I think that a surveillance system which magnifies normal abilities beyond anything humanly achievable must, by definition, raise questions of being an unreasonable search and seizure. Right you are. We had better make x-ray machines illegal, then. And infrared goggles. And binoculars. And flashlights. And glasses.
The requirement of unreasonable search and seizure has nothing to do with the method used to collect the data. Your license plate is readily visible for anyone to read as you drive by. I could easily hire a whole bunch of students to set up lawn chairs on the side of the road and write down license plate numbers, and it would amount to the same thing. There is nothing inherently bad in collecting license plate numbers in a public place.
Do not confuse speed of collection with appropriateness of collection. If it's appropriate to collect the data, then it's still appropriate to collect it really fast.
That type of information database is really only dangerous if the cops are the only ones with the data.
I have no problem with increased surveillance of the populace in public places (cameras, microphones, autoscanning devices like this one, whatever), but only under the condition that this information is available to *everyone*, not just the authorities.
This will create a more open society, yes, and it will challenge our notions of what is and what should be private. But as long as the entire population has access to this data, and not just the authorities, then there is no imbalance of power.
So... if this system is not available for purchase by citizens, then let's build our own. The Slashdot community should start a project to aggregate all the same types of data that the police use for surveillance, and make it public. Webcams, license plate scanners, photographs, everything available on the web. Not only would this make the police's data not as privileged, but the populace could keep track of the police as well.
* Have you been making too many trips to the coffee shop? Oh, sorry, we got a concerned call from citizens about these three crimes you missed because you we getting another scone. * Oh, thank you for your job application with the Washington State Patrol... oh, dear, it seems you spent all your time in Ohio parked in a speed trap napping, we don't want to hire you.
I guess we also need to include singing along with the radio, talking to passengers, thinking about something, and scratching your nose to the list of things illegal to do while driving.
Won't someone please think of the ticket revenue?!
Freed of the need to limit paper use or even disc space (and therefore cost), an online encyclopedia can afford to expand on any topic for as far as that topic needs. And then,
...no good mechanism for keeping the length of trivial articles under control... Huh? Do you want more information or less?
There's also this gem from your sig:
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop" Perhaps, if the people at the bus stop cited their sources, had a mechanism for tracking changes in what was said, had ever-vigilant anti-vandalism editors to stamp out graffiti, included people with vast knowledge of the subject, and were able to translate everything they said into hundreds of languages.
...there's no business model... Linux doesn't have a business model, either, and it is widely considered a superior operating system to its commercial alternatives. Does everything have to make money to be worthwhile?
...no quality control except agreeing with the consensus... Wikipedia is not a place for your personal opinions. Those who post personal opinions are quickly suppressed, and the vast majority of the articles I read have a fairly balanced approach to the subject. If a topic is especially controversial, the page will likely contain a "Controversy" heading, where the controversial nature is discussed. I'm not sure how that's "agreeing with the consensus." Have you even read Wikipedia since 2002?
Did Wikipedia touch you as a child or something? If you don't like it, don't read it. I'm sure you have much better things to do with your time than dump on the single most successful* web collaboration effort to date.
You missed the next section:
(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order... (emphasis added) So, it's not just violent acts. Supporting the terrorists who actually commit the acts counts as well. I don't think they could link protesters to this. The person needs to be directly and knowingly assisting terrorist activities related to Iraq in order to be covered by this order.
That being said, if the person is a US citizen, the 5th Amendment still applies, and the Supreme Court has a few things to say about it. If the person is not a US citizen, then extradition treaties apply; that situation is a little hairier, but nonetheless fairly straightforward.
Honestly, I don't know what the fuss is. "They" will not break into your room and drag you to a secret prison in Siberia and attach electrodes to your gonads just for being against the war. This executive order simply allows the United States to legally freeze the assets of known violent terrorists, or any person knowingly and materially assisting violent terrorists. I'm not sure if this ability existed before, but if so, this order clarifies the extent of it.
