How many times have you called an electrician? How many times have you called a plumber?
The number of each profession needed is directly proportional to how often an average person needs their services in a year times the length of the average visit. I've only needed an electrician about once every 5 years (air conditioning circuit blows, or I'm installing a new appliance and need things rewired). I call a plumber about once a year. So outside of new construction (I'm not sure if plumbers work those or if general contracts install the pipes), I imagine there's much more demand for plumbers.
Same thing goes for barbers and hair stylists. If a barber takes on average 20 minutes to cut someone's hair and they work 6 hours/day (figure some slow times), 5 days/week, 50 weeks/year, that's 4500 haircuts in a year. If you figure the average person gets their hair cut once a month, that's one barber needed for every 375 people. That's 3x the demand of a plumber (figure 2 hours per visit, 1 visit per year = 2 hours per person, or one plumber needed per 1000 people).
In colder climates, I've noticed heat is an attractant as well. I'd run networking cable through a multi-tenant building and placed a switch in the concrete-floored water heater room. A few years later I got a call saying the network had stopped working. I investigated and when I checked the switch, not only was it full of ants, they'd carried a large number of their eggs and larvae inside. They'd coated the circuit board with some sort of liquid which shorted out the switch (it was completely dead even after I cleaned out the ants and residue). Aside from the water heater (which was gas so had an open flame), the switch was the hottest thing in the sub-zero room. They're supposed to be hibernating in winter, so the fact that they were active was entirely due to the heat.
but I liken this to plays - sure, the individual performance of a play is unique, but since you didn't write the script, you can't expect to be profiting from the performance without the author's permission.
I think Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot with this. These videos act like servo tab. They direct the airflow the opposite direction that you want it to go, but because of their mechanical leverage, they cause the main control surface to move, thus directing an even larger amount of airflow in the direction you want it to go. You give up a little to gain a lot. Prop aircraft and even some jet aircraft like the DC-9 use these on their flight control surfaces instead of hydraulics.
In the same way, these videos act as free advertisement for Nintendo. Yeah a little bit of advertising dollars go to the people who make the videos instead of to Nintendo, but the videos lead to increased sales allowing Nintendo to make a lot more money. If they siphon off the advertising dollars, the videos will stop being made, and Nintendo will lose what was essentially free advertising for them (I frequently watch gameplay videos to help decide if I want to buy a game).
So yeah legally they may have the right to do this. But financially they're being stupid by doing it.
Really though, tablets are not a standalone device. They're an accessory and a document viewer. They've found a niche in a lot of industries that have been clamoring for a basic digital reader. Airlines and medical have been dabbling in iPads, and shipping companies have been using such devices for a long time. I doubt tablets will ever take over computing, but I think they'll have a place for many years to come.
Tablets are here to stay. I've been saying this ever since I bought a tablet PC to play around with in 2004, years before the iPad (or iPhone) ever showed up.
Tablets are what will replace the clipboard. Any time you need portable data entry or data viewing (what you do with a clipboard today), you'll be able to do it with a tablet in the future. Every business I have seen uses clipboards. The original tablet PCs were too heavy and clumsy to replace a clipboard. But within minutes of using one in tablet mode, it was obvious that that was what was going to happen as soon as the technology shrank to a more wieldy weight and size.
Remember: you're going with some heavy selection bias picking the few counter examples. For every one of them, there have been a thousand lunatics who were completely and utterly wrong.
That's the whole point. If you claim reindeer can't fly, and I claim they can, and I produce one reindeer which can fly, you can't dismiss it as selection bias and thus claim your assertion that reindeer can't fly is still valid.
That counter-examples exist is a demonstration why we should not leap to the conclusion that just because 97% of scientists believe it to be true, it must be true. A scientific theory must always be allowed to be challenged if someone puts forth a logical, well-reasoned argument, and well-collected data against it. Immediately dismissing the 3% as unscientific solely because they're in the minority is, well, unscientific.
Yes thousands of lunatics exist. But you have to give them a fair shake. If you dismiss them in one fell swoop with reasoning like "97% of scientists think you're wrong, so you must be wrong," your reasoning is no better than theirs. That's what distinguishes science from American Idol - a theory can only be dismissed if it fails logical reasoning or if the data does not support it, not because it loses a popularity contest.
The day Steve Jobs stood in front of a room and introduced the Iphone EVERYONE knew this was a game changer. "Today we're going to introduce a new iPod, a phone, and world class web device" As he repeated that line the graphics on the screen merged and the room realized the leaks about three new products were instead one new device. It was a hell of a mis-direction. It wasn't "the mother of all demos" but it was a close second.
I disagree, but that's probably because I'd been using PDAs for a decade prior to the iPhone. Everyone in the PDA business knew that phones and PDAs were going to merge. The only thing they didn't know was if phones were going to pick up PDA features, or if PDAs were going to be able to make calls. In the end, they are both small computers running various programs.
The only game-changer the iPhone brought was that it eschewed hardware number/keyboard entry (and one helluva marketing campaign). Others had toyed with a purely touchscreen interface before, but nobody had bet the entire farm on it like Apple did. (For those taken in by the marketing who believe that the iPhone was the first purely touchscreen phone, google for LG Prada.)
