>the HD-DVD format because they really had nothing to say that could trump Blu-Ray.
Except for the ability to play red-laser discs authored with HD-DVD content. If you have a 480p60 camcorder, this is a VERY big deal, because it means you can copy the video to your desktop PC, edit it, author your own HD-DVD disc, and as long as the total storage requirements are 8.7 gigs or less, you can burn it to a recordable DVD, take it to the house of a friend with HD-DVD player, and watch it there.
With HD-DVD, the larger-capacity new disc format is an OPTION, but the player itself is just a multiformat optical drive with bucket of codecs it can draw upon. In fact, I'm willing to bet a HUGE amount of money that by next Christmas, the cheap progressive-scan DVD players currently selling at Wal-Mart & Circuit City for $50-100 will be replaced by equally cheap "DVD+HD" players that still have a red laser optical drive (2.4X or faster, though), but can ALSO play red-laser discs authored as HD-DVDs. It's just a bucket of codecs and capabilities, remember?
Wait, keep reading. There's one particular segment of the media industry that's DROOLING for a low-cost "Higher-Def" optical format that can play on cheap drives and use cheap DVD5 and DVD9 media, but play 480p60, 720p24, and (maybe) overcompressed 720p60 (with low-bitrate audio). That's right, the porn industry. It could care less about 1080p60, because it'll be at least a decade before they'll be in any position to use it. HOWEVER, they have tons of 480p60 content right now (they switched to 480p60 a year or two ago for production, because it makes it easier to put content online as streaming video and increases the odds that they'll be able to shovel their old porn onto terrabyte compilation discs and earn a few more bucks off of it 5-10 years from now). If they make a point of distributing HD porn on DVD9 media (that will play just fine on HD-DVD players, remember), it'll take about 6 months for Joe Sixpack to figure out that he can buy one of those $49 Wal-Mart "DVD+HD" players and start enjoying HD porn *right now* instead of blowing $300 or more on a "proper" HD-DVD player.
What? It's not true HD? Joe doesn't care. Joe's TV can't come anywhere close to 1080p60 anyway, and he couldn't tell the difference between 224 kBit lossy audio and 192-bit 8-channel 32-bit PCM if you put a gun to his head. He'll be delighted to get HD that's roughly about as HD as his own TV, for less than the cost of a single high-end new porn disc....
... and, of course, is also a source of endless frustration for individuals who bought a new laptop with XP Pro, but were given ONLY a bastardized crapware-infested image on a restore disk... so they CAN'T wipe the drive and do a nice, clean installation of XP Pro without blowing another $140+ for a second copy of an OS they already paid for -- or hunt down an activation-free corporate copy and disable auto-update on the theory that Microsoft's endless nagging about their copy being non-Genuine(TM) is more annoying than buffer overflows and malware. Not good, but a Faustian bargain Microsoft has forced a few million laptop owners into because they neither require OEMs to provide clean, virgin Windows installation CDs nor provide any non-extortionate means of escape.
And of course, there's the whole insanity of Microsoft requiring the purchase of separate Windows licenses for use in a VM. Now, in Microsoft's defense, I suspect they'd be perfectly cool with making the license to Vista Ultimate recursive (ie, allowing you to run Vista Ultimate on as many hosted virtual machines as you want, as long as the real PC itself is running Vista Ultimate), but can't think of any good way to actually make WGA recognize when it's running on a virtual machine hosted on a computer running a Genuine Copy that couldn't be spoofed to enable the same technique to be used on standalone PCs.
Exactly! If DHS *really* wants to rally popular support, they should get Congress to do two things first:
* Establish an objective standard that, when VOLUNTARILY satisfied by a state (or for that matter, Canadian province) with regard to its IDs, would permit its bearer to use it in lieu of a passport for entry to the US. Requiring passports for travel between the US and Canada is complete idiocy.
* Repeal any and all federal laws mandating a minimum drinking age. For the love of f***ing god, is Congress *so* thoroughly out of touch with reality that its members haven't figured out yet that the federally-mandated drinking age is 99.9% of the reason why there's a big, immensely profitable mass market for quality fake ID cards in the first place?!? Or do they just want 18-20 year olds to smoke pot instead, since it'll be cheaper, easier to get, and (in California and a few other states, at least) a lesser offense than underage possession of alcohol combined with the purchase/possession of a fraudulent ID card acquired for that exact purpose?
One way or another, HD-DVD will win... even if the physical media format itself fails (in the near-term, at least).
Most people don't realize that you can author a HD-DVD.iso file, and if it's small enough... burn it onto a normal single- or dual-layer red-laser DVD. And play it on any HD-DVD player. So... if you have a 30-minute video, you can distribute it on normal red-laser discs and save the higher media cost.
Of course, "normal" DVD players can't play them... they can read the bits off the disc, but don't know how to interpret the data stream. At least, not until next summer, when the first crop of high-end Chinese FrankenPlayers with MP@HL, MPEG-4, and VC-1 codecs start to show up.