I don't like the flat fee idea. In order for that to work, it has to be fair among all movie producers. If the price is too low, then companies again have perpetual copyrights. If the price is too high, then indy filmmakers are shut out and moviemaking is exclusively in the hands of the big movie studios.
Instead, I'd like to see each year's fee be a percentage of last year's sales figures, due perhaps at tax time. So the 2008 fee (due April 15, 2008) would be x% of the revenue generated by sales of the property in 2007, not to be less than some minimum amount. If the fee is less than the minimum amount, then the work falls into the public domain. The minimum amount should be set by a board and reconsidered every few years, to account for inflation, and should probably also scale to the cost of producing the work (that way the indy filmmakers won't unfairly lose their copyright before the studios; if they only spent $5000 to make the movie and sell 50 DVDs a year, their minimum amount is lower than a Universal Pictures movie that cost $250 million* but only sells 300 DVDs a year).
The devil's in the details, of course, but the point is that new copyright laws should be 1) fair to all parties regardless of size/funding, 2) have a provision that everything falls into the public domain eventually, and 3) provide for commercially successful works to not be forcibly taken away from the creators at the end of an arbitrary time.
* As an aside, if the copyright fee minimum is scaled based on the expenses associated with producing a movie, there will be incentive for movie studios to claim lower expenses. That drives up the profit of each movie (assuming fixed revenue), and lets people who own a percentage share of profits be less screwed than they currently are.
Estimated sales are difficult to come up with; even actual sales can be obscured through various accounting mechanisms (e.g. movies never have profits so "percentage of the profits" is a loser's share). No, actually sales are very easy to measure. Number of items sold times price per item.
What you're talking about is profit and that is what Hollywood obscures to screw the people who signed up for a percentage share. They do this by increasing their expenses (sales - expenses = profit) artificially. They would, for example, charge a movie theater 3 times the normal rate to rent the movie reels to be shown; when the movie theater is owned by the same company that made the movie, the money all stays within the company, but that expense number for that particular movie goes up and profits go down. They shuffle money around the company, through its various divisions, in creative ways that reduce the profit listed on a single project's balance sheet. None of those creative expenses ever leave the company or its subsidiaries.
It is much harder to obscure the actual revenue generated (sales). It can be done, but the SEC has a few things to say about revenue recognition and would likely come knocking on your door if you started fudging the numbers. Making the copyright "extension fee" a percentage of last year's revenue is a good compromise for those properties that still have significant commercial value (which many of Disney's properties do), while allowing the law to remain sane for the majority of works that only have value for a short time.
These stations need to start up alternate stations that make use of indies. It doesn't work that way. SoundExchange collects royalties for all music played, not just those bands that have registered for the service. The idea behind it was that keeping track of who has and has not registered with SoundExchange would be "too hard", so Congress just allows SoundExchange to collect for everyone, and distribute to those who have registered. Of course, in this day of internet databases and automated playlists that argument doesn't hold water anymore, but that's still how the system works. Even if the internet radio stations played 99.999% indy music, as soon as they play one song by one band that has registered with SoundExchange, they owe SoundExchange money for all their music on all their stations.
Don't like it? Write to your congresscritter. I did.
While I agree that B5 showed some of the most realistic space combat to date (only recently surpassed by BSG), I have to call shenanigans on that NASA story. The only references to anything even close to that I can find online are unsupported "trivia" references, and all of them suspiciously have exactly the same wording. If you can find some more substantial evidence for the claim, then I'll believe you. Until then, I'll go on believing that NASA worked on several designs for Orbital Maneuvering Vehicles (OMVs - "space tugs") and has been studying them since the start of the space shuttle program. All of them predate B5 and none of them owed any allegiance to any sci-fi television show.