In that way, the iPhone was a lot like the iPod. It was ho-hum in terms of technical features - things which everyone else already had or had tried before. But the interface was a game-changer, and even if they weren't actually the first to market with the idea their massive marketing campaign made it first in people's minds. So I don't really blame Intel for missing the boat. Interface and marketing aren't things you can really appraise prior to a product's release. If Intel judged the iPhone purely on its technical features, it would've looked like any other smartphone with one helluva risky bet on a touchscreen-only keyboard. Just like the technocrati here first saw the iPod and based on its technical features declared, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
This is similar to making a DVD player without region locks - it makes the player much more useful for its actual users, but pisses off the movie distributers because they want to control how the DVDs are used. In this case, Microsoft has created a youtube player that is better for the user in two important ways (no ads, which the user doesn't want to see, and the ability to store the video for later).
Be careful what you ask for. In the DVD example you compare to, the movie companies have already made money when you bought the DVD. Them annoying you with arbitrary restrictions on how the DVD is played back goes above and beyond the powers of the seller in the traditional buy/sell model.
In the YouTube case, Google doesn't make any money when you view the video. They make money from the ads. If they provide you the ability to block ads, their advertisers get mad and stop paying. Their revenue stream dries up. Then they're forced to put YouTube behind a paywall, and you'll have to pay first before you can view a video. Just like when you buy a DVD. Is that what you really want?
I know the world seems so simple when you only have to think of what you want. But in the real world, a system has to give everyone involved a little of what they want in order for it to work. Just like you want to watch those videos, the people making the videos want some (cash) incentive to continue making videos, and Google needs money to keep running the servers. If you insist that everyone be able to watch those videos with no compensation for Google or the video creators, then YouTube and the videos disappear, and you don't get to watch those videos anymore.
The ability to block advertisements and download movies is provided by web browser addons, so people championing Google in its fight against this windows phone program would also have to come out against those addons.
I think Google has been very cool about how they handle these add-ons. Only a small portion of their users use ad blockers, so they haven't raised a fuss about it. They know it cuts their ad revenue, but they also know that a certain percentage of the population really, REALLY hates ads. So as long as that percentage remains small, Google is not fighting them. Keeping those people happy (or at least not raising a fuss) is more important to Google than the small amount of revenue they lose.
Likewise the copyright holders are probably constantly complaining to Google demanding they prevent downloading of the videos. So Google can't give you that ability themselves on the YouTube site. But they're looking the other way when you do it yourself, and they're shielding you from the copyright holders by not giving them access to server logs which may reveal who is downloading instead of streaming. (Unless you happen to be using a YouTube app written by a company who is milking money out of hundreds of millions of Google's Android customers on the basis of dubious patents.)
No, no, no. You know the joke about asking a mathematician to corral a dozen sheep inside a hula hoop? The mathematician thinks about it for a minute, then steps inside the hula hoop and declares that his side is the outside. That's what we need to do here. Just cut off the guy's Internet access forever. Then he won't know that this is going on, and everything will be just fine.
Amazon gets nothing back. They entered an agreement to license the patent, irrespective of whether or not the patent was valid. That's why patent trolling works - no risk of a negative outcome (a zero outcome is still possible).
Same thing happened to Research in Motion. They were sued by NTP for patent infringement. After RIM lost the court cases and the SCotUS turned down their appeal, they were backed into a corner and forced to settle with NTP for $600+ million. Then the USPTO decided to review the patents and invalidated some of them. (They're still in the process of being reviewed AFAIK. The courts have put NTP's lawsuits against other wireless companies on hold until the review is completed. Fat lot of good that does RIM. We'll always wonder if they would have fallen as badly as they did if they had had $600 million extra to put into R&D back in 2006.)
The printer driver itself wasn't 500 MB. What happened was that some manager at HP decided tech support was wasting too much time (money) instructing people on how to navigate their byzantine support website to find and download the correct drivers for their printer. So they glommed the drivers for all of their printers into one big binary and told people to just download that.
IMHO the real lesson from the HP printer drive fiasco is that if it's quicker and easier to find something on your website by doing a Google search for it, you need to redesign your website. HP eventually did that, and their site now lets you just type the printer's name and it'll take you directly to its download page.
Google isn't writing it. The World Wide Web is. Google's autocomplete is just a nifty tool that compiles all that WWW cross-relationship data and displays it for you in real-time as you type.
This is shooting the messenger. If RottenTomatoes says that a movie liked by 15% of reviewers, it's wrong to sue RottenTomatoes for reporting that. They're not saying the movie is bad. They're just stating the fact that 85% of reviewers didn't like the movie. Likewise, Google's autocomplete is just stating the fact that the person's name has a high degree of correlation with those other terms on the web.
The hang up comes when a farmer replants cross-pollinated seeds, and then intentionally roundup's the results so he has a crop of new 100% roundup-ready seeds to replant, even though he never bought seeds from monsanto to begin with. Farmers who just let the cross pollination go unchecked and never use roundup anyway are fine, monsanto would have to have probable cause (depending on who you ask) and test a LOT of seed to find the ones that are roundup-ready.
