Oh, I forgot to mention... the fundamental reason why everyone who emails me is given a unique generated alias is to protect myself against trojans/worms/malware that might harvest the contents of a trusted friend's addressbook. If it happens (like to my dad 3 times already. Sigh. He's actually the reason I came up with this scheme... he kept getting my addresses harvested and ruining them forever), all I have to do is nuke that one specific alias, and tell that one person to use a different address to reach me at going forward. It's a lot easier to nuke an incoming address used by ONE person, and notify that ONE person if something changes, than it is to notify everyone (including banks, websites, etc) that they need to use a new address to reach you.
> I agree all these things are difficult. So what solution do you suggest?
I personally applied a multi-pronged approach, and my spam problem has been negligible for YEARS.
1) Everyone I give my email address to is given a different alias, in the form 'myname-alias.validation@mydomain.com'. 'validation' is basically the hash of the salted alias, with different salting recipes for different pattern-matches just to make life difficult for spammers. In theory I could generate the aliases by hand, but I wrote a program that runs on my HTC Touch to generate them for me as necessary. Anything sent to 'myname@mydomain.com' automatically bounces with message to go to my website and obtain an alias to use for contacting me. Ditto, for the first message addressed to a given 'alias' whose 'validation' is invalid (thereafter they're unceremoniously sent to/dev/null).
2) I wrote an app to generate time-limited aliases in the form 'myname-yyyymmdd.validation@mydomain.com', but for now it ended up being gross overkill since nobody has ever tried reverse-engineering it so I just automatically accept all incoming mail sent to 'myname-yyyymmdd@mydomain.net' (where 'yyyymmdd' is today's date, or at least a date within the past week or so). But if spammers ever caught on, the generator app goes back up, and the rules get tightened.
Aside from the fact that some people and businesses get seriously weirded out when they're told to email you at 'myusername-theircompanyname.longhexstring@mydomain.org', it works BRILLIANTLY. How brilliantly? On a typical day, procmail chucks, bounces, or otherwise blackholes about 18,000 to 25,000 spam emails addressed to an outright nonexistent address, roughly 8,000-12,000 spams addressed to an alias that fell into spammer hands, and maybe a half-dozen that are in the right form, but have an invalid hashcode (they get sent to another account on the server that I check occasionally). Every few days, I have to spend a couple of minutes adding another blackhole rule to.procmailrc, but I've never really had enough to make it worth my time to actually write an administration program to manage it for me.
Would this work for Joe Sixpack or Sally Soccermom? Of course not. They have a hard enough time keeping one email address at aol.com straight, let alone generating salty-checksum-validated adhoc aliases unique to everyone who emails them (and every website that extorts their email address, etc). But for the world's Slashdot Elite, it's a nice, elegant solution (as long as you've got your own domain name or ten and have either a dedicated server or a hosting account somewhere with shell and script access so you can run Procmail. My email has gone from "worthless due to the avalanche of spam" to "for all intents and purposes, spam-free", and has stayed that way for almost six years now.
>Strong IP protection and enforcement will help protect one of our most vital and productive assets.
Sort of. The original founding fathers had it right, when they decided IP law was a utilitarian compromise that protected new creations for a short time. Its perversion into a new property right of effectively perpetual duration is a modern development.
Here's a perfect example of everything that's wrong with American copyright law today: Snoopy is dead.
Literally. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, grandchildren, and probably beyond. He died with Charles Schultz. The estate of Charles Schultz owns the copyright to Peanuts, and has decided that there will never be anything new created involving Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus, Peppermint Patty, and the rest of the Peanuts gang. Thanks to American copyright law, that effectively means nobody ELSE can legally do it, either. Of course, the new owners of the "Peanuts" IP can recycle and try to wring a little more value out of it forever, but this is a perfect example of how the original intent of America's founding fathers has been hijacked and perverted by Disney & Company. As the years pass, the "Peanuts" universe will seem increasingly quaint and out-of-touch with contemporary life, and gradually fade into history. Charlie brown will never use Myspace. Snoopy will never compose an email message on his laptop. Peppermint Patty will never send a text message to Marcy. Sally will never own a cell phone. Schroeder will never own a synth, and a teenage Linus will never foil a terrorist plot with his magic blanket.
I like to use the "Peanuts" example, because driving home the realization that Snoopy and Charlie Brown are dead forever thanks to the state of American copyright law.
Copyright law needs to be returned to its original roots, encouraging and rewarding the production of new content without enabling it to be used to forcibly extinguish part of our common heritage and keep it dead "forever" in the holy name of copyright.
Actually, I know what a BIG part of the problem is: there's no good way to use a "dev" phone as your "real" phone due to current cell phone business policies. So the people who do the official development for new phones never really use them as intimately as they'd use a "real" phone, and never encounter the kinds of use cases and problems that real users do. Usability labs are a joke, because they get hijacked by the marketing/business folks who want to test their ideas for value-added services rather than watch the testers swear violently every time the phone does something annoying or stupid (especially if it contradicts a theory the marketing department is trying to prove).
A major crash (especially if what you're testing IS the phone UI itself) renders your phone unusable for 3-5 minutes while the phone reboots. Nobody wants to use an unreliable phone like that as their "real life" phone. So, developers get their "dev" phone, with a second "dev" account, and never use it for anything more than contrived "test" calls that bear little resemblance to the way phones get used by real people going about their daily lives. I know... I used to crash my SPH-i300, SPH-i500, and PPC-6700/HTC Apache all the time. It sucks, and really discourages you from pursuing phone-related dev projects as a recreational matter. Especially the first time your app insidiously crashes something on the phone, and all your incoming calls end up going to voicemail for 3 days (with no notification to you) before you finally notice something's wrong. I know Microsoft's devs are human, and almost certainly feel the exact same way about depending upon a phone they KNOW is unstable to take their "real" calls with.
So... what would go a LONG way towards encouraging developers of phone apps (and phone UIs) to "eat their own dogfood"? Allowing us to add a second phone (the "dev" phone) to our account as a "second line", with its own number but sharing the first phone's minute pool, but ALSO enable BOTH phones to poll the nearest tower for incoming calls to BOTH numbers. Put another way, suppose my "real" number is 305-555-2222. I associate my Sprint Touch with it. I then get the itch to try writing my own phone UI, but want to do it without destroying my social life... so I grab my old PPC-6700 from the closet, call Sprint, and tell them I want a "developer second line". They give me a new, second phone number (say, 786-555-3333) for the 6700, then tell me where I can download a firmware update so that BOTH phones will poll for incoming calls to BOTH 305-555-2222 AND 786-555-3333. Fast forward a few days. My nifty, new Touch UI seems to be working, but as luck would have it, I crashed my phone HARD about 10 seconds before getting a call from the Danish supermodel I met in South Beach the previous weekend (hey, we're fantasizing, right?). With the way things work now, I'd be SOL, her call would go straight to voicemail, and I wouldn't find out that she urgently needed to have sex until it was too late to take up the offer. HOWEVER, if the 6700 were polling BOTH its number AND the Touch's number while the Touch was rebooting and incommunicado (literally), I'd end up taking the call and being pleasantly sidetracked for a few hours;-)
As I understand it, the capability of having one phone poll for two numbers has actually been an official capability of every cell phone since the first AMPS brick circa 1981, but no carrier has ever been willing to offer it as a feature due to fears that family members might try to use it as a ghetto-fabulous way of sharing a phone between two people.
> Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux
Um, in America at least, Linux-based and/or Java-using phones (like Motorola's and the Sidekick, respectively) are some of the most locked-down phones you can buy, requiring certs and signed apps for everything. The last time I checked, anyone with a copy of Visual Studio can build apps for WM6 and deploy them to their phone, their friends' phones, or post them online for anyone else to download and install.
When it comes to real-world PDA phones, HTC's phones running Windows Mobile have been more open than even PALM's phones were. Anyone remember the Samsung SPHi300, i330, and i500 -- all of which were eagerly bought up when introduced, then withered on the vine because Samsung wouldn't release useful SDKs for them -- not even for innocent things like the screen/soft graffiti API, let alone anything related to the phone UI? Compare that to, say, the HTC Apache/PPC-6700, which was probably the most sliced, diced, hacked, and extended phone in history... a phone that was dysfunctional and almost unusable as a phone "out of the box", but had most of its worst problems ultimately solved by independent programmers who wrote their own extensions and enhancements for it.
The battle isn't "Android vs Windows Mobile and iPhone", it's "Android AND Windows Mobile vs iPhone". Windows Mobile devices might be some of the most dysfunctional phones on earth for making voice calls(*), but they ARE an open platform as far as app and extension development is concerned.
(*)I'd like to kill the IDIOT(s) who decided that an incoming call on a Touch whose display is "off" should enable touchscreen input... and leave it enabled... so if you don't hear an incoming call and have the phone in your pocket, you can trigger all kinds of random events without even realizing it. Or "ignore" an incoming call by accidentally touching the wrong place on the screen while trying to fish the ringing phone out of your pocket. Or notify me that I have voicemail, but require me to dismiss the notification to see the notification that I missed a call, then keep dismissing notifications to actually SEE whose call it was that I missed.... (bangs head on wall, fantasizing occasionally about banging the phone instead).
> Exploit the Windows operating system cause the majority of users have it. > Exploit Internet Explorer because the majority of users have it. > Exploit Office products because the majority of users have it. > Exploit Adobe's PDF format because the majority of users have it.
Fortunately, you seem to be right. Remember back around 1998, when ActiveState Perl installed itself as a CLIENT-SIDE BROWSER SCRIPTING LANGUAGE for Internet Explorer, sitting alongside VBscript and JScript... but no real limits on what it could do? Had more than a few thousand people installed it at the time, it could have gone down in history as the most outrageously dangerous exploit of all time. A hidden time bomb that would have enabled someone with even minimal knowledge of Perl to embed it in innocent-looking HTML pages and do... well... just about anything you COULD do with Perl, which was "basically everything". Adding insult to injury, it would have burned PRECISELY the group of people to whom these kinds of things "never" happen;)
Interestingly, the capability of installing Perl as a browser scripting language was still present in modern releases of ActivePerl the last time I felt curious and looked it up... but you had to finish the job manually to enable it, and I think one of the requirements was that you hand-insert a registry key whose name and value was something like "IAmTrulyInsane=1" just to drive home the point that it was an exceptionally bad idea.
> Pretty much any system is superior to that in use in the United States.
Erm, no. First-past-the-post plurality is just about the worst, and most dreadfully abusive, voting system ever conceived on planet Earth. At least America's current system requires that the winning presidential candidate win an absolute majority (50% + 1) of *something*. If only a simple plurality is all that's required, someone running in a race with 3 viable candidates could theoretically win with as little as 33.3% + 1 support. Or, put another way, with 66.67% - 1 of the public voting for a different candidate. The Electoral College might occasionally produce a result where someone with an absolute majority of electoral votes nevertheless has a small number of popular votes fewer than a losing candidate, but that's mainly due to most states having a "winner takes all" policy for allocating electoral votes. Most of the time, all the policy does is amplify differences, so a slight lead turns into a landslide victory.