With more and more people listening to iPods and music on their mp3-phones or other tiny music gadgets, its no surprise that soon we'll have our next generation born partially deaf or with their ears insensitive to certain frequencies. That has nothing to do with the genetics of hearing. If a soldier gets an arm blown off in a battle, does that mean he has a higher chance of having kids with only one arm? Of course not.
Get-off-my-lawnism aside, I've found that most people who are satisfied with iPod quality music have either never been exposed to proper audio reproduction, or they just don't care that much. Not everyone wants a medium-rare filet; some people just want a cheeseburger.
Cheeseburgers and blown-off arms in the same post. Take that, mods!
...both take about a day of travel, no large body of water to cross... You are either from Europe or the east coast of the United States.
Out here in the western United States, it's not one day to *anywhere*. You could conceivably drive 1000 miles in a day, but that would take up upwards of 16 hours of constant driving, not including stops for gas, rest, or food. It's much more likely that a fairly hardcore driver would max out at about 700-800 miles a day. With that in mind, check out the distances between US cities. Then, with a straight face, tell me that driving the 2050 miles between Seattle, WA and Chicago, IL (3 days, even for the hardcore) is easier than a 4 hour flight.
Also, there is economics.
2050 miles divided by average MPG of 24.7 times average $3.00 a gallon is $249 (not including hotel cost). A flight on United Airlines from SeaTac to O'Hare is about $300, booked far enough in advance.
With a TiVo, you can plug in three cables and press power, at which point you are done but for the watching. You're claiming MYTH can do this too? "With an Aibo, you can charge it up and press power, at which point you are done and have a fully functional robot dog at your disposal. You're claiming that LEGO Mindstorms can do this too?"
MythTV is not, on its own, a plug-and-play solution. It is a tool used to accomplish a task, and in its current form right now, it is designed for people who want to build their own system and configure it just the way they like. It does not include hardware, and it does not benefit from the economy of scale in manufacturing that TiVo does. If you want the ease of use of TiVo and are willing to put up with the shenanigans of a company who is slowly reducing what you are allowed to do with the downloaded content (which, by the way, is reducing your fair use rights) then I encourage you to buy a TiVo, and stop trolling in a MythTV thread.
Do not confuse "I want it to work RIGHT NOW" with "I want to build it myself". These are very different and, in some cases, mutually exclusive concepts, and they require different tools. We want to build our own boxes. Go away and let us play.
He talks about the dual screen, which is a neat idea and not one I had thought of before. However, he also talks about the small size of the phone, and gives example dimensions in the sketch which seem to show a screen of about 5.3 cm by 5.3 cm. The highest resolution OLED has ever achieved is 200dpi which would result in a resolution of 418x418, and it's more likely that the screen will be the much more common and standard 72dpi with a whopping resolution of 150x150. How exactly is a UI designer supposed to fit the ability to "navigate full-sized pages in desktop mode using an overview window and open tabs to navigate to other pages" in such a small number of pixels?
I love the ideas that are going into this phone, but the engineering reality is that small screens suck for large applications like web browsing. Everyone wants a full QUERTY keyboard, but no one wants a big phone. Everyone wants a giant screen with a ridiculous resolution, but they want it to fit in their pocket, and they don't want any moving parts.
The best compromise might be a pair of Bluetooth eyeglasses that project a virtual screen in front of the user, with the controls on the phone, that can be used for tasks that are more demanding of real estate, like web browsing, reading ebooks, editing documents, viewing pictures, or reading/sending email. A microphone and speaker could even be integrated so the glasses could be used for phone calls as well. With two virtual screens, 3D effects would be possible, and when combined with GPS and accelerometers, could even overlay a HUD on top of the real world. Imagine navigating on the sidewalks of NYC with arrows overlaid in front of your eyes, giving you directions, or walking around a cocktail party letting your facial recognition software (or even Bluetooth identities in other peoples' cell phones) apply a name from your contact list floating above a person's head, MMORPG-style.