That's precisely what the Schmeiser case someone linked to above was about. Schmeiser acquired Monsanto canola gene which had blown onto his property, and got mixed (Monsanto claimed deliberately) with his regular crop seed. The Canadian supreme court found that Schmeiser did in fact violate Monsanto's patent. However, since he never used Roundup on his crop, only to kill weeds in the ditches bordering his crop, he gained no advantage from using Monsanto's seed, so they reduced his patent violation fine to $1.
Unfortunately, since Monsanto technically won, that meant he couldn't make Monsanto pay his legal bills for this colossal waste of his time and money. The U.S. standard for a crime requires a motive, a means, and an opportunity. Schmeiser had no motive since he did not and never used Round-up on his canola crop. So the whole thing was a fishing expedition by Monsanto. The precedent the ruling set means that Canadian farmers who are wont to "just let the cross pollination go unchecked" risk huge fines if Monsanto decides to test their crop and finds them in violation. Thus to alleviate that risk they must A) license Monsanto's patent even though they don't use Monsanto's seed, or B) pay for expensive testing of their seed every year to make sure none of it violates Monsanto's patent.
That's completely backwards. The default state should be what millenia of farmers have done - use seeds which are pollinated naturally. If Monsanto doesn't want their self-replicating product to replicate in ways they can't control, then that's their problem and they should figure out a way to make it stop replicating. The onus shouldn't be upon the rest of the world to make sure they don't accidentally get some of Monsanto's self-replicating product on them.
Why is everyone hailing the "green revolution"? What did it do to us? Allowed us what, 2 decades of "phew, we fed the world" warm feeling? While replacing food with tasteless accelerated growth watery fodder! You know, people pay premium prices for "biological food", but in fact this is food. Not biological , just food. The other stuff is different - processed food. This should be the division - food and process food, rather than food and biological food.
Note to Americans: "bio" or "biological" is the EU equivalent term for "organic" in the U.S.
Without going into discussion why and what , here is a statement for you - the green revolution did not "save people from starvation" Those people where already there. Understand! Noone started developing the revolution in anticipation of an increasing population. The increased population was already there. It existed, therefore it had food to eat. Instead the green revolution increased the yield so we can throw the food in the sea to keep the price "right". The revolution helped very little (if at all) the actual people that were lived with malnutrition.
The thing is, thinking up more ways to feed hungry people actually exacerbates the problem of overpopulation. Most people see the ever-increasing world population, see that consumption of resources is disproportionately greater in technologically advanced societies, and incorrectly conclude that it's the technologically advanced societies which are to blame for the problems caused by overpopulation.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly all of the world's population growth is in developing countries. Industrialized nations have nearly zero population growth. Some are even decreasing in population (e.g. Japan). There is just something about living in a technologically advanced society and economy which makes people want to have fewer kids. So the solution to population growth is to help developing countries develop. Educate the people, help them build infrastructure and a functional market economy. Then the problem of population growth takes care of itself.
If instead you concentrate solely on providing people in developing nations with donated food, clean water, and medicine, you actually exacerbate the problem by increasing their population growth rate, requiring an even larger financial investment in infrastructure and education before they can develop a functional economy. In fact, if you plot population growth in developing nations on a log graph, I suspect it started to explode about the time the West decided to start providing massive humanitarian aid - around the middle of the 20th century.
Monsanto has a policy to protect its investment in seed development that prohibits farmers from saving or reusing the seeds once the crop is grown. Farmers must buy new seeds every year.
No they don't. It is always their choice which type of seed they wish to plant. If they want, they can use non-Monsanto seed and replant every year at no additional cost.
That's a very harsh policy and they probably charge a premium for their seed, it must be tough to be a farmer nowadays.
Financially, there is only an incentive to buy new seeds every year if the increased yield from the Monsanto seed exceeds the cost to buy the patented seeds. That is, the farmers are coming out ahead by buying Monsanto's seed. If the improvement to their yield doesn't exceed the cost of the seed, then they'd simply go back to replanting non-Monsanto seeds. Nobody is forcing them to buy the Monsanto seed - they are making that decision themselves. So the only way Monsanto can make money is if their seeds make life easier for the farmer than before. Not harder as you're implying.
The bigger problem is that all the court decisions I've seen have also been in favor of Monsanto when their seeds were unwanted. e.g. A group of organic farmers who didn't want GMO crops tried to sue Monsanto for damages when the Roundup-ready seeds spread to their organic fields. That case got thrown out for lack of standing (i.e. the farmers themselves would have to sue, not the organic growers' association representing them). In that case the farmers are being forced to accept Monsanto's seed, and there is a problem.
Just imagine if someone buying a computer had to get separate permission from its hundreds of patent holders after purchasing it before being able to legally switch it on?
The difference here is that the seeds are self-replicating. In the computer case, the company who built the computer (e.g. Dell) already paid the patent holders, so you don't have to worry about patent fees when they sell it to you. In the seed case, the grain elevator owner presumably paid the patent fees to Monsanto. If the Indiana farmer had bought the seeds and eaten them or turned them into animal feed, then it would be analogous to your computer example and there would be no problem. But he replanted them to grow more crop, which created more copies of the patented gene. Monsanto's argument was that in that case he had to pay them royalties. In that context, I actually agree with them.
