The correct solution is that security features (including status bar, address bar, etc.) should be turned off by user. Of course, it should not be too easy (lest the users are tricked into doing it).
Then IT staff can easily turn the browsers into custom apps (by disabling status bar and other things for a particular server), but hostile sites can't do it remotedly. There is no reason a remote site should have access to such power directly.
BTW, I think that Opera does things right on this front. The program window is the program window, noone can mess with it. The sites are limited to small page windows and they can't take over my desktop from there.
First, it's written id, not ID. Second, what was exactly so original about Unreal? As I recall, it was mostly better graphics than Quake 2 (more variety in levels). Unreal 2 couldn't be less original if they tried - the very definition of run-off-the-mill. Half-Life was great, but so were Wolf 3D and Doom, even story wise. And finally, if you actually checked at least a single article or a news item related to Doom3, you would realise that there actually are a lot of gameplay, story, style, etc. innovations in this game.
Sorry for feeding the troll, but this one was so pathetic, I kind of pitied him.
The original point was that Akademgorodok felt more free than Detroit. My take on this is that although political freedom was apparently lacking in the USSR, people were quite free in other aspects.
As for the Negroes, well, they were lynched in the states, not beaten up, but lynched by the mob. This happened in the 1960s too. And even though there definitely was some negative sentiment among Russians towards Jews and people from Caucasus, this was against the principles of internationalism. Don't forget that Stalin was from Georgia, that Soviet Union supported and developed all republics and that normal people never discriminated on the basis of race/nationality. Personally, I didn't even knew that Jews were "supposed to be somehow bad" until I was about 18 years old and when I finally learned that theory, it appeared completely and utterly ridiculous to me. Don't forget that the word WASP doesn't come from Russian language. And the University of the Friendship of Nations is not in the USA, it's in Moscow.
What is "significant" or "huge"? Short of actual numbers, I'm forced to dismiss that as meaningless.
I don't have the reference handy and I don't remember it very well, so I didn't want to mislead you. I think it was 5-10%. Of course, there is always an explanation for that, because USA is the best, but when one child dies in Cuba that's because of evil Castro.
And giving out free milk helps that... how? This is a red herring; it has nothing to do with the give away of free milk, nor the differences between Cuba and the US. It just shows that Castro (his government) cares about children and actually does something for them. Meanwhile the US government (and the President) prefer empty rhetoric about leaving no children behind without funding or any actions.
So it's demand-driven, as I said. Supply-driven would mean it is about the making, not the selling. Not exactly. The amount of watching of educational TV depends on how much programming is produced. If you make it, people will watch it, if you don't people won't. It's determined by how much you produce, so it's supply-driven.
That is a horse of a slightly different color. How does this differ from the History Channel and Discovery Channel and the like that most Americans get on cable? Discovery Channel is masqueraded as edutainment, but it's not even that. It's mindless drivel. Can't say that about History Channel, specific Discovery subchannels and PBS (PBS apparently does have some decent programs). Cuba has college courses, not random programs about UFOs and Yeti (which is apparently all that Discovery ever shows). College courses are education, not edutainment, even when they are designed for TV.
I don't watch PBS. I don't use the TV to learn; I use a TV to be entertained. TV is just a medium. Like the Internet it can (and should) be used for education. The fact that the US government prefers people watching 4 hours of entertainment per day is just sad. Showing educational courses on TV is one of the most efficient investments in education that you can make - much better (in returns per dollar spent) than improving libraries and schools. Of course, Cuban government also spends on schools and libraries. For example, according to the figures I once read, average class is 30 children in the US and 20 children in Cuba.
It's off-topic. I wish people could discuss these subjects without going off on a diatribe about America. It's not off-topic because less children drop out of school in Cuba, proving that the state cares about the children and about effective education system.
Well, Poland was occupied (as much as I hate the word and as much as it was expedient, you might have still not liked it)and you had a socialist government forced on you. That's different from the USSR, where there were less reasons to desire political freedom.