One thing that's frequently overlooked... the current system is almost guaranteed to result in a president who's significantly more moderate than his/her party, and two legislative bodies whose agendas rarely coincide. It's by design. We don't *want* a government that can effectively pass sweeping laws on a daily basis. You only have to look at wonderful gems like the PATRIOT act to see what happens when all three branches of the federal government happen to briefly agree about something that appears to momentarily cross party lines. The founding fathers knew quite well that the best way to protect Americans from the government was to rig the system to keep it safely bound, gagged, and hobbled as often and completely as possible.
> Please inform me if you think that I'm mistaken, and there is some important cause being served by each person in Ohio > having a vote as powerful as ten thousand people in New York or Alabama. If there is some important goal that this accomplishes, > I would love to hear it.
Among other things, it's one of the reasons the United States was able to get the original state governments to approve its establishment in the first place. Small states like Connecticut, Vermont, and Maryland would have NEVER voluntarily relinquished sovereignty to a federal government that rendered them more or less irrelevant and moot. It was the Great Compromise, balancing the interests of small/sparsely-populated states against big/populous states.
The fact that candidates have to win an absolute 50%+1 majority (rather than a mere first past the post plurality), and have to win a majority of STATES rather than individual voters, is part of the reason why our federal government can't screw people who don't live in New York or Los Angeles the way Britain's elected officials seem to do on a regular basis to just about everyone who doesn't live in London. In the US, presidential candidates need to win lots of votes spread across a geographically huge area, and there are VERY few states that any candidate can afford to completely write off or take for granted.
> Was it not Windows XP, before any service packs, which came with a file in the 'My Videos' which, when opened in a text editor, > showed the cracked software version used to create it?
This was apparently surprising only to people who don't work for companies that actually make it easy for developers to BUY software without having to get approval up the management chain all the way up to god himself. Half the software my co-workers and I use ends up being pirated, because our company makes it damn near impossible to buy anything that's not on the list of officially-sanctioned software (almost all of which is stuff that the "business" users need). I can blow $150 on lunch when I'm traveling without even needing to get my immediate manager to sign off an approve the reimbursement as long as I don't spend more than $250/day on meals/incidentals/entertainment, but getting reimbursed $29.95 for some shareware app I can't live without requires approval by the vice-president (my boss' boss' boss), who requires our department to submit purchase requests in batches no more than once per quarter. Of course, if we're 5 weeks into the current quarter, and I need the damn app TODAY (or at least by next week)... well... time to visit astalavista.box.sk (under vmware, of course) to get the crack and run the app (also under vmware, with write access to nothing besides a usb thumbdrive, of course).
Personally, I think 99% of free software's appeal to people who work for big, oblivious corporations is the fact that it's not just free as in beer or liberty... it's also free of bureaucratic grief.
Getting back to the Microsoft example... name any app produced by Microsoft that does something remotely close to what SoundForge does. Um, none? OK, now picture the hapless employee, who works for the largest software company on earth, dealing with THEIR bureaucracy trying to get permission to buy a program sold by one of their "competitors", even though it's a niche they don't actually compete in. Especially with a looming deadline.
Or, alternatively... picture Microsoft hiring an outside consultant/musician to do the track. To save money, they hired a freelancer who's just getting started and doesn't quite do it as his/her "real" job yet. The individual hasn't gotten to the point yet where he/she's making enough money off of it for buying it to be a no-brainer (It IS usually one of the first 3 apps anyone who becomes halfway serious about music production ends up buying when "the time comes"), and the employees at the Microsoft end responsible for getting it on the disc were themselves under immense deadline pressure. The file played, normal users aren't going to view it in a hex editor looking for anything "funny", so on the disc it went.
> Or how modems used to have their own signal processors? But now most use the CPU.
Welllll... I'd say the move to HSP modems took place more because the ascent of DSL and cable internet relegated modems to the status of, "nice to have if I happen to need it once in a blue moon to send a fax or dialup in the middle of nowhere at some point over the next 2-4 years." Remember all those articles 3-5 years ago about how host signal processing absolutely DESTROYS CPU performance because it demands constant attention from the CPU, and the software overhead of having to keep stopping to service the modem caused the computer to run at least 20-30% slower? Well, not much has changed, except now with a multi-core CPU it can kill the performance of just ONE core instead of bringing the whole computer to its knees. But even with multicore CPUs, I can guarantee that if modems were still the primary way people got online, there would definitely be a thriving market for "performance" modems that offloaded at LEAST the signal-processing functions to a real DSP (like the Lucent "semi-Winmodems", that actually gave users the best of both worlds... offloading the stuff that really dragged the CPU down to its own DSP, but doing things like compression and error-correction that could be handled in discrete batches faster than even dedicated hardware could achieve).
There's another thing to remember about discrete chips... in the early 3dfx days, the mainstream CPU makers (Intel, AMD, and Cyrix) had ZERO interest in giving even the slightest attention to 3D graphics. Unless you're IBM (who wasn't interested in 3D, either), building CPUs is probably way beyond your company's capabilities. HOWEVER, designing a 3D graphics chip with the complexity of the first ones used by 3dfx IS within the capabilities of a well-funded design company with the connections to get it manufactured. It doesn't even need a fab with the capabilities of one owned by Intel, AMD, etc. So discrete 3d cards were an elegant way to sidestep the deadweight lack of interest on the CPU side by shifting it to a chip that smaller companies could design and build. Now that "the big guys" have turned their attention to it, the smaller players don't have a prayer (ergo, the merger mania among CPU/mobo chipset makers and graphics chip makers).
The same observation can be made regarding cache and memory controllers. In the First Pentium Era, volume manufacturers like Compaq (and their comrades at arms, Intel & AMD) regarded cache as a luxury the unwashed masses could live without, even if it only saved $5 and cut the effective performance in half. Hey, consumers only look at that "Mhz" number, anyway... Fortunately, performance-oriented mobo makers were able to take matters into their own hands, and once again do an end run around the CPU vendors' sloth and put cache directly on the mobo. Once CPU makers decided cache mattered, and put lots of it on-die, the marginal benefit of putting more, relatively expensive tertiary cache on the motherboard diminished. As for memory controllers, they got moved into the CPU because it was the only way to reliably achieve increased memory bandwidth (designing a 32-bit parallel interface for ANYTHING that has to run at 400+ MHz and communicate across traces on a circuit board is a hardcore engineering challenge; Serial is cheaper to implement and can be faster overall than a simpler parallel solution, but there's a point where you can't shove the bits any faster, and the only way to increase bandwidth is to go parallel. It's not a coincidence that PCI Express video cards communicate 16 bits at a time, but even the fastest fibre-channel disk or network interface is happy with a single bit.
The sad irony, though, is that 5 years from now, games will probably have graphics about as good as you can get from the best and most expensive SLI solutions money can buy today... but overall performance will probably be less consistent (ie, if Windows decides that it might be a good time to reorganize its temp directory while y
> This is (one of) the real culprits of low CD sales
Another is the fact that quite a few current pop CDs don't sound a whole lot better than the badly-compressed alternatives you can download for free. Part of the problem is the "loudness war" -- studios want THEIR songs to sound louder than others when played on the radio. Radio stations almost never adjust the source level for different songs. So... producers are now pressured by record companies to mix music with the average volume as high as possible. What usually results is something we all thought was banished from the earth 20 years ago -- clipping. Take a Madonna CD from the late 80s/early 90s, rip a track from it, and view the waveform in SoundForge. Then do the same with any recent CD by someone like Britney Spears, Good Charlotte, Justin Timberlake, or even Madonna. It's not subtle... you'll see the difference INSTANTLY.
It's sad... the music industry has basically forgotten (or abandoned) just about EVERYTHING it learned about producing high-quality recordings during the 80s and 90s.
And don't even get me started on the MECHANICAL quality of modern CDs. I have badly-abused CDs from high school that rip and play better than almost-new CDs subjected to a week in my car. Modern pressed CDs have almost NO scratch-resistance, and are almost as easy to destroy as records were.
> I'd be more interested in killing Daylight Savings Time than dealing with Leap Year.
OK, but ONLY if our time zones get permanently moved +1 hour. In Florida, at least, that would be awesome... even in the northernmost part of the state, the sun would still rise by 8am on the darkest day of winter, and we'd get to have an hour or two of daylight after work in the winter instead of driving home in darkness (and hellish gridlock).
Don't underestimate the impact of daylight on traffic. Morning traffic tends to be spread out over several hours. So does evening traffic... except during the winter, when people who normally might have straggled home at 6 or 7 (figuring traffic is gridlocked anyway) all start to rush out the door at 5pm in a desperate effort to get home before dark, and a 3-5 hour process of congested traffic collapses into 2-4 hours of complete gridlock for everyone. When traffic is normally bumper-to-bumper and a half step shy of complete gridlock, it doesn't really take THAT many people to decide to try and get home early to tip the balance and bring everything to a grinding halt. If you don't believe me, come to Miami and observe morning and evening rush hour on the last Friday of Daylight Savings Time, then compare it to morning and evening rush hour the first Monday after it ends. Then Do the same thing a few months later... on the last Friday before DST begins, observe that traffic really hasn't gotten any better all winter despite the sun now setting around 6:30pm, and morning traffic is as bad as ever... then compare it to the traffic on Monday. Morning traffic? Unchanged. Evening traffic? Literally, a night-and-day difference. A 5pm drive that took 45 minutes during the winter suddenly takes 30 minutes.
> Fees, yes. 100x what you normally pay? Not so much.
Which brings up another point... just TRYING to get a straight answer out of most carriers about the exact charges (taxes, "fees", surcharges, and all) that will be incurred is damn near impossible. Even if they give you an answer, it will always be with a disclaimer that effectively lets them off the hook if they're wrong, and gives them free reign to add on as many other fees as they like. About 3 years ago, it took me about 40 minutes with 3 Sprint reps to get a straight answer about how much it would cost to use my phone as a modem while roaming in Canada. And best of all, the rep was wrong, and the ultimate charges were about 40% more than I was quoted.
Telling someone, "additional charges may be imposed" is bullshit. Throwing up a Windows Mobile dialog box the first time you try to initiate a data session in a foreign country that says something like, "If you continue, each kilobyte of data you send or receive will cost US$3.74 including all applicable charges, fees, taxes, and tarrifs... do you REALLY want to continue? would be another matter.
IMHO, this IS an intellectually-consistent libertarian position. Libertarianism assumes free-market transactions made between informed buyers and sellers. If the seller has a government-protected monopoly or oligopoly, and can't/won't even give the buyer a straight answer about how much something is going to cost, the seller has no right to complain if a court sides with the customer when they try to turn around and impose charges amounting to roughly 200 times a normal monthly bill.