(Putting aside the argument of whether or not self-replicating things should even be patentable. As it currently stands, I could build a self-replicating virus that inserts itself into all sorts of DNA sequences, patent it, release it, then sue the whole world for patent infringement. The court decisions I've seen have done next to nothing about placing the onus of responsibility for natural dispersion nor negative consequences upon the patent holder. My position is that if you solely reap the financial rewards for a self-replicating thing propagating, then likewise you solely bear responsibility for making sure it doesn't get where it's unwanted and for any damages it causes. In my patented virus example, if people didn't want it, then I would be responsible for cleaning up the mess I created by releasing it.)
So in five years, when Google realizes that even though Docs is popular, it isn't making them any money, they'll decide to yank it with six months notice. When Boston gets to spend way more than that $280k to move back to an actual purchased office suite on an emergency basis, we'll all say, "So much for big savings."
1) The estimated savings is $280k per year. So in 5 years they'd have saved $1.4 million. There's also a direct correlation here between savings and cost to move back to Office. If stopping using Office will save them $280k per year, then starting to use it again will cost them $280k per year. Yes there might be a spike to purchase licenses if/when they start using it again, but it'll be followed by a lull between upgrades driving the long-term average cost back down to $280k/yr. So unless there are other unforeseen costs of using Docs, even a brief 5-year stint with Docs will save them money.
2) Google has been by far the most benign of the programs/services I've seen which have control over your data. They let you export your files into various formats at any time. The only issue I have with Google is that they can or are peeking at my data. I have no worries about being unable to retrieve my data from them if they should decide to shut down a service. They don't play the "lock-in" game most of the other vendors are wont to do.
In terms of efficiency per square area, no they're not the most efficient.
In terms of efficiency per energy/money invested, yes they are the most efficient. So efficient that they're net positive and self-replicating. Trees can shed their leaves every year and still have a substantial net energy gain. The most cost-effective PV cells need 5-7 years to pay back their manufacturing costs.
And that's really what matters. Tesearch PV cells with 40% efficiency per square area aren't used commercially because they suck by this measure.
That's actually the more interesting part about this I think. Up until now, most people have thought of copyright as only applying to intangible goods like movies, music, and software. So "it's ok" if the copyright terms are extended to ridiculous lengths because it doesn't affect anything physical.
What they don't realize is that what we decide about copyright based on intangible goods is going to directly affect our access to tangible goods in the future. As 3D printing technology improves, eventually you're going to be able to print your own car. Except if the plans for all modern cars are protected by a death+70 year copyright, the only car you'll be able to print is what your great-grandparents were driven around in when they were kids. That's why copyright needs to be rolled back to something like 25-50 years - slightly longer than patents which were designed from the get-go with tangible goods in mind.
Aluminum is usually the go-to material for broadband reflectance in the visible spectrum. It's about 93% reflective when freshly applied (it corrodes on contact with oxygen to form a thin layer of transparent aluminum oxide which helps protects it from further corrosion but degrades reflectivity - better to coat it with something else). You can improve it a bit with coatings, but those are highly directional. Silver is a bit better for most of the visible spectrum, but falls off quickly towards the blue/ultraviolet end which is where many powerful chemical lasers emit (dunno what this system uses). Chrome is actually pretty bad, usually around 60%-80%. Other tricks like dielectric mirrors are highly sensitive to wavelength and incident angle, while total internal reflection prisms (common in binoculars) only work for a narrow range of angles.
So best-case aluminum will still absorb 7% of the laser energy, meaning worst-case the laser needs 14x more time to heat up a target vs. a black one (ignoring cooling). Of course if the range of this laser is only 2 km, that may make a huge difference.
The big difference between North Korea and Nazi Germany is that North Korea's problems and human rights violations are all internal (aside from a few bombings and assassination attempts). Germany made their behavior an international matter by invading neighboring countries.
There's an unstated rule that what happens in your country is your business. Other members of the international community may complain about what you do inside your own borders, but they'll almost never take action based on it. Most of the international community supported the first Gulf War because Iraq invaded Kuwait. Most did not support the second Gulf War because it was a drastic intervention on the internal affairs of Iraq, even if S. Hussein was a psychopathic dictator who occasionally gassed his own citizens. The U.S. tried to paint it as an international matter by saying the threat of using WMDs on other countries was there. But without solid evidence to back it up, people weren't buying it.
I think most people see the right to self-governance as sacrosanct, even if it's clearly being abused by those in power. Because once you cross that line and say it's ok to invade another country for reasons that are internal to that country, you lose the moral high ground if someone invades your country. All the invader have to do is cite some sorts of problems or human rights violations within your country to justify their invasion, and they're treating you by your own standards.
If North Korea invades South Korea or attacks Japan, the U.S. will be there in a heartbeat to drive them back (and probably then some). But as long as North Korea's abuses remain internal, it's going to take a lot before the U.S. (or the international community for that matter) decides to intervene.
I don't recall ever seeing a U.S. missile in a parade. Can someone point out where these are? It might be cool to see, considering they're just suborbital rockets.
Creative Suite 6 comes in all sorts of different versions. Based on the comparison chart (which Adobe replaced with a link forwarder to Creative Cloud), it looks like the equivalent CS6 version is Master Collection, which is $2100 on Amazon retail, $900 upgrade. So at $50/mo that'd be equivalent to 3.5 years for the initial purchase, and 1.5 years between upgrades (granted $50/mo is their introductory pricing).
