The present-day SCOTUS is little more than a rubber stamp for the President and Congress. And even when they do make the rare controversial ruling, it's for some conservative political end (like the Citizen's United case), not in some noble defense of citizens' Constitutional rights. I would frankly be surprised if anyone in that chamber has even *glanced* at the U.S. Constitution since they took a required class on it once in law school.
Indeed, you can clearly see that in such rulings as Boumediene v. Bush (Guantanamo prisoners have the right of habeus corpus), Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (violent video games are protected by the First Amendment), and Bullcoming v. New Mexico (the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to confront the actual accuser, another person that is employed in the same role is not sufficient).
The current Court is certainly conservative, but it's hardly a rubber stamp on the government. The Justices clearly consider each case on its own merits, and they might disagree with you on what the right answer is, but it's not because they haven't thoroughly considered the case.
The fact that Barack Obama can all but abolish habeas corpus and due process with the stroke of a pen without them so much as raising an eyebrow should let you know where those nine stooges stand on the U.S. Constitution.
Supreme Court justices rarely say anything about a law until a case is presented to them, and they're barred by the Constitution from issuing a ruling on a law until an actual case arising under that law is presented to them. Congress can pass whatever unconstitutional laws it likes, the Supreme Court isn't involved until the laws are invoked in some manner.
Also there is no need to follow the specs exactly.
Sure there is, if you're saying that buying a computer from Apple is more expensive than buying the equivalent computer from someone else or building it yourself. Nobody disputes that you can buy a computer with worse parts than a Mac for much cheaper than a Mac. Similarly, nobody disputes that the high quality parts are superfluous for some (possibly large) segment of the population, so you can make some substitutions of worse parts without affecting the value to that consumer. The question is whether a computer with the same specs built by Apple is more expensive than one obtained some other way.
Keep in mind that every print subscriber gets a free top-of-the-line digital subscription. Its actually cheaper to get the paper edition and recycle it then it is to just get the online, in fact, which is annoyingly stupid.
Stupid, but economically sensible given the environment. Print advertising rates are set based on circulation, so simply sending a paper to someone earns money for the Times, whether they read it or not. If you assume that (advertising income per paper subscriber) - (cost of printing a paper) > (web subscription cost) - (paper subscription cost), the Times makes more money when you sign up for the cheaper paper edition than when you sign up for online only.
Am I out of touch or am I, by default, wise? I look at these services and think "why would I want that? I have an ftp site of my own anyway."
The main advantage to iCloud over your own server appears to be that they'll upsample your music for you, as long as it's something they sell on iTunes. If you only have a crappy copy (that's what you could find for download, you ripped it from CD in a low bitrate, whatever), your copy on your FTP server won't be any better, but the copy in iCloud will be 256kbps AAC. Whether that's worth the price is up to you, but it's at least one clear advantage over running your own server.
Either the plaintiffs didn't read that law and it clearly states that anyone is exempt from being sued as long as they follow EPA regs, or the Supreme Court inferred that anyone who follows EPA regs is indemnified but it doesn't actually say that in the law.
It's a little more complicated than that. The suit was based in common law, which is basically laws that are created by judges to handle cases that clearly are wrong but there isn't a law about. In this case, the power companies were sued for "nuisance", which is pretty much just the act of screwing up someone else's property.
One of the rules of the US legal system is that actual laws displace common law in that area, because common laws aren't written down and the Supreme Court doesn't really like to rely on them. In this case, they said that since the Clean Air Act exists and addresses the particular behavior in question (even if it ultimately allows the behavior), the unwritten common law no longer applies. The major question was whether or not the state of having the act (and the previous Supreme Court ruling that said that it applies to carbon dioxide) but not having any regulations was enough to displace the common law, and the Court ruled that it was.
Yeah, I sure hope none of the websites I frequent would ever have a system by which I could give them some money to have the advertising removed. That would be awful!
However besides swapping out a stylus for a mouse, MS has put in very little thought or development about optimizing the UI for tablets. There is no sliding. Clicking and dragging on the stylus is the same as with a mouse; however, with a stylus, it's not very as comfortable or elegant.