The era of squinting at a 150x150 screen to read your email may be coming to a middle.
That seems fair, fuck the sound engineers, recording studios and EVERYONE ELSE who actually works in the recording of music No one is leaving out this group of people. They were all paid for their time at the creation of the album, and do not earn royalties on future sales. Their relationship to the music is as contractor only; their income does not depend on me buying the album.
I suppose an argument could be made that if the record companies don't make any money, then they won't be able to afford to pay the sound engineers and other such people for future recordings. To that, I say bullshit. If you can show me even one single shred of evidence that the recording companies are losing money (reports of declining sales of a specific format like CDs are misleading, since more and more people buy music online at places like iTunes and Napster), then you might have a case. But all the studies I've seen show that sales numbers of all new music in all formats is at an all-time high. (Also keep in mind that much of the sales numbers of the past couple decades included sales of music people already owned and are now being purchased in a new digital format. This will artificially inflate sales numbers. If sales of that format are delining now, it's probably because people are finished upgrading their collection.)
Additionally, if sales truly are down *and* correllated in a statistically meaningful way to piracy (evidence of which I have not yet seen), then it means that the record companies are not offering products that the market wants to buy at the price they are offering it for sale. I'm not going to cry myself to sleep over this; it's how the market works.
You are not guaranteed success just because you created a product. If I start a news service website and charge $50 a day for access, I can't complain that my business model is in danger soley because people are getting the same news from Google News for free. Those filthy news freeloaders! All it means is that I have a failing business model, and it's time to do something else.
There is a fundamental difference between two methods of selling items: goods or services. If you sell me a good, then I have a physical product, and I can modify it or change it or scrap it or resell it or do whatever the hell I want with it, and you can't to a damn thing about it. But if you sell me a service, then that's a contract, and it means that I have to abide by the terms of the contract, including any licensing terms or warrantees or conditions of the sale I agreed to when I first signed on. Physical products are sold under both models, but typically only as a package deal, such as a physical item and a warrantee. But the same rules apply... you can legally modify your PS2 with a mod chip and Sony can do nothing about it; they can only void your warantee, which is a contract you signed stating "I will not mod my PS2", among other things. But the PS2 is yours, and modding it is legal. So is resale.
The media companies are trying to play both sides of this coin, and sell a single product under both models, using what they consider to be the "favorable" aspects of each. Under the goods model, if I buy a CD, I can do whatever the hell I want with the bits thereon, including ripping to iPod, burning as many copies as I like, or printing out the individual bits and wallpapering my living room. BUT, if I break the CD, it's gone; the media company does not owe me a replacement, because it's a good, and there was no warrantee. Under the service model, if I buy a CD, I'm not buying the physical bits, I'm buying the right to listen to the music. This means that I have to abide by the terms of the contract I signed when I bought it, including not making copies or ripping to iPod. But it also means that if I lose or break the CD, I am entitled to a replacement because the contract to listen to the music is still valid. These media companies are trying to enforce the "you must obey these terms of the contract" aspect of the service model, but the "you lost/broke it: tough noogies" aspect of the goods model, and that's wrong.*
Your suggestion, is looking to use both models, too, but use the other sides, and that's just as wrong. You want the "I don't have to abide by your terms" aspect of the goods model, but the "you owe me a replacement/upgrade" aspect of the service model. This is just as duplitous as what the media companies are doing.
Either you bought a disk/file with ones and zeros in/on it, or you signed a contract allowing you to listen to that music under the terms of the contract. Each model has beneficial and detrimental aspects to both buyer and seller, but that's the way it is. The media companies shouldn't have it both ways, and you shouldn't either.
*My earlier suggestion of packaging two products together (a good and a warrantee are techinically separate products, each with their own rules in a court of law) still holds, and a click-through EULA counts as an add-on product, but only for purposes of voiding the warrantee, not for legality of the purchased material (i.e., violating the terms of the contract should not revoke possession of your purchased item). Why people put up with this and continue to buy music with these stupid contracts attached is beyond my understanding.