And yes, they WILL. Adding the codecs won't add much to the price, but it will give manufacturers in an increasingly-commoditized market one more feature to differentiate themselves with. Commercial support from Hollywood will be nonexistent, of course... but people burning their own discs (and porn... can't forget porn...) WILL start to make use of it. Did I mention "Porn" yet? See, most porn is about 70-90 minutes in length... encode it on the disc at 720p60 with 192kbit compressed audio, encode the "extras" at 480p60 with a lower bitrate, and it'll fit easily. And THAT is what's going to bring about the "real" immediate successor to DVD -- DVD-HD (HD-DVD encoded on redlaser discs).
Look at it this way: widespread guerrilla adoption of a hypothetical "DVD-HD" format (especially by the Porn industry) would set back HD-DVD adoption by a couple of years by removing a big chunk of the imperative -- especially for people who want something a little better than regular DVD, but are still years away from owning a 1080p60 set... but it will likely deal an outright deathblow to Blu-Ray, for being incompatible with both. Even if HD-DVD falls from the limelight, it can limp along in the shadows and bide its time for another 2-3 years while Walmart-shopping consumers grab "DVD-H" players (whose media encoding is fundamentally the same, just lower-res), then re-emerge as the natural "next step" beyond DVD-H when the market has matured a bit more, and "dual-format" HD-DVDs switch from being DVD+HD-DVD to DVD=HD=DVD.
Yes, the single "HD" flanked by "=" is intentional. It signifies the union of a single HD bitstream format in a dual-format optical disc. Pretty cool, huh? It still needs a good graphic artist to turn it into an official-looking compatibility logo to put on boxes showing that it's a disc compatible with both red- and blueviolet-laser players with HD content viewable on both, but I think you get the idea by now:-)
I, for one, can't wait. Cheap DVD-HD next summer, dual-compatible DVD=HD=DVD next Christmas, and "real" HD-DVD (with both layers and 30-gigs to itself) eventually. All dancing on Sony's grave:-)
The biggest problem with our patent system is that it gives WAY too much weight to "the idea", and grossly undervalues the work of actually transforming it into a practical, manufacturable, real-world product. Most cases where people scream about "obvious" patents seem to be ones where the patentholder had "an idea" and registered it long before he or anyone else had any real way of turning it into a product that could actually be manufactured and sold.
IMHO, patents should be viewed as a gradient with at least two shades... "idea" and "implementation". Patent applications should be allowed to claim that referenced patents are one or the other. If the USPTO agrees, patents judged to be "ideas" relative to the new patent would be eligible for compulsory licensing by the new patent's owner at a fairly low statutory rate that depends entirely upon the licensing fees charged by the new patent's owner (or his real profit, if the owner also is the manufacturer). So... if the USPTO decides that patent "B" is a real implementation of patent "A" that documents real solutions to real problems (like manufacturability), patent B's owner might be granted an automatic license to pay patent A's owner 10% of its own licensing fees (or profit, if the owner is also the manufacturer). The license would be documented in an appendix to Patent B itself. Someone licensing patent B would have no relationship at all with patent A's owner... all money would flow through patent B's owner. Furthermore, patent A's owner would have no say in patent B's licensing fees. If patent B's owner decides to license it free for noncommercial use, patent A's owner gets 10% of... nothing. If patent B's owner decides to license it to someone for $10 million/year for unlimited quantities made during the year, patent A's owner would get $1 million of it.
The basic idea is to make licensing as straightforward as possible, clarifying relationships and eliminating lots of lawyer intermediaries... and enabling people who REALLY deserve patent protection to sidestep the trolls. If patent A's owner sent a demand to a licensee of patent B, the USPTO's determination that B trumped A and qualified for compulsory licensing would be prima-facie evidence of non-infringement by patent B's licensee, and they could turn around and sue patent A's owner for statutory damages for harrassment.
Wii's "different-ness" is a really big advantage, because lots of people who buy an Xbox360 OR PS3 will eventually end up buying a Wii TOO. Or, if they're dying for a PS3 but can't get one by Christmas, will buy their Wii FIRST... then keep pushing the PS3 purchase off until summer or next Christmas because the Wii will keep them happy enough to willingly wait for PS3 prices to drop a bit.
IMHO, a big group of Xbox360 and PS3 early adopters are people also buying their first HDTV around the same time, who are dying to buy anything that says, "HDTV" on it. People who've owned HDTVs for a few years already know that the difference between a Wii's 480p and an Xbox360/PS3's 720p or 1080i is visible, but nowhere near as breathtakingly-dramatic as less-experienced HDTV owners think it will be (native 1080p60, is another matter entirely... but we're at least 5-10 years away from 1080p60 videogames even being a whispered fantasy, let alone a SKU at Best Buy).