One of the very interesting things that was pointed out to me is that scrolling with a mouse wheel and scrolling with a finger both work the way you expect them to, but they work in opposite directions. With a mouse wheel, moving your finger up moves the document up; on touchscreen devices, moving your finger up moves the document down. That's the kind of thing that makes just putting a desktop OS onto a touchscreen device a losing proposition: you need to change fundamental input interactions in order to make it work the way people think it should work.
It's really amazing how an excellent UI is so valuable to quite a lot of people that they'll pay much higher prices, and blow off the overreaching fine print that infringes on our rights.
I don't really find that amazing at all. The point of a computer for most people isn't anything to do with the computer, it's just a tool for doing something they care about, and an excellent UI makes doing that thing easier. If the restrictions on freedom are less of a hindrance to doing that thing than the design is a benefit, then they'll buy that product.
For most people, this isn't about philosophy, it's just about the most efficient way to do what they care about.
3. This is the same company that produced this choice quote: "Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said Internet users shouldn't worry about privacy unless they have something to hide."
This has been kind of overblown. The answer was actually "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.", and he was speaking in the context of court orders. It's just a statement of reality: if Google is holding some of your information and the US Government comes along and wants it, they have to hand it over. So if you're worried about that happening, you probably shouldn't upload it to Google (or anyone) in the first place.
Only if people insist on using it. I can't see that it would be in YouTube's interest to use H.264 exclusively.
The YouTube guys have said that they don't want to spend the hard drive space to hold three different formats on disk (and considering 20 hours of video of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, I can't blame them), and that the bandwidth requirements for the same level of quality are significantly higher for Theora than for H.264. So basically, YouTube uses H.264 because it's cheaper than any alternative, presumably even after factoring in licensing costs (which I think are capped at like a few million dollars for each licensee, and thus are probably noise to YouTube).
Anyway the holy grail of choice would be a phone that is $500 or less that support CDMA and GSM on Verizon/T-Mobile/ATT/Sprint..
From what I've heard, this is basically impossible (so far) due to antenna and radio design problems. At least on the GSM side, you can apparently support either AT&T 3G or T-Mobile 3G, but both doesn't fly. (There's money to be made for a handset maker who did so, if only from not having to manufacture multiple SKUs for different networks, so it's not a lack of trying. The BB Storm is close, but still doesn't support all 3G frequencies in the US.)
Sounds like 'uneducation' to me. The problem with learning at your own pace is that not all students are naturally curious, and even those who are are most likely not naturally curious about every subject that needs to be taught in the world. Learning should be fun whenever possible, but not all things are pleasant, and children need to learn that some things require work and discipline. Outside of research labs, very few individuals in life are able to do or think about just what they want to do.
From a cynical point of view, it sounds an awful lot like the people I know whose parents had them home schooled but then didn't actually spend any time teaching them anything. They didn't end up learning anything and now aren't really prepared to get a job that pays the rent.
I don't think it's impossible to make it work well, and for a certain kind of kid I think it would be fantastic. Unschooling would require a lot of involvement from parents, though, probably a lot more than public school would, and I expect that some portion of parents aren't willing to provide that involvement. I'd worry that those parents will latch onto unschooling as a way to justify letting their kids do whatever they want without any supervision.
Perhaps it is a stupid question but why do the vendors have a say what goes into the spec and what doesn't? Isn't it up to them to choose to implement the spec fully or not? FFS just make it Ogg Vorbis/Theora and if Apple doesn't want to support it then Safari can just not support that part of the spec. It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.
If you go down that road then you end up with the world we have today: developers first look at the spec, and then they try to find out whether or not that part of the spec actually matters to the real world of browsers. The HTML5 editors want a better world, one where the major browsers are actually 100% compliant. They may not get there, but they definitely won't if they put things in the spec that browser vendors have said outright that they won't implement.
Indeed. I live in NYC, and since it has a sufficiently extensive network, I don't ever need a car, so my yearly transportation costs are $972 (soon to increase to $1068), paid for with pre-tax money. That's less than a lot of people pay just for insurance on their car, let alone gas or maintenance.
