There is only one way in theory this could work at all and be practical. You'd need the printer itself to essentially just be a mechanical shell of servos, have a good deal of flash and a small ROM onboard with a thin client that dials out to a server to download the bits of the OS it needs as it needs them. You turn it on, chip dials out, authenticates, downloads a minimal OS to non-volatile flash for the current session, and then uses a design authentication phase to check the design file with the server and then, instead of just getting a "Yes" bit sent back the server actually sends back the instruction set necessary to the machine so that it can print just that design, and does so only in small segments, to ensure that a constant internet connection is required throughout the entire manufacturing session for the object to be printed.
From there your printer will do its job, and once the object is done, the thin-client flashes its instruction set and on power-off removes the remaining fragments of its OS. Of course, such a process would likely be so annoying and cumbersome that I can't imagine the entire market adopting it short of Federal law mandating it be done that way. Otherwise all it takes is one person/company to make a regular 3D printer that has all of its software onboard to break that model. Since with the internet being what it is outside of major metro areas why would anyone want to tie the performance of their 3D printer to what could be a spotty connection? It'd be worse than Ubisoft's DRM, and it'd certainly NEED to be, to actually "secure" the maker market.
And this illustrates beautifully why it is fallacious to compare the concept of possession of physical property towards any sort of "ownership" of intangibles.
Property by nature is limited, ownership of scarce materials makes sense for this reason and the law is meant to reflect that. Information, however, is naturally abundant, and computers make this quite apparent. It's worth remembering the founders recognized this and even explicitly wrote into the constitution that Patent/Copyright was only intended to spur the creation of more art and science. It was not based on any moral or philosophical "right" to ownership, it was entirely a pragmatic compromise.
When research shows that compromise by and large no longer works, then is it any wonder that "ownership" is no longer respected? This is why people consider it "Sharing." Because they don't respect the idea that people should be able to "own" such things, period. This doesn't mean they can't be made to pay for content, but it does reflect that people do not labor under any misguided belief that any sort of IP regime is a moral construct necessary to the maintenance of society.
Rather than play whack-a-mole with pirates, someone 'ought to take a page from Valve and try to invest in ways to engage people in paying for cool things because they want to legitimately support the art/science that went into it. Trying to force people to treat a pragmatic compromise as a moral good is not a winning strategy.
Except you're missing the grander point. "Spending problem" is code for "Spending cuts" is code for "Cut social services" is code for "Let's viciously rape the poor, children and homeless six ways to Sunday without lube"
Anyone who talks about a "Spending problem" is typically someone advocating in a rather roundabout and flowery way for Randian social Darwinism and will usually imply situations one step shy of "Sending the poor to the gas chambers" by arguing directly for policies which will leave them with no ability to do anything other than slowly starve to death, which is a rather painful way to die and very degrading.
And even then, outside of social acceptability the only reason people arguing this do not want to "Send the poor to the gas chambers" is organized and orderly disposal actually costs something, and these people are so content to never want to do a single thing in absolutely any way for anyone they consider an "other" that they would learn to tolerate the screams of the starving, the violence of the dying, and build a society of organized violence (Law and order) so that they would not have to be bothered in their selfish existence.
It's all rather barbaric actually and any time you make a vacuous argument about "Spending" and do not directly take the time to explain how, when we implement your solution, it will not be horribly destroy anyone who has not played the money game and become incredibly wealthy, you are implying this exact same system of barbaric Randian Social Darwinism in your lack of a response as to how that would be anything BUT the world we would live in if we just magically "Cut government spending" or "Drowned government in the bathtub."
Some of us humans though, we have hearts. Shocking huh?;p
If Microsoft really wanted to actually help users it would build the anti-virus anti-spyware stuff into a pluggable architecture for the OS that would default to the Microsoft version but allow you to swap it out for Norton, Avast, McAfee or whatever else you wanted. So that it provided a tightly integrated default level of security that any other anti-virus vendor would be able to make use of. Just require a special sort of signature or authorization to install new AV software. That way it should be a win-win for everyone. More choice and a more secure OS by default.
Will that be what happens? Most likely not! I mean look at what it took Microsoft to just consider unbundling IE, if it really needs a web browser shell it should be able to allow the shell to be swapped out for other browsers. Would it be more work? Yes, but that's where you can obviously tell there's a bit of monopolization at play. Rather than do the work to let their products stand for themselves they'll just lock you into theirs because it'd be "TOO HARD!" to make choice available.
California's ballot initiatives are a horribly stupid comparison. The Ballot initiatives can only increase spending, not raise taxes. The ballot measures force the state to spend without paying for it through taxes and Proposition 13 neutered California's ability to collect taxes. It takes a super majority to do anything, and of course we have had gridlock on taxes since...Prop 13! So this then gets made up in silly high local taxes which should never need to be collected but someone sold the state on the idea that taxes were evil in every way shape or form (rather then some taxes unfairly hitting the poor/working/middle classes harder than they should) that means that localities have to make it up somehow.
Direct democracy can work but it requires a good process and it does require some level of debate. Quite honestly I think all you need to do, is take a direct democracy and add an actual pointed, winnable debate on issues. If you could force a debate where there are winners and losers based on facts you could prevent "stupid votes" by establishing someone's vote is counter to reality and therefore disqualifiable under very narrow conditions.