The problem is, had they been forced to pick a single standard, it almost certainly wouldn't have been 720p. It would have been 1080i. At least by making 720p and 1080i legally co-legitimate, the door is open for networks that initially went with 1080i to someday join the civilized video universe and switch to 720p.
I firmly believe 1080i's days are numbered. 1080i is a pain to display on anything besides CRTs. As natively-720p TVs become the norm, 720p content will have a competitive advantage because it'll look better on those TVs. 720p will look better than 1080i, even on higher-end TVs that are inherently 1080p (for the moment, we'll ignore the two dozen or so wealthy individuals who can afford to spend $20k on a Faroudja 1080i->1080p deinterlacer).
For all intents and purposes, TVs internally convert 1080i to 720p by treating it like 1920 x 540 progressive and resampling it to 1280x720. As a result, 1080i viewed on a natively-720p TV has the worst of both worlds... ~50% less vertical resolution (1080i's "real" vertical resolution on NATIVELY 1080i displays is about 70% its nominal resolution due to Kell-filtering of adjacent scanlines to prevent thin horizontal high-contrast lines from flickering like a 1980s radar weather map), and reduced horizontal resolution (though it's largely an academic point, since compression reduces the "real" horizontal resolution to 1440 or fewer pixels of hard detail anyway).
Plus, progressive-scan video has a huge advantage for cable channels and smaller content producers: you can meaningfully edit progressive video on laptops and normal computers. The same can't necessarily be said for interlaced video (interlaced video that looks GOOD on a laptop will almost certainly look AWFUL on a natively-1080i display, and vice-versa). For news channels in particular, this is a very, VERY big deal. A vacationing CNN reporter with little more than a 480p camcorder, laptop, and EV-DO wireless data card can capture, edit, and upload reports with minimal ceremony and delay, while the local 1080i affiliate is still setting up the microwave link back to the station so the crew there can edit their video.
The university's employees mishandled the situation from the start. Had the CSO responded to Mostafa's refusal by calmly announcing that he would check the IDs of everyone in the area:
* The surrounding students would have been mildly irritated
* Mostafa would have probably ended up feeling pretty silly had they unceremoniously presented their IDs, and either presented his own (if he had it) or left quickly (partly because he'd feel the angry vibe from the others who were ID'ed as well due to his complaining). By standing his ground and demanding to see ONLY Mostafa's ID, the CSO did a wonderful job of validating and reinforcing the beliefs of Mostafa and every other student on campus who thinks they're being unfairly picked on.
* Or, alternatively, the CSO could have asked for the IDs of only the students vouching for Mostafa's status as a student.
Either way, the policy's goal would be achieved: giving police an excuse to kick homeless people out of the library who'd otherwise sleep there overnight. Of course, braindamaged antisocial bullies for whom rulebooks are the equivalent of softcore porn will bitch... but they're kind of like diehard fundies whose own words do a better job of making them look like complete tools with stakes up their butts than anyone else's writings possibly could.
Another example of incompetence and stupidity: the first actual police officer to encounter Mostafa apparently proceeded straight to the "grab him and drag him out" strategy, as opposed to looking straight at him (while maintaining a nonthreatening, respectful distance) and calmly informing him in a "look, I really don't want to do this, but..." tone of voice that he WOULD be forcibly removed if he didn't leave voluntarily, and that if he were subject to forcible removal and resisted, he could be tased and/or subject to real, honest-to-god arrest... something that might very well have not occurred to him up to that point.
God knows, if I were pissed and embarrassed about having been singled-out for an ID check (or believed myself to have been), threw in the towel & conceded defeat by heading towards the door, and THEN had a cop grab my arm so he could bully me some more and rub some more salt into the wounds... yeah, I'd have probably reflexively tried pushing him away and had some angry words for him too.
I second that. GPRS data is cruel and unusual punishment. EDGE isn't broadband by any measure, but it IS fast enough to be tolerable. It makes me sick to think that the TrollTech GreenPhone gave up EDGE to use the slightly-cheaper GPRS-only chipset and shave a whopping $5 or so off the manufacturing cost of a phone meant to sell for $500+.
And no gamepad? Jesus Christ, would it *really* kill phone manufacturers to just bite the bullet and give us a decent analog (hell, even digital) gamepad for once? It might not be the ultimate gaming platform, but can it AT LEAST try to not be completely dysfunctional for games?
Somewhere, in a parallel universe, Nintendo is about to unleash the PhoneBoy and experience the hottest-selling Christmas item in history -- a "must have" item for kids AND their parents (ok, at least their dads). A phone, with real keypad. A transflective color touchscreen with Graffiti handwriting recognition. AccessLinux for Palm. A Zodiac-like analog gamepad on one side, a digital gamepad on the other, with two thumb-able buttons flanking each. SD or MicroSD. WiFi. Bluetooth. MP3 playback, via headphones or A2DC. And a cool feature that lets you plug 4 GBA cartridges into the charging base and upload them to flash (playable for 48 hours or however long the cartridge has been continuously plugged into the base, whichever is less... a reasonable compromise between convenience and copy protection).