While I appreciate the anecdotal reference here to supposedly a successful economic situation, I'm still not convinced that this company would have made less money without the patent process in place.
...
In this case, I'll bet the patents were used in a defensive mode, where the chemical processes were implemented with the understanding that a patent troll couldn't stop them.
Actually, they definitely did make more money than they would have without the patent process. The chemical industry is one in which it's difficult to come up with a chemical that does a specific thing, but easy to produce a lot of a chemical once you have it. The patents weren't used to protect the company from patent trolls, they were used to protect the company from other major chemical companies. Without a patent, if they came up with a new chemical and put it on the market, another company could come along, analyze what they were selling, and produce substantially the same product without putting in the time and money upfront for the R&D. That would seriously reduce the profitability of coming up with new chemicals.
And no, I don't love the patent system (I wish it were completely abolished), but it is an unfortunate evil in today's engineering environment. I have yet to meet a single individual that I know personally or have been able to shake their hand who has made a single penny off of a patent, yet I know dozens of individuals who have had them granted and have even developed patent-worthy concepts of my own.
There are some industries in which the patent system works like it's supposed to. My dad was a chemist until he retired, and he generated a number of patents which have been really valuable to him and the company he worked for. It costs a lot of time and money to come up with chemicals that do interesting things, and patents makes it so that doing so is profitable.
Google doesn't promote some of its other services as much as it should. For instance what's the point of buying Orkut and then not promoting it? Unless the whole point was to kill it off for Blogger.
Are you thinking of some other product? Orkut has been a Google service since the beginning, and is one of the top social networks in the world (though not in the United States).
Slashdot Mirror
Let us know how it goes, NYC!
It's going pretty well so far.
The present-day SCOTUS is little more than a rubber stamp for the President and Congress. And even when they do make the rare controversial ruling, it's for some conservative political end (like the Citizen's United case), not in some noble defense of citizens' Constitutional rights. I would frankly be surprised if anyone in that chamber has even *glanced* at the U.S. Constitution since they took a required class on it once in law school.
Indeed, you can clearly see that in such rulings as Boumediene v. Bush (Guantanamo prisoners have the right of habeus corpus), Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (violent video games are protected by the First Amendment), and Bullcoming v. New Mexico (the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to confront the actual accuser, another person that is employed in the same role is not sufficient).
The current Court is certainly conservative, but it's hardly a rubber stamp on the government. The Justices clearly consider each case on its own merits, and they might disagree with you on what the right answer is, but it's not because they haven't thoroughly considered the case.
The fact that Barack Obama can all but abolish habeas corpus and due process with the stroke of a pen without them so much as raising an eyebrow should let you know where those nine stooges stand on the U.S. Constitution.
Supreme Court justices rarely say anything about a law until a case is presented to them, and they're barred by the Constitution from issuing a ruling on a law until an actual case arising under that law is presented to them. Congress can pass whatever unconstitutional laws it likes, the Supreme Court isn't involved until the laws are invoked in some manner.
Also there is no need to follow the specs exactly.
Sure there is, if you're saying that buying a computer from Apple is more expensive than buying the equivalent computer from someone else or building it yourself. Nobody disputes that you can buy a computer with worse parts than a Mac for much cheaper than a Mac. Similarly, nobody disputes that the high quality parts are superfluous for some (possibly large) segment of the population, so you can make some substitutions of worse parts without affecting the value to that consumer. The question is whether a computer with the same specs built by Apple is more expensive than one obtained some other way.
Keep in mind that every print subscriber gets a free top-of-the-line digital subscription. Its actually cheaper to get the paper edition and recycle it then it is to just get the online, in fact, which is annoyingly stupid.
Stupid, but economically sensible given the environment. Print advertising rates are set based on circulation, so simply sending a paper to someone earns money for the Times, whether they read it or not. If you assume that (advertising income per paper subscriber) - (cost of printing a paper) > (web subscription cost) - (paper subscription cost), the Times makes more money when you sign up for the cheaper paper edition than when you sign up for online only.
Yes code reviews can be painful especially if you work with some douchebags.
I don't think the problem there is the code reviews.