There is comparision. Censorship in the US is as bad as it was in the Soviet Union, it's just different. And in practice censorship doesn't really matter as much as the access to media. Yeah, I can bash the American government, but... If I said on Slasdhot that I am thinking (not planning, just entertaining the possibilities) about killing President Bush, and if I lived in the US, I would be visited by the Secret Service in a few days (real story). OK, after a detailed interrogation and background check I would still be free (hopefully), but does the fact that there is "no censorship" compensates for more totalitarian control than ever in the USSR?
And don't tell me the US didn't punish people for producing porn. And don't even start on the discrimination (at least the Soviets didn't lynch Negroes), because this is utter bullshit. Yes, there were cases (like with Chechens, or Turks) in Stalin's time when the state did the discrimination. But in the majority of the cases, especially in the 1960s-1980s, people of other nationalities had as many rights as Russians and as many opportunities to execute their rights. Not to mention that the whole Soviet culture was opposed to discrimination on the very basic level.
Sure, everybody knows that the Soviet Union was a bastion of freedom, except for those old crooks Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, who kept remindinding us some stupid gulag stuff and the like... Americans tend to associate human rights with political freedom. This is not necessarily natural for people in other cultures. Soviet people were free in many respects, even though political dissent was not tolerated.
We're talking about a country that had censorship, no freedom of speech, no independent judiciary system whatsowever... Jesus Christ, in Moscow in the old times they transported homeless people 100km from the city center as not to spoil the view. What kind of propaganda were you fed on? Censorship? As in "Janet Jackson"? There was censorship in the USSR, there is censorship in the USA. Your TV is notorious for refusing to air controversial ads (anti-consumerism and stuff). Not to mention the fact that your media can be blinded by patriotism very easily. There was freedom of speech in the USSR. It had limits though, as political opposition was usually not permitted. But in the US you have freedom of speech, in specially designated Freedom speech zones, no less. The judiciary system in the Soviet Union was generally ok (not the best), it's just that the laws did not permit certain things, most notably political opposition. And homeless people were not transported anywhere, because generally there were no homeless people. Seriously. Living conditions weren't necessarily great for all 200 million people, but there were no slums and no people living in a cardboard box. I remember that prostitutes and criminals were moved out of Moscow during 1980 Olympic games, but how is that different from any other country (such as Greece)?
If you think that there is no government oppression in Russia, go look up 'Chechenya' and 'Yukos'. Or, find and read the story about how recently Russian government cracked down on vets for using anaesthetics to operate on dogs (they locked them up for 'possession of large quantities of drugs'). Those bastards made vets operate on dogs without anaesthetics. Modern Russia is different from the Soviet Union (the example about Akademgorodok was from the Soviet times), in many (pretty much all, to tell the truth) respects it is much worse. Your second example is just random craziness, though, not government oppression. The government couldn't care less about drugs, or dogs, or people...
Even though in theory American children should be allright, the facts are that a very significant (i.e. huge) number of American kids are undernourished. Not to mention that another large group is overweight.
As for college courses, I am not very familiar with the situation in America, but I can tell you that educational TV is very much supply-driven. There was excellent educational programming on Soviet TV, really quality stuff, and very popular. But the transition to market economy slowly but surely killed it. Because, truth be told, softcore-porn reality shows, stupid talk-shows and shows about mobsters attract people much easier. Heck, there weren't even any "shows" in the USSR, those were "programs" or "transmissions".
In reality, college courses build on each other and each lecture builds on the last. They build on books and graded homework. The number of people who would actually watch and gain something from college courses on TV is minimal. This is simply false. In countries where there are quality college (or other level) courses on TV, people do use them to study. Of course, these are not just filmed college lectures, but special TV courses that try to use the advantages of the media.
Markets don't always work, and TV is one example where public organisations guided by public interests can fare much better than ad-supported private channels. It must be obvious - if PBS is good, than public television must obviously be excellent. Logic.:)
In any case, about 10 percent of teens in the US are not attending school, and the school results are generally considered appalling.
Like probably everyone else, I am tired to death of journalists constantly adding how this and that technology will help fight terrorists or cure cancer. Fuck that - there are millions other uses, which are just as important. Not everything should be a weapon or a cure.
