past is not always a helpful guide to the future, and a team of criminologists from University College, London, led by Kate Bowers, think they can do better. A test of their new model, unveiled in this month's British Journal of Criminology, suggests it is 30% better at predicting crime than traditional methods.
It is a cliché to say that crime spreads like a disease, but previous work by Dr Bowers and her colleagues found that this is exactly how crime does spread. Using statistical techniques developed to study the transmission of infections, they found that burglaries cluster in space and time in predictable ways. For example, properties within 400 metres of a burgled home, particularly those on the same side of the road, are at an increased risk of being broken into for up to two months after the initial incident.
Using these and other findings, the team created algorithms that predict where criminals will strike next, and then used those algorithms to generate "prospective hot-spot maps". These divide an area into 50-metre squares--a level of resolution chosen because 50 metres is a typical line-of-sight for a police officer in an urban area--and give a crime forecast for each square.
In their paper, Dr Bowers and her colleagues reveal the results of a study of burglaries in Merseyside, in northern England. Using historical data, they pitted their predictive modelling method against two traditional crime-mapping systems. They found that their method successfully "hindcasted" 62-80% of burglaries. The traditional techniques, by contrast, hindcasted only 46% of those incidents.
Computerized crime tracking technology like COMPSTAT is already helping to make police departments more efficient, focused and accountable in the real world. No, it won't alert you to a Stop'n'Go shooting spree in the last 3 hours, but it does help you clarify the big picture, about where carjackings are becoming more common, which neighborhoods are becoming more robbery-prone, that sort of thing. And that information can be immensely useful to an overworked precinct with limited resources (overtime, etc.) to do their jobs.
I'm not defending this expensive realtime display covering three walls of a command center, but I don't think the facts justify your skepticism about the use of trend-finding in police work.
Hey, you should go read up on COMPSTAT, the computerized crime-tracking tool the NYPD implemented under Rudy. I'm sure it cost at least a dozen cops' salaries worth of technology, but it was instrumental in driving down the crime rate, and now it's being implemented by many other cities, not just in America, but around the world. In short: yes, making information easy to access and read can be just as effective as hiring cops at reducing crime.
The Karma's a whopping 1.1 inches thick to the iPod's 0.62. It also appears to have been designed by someone with a terrible hangover from the late '90s.
After that, everything else is just quibbling. Still, I should point out that you neglected to mention the iPod's new lossless codec.
Operator: And our next question we'll take is from Arik Hesseldahl with Forbes.com.
Arik Hesseldahl: Hi, Steve. Always concerned about -- not concerned, I guess, but wondering -- one of the previous questions was about revenue. I'm wondering if iTunes has reached the break even point yet.
Steve Jobs: Yes. The iTunes music store had a small profit this past quarter.
Arik Hesseldahl: Had a small profit. OK. Any interest whatsoever, since in the open source OGG Vorbis format?
Steve Jobs: We're certainly not getting any requests from customers for it.
I wouldn't either. That was my point. Rape and murder are terrible, terrible crimes, especially to victims and their families, but dealing with these ills may be the price we pay for enjoying our civil liberties. Thus, it isn't very useful to say things like "the rate is always too high," as did my parent poster.
Sounds good, except that given the politics surrounding capital punishment--a contentious climate that won't change anytime soon--death sentences end up being more expensive than life in prison, what with all the appeals, higher legal fees, fact-finding costs, press costs and so on that each capital case generates.
You live somewhere with ditches instead of sidewalks, where there are no pedestrians because they get mowed down by cars? I got news for you: you don't live in a city.
But you know, you could drive to a park and then go running. Or is that too simple?
Natural selection gave most of us the genes to forgive other people's children when they make insignificant mistakes like trespassing. If, as you appear to be saying, every little kid who commits these tiny transgressions deserves to die, then I don't understand how you think any society is sustainable. Any society based on your conception of the rule of law would kill itself off rather rapidly, I would think.
In most jurisdictions (in the U.S., at least), you would be held legally liable for failing to properly store your firearm, and this is the way it should be. If you buy something dangerous like a gun, you should be expected to take precautions to prevent its misuse--and if you're not responsible enough to do so, nobody wants you owning a gun.