It's possible they are. But my point was that until GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Mail.com, Exchange, Lotus, and Outlook all support these keyservers, encryption between different mail systems will not be widespread.
...however, I did note that Dell's website still does not offer XP in any flavor (although there was some talk of this eventually becoming an option). You didn't look veryhard.
That being said, the "feature comparison" is laughably biased, so Dell is clearly pushing Windows Vista aggressively.
A better measure of Vista adoption might be web statistics. Anyone know of a good aggregator of individual site traffic data that would show percantage of unique hits that are from Vista?
Slashdot Mirror
The requirement of unreasonable search and seizure has nothing to do with the method used to collect the data. Your license plate is readily visible for anyone to read as you drive by. I could easily hire a whole bunch of students to set up lawn chairs on the side of the road and write down license plate numbers, and it would amount to the same thing. There is nothing inherently bad in collecting license plate numbers in a public place.
Do not confuse speed of collection with appropriateness of collection. If it's appropriate to collect the data, then it's still appropriate to collect it really fast.
That type of information database is really only dangerous if the cops are the only ones with the data.
I have no problem with increased surveillance of the populace in public places (cameras, microphones, autoscanning devices like this one, whatever), but only under the condition that this information is available to *everyone*, not just the authorities.
This will create a more open society, yes, and it will challenge our notions of what is and what should be private. But as long as the entire population has access to this data, and not just the authorities, then there is no imbalance of power.
So... if this system is not available for purchase by citizens, then let's build our own. The Slashdot community should start a project to aggregate all the same types of data that the police use for surveillance, and make it public. Webcams, license plate scanners, photographs, everything available on the web. Not only would this make the police's data not as privileged, but the populace could keep track of the police as well.
* Have you been making too many trips to the coffee shop? Oh, sorry, we got a concerned call from citizens about these three crimes you missed because you we getting another scone.
* Oh, thank you for your job application with the Washington State Patrol... oh, dear, it seems you spent all your time in Ohio parked in a speed trap napping, we don't want to hire you.
I guess we also need to include singing along with the radio, talking to passengers, thinking about something, and scratching your nose to the list of things illegal to do while driving.
Won't someone please think of the ticket revenue?!
...no good mechanism for keeping the length of trivial articles under control... Huh? Do you want more information or less?There's also this gem from your sig: "Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop" Perhaps, if the people at the bus stop cited their sources, had a mechanism for tracking changes in what was said, had ever-vigilant anti-vandalism editors to stamp out graffiti, included people with vast knowledge of the subject, and were able to translate everything they said into hundreds of languages.
...there's no business model... Linux doesn't have a business model, either, and it is widely considered a superior operating system to its commercial alternatives. Does everything have to make money to be worthwhile?
...no quality control except agreeing with the consensus... Wikipedia is not a place for your personal opinions. Those who post personal opinions are quickly suppressed, and the vast majority of the articles I read have a fairly balanced approach to the subject. If a topic is especially controversial, the page will likely contain a "Controversy" heading, where the controversial nature is discussed. I'm not sure how that's "agreeing with the consensus." Have you even read Wikipedia since 2002?
...no overall editing system either for the entire work or individual articles... You're right.Except for this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this.
Did Wikipedia touch you as a child or something? If you don't like it, don't read it. I'm sure you have much better things to do with your time than dump on the single most successful* web collaboration effort to date.
----
*I did not say perfect, I said most successful.
That being said, if the person is a US citizen, the 5th Amendment still applies, and the Supreme Court has a few things to say about it. If the person is not a US citizen, then extradition treaties apply; that situation is a little hairier, but nonetheless fairly straightforward.