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a terrible idea, and am thanking my lucky stars the only Adobe software I use extensively anymore is Lightroom, which for the time being can still be purchased as a standalone version. But for people/companies who actively use the different CS products and upgrade them with each release, it doesn't sound like that bad a deal. It will suck for casual users though. I keep an old copy of Photoshop CS2 around for the stuff I can't do in Lightroom. I feel sorry for the kids graduating now - if they need to touch up one photo in PS, they'll have to pay $20/mo for a year = $240 for that casual use.
Aperture is competitive with Adobe's Lightroom, not Photoshop. Neither program supports even basic features like layers, which are necessary for many types of graphical manipulation work. Instead, they're meant as the first step of the workflow for raw image files that have just been taken off the camera.
Dunno about Aperture, but Lightroom covers almost your entire workflow from camera to publishing (whether on the web or in print). Everything you do in Lightroom is like a layer - you can change it, undo it, fork it (so if you need to make 4:3 and 16:9 versions, you don't need two separate files), etc. The only thing it lacks is pixel-level manipulation like creating composites, for which you have to export to Photoshop. In my experience as a photographer, only about 1 photo in 1000 needs that level of manipulation.
Lightroom is for photographers. If your pictures are meant to be a representation of what you saw, then Lightroom is for you. Photoshop is for graphical artists. If you want to create entirely made-up pictures (fine art), or morph photos into something not representative of the reality the camera saw (e.g. advertising or composites), Photoshop is for you.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times have you called an electrician? How many times have you called a plumber?
The number of each profession needed is directly proportional to how often an average person needs their services in a year times the length of the average visit. I've only needed an electrician about once every 5 years (air conditioning circuit blows, or I'm installing a new appliance and need things rewired). I call a plumber about once a year. So outside of new construction (I'm not sure if plumbers work those or if general contracts install the pipes), I imagine there's much more demand for plumbers.
Same thing goes for barbers and hair stylists. If a barber takes on average 20 minutes to cut someone's hair and they work 6 hours/day (figure some slow times), 5 days/week, 50 weeks/year, that's 4500 haircuts in a year. If you figure the average person gets their hair cut once a month, that's one barber needed for every 375 people. That's 3x the demand of a plumber (figure 2 hours per visit, 1 visit per year = 2 hours per person, or one plumber needed per 1000 people).
In colder climates, I've noticed heat is an attractant as well. I'd run networking cable through a multi-tenant building and placed a switch in the concrete-floored water heater room. A few years later I got a call saying the network had stopped working. I investigated and when I checked the switch, not only was it full of ants, they'd carried a large number of their eggs and larvae inside. They'd coated the circuit board with some sort of liquid which shorted out the switch (it was completely dead even after I cleaned out the ants and residue). Aside from the water heater (which was gas so had an open flame), the switch was the hottest thing in the sub-zero room. They're supposed to be hibernating in winter, so the fact that they were active was entirely due to the heat.
I think Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot with this. These videos act like servo tab. They direct the airflow the opposite direction that you want it to go, but because of their mechanical leverage, they cause the main control surface to move, thus directing an even larger amount of airflow in the direction you want it to go. You give up a little to gain a lot. Prop aircraft and even some jet aircraft like the DC-9 use these on their flight control surfaces instead of hydraulics.
In the same way, these videos act as free advertisement for Nintendo. Yeah a little bit of advertising dollars go to the people who make the videos instead of to Nintendo, but the videos lead to increased sales allowing Nintendo to make a lot more money. If they siphon off the advertising dollars, the videos will stop being made, and Nintendo will lose what was essentially free advertising for them (I frequently watch gameplay videos to help decide if I want to buy a game).
So yeah legally they may have the right to do this. But financially they're being stupid by doing it.
Tablets are here to stay. I've been saying this ever since I bought a tablet PC to play around with in 2004, years before the iPad (or iPhone) ever showed up.
Tablets are what will replace the clipboard. Any time you need portable data entry or data viewing (what you do with a clipboard today), you'll be able to do it with a tablet in the future. Every business I have seen uses clipboards. The original tablet PCs were too heavy and clumsy to replace a clipboard. But within minutes of using one in tablet mode, it was obvious that that was what was going to happen as soon as the technology shrank to a more wieldy weight and size.
That's the whole point. If you claim reindeer can't fly, and I claim they can, and I produce one reindeer which can fly, you can't dismiss it as selection bias and thus claim your assertion that reindeer can't fly is still valid.
That counter-examples exist is a demonstration why we should not leap to the conclusion that just because 97% of scientists believe it to be true, it must be true. A scientific theory must always be allowed to be challenged if someone puts forth a logical, well-reasoned argument, and well-collected data against it. Immediately dismissing the 3% as unscientific solely because they're in the minority is, well, unscientific.
Yes thousands of lunatics exist. But you have to give them a fair shake. If you dismiss them in one fell swoop with reasoning like "97% of scientists think you're wrong, so you must be wrong," your reasoning is no better than theirs. That's what distinguishes science from American Idol - a theory can only be dismissed if it fails logical reasoning or if the data does not support it, not because it loses a popularity contest.