And better yet, unsigned thirdparty removal tools won't be able to touch it.
I bet everyone CAN'T WAIT until new laptops from HP, Dell, etc. come with marketing-partner crapware wedged into signed kernel-level drivers that can't be blown away short of going out and buying a full copy of Vista (since new PCs from major companies almost NEVER come with untainted install disks, and Microsoft will almost certainly decide that the mutilated mess provided by the vendor on the lame "restore disk" doesn't qualify for "upgrade" pricing...)
Sigh. Remember when people actually used to LOOK FORWARD to new versions of Windows, and installed them at the first opportunity?
OK, imagine this scene: crowds of people lined up outside CompUSA, Best Buy, and other stores, waiting for the store to open at the stroke of Midnight so they can buy Vista. Palpable energy and enthusiasm runs through the crowd. Everyone is happy.... and as we all know, it's not going to happen. At least, not unless everyone buying it within the first hour gets it for 50% off, or something comparably generous. Go on... try to even think of ONE person you know who'd be there. Microsoft killed any genuine enthusiasm anyone has ever had for Vista long ago. Now, the very THOUGHT of anyone clamoring in front of a store at midnight to buy a copy just seems laughably ridiculous.
Actually, considering the piddlingly short distance that Acela Express actually RUNS at 150mph, its existence at public expense is borderline criminal... if only because it gives rail a bad name.
We don't need more High-Speed(TM) Rail. At least, not at this nanosecond in time. We DO need a LOT more Reasonable-Speed Rail (80-110mph), with frequent & on-time service between all those city pairs that are further than anyone *really* wants to drive, but not really far enough apart to justify the hours of stressful active waiting & misery air travel entails.
Make it exceptionally convenient and pleasant to take a train (onboard internet is a given), with travel times that are at least as fast as driving, with onboard car rental & key distribution and cars ready to be driven away immediately after arrival at the station, for a cost that's less than twice what someone driving themselves would pay, and rail travel WILL become popular.
Just to repeat... as long as air travel remains a miserable experience to avoid at any cost, rail doesn't have to even TRY to be as fast. Given a choice between 2-3 hours of stressful misery or 3-5 hours surfing the net, eating, or just hanging out in the lounge car getting trashed on $8.95 bottles of Miller Lite watching ESPN on the overhead TVs, most people WILL choose the more pleasant alternative.
Trains have one big advantage over jets: their ability to limit the scope of damage, and significantly greater self-help options for potential victims. A small bomb big enough to kill lots of people on a jet (if only due to fumes or schrapnel in a wide-open cabin) won't do quite as much damage in even a crowded railcar, where you'll never have more than a hundred or so people in any one area at any one time. Plus, passenger trains have another strategic advantage over planes: they can stop quickly, and people can get out. If they're really desperate, they can even break the window and take their chances jumping out of a coach rolling at 20-30mph to avoid being engulfed by flames. That's a wee bit harder to do at 500mph @ 25,000 feet.
In a worst-case scenario, future trains could run with DMUs (www.coloradorailcar.com) redundantly tethered together by rf, optical, and track-based communication... programmed to run a few hundred feet apart and take their high-level instructions from the engineer in the lead cab. In other words, they neatly pull into the station and park close together, but depart a few seconds apart to put a hundred feet or more between each DMU.
Track-based security? Build some Segway-like robots that run a thousand feet and a few miles ahead of each passenger train, and run periodically over the tracks in between trains, digitizing the vicinity and relaying the info to the railroad's computers, which compare the track images constantly and escalate to a human when they see something questionable, and automatically stop the trains if they recognize something that clearly indicates something is wrong with the track up ahead. In particular, if they see something that changed between the "mile-ahead" robot and "thousand-feet-ahead" robot.
But in any case, the main advantage of trains is that you can live with a higher level of risk, because it's a lot harder to literally make a dent in trains. The fact is, compared to even a normal Amtrak train, a crowded New York subway or PATH train is *infinitely* "better" as a target if you want to hurt the most people possible. If someone blew up a small bomb in a private compartment, the deaths won't reach much beyond the adjacent compartment or two. If they blew up a small bomb in a coach car, they'd take out a few dozen poor people and senior citizens... but probably NOT the powerful individuals who normally fly in First- or Business-class, and are accompanied by a few hundred unfortunate others (all packed like sardines in a wide-open compartment). Even if they derailed the train at 80-100mph (the fastest trains are ever likely to REALLY run in America at any point over the next 25-50 years), simply providing passengers with seatbelts and encouraging them to keep them fastened while seated would probably cut the fatality rate down to almost nothing.