Honestly, I don't know what the fuss is. "They" will not break into your room and drag you to a secret prison in Siberia and attach electrodes to your gonads just for being against the war. This executive order simply allows the United States to legally freeze the assets of known violent terrorists, or any person knowingly and materially assisting violent terrorists. I'm not sure if this ability existed before, but if so, this order clarifies the extent of it.
So if these plugins don't work on my system...
If I buy the Fluendo codecs but don't download them, and install my distro's version instead, is that still legal?
Is there an IP lawyer in the house?
What are you, new?
http://www.firefox.com
http://www.opera.com
I don't like the flat fee idea. In order for that to work, it has to be fair among all movie producers. If the price is too low, then companies again have perpetual copyrights. If the price is too high, then indy filmmakers are shut out and moviemaking is exclusively in the hands of the big movie studios.
Instead, I'd like to see each year's fee be a percentage of last year's sales figures, due perhaps at tax time. So the 2008 fee (due April 15, 2008) would be x% of the revenue generated by sales of the property in 2007, not to be less than some minimum amount. If the fee is less than the minimum amount, then the work falls into the public domain. The minimum amount should be set by a board and reconsidered every few years, to account for inflation, and should probably also scale to the cost of producing the work (that way the indy filmmakers won't unfairly lose their copyright before the studios; if they only spent $5000 to make the movie and sell 50 DVDs a year, their minimum amount is lower than a Universal Pictures movie that cost $250 million* but only sells 300 DVDs a year).
The devil's in the details, of course, but the point is that new copyright laws should be 1) fair to all parties regardless of size/funding, 2) have a provision that everything falls into the public domain eventually, and 3) provide for commercially successful works to not be forcibly taken away from the creators at the end of an arbitrary time.
* As an aside, if the copyright fee minimum is scaled based on the expenses associated with producing a movie, there will be incentive for movie studios to claim lower expenses. That drives up the profit of each movie (assuming fixed revenue), and lets people who own a percentage share of profits be less screwed than they currently are.
What you're talking about is profit and that is what Hollywood obscures to screw the people who signed up for a percentage share. They do this by increasing their expenses (sales - expenses = profit) artificially. They would, for example, charge a movie theater 3 times the normal rate to rent the movie reels to be shown; when the movie theater is owned by the same company that made the movie, the money all stays within the company, but that expense number for that particular movie goes up and profits go down. They shuffle money around the company, through its various divisions, in creative ways that reduce the profit listed on a single project's balance sheet. None of those creative expenses ever leave the company or its subsidiaries.
It is much harder to obscure the actual revenue generated (sales). It can be done, but the SEC has a few things to say about revenue recognition and would likely come knocking on your door if you started fudging the numbers. Making the copyright "extension fee" a percentage of last year's revenue is a good compromise for those properties that still have significant commercial value (which many of Disney's properties do), while allowing the law to remain sane for the majority of works that only have value for a short time.
Don't like it? Write to your congresscritter. I did.
Screw this! I'll go make my own wing stress test! With blackjack! And hookers!
Come to think of it, forget the wing stress test!
While I agree that B5 showed some of the most realistic space combat to date (only recently surpassed by BSG), I have to call shenanigans on that NASA story. The only references to anything even close to that I can find online are unsupported "trivia" references, and all of them suspiciously have exactly the same wording. If you can find some more substantial evidence for the claim, then I'll believe you. Until then, I'll go on believing that NASA worked on several designs for Orbital Maneuvering Vehicles (OMVs - "space tugs") and has been studying them since the start of the space shuttle program. All of them predate B5 and none of them owed any allegiance to any sci-fi television show.
Get-off-my-lawnism aside, I've found that most people who are satisfied with iPod quality music have either never been exposed to proper audio reproduction, or they just don't care that much. Not everyone wants a medium-rare filet; some people just want a cheeseburger.
Cheeseburgers and blown-off arms in the same post. Take that, mods!
I'm a firstborn zombie.
Braaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiinnnnnssss....