Of course that's even a very overbroad view of it. But you can make it work, you just need to ensure that people's votes are cast for meaningful reasons informed by facts and a good debate. The GAs I've been to have all been long but they all were pretty sensible, not a den of morons at all like some people might think. Some people didn't always understand things at first but as long as everyone was willing to listen, answer questions and debate honestly we always arrived at a conclusion.
Really, it's what congress was kind of supposed to be before they realized that they could live the good life selling the voters out for corporate interests. We just need a formalized platform and procedure and we could create a global decentralized government by consensus system.
Who? Nobody, what you don't see now is that if you extrapolate the long game out then they'll merely remove that above there nasty part that forces the banks to write off a loss. Again, just look at current legislative trends, we can't even pass a budget that looks more than maybe ten years into the future, let alone 25. This was a blind give-me to the banks. REAL DEBT RELIEF is what we need, but Obama doesn't want to piss off the bankers so he never suggests it. Instead he uses a slight of hand saying payments will be easier now because it gives the banks 20 years to buy enough congressman or another President to take it away before they face any crunch because of it.
Any change which does not absolve debt is a blind attempt to trick us into playing the bankers game by making us think they can't just eventually change the law before it hurts their pocketbooks.
Well I think the bigger problem here is that Capitalism needs SO MANY checks and balances that all it takes is someone screaming "ALL GUBB'MINT WANTS TA KILL UR BABIEZ!!!!!11" and they can repeal regulations and gut the industry. But the primary fault is that government was NOT insulated from economics. You can essentially "Fire" a politician by cancelling his funding. This current congress is bought and paid for.
It all leads me to wonder if we really shouldn't be doing the hard work now to transition to a resource based economy. Money as merely a means of exchanging arbitrary value is fine but its supply and distribution needs to be build around actually enabling sensible use of resources and also enabling sensible compensation for all involved. The Capitalist system can be made to work, but it takes a lot of government intervention, and DIRECT government redistribution of wealth otherwise those without capital have all of their wealth extracted and are never able to even enter the system at all as a capitalist.
Rugged capitalism worked far more in the older America because well, we were a frontier nation with no central bank for a long time, and anyone could go and get land, make a home, start a business. Gradually we've seen those freedoms eroded and land rights all but locked up. You can't just move onto a plot, build a home and call it yours.
We need a sensible alternative and that first means admitting we are not 1800s America and that 1800s American Capitalism will not work in 21st century America. Income inequality has to have a direct check built into the system to balance (through direct redistribution) otherwise you'll just have this same situation repeat time and time again. Sadly I doubt we'd have many takers on that one. But realistically that's the only way capitalism in a modern economy can work. Workers will never be able to own capital unless we literally GIVE IT TO THEM. Business owners sure as hell won't, they're incentivized by the system to screw their workers as hard as they can to get the job done efficiently.
Oh and like THAT's a compelling case for the status quo? Either argue that the status quo IS ACTIVELY BETTER than the alternative or argue that the alternative IS CONSIDERABLY WORSE. You have done neither, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not a good step in the right direction and doesn't mean we can't figure out the ideal way to do it if we're vigilant over time.
Also, keeping money out of politics is simple if we realize one central thing. In the Military soldiers do not get the same freedoms as civilians. This is only so because it is necessary to do their job. I would so propose that we should consider elected officials right in that same sort of group. We need to basically have a comprehensive ban on receiving or making arrangements to receive future gifts of any kind to an elected official and their immediate or extended family (they would have to all agree to this for the candidate to even be eligible to run) for their campaign, terms, and a little before/after to prevent some kinds of sneaky planning to game the rules.
First of all, the economy is in a massive stall, we are at the tippy top of the roller coaster and about to careen into Great Depression 2 Vs Mega Shark if something isn't done NOW. (Congress flat out refuses to put $1.00 in the hands of ANY PERSON WHO WOULD SPEND It, we are consumer goods/services economy, austerity will cripple lower middle class and further depress demand cascading slowly through the economy to bring it all down.)
The fact is that the banks are the majority guilty parties here. The commercial banks LIED TO THEIR CUSTOMERS, Goldman Sachs LIED TO THEIR INVESTORS, and AIG LIED TO WHOEVER READ THEIR CREDIT RATINGS. They illegally foreclosed on millions of homes after they received taxpayer dollars and continued to pay their executives exorbitant bonuses.
A Debt Jubilee is the ONLY sane settlement that can be reached with the banks. They have so gravely overstepped the law that any suitable punitive damage award against them would destroy the current economy. So instead of damage awards we should simply have a Debt Jubilee. People get to keep their homes, Greece doesn't crash into the Eurozone, and the Big Banks still get to exist...for now.
Um, no. We have OFFICIAL RECORDS which state quite plainly that banks TOLD THEIR EMPLOYEES TO LIE and WE HAVE PROOF OF THIS. These banks directly lied to customers to get them to buy ARMs they couldn't possibly afford. They were constantly pressuring them. There's a reason all fifty states have suits against the big banks right now. This is not a case where you can say: "Stupid lazy poors! lol! tehy shud stop bein' stupid 'n lazay!!!111"
RIM Providing a consistent platform? Have you even LOOKED at their JDK? The EXACT reason there is such a dirth of Apps for Blackberry is BECAUSE of how horrible the device is to develop for. You have to write your entire UI in code, there are no automatic scaling or resource conversion tools like Android provides so you can't design a uniform UI and instead have to design multiple UIs to support any number of their phones. Their JDK was developed on an ancient version of Java and it's never seen a full update to Java 1.5/1.6 which it desperately needs.
