Yeah, I agree, we've been headed in this direction for a while now. But now with three parents, we can actually target specific genes and swap them out for "better" genes. A genetic disease today, your specific height or IQ tomorrow. That's the moral issue here, not whether or not the kid will be a mutant.
Of course people know where these satellites are. Between radar and simple telescopes, they are easy to see and compare to lists of known objects. One of the main reasons the Predator and other drones are effective at finding terrorists and the like out in the mountains or desert is because the terrorists know when our satellites are going overhead. They hide when the satellites goes over, and move when the sky is clear overhead, which is when we send out our drones. It's a constant struggle to keep our satellites' orbits changing so the people we want to spy on get caught.
I had some similar problems dealing with TWC's customer service in another part of NY. If I had another choice, after hour 2 on the phone with them, I would have returned their cable modem and signed up for another service. But there's just no other choice. While the problem eventually got worked out (they finally kicked me up to the national level, and the second guy I talked to there could fix it), I'm still paying whatever they want me to pay because otherwise I can't have acceptable TV or internet service.
Back when anything over ISDN was considered broadband, you didn't have websites like YouTube, people downloading movies off of iTunes, not to mention practically every website containing all sorts of things beyond simple HTML. The internet has gotten bloated, more bandwidth is needed than ever before. The definition of broadband has to move as well.
Anyway, in this particular case, it's not a situation where governments are managing monopolies, it's governments creating monopolies. They hand over entire regions to these huge corporations, and then make it harder for anybody else to get in.
Assuming it has the right number of chromosomes, and all the basic genetic material is in the right places, it shouldn't be any different than anyone else. It just won't have whatever genetic disease they're trying to eliminate.
If it's unethical, it's because this is a slippery slope to picking the color of your kid's eyes, and how fast they can run. Think about Gattaca.
You're describing it like a manpower problem. So hire more people. All I'm saying is, it if strikes us as obvious or we can easily show prior art, then they need to hire some of us. Some kind of wiki isn't a bad idea either. But look, if they're getting too many patent applications than they can deal with, it's their own fault. They keep awarding patents for really dumb things, so everybody and their brother is now filing even more meaningless patents. Make the process stricter, and the number of patents coming in will have to drop when they realize they can't get away with it anymore. It costs money to file a patent. If 90% of your patents get rejected instantly, that's a lot of money down the drain. You'll probably not try to patent something meaningless again.
Isn't the patent office supposed to investigate these things and reject obvious patent claims? Sheesh guys, hire better experts. Maybe we need some from our numbers to go down to the patent office and apply for a job.
It's not just that these companies create content, or that they need somebody else to pay for high-bandwidth users, it's that there's no competition in their markets. You have one cable company (usually) that has a cable franchise in the area. You might have one DSL company too (if you can really call that broadband). That's usually it for most people. So if you want speed x, you're forced to use company y, and they have no incentive to lower their prices. A company comes along that wants to lay down their own coax or fiber cables, and the established company can lobby against them getting their own franchise. There's nothing natural about these "natural monopolies", they are monopolies enforced by local government under the influence of the monopolies. There are very few market forces at work, so your cable company can charge whatever they want and then pull moves like this to get even more out of you.
That's just it, really. Games need to support it in large enough numbers, and need to do it well enough to make a difference between those without the cards and those that have them. Most people seem to think this is a joke, and the way CPUs are going anyway with extra cores, I think we'd be better off seeing multithreaded games instead of physics cards.
This is true, and it's hard to argue that any measure to prevent transmission shouldn't be welcomed, whether or not it cures the person. Unfortunately not everyone with HIV and knows it stops having sex. If there's a treatment that can let them keep doing what they're doing anyway and stop the virus from spreading, great.
Heh, I do think you're right. Microsoft buying out Yahoo really does seem desperate to me. I wouldn't mind if both companies ended up sinking each other, but then it would be far less interesting without all three search companies constantly fighting each other.
As much as I agree with you about RealPlayer being utterly evil, I still prefer the unstable tripod of Google-Microsoft-Yahoo to the cold war deadlock Google-Microsoft.
We need less regulation, absolutely. The way it is currently you have to lobby every little municipality to get the right to lay your cables, and of course the other companies can lobby against you if they are already established. These so-called natural monopolies are a joke. They prevent all competition and your cable bill is all the higher. Same happens with internet. You have one or two big players (cable and DSL), and that's it. Verizon and other companies are spreading their fiber optics, but every little town needs to be lobbied to bring in their service, and of course your Comcast and your Time Warner or whatever put as much pressure as possible to keep out the competition. Less regulation will be better for everyone.