...both take about a day of travel, no large body of water to cross... You are either from Europe or the east coast of the United States.Out here in the western United States, it's not one day to *anywhere*. You could conceivably drive 1000 miles in a day, but that would take up upwards of 16 hours of constant driving, not including stops for gas, rest, or food. It's much more likely that a fairly hardcore driver would max out at about 700-800 miles a day. With that in mind, check out the distances between US cities. Then, with a straight face, tell me that driving the 2050 miles between Seattle, WA and Chicago, IL (3 days, even for the hardcore) is easier than a 4 hour flight.
Also, there is economics.
2050 miles divided by average MPG of 24.7 times average $3.00 a gallon is $249 (not including hotel cost). A flight on United Airlines from SeaTac to O'Hare is about $300, booked far enough in advance.
They are most *definitely* not the same.
MythTV is not, on its own, a plug-and-play solution. It is a tool used to accomplish a task, and in its current form right now, it is designed for people who want to build their own system and configure it just the way they like. It does not include hardware, and it does not benefit from the economy of scale in manufacturing that TiVo does. If you want the ease of use of TiVo and are willing to put up with the shenanigans of a company who is slowly reducing what you are allowed to do with the downloaded content (which, by the way, is reducing your fair use rights) then I encourage you to buy a TiVo, and stop trolling in a MythTV thread.
Do not confuse "I want it to work RIGHT NOW" with "I want to build it myself". These are very different and, in some cases, mutually exclusive concepts, and they require different tools. We want to build our own boxes. Go away and let us play.
Ok, I admit it. I read the article.
He talks about the dual screen, which is a neat idea and not one I had thought of before. However, he also talks about the small size of the phone, and gives example dimensions in the sketch which seem to show a screen of about 5.3 cm by 5.3 cm. The highest resolution OLED has ever achieved is 200dpi which would result in a resolution of 418x418, and it's more likely that the screen will be the much more common and standard 72dpi with a whopping resolution of 150x150. How exactly is a UI designer supposed to fit the ability to "navigate full-sized pages in desktop mode using an overview window and open tabs to navigate to other pages" in such a small number of pixels?
I love the ideas that are going into this phone, but the engineering reality is that small screens suck for large applications like web browsing. Everyone wants a full QUERTY keyboard, but no one wants a big phone. Everyone wants a giant screen with a ridiculous resolution, but they want it to fit in their pocket, and they don't want any moving parts.
The best compromise might be a pair of Bluetooth eyeglasses that project a virtual screen in front of the user, with the controls on the phone, that can be used for tasks that are more demanding of real estate, like web browsing, reading ebooks, editing documents, viewing pictures, or reading/sending email. A microphone and speaker could even be integrated so the glasses could be used for phone calls as well. With two virtual screens, 3D effects would be possible, and when combined with GPS and accelerometers, could even overlay a HUD on top of the real world. Imagine navigating on the sidewalks of NYC with arrows overlaid in front of your eyes, giving you directions, or walking around a cocktail party letting your facial recognition software (or even Bluetooth identities in other peoples' cell phones) apply a name from your contact list floating above a person's head, MMORPG-style.
The era of squinting at a 150x150 screen to read your email may be coming to a middle.
Let's see ... 400 million in landfills, 650 million connected to the internet. 1 billion sold.
.rm files...
Are there 50 million computers in landfills still connected to the internet? Might explain the proliferation of
*rimshot*
You're thinking of Penn State .
I suppose an argument could be made that if the record companies don't make any money, then they won't be able to afford to pay the sound engineers and other such people for future recordings. To that, I say bullshit. If you can show me even one single shred of evidence that the recording companies are losing money (reports of declining sales of a specific format like CDs are misleading, since more and more people buy music online at places like iTunes and Napster), then you might have a case. But all the studies I've seen show that sales numbers of all new music in all formats is at an all-time high. (Also keep in mind that much of the sales numbers of the past couple decades included sales of music people already owned and are now being purchased in a new digital format. This will artificially inflate sales numbers. If sales of that format are delining now, it's probably because people are finished upgrading their collection.)