For example, this technology may be used as interface for wearable computers, it can be used in museums by AI guides and everywhere else where computers can provide context sensitive information. It can be used by life recording systems (like Microsoft's My Digital Bits or some such). Girls can be use it with their wearable computers to confirm their suspicions that a guy indeed stares at her chest. There are so many uses, especially those that are not obvious now. Why should we always worry about terrorism?
There is more to search than Yahoo, MSN or Google. How about Vivisimo, Teoma and AllTheWeb. Diversity is always good. I will find with other search engines things that you will not find on Google alone. And additional search features like clustering at Vivisimo are great.
This shows again that Microsoft design of the office file formats (basically dumping RAM on disk) was pure genius. After so much time so many brilliant developers still can't write a 100% compatible office suite. Meanwhile Wine guys managed to replicate a lot of Windows functionality using available APIs and specifications.
The MS Office documents, on the other hand, are generated using a very complicated and chaotic process. Given that there were documented cases of word files containing parts of the memory that once belonged to another application, one cannot fathom the intricacy of this, much less recreate it in readable code.
Ah-ah-ah-ha! I am cuming, I am cuming! Look, a house! Look, trimmed grass! Look, expensive movie theatre! Look, Bill Gates! What a disgusting example of mercantile Microsoftie porn that blog was. Yeah, I get it, Bill is rich, or, more precisely, filthy rich. And nobody knows the name of his daughter. Big fucking deal.
P.S. As a courtecy for all microsofties, let me give you these valuable bits of information. Bill has pimple. He jerks off to dirty pictures. He constantly makes mistakes that cost billions of dollars. And in the morning his breath smells. Don't get too excited about him.:)
Fidel Castro is not that bad. Neither is Cuba. After all, do all American children get free milk until they are six? Do they get free college courses on television? Though so.
As for Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe, they are not "public servants", they are more like dictators - that's a different category, since dictators are not supposed to worry about some pesky privacy laws.
Perhaps that's what we actually need - protection without restrictions? That lady didn't prevent anyone doing anything, she didn't do cavity search to find drugs or what kind of books you were reading.
As for the Moscow unfortunate situation today, this is the result of "reforms". It wasn't like that in Soviet Union (even though you had to register where you travel), the problem is that there are several times more policemen today in Moscow that there was in the USSR. The average number of registered incidents is actually less than 1 per policeman per year! They just extort money, plain and simple - an example of crime, not government oppression.
My Konica Minolta camera is as heavy as my Nokia phone. I am perfectly sure that with some ingenious engineering it will be (or already is) feasible to combine them into one device that is not larger. After all, you don't need two screens or two batteries. And the camera already takes pictures that are better than the majority of camera user will ever need.
Ditto for MP3s. While there will be a market for higher-end hardware, 90% of customers will be happy with a camera/mp3/phone/PDA combo.
Some day when miniaturization and overall quality of such products improves, then I'll reconsider.
Which is basically the point of the article. There is no market for specialised devices, because in a few years it is possible to fit everything into the phone and then everyone will "reconsider". But apparently, the moderation mob here is bent on upmoding everyone who says that convergence is bad.
Your Qualcomm sounds good by basically not supporting decent compression. Which means that it wastes as much capacity as 2-3 modern phones. Which means that you are leeching capacity from the operator (who is too kind to stop supporting older phones, or doesn't care because there are too few leeches like you). And you keep complaining.
Meanwhile everyone enjoys much cheaper cellular service, albeit with a minor drop in quality. As for you, happy piggybacking.
If celllular is such a terrible business, why more and more operators emerge? The reason is that infrastructure is cheap today, there aren't many entry barriers (every phone operator mush provide interoperability to everyone) and there are a lot of opportunities for creative marketing, good service and whatever tricks you could use. Mergers make sense to a point, but then establishing new operators also makes sense. Just a few years ago a new national operator, DNA, was started in Finland.
And the fact that some customers are price-conscious doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the business.