The problem is the majority of blackberries are on older devices because RIM allowed carriers to decide when they wanted to enable OS upgrades and because of this it means that fragmentation on Blackberries is actually WORSE than Android. Because Blackberry didn't foresee this and didn't design their JDK so it was simple to query a device for what features it might support. Hell, I have to at a minimum compile two different versions of my Blackberry app, at a bare minimum to run on touch and non-touch devices.
Hell, Google goes out of its way to show you how to make universally usable backwards compatible apps. Do you know of any Blackberry apps that are truly backwards compatible and run on almost all of their recent devices? I know of one, and only one, LogicMail and to be able to create it the lead developer had to implement A CUSTOM BUILD SERVER. Do you think this is anywhere near a sane environment to develop in? If Android is windows 3.1 then Blackberry is ENIAC, still somehow running on its vacuum tubes despite the world having moved on.
I mean the biggest advantage touted of Blackberry OS 6 was that you could develop native apps in Adobe Air, and the Playbook was supposed to originally support Android Apps. I don't think it's a good sign when one of your primary marketed features in a new OS addition is that you can now develop applications for it without having to use the official API. It screams (we're too lazy and/or incompetent to fix our API and app design model entirely and do it right from the start.)
In the end though I couldn't be happier that Blackberry is dying. While Apple's done some shady things, there are some things not even Steve Jobs will do for money and Blackberry's entire reason for continued existence is just that. The only device built from the ground up to enable complete surveillance of all communications to/from it, good riddance I say.
Normally I don't rag on Facebook for privacy...but they have to have video chat, and choose the ONE company determined to make Law Enforcement's wet dream of total VOIP surveillance even in retroactivity a reality. FB is probably working with them to automatically transcribe your calls so that ads can be targeted at you based on what you talk about with relatives. I am deeply disappointed.
RIM pulled the App for the same reason they gave India and Saudi Arabia national backdoors into all Encrypted Blackberry communication. RIM has always been in the business of exclusively selling Treacherous Devices built for enterprise and government use. They were built since their inception to enable and facilitate this level of control. So is it really any surprise to anyone that they'd immediately respond to a government request over an inappropriate app? Their entire business model is built around this type of appeasement.
I think that given the level of transparent cartoonish villainy that's starting to pop up in politics that while yes, a lot of the same people that make up Anonymous are the same people who voted for Ron Paul. Maybe it's just me, but coming as someone who used to share that mindset I would think enough exposure to the current political climate would make them be more likely to side with the Unions than against them.
I know when I was attracted to that whole Ron Paul, limited government movement my concerns were 100% social justice and social issues and I really didn't concern myself hardly at all with the economic platform. You can imagine my dismay when I found out well over half of the most vocal supporters didn't care at all about social issues and many were in fact advancing horribly regressive social policy (as bad and in some cases worse than the current GOP) and dressing it up as "m0ar fr33d0mz!!!" and were really in it for the economics side because they just wanted to never pay taxes and didn't want Big Mean Ol' Gubbmint' from stopping them from hating on minorities and the poor.
All it took for me to see that, ironically enough, was for me to stop looking at politics from an ivory tower as a game of theories and to look at real-world data on what policies actually produced results, and were likely to ever be passed in this lifetime in our government. Good politics and good policy are inseparable, because even the best plan in the world is useless if you can't convince anyone to follow it.
It could possibly be a fake, that's one thing I'm curious about too. The Westboro Baptist Church recently tried to bait them so this could be more bait, or slashdot being a bit cautious after front-paging the fake WBC anon story previously.
You want to know Why Blackberry's network is so horrible? RIM routes 100% of your traffic straight to them before it gets to go to the regular Internet. Why do you think you need to run a separate MDS daemon to connect to the internet on your Blackberry Sim? It's because that SIM's looking for a hardcoded path to a RIM server so it can use BES. Admitedly BES had some good stuff it did back in the day, but right now it exists for one and only one reason.
Saudi Arabia, India and who only knows who else all want irrevocable backdoors into the Blackberry, and RIM can provide that because they've built their entire phone and its ability to access phone or internet features around requiring a constantly active-connection between RIM's servers, the Phone, and RIM's special crypto packages to secure the whole thing (which oh-so conveniently carry backdoors.)
Why is RIM still alive? Well, that's obvious. There are some things in this world not even Steve Jobs will do for money.:p
You know in many ways I'm starting to wonder if the rise of Anonymous could be considered a legitimate political/social phenomena linked to the recession and how people feel increasingly left out of the political process/system because of big money buying our congress' collective ears? Widespread piracy is widely considered by many to be an economic indicator that the market has become too one-sided, maybe this is the political equivalent?
I saw a post suggesting they may be targeting the Koch Brothers for their involvement in the current Wisconsin/multi-state effort to completely bust Unions. Is this finally the people striking back? Not to say I'm not thankful someone's taking the time to respond, but oh what a sad thing it says about humanity that we have to resort to these types of solutions to keep from getting completely steamrolled by the almighty dollar?
As someone who's developed for Blackberry, Android and iDevices am I the only one entirely expecting this? My best guess is that RIM just does not have or know how to find anything resembling a decent API developer. Having developed for their abortion of a Java Development API I can't come to any other conclusion. What other modern device requires you to implement a custom build server just to develop a mobile app compatible for all modern OS versions? What other modern device requires you build your entire user interface in code? Or regularly breaks API forward and backward compatibility with each major release? Please, please, please let Blackberry die like OS/2! I for one will gladly cheer the day RIM closes its doors.