Actually, the latency between ISS and anywhere on earth should theoretically be no worse than roughly double the time it would take to make a trip halfway around the earth via fiber. Remember, geostationary satellites have latency issues because they're about 28,000 miles away from Earth. The ISS is only about 200 miles up... approximately the distance between Miami and Orlando, or Paris and London. The only reason I even factored in as much time as I did is the fact that ISS moves relative to the earth, so in order to avoid breaking TCP/IP and give it an apparent fixed IP route to the rest of the internet, all traffic to and from it would have to pass through a single network point somewhere (probably Houston), then be forwarded via fiber to an uplink somewhere within the ISS's line of sight at that moment. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the ISS's internet connectivity actually is implemented using more or less off the shelf cellular data technology (using NASA's frequencies, with higher-power transceivers spaced further apart, but the same general idea as CDMA or GPRS data). Then again, to cut costs, they might very well have implemented internet connectivity on the ISS by just adding two or three tracking dishes to it, and using the same satellites as VSAT internet, which WOULD subject them to the same drawbacks as terrestrial customers. God, can you imagine the headlines if ISS ended up getting FAP'ed?!?:D
> Are you saying that there are secret regulations not available to the public that they must still follow? > How would a building firm know what is an acceptable height for a toilet seat unless that is specified in some regulation? > Sounds like you are bullshitting.
Actually, building and zoning codes are the worst offenders of this. I'm pretty sure that the National Electric Code, the National Fire/Life Safety Code, or both, are copyrighted, aggressively guarded by their respective owners, and incorporated by reference into just about every building code in America. I *know* at least 2 of the "big 3" model building codes (IRC, BOCA, CABO) are officially copyrighted, though Florida's building code (which is ~98% verbatim IRC) *does* seem to be available online for free perusal (though it seems to be "free as in beer", in the sense that you can download and read it for free, but can't redistribute it yourself).
Most transit info is officially copyrighted, too. Put up a web site with BART or NYC subway maps, timetables, or aggregate their realtime status without their blessing, and they'll have you in court before you can blink. I believe that in New York's case, they actually go so far as to use TRADEMARK law to prohibit the third-party publication of ANYTHING claiming to be a New York City subway map, even if it's a completely novel design with no discernible resemblance to their "official" maps. It would probably go down in flames if it were ever challenged in court, but I believe it's been on the books for at least a few decades.
In any case, I agree 100%... the entire idea of copyrighting a LAW is absolute bullshit, unless ignorance of a copyrighted law IS an ironclad defense in court.
You know, even 25 or 50 years ago, there probably WOULDN'T seem to be any obvious explanation for "that feeling" that didn't seem metaphysical or supernatural... but then again, to Marconi or Tesla, CDMA and MPEG-4 would have seemed like black magic (though PCM, with bits recorded as horizontal rows on high-resolution black & white film with one sensor tube per bit fed into a simple resistor DAC, would have probably made perfect sense and been do-able with 1920s technology if cost were no object and someone managed to figure out how to get the bits sampled in the first place). When you think of it terms of visible high-frequency motion patterns, protocol handshaking, Kalman filters, and digital signal processing in a massively multitasking environment (the human brain), the theory doesn't really seem particularly strange or unbelievable. I've actually searched online to see whether anyone has ever explored it in a research/academic setting, but so far it seems to be just a personal pet theory of mine;-)
An even bigger problem will be making robots that can convincingly pass for human while physically in their presence and trying to feign one-on-one communication. Have you ever noticed that somehow, something just kind of clicks, and you *know* you've made eye contact with someone... and you know that THEY know, too? They might be far away, in a moving vehicle, looking at something else (or just generally looking around), but every now and then "it" happens... you make random, fleeting eye contact with a stranger.
My theory is that it's due to the fact that your eyes are always moving (if your eye were perfectly still, you wouldn't be able to see, because rods and cones derive most of their information from CHANGES rather than instantaneous sampled state). I'm guessing that the pattern of movement appears random, but somehow the part of your brain responsible for background signal processing is able to recognize that movement pattern in the eyes others, and tries to synchronize itself to it. Neither person is intentionally trying to do it, or is even aware of it, but their brains -- through visible eye movement -- are actively negotiating the equivalent of a handshake... and when it happens, a metaphorical "datagram" gets sent to your conscious brain letting you know that you've "locked on" to another person. When you're intentionally talking to someone, it lets you know that you have their attention. When it unexpectedly happens at some random moment when you're just gazing out at the horizon, it can be awkward and uncomfortable.
It's why if you're trying to hide, the worst thing you can possibly do is try to watch what's going on nearby. You might be in the dark shadows, or behind a large object with little more than a hole big enough to see through... but somehow, if someone happens to gaze in the right direction, and their eye detects the movement pattern of an eye somewhere nearby, they're going to immediately feel like something is amiss, even if they don't immediately realize what just happened. If their gaze crosses the gaze of another person who's looking at something entirely different, it might just be a feeling of unease. It's why looking for a lost person or animal is easier than looking for a lost object, at least if you're close enough to potentially make eye contact, Looking for a misplaced object, your brain has to process everything it sees, and constantly do pattern-matching. With people and animals, it's kind of like they're emitting a short-range beacon that allows you to randomly gaze around, but get "that feeling" whenever eye contact occurs, signaling that some area merits further visual inspection.
Anyway, getting back to the Uncanny Valley, it'll be interesting to see what impact the ability to feign eye contact by robots will have. A robot with no eye contact seems creepy in a "dead" kind of way. Would a robot that "almost" managed to maintain eye contact be MORE comforting, or creepier still? Would the "comfort" factor depend upon whether the person interacting with the robot KNEW they were interacting with a robot? Or would making "almost correct" subconscious eye contact with a robot send chills down the person's spine, setting off subconscious alarms to let them know, "DANGER! Something here isn't quite right!", regardless of whether the person KNEW it was a robot?
> There are too many flaws in IPv4 to not want to break compatibility. Most server software supports IPv6 fine, > it is just the lazy (or uninformed) people who refuse to roll it out until IPv4 is exhausted.
Uh, right. And communism failed because the people forced to live under it didn't work hard enough to make it succeed, or subverted the plans of social engineers to pursue their own petty best interests.
The problem with IPv6 is that it solves problems that already have cheap work-arounds, and introduces several billion new problems to complicate things and take their place. Like Marx, IPv6's designers grossly underestimated the importance of the human element wherever observed human behavior contradicted their neat, orderly theory. And ultimately, IPv6 will fail (or be subverted by its users) just like communism was.
Read most complaints about IPv6, and you quickly see a common theme. People gripe a bit about lots of its details, but the one thing everyone bitches loudly about is the simple fact that no non-autistic human can meaningfully remember a real IPv6 address. Not some early-adopter experimental IPv6 address that can be neatly compacted down to 6 or 8 bytes, but a real, honest-to-god "AT&T has a subnet, that they've subnetted into 65k subnets, further subnetted into 16.8 million subnets" IPv6 address that really WILL take 40-80 characters to represent.
Variable-length addresses might be "kludgy", but imagine IPv6 addresses looked like this:
0x0000.a.b.c.d = legacy IPv4 address. Yes, 0x0000.192.168.1.100 still works as a private address, as does 0x0000.10.0.0.1.
0x0001.a.b.c.d through 0xffef.a.b.c.d = IPv7 address. We've just expanded the address space by a factor of roughly 64k. The Powers that Be can slice and dice this new address space however they like... by geography, mode (multicast, etc), political boundary, business entity, or however they think makes sense.
0xfffn.{5 to 20 (5+n, 0n16) additional bytes follow, all of which should be ignored by the router unless it explicitly knows what to do with them}. The "Always Provide A Graceful Upgrade Path" value. If, 50 years from now, it's decided that all new IP addresses should have 128 address bits, fine... legacy addresses still work, and new addresses that begin with "0xffff." can move forward to the next level.
For an example of practical reality triumphing over academic ideology, just look at Intel-compatible CPUs. The 80386 could do linear memory and had orthogonal registers... but it could also run like a fast 8086, so there was no real reason to NOT use it for new computers instead of the 8086, 8088, or 80286. As a practical matter, that's exactly how it WAS used until Commodore went down in flames, Amiga software companies realized that you could write off every PC less than a 486-66 with 4 megs of RAM and STILL have a potential market several times as big as the Amiga market at its peak, and their developers simply REFUSED to deal with segmentation and wacky registers when every IA-32 CPU since the 386SX had orthogonal registers and linear memory addressing available. And thus DOS4GW, Commanche: Maximum Overkill, and Doom arrived. In other words, the new "386" features were THERE for anyone who wanted to use them, but for the most part they were harmless if you didn't. Then, look at what happened to the Itanium, when Intel decided to wipe the slate clean.
IMHO, IPv6 is the new Itanium. It doesn't matter how hard its backers try to push it... stakeholders WILL fight back, just like they are now, and will either doom it to an academic footnote in history, or organically mangle & munge it into something more human-friendly. "The Powers that Be" can either go back to the drawing board and come up with a clean extension to IPv4, or they can wait until Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, and/or a few rogue Linux kernel devs take matters into their own hands and create de-facto workarounds that cause interoperability nightmares for the next generation of devs, admins, and users.
> Do you think decently-scaled SD looks good more commonly on DLP sets than on LCD sets because of some inherent superiority > of DLP vs. LCD re: SD? Or because built-in scalers on DLP sets might be better on average than those found in LCD sets?
I think it's SCSI vs SATA, part deux. There's no inherent reason why DLP sets MUST have better scalers than LCD, anymore than any inherent reason why a SATA drive couldn't spin 15kRPM and have a 256mb cache... but for the most part, as of ~2008, low-end DLP sets have largely vanished from the market. The cheapest DLP sets start where the most expensive LCD sets leave off, both size-wise AND price-wise. To the best of my knowledge, there's no such thing as a sub-$1k TV whose box and/or feature list includes the "F" word ("Faroudja"). Faroudja's best technology was doing things 15 years ago that today's TVs gave up doing once their price point dropped below a kilobuck.
Sadly, the TV industry seems to have never heard of Moore's Law. 15 years ago, my dad took me to a high-end stereophile show in Miami where Faroudja happened to be showing off their newest toy... a ~$18k box that turned OTA NTSC mush into spectacular video worthy of a $50k video projector with some insane resolution developed for flight simulators by the Israeli air force. It definitely made an impression on me, and ever since then I've been disappointed by real-world video quality of consumer-grade TVs. I want to see modern video hardware pull off the same stunt with non-film-source 1080i60, and transform it into beautiful faux 1080p60. It's one reason why I hate HDCP with a passion... I have a gut feeling that a top of the line quad-core PC could probably pull off the same stunt through sheer brute force... but thanks to HDCP (and the nearly complete nonexistence of anything capable of digitizing even 480p60 in realtime, let alone 1080i60), we're stuck with ugly interlaced video for another decade or two:-(
> I have a voluminous canvas bag which I take with me when I go shopping. How hard is that?
For stores (in America, at least), that's bad. Especially in poor neighborhoods. Stores don't WANT customers to go in with large bags, because that means they have to either check inside them to make sure you aren't stealing anything, or watch their "shrinkage" go through the stratosphere.
There's another problem -- charging for bags COMPLETELY screws up the checkout workflow. Normally, one of two checkout workflows exist:
a) Cashier scans items as quickly as possible, and hurls them in the general direction of the bagger. Bagging continues while the transaction is finalized and the purchase is paid for (credit card authorization, cash exchanged, etc).
b) Cashier scans items as quickly as possible, and hurls them towards one of two or three possible destinations. The customer pays, then bags the groceries himself while the next customer or two gets processed in a similar fashion.