Same as if you live in the suburbs and build a pool in your front yard. If you're so irresponsible as to neglect to install a fence to prevent trespassing neighborhood kids from falling in, then as far as I'm concerned, you have no business building a pool in the first place. Most municipal laws agree on this point as well.
How about quoting the whole phrase instead of picking out specific words to completely change the meaning? "... US Patent Application No. 20040090467, published on May 13, 2004, in which Apple filed a patent application..."
Besides, since when could you ever trust the blurb?
A patent, once filed, is kept secret until it is granted, upon which it is published. If it is not granted, it is not published. That's just the way it works.
This won't help, because after your company goes public, you stop being able to tell it what to do. You, as CEO, become a slave to the shareholders' interests. You know, just like everyone's whining about with the Google IPO.
At least, that's what the Slashbots kept saying in the Google stories. So which is it? Are you responsible for your company's actions or not?
I don't know about the others, but at least in China and India, as reforms enabling freer capitalism were instituted during the 80s and 90s, plenty fewer people have been "starving poor." I think you're just another rebel without a cause.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time the iPod becomes a commodity, Apple will have moved on to the next big thing, whatever that will be, and they'll own that market for a while, too. That's just what you do if your business model depends on innovation instead of winning price wars on commodity product. (Contrast Dell.)
</fanboy>
"The left" is a useful abstraction, nothing more, but nothing less. Are you saying we should abolish all political labels because they can be misleading?
Thanks, that was one of the points I was trying (probably poorly) to make: liberty is in the eye of the beholder.
OK, I'll grant you the Patriot Act. But you seem to be implying that people outside America enjoy greater personal freedoms. Where?
Not Spain, which is notorious for banning political parties that push for regional independence. Not France, whose restrictions on journalism have attracted the ire of the European Court on Human Rights (and let's not forget its little headscarf problem). Not Germany, which along with France bans many forms of hate speech and considers the sale of Nazi artifacts a criminal offense. Perhaps one of the Scandinavian countries? After all, they rank at the top of Reporters Sans Frontières' press freedom index. But then again, it's impossible to earn anything there without half of it being taken away by the state. Sure, we could argue about whether taxation really constitutes a violation of "liberty," but then we'd be diving straight into a moral and philosophical bog where semantics float facedown in their own slippery juices and practical justice lies forgotten, suffocating deep beneath the surface.
When it comes to liberty, America's version surely leaves much to be desired. But you're dead wrong when you claim "the good ol' USA isn't even in the running."
Your charge of endemic racism has merit; however, I challenge you to find a society anywhere in the world lucky enough not to count discrimination among its ills. Please don't bother citing places without significant minority populations, as even in these countries racial tensions have become disturbingly apparent, given the relative lack of interracial mixing as compared to American society: Turks in Germany, Muslims in France (that headscarf thing again), non-Japanese in Japan. Across Europe, xenophobia is becoming increasingly evident as nations open their borders to immigrants and foreign workers (remember Pim's legacy!). Things are little better elsewhere in the world; even Brazil's supposed racial harmony is largely mythical. One could argue that at least America's racial tensions are in the open, a matter of public debate--not swept under the carpet and ignored, the way they are in much of Europe and Asia.
Ultimately, liberty is in the eye of the beholder, as is the comfortable balance between chaos and order (which I think is what you were referring to by your "perfect state" comment). Singapore can a great place to live, if you value order and discipline above the personal freedoms you'd have elsewhere. I personally wouldn't want to live there, but I'm sure that many Singaporeans find it liberating to be ensured clean sidewalks and elevators. This opinion based on having been close friends with at least three Singaporeans in my lifetime.
Just throwing that out there.
So why carry a gun? Just carry a replica.
Since you seem to be so skeptical about the usefulness of computerized crime tracking technology, I think you might find this article from the Economist an interesting read. I couldn't tell whether it's subscriber-only, so I'll reproduce part of it here:
Computerized crime tracking technology like COMPSTAT is already helping to make police departments more efficient, focused and accountable in the real world. No, it won't alert you to a Stop'n'Go shooting spree in the last 3 hours, but it does help you clarify the big picture, about where carjackings are becoming more common, which neighborhoods are becoming more robbery-prone, that sort of thing. And that information can be immensely useful to an overworked precinct with limited resources (overtime, etc.) to do their jobs.
I'm not defending this expensive realtime display covering three walls of a command center, but I don't think the facts justify your skepticism about the use of trend-finding in police work.