I might agree if he hadn't passed some of the toughest ethics reform bills since watergate in the Senate. Obama may not have a huge backlog but he has shown in his time in both the IL state senate and the U.S. senate that he does care very much about ethics. For instance, requiring police videotape all interrogations is a good example of transparency legislation he passed (while in IL.)
He obviously won't be able to give us policy specifics right now on everything, it's the primaries for christ's sake. He's outlined some of his plans and some remain more vague because it becomes a lot different once you're in office. However one of the more specific plans he's mentioned for transparency is creating a google for government so we can track every federal dollar spent as well as track legislation and earmarks to bills so we can easily watch what the government is doing. He's also talked about broadcasting hearings and senate sessions over the internet and even allowing public commentary. Remember as well, the President doesn't make the laws himself. Obama's more concerned right now with building a movement and consensus within the people because none of these laws will do any good if the public doesn't realize or believe they can actually take advantage of it or make a difference.
If he gets a clear consensus of support now that makes it that much easier to get what he wants done later if/when he takes office and you don't build a movement by just being a policy wonk. I'd also add he's been just as clear if not more so in a few areas then Hillary has. In the meantime check his website for more specifics and look into some of the articles online that have gone into more detail on his policies. There's a lot of information out there if you know where to look.
You seem to be failing to understand that all the good legislation in the world won't work if no one but politicians, who tend to be easily influenced, swayed and corrupted, can challenge it. If, for instance, the slashdot community could have participated in hearings on the Sonny Bono Copyright Act or the DMCA do you honestly think that we'd he even half as clusterfucked as we are right now in relation to copyright law? Do you think software patents would have ever even stood a chance? We need transparency so that we, the public, can do the things the politicians just can't do. We don't need special interest money, we don't get fancy gifts or all expense paid junkets. We are the people the law effects the most and if corporations get to have their say we had damn better well get ours too. None of the laws we really need will be possible without large public grass roots support. That is only possible by letting the public in on day one, informing them, and most importantly letting them speak up in these proceedings to challenge obviously erroneous or harmful legislation or policy and you're a fool if you think we can somehow accomplish this otherwise.
MySpace has a lot of potential, unfortunately its execution is lacking. Right now its entire focus is primarily a numbers based game. The site has created a sort of self-sustaining black hole status where it sucks people in due to its size, it grows and then can suck even more in. The problem though is it lacks any sort of polish or quality focus.
For a key example, the ability to embed HTML and totally change your profile. This can and has as I've seen routinely allowed users with no knowledge of HTML to break the page or just make plain horrible-looking pages. They also allow unrestricted embedding of audio and video which can be annoying when a page has ten or so songs/videos all auto-playing on page load.
Why was this done? Your guess is as good as mine however my bet was it was an easy way out for customizability. It gives users total control, but as I said earlier about not having a quality focus, it can in fact enable users to de-value the site by creating horrible and/or broken profiles.
So here we are now with an article stating NewsCorp wants to build a brand out of a fundamentally flawed product. Not to say it may not make some profit. However without something short of radical changes to how the site works they're potentially facing what could eventually be a big user exodus if a competing site can create a superior quality-focused and feature-rich environment that trumps what MySpace has.
I also have to say I find it hilarious they think celebrities are actually on MySpace. Obviously nobody's informed businessweek of the common practice referred to as faking, or pretending to be someone you're not using fake pictures (which unlike other sites MySpace makes no attempt to prevent and does little to nothing to identify/remove said accounts at all.)
There are better sites out there that are doing the things MySpace should be doing right now. If they're too slow to move someone else may steal their thunder and a good chunk of their user base eventually. Especially with how I've been hearing from people frustrated with their frequent downtime and errors lately after the NewsCorp acquisition.
It was a rough estimate, I was asking someone who was more familiar with it once and he gave me a rough number for about how many bits it'd take to produce a digital range of color roughly equivalent to what the human eye can perceive. This was a while back but the number still sticks with me unlike the rest of what he said, which was that it would take roughly 256 bits divided between red, green and blue, with a 64-bit alpha channel, which I rounded up to 512-bits, since I doubt anyone would make color with such an odd combination of bits. I might be mistaken about the numbers, but that's what I can recall to the best of my knowledge.
Well, let me elaborate further. I can tell the difference between a CG character and a real character because of the coloring. This isn't just necessarily the color depth but the lighting as well. Usually it's just some slight blending problems, this is especially evident when you take what once was a real character, like say, Neo during the Burly Brawl, and CG him. The differences are slowly becoming more subtle, however I can still see them.
Admittedly this takes a bit of staring sometimes, however usually I can tell the difference more often then not. As long as I can tell that it's CG by looking at it, then that, to me, means it's not a "real creature."