Am I out of touch or am I, by default, wise? I look at these services and think "why would I want that? I have an ftp site of my own anyway."
The main advantage to iCloud over your own server appears to be that they'll upsample your music for you, as long as it's something they sell on iTunes. If you only have a crappy copy (that's what you could find for download, you ripped it from CD in a low bitrate, whatever), your copy on your FTP server won't be any better, but the copy in iCloud will be 256kbps AAC. Whether that's worth the price is up to you, but it's at least one clear advantage over running your own server.
Either the plaintiffs didn't read that law and it clearly states that anyone is exempt from being sued as long as they follow EPA regs, or the Supreme Court inferred that anyone who follows EPA regs is indemnified but it doesn't actually say that in the law.
It's a little more complicated than that. The suit was based in common law, which is basically laws that are created by judges to handle cases that clearly are wrong but there isn't a law about. In this case, the power companies were sued for "nuisance", which is pretty much just the act of screwing up someone else's property.
One of the rules of the US legal system is that actual laws displace common law in that area, because common laws aren't written down and the Supreme Court doesn't really like to rely on them. In this case, they said that since the Clean Air Act exists and addresses the particular behavior in question (even if it ultimately allows the behavior), the unwritten common law no longer applies. The major question was whether or not the state of having the act (and the previous Supreme Court ruling that said that it applies to carbon dioxide) but not having any regulations was enough to displace the common law, and the Court ruled that it was.
Yeah, I sure hope none of the websites I frequent would ever have a system by which I could give them some money to have the advertising removed. That would be awful!
However besides swapping out a stylus for a mouse, MS has put in very little thought or development about optimizing the UI for tablets. There is no sliding. Clicking and dragging on the stylus is the same as with a mouse; however, with a stylus, it's not very as comfortable or elegant.
One of the very interesting things that was pointed out to me is that scrolling with a mouse wheel and scrolling with a finger both work the way you expect them to, but they work in opposite directions. With a mouse wheel, moving your finger up moves the document up; on touchscreen devices, moving your finger up moves the document down. That's the kind of thing that makes just putting a desktop OS onto a touchscreen device a losing proposition: you need to change fundamental input interactions in order to make it work the way people think it should work.
Which you can mount under Linux, using FUSE and the appropriate apps (usbmuxd, libimobiledevice, and ifuse). I maintain usbmuxd.
In fact, when you plug an iPhone into a Mac, you can see in the process list that usbmuxd is what Mac OS is using to talk to the device.
It's really amazing how an excellent UI is so valuable to quite a lot of people that they'll pay much higher prices, and blow off the overreaching fine print that infringes on our rights.
I don't really find that amazing at all. The point of a computer for most people isn't anything to do with the computer, it's just a tool for doing something they care about, and an excellent UI makes doing that thing easier. If the restrictions on freedom are less of a hindrance to doing that thing than the design is a benefit, then they'll buy that product.
For most people, this isn't about philosophy, it's just about the most efficient way to do what they care about.
3. This is the same company that produced this choice quote: "Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said Internet users shouldn't worry about privacy unless they have something to hide."
This has been kind of overblown. The answer was actually "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.", and he was speaking in the context of court orders. It's just a statement of reality: if Google is holding some of your information and the US Government comes along and wants it, they have to hand it over. So if you're worried about that happening, you probably shouldn't upload it to Google (or anyone) in the first place.
Then why doesn't it have an eInk or other non-backlit display suitable for staring at for long periods of time?
Because you can't display video on eInk, and people do an awful lot more video watching than book reading nowadays.
And considering that it only continued sending information until you restarted the browser.
Only if people insist on using it. I can't see that it would be in YouTube's interest to use H.264 exclusively.
The YouTube guys have said that they don't want to spend the hard drive space to hold three different formats on disk (and considering 20 hours of video of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, I can't blame them), and that the bandwidth requirements for the same level of quality are significantly higher for Theora than for H.264. So basically, YouTube uses H.264 because it's cheaper than any alternative, presumably even after factoring in licensing costs (which I think are capped at like a few million dollars for each licensee, and thus are probably noise to YouTube).