In short, there's no financially-viable way to ever make rail travel a "sealed" environment the way officials like to *pretend* air travel is, but intercity rail makes a shitty target, especially in America, because you're talking about vehicles that by law have to be capable of surviving a head-on 80-100mph collision with a mile-long freight train, with only a few dozen people in any one car, and lots of steel to contain the effects of a bomb blast.
Now, I don't think rail (especially the 100-110mph variety) will ever replace flying for thousand+ mile trips, but if even a few regional networks (say, Miami-WPB to Orlando & Tampa, Houston-Austin-Dallas, pacific coast, Chicago region, Atlanta-Carolinas-Southeast) were to become viable with travel times no worse than driving (say, 4 hours Miami to Orlando or Tampa, gradually falling to 3 hours as the track gets incrementally improved to 110mph), regional air travel would be a lot less attractive. Ironically, if security grief continues and regional rail goes upscale, 15 years from now, it might be POOR people who endure air travel hell, while business and affluent travelers take trains that are a little slower than air travel, but enormously more pleasant travel environments.
Well, I'd argue that it became immoral the moment it dragged innocent bystanders (the people who parked their cars) into the crossfire and turned them into collateral damage.
If one of the cars' owners flew down to Florida and was arrested for destroying the CEO's car with a baseball bat, this is the kind of case where the prosecutor would have to legally try to bind and gag the defense in court so they couldn't let the jury know WHY the defendant destroyed the CEO's car... because if they did, no jury in America would convict him or her, even if it were beyond doubt that the facts of the case indicated that he did, in fact, break the law.
Actually, the $5500 probably DID go to pay the salary of a full-time employee whose main/only job was to write the software for the city's garage.
It's hard to criticize the fee without knowing the other facts, since it probably WOULD be semi-justified during the first few years of operation when the software were under constant refinement by an employee working mainly on their garage... but it would be downright immoral if they expected to be raking in $5,500/month 30, 40, and 50 years from now as well. That said, it would have been much better (if only for public relations' sake) for RP to have licensed the software in perpetuity with the garage purchase, then had a separate contract charging for revisions and rewrites (so they could technically decide at any time they were happy with the software "as is", but keep up development as long as RP's developer(s) could keep improving it enough to make it worth the city's money).
From what I've read, this is one of those situations where basically everyone involved has mud on their hands... two entities, both trying to screw, extort, and exploit each other, and ensuring that nobody will ever want to do business with EITHER party again.
Assuming the cars were trapped because the software recognized its license had expired and refused to operate (as opposed to merely being fragile and needing constant tweaking and babysitting by Robotic Parking staff), this was an INCREDIBLY stupid stunt to pull.
Absolutely, positively NOBODY with a gram of sanity is going to want to do business with them going forward. Smart move, guys.
The SMART way to timebomb the software (if it truly had to be done) would have been to program a soft landing... enabling the removal of cars already in the garage without restriction, and maybe even allowing new cars to be parked, but adding progressively longer delays (with obvious system messages, like "Delaying for 90 seconds due to software license expiration") to give the garage's owners time to digest the situation and react. Progressively annoying someone into action is one thing... holding them ransom with a metaphorical gun to their head is another matter entirely. I wouldn't be HAPPY with the former, but I'd be positively OUTRAGED over the latter.
I turned 18 in October of my Senior year in high school. I tried to sign my own permission form for a field trip (crossing out "son/daughter/ward" and writing "SELF" above) and hand it in, but was told I couldn't. Over the next few weeks, I pursued the matter up the bureaucracy chain until I finally got an appointment with the principal himself, trying to get someone to quote the exact written rule that actually prohibited legally-adult students from signing their own permission slips. The best I got was, "Look, that's just the way it is. If you don't like it, get a lawyer and take it up with the school board."
My mom thought I was being silly... my dad was semi-amused... but neither would finance the lawyer, which unfortunately ended the matter there since I didn't personally have the cash to pursue the matter further.
Looking back, I'm convinced that if hell exists, people die, then are forced to relive high school over and over for all eternity. I feel sorry for today's high school students. Things were bad in the late 80s, but dear god... the crap kids have to endure NOW from AuthoriNazi administrators is just over the top.
That's exactly how Chinese names days of the week and months of the year (with, I believe, one exception).
January? one month. (literally, the character for "one" followed by the character for "month") February? two month. March? three month.... November? ten one month. December? ten two month.
Monday? one day. Tuesday? two day.... Saturday? six day. Sunday? ummm.... I don't remember that one. I think it's the one exception that has a special name.
Chinese expresses the NUMBER of something by sticking a "measure word" (with a character of its own) between the number and word. So "two month" is "February", but "two of month" is "two months".
For the record, "Chinese numbers" fall halfway between Roman numerals and spelled English numbers as far as use. It's legitimate to write numbers entirely with Chinese characters, but it's not unusual to use western digits. However, it would be completely wrong to use western digits to name a month. Using ASCII to approximate mangled Chinese, the Chinese character for "1" is a horizontal stroke. For now, let's pretend it's "-". The Chinese character for "10" is a vertical stroke and horizontal stroke vaguely resembling "+". Mangling the language even more, you can kind of pretend that "B" vaguely resembles the Chinese character for "month"... and "#" is a miserable approximation of "the measure word". So...