Nokia is Finnish. Sony-Ericsson is Japanese/Swedish. Siemens is German. In their home markets people buy phones for themselves. That's why you can enter a ring-tone on the phone or transfer a MIDI file from your PC or a PDA. DRM might be a factor for Motorola, but Nokia and other phone manufacturers know who is paying them - customers.
Everyone here on/. keeps whining about how they only want their phone to make calls. And everyone else keeps moderating this shit up. With the intent of getting some cheap karma, let me repeat the same boring lie.
A soundcard in my computer just makes it bigger/bulkier, no thanks. If I wanted a music player I would have bought a stereo, if I wanted to play movies, I would have bought a VCR, if I wanted to play games, I would go into arcades or buy a console. If I wanted to make cheap phone calls I would get a better long-distance contract, if I wanted to write a document, I would have bought an electric typewriter. And if I wanted to read news, I would have get a Reuters/Minitel/whatever terminal. Of course, if I wanted to read books, I could have gotten a microfilm reader. Did I miss anything? So, as it stands, computers are evil and have no realistic reason to ever be useful. It is stupid to include extra functionality in it, while it's obvious that separate devices are better.
Convinced? The same is true for the phones as well. While at the moment it makes sense to buy some separate devices, it will not last forever and everyone will benefit from convergence. Currently I use a cheap old phone that costed me 30 euros, but has great battery life, reception and voice quality. I also use an old Palm IIIxe and a new digital camera. I might get an MP3 player too. But this doesn't change the fact that in five years I will be extremely happy to replace all this great hardware with one small communicator device that will be better and cheaper.
Consumers in Europe and Asia buy their cell phones. They don't get one with their phone contract, as is common in the US. One advantage of that is that they can easily get the newest phones without waiting for their mobile operator to get rid of the old models. Second advantage is that the manufacturer gets paid.
Crick understood that the consciousness has neural basis. In the ideal world that should have pushed him towards cryonics and we wouldn't lose a great scientist.:( Why can't people think rationally about matters that concern them so much.
I've read more than once managers in retail (and other areas, for example, Internet providing) complaining about customers always looking for the bargain, but still expecting high quality. This sometimes forces the retailers to basically mislead the consumer and sell junk, lest they lose to competitors who do it.
There are some projects, there are some products. But we will have to wait several years until the enabling technologies develop enough. There are technologies to automatically produce stuff from a CAD file - computer circuit boards, components from plastic, metal, wood, even marble sculptures. You can already design something and order it online to be delivered in a few days.
These manufacturing technologies will evolve and in 5-10 years it will be possible to automatically build a wide range of complex products. When many objects can be built for the price of materials plus a small markup to cover robotic manufacturing, there will be open source for physical objects.
At some point the major (or even the only reasonable) way to design things will be the open community development.
But then, more and more things would be made by robots and eventually this will spread to nanotechnology. At that point having AI design something from scratch will be so simple that there will be no reason to keep designs secret (you wouldn't be able to exploit the monopoly anyway) and everything will become open source.
It is fun to be bad once. After you replace the text of an article with the word PENIS a few times (only to have it reverted in a few minutes) it becomes boring. Only the most backwards and retarded people can enjoy repeating this over and over. There are also some people who are cunning and evil and enjoy destroying things in a subtle way, but there are even fewer of them and they are usually dealt with eventually.
I never vandalised articles - the words thing I did was intentionally place some true, neutral and relevant (but controversial in some way:] ) bit of text (or an image) that I knew would be removed. And I saw many times people writing some nonsense in the article, only to revert the change themselves in a minute after seeing that they indeed can change the encyclopedia.
The truth is - quality is not a big problem in Wikipedia. Yes, potentially it could have been, but in reality it is not. You can speculate as much as you want, but in actual, real world there are relatively few cases where people try to break Wikipedia.
Free doesn't necessarily mean @0$. Any company (even your company) can take Wikipedia, fix the style and sell it to the K-12 market. There are already many sites that use Wikipedia content to attract visitors, because the entry costs are so low. Anyone will be able to compete with you tomorrow using Wikipedia and a relatively small investment.
Of course, you still have a valid point, but I don't believe your current business model will survive even in mid-term.