Sure, you won't have sleepy little towns in the middle of nowhere getting 500 channels (half of which are public access or community channels, of course), but oh wait, they already do. Whatever benefits regulation promised were one-time things and those benefits are now irrelevant. Let more players into the market.
One thing a lot of people keep forgetting is that Taiwan actually does quite a lot of business with China. Currently China gets all the benefits of Taiwan's capitalism without actually having to control it politically.
Just as the US and China have no desire to go to war with one another, China doesn't *really* want to go to take over Taiwan. They like to make a big show like this submarine incident to get respect, but that's it. Why invade a country that's investing a lot of money in you and helping your economy? They certainly want to keep the option of invading if Taiwan really declares independence, but as long as Taiwan never does that, they won't attack. So they put pressure on the US to say out of their business, and the US puts pressure on Taiwan not to cause trouble.
This submarine incident is just the Chinese government telling the US government that they are prepared to fight if it comes down to that. 99% of international relations is making plausible threats.
They should have stopped making movies at #9. I happened to like Insurrection (it wrapped things up fairly neatly for most characters), but that's besides the point. Nemesis was atrocious, never should have been made, and Enterprise was poorly managed so while I liked a fair portion of it, it should have not existed.
If they want to take another 10 year break and then do something in the 25th century, I will gladly watch. But right now I'd rather watch more original sci-fi than the same stuff rehashed in prequel after prequel.
The Even Rule generally regards even-numbered movies as being good. Odds aren't necessarily bad, and Star Trek X pretty much destroyed the Even Rule anyway...
Anyway, I tend to like most of them. The only ones that I can say I really disliked were The Final Frontier and Nemesis. So I have invented a new rule, the Multiples of Five Rule. If the movie is a multiple of five, it's non-canon horrible crap.
I agree, the whole article reeked of bias. Does he really think that the minidisc was better than the iPod??? As for BeOS, NEXTSTEP was a really impressive OS as well. Heck, I've seen old demo videos, and we *still* don't have some of that stuff NeXT was doing, or we only just got there.
I think I like history how it turned out. You can still get minidiscs and they have their uses in radio and the performing arts, and they are apparently popular in Japan. But, better solutions exist now for the majority of people.
As for the rest of the stuff...
Betamax was cool, but we got DVRs and DVD-Rs now. The fact that VHS sucked so much is probably a large part of why we have much better stuff now.
Laserdiscs were cool, but way too expensive. Probably the only valid point in the whole bunch. Had Laserdiscs been cheaper and more popular, we probably wouldn't be arguing over HD-DVD and BluRay, we'd have an HD video media long ago.
8-Track... yeah, nobody really cares. There are very good reasons for why it doesn't exist today.
HD Audio, what? Frankly I'd never even heard of it. Music sounds just fine as it is.
There's plenty of neat things you can do with touch screens. Just look at the stuff they're doing on the iPhone with multi-touch. But unless you're going to do something like "length of time touching the screen on a tap" to differentiate between different kinds of clicks, which frankly seems awfully awkward to me, you will never have the flexibility of a mouse. Personally I'm a fan of the one-button strategy that Mac OS has always had. But there are reasons even in Mac OS X to have multiple buttons, and even Apple ships out multi-buttoned mice these days.
The point I'm trying to make is, the mouse *is* a discrete tool. It has the element of being all over the screen, etc. etc., but at the same time it's got different functionality at any given place on the screen, and that functionality is on discrete buttons. You can't replace that with somebody's fat fingers. You can do some really cool things with touch screens, and I personally prefer to use keyboard shortcuts as a way of life, but don't replace my mouse or tablet stylus.
The fact of the matter is, the US military was sending up very high altitude weather balloons capable of drifting over soviet airspace. The idea was to get information for a possible nuclear war, in which case the way the wind blew was sort of important. People in the Roswell area saw these balloons flying over town all the time. Now, due to the fact that these balloon flights were fairly secret during the cold war, yeah, they tried to cover it up when one ended up coming back to earth a little early. Then you have a few people with active imaginations or a wish to get famous/rich, and you've got your alien conspiracy theories.
I don't buy it. Nobody with built-in wireless uses a third party wireless adapter. This is as stupid as that "virus" that failed to work even with people going out of their way to trying to make it work.
If these people want to shake up the "myth", they should do something that doesn't require extremely unlikely situations and careful set-up to make it possible. Until then, it's all just BS sensationalism.
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Yeah, I agree, we've been headed in this direction for a while now. But now with three parents, we can actually target specific genes and swap them out for "better" genes. A genetic disease today, your specific height or IQ tomorrow. That's the moral issue here, not whether or not the kid will be a mutant.