I disagree, but that's probably because I'd been using PDAs for a decade prior to the iPhone. Everyone in the PDA business knew that phones and PDAs were going to merge. The only thing they didn't know was if phones were going to pick up PDA features, or if PDAs were going to be able to make calls. In the end, they are both small computers running various programs.
The only game-changer the iPhone brought was that it eschewed hardware number/keyboard entry (and one helluva marketing campaign). Others had toyed with a purely touchscreen interface before, but nobody had bet the entire farm on it like Apple did. (For those taken in by the marketing who believe that the iPhone was the first purely touchscreen phone, google for LG Prada.)
In that way, the iPhone was a lot like the iPod. It was ho-hum in terms of technical features - things which everyone else already had or had tried before. But the interface was a game-changer, and even if they weren't actually the first to market with the idea their massive marketing campaign made it first in people's minds. So I don't really blame Intel for missing the boat. Interface and marketing aren't things you can really appraise prior to a product's release. If Intel judged the iPhone purely on its technical features, it would've looked like any other smartphone with one helluva risky bet on a touchscreen-only keyboard. Just like the technocrati here first saw the iPod and based on its technical features declared, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Be careful what you ask for. In the DVD example you compare to, the movie companies have already made money when you bought the DVD. Them annoying you with arbitrary restrictions on how the DVD is played back goes above and beyond the powers of the seller in the traditional buy/sell model.
In the YouTube case, Google doesn't make any money when you view the video. They make money from the ads. If they provide you the ability to block ads, their advertisers get mad and stop paying. Their revenue stream dries up. Then they're forced to put YouTube behind a paywall, and you'll have to pay first before you can view a video. Just like when you buy a DVD. Is that what you really want?
I know the world seems so simple when you only have to think of what you want. But in the real world, a system has to give everyone involved a little of what they want in order for it to work. Just like you want to watch those videos, the people making the videos want some (cash) incentive to continue making videos, and Google needs money to keep running the servers. If you insist that everyone be able to watch those videos with no compensation for Google or the video creators, then YouTube and the videos disappear, and you don't get to watch those videos anymore.
I think Google has been very cool about how they handle these add-ons. Only a small portion of their users use ad blockers, so they haven't raised a fuss about it. They know it cuts their ad revenue, but they also know that a certain percentage of the population really, REALLY hates ads. So as long as that percentage remains small, Google is not fighting them. Keeping those people happy (or at least not raising a fuss) is more important to Google than the small amount of revenue they lose.
Likewise the copyright holders are probably constantly complaining to Google demanding they prevent downloading of the videos. So Google can't give you that ability themselves on the YouTube site. But they're looking the other way when you do it yourself, and they're shielding you from the copyright holders by not giving them access to server logs which may reveal who is downloading instead of streaming. (Unless you happen to be using a YouTube app written by a company who is milking money out of hundreds of millions of Google's Android customers on the basis of dubious patents.)
No, no, no. You know the joke about asking a mathematician to corral a dozen sheep inside a hula hoop? The mathematician thinks about it for a minute, then steps inside the hula hoop and declares that his side is the outside. That's what we need to do here. Just cut off the guy's Internet access forever. Then he won't know that this is going on, and everything will be just fine.
Amazon gets nothing back. They entered an agreement to license the patent, irrespective of whether or not the patent was valid. That's why patent trolling works - no risk of a negative outcome (a zero outcome is still possible).
Same thing happened to Research in Motion. They were sued by NTP for patent infringement. After RIM lost the court cases and the SCotUS turned down their appeal, they were backed into a corner and forced to settle with NTP for $600+ million. Then the USPTO decided to review the patents and invalidated some of them. (They're still in the process of being reviewed AFAIK. The courts have put NTP's lawsuits against other wireless companies on hold until the review is completed. Fat lot of good that does RIM. We'll always wonder if they would have fallen as badly as they did if they had had $600 million extra to put into R&D back in 2006.)
Recursion is the key to generating small op code.
The printer driver itself wasn't 500 MB. What happened was that some manager at HP decided tech support was wasting too much time (money) instructing people on how to navigate their byzantine support website to find and download the correct drivers for their printer. So they glommed the drivers for all of their printers into one big binary and told people to just download that.
IMHO the real lesson from the HP printer drive fiasco is that if it's quicker and easier to find something on your website by doing a Google search for it, you need to redesign your website. HP eventually did that, and their site now lets you just type the printer's name and it'll take you directly to its download page.
Google isn't writing it. The World Wide Web is. Google's autocomplete is just a nifty tool that compiles all that WWW cross-relationship data and displays it for you in real-time as you type.
This is shooting the messenger. If RottenTomatoes says that a movie liked by 15% of reviewers, it's wrong to sue RottenTomatoes for reporting that. They're not saying the movie is bad. They're just stating the fact that 85% of reviewers didn't like the movie. Likewise, Google's autocomplete is just stating the fact that the person's name has a high degree of correlation with those other terms on the web.
That's precisely what the Schmeiser case someone linked to above was about. Schmeiser acquired Monsanto canola gene which had blown onto his property, and got mixed (Monsanto claimed deliberately) with his regular crop seed. The Canadian supreme court found that Schmeiser did in fact violate Monsanto's patent. However, since he never used Roundup on his crop, only to kill weeds in the ditches bordering his crop, he gained no advantage from using Monsanto's seed, so they reduced his patent violation fine to $1.