Slashdot Mirror
The correct solution is that security features (including status bar, address bar, etc.) should be turned off by user. Of course, it should not be too easy (lest the users are tricked into doing it).
Then IT staff can easily turn the browsers into custom apps (by disabling status bar and other things for a particular server), but hostile sites can't do it remotedly. There is no reason a remote site should have access to such power directly.
BTW, I think that Opera does things right on this front. The program window is the program window, noone can mess with it. The sites are limited to small page windows and they can't take over my desktop from there.
You don't mean to troll, but you are trolling.
First, it's written id, not ID. Second, what was exactly so original about Unreal? As I recall, it was mostly better graphics than Quake 2 (more variety in levels). Unreal 2 couldn't be less original if they tried - the very definition of run-off-the-mill. Half-Life was great, but so were Wolf 3D and Doom, even story wise. And finally, if you actually checked at least a single article or a news item related to Doom3, you would realise that there actually are a lot of gameplay, story, style, etc. innovations in this game.
Sorry for feeding the troll, but this one was so pathetic, I kind of pitied him.
The original point was that Akademgorodok felt more free than Detroit. My take on this is that although political freedom was apparently lacking in the USSR, people were quite free in other aspects.
As for the Negroes, well, they were lynched in the states, not beaten up, but lynched by the mob. This happened in the 1960s too. And even though there definitely was some negative sentiment among Russians towards Jews and people from Caucasus, this was against the principles of internationalism. Don't forget that Stalin was from Georgia, that Soviet Union supported and developed all republics and that normal people never discriminated on the basis of race/nationality. Personally, I didn't even knew that Jews were "supposed to be somehow bad" until I was about 18 years old and when I finally learned that theory, it appeared completely and utterly ridiculous to me. Don't forget that the word WASP doesn't come from Russian language. And the University of the Friendship of Nations is not in the USA, it's in Moscow.
What is "significant" or "huge"? Short of actual numbers, I'm forced to dismiss that as meaningless.
... how? This is a red herring; it has nothing to do with the give away of free milk, nor the differences between Cuba and the US.
I don't have the reference handy and I don't remember it very well, so I didn't want to mislead you. I think it was 5-10%. Of course, there is always an explanation for that, because USA is the best, but when one child dies in Cuba that's because of evil Castro.
And giving out free milk helps that
It just shows that Castro (his government) cares about children and actually does something for them. Meanwhile the US government (and the President) prefer empty rhetoric about leaving no children behind without funding or any actions.
So it's demand-driven, as I said. Supply-driven would mean it is about the making, not the selling.
Not exactly. The amount of watching of educational TV depends on how much programming is produced. If you make it, people will watch it, if you don't people won't. It's determined by how much you produce, so it's supply-driven.
That is a horse of a slightly different color. How does this differ from the History Channel and Discovery Channel and the like that most Americans get on cable?
Discovery Channel is masqueraded as edutainment, but it's not even that. It's mindless drivel. Can't say that about History Channel, specific Discovery subchannels and PBS (PBS apparently does have some decent programs). Cuba has college courses, not random programs about UFOs and Yeti (which is apparently all that Discovery ever shows). College courses are education, not edutainment, even when they are designed for TV.
I don't watch PBS. I don't use the TV to learn; I use a TV to be entertained.
TV is just a medium. Like the Internet it can (and should) be used for education. The fact that the US government prefers people watching 4 hours of entertainment per day is just sad. Showing educational courses on TV is one of the most efficient investments in education that you can make - much better (in returns per dollar spent) than improving libraries and schools. Of course, Cuban government also spends on schools and libraries. For example, according to the figures I once read, average class is 30 children in the US and 20 children in Cuba.
It's off-topic. I wish people could discuss these subjects without going off on a diatribe about America.
It's not off-topic because less children drop out of school in Cuba, proving that the state cares about the children and about effective education system.
Well, Poland was occupied (as much as I hate the word and as much as it was expedient, you might have still not liked it)and you had a socialist government forced on you. That's different from the USSR, where there were less reasons to desire political freedom.