- B = January - # B = one month + B = October + # B = ten months + - B = November + - # B = eleven months
HOWEVER
"1 B" does NOT mean "January". The western "1" would probably be read as "- # B", but I don't know enough Chinese to know for sure.
Apologies to anyone Chinese for the mangled ASCII approximations... I know some characters, but don't know how to write them in Pinyin. I can, however, "kind of" type them using Wubihua... but Microsoft thoughtfully omitted that particular IME from American copies of WinXP. Bastards. So I can't type them right this instant.:(
The unfortunate residents of South Florida (myself included) are stuck with what is, beyond any shadow of doubt, the WORST power company on Earth. Thanks to the bastards at FPL, who've historically done everything in their power to fight any and all attempts by communities to bury power lines, South Florida has the power grid of a rural village in a poor third-world country. We're talking about a company that sucks so badly, even middle-aged British housewives in small towns know who "FPL" is and why they suck (not to demean such housewives, but simply to point out an illustrative demographic group that has absolutely no reason to know or care who south Florida's power company is... but actually DOES know because it's been on the news so much).
FPL's historical attitude can be accurately summed up as, "We hate underground lines with a passion, but if you solve all of our problems, even the ones we currently tolerate, and make our lives absolutely perfect at ${inflated_unholy_cost}, we'll think about letting you have your lines buried." When they came up with their post-Wilma $100 billion+ estimate, they didn't mention that the lion's share of the cost was for easement acquisition. See, they won't bury lines in the 10 foot wide backyard easement they already have... they want the city to give them a brand new one, adjacent to a road, because it makes their jobs easier.
My heart bleeds for them. Not.
It's a fact -- for the past few years prior to Wilma, FPL did basically NO preventative maintenance. None. Nada. Zip. See, it cut their operating costs, boosted their stock price, and made their shareholders happy. Their customers? We don't matter. It's not like we can take our business elsewhere.
Last year, I lost my power at THREE PM IN THE AFTERNOON the day Katrina hit (the eye reached Dade County a little before midnight). Judging from the clock on the wall, about a half hour before I even got home from work and last-minute shopping. I'll give partial credit to FPL for having it fixed two days later... then take it right back for the fact that my power never even should have gone off before 10pm at the absolute earliest. Wilma? Shudder. I had no power for FIFTEEN DAYS -- the first 12 of which passed without seeing a FPL truck ANYWHERE. And I don't live out in the swamp... I live practically right in the middle of urban Dade County (northwest Coral Gables). Bastards. The best part is that I actually HAD DSL throughout the entire post-hurricane aftermath, not counting ~5 hours or so two days AFTER Wilma when my ISP temporarily ran out of diesel for THEIR generator.
IMHO, FPL should be fined liquidated damages for each day beyond some threshold that some number of customers (say, 100,000 or 25% of a county) remain without power, with those fines used to subsidize the undergrounding of power lines in the affected area. If FPL ended up forfeiting most/all of their shareholder dividends for 2 or 3 years in a row, I suspect their stock price would tank, and line burial would suddenly become a very, VERY high corporate priority for them.
And don't even get me *started* on FPL's DAILY power outages during the summer. At my office (in Doral... the area west of the airport), we literally have to have UPSes for everything, because the power goes out long enough to reboot anything NOT protected by one AT LEAST a half-dozen times over any two-week period. And during really bad weeks (like the past one), it's flickered so many times I've lost count. I even have to have my ****ing LAPTOP (well, its docking station) on a UPS now (a few days ago, Windows crashed after informing me that the docking station was improperly disconnected following a ~3 second power outage. Grrrrrrrr....). At home? Same story. Anything with a timer has a UPS (the $29.99 ones OfficeMax and Office Depot were selling like mad a few years ago). Before I opened them up and cut the wires to their piezo alarms, they used to wake me up in the middle of the night at least once or twice a week (you guessed it... due to FPL's infamo
There's a perfectly good reason why unionization wouldn't work... programmers passionately HATE bureaucracy, and do their best to ignore or actively subvert it. Especially bureaucracy they can't get fired for subverting, like the union boss who tells them they aren't allowed to load Photoshop and spend 5 minutes editing an image, but instead have to fill out a proper request to have an official Graphics Developer II make the changes in 2 or 3 days and get back to them. Can you even IMAGINE the reaction from a developer upon being told by a union rep that he's not allowed to manage his own test server, because that's the job of Server Administrator IV?