Of course people know where these satellites are. Between radar and simple telescopes, they are easy to see and compare to lists of known objects. One of the main reasons the Predator and other drones are effective at finding terrorists and the like out in the mountains or desert is because the terrorists know when our satellites are going overhead. They hide when the satellites goes over, and move when the sky is clear overhead, which is when we send out our drones. It's a constant struggle to keep our satellites' orbits changing so the people we want to spy on get caught.
I had some similar problems dealing with TWC's customer service in another part of NY. If I had another choice, after hour 2 on the phone with them, I would have returned their cable modem and signed up for another service. But there's just no other choice. While the problem eventually got worked out (they finally kicked me up to the national level, and the second guy I talked to there could fix it), I'm still paying whatever they want me to pay because otherwise I can't have acceptable TV or internet service.
Back when anything over ISDN was considered broadband, you didn't have websites like YouTube, people downloading movies off of iTunes, not to mention practically every website containing all sorts of things beyond simple HTML. The internet has gotten bloated, more bandwidth is needed than ever before. The definition of broadband has to move as well.
Anyway, in this particular case, it's not a situation where governments are managing monopolies, it's governments creating monopolies. They hand over entire regions to these huge corporations, and then make it harder for anybody else to get in.
While it may be quantifiable, they're fooling themselves if they think that the 90% of the pirated market won't just be taken over by some competitor.
Assuming it has the right number of chromosomes, and all the basic genetic material is in the right places, it shouldn't be any different than anyone else. It just won't have whatever genetic disease they're trying to eliminate.
If it's unethical, it's because this is a slippery slope to picking the color of your kid's eyes, and how fast they can run. Think about Gattaca.
You're describing it like a manpower problem. So hire more people. All I'm saying is, it if strikes us as obvious or we can easily show prior art, then they need to hire some of us. Some kind of wiki isn't a bad idea either. But look, if they're getting too many patent applications than they can deal with, it's their own fault. They keep awarding patents for really dumb things, so everybody and their brother is now filing even more meaningless patents. Make the process stricter, and the number of patents coming in will have to drop when they realize they can't get away with it anymore. It costs money to file a patent. If 90% of your patents get rejected instantly, that's a lot of money down the drain. You'll probably not try to patent something meaningless again.
Isn't the patent office supposed to investigate these things and reject obvious patent claims? Sheesh guys, hire better experts. Maybe we need some from our numbers to go down to the patent office and apply for a job.
It's not just that these companies create content, or that they need somebody else to pay for high-bandwidth users, it's that there's no competition in their markets. You have one cable company (usually) that has a cable franchise in the area. You might have one DSL company too (if you can really call that broadband). That's usually it for most people. So if you want speed x, you're forced to use company y, and they have no incentive to lower their prices. A company comes along that wants to lay down their own coax or fiber cables, and the established company can lobby against them getting their own franchise. There's nothing natural about these "natural monopolies", they are monopolies enforced by local government under the influence of the monopolies. There are very few market forces at work, so your cable company can charge whatever they want and then pull moves like this to get even more out of you.
Ding dong the witch is dead?
That's just it, really. Games need to support it in large enough numbers, and need to do it well enough to make a difference between those without the cards and those that have them. Most people seem to think this is a joke, and the way CPUs are going anyway with extra cores, I think we'd be better off seeing multithreaded games instead of physics cards.
I'm sure he meant the doctor's office.
This is true, and it's hard to argue that any measure to prevent transmission shouldn't be welcomed, whether or not it cures the person. Unfortunately not everyone with HIV and knows it stops having sex. If there's a treatment that can let them keep doing what they're doing anyway and stop the virus from spreading, great.
Heh, I do think you're right. Microsoft buying out Yahoo really does seem desperate to me. I wouldn't mind if both companies ended up sinking each other, but then it would be far less interesting without all three search companies constantly fighting each other.
As much as I agree with you about RealPlayer being utterly evil, I still prefer the unstable tripod of Google-Microsoft-Yahoo to the cold war deadlock Google-Microsoft.
We need less regulation, absolutely. The way it is currently you have to lobby every little municipality to get the right to lay your cables, and of course the other companies can lobby against you if they are already established. These so-called natural monopolies are a joke. They prevent all competition and your cable bill is all the higher. Same happens with internet. You have one or two big players (cable and DSL), and that's it. Verizon and other companies are spreading their fiber optics, but every little town needs to be lobbied to bring in their service, and of course your Comcast and your Time Warner or whatever put as much pressure as possible to keep out the competition. Less regulation will be better for everyone.