In both cases, the transaction is finalized, and payment is made, long before bagging is finished (or begins at all). Charging for bags would require waiting until the groceries have been fully bagged (so they can be counted) before beginning the credit card authorization... adding 20-40 seconds to each transaction, and requiring more employees working at once to offset the delay. Two employees (a cashier and a bagger) working for one hour are several orders of magnitude more expensive than the cost (to the store) of the maximum number of plastic bags that might conceivably be handed out for free during each hour that they'd have to work. If you want to be environmental about it, don't forget to add in the fact that both extra employees are statistically guaranteed to drive to work (remember, in America, even poor people have cars and drive everywhere).
Well, ok... they COULD run the bag charge through as a second credit card transaction, but when you factor in the transaction fee charged by Mastercard & Visa, most stores would have to charge even MORE for the bags or lose money overall. Don't even THINK about suggesting that stores require that bags be paid for with cash. Customers at any store that tried would angrily demand an immediate refund, or abandon their groceries in the line (if they hadn't paid yet), requiring yet more employees to restock them and keep frozen/refrigerated foods from spoiling.
Charging for the estimated number of bags? Good luck getting that past the legal department. All it takes is one angry customer who's pissed off about being "nickeled and dimed" to discover he was charged for 3 bags, but only received 2, to file a fraud complaint with the state attorney's office. A store that wanted to charge for the estimated number of bags would be required by their legal department to count the number of bags actually used, and give empty bags to the customer if fewer than the number charged for were used. And of course, in THAT scenario, you'd have pissed off customers who were livid about being charged an extra nickel for a bag they didn't even need, who'd be even angrier about the fact that most of that 5c charge was pure profit for the store.
Publix (Florida's nearly-ubiquitous grocery store) has a far more elegant solution. Baggers have a nickel dispenser. If you bring your own bag(s), they give you a nickel for every one used, and have a jar for charity near the door on the way out for customers who don't want to be bothered with loose change. It avoids disrupting the workflow, and avoids pissing off customers who've become increasingly agitated about being "nickeled and dimed" by companies they do business with.
>Why did the FCC only grant two satellite licences? It's not like there's limited bandwith.
Actually, there IS. Go google "SDARS".
The reason you don't need a dish to receive Sirius or XM is because they broadcast a signal that's strong enough to receive with just an antenna, and just as importantly, because they have the exclusive use of their respective band of SDARS frequencies throughout North America (and southern Canada, northern Mexico, and the Caribbean, for that matter).
Sirius divides its band into 3 blocks, and has 3 satellites in modified Molniya orbits (I think there's a fourth satellite up there as a spare). At any given moment, one of the satellites is on the other side of the earth, and two are visible from North America. Most of the time, one satellite will appear to be almost directly "straight up", and the other will be somewhere near the horizon. This works wonderfully for Sirius, because the "up" satellite is usually high enough to keep things like mountains and valleys from interfering with reception, while the "horizon" satellite increases the likelihood of getting good reception when you're parked under the roof of a gas station. The terrestrial repeaters fill in most of the remaining gaps. They handle the "overpass problem" by time-delaying and buffering the audio program by several seconds, and sending chunks of it out-of-order via the two visible satellites and terrestrial repeaters. Thus, if your signal gets interrupted for a half second because you drove under an overpass, it doesn't really matter, because the data is missed from satellite #1 was already sent by satellite #2 and/or the nearest repeater (or will be, a second or two later), so that when the time comes to actually PLAY it in another few seconds, at least one copy of the necessary data will be in the buffer.
The benefit of Sirius' satellite strategy is that you can get great reception in a moving vehicle just about everywhere in America. The downside is that if you're listening from a fixed location (like a home), and you're trying to get by with a single antenna sitting on a windowsill (vs an outdoor antenna with clear view of both the sky AND horizon), you're going to have to move the antenna to a different windowsill every few hours, because their satellites don't stay in one place.
By comparison, XM's satellites aren't quite as interesting. They're just a pair of conventional geostationary satellites sitting ~22k miles above the equator, with lots and lots of terrestrial repeaters to compensate for things like mountains and tall buildings that might block the view to the south.
With DBS services like DirecTV or Dish Network, the dish's purpose isn't to capture enough of a weak signal from a distant satellite to decode... it's to capture a lot MORE of the signal coming from one specific satellite, so that they can attenuate the signal (causing weaker signals from adjacent satellites to drop out) and re-amplify what's left. If there were only a single DBS provider, broadcasting a single beam from a single satellite over a single block of frequencies, you wouldn't need a dish to receive THAT, either.
>*Station playlists that would become predictable within a week.
And you've just identified the #1 reason why so many Sirius AND XM subscribers are opposed to the merger -- we both like our respective satellite services EXACTLY the way they are. Sirius channels are hit-based and programmed like ideal big-city FM stations, sans commercials. XM channels have deeper and more esoteric playlists. To a Sirius fan, XM sounds like someone bought a pile of B-stock CDs from the bargain bin, dumped them into a changer, and hit the "randomize" button. To an XM fan, Sirius sounds like someone locked a DJ into a booth with one single "${catchy_name} Hits 2k8" CD and forced them to play it overAndOverAndOver.
One thing that's often overlooked in the "Sirius/XM have competition from terrestrial radio/ipods/etc" argument -- the overwhelming majority of people who actually BELIEVE it *aren't* Sirius or XM subscribers. Sirius and XM subscribers subscribe precisely BECAUSE they think terrestrial radio sucks, ipods aren't realtime, and anyone who thinks you can stream internet media wirelessly through most of the western US (and a fairly big chunk of the EASTERN US, for that matter) is seriously deluded about the availability of high-speed cellular broadband in non-urban areas. For the proud elite who subscribe to Sirius or XM, there IS no acceptable alternative to satellite radio.
The worst thing about the merger isn't the prospect of higher rates. Compared to what I spend every month on wireless voice & data service, satellite TV, broadband, mortgage, HOA fees, and everything else, it's below the threshold of consciousness. Rather, it's the prospect of having "duplicate" (to someone in upper management) channels from Sirius and XM "merged", so Sirius can use the freed-up bandwidth to broadcast "Backseat Barney" videos. NOBODY, with the possible exception of diehard sports fans who listen to nothing BUT sports, would EVER mistake Sirius music content for XM music content, and vice-versa. They're as different as night and day. Partly, because when they were competing, they HAD to discover their respective niches and aggressively appeal to them.
Today is a very sad day for subscribers of BOTH services.
I'd kill for a buckling-spring keyboard with Trackpoint-type pointer stick, located below the spacebar and a pair of buttons (like the rare-but-existing IBM keyboards w/buckling-spring keyboards and Trackpoint in the traditional G-H-B position). THAT is the "natural" position for a pointer stick -- the point where your THUMB manipulates it instead of your hyperextended index finger. I've come across 2 keyboards in my life (one attached to an ancient laptop, one attached to a specialized piece of EE test equipment that cost a few thousand dollars) with Trackpoint-type pointer stick in "thumb position", and using it was pure nirvana. Why? Your index finger isn't very strong, and fatigues easily when hyperextended. Your thum, on the other hand, is strong and can be controlled with precision, but has a limited range of motion. Ergo, gross movements (like a touchpad) fail miserably, because you don't have nearly as much horizontal range as vertical-diagonal range... but applying isometric pressure against a stick works beautifully.
So, why doesn't anybody (besides the most evil company on Earth, Sony... which occasionally dabbles with it on a Japanese-market subnotebook) ever put the stick there? Apparently, because Fujitsu has a patent on their worthless crap alternate pointer stick that ALSO claims its location (you guessed it... below the keyboard), and nobody wants to risk a lawsuit for infringement by putting a Trackpoint-type stick down there (Sony presumably has either a blanket licensing agreement with Fujitsu, or enough IP of their own to squash Fujitsu like a grape if they tried suing SOny for infringement).
Disclaimer: I type 100+ wpm on a bad day with a good (buckling-spring) keyboard, and insist on trying to use touchpads without moving my hands away from the rest of the keyboard a-la-trackball... a strategy that fails miserably on just about everything besides maybe Macbooks, because PC notebook touchpads were all apparently designed for people who navigate using their index fingers. Macbook touchpads DO seem to "get it right", but unfortunately they only come attached to some of the most god-awful chiclet keyboards seen since the days of the TRS-80 Color Computer...
One thing that probably needs to be mentioned, since it's not necessarily obvious to anyone who hasn't taken physics: spacecraft in their current incarnation don't use their engines to keep them moving... they use their engines to rapidly propel themselves to a speed that's hopefully sufficient to reach their final destination (or next gravity waypoint) before the Earth's own gravity manages to pull them back. The shuttle & ISS fire their engines to alter their orbits and nudge themselves around, but once the shuttle is in orbit, it ALREADY has to be going in the right direction at the right speed to eventually rendezvous with the ISS. If there were another space station at a higher altitude, the current shuttle couldn't visit the ISS, then go visit space station #2... at least, not without refueling somehow, because it doesn't carry enough fuel to radically alter its orbit to a higher destination.
That's the main reason why using the shuttle to service Hubble is so dangerous... it has to use most of its fuel to get there, and literally returns to Earth "on the fumes" (so to speak). Think of it as driving up a road along the side of a mountain in a car with mostly-empty gas tank, with *just* enough fuel to make it to the top... then using that final bit of gas to turn around, and coast all the way back down the mountain. If the shuttle encounters a serious problem en route to Hubble, it doesn't have enough fuel to reach the ISS, and no spacecraft already docked at the ISS has enough fuel left to reach the imperiled shuttle, so there's no metaphorical "tow truck" to rescue them.
It's also the reason why spacecraft have to rapidly accelerate to multiple Gees, instead of taking off like a jet and just circling the Earth over and over, getting a little higher each time. When the solid rocket boosters are ignited, they burn in a predictable way, but there's no way to gracefully throttle them "up". They do their thing, run out of fuel, and quit -- hopefully (and by design) after the shuttle is already going fast enough for the liquid fueled engines to get it the rest of the way to its destination.
That's one reason why nuclear engines were so eagerly explored during the 60s... they were the only potentially-viable way to achieve the kind of slow, steady, long-term acceleration that would have permitted a "space plane" to take off and slowly travel to orbit without subjecting its passengers to the usual Gee forces experienced by astronauts. Unfortunately, when you've got a populated planet below with lots of high-value real estate and residents below, nuclear-fired jet/rocket engines just aren't going to happen. People get neurotic about the use of RPGs, which are basically sealed nuclear batteries that generate heat from their own decay and generate electricity using technology that works not unlike solar cells (but with heat, rather than light)... and they probably WOULD make it safely back to Earth if something went wrong on the way up. As such, a real, honest-to-got nuclear REACTOR running at full-bore in a moving vehicle flying anywhere near anything resembling a populated area just isn't going to happen;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I forgot to mention... the fundamental reason why everyone who emails me is given a unique generated alias is to protect myself against trojans/worms/malware that might harvest the contents of a trusted friend's addressbook. If it happens (like to my dad 3 times already. Sigh. He's actually the reason I came up with this scheme... he kept getting my addresses harvested and ruining them forever), all I have to do is nuke that one specific alias, and tell that one person to use a different address to reach me at going forward. It's a lot easier to nuke an incoming address used by ONE person, and notify that ONE person if something changes, than it is to notify everyone (including banks, websites, etc) that they need to use a new address to reach you.