Well really you'll always have a problem when making CG right now for one very specific reason. Current Hollywood CG uses 128-bit color (32 bits in red, green, blue, and alpha channels). The human eye can see the equivalent of about 512-bit color (128 bits per channel instead of 32). Until we have the equivalent color processing power as such to produce a variety of color that can mimic what the human eye can perceive, the creatures will always look fake for the mere fact that at some level we know the coloring's off from the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
There is only one way in theory this could work at all and be practical. You'd need the printer itself to essentially just be a mechanical shell of servos, have a good deal of flash and a small ROM onboard with a thin client that dials out to a server to download the bits of the OS it needs as it needs them. You turn it on, chip dials out, authenticates, downloads a minimal OS to non-volatile flash for the current session, and then uses a design authentication phase to check the design file with the server and then, instead of just getting a "Yes" bit sent back the server actually sends back the instruction set necessary to the machine so that it can print just that design, and does so only in small segments, to ensure that a constant internet connection is required throughout the entire manufacturing session for the object to be printed.
From there your printer will do its job, and once the object is done, the thin-client flashes its instruction set and on power-off removes the remaining fragments of its OS. Of course, such a process would likely be so annoying and cumbersome that I can't imagine the entire market adopting it short of Federal law mandating it be done that way. Otherwise all it takes is one person/company to make a regular 3D printer that has all of its software onboard to break that model. Since with the internet being what it is outside of major metro areas why would anyone want to tie the performance of their 3D printer to what could be a spotty connection? It'd be worse than Ubisoft's DRM, and it'd certainly NEED to be, to actually "secure" the maker market.
And this illustrates beautifully why it is fallacious to compare the concept of possession of physical property towards any sort of "ownership" of intangibles.
Property by nature is limited, ownership of scarce materials makes sense for this reason and the law is meant to reflect that. Information, however, is naturally abundant, and computers make this quite apparent. It's worth remembering the founders recognized this and even explicitly wrote into the constitution that Patent/Copyright was only intended to spur the creation of more art and science. It was not based on any moral or philosophical "right" to ownership, it was entirely a pragmatic compromise.
When research shows that compromise by and large no longer works, then is it any wonder that "ownership" is no longer respected? This is why people consider it "Sharing." Because they don't respect the idea that people should be able to "own" such things, period. This doesn't mean they can't be made to pay for content, but it does reflect that people do not labor under any misguided belief that any sort of IP regime is a moral construct necessary to the maintenance of society.
Rather than play whack-a-mole with pirates, someone 'ought to take a page from Valve and try to invest in ways to engage people in paying for cool things because they want to legitimately support the art/science that went into it. Trying to force people to treat a pragmatic compromise as a moral good is not a winning strategy.
Except you're missing the grander point. "Spending problem" is code for "Spending cuts" is code for "Cut social services" is code for "Let's viciously rape the poor, children and homeless six ways to Sunday without lube"
Anyone who talks about a "Spending problem" is typically someone advocating in a rather roundabout and flowery way for Randian social Darwinism and will usually imply situations one step shy of "Sending the poor to the gas chambers" by arguing directly for policies which will leave them with no ability to do anything other than slowly starve to death, which is a rather painful way to die and very degrading.
And even then, outside of social acceptability the only reason people arguing this do not want to "Send the poor to the gas chambers" is organized and orderly disposal actually costs something, and these people are so content to never want to do a single thing in absolutely any way for anyone they consider an "other" that they would learn to tolerate the screams of the starving, the violence of the dying, and build a society of organized violence (Law and order) so that they would not have to be bothered in their selfish existence.
It's all rather barbaric actually and any time you make a vacuous argument about "Spending" and do not directly take the time to explain how, when we implement your solution, it will not be horribly destroy anyone who has not played the money game and become incredibly wealthy, you are implying this exact same system of barbaric Randian Social Darwinism in your lack of a response as to how that would be anything BUT the world we would live in if we just magically "Cut government spending" or "Drowned government in the bathtub."
Some of us humans though, we have hearts. Shocking huh? ;p
If Microsoft really wanted to actually help users it would build the anti-virus anti-spyware stuff into a pluggable architecture for the OS that would default to the Microsoft version but allow you to swap it out for Norton, Avast, McAfee or whatever else you wanted. So that it provided a tightly integrated default level of security that any other anti-virus vendor would be able to make use of. Just require a special sort of signature or authorization to install new AV software. That way it should be a win-win for everyone. More choice and a more secure OS by default.
Will that be what happens? Most likely not! I mean look at what it took Microsoft to just consider unbundling IE, if it really needs a web browser shell it should be able to allow the shell to be swapped out for other browsers. Would it be more work? Yes, but that's where you can obviously tell there's a bit of monopolization at play. Rather than do the work to let their products stand for themselves they'll just lock you into theirs because it'd be "TOO HARD!" to make choice available.
California's ballot initiatives are a horribly stupid comparison. The Ballot initiatives can only increase spending, not raise taxes. The ballot measures force the state to spend without paying for it through taxes and Proposition 13 neutered California's ability to collect taxes. It takes a super majority to do anything, and of course we have had gridlock on taxes since...Prop 13! So this then gets made up in silly high local taxes which should never need to be collected but someone sold the state on the idea that taxes were evil in every way shape or form (rather then some taxes unfairly hitting the poor/working/middle classes harder than they should) that means that localities have to make it up somehow.
Direct democracy can work but it requires a good process and it does require some level of debate. Quite honestly I think all you need to do, is take a direct democracy and add an actual pointed, winnable debate on issues. If you could force a debate where there are winners and losers based on facts you could prevent "stupid votes" by establishing someone's vote is counter to reality and therefore disqualifiable under very narrow conditions.
Of course that's even a very overbroad view of it. But you can make it work, you just need to ensure that people's votes are cast for meaningful reasons informed by facts and a good debate. The GAs I've been to have all been long but they all were pretty sensible, not a den of morons at all like some people might think. Some people didn't always understand things at first but as long as everyone was willing to listen, answer questions and debate honestly we always arrived at a conclusion.