Unfortunately, since Monsanto technically won, that meant he couldn't make Monsanto pay his legal bills for this colossal waste of his time and money. The U.S. standard for a crime requires a motive, a means, and an opportunity. Schmeiser had no motive since he did not and never used Round-up on his canola crop. So the whole thing was a fishing expedition by Monsanto. The precedent the ruling set means that Canadian farmers who are wont to "just let the cross pollination go unchecked" risk huge fines if Monsanto decides to test their crop and finds them in violation. Thus to alleviate that risk they must A) license Monsanto's patent even though they don't use Monsanto's seed, or B) pay for expensive testing of their seed every year to make sure none of it violates Monsanto's patent.
That's completely backwards. The default state should be what millenia of farmers have done - use seeds which are pollinated naturally. If Monsanto doesn't want their self-replicating product to replicate in ways they can't control, then that's their problem and they should figure out a way to make it stop replicating. The onus shouldn't be upon the rest of the world to make sure they don't accidentally get some of Monsanto's self-replicating product on them.
Note to Americans: "bio" or "biological" is the EU equivalent term for "organic" in the U.S.
The thing is, thinking up more ways to feed hungry people actually exacerbates the problem of overpopulation. Most people see the ever-increasing world population, see that consumption of resources is disproportionately greater in technologically advanced societies, and incorrectly conclude that it's the technologically advanced societies which are to blame for the problems caused by overpopulation.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly all of the world's population growth is in developing countries. Industrialized nations have nearly zero population growth. Some are even decreasing in population (e.g. Japan). There is just something about living in a technologically advanced society and economy which makes people want to have fewer kids. So the solution to population growth is to help developing countries develop. Educate the people, help them build infrastructure and a functional market economy. Then the problem of population growth takes care of itself.
If instead you concentrate solely on providing people in developing nations with donated food, clean water, and medicine, you actually exacerbate the problem by increasing their population growth rate, requiring an even larger financial investment in infrastructure and education before they can develop a functional economy. In fact, if you plot population growth in developing nations on a log graph, I suspect it started to explode about the time the West decided to start providing massive humanitarian aid - around the middle of the 20th century.
No they don't. It is always their choice which type of seed they wish to plant. If they want, they can use non-Monsanto seed and replant every year at no additional cost.
Financially, there is only an incentive to buy new seeds every year if the increased yield from the Monsanto seed exceeds the cost to buy the patented seeds. That is, the farmers are coming out ahead by buying Monsanto's seed. If the improvement to their yield doesn't exceed the cost of the seed, then they'd simply go back to replanting non-Monsanto seeds. Nobody is forcing them to buy the Monsanto seed - they are making that decision themselves. So the only way Monsanto can make money is if their seeds make life easier for the farmer than before. Not harder as you're implying.
The bigger problem is that all the court decisions I've seen have also been in favor of Monsanto when their seeds were unwanted. e.g. A group of organic farmers who didn't want GMO crops tried to sue Monsanto for damages when the Roundup-ready seeds spread to their organic fields. That case got thrown out for lack of standing (i.e. the farmers themselves would have to sue, not the organic growers' association representing them). In that case the farmers are being forced to accept Monsanto's seed, and there is a problem.
The difference here is that the seeds are self-replicating. In the computer case, the company who built the computer (e.g. Dell) already paid the patent holders, so you don't have to worry about patent fees when they sell it to you. In the seed case, the grain elevator owner presumably paid the patent fees to Monsanto. If the Indiana farmer had bought the seeds and eaten them or turned them into animal feed, then it would be analogous to your computer example and there would be no problem. But he replanted them to grow more crop, which created more copies of the patented gene. Monsanto's argument was that in that case he had to pay them royalties. In that context, I actually agree with them.
(Putting aside the argument of whether or not self-replicating things should even be patentable. As it currently stands, I could build a self-replicating virus that inserts itself into all sorts of DNA sequences, patent it, release it, then sue the whole world for patent infringement. The court decisions I've seen have done next to nothing about placing the onus of responsibility for natural dispersion nor negative consequences upon the patent holder. My position is that if you solely reap the financial rewards for a self-replicating thing propagating, then likewise you solely bear responsibility for making sure it doesn't get where it's unwanted and for any damages it causes. In my patented virus example, if people didn't want it, then I would be responsible for cleaning up the mess I created by releasing it.)
1) The estimated savings is $280k per year. So in 5 years they'd have saved $1.4 million. There's also a direct correlation here between savings and cost to move back to Office. If stopping using Office will save them $280k per year, then starting to use it again will cost them $280k per year. Yes there might be a spike to purchase licenses if/when they start using it again, but it'll be followed by a lull between upgrades driving the long-term average cost back down to $280k/yr. So unless there are other unforeseen costs of using Docs, even a brief 5-year stint with Docs will save them money.
2) Google has been by far the most benign of the programs/services I've seen which have control over your data. They let you export your files into various formats at any time. The only issue I have with Google is that they can or are peeking at my data. I have no worries about being unable to retrieve my data from them if they should decide to shut down a service. They don't play the "lock-in" game most of the other vendors are wont to do.