> I agree all these things are difficult. So what solution do you suggest?
I personally applied a multi-pronged approach, and my spam problem has been negligible for YEARS.
1) Everyone I give my email address to is given a different alias, in the form 'myname-alias.validation@mydomain.com'. 'validation' is basically the hash of the salted alias, with different salting recipes for different pattern-matches just to make life difficult for spammers. In theory I could generate the aliases by hand, but I wrote a program that runs on my HTC Touch to generate them for me as necessary. Anything sent to 'myname@mydomain.com' automatically bounces with message to go to my website and obtain an alias to use for contacting me. Ditto, for the first message addressed to a given 'alias' whose 'validation' is invalid (thereafter they're unceremoniously sent to /dev/null).
2) I wrote an app to generate time-limited aliases in the form 'myname-yyyymmdd.validation@mydomain.com', but for now it ended up being gross overkill since nobody has ever tried reverse-engineering it so I just automatically accept all incoming mail sent to 'myname-yyyymmdd@mydomain.net' (where 'yyyymmdd' is today's date, or at least a date within the past week or so). But if spammers ever caught on, the generator app goes back up, and the rules get tightened.
Aside from the fact that some people and businesses get seriously weirded out when they're told to email you at 'myusername-theircompanyname.longhexstring@mydomain.org', it works BRILLIANTLY. How brilliantly? On a typical day, procmail chucks, bounces, or otherwise blackholes about 18,000 to 25,000 spam emails addressed to an outright nonexistent address, roughly 8,000-12,000 spams addressed to an alias that fell into spammer hands, and maybe a half-dozen that are in the right form, but have an invalid hashcode (they get sent to another account on the server that I check occasionally). Every few days, I have to spend a couple of minutes adding another blackhole rule to .procmailrc, but I've never really had enough to make it worth my time to actually write an administration program to manage it for me.
Would this work for Joe Sixpack or Sally Soccermom? Of course not. They have a hard enough time keeping one email address at aol.com straight, let alone generating salty-checksum-validated adhoc aliases unique to everyone who emails them (and every website that extorts their email address, etc). But for the world's Slashdot Elite, it's a nice, elegant solution (as long as you've got your own domain name or ten and have either a dedicated server or a hosting account somewhere with shell and script access so you can run Procmail. My email has gone from "worthless due to the avalanche of spam" to "for all intents and purposes, spam-free", and has stayed that way for almost six years now.
>Strong IP protection and enforcement will help protect one of our most vital and productive assets.
Sort of. The original founding fathers had it right, when they decided IP law was a utilitarian compromise that protected new creations for a short time. Its perversion into a new property right of effectively perpetual duration is a modern development.
Here's a perfect example of everything that's wrong with American copyright law today: Snoopy is dead.
Literally. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, grandchildren, and probably beyond. He died with Charles Schultz. The estate of Charles Schultz owns the copyright to Peanuts, and has decided that there will never be anything new created involving Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus, Peppermint Patty, and the rest of the Peanuts gang. Thanks to American copyright law, that effectively means nobody ELSE can legally do it, either. Of course, the new owners of the "Peanuts" IP can recycle and try to wring a little more value out of it forever, but this is a perfect example of how the original intent of America's founding fathers has been hijacked and perverted by Disney & Company. As the years pass, the "Peanuts" universe will seem increasingly quaint and out-of-touch with contemporary life, and gradually fade into history. Charlie brown will never use Myspace. Snoopy will never compose an email message on his laptop. Peppermint Patty will never send a text message to Marcy. Sally will never own a cell phone. Schroeder will never own a synth, and a teenage Linus will never foil a terrorist plot with his magic blanket.
I like to use the "Peanuts" example, because driving home the realization that Snoopy and Charlie Brown are dead forever thanks to the state of American copyright law.
Copyright law needs to be returned to its original roots, encouraging and rewarding the production of new content without enabling it to be used to forcibly extinguish part of our common heritage and keep it dead "forever" in the holy name of copyright.
Actually, I know what a BIG part of the problem is: there's no good way to use a "dev" phone as your "real" phone due to current cell phone business policies. So the people who do the official development for new phones never really use them as intimately as they'd use a "real" phone, and never encounter the kinds of use cases and problems that real users do. Usability labs are a joke, because they get hijacked by the marketing/business folks who want to test their ideas for value-added services rather than watch the testers swear violently every time the phone does something annoying or stupid (especially if it contradicts a theory the marketing department is trying to prove).
A major crash (especially if what you're testing IS the phone UI itself) renders your phone unusable for 3-5 minutes while the phone reboots. Nobody wants to use an unreliable phone like that as their "real life" phone. So, developers get their "dev" phone, with a second "dev" account, and never use it for anything more than contrived "test" calls that bear little resemblance to the way phones get used by real people going about their daily lives. I know... I used to crash my SPH-i300, SPH-i500, and PPC-6700/HTC Apache all the time. It sucks, and really discourages you from pursuing phone-related dev projects as a recreational matter. Especially the first time your app insidiously crashes something on the phone, and all your incoming calls end up going to voicemail for 3 days (with no notification to you) before you finally notice something's wrong. I know Microsoft's devs are human, and almost certainly feel the exact same way about depending upon a phone they KNOW is unstable to take their "real" calls with.
So... what would go a LONG way towards encouraging developers of phone apps (and phone UIs) to "eat their own dogfood"? Allowing us to add a second phone (the "dev" phone) to our account as a "second line", with its own number but sharing the first phone's minute pool, but ALSO enable BOTH phones to poll the nearest tower for incoming calls to BOTH numbers. Put another way, suppose my "real" number is 305-555-2222. I associate my Sprint Touch with it. I then get the itch to try writing my own phone UI, but want to do it without destroying my social life... so I grab my old PPC-6700 from the closet, call Sprint, and tell them I want a "developer second line". They give me a new, second phone number (say, 786-555-3333) for the 6700, then tell me where I can download a firmware update so that BOTH phones will poll for incoming calls to BOTH 305-555-2222 AND 786-555-3333. Fast forward a few days. My nifty, new Touch UI seems to be working, but as luck would have it, I crashed my phone HARD about 10 seconds before getting a call from the Danish supermodel I met in South Beach the previous weekend (hey, we're fantasizing, right?). With the way things work now, I'd be SOL, her call would go straight to voicemail, and I wouldn't find out that she urgently needed to have sex until it was too late to take up the offer. HOWEVER, if the 6700 were polling BOTH its number AND the Touch's number while the Touch was rebooting and incommunicado (literally), I'd end up taking the call and being pleasantly sidetracked for a few hours ;-)
As I understand it, the capability of having one phone poll for two numbers has actually been an official capability of every cell phone since the first AMPS brick circa 1981, but no carrier has ever been willing to offer it as a feature due to fears that family members might try to use it as a ghetto-fabulous way of sharing a phone between two people.
> Apple is taking a page from Microsoft's book, while Google looks suspiciously like Linux
Um, in America at least, Linux-based and/or Java-using phones (like Motorola's and the Sidekick, respectively) are some of the most locked-down phones you can buy, requiring certs and signed apps for everything. The last time I checked, anyone with a copy of Visual Studio can build apps for WM6 and deploy them to their phone, their friends' phones, or post them online for anyone else to download and install.
When it comes to real-world PDA phones, HTC's phones running Windows Mobile have been more open than even PALM's phones were. Anyone remember the Samsung SPHi300, i330, and i500 -- all of which were eagerly bought up when introduced, then withered on the vine because Samsung wouldn't release useful SDKs for them -- not even for innocent things like the screen/soft graffiti API, let alone anything related to the phone UI? Compare that to, say, the HTC Apache/PPC-6700, which was probably the most sliced, diced, hacked, and extended phone in history... a phone that was dysfunctional and almost unusable as a phone "out of the box", but had most of its worst problems ultimately solved by independent programmers who wrote their own extensions and enhancements for it.
The battle isn't "Android vs Windows Mobile and iPhone", it's "Android AND Windows Mobile vs iPhone". Windows Mobile devices might be some of the most dysfunctional phones on earth for making voice calls(*), but they ARE an open platform as far as app and extension development is concerned.
(*)I'd like to kill the IDIOT(s) who decided that an incoming call on a Touch whose display is "off" should enable touchscreen input... and leave it enabled... so if you don't hear an incoming call and have the phone in your pocket, you can trigger all kinds of random events without even realizing it. Or "ignore" an incoming call by accidentally touching the wrong place on the screen while trying to fish the ringing phone out of your pocket. Or notify me that I have voicemail, but require me to dismiss the notification to see the notification that I missed a call, then keep dismissing notifications to actually SEE whose call it was that I missed.... (bangs head on wall, fantasizing occasionally about banging the phone instead).
> Exploit the Windows operating system cause the majority of users have it.
> Exploit Internet Explorer because the majority of users have it.
> Exploit Office products because the majority of users have it.
> Exploit Adobe's PDF format because the majority of users have it.
Fortunately, you seem to be right. Remember back around 1998, when ActiveState Perl installed itself as a CLIENT-SIDE BROWSER SCRIPTING LANGUAGE for Internet Explorer, sitting alongside VBscript and JScript... but no real limits on what it could do? Had more than a few thousand people installed it at the time, it could have gone down in history as the most outrageously dangerous exploit of all time. A hidden time bomb that would have enabled someone with even minimal knowledge of Perl to embed it in innocent-looking HTML pages and do... well... just about anything you COULD do with Perl, which was "basically everything". Adding insult to injury, it would have burned PRECISELY the group of people to whom these kinds of things "never" happen ;)
Interestingly, the capability of installing Perl as a browser scripting language was still present in modern releases of ActivePerl the last time I felt curious and looked it up... but you had to finish the job manually to enable it, and I think one of the requirements was that you hand-insert a registry key whose name and value was something like "IAmTrulyInsane=1" just to drive home the point that it was an exceptionally bad idea.
> Pretty much any system is superior to that in use in the United States.
Erm, no. First-past-the-post plurality is just about the worst, and most dreadfully abusive, voting system ever conceived on planet Earth. At least America's current system requires that the winning presidential candidate win an absolute majority (50% + 1) of *something*. If only a simple plurality is all that's required, someone running in a race with 3 viable candidates could theoretically win with as little as 33.3% + 1 support. Or, put another way, with 66.67% - 1 of the public voting for a different candidate. The Electoral College might occasionally produce a result where someone with an absolute majority of electoral votes nevertheless has a small number of popular votes fewer than a losing candidate, but that's mainly due to most states having a "winner takes all" policy for allocating electoral votes. Most of the time, all the policy does is amplify differences, so a slight lead turns into a landslide victory.