Hey, you should go read up on COMPSTAT, the computerized crime-tracking tool the NYPD implemented under Rudy. I'm sure it cost at least a dozen cops' salaries worth of technology, but it was instrumental in driving down the crime rate, and now it's being implemented by many other cities, not just in America, but around the world. In short: yes, making information easy to access and read can be just as effective as hiring cops at reducing crime.
The Karma's a whopping 1.1 inches thick to the iPod's 0.62. It also appears to have been designed by someone with a terrible hangover from the late '90s.
After that, everything else is just quibbling. Still, I should point out that you neglected to mention the iPod's new lossless codec.
Operator: And our next question we'll take is from Arik Hesseldahl with Forbes.com.
Arik Hesseldahl: Hi, Steve. Always concerned about -- not concerned, I guess, but wondering -- one of the previous questions was about revenue. I'm wondering if iTunes has reached the break even point yet.
Steve Jobs: Yes. The iTunes music store had a small profit this past quarter.
Arik Hesseldahl: Had a small profit. OK. Any interest whatsoever, since in the open source OGG Vorbis format?
Steve Jobs: We're certainly not getting any requests from customers for it.
Arik Hesseldahl: OK.
Source: Conference call, April 29, 2004.
I wouldn't either. That was my point. Rape and murder are terrible, terrible crimes, especially to victims and their families, but dealing with these ills may be the price we pay for enjoying our civil liberties. Thus, it isn't very useful to say things like "the rate is always too high," as did my parent poster.
Sounds good, except that given the politics surrounding capital punishment--a contentious climate that won't change anytime soon--death sentences end up being more expensive than life in prison, what with all the appeals, higher legal fees, fact-finding costs, press costs and so on that each capital case generates.
Would you give up all your civil liberties for one day--if it meant that no one would ever get raped or murdered again?
How about for one year? How about the rest of your life?
Pot always used to make me paranoid; coke makes me happy. YMMV
You live somewhere with ditches instead of sidewalks, where there are no pedestrians because they get mowed down by cars? I got news for you: you don't live in a city.
But you know, you could drive to a park and then go running. Or is that too simple?
Natural selection gave most of us the genes to forgive other people's children when they make insignificant mistakes like trespassing. If, as you appear to be saying, every little kid who commits these tiny transgressions deserves to die, then I don't understand how you think any society is sustainable. Any society based on your conception of the rule of law would kill itself off rather rapidly, I would think.
In most jurisdictions (in the U.S., at least), you would be held legally liable for failing to properly store your firearm, and this is the way it should be. If you buy something dangerous like a gun, you should be expected to take precautions to prevent its misuse--and if you're not responsible enough to do so, nobody wants you owning a gun.
Same as if you live in the suburbs and build a pool in your front yard. If you're so irresponsible as to neglect to install a fence to prevent trespassing neighborhood kids from falling in, then as far as I'm concerned, you have no business building a pool in the first place. Most municipal laws agree on this point as well.
yours
Oops, I didn't know that. Thanks for the correction.
How about quoting the whole phrase instead of picking out specific words to completely change the meaning? "... US Patent Application No. 20040090467, published on May 13, 2004, in which Apple filed a patent application..."
Besides, since when could you ever trust the blurb?
A patent, once filed, is kept secret until it is granted, upon which it is published. If it is not granted, it is not published. That's just the way it works.
This won't help, because after your company goes public, you stop being able to tell it what to do. You, as CEO, become a slave to the shareholders' interests. You know, just like everyone's whining about with the Google IPO.
At least, that's what the Slashbots kept saying in the Google stories. So which is it? Are you responsible for your company's actions or not?
You have to file within one year of public use. The Apple patent was just granted--far from the same thing.
When would you ever convert from km to cm? The measurements are commonly used for entirely different purposes.
I don't know about the others, but at least in China and India, as reforms enabling freer capitalism were instituted during the 80s and 90s, plenty fewer people have been "starving poor." I think you're just another rebel without a cause.
It's non-voting stock, retard. No dividends to be paid, either. Stop blaming markets and entrepreneurship for the world's problems.
Source? If we're talking about this guy, I'm pretty sure no one knows what happened to him.
Holy shit, I was gonna add you as a friend for that. But it turns out you already are.