If programmers ever DID unionize, it would never work unless they managed to be completely independent of "normal" unions. The nanosecond they smelled union-mandated bureaucracy that doesn't directly serve their own immediate interests, they'd ignore/subvert it. The problem is, even if programmers DID form such a magical union, it would disintegrate within a matter of weeks, because none of them would be interested in actually ADMINISTERING it... and the moment they brought in "normal" union-type administrators, who tried to act like "normal" union administrators, the programmers would get mad and dissolve the union.
... which is precisely why so many adults who USED to love videogames now own Gamecubes instead of XBoxen and PS2s. Sure, most Nintendo games have some kind of superficial story... but most of the time, it's obvious that the game came first, and the story came about 3 days before the packaging materials went to press. That's a GOOD thing. Nintendo, more than anyone else, understands that good graphics are necessary, but are not in and of themselves sufficient for a great game. There are a few notable exceptions (like Zelda), but for the most part, even progressive games like Super Monkey Ball II can be enjoyed a level or two at a time.
The biggest problem with most XBox/PS2/PC games is their determination to be lifestyles rather than games. Most Nintendo games (as in, games made BY Nintendo, not necessarily games FOR a Nintendo platform) bend over backwards to have at least one or two play modes to accommodate people who just want to insert a metaphorical quarter, enjoy a few minutes of gratification, then go do something else. In particular, they have some mode where you can quickly launch the game with some sensible set of defaults... unlike most of the XBox games I've seen, where starting a new game involves forcibly making more choices than setting up Active Directory under Windows 2000 Server (and is about as much fun).
As usual, there's a grain of truth on both sides. If you massively widen a freeway, but do nothing else, congestion on the roads leading to it increases because the improved road becomes SO GOOD, people go WAY out of the way to use it. Ultimately, you need to make EVERY freeway as good as the first, and improve the roads that lead to them. And probably build a few new freeways, too.
The favorite slogan of environmentalists and city planners, "You can't build your way out of congestion," is only true if you finish the slogan with "...one or two lanes at a time." The truth is, if you pull out all the stops and aggressively improve every facet of a city's road network, from freeways to alleys, you CAN reduce congestion. Houston is living proof. Demand isn't infinite... it just appears to be because most existing road networks are so grossly overcapacity. Houston is a grand experiment... and one that so far, appears to be working brilliantly.
The key isn't to keep building new roads farther and farther from the core... it's to keep improving the roads WITHIN the core so the core becomes every bit as convenient and accessible to drivers as the local mall. Building a new four-lane freeway 20 miles further out into suburbia just brings commuters into the misery faster, and gives others an excuse to flee there. Replacing the creaky old six-lane freeway with dysfunctional exits that staggers above the crack addicts downtown on spindly pilings with a shiny new sixteen-lane road in a trench with a half-dozen cantilevered transition lanes above, in contrast, makes the downtown area desirable and accessible. Of course, then the habitual handwringers will bitch and moan about developers bulldozing everything in sight and displacing poor people to build $600k condos and million-dollar townhomes... but hey, you can't please everyone, so you might as well start with the ones who actually pay the city's bills....
Air conditioning was only invented in the last century. Surely it was inhabited for thousands of years before?
Actually, it wasn't. At least, not year-round south of Orlando. OK, there were a few hardy/masochistic individuals who lived in south Florida all year... but anyone else with the slightest opportunity to do so fled north at the first hint of June, and didn't come back until November or December.
Air conditioning is what makes it possible for normal, middle-class people to willingly live in Florida all year. If A/C vanished from the earth tomorrow, Miami would be largely abandoned by its populace within a year. People in highrises near the coast (with slightly better breezes) might stick around a tiny bit longer, but for the most part, the metro area would be depopulated.
Sounds like the ad for a position I saw back in '97 that required "five years of Java and Javascript". At that instant in time, I seriously doubt whether the lead members of the JAVA DEVELOPMENT TEAM AT SUN, including Gosling HIMSELF, could have met that particular requirement. Nor, for that matter, could the team that developed Javascript-nee-Livescript at Netscape (which, five years earlier in early 1992, didn't even exist as a company, let alone as a product). I sent them an anonymous letter asking whether they were really looking for high-pressure salespeople instead, since the only applicants they were going to get claiming to meet their stated criteria would be people able to tell baldfaced lies with a straight face....
Copy protection in the old days (80s/early 90s C64/Amiga/etc) was annoying, but "modern" copy protection steps completely over the bounds of decency because it destabilizes, slows down, and otherwise corrupts every computer it runs on. It's "malware" in every sense of the word, because it negatively impacts the system's functioning long after the protected game is run. Often... long after it's deleted in disgust.
In the old days, all you had to do to get your computer "back to normal" was reboot and put the game's floppies back in the drawer. Now, you have to reinstall Windows. Or physically yank out the quarrantined hard drive you run games from, and put your other 3 drives back in after checking to make sure the optical drives are empty and shutting down.
It's high time a new site like resellerratings.com went up to publicize copy protection issues with new games. Game vendors have to learn that it's NOT ACCEPTABLE for them to treat customers' computers like their personal property and feel free to wantonly vandalize them at will.