One thing that's frequently overlooked... the current system is almost guaranteed to result in a president who's significantly more moderate than his/her party, and two legislative bodies whose agendas rarely coincide. It's by design. We don't *want* a government that can effectively pass sweeping laws on a daily basis. You only have to look at wonderful gems like the PATRIOT act to see what happens when all three branches of the federal government happen to briefly agree about something that appears to momentarily cross party lines. The founding fathers knew quite well that the best way to protect Americans from the government was to rig the system to keep it safely bound, gagged, and hobbled as often and completely as possible.
> Please inform me if you think that I'm mistaken, and there is some important cause being served by each person in Ohio
> having a vote as powerful as ten thousand people in New York or Alabama. If there is some important goal that this accomplishes,
> I would love to hear it.
Among other things, it's one of the reasons the United States was able to get the original state governments to approve its establishment in the first place. Small states like Connecticut, Vermont, and Maryland would have NEVER voluntarily relinquished sovereignty to a federal government that rendered them more or less irrelevant and moot. It was the Great Compromise, balancing the interests of small/sparsely-populated states against big/populous states.
The fact that candidates have to win an absolute 50%+1 majority (rather than a mere first past the post plurality), and have to win a majority of STATES rather than individual voters, is part of the reason why our federal government can't screw people who don't live in New York or Los Angeles the way Britain's elected officials seem to do on a regular basis to just about everyone who doesn't live in London. In the US, presidential candidates need to win lots of votes spread across a geographically huge area, and there are VERY few states that any candidate can afford to completely write off or take for granted.
> Was it not Windows XP, before any service packs, which came with a file in the 'My Videos' which, when opened in a text editor,
> showed the cracked software version used to create it?
This was apparently surprising only to people who don't work for companies that actually make it easy for developers to BUY software without having to get approval up the management chain all the way up to god himself. Half the software my co-workers and I use ends up being pirated, because our company makes it damn near impossible to buy anything that's not on the list of officially-sanctioned software (almost all of which is stuff that the "business" users need). I can blow $150 on lunch when I'm traveling without even needing to get my immediate manager to sign off an approve the reimbursement as long as I don't spend more than $250/day on meals/incidentals/entertainment, but getting reimbursed $29.95 for some shareware app I can't live without requires approval by the vice-president (my boss' boss' boss), who requires our department to submit purchase requests in batches no more than once per quarter. Of course, if we're 5 weeks into the current quarter, and I need the damn app TODAY (or at least by next week)... well... time to visit astalavista.box.sk (under vmware, of course) to get the crack and run the app (also under vmware, with write access to nothing besides a usb thumbdrive, of course).
Personally, I think 99% of free software's appeal to people who work for big, oblivious corporations is the fact that it's not just free as in beer or liberty... it's also free of bureaucratic grief.
Getting back to the Microsoft example... name any app produced by Microsoft that does something remotely close to what SoundForge does. Um, none? OK, now picture the hapless employee, who works for the largest software company on earth, dealing with THEIR bureaucracy trying to get permission to buy a program sold by one of their "competitors", even though it's a niche they don't actually compete in. Especially with a looming deadline.
Or, alternatively... picture Microsoft hiring an outside consultant/musician to do the track. To save money, they hired a freelancer who's just getting started and doesn't quite do it as his/her "real" job yet. The individual hasn't gotten to the point yet where he/she's making enough money off of it for buying it to be a no-brainer (It IS usually one of the first 3 apps anyone who becomes halfway serious about music production ends up buying when "the time comes"), and the employees at the Microsoft end responsible for getting it on the disc were themselves under immense deadline pressure. The file played, normal users aren't going to view it in a hex editor looking for anything "funny", so on the disc it went.
> Or how modems used to have their own signal processors? But now most use the CPU.
Welllll... I'd say the move to HSP modems took place more because the ascent of DSL and cable internet relegated modems to the status of, "nice to have if I happen to need it once in a blue moon to send a fax or dialup in the middle of nowhere at some point over the next 2-4 years." Remember all those articles 3-5 years ago about how host signal processing absolutely DESTROYS CPU performance because it demands constant attention from the CPU, and the software overhead of having to keep stopping to service the modem caused the computer to run at least 20-30% slower? Well, not much has changed, except now with a multi-core CPU it can kill the performance of just ONE core instead of bringing the whole computer to its knees. But even with multicore CPUs, I can guarantee that if modems were still the primary way people got online, there would definitely be a thriving market for "performance" modems that offloaded at LEAST the signal-processing functions to a real DSP (like the Lucent "semi-Winmodems", that actually gave users the best of both worlds... offloading the stuff that really dragged the CPU down to its own DSP, but doing things like compression and error-correction that could be handled in discrete batches faster than even dedicated hardware could achieve).
There's another thing to remember about discrete chips... in the early 3dfx days, the mainstream CPU makers (Intel, AMD, and Cyrix) had ZERO interest in giving even the slightest attention to 3D graphics. Unless you're IBM (who wasn't interested in 3D, either), building CPUs is probably way beyond your company's capabilities. HOWEVER, designing a 3D graphics chip with the complexity of the first ones used by 3dfx IS within the capabilities of a well-funded design company with the connections to get it manufactured. It doesn't even need a fab with the capabilities of one owned by Intel, AMD, etc. So discrete 3d cards were an elegant way to sidestep the deadweight lack of interest on the CPU side by shifting it to a chip that smaller companies could design and build. Now that "the big guys" have turned their attention to it, the smaller players don't have a prayer (ergo, the merger mania among CPU/mobo chipset makers and graphics chip makers).
The same observation can be made regarding cache and memory controllers. In the First Pentium Era, volume manufacturers like Compaq (and their comrades at arms, Intel & AMD) regarded cache as a luxury the unwashed masses could live without, even if it only saved $5 and cut the effective performance in half. Hey, consumers only look at that "Mhz" number, anyway... Fortunately, performance-oriented mobo makers were able to take matters into their own hands, and once again do an end run around the CPU vendors' sloth and put cache directly on the mobo. Once CPU makers decided cache mattered, and put lots of it on-die, the marginal benefit of putting more, relatively expensive tertiary cache on the motherboard diminished. As for memory controllers, they got moved into the CPU because it was the only way to reliably achieve increased memory bandwidth (designing a 32-bit parallel interface for ANYTHING that has to run at 400+ MHz and communicate across traces on a circuit board is a hardcore engineering challenge; Serial is cheaper to implement and can be faster overall than a simpler parallel solution, but there's a point where you can't shove the bits any faster, and the only way to increase bandwidth is to go parallel. It's not a coincidence that PCI Express video cards communicate 16 bits at a time, but even the fastest fibre-channel disk or network interface is happy with a single bit.
The sad irony, though, is that 5 years from now, games will probably have graphics about as good as you can get from the best and most expensive SLI solutions money can buy today... but overall performance will probably be less consistent (ie, if Windows decides that it might be a good time to reorganize its temp directory while y
> This is (one of) the real culprits of low CD sales
Another is the fact that quite a few current pop CDs don't sound a whole lot better than the badly-compressed alternatives you can download for free. Part of the problem is the "loudness war" -- studios want THEIR songs to sound louder than others when played on the radio. Radio stations almost never adjust the source level for different songs. So... producers are now pressured by record companies to mix music with the average volume as high as possible. What usually results is something we all thought was banished from the earth 20 years ago -- clipping. Take a Madonna CD from the late 80s/early 90s, rip a track from it, and view the waveform in SoundForge. Then do the same with any recent CD by someone like Britney Spears, Good Charlotte, Justin Timberlake, or even Madonna. It's not subtle... you'll see the difference INSTANTLY.
It's sad... the music industry has basically forgotten (or abandoned) just about EVERYTHING it learned about producing high-quality recordings during the 80s and 90s.
And don't even get me started on the MECHANICAL quality of modern CDs. I have badly-abused CDs from high school that rip and play better than almost-new CDs subjected to a week in my car. Modern pressed CDs have almost NO scratch-resistance, and are almost as easy to destroy as records were.
> I'd be more interested in killing Daylight Savings Time than dealing with Leap Year.
OK, but ONLY if our time zones get permanently moved +1 hour. In Florida, at least, that would be awesome... even in the northernmost part of the state, the sun would still rise by 8am on the darkest day of winter, and we'd get to have an hour or two of daylight after work in the winter instead of driving home in darkness (and hellish gridlock).
Don't underestimate the impact of daylight on traffic. Morning traffic tends to be spread out over several hours. So does evening traffic... except during the winter, when people who normally might have straggled home at 6 or 7 (figuring traffic is gridlocked anyway) all start to rush out the door at 5pm in a desperate effort to get home before dark, and a 3-5 hour process of congested traffic collapses into 2-4 hours of complete gridlock for everyone. When traffic is normally bumper-to-bumper and a half step shy of complete gridlock, it doesn't really take THAT many people to decide to try and get home early to tip the balance and bring everything to a grinding halt. If you don't believe me, come to Miami and observe morning and evening rush hour on the last Friday of Daylight Savings Time, then compare it to morning and evening rush hour the first Monday after it ends. Then Do the same thing a few months later... on the last Friday before DST begins, observe that traffic really hasn't gotten any better all winter despite the sun now setting around 6:30pm, and morning traffic is as bad as ever... then compare it to the traffic on Monday. Morning traffic? Unchanged. Evening traffic? Literally, a night-and-day difference. A 5pm drive that took 45 minutes during the winter suddenly takes 30 minutes.
> Fees, yes. 100x what you normally pay? Not so much.
Which brings up another point... just TRYING to get a straight answer out of most carriers about the exact charges (taxes, "fees", surcharges, and all) that will be incurred is damn near impossible. Even if they give you an answer, it will always be with a disclaimer that effectively lets them off the hook if they're wrong, and gives them free reign to add on as many other fees as they like. About 3 years ago, it took me about 40 minutes with 3 Sprint reps to get a straight answer about how much it would cost to use my phone as a modem while roaming in Canada. And best of all, the rep was wrong, and the ultimate charges were about 40% more than I was quoted.
Telling someone, "additional charges may be imposed" is bullshit. Throwing up a Windows Mobile dialog box the first time you try to initiate a data session in a foreign country that says something like, "If you continue, each kilobyte of data you send or receive will cost US$3.74 including all applicable charges, fees, taxes, and tarrifs... do you REALLY want to continue? would be another matter.
IMHO, this IS an intellectually-consistent libertarian position. Libertarianism assumes free-market transactions made between informed buyers and sellers. If the seller has a government-protected monopoly or oligopoly, and can't/won't even give the buyer a straight answer about how much something is going to cost, the seller has no right to complain if a court sides with the customer when they try to turn around and impose charges amounting to roughly 200 times a normal monthly bill.