There is comparision. Censorship in the US is as bad as it was in the Soviet Union, it's just different. And in practice censorship doesn't really matter as much as the access to media. Yeah, I can bash the American government, but... If I said on Slasdhot that I am thinking (not planning, just entertaining the possibilities) about killing President Bush, and if I lived in the US, I would be visited by the Secret Service in a few days (real story). OK, after a detailed interrogation and background check I would still be free (hopefully), but does the fact that there is "no censorship" compensates for more totalitarian control than ever in the USSR?
And don't tell me the US didn't punish people for producing porn. And don't even start on the discrimination (at least the Soviets didn't lynch Negroes), because this is utter bullshit. Yes, there were cases (like with Chechens, or Turks) in Stalin's time when the state did the discrimination. But in the majority of the cases, especially in the 1960s-1980s, people of other nationalities had as many rights as Russians and as many opportunities to execute their rights. Not to mention that the whole Soviet culture was opposed to discrimination on the very basic level.
Sure, everybody knows that the Soviet Union was a bastion of freedom, except for those old crooks Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, who kept remindinding us some stupid gulag stuff and the like...
Americans tend to associate human rights with political freedom. This is not necessarily natural for people in other cultures. Soviet people were free in many respects, even though political dissent was not tolerated.
We're talking about a country that had censorship, no freedom of speech, no independent judiciary system whatsowever... Jesus Christ, in Moscow in the old times they transported homeless people 100km from the city center as not to spoil the view. What kind of propaganda were you fed on?
Censorship? As in "Janet Jackson"? There was censorship in the USSR, there is censorship in the USA. Your TV is notorious for refusing to air controversial ads (anti-consumerism and stuff). Not to mention the fact that your media can be blinded by patriotism very easily. There was freedom of speech in the USSR. It had limits though, as political opposition was usually not permitted. But in the US you have freedom of speech, in specially designated Freedom speech zones, no less. The judiciary system in the Soviet Union was generally ok (not the best), it's just that the laws did not permit certain things, most notably political opposition. And homeless people were not transported anywhere, because generally there were no homeless people. Seriously. Living conditions weren't necessarily great for all 200 million people, but there were no slums and no people living in a cardboard box. I remember that prostitutes and criminals were moved out of Moscow during 1980 Olympic games, but how is that different from any other country (such as Greece)?
If you think that there is no government oppression in Russia, go look up 'Chechenya' and 'Yukos'. Or, find and read the story about how recently Russian government cracked down on vets for using anaesthetics to operate on dogs (they locked them up for 'possession of large quantities of drugs'). Those bastards made vets operate on dogs without anaesthetics.
Modern Russia is different from the Soviet Union (the example about Akademgorodok was from the Soviet times), in many (pretty much all, to tell the truth) respects it is much worse. Your second example is just random craziness, though, not government oppression. The government couldn't care less about drugs, or dogs, or people...
Even though in theory American children should be allright, the facts are that a very significant (i.e. huge) number of American kids are undernourished. Not to mention that another large group is overweight.
:)
As for college courses, I am not very familiar with the situation in America, but I can tell you that educational TV is very much supply-driven. There was excellent educational programming on Soviet TV, really quality stuff, and very popular. But the transition to market economy slowly but surely killed it. Because, truth be told, softcore-porn reality shows, stupid talk-shows and shows about mobsters attract people much easier. Heck, there weren't even any "shows" in the USSR, those were "programs" or "transmissions".
In reality, college courses build on each other and each lecture builds on the last. They build on books and graded homework. The number of people who would actually watch and gain something from college courses on TV is minimal.
This is simply false. In countries where there are quality college (or other level) courses on TV, people do use them to study. Of course, these are not just filmed college lectures, but special TV courses that try to use the advantages of the media.
Markets don't always work, and TV is one example where public organisations guided by public interests can fare much better than ad-supported private channels. It must be obvious - if PBS is good, than public television must obviously be excellent. Logic.
In any case, about 10 percent of teens in the US are not attending school, and the school results are generally considered appalling.
Like probably everyone else, I am tired to death of journalists constantly adding how this and that technology will help fight terrorists or cure cancer. Fuck that - there are millions other uses, which are just as important. Not everything should be a weapon or a cure.