Sure, you won't have sleepy little towns in the middle of nowhere getting 500 channels (half of which are public access or community channels, of course), but oh wait, they already do. Whatever benefits regulation promised were one-time things and those benefits are now irrelevant. Let more players into the market.
That's no moon...
One thing a lot of people keep forgetting is that Taiwan actually does quite a lot of business with China. Currently China gets all the benefits of Taiwan's capitalism without actually having to control it politically.
Just as the US and China have no desire to go to war with one another, China doesn't *really* want to go to take over Taiwan. They like to make a big show like this submarine incident to get respect, but that's it. Why invade a country that's investing a lot of money in you and helping your economy? They certainly want to keep the option of invading if Taiwan really declares independence, but as long as Taiwan never does that, they won't attack. So they put pressure on the US to say out of their business, and the US puts pressure on Taiwan not to cause trouble.
This submarine incident is just the Chinese government telling the US government that they are prepared to fight if it comes down to that. 99% of international relations is making plausible threats.
They should have stopped making movies at #9. I happened to like Insurrection (it wrapped things up fairly neatly for most characters), but that's besides the point. Nemesis was atrocious, never should have been made, and Enterprise was poorly managed so while I liked a fair portion of it, it should have not existed.
If they want to take another 10 year break and then do something in the 25th century, I will gladly watch. But right now I'd rather watch more original sci-fi than the same stuff rehashed in prequel after prequel.
The Even Rule generally regards even-numbered movies as being good. Odds aren't necessarily bad, and Star Trek X pretty much destroyed the Even Rule anyway... Anyway, I tend to like most of them. The only ones that I can say I really disliked were The Final Frontier and Nemesis. So I have invented a new rule, the Multiples of Five Rule. If the movie is a multiple of five, it's non-canon horrible crap.
I agree, the whole article reeked of bias. Does he really think that the minidisc was better than the iPod??? As for BeOS, NEXTSTEP was a really impressive OS as well. Heck, I've seen old demo videos, and we *still* don't have some of that stuff NeXT was doing, or we only just got there.
I think I like history how it turned out. You can still get minidiscs and they have their uses in radio and the performing arts, and they are apparently popular in Japan. But, better solutions exist now for the majority of people.
As for the rest of the stuff...
Betamax was cool, but we got DVRs and DVD-Rs now. The fact that VHS sucked so much is probably a large part of why we have much better stuff now.
Laserdiscs were cool, but way too expensive. Probably the only valid point in the whole bunch. Had Laserdiscs been cheaper and more popular, we probably wouldn't be arguing over HD-DVD and BluRay, we'd have an HD video media long ago.
8-Track... yeah, nobody really cares. There are very good reasons for why it doesn't exist today.
HD Audio, what? Frankly I'd never even heard of it. Music sounds just fine as it is.
DTS is pretty irrelevant.
There's plenty of neat things you can do with touch screens. Just look at the stuff they're doing on the iPhone with multi-touch. But unless you're going to do something like "length of time touching the screen on a tap" to differentiate between different kinds of clicks, which frankly seems awfully awkward to me, you will never have the flexibility of a mouse. Personally I'm a fan of the one-button strategy that Mac OS has always had. But there are reasons even in Mac OS X to have multiple buttons, and even Apple ships out multi-buttoned mice these days. The point I'm trying to make is, the mouse *is* a discrete tool. It has the element of being all over the screen, etc. etc., but at the same time it's got different functionality at any given place on the screen, and that functionality is on discrete buttons. You can't replace that with somebody's fat fingers. You can do some really cool things with touch screens, and I personally prefer to use keyboard shortcuts as a way of life, but don't replace my mouse or tablet stylus.
I don't know about you, but my finger can't click in 8 different ways.
The fact of the matter is, the US military was sending up very high altitude weather balloons capable of drifting over soviet airspace. The idea was to get information for a possible nuclear war, in which case the way the wind blew was sort of important. People in the Roswell area saw these balloons flying over town all the time. Now, due to the fact that these balloon flights were fairly secret during the cold war, yeah, they tried to cover it up when one ended up coming back to earth a little early. Then you have a few people with active imaginations or a wish to get famous/rich, and you've got your alien conspiracy theories.
I don't buy it. Nobody with built-in wireless uses a third party wireless adapter. This is as stupid as that "virus" that failed to work even with people going out of their way to trying to make it work.
If these people want to shake up the "myth", they should do something that doesn't require extremely unlikely situations and careful set-up to make it possible. Until then, it's all just BS sensationalism.