Actually, the latency between ISS and anywhere on earth should theoretically be no worse than roughly double the time it would take to make a trip halfway around the earth via fiber. Remember, geostationary satellites have latency issues because they're about 28,000 miles away from Earth. The ISS is only about 200 miles up... approximately the distance between Miami and Orlando, or Paris and London. The only reason I even factored in as much time as I did is the fact that ISS moves relative to the earth, so in order to avoid breaking TCP/IP and give it an apparent fixed IP route to the rest of the internet, all traffic to and from it would have to pass through a single network point somewhere (probably Houston), then be forwarded via fiber to an uplink somewhere within the ISS's line of sight at that moment. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the ISS's internet connectivity actually is implemented using more or less off the shelf cellular data technology (using NASA's frequencies, with higher-power transceivers spaced further apart, but the same general idea as CDMA or GPRS data). Then again, to cut costs, they might very well have implemented internet connectivity on the ISS by just adding two or three tracking dishes to it, and using the same satellites as VSAT internet, which WOULD subject them to the same drawbacks as terrestrial customers. God, can you imagine the headlines if ISS ended up getting FAP'ed?!? :D
> Are you saying that there are secret regulations not available to the public that they must still follow?
> How would a building firm know what is an acceptable height for a toilet seat unless that is specified in some regulation?
> Sounds like you are bullshitting.
Actually, building and zoning codes are the worst offenders of this. I'm pretty sure that the National Electric Code, the National Fire/Life Safety Code, or both, are copyrighted, aggressively guarded by their respective owners, and incorporated by reference into just about every building code in America. I *know* at least 2 of the "big 3" model building codes (IRC, BOCA, CABO) are officially copyrighted, though Florida's building code (which is ~98% verbatim IRC) *does* seem to be available online for free perusal (though it seems to be "free as in beer", in the sense that you can download and read it for free, but can't redistribute it yourself).
Most transit info is officially copyrighted, too. Put up a web site with BART or NYC subway maps, timetables, or aggregate their realtime status without their blessing, and they'll have you in court before you can blink. I believe that in New York's case, they actually go so far as to use TRADEMARK law to prohibit the third-party publication of ANYTHING claiming to be a New York City subway map, even if it's a completely novel design with no discernible resemblance to their "official" maps. It would probably go down in flames if it were ever challenged in court, but I believe it's been on the books for at least a few decades.
In any case, I agree 100%... the entire idea of copyrighting a LAW is absolute bullshit, unless ignorance of a copyrighted law IS an ironclad defense in court.
You know, even 25 or 50 years ago, there probably WOULDN'T seem to be any obvious explanation for "that feeling" that didn't seem metaphysical or supernatural... but then again, to Marconi or Tesla, CDMA and MPEG-4 would have seemed like black magic (though PCM, with bits recorded as horizontal rows on high-resolution black & white film with one sensor tube per bit fed into a simple resistor DAC, would have probably made perfect sense and been do-able with 1920s technology if cost were no object and someone managed to figure out how to get the bits sampled in the first place). When you think of it terms of visible high-frequency motion patterns, protocol handshaking, Kalman filters, and digital signal processing in a massively multitasking environment (the human brain), the theory doesn't really seem particularly strange or unbelievable. I've actually searched online to see whether anyone has ever explored it in a research/academic setting, but so far it seems to be just a personal pet theory of mine ;-)
An even bigger problem will be making robots that can convincingly pass for human while physically in their presence and trying to feign one-on-one communication. Have you ever noticed that somehow, something just kind of clicks, and you *know* you've made eye contact with someone... and you know that THEY know, too? They might be far away, in a moving vehicle, looking at something else (or just generally looking around), but every now and then "it" happens... you make random, fleeting eye contact with a stranger.
My theory is that it's due to the fact that your eyes are always moving (if your eye were perfectly still, you wouldn't be able to see, because rods and cones derive most of their information from CHANGES rather than instantaneous sampled state). I'm guessing that the pattern of movement appears random, but somehow the part of your brain responsible for background signal processing is able to recognize that movement pattern in the eyes others, and tries to synchronize itself to it. Neither person is intentionally trying to do it, or is even aware of it, but their brains -- through visible eye movement -- are actively negotiating the equivalent of a handshake... and when it happens, a metaphorical "datagram" gets sent to your conscious brain letting you know that you've "locked on" to another person. When you're intentionally talking to someone, it lets you know that you have their attention. When it unexpectedly happens at some random moment when you're just gazing out at the horizon, it can be awkward and uncomfortable.
It's why if you're trying to hide, the worst thing you can possibly do is try to watch what's going on nearby. You might be in the dark shadows, or behind a large object with little more than a hole big enough to see through... but somehow, if someone happens to gaze in the right direction, and their eye detects the movement pattern of an eye somewhere nearby, they're going to immediately feel like something is amiss, even if they don't immediately realize what just happened. If their gaze crosses the gaze of another person who's looking at something entirely different, it might just be a feeling of unease. It's why looking for a lost person or animal is easier than looking for a lost object, at least if you're close enough to potentially make eye contact, Looking for a misplaced object, your brain has to process everything it sees, and constantly do pattern-matching. With people and animals, it's kind of like they're emitting a short-range beacon that allows you to randomly gaze around, but get "that feeling" whenever eye contact occurs, signaling that some area merits further visual inspection.
Anyway, getting back to the Uncanny Valley, it'll be interesting to see what impact the ability to feign eye contact by robots will have. A robot with no eye contact seems creepy in a "dead" kind of way. Would a robot that "almost" managed to maintain eye contact be MORE comforting, or creepier still? Would the "comfort" factor depend upon whether the person interacting with the robot KNEW they were interacting with a robot? Or would making "almost correct" subconscious eye contact with a robot send chills down the person's spine, setting off subconscious alarms to let them know, "DANGER! Something here isn't quite right!", regardless of whether the person KNEW it was a robot?
> There are too many flaws in IPv4 to not want to break compatibility. Most server software supports IPv6 fine,
> it is just the lazy (or uninformed) people who refuse to roll it out until IPv4 is exhausted.
Uh, right. And communism failed because the people forced to live under it didn't work hard enough to make it succeed, or subverted the plans of social engineers to pursue their own petty best interests.
The problem with IPv6 is that it solves problems that already have cheap work-arounds, and introduces several billion new problems to complicate things and take their place. Like Marx, IPv6's designers grossly underestimated the importance of the human element wherever observed human behavior contradicted their neat, orderly theory. And ultimately, IPv6 will fail (or be subverted by its users) just like communism was.
Read most complaints about IPv6, and you quickly see a common theme. People gripe a bit about lots of its details, but the one thing everyone bitches loudly about is the simple fact that no non-autistic human can meaningfully remember a real IPv6 address. Not some early-adopter experimental IPv6 address that can be neatly compacted down to 6 or 8 bytes, but a real, honest-to-god "AT&T has a subnet, that they've subnetted into 65k subnets, further subnetted into 16.8 million subnets" IPv6 address that really WILL take 40-80 characters to represent.
Variable-length addresses might be "kludgy", but imagine IPv6 addresses looked like this:
0x0000.a.b.c.d = legacy IPv4 address. Yes, 0x0000.192.168.1.100 still works as a private address, as does 0x0000.10.0.0.1.
0x0001.a.b.c.d through 0xffef.a.b.c.d = IPv7 address. We've just expanded the address space by a factor of roughly 64k. The Powers that Be can slice and dice this new address space however they like... by geography, mode (multicast, etc), political boundary, business entity, or however they think makes sense.
0xfffn.{5 to 20 (5+n, 0n16) additional bytes follow, all of which should be ignored by the router unless it explicitly knows what to do with them}. The "Always Provide A Graceful Upgrade Path" value. If, 50 years from now, it's decided that all new IP addresses should have 128 address bits, fine... legacy addresses still work, and new addresses that begin with "0xffff." can move forward to the next level.
For an example of practical reality triumphing over academic ideology, just look at Intel-compatible CPUs. The 80386 could do linear memory and had orthogonal registers... but it could also run like a fast 8086, so there was no real reason to NOT use it for new computers instead of the 8086, 8088, or 80286. As a practical matter, that's exactly how it WAS used until Commodore went down in flames, Amiga software companies realized that you could write off every PC less than a 486-66 with 4 megs of RAM and STILL have a potential market several times as big as the Amiga market at its peak, and their developers simply REFUSED to deal with segmentation and wacky registers when every IA-32 CPU since the 386SX had orthogonal registers and linear memory addressing available. And thus DOS4GW, Commanche: Maximum Overkill, and Doom arrived. In other words, the new "386" features were THERE for anyone who wanted to use them, but for the most part they were harmless if you didn't. Then, look at what happened to the Itanium, when Intel decided to wipe the slate clean.
IMHO, IPv6 is the new Itanium. It doesn't matter how hard its backers try to push it... stakeholders WILL fight back, just like they are now, and will either doom it to an academic footnote in history, or organically mangle & munge it into something more human-friendly. "The Powers that Be" can either go back to the drawing board and come up with a clean extension to IPv4, or they can wait until Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, and/or a few rogue Linux kernel devs take matters into their own hands and create de-facto workarounds that cause interoperability nightmares for the next generation of devs, admins, and users.
> Do you think decently-scaled SD looks good more commonly on DLP sets than on LCD sets because of some inherent superiority
> of DLP vs. LCD re: SD? Or because built-in scalers on DLP sets might be better on average than those found in LCD sets?
I think it's SCSI vs SATA, part deux. There's no inherent reason why DLP sets MUST have better scalers than LCD, anymore than any inherent reason why a SATA drive couldn't spin 15kRPM and have a 256mb cache... but for the most part, as of ~2008, low-end DLP sets have largely vanished from the market. The cheapest DLP sets start where the most expensive LCD sets leave off, both size-wise AND price-wise. To the best of my knowledge, there's no such thing as a sub-$1k TV whose box and/or feature list includes the "F" word ("Faroudja"). Faroudja's best technology was doing things 15 years ago that today's TVs gave up doing once their price point dropped below a kilobuck.
Sadly, the TV industry seems to have never heard of Moore's Law. 15 years ago, my dad took me to a high-end stereophile show in Miami where Faroudja happened to be showing off their newest toy... a ~$18k box that turned OTA NTSC mush into spectacular video worthy of a $50k video projector with some insane resolution developed for flight simulators by the Israeli air force. It definitely made an impression on me, and ever since then I've been disappointed by real-world video quality of consumer-grade TVs. I want to see modern video hardware pull off the same stunt with non-film-source 1080i60, and transform it into beautiful faux 1080p60. It's one reason why I hate HDCP with a passion... I have a gut feeling that a top of the line quad-core PC could probably pull off the same stunt through sheer brute force... but thanks to HDCP (and the nearly complete nonexistence of anything capable of digitizing even 480p60 in realtime, let alone 1080i60), we're stuck with ugly interlaced video for another decade or two :-(
> I have a voluminous canvas bag which I take with me when I go shopping. How hard is that?
For stores (in America, at least), that's bad. Especially in poor neighborhoods. Stores don't WANT customers to go in with large bags, because that means they have to either check inside them to make sure you aren't stealing anything, or watch their "shrinkage" go through the stratosphere.
There's another problem -- charging for bags COMPLETELY screws up the checkout workflow. Normally, one of two checkout workflows exist:
a) Cashier scans items as quickly as possible, and hurls them in the general direction of the bagger. Bagging continues while the transaction is finalized and the purchase is paid for (credit card authorization, cash exchanged, etc).
b) Cashier scans items as quickly as possible, and hurls them towards one of two or three possible destinations. The customer pays, then bags the groceries himself while the next customer or two gets processed in a similar fashion.