For example, this technology may be used as interface for wearable computers, it can be used in museums by AI guides and everywhere else where computers can provide context sensitive information. It can be used by life recording systems (like Microsoft's My Digital Bits or some such). Girls can be use it with their wearable computers to confirm their suspicions that a guy indeed stares at her chest. There are so many uses, especially those that are not obvious now. Why should we always worry about terrorism?
There is more to search than Yahoo, MSN or Google.
How about Vivisimo, Teoma and AllTheWeb. Diversity is always good. I will find with other search engines things that you will not find on Google alone. And additional search features like clustering at Vivisimo are great.
This shows again that Microsoft design of the office file formats (basically dumping RAM on disk) was pure genius. After so much time so many brilliant developers still can't write a 100% compatible office suite. Meanwhile Wine guys managed to replicate a lot of Windows functionality using available APIs and specifications.
The MS Office documents, on the other hand, are generated using a very complicated and chaotic process. Given that there were documented cases of word files containing parts of the memory that once belonged to another application, one cannot fathom the intricacy of this, much less recreate it in readable code.
Ah-ah-ah-ha! I am cuming, I am cuming! Look, a house! Look, trimmed grass! Look, expensive movie theatre! Look, Bill Gates! What a disgusting example of mercantile Microsoftie porn that blog was. Yeah, I get it, Bill is rich, or, more precisely, filthy rich. And nobody knows the name of his daughter. Big fucking deal.
:)
P.S. As a courtecy for all microsofties, let me give you these valuable bits of information. Bill has pimple. He jerks off to dirty pictures. He constantly makes mistakes that cost billions of dollars. And in the morning his breath smells. Don't get too excited about him.
Fidel Castro is not that bad. Neither is Cuba. After all, do all American children get free milk until they are six? Do they get free college courses on television? Though so.
As for Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe, they are not "public servants", they are more like dictators - that's a different category, since dictators are not supposed to worry about some pesky privacy laws.
Perhaps that's what we actually need - protection without restrictions? That lady didn't prevent anyone doing anything, she didn't do cavity search to find drugs or what kind of books you were reading.
As for the Moscow unfortunate situation today, this is the result of "reforms". It wasn't like that in Soviet Union (even though you had to register where you travel), the problem is that there are several times more policemen today in Moscow that there was in the USSR. The average number of registered incidents is actually less than 1 per policeman per year! They just extort money, plain and simple - an example of crime, not government oppression.
My Konica Minolta camera is as heavy as my Nokia phone. I am perfectly sure that with some ingenious engineering it will be (or already is) feasible to combine them into one device that is not larger. After all, you don't need two screens or two batteries. And the camera already takes pictures that are better than the majority of camera user will ever need.
Ditto for MP3s. While there will be a market for higher-end hardware, 90% of customers will be happy with a camera/mp3/phone/PDA combo.
Some day when miniaturization and overall quality of such products improves, then I'll reconsider.
Which is basically the point of the article. There is no market for specialised devices, because in a few years it is possible to fit everything into the phone and then everyone will "reconsider". But apparently, the moderation mob here is bent on upmoding everyone who says that convergence is bad.
Your Qualcomm sounds good by basically not supporting decent compression. Which means that it wastes as much capacity as 2-3 modern phones. Which means that you are leeching capacity from the operator (who is too kind to stop supporting older phones, or doesn't care because there are too few leeches like you). And you keep complaining.
Meanwhile everyone enjoys much cheaper cellular service, albeit with a minor drop in quality. As for you, happy piggybacking.
If celllular is such a terrible business, why more and more operators emerge? The reason is that infrastructure is cheap today, there aren't many entry barriers (every phone operator mush provide interoperability to everyone) and there are a lot of opportunities for creative marketing, good service and whatever tricks you could use. Mergers make sense to a point, but then establishing new operators also makes sense. Just a few years ago a new national operator, DNA, was started in Finland.
And the fact that some customers are price-conscious doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the business.