Really, it's what congress was kind of supposed to be before they realized that they could live the good life selling the voters out for corporate interests. We just need a formalized platform and procedure and we could create a global decentralized government by consensus system.
Who? Nobody, what you don't see now is that if you extrapolate the long game out then they'll merely remove that above there nasty part that forces the banks to write off a loss. Again, just look at current legislative trends, we can't even pass a budget that looks more than maybe ten years into the future, let alone 25. This was a blind give-me to the banks. REAL DEBT RELIEF is what we need, but Obama doesn't want to piss off the bankers so he never suggests it. Instead he uses a slight of hand saying payments will be easier now because it gives the banks 20 years to buy enough congressman or another President to take it away before they face any crunch because of it.
Any change which does not absolve debt is a blind attempt to trick us into playing the bankers game by making us think they can't just eventually change the law before it hurts their pocketbooks.
Well I think the bigger problem here is that Capitalism needs SO MANY checks and balances that all it takes is someone screaming "ALL GUBB'MINT WANTS TA KILL UR BABIEZ!!!!!11" and they can repeal regulations and gut the industry. But the primary fault is that government was NOT insulated from economics. You can essentially "Fire" a politician by cancelling his funding. This current congress is bought and paid for.
It all leads me to wonder if we really shouldn't be doing the hard work now to transition to a resource based economy. Money as merely a means of exchanging arbitrary value is fine but its supply and distribution needs to be build around actually enabling sensible use of resources and also enabling sensible compensation for all involved. The Capitalist system can be made to work, but it takes a lot of government intervention, and DIRECT government redistribution of wealth otherwise those without capital have all of their wealth extracted and are never able to even enter the system at all as a capitalist.
Rugged capitalism worked far more in the older America because well, we were a frontier nation with no central bank for a long time, and anyone could go and get land, make a home, start a business. Gradually we've seen those freedoms eroded and land rights all but locked up. You can't just move onto a plot, build a home and call it yours.
We need a sensible alternative and that first means admitting we are not 1800s America and that 1800s American Capitalism will not work in 21st century America. Income inequality has to have a direct check built into the system to balance (through direct redistribution) otherwise you'll just have this same situation repeat time and time again. Sadly I doubt we'd have many takers on that one. But realistically that's the only way capitalism in a modern economy can work. Workers will never be able to own capital unless we literally GIVE IT TO THEM. Business owners sure as hell won't, they're incentivized by the system to screw their workers as hard as they can to get the job done efficiently.
Oh and like THAT's a compelling case for the status quo? Either argue that the status quo IS ACTIVELY BETTER than the alternative or argue that the alternative IS CONSIDERABLY WORSE. You have done neither, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not a good step in the right direction and doesn't mean we can't figure out the ideal way to do it if we're vigilant over time.
Also, keeping money out of politics is simple if we realize one central thing. In the Military soldiers do not get the same freedoms as civilians. This is only so because it is necessary to do their job. I would so propose that we should consider elected officials right in that same sort of group. We need to basically have a comprehensive ban on receiving or making arrangements to receive future gifts of any kind to an elected official and their immediate or extended family (they would have to all agree to this for the candidate to even be eligible to run) for their campaign, terms, and a little before/after to prevent some kinds of sneaky planning to game the rules.
First of all, the economy is in a massive stall, we are at the tippy top of the roller coaster and about to careen into Great Depression 2 Vs Mega Shark if something isn't done NOW. (Congress flat out refuses to put $1.00 in the hands of ANY PERSON WHO WOULD SPEND It, we are consumer goods/services economy, austerity will cripple lower middle class and further depress demand cascading slowly through the economy to bring it all down.)
The fact is that the banks are the majority guilty parties here. The commercial banks LIED TO THEIR CUSTOMERS, Goldman Sachs LIED TO THEIR INVESTORS, and AIG LIED TO WHOEVER READ THEIR CREDIT RATINGS. They illegally foreclosed on millions of homes after they received taxpayer dollars and continued to pay their executives exorbitant bonuses.
A Debt Jubilee is the ONLY sane settlement that can be reached with the banks. They have so gravely overstepped the law that any suitable punitive damage award against them would destroy the current economy. So instead of damage awards we should simply have a Debt Jubilee. People get to keep their homes, Greece doesn't crash into the Eurozone, and the Big Banks still get to exist...for now.
Um, no. We have OFFICIAL RECORDS which state quite plainly that banks TOLD THEIR EMPLOYEES TO LIE and WE HAVE PROOF OF THIS. These banks directly lied to customers to get them to buy ARMs they couldn't possibly afford. They were constantly pressuring them. There's a reason all fifty states have suits against the big banks right now. This is not a case where you can say: "Stupid lazy poors! lol! tehy shud stop bein' stupid 'n lazay!!!111"
RIM Providing a consistent platform? Have you even LOOKED at their JDK? The EXACT reason there is such a dirth of Apps for Blackberry is BECAUSE of how horrible the device is to develop for. You have to write your entire UI in code, there are no automatic scaling or resource conversion tools like Android provides so you can't design a uniform UI and instead have to design multiple UIs to support any number of their phones. Their JDK was developed on an ancient version of Java and it's never seen a full update to Java 1.5/1.6 which it desperately needs.