"Serial Number Entry Technician"? I work in Serial Number Quality Assurance, you insensitive clod!
Anyway the holy grail of choice would be a phone that is $500 or less that support CDMA and GSM on Verizon/T-Mobile/ATT/Sprint..
From what I've heard, this is basically impossible (so far) due to antenna and radio design problems. At least on the GSM side, you can apparently support either AT&T 3G or T-Mobile 3G, but both doesn't fly. (There's money to be made for a handset maker who did so, if only from not having to manufacture multiple SKUs for different networks, so it's not a lack of trying. The BB Storm is close, but still doesn't support all 3G frequencies in the US.)
Sounds like 'uneducation' to me. The problem with learning at your own pace is that not all students are naturally curious, and even those who are are most likely not naturally curious about every subject that needs to be taught in the world. Learning should be fun whenever possible, but not all things are pleasant, and children need to learn that some things require work and discipline. Outside of research labs, very few individuals in life are able to do or think about just what they want to do.
From a cynical point of view, it sounds an awful lot like the people I know whose parents had them home schooled but then didn't actually spend any time teaching them anything. They didn't end up learning anything and now aren't really prepared to get a job that pays the rent.
I don't think it's impossible to make it work well, and for a certain kind of kid I think it would be fantastic. Unschooling would require a lot of involvement from parents, though, probably a lot more than public school would, and I expect that some portion of parents aren't willing to provide that involvement. I'd worry that those parents will latch onto unschooling as a way to justify letting their kids do whatever they want without any supervision.
Perhaps it is a stupid question but why do the vendors have a say what goes into the spec and what doesn't? Isn't it up to them to choose to implement the spec fully or not? FFS just make it Ogg Vorbis/Theora and if Apple doesn't want to support it then Safari can just not support that part of the spec. It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.
If you go down that road then you end up with the world we have today: developers first look at the spec, and then they try to find out whether or not that part of the spec actually matters to the real world of browsers. The HTML5 editors want a better world, one where the major browsers are actually 100% compliant. They may not get there, but they definitely won't if they put things in the spec that browser vendors have said outright that they won't implement.
I go to NYC and it's like heaven
Indeed. I live in NYC, and since it has a sufficiently extensive network, I don't ever need a car, so my yearly transportation costs are $972 (soon to increase to $1068), paid for with pre-tax money. That's less than a lot of people pay just for insurance on their car, let alone gas or maintenance.
While I appreciate the anecdotal reference here to supposedly a successful economic situation, I'm still not convinced that this company would have made less money without the patent process in place.
...
In this case, I'll bet the patents were used in a defensive mode, where the chemical processes were implemented with the understanding that a patent troll couldn't stop them.
Actually, they definitely did make more money than they would have without the patent process. The chemical industry is one in which it's difficult to come up with a chemical that does a specific thing, but easy to produce a lot of a chemical once you have it. The patents weren't used to protect the company from patent trolls, they were used to protect the company from other major chemical companies. Without a patent, if they came up with a new chemical and put it on the market, another company could come along, analyze what they were selling, and produce substantially the same product without putting in the time and money upfront for the R&D. That would seriously reduce the profitability of coming up with new chemicals.
And no, I don't love the patent system (I wish it were completely abolished), but it is an unfortunate evil in today's engineering environment. I have yet to meet a single individual that I know personally or have been able to shake their hand who has made a single penny off of a patent, yet I know dozens of individuals who have had them granted and have even developed patent-worthy concepts of my own.
There are some industries in which the patent system works like it's supposed to. My dad was a chemist until he retired, and he generated a number of patents which have been really valuable to him and the company he worked for. It costs a lot of time and money to come up with chemicals that do interesting things, and patents makes it so that doing so is profitable.
The FAQ actually says it'll stay around. (RTFFAQ?)
Google doesn't promote some of its other services as much as it should. For instance what's the point of buying Orkut and then not promoting it? Unless the whole point was to kill it off for Blogger.
Are you thinking of some other product? Orkut has been a Google service since the beginning, and is one of the top social networks in the world (though not in the United States).
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 30 years, then yes.
So you're saying that it's self-explanatory once you've been exposed to it :)