Nokia is Finnish. Sony-Ericsson is Japanese/Swedish. Siemens is German. In their home markets people buy phones for themselves. That's why you can enter a ring-tone on the phone or transfer a MIDI file from your PC or a PDA. DRM might be a factor for Motorola, but Nokia and other phone manufacturers know who is paying them - customers.
Everyone here on /. keeps whining about how they only want their phone to make calls. And everyone else keeps moderating this shit up. With the intent of getting some cheap karma, let me repeat the same boring lie.
A soundcard in my computer just makes it bigger/bulkier, no thanks. If I wanted a music player I would have bought a stereo, if I wanted to play movies, I would have bought a VCR, if I wanted to play games, I would go into arcades or buy a console. If I wanted to make cheap phone calls I would get a better long-distance contract, if I wanted to write a document, I would have bought an electric typewriter. And if I wanted to read news, I would have get a Reuters/Minitel/whatever terminal. Of course, if I wanted to read books, I could have gotten a microfilm reader. Did I miss anything? So, as it stands, computers are evil and have no realistic reason to ever be useful. It is stupid to include extra functionality in it, while it's obvious that separate devices are better.
Convinced? The same is true for the phones as well. While at the moment it makes sense to buy some separate devices, it will not last forever and everyone will benefit from convergence. Currently I use a cheap old phone that costed me 30 euros, but has great battery life, reception and voice quality. I also use an old Palm IIIxe and a new digital camera. I might get an MP3 player too. But this doesn't change the fact that in five years I will be extremely happy to replace all this great hardware with one small communicator device that will be better and cheaper.
Consumers in Europe and Asia buy their cell phones. They don't get one with their phone contract, as is common in the US. One advantage of that is that they can easily get the newest phones without waiting for their mobile operator to get rid of the old models. Second advantage is that the manufacturer gets paid.
Crick understood that the consciousness has neural basis. In the ideal world that should have pushed him towards cryonics and we wouldn't lose a great scientist. :( Why can't people think rationally about matters that concern them so much.
I've read more than once managers in retail (and other areas, for example, Internet providing) complaining about customers always looking for the bargain, but still expecting high quality. This sometimes forces the retailers to basically mislead the consumer and sell junk, lest they lose to competitors who do it.
There are some projects, there are some products. But we will have to wait several years until the enabling technologies develop enough. There are technologies to automatically produce stuff from a CAD file - computer circuit boards, components from plastic, metal, wood, even marble sculptures. You can already design something and order it online to be delivered in a few days.
These manufacturing technologies will evolve and in 5-10 years it will be possible to automatically build a wide range of complex products. When many objects can be built for the price of materials plus a small markup to cover robotic manufacturing, there will be open source for physical objects.
At some point the major (or even the only reasonable) way to design things will be the open community development.
But then, more and more things would be made by robots and eventually this will spread to nanotechnology. At that point having AI design something from scratch will be so simple that there will be no reason to keep designs secret (you wouldn't be able to exploit the monopoly anyway) and everything will become open source.
It is fun to be bad once. After you replace the text of an article with the word PENIS a few times (only to have it reverted in a few minutes) it becomes boring. Only the most backwards and retarded people can enjoy repeating this over and over. There are also some people who are cunning and evil and enjoy destroying things in a subtle way, but there are even fewer of them and they are usually dealt with eventually.
:] ) bit of text (or an image) that I knew would be removed. And I saw many times people writing some nonsense in the article, only to revert the change themselves in a minute after seeing that they indeed can change the encyclopedia.
I never vandalised articles - the words thing I did was intentionally place some true, neutral and relevant (but controversial in some way
The truth is - quality is not a big problem in Wikipedia. Yes, potentially it could have been, but in reality it is not. You can speculate as much as you want, but in actual, real world there are relatively few cases where people try to break Wikipedia.
Free doesn't necessarily mean @0$. Any company (even your company) can take Wikipedia, fix the style and sell it to the K-12 market. There are already many sites that use Wikipedia content to attract visitors, because the entry costs are so low. Anyone will be able to compete with you tomorrow using Wikipedia and a relatively small investment.
Of course, you still have a valid point, but I don't believe your current business model will survive even in mid-term.