Additionally, if sales truly are down *and* correllated in a statistically meaningful way to piracy (evidence of which I have not yet seen), then it means that the record companies are not offering products that the market wants to buy at the price they are offering it for sale. I'm not going to cry myself to sleep over this; it's how the market works.
You are not guaranteed success just because you created a product. If I start a news service website and charge $50 a day for access, I can't complain that my business model is in danger soley because people are getting the same news from Google News for free. Those filthy news freeloaders! All it means is that I have a failing business model, and it's time to do something else.
The bottled water companies do not seem to have a problem turning a profit despite the availability of free alternatives.
Hold on a minute.
There is a fundamental difference between two methods of selling items: goods or services. If you sell me a good, then I have a physical product, and I can modify it or change it or scrap it or resell it or do whatever the hell I want with it, and you can't to a damn thing about it. But if you sell me a service, then that's a contract, and it means that I have to abide by the terms of the contract, including any licensing terms or warrantees or conditions of the sale I agreed to when I first signed on. Physical products are sold under both models, but typically only as a package deal, such as a physical item and a warrantee. But the same rules apply... you can legally modify your PS2 with a mod chip and Sony can do nothing about it; they can only void your warantee, which is a contract you signed stating "I will not mod my PS2", among other things. But the PS2 is yours, and modding it is legal. So is resale.
The media companies are trying to play both sides of this coin, and sell a single product under both models, using what they consider to be the "favorable" aspects of each. Under the goods model, if I buy a CD, I can do whatever the hell I want with the bits thereon, including ripping to iPod, burning as many copies as I like, or printing out the individual bits and wallpapering my living room. BUT, if I break the CD, it's gone; the media company does not owe me a replacement, because it's a good, and there was no warrantee. Under the service model, if I buy a CD, I'm not buying the physical bits, I'm buying the right to listen to the music. This means that I have to abide by the terms of the contract I signed when I bought it, including not making copies or ripping to iPod. But it also means that if I lose or break the CD, I am entitled to a replacement because the contract to listen to the music is still valid. These media companies are trying to enforce the "you must obey these terms of the contract" aspect of the service model, but the "you lost/broke it: tough noogies" aspect of the goods model, and that's wrong.*
Your suggestion, is looking to use both models, too, but use the other sides, and that's just as wrong. You want the "I don't have to abide by your terms" aspect of the goods model, but the "you owe me a replacement/upgrade" aspect of the service model. This is just as duplitous as what the media companies are doing.
Either you bought a disk/file with ones and zeros in/on it, or you signed a contract allowing you to listen to that music under the terms of the contract. Each model has beneficial and detrimental aspects to both buyer and seller, but that's the way it is. The media companies shouldn't have it both ways, and you shouldn't either.
*My earlier suggestion of packaging two products together (a good and a warrantee are techinically separate products, each with their own rules in a court of law) still holds, and a click-through EULA counts as an add-on product, but only for purposes of voiding the warrantee, not for legality of the purchased material (i.e., violating the terms of the contract should not revoke possession of your purchased item). Why people put up with this and continue to buy music with these stupid contracts attached is beyond my understanding.
Linux better than Windows for sysadmin tasks!
News at 11.
It's possible they are. But my point was that until GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Mail.com, Exchange, Lotus, and Outlook all support these keyservers, encryption between different mail systems will not be widespread.
...however, I did note that Dell's website still does not offer XP in any flavor (although there was some talk of this eventually becoming an option). You didn't look very hard.That being said, the "feature comparison" is laughably biased, so Dell is clearly pushing Windows Vista aggressively.
A better measure of Vista adoption might be web statistics. Anyone know of a good aggregator of individual site traffic data that would show percantage of unique hits that are from Vista?