In terms of efficiency per square area, no they're not the most efficient.
In terms of efficiency per energy/money invested, yes they are the most efficient. So efficient that they're net positive and self-replicating. Trees can shed their leaves every year and still have a substantial net energy gain. The most cost-effective PV cells need 5-7 years to pay back their manufacturing costs.
And that's really what matters. Tesearch PV cells with 40% efficiency per square area aren't used commercially because they suck by this measure.
That's actually the more interesting part about this I think. Up until now, most people have thought of copyright as only applying to intangible goods like movies, music, and software. So "it's ok" if the copyright terms are extended to ridiculous lengths because it doesn't affect anything physical.
What they don't realize is that what we decide about copyright based on intangible goods is going to directly affect our access to tangible goods in the future. As 3D printing technology improves, eventually you're going to be able to print your own car. Except if the plans for all modern cars are protected by a death+70 year copyright, the only car you'll be able to print is what your great-grandparents were driven around in when they were kids. That's why copyright needs to be rolled back to something like 25-50 years - slightly longer than patents which were designed from the get-go with tangible goods in mind.
Aluminum is usually the go-to material for broadband reflectance in the visible spectrum. It's about 93% reflective when freshly applied (it corrodes on contact with oxygen to form a thin layer of transparent aluminum oxide which helps protects it from further corrosion but degrades reflectivity - better to coat it with something else). You can improve it a bit with coatings, but those are highly directional. Silver is a bit better for most of the visible spectrum, but falls off quickly towards the blue/ultraviolet end which is where many powerful chemical lasers emit (dunno what this system uses). Chrome is actually pretty bad, usually around 60%-80%. Other tricks like dielectric mirrors are highly sensitive to wavelength and incident angle, while total internal reflection prisms (common in binoculars) only work for a narrow range of angles.
So best-case aluminum will still absorb 7% of the laser energy, meaning worst-case the laser needs 14x more time to heat up a target vs. a black one (ignoring cooling). Of course if the range of this laser is only 2 km, that may make a huge difference.
The big difference between North Korea and Nazi Germany is that North Korea's problems and human rights violations are all internal (aside from a few bombings and assassination attempts). Germany made their behavior an international matter by invading neighboring countries.
There's an unstated rule that what happens in your country is your business. Other members of the international community may complain about what you do inside your own borders, but they'll almost never take action based on it. Most of the international community supported the first Gulf War because Iraq invaded Kuwait. Most did not support the second Gulf War because it was a drastic intervention on the internal affairs of Iraq, even if S. Hussein was a psychopathic dictator who occasionally gassed his own citizens. The U.S. tried to paint it as an international matter by saying the threat of using WMDs on other countries was there. But without solid evidence to back it up, people weren't buying it.
I think most people see the right to self-governance as sacrosanct, even if it's clearly being abused by those in power. Because once you cross that line and say it's ok to invade another country for reasons that are internal to that country, you lose the moral high ground if someone invades your country. All the invader have to do is cite some sorts of problems or human rights violations within your country to justify their invasion, and they're treating you by your own standards.
If North Korea invades South Korea or attacks Japan, the U.S. will be there in a heartbeat to drive them back (and probably then some). But as long as North Korea's abuses remain internal, it's going to take a lot before the U.S. (or the international community for that matter) decides to intervene.
I don't recall ever seeing a U.S. missile in a parade. Can someone point out where these are? It might be cool to see, considering they're just suborbital rockets.
Creative Suite 6 comes in all sorts of different versions. Based on the comparison chart (which Adobe replaced with a link forwarder to Creative Cloud), it looks like the equivalent CS6 version is Master Collection, which is $2100 on Amazon retail, $900 upgrade. So at $50/mo that'd be equivalent to 3.5 years for the initial purchase, and 1.5 years between upgrades (granted $50/mo is their introductory pricing).
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a terrible idea, and am thanking my lucky stars the only Adobe software I use extensively anymore is Lightroom, which for the time being can still be purchased as a standalone version. But for people/companies who actively use the different CS products and upgrade them with each release, it doesn't sound like that bad a deal. It will suck for casual users though. I keep an old copy of Photoshop CS2 around for the stuff I can't do in Lightroom. I feel sorry for the kids graduating now - if they need to touch up one photo in PS, they'll have to pay $20/mo for a year = $240 for that casual use.
The real fountain of youth is to have kids. That reverses aging of your genetic material by resetting it to zero years old
Alas for most slashdotters, this goal will be as unattainable as the legendary Fountain of Youth.
Dunno about Aperture, but Lightroom covers almost your entire workflow from camera to publishing (whether on the web or in print). Everything you do in Lightroom is like a layer - you can change it, undo it, fork it (so if you need to make 4:3 and 16:9 versions, you don't need two separate files), etc. The only thing it lacks is pixel-level manipulation like creating composites, for which you have to export to Photoshop. In my experience as a photographer, only about 1 photo in 1000 needs that level of manipulation.
Lightroom is for photographers. If your pictures are meant to be a representation of what you saw, then Lightroom is for you. Photoshop is for graphical artists. If you want to create entirely made-up pictures (fine art), or morph photos into something not representative of the reality the camera saw (e.g. advertising or composites), Photoshop is for you.