The problem is the majority of blackberries are on older devices because RIM allowed carriers to decide when they wanted to enable OS upgrades and because of this it means that fragmentation on Blackberries is actually WORSE than Android. Because Blackberry didn't foresee this and didn't design their JDK so it was simple to query a device for what features it might support. Hell, I have to at a minimum compile two different versions of my Blackberry app, at a bare minimum to run on touch and non-touch devices.
Hell, Google goes out of its way to show you how to make universally usable backwards compatible apps. Do you know of any Blackberry apps that are truly backwards compatible and run on almost all of their recent devices? I know of one, and only one, LogicMail and to be able to create it the lead developer had to implement A CUSTOM BUILD SERVER. Do you think this is anywhere near a sane environment to develop in? If Android is windows 3.1 then Blackberry is ENIAC, still somehow running on its vacuum tubes despite the world having moved on.
I mean the biggest advantage touted of Blackberry OS 6 was that you could develop native apps in Adobe Air, and the Playbook was supposed to originally support Android Apps. I don't think it's a good sign when one of your primary marketed features in a new OS addition is that you can now develop applications for it without having to use the official API. It screams (we're too lazy and/or incompetent to fix our API and app design model entirely and do it right from the start.)
In the end though I couldn't be happier that Blackberry is dying. While Apple's done some shady things, there are some things not even Steve Jobs will do for money and Blackberry's entire reason for continued existence is just that. The only device built from the ground up to enable complete surveillance of all communications to/from it, good riddance I say.
Normally I don't rag on Facebook for privacy...but they have to have video chat, and choose the ONE company determined to make Law Enforcement's wet dream of total VOIP surveillance even in retroactivity a reality. FB is probably working with them to automatically transcribe your calls so that ads can be targeted at you based on what you talk about with relatives. I am deeply disappointed.
RIM pulled the App for the same reason they gave India and Saudi Arabia national backdoors into all Encrypted Blackberry communication. RIM has always been in the business of exclusively selling Treacherous Devices built for enterprise and government use. They were built since their inception to enable and facilitate this level of control. So is it really any surprise to anyone that they'd immediately respond to a government request over an inappropriate app? Their entire business model is built around this type of appeasement.
I think that given the level of transparent cartoonish villainy that's starting to pop up in politics that while yes, a lot of the same people that make up Anonymous are the same people who voted for Ron Paul. Maybe it's just me, but coming as someone who used to share that mindset I would think enough exposure to the current political climate would make them be more likely to side with the Unions than against them.
I know when I was attracted to that whole Ron Paul, limited government movement my concerns were 100% social justice and social issues and I really didn't concern myself hardly at all with the economic platform. You can imagine my dismay when I found out well over half of the most vocal supporters didn't care at all about social issues and many were in fact advancing horribly regressive social policy (as bad and in some cases worse than the current GOP) and dressing it up as "m0ar fr33d0mz!!!" and were really in it for the economics side because they just wanted to never pay taxes and didn't want Big Mean Ol' Gubbmint' from stopping them from hating on minorities and the poor.
All it took for me to see that, ironically enough, was for me to stop looking at politics from an ivory tower as a game of theories and to look at real-world data on what policies actually produced results, and were likely to ever be passed in this lifetime in our government. Good politics and good policy are inseparable, because even the best plan in the world is useless if you can't convince anyone to follow it.
It could possibly be a fake, that's one thing I'm curious about too. The Westboro Baptist Church recently tried to bait them so this could be more bait, or slashdot being a bit cautious after front-paging the fake WBC anon story previously.
You want to know Why Blackberry's network is so horrible? RIM routes 100% of your traffic straight to them before it gets to go to the regular Internet. Why do you think you need to run a separate MDS daemon to connect to the internet on your Blackberry Sim? It's because that SIM's looking for a hardcoded path to a RIM server so it can use BES. Admitedly BES had some good stuff it did back in the day, but right now it exists for one and only one reason.
Saudi Arabia, India and who only knows who else all want irrevocable backdoors into the Blackberry, and RIM can provide that because they've built their entire phone and its ability to access phone or internet features around requiring a constantly active-connection between RIM's servers, the Phone, and RIM's special crypto packages to secure the whole thing (which oh-so conveniently carry backdoors.)
Why is RIM still alive? Well, that's obvious. There are some things in this world not even Steve Jobs will do for money. :p
You know in many ways I'm starting to wonder if the rise of Anonymous could be considered a legitimate political/social phenomena linked to the recession and how people feel increasingly left out of the political process/system because of big money buying our congress' collective ears? Widespread piracy is widely considered by many to be an economic indicator that the market has become too one-sided, maybe this is the political equivalent?
I saw a post suggesting they may be targeting the Koch Brothers for their involvement in the current Wisconsin/multi-state effort to completely bust Unions. Is this finally the people striking back? Not to say I'm not thankful someone's taking the time to respond, but oh what a sad thing it says about humanity that we have to resort to these types of solutions to keep from getting completely steamrolled by the almighty dollar?
As someone who's developed for Blackberry, Android and iDevices am I the only one entirely expecting this? My best guess is that RIM just does not have or know how to find anything resembling a decent API developer. Having developed for their abortion of a Java Development API I can't come to any other conclusion. What other modern device requires you to implement a custom build server just to develop a mobile app compatible for all modern OS versions? What other modern device requires you build your entire user interface in code? Or regularly breaks API forward and backward compatibility with each major release? Please, please, please let Blackberry die like OS/2! I for one will gladly cheer the day RIM closes its doors.