In both cases, the transaction is finalized, and payment is made, long before bagging is finished (or begins at all). Charging for bags would require waiting until the groceries have been fully bagged (so they can be counted) before beginning the credit card authorization... adding 20-40 seconds to each transaction, and requiring more employees working at once to offset the delay. Two employees (a cashier and a bagger) working for one hour are several orders of magnitude more expensive than the cost (to the store) of the maximum number of plastic bags that might conceivably be handed out for free during each hour that they'd have to work. If you want to be environmental about it, don't forget to add in the fact that both extra employees are statistically guaranteed to drive to work (remember, in America, even poor people have cars and drive everywhere).
Well, ok... they COULD run the bag charge through as a second credit card transaction, but when you factor in the transaction fee charged by Mastercard & Visa, most stores would have to charge even MORE for the bags or lose money overall. Don't even THINK about suggesting that stores require that bags be paid for with cash. Customers at any store that tried would angrily demand an immediate refund, or abandon their groceries in the line (if they hadn't paid yet), requiring yet more employees to restock them and keep frozen/refrigerated foods from spoiling.
Charging for the estimated number of bags? Good luck getting that past the legal department. All it takes is one angry customer who's pissed off about being "nickeled and dimed" to discover he was charged for 3 bags, but only received 2, to file a fraud complaint with the state attorney's office. A store that wanted to charge for the estimated number of bags would be required by their legal department to count the number of bags actually used, and give empty bags to the customer if fewer than the number charged for were used. And of course, in THAT scenario, you'd have pissed off customers who were livid about being charged an extra nickel for a bag they didn't even need, who'd be even angrier about the fact that most of that 5c charge was pure profit for the store.
Publix (Florida's nearly-ubiquitous grocery store) has a far more elegant solution. Baggers have a nickel dispenser. If you bring your own bag(s), they give you a nickel for every one used, and have a jar for charity near the door on the way out for customers who don't want to be bothered with loose change. It avoids disrupting the workflow, and avoids pissing off customers who've become increasingly agitated about being "nickeled and dimed" by companies they do business with.
>Why did the FCC only grant two satellite licences? It's not like there's limited bandwith.
Actually, there IS. Go google "SDARS".
The reason you don't need a dish to receive Sirius or XM is because they broadcast a signal that's strong enough to receive with just an antenna, and just as importantly, because they have the exclusive use of their respective band of SDARS frequencies throughout North America (and southern Canada, northern Mexico, and the Caribbean, for that matter).
Sirius divides its band into 3 blocks, and has 3 satellites in modified Molniya orbits (I think there's a fourth satellite up there as a spare). At any given moment, one of the satellites is on the other side of the earth, and two are visible from North America. Most of the time, one satellite will appear to be almost directly "straight up", and the other will be somewhere near the horizon. This works wonderfully for Sirius, because the "up" satellite is usually high enough to keep things like mountains and valleys from interfering with reception, while the "horizon" satellite increases the likelihood of getting good reception when you're parked under the roof of a gas station. The terrestrial repeaters fill in most of the remaining gaps. They handle the "overpass problem" by time-delaying and buffering the audio program by several seconds, and sending chunks of it out-of-order via the two visible satellites and terrestrial repeaters. Thus, if your signal gets interrupted for a half second because you drove under an overpass, it doesn't really matter, because the data is missed from satellite #1 was already sent by satellite #2 and/or the nearest repeater (or will be, a second or two later), so that when the time comes to actually PLAY it in another few seconds, at least one copy of the necessary data will be in the buffer.
The benefit of Sirius' satellite strategy is that you can get great reception in a moving vehicle just about everywhere in America. The downside is that if you're listening from a fixed location (like a home), and you're trying to get by with a single antenna sitting on a windowsill (vs an outdoor antenna with clear view of both the sky AND horizon), you're going to have to move the antenna to a different windowsill every few hours, because their satellites don't stay in one place.
By comparison, XM's satellites aren't quite as interesting. They're just a pair of conventional geostationary satellites sitting ~22k miles above the equator, with lots and lots of terrestrial repeaters to compensate for things like mountains and tall buildings that might block the view to the south.
With DBS services like DirecTV or Dish Network, the dish's purpose isn't to capture enough of a weak signal from a distant satellite to decode... it's to capture a lot MORE of the signal coming from one specific satellite, so that they can attenuate the signal (causing weaker signals from adjacent satellites to drop out) and re-amplify what's left. If there were only a single DBS provider, broadcasting a single beam from a single satellite over a single block of frequencies, you wouldn't need a dish to receive THAT, either.
>*Station playlists that would become predictable within a week.
And you've just identified the #1 reason why so many Sirius AND XM subscribers are opposed to the merger -- we both like our respective satellite services EXACTLY the way they are. Sirius channels are hit-based and programmed like ideal big-city FM stations, sans commercials. XM channels have deeper and more esoteric playlists. To a Sirius fan, XM sounds like someone bought a pile of B-stock CDs from the bargain bin, dumped them into a changer, and hit the "randomize" button. To an XM fan, Sirius sounds like someone locked a DJ into a booth with one single "${catchy_name} Hits 2k8" CD and forced them to play it overAndOverAndOver.
One thing that's often overlooked in the "Sirius/XM have competition from terrestrial radio/ipods/etc" argument -- the overwhelming majority of people who actually BELIEVE it *aren't* Sirius or XM subscribers. Sirius and XM subscribers subscribe precisely BECAUSE they think terrestrial radio sucks, ipods aren't realtime, and anyone who thinks you can stream internet media wirelessly through most of the western US (and a fairly big chunk of the EASTERN US, for that matter) is seriously deluded about the availability of high-speed cellular broadband in non-urban areas. For the proud elite who subscribe to Sirius or XM, there IS no acceptable alternative to satellite radio.
The worst thing about the merger isn't the prospect of higher rates. Compared to what I spend every month on wireless voice & data service, satellite TV, broadband, mortgage, HOA fees, and everything else, it's below the threshold of consciousness. Rather, it's the prospect of having "duplicate" (to someone in upper management) channels from Sirius and XM "merged", so Sirius can use the freed-up bandwidth to broadcast "Backseat Barney" videos. NOBODY, with the possible exception of diehard sports fans who listen to nothing BUT sports, would EVER mistake Sirius music content for XM music content, and vice-versa. They're as different as night and day. Partly, because when they were competing, they HAD to discover their respective niches and aggressively appeal to them.
Today is a very sad day for subscribers of BOTH services.
I'd kill for a buckling-spring keyboard with Trackpoint-type pointer stick, located below the spacebar and a pair of buttons (like the rare-but-existing IBM keyboards w/buckling-spring keyboards and Trackpoint in the traditional G-H-B position). THAT is the "natural" position for a pointer stick -- the point where your THUMB manipulates it instead of your hyperextended index finger. I've come across 2 keyboards in my life (one attached to an ancient laptop, one attached to a specialized piece of EE test equipment that cost a few thousand dollars) with Trackpoint-type pointer stick in "thumb position", and using it was pure nirvana. Why? Your index finger isn't very strong, and fatigues easily when hyperextended. Your thum, on the other hand, is strong and can be controlled with precision, but has a limited range of motion. Ergo, gross movements (like a touchpad) fail miserably, because you don't have nearly as much horizontal range as vertical-diagonal range... but applying isometric pressure against a stick works beautifully.
So, why doesn't anybody (besides the most evil company on Earth, Sony... which occasionally dabbles with it on a Japanese-market subnotebook) ever put the stick there? Apparently, because Fujitsu has a patent on their worthless crap alternate pointer stick that ALSO claims its location (you guessed it... below the keyboard), and nobody wants to risk a lawsuit for infringement by putting a Trackpoint-type stick down there (Sony presumably has either a blanket licensing agreement with Fujitsu, or enough IP of their own to squash Fujitsu like a grape if they tried suing SOny for infringement).
Disclaimer: I type 100+ wpm on a bad day with a good (buckling-spring) keyboard, and insist on trying to use touchpads without moving my hands away from the rest of the keyboard a-la-trackball... a strategy that fails miserably on just about everything besides maybe Macbooks, because PC notebook touchpads were all apparently designed for people who navigate using their index fingers. Macbook touchpads DO seem to "get it right", but unfortunately they only come attached to some of the most god-awful chiclet keyboards seen since the days of the TRS-80 Color Computer...
Oops. Typo. "RPG" => "RTG"
One thing that probably needs to be mentioned, since it's not necessarily obvious to anyone who hasn't taken physics: spacecraft in their current incarnation don't use their engines to keep them moving... they use their engines to rapidly propel themselves to a speed that's hopefully sufficient to reach their final destination (or next gravity waypoint) before the Earth's own gravity manages to pull them back. The shuttle & ISS fire their engines to alter their orbits and nudge themselves around, but once the shuttle is in orbit, it ALREADY has to be going in the right direction at the right speed to eventually rendezvous with the ISS. If there were another space station at a higher altitude, the current shuttle couldn't visit the ISS, then go visit space station #2... at least, not without refueling somehow, because it doesn't carry enough fuel to radically alter its orbit to a higher destination.
That's the main reason why using the shuttle to service Hubble is so dangerous... it has to use most of its fuel to get there, and literally returns to Earth "on the fumes" (so to speak). Think of it as driving up a road along the side of a mountain in a car with mostly-empty gas tank, with *just* enough fuel to make it to the top... then using that final bit of gas to turn around, and coast all the way back down the mountain. If the shuttle encounters a serious problem en route to Hubble, it doesn't have enough fuel to reach the ISS, and no spacecraft already docked at the ISS has enough fuel left to reach the imperiled shuttle, so there's no metaphorical "tow truck" to rescue them.
It's also the reason why spacecraft have to rapidly accelerate to multiple Gees, instead of taking off like a jet and just circling the Earth over and over, getting a little higher each time. When the solid rocket boosters are ignited, they burn in a predictable way, but there's no way to gracefully throttle them "up". They do their thing, run out of fuel, and quit -- hopefully (and by design) after the shuttle is already going fast enough for the liquid fueled engines to get it the rest of the way to its destination.
That's one reason why nuclear engines were so eagerly explored during the 60s... they were the only potentially-viable way to achieve the kind of slow, steady, long-term acceleration that would have permitted a "space plane" to take off and slowly travel to orbit without subjecting its passengers to the usual Gee forces experienced by astronauts. Unfortunately, when you've got a populated planet below with lots of high-value real estate and residents below, nuclear-fired jet/rocket engines just aren't going to happen. People get neurotic about the use of RPGs, which are basically sealed nuclear batteries that generate heat from their own decay and generate electricity using technology that works not unlike solar cells (but with heat, rather than light)... and they probably WOULD make it safely back to Earth if something went wrong on the way up. As such, a real, honest-to-got nuclear REACTOR running at full-bore in a moving vehicle flying anywhere near anything resembling a populated area just isn't going to happen ;-)