I might agree if he hadn't passed some of the toughest ethics reform bills since watergate in the Senate. Obama may not have a huge backlog but he has shown in his time in both the IL state senate and the U.S. senate that he does care very much about ethics. For instance, requiring police videotape all interrogations is a good example of transparency legislation he passed (while in IL.)
He obviously won't be able to give us policy specifics right now on everything, it's the primaries for christ's sake. He's outlined some of his plans and some remain more vague because it becomes a lot different once you're in office. However one of the more specific plans he's mentioned for transparency is creating a google for government so we can track every federal dollar spent as well as track legislation and earmarks to bills so we can easily watch what the government is doing. He's also talked about broadcasting hearings and senate sessions over the internet and even allowing public commentary. Remember as well, the President doesn't make the laws himself. Obama's more concerned right now with building a movement and consensus within the people because none of these laws will do any good if the public doesn't realize or believe they can actually take advantage of it or make a difference.
If he gets a clear consensus of support now that makes it that much easier to get what he wants done later if/when he takes office and you don't build a movement by just being a policy wonk. I'd also add he's been just as clear if not more so in a few areas then Hillary has. In the meantime check his website for more specifics and look into some of the articles online that have gone into more detail on his policies. There's a lot of information out there if you know where to look.
You seem to be failing to understand that all the good legislation in the world won't work if no one but politicians, who tend to be easily influenced, swayed and corrupted, can challenge it. If, for instance, the slashdot community could have participated in hearings on the Sonny Bono Copyright Act or the DMCA do you honestly think that we'd he even half as clusterfucked as we are right now in relation to copyright law? Do you think software patents would have ever even stood a chance? We need transparency so that we, the public, can do the things the politicians just can't do. We don't need special interest money, we don't get fancy gifts or all expense paid junkets. We are the people the law effects the most and if corporations get to have their say we had damn better well get ours too. None of the laws we really need will be possible without large public grass roots support. That is only possible by letting the public in on day one, informing them, and most importantly letting them speak up in these proceedings to challenge obviously erroneous or harmful legislation or policy and you're a fool if you think we can somehow accomplish this otherwise.
MySpace has a lot of potential, unfortunately its execution is lacking. Right now its entire focus is primarily a numbers based game. The site has created a sort of self-sustaining black hole status where it sucks people in due to its size, it grows and then can suck even more in. The problem though is it lacks any sort of polish or quality focus.
For a key example, the ability to embed HTML and totally change your profile. This can and has as I've seen routinely allowed users with no knowledge of HTML to break the page or just make plain horrible-looking pages. They also allow unrestricted embedding of audio and video which can be annoying when a page has ten or so songs/videos all auto-playing on page load.
Why was this done? Your guess is as good as mine however my bet was it was an easy way out for customizability. It gives users total control, but as I said earlier about not having a quality focus, it can in fact enable users to de-value the site by creating horrible and/or broken profiles.
So here we are now with an article stating NewsCorp wants to build a brand out of a fundamentally flawed product. Not to say it may not make some profit. However without something short of radical changes to how the site works they're potentially facing what could eventually be a big user exodus if a competing site can create a superior quality-focused and feature-rich environment that trumps what MySpace has.
I also have to say I find it hilarious they think celebrities are actually on MySpace. Obviously nobody's informed businessweek of the common practice referred to as faking, or pretending to be someone you're not using fake pictures (which unlike other sites MySpace makes no attempt to prevent and does little to nothing to identify/remove said accounts at all.)
There are better sites out there that are doing the things MySpace should be doing right now. If they're too slow to move someone else may steal their thunder and a good chunk of their user base eventually. Especially with how I've been hearing from people frustrated with their frequent downtime and errors lately after the NewsCorp acquisition.
It was a rough estimate, I was asking someone who was more familiar with it once and he gave me a rough number for about how many bits it'd take to produce a digital range of color roughly equivalent to what the human eye can perceive. This was a while back but the number still sticks with me unlike the rest of what he said, which was that it would take roughly 256 bits divided between red, green and blue, with a 64-bit alpha channel, which I rounded up to 512-bits, since I doubt anyone would make color with such an odd combination of bits. I might be mistaken about the numbers, but that's what I can recall to the best of my knowledge.
Well, let me elaborate further. I can tell the difference between a CG character and a real character because of the coloring. This isn't just necessarily the color depth but the lighting as well. Usually it's just some slight blending problems, this is especially evident when you take what once was a real character, like say, Neo during the Burly Brawl, and CG him. The differences are slowly becoming more subtle, however I can still see them.
Admittedly this takes a bit of staring sometimes, however usually I can tell the difference more often then not. As long as I can tell that it's CG by looking at it, then that, to me, means it's not a "real creature."
And for the record, I was born in 1984.
Well really you'll always have a problem when making CG right now for one very specific reason. Current Hollywood CG uses 128-bit color (32 bits in red, green, blue, and alpha channels). The human eye can see the equivalent of about 512-bit color (128 bits per channel instead of 32). Until we have the equivalent color processing power as such to produce a variety of color that can mimic what the human eye can perceive, the creatures will always look fake for the mere fact that at some level we know the coloring's off from the real world.
Well, I'd argue it does offer a bit of a con in that it requires three libraries to be installed versus just one for DX, that's just me anyway.