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>the HD-DVD format because they really had nothing to say that could trump Blu-Ray.
Except for the ability to play red-laser discs authored with HD-DVD content. If you have a 480p60 camcorder, this is a VERY big deal, because it means you can copy the video to your desktop PC, edit it, author your own HD-DVD disc, and as long as the total storage requirements are 8.7 gigs or less, you can burn it to a recordable DVD, take it to the house of a friend with HD-DVD player, and watch it there.
With HD-DVD, the larger-capacity new disc format is an OPTION, but the player itself is just a multiformat optical drive with bucket of codecs it can draw upon. In fact, I'm willing to bet a HUGE amount of money that by next Christmas, the cheap progressive-scan DVD players currently selling at Wal-Mart & Circuit City for $50-100 will be replaced by equally cheap "DVD+HD" players that still have a red laser optical drive (2.4X or faster, though), but can ALSO play red-laser discs authored as HD-DVDs. It's just a bucket of codecs and capabilities, remember?
Wait, keep reading. There's one particular segment of the media industry that's DROOLING for a low-cost "Higher-Def" optical format that can play on cheap drives and use cheap DVD5 and DVD9 media, but play 480p60, 720p24, and (maybe) overcompressed 720p60 (with low-bitrate audio). That's right, the porn industry. It could care less about 1080p60, because it'll be at least a decade before they'll be in any position to use it. HOWEVER, they have tons of 480p60 content right now (they switched to 480p60 a year or two ago for production, because it makes it easier to put content online as streaming video and increases the odds that they'll be able to shovel their old porn onto terrabyte compilation discs and earn a few more bucks off of it 5-10 years from now). If they make a point of distributing HD porn on DVD9 media (that will play just fine on HD-DVD players, remember), it'll take about 6 months for Joe Sixpack to figure out that he can buy one of those $49 Wal-Mart "DVD+HD" players and start enjoying HD porn *right now* instead of blowing $300 or more on a "proper" HD-DVD player.
What? It's not true HD? Joe doesn't care. Joe's TV can't come anywhere close to 1080p60 anyway, and he couldn't tell the difference between 224 kBit lossy audio and 192-bit 8-channel 32-bit PCM if you put a gun to his head. He'll be delighted to get HD that's roughly about as HD as his own TV, for less than the cost of a single high-end new porn disc....
... and, of course, is also a source of endless frustration for individuals who bought a new laptop with XP Pro, but were given ONLY a bastardized crapware-infested image on a restore disk... so they CAN'T wipe the drive and do a nice, clean installation of XP Pro without blowing another $140+ for a second copy of an OS they already paid for -- or hunt down an activation-free corporate copy and disable auto-update on the theory that Microsoft's endless nagging about their copy being non-Genuine(TM) is more annoying than buffer overflows and malware. Not good, but a Faustian bargain Microsoft has forced a few million laptop owners into because they neither require OEMs to provide clean, virgin Windows installation CDs nor provide any non-extortionate means of escape.
And of course, there's the whole insanity of Microsoft requiring the purchase of separate Windows licenses for use in a VM. Now, in Microsoft's defense, I suspect they'd be perfectly cool with making the license to Vista Ultimate recursive (ie, allowing you to run Vista Ultimate on as many hosted virtual machines as you want, as long as the real PC itself is running Vista Ultimate), but can't think of any good way to actually make WGA recognize when it's running on a virtual machine hosted on a computer running a Genuine Copy that couldn't be spoofed to enable the same technique to be used on standalone PCs.
Exactly! If DHS *really* wants to rally popular support, they should get Congress to do two things first:
* Establish an objective standard that, when VOLUNTARILY satisfied by a state (or for that matter, Canadian province) with regard to its IDs, would permit its bearer to use it in lieu of a passport for entry to the US. Requiring passports for travel between the US and Canada is complete idiocy.
* Repeal any and all federal laws mandating a minimum drinking age. For the love of f***ing god, is Congress *so* thoroughly out of touch with reality that its members haven't figured out yet that the federally-mandated drinking age is 99.9% of the reason why there's a big, immensely profitable mass market for quality fake ID cards in the first place?!? Or do they just want 18-20 year olds to smoke pot instead, since it'll be cheaper, easier to get, and (in California and a few other states, at least) a lesser offense than underage possession of alcohol combined with the purchase/possession of a fraudulent ID card acquired for that exact purpose?
One way or another, HD-DVD will win... even if the physical media format itself fails (in the near-term, at least).
.iso file, and if it's small enough... burn it onto a normal single- or dual-layer red-laser DVD. And play it on any HD-DVD player. So... if you have a 30-minute video, you can distribute it on normal red-laser discs and save the higher media cost.
:-)
:-)
Most people don't realize that you can author a HD-DVD
Of course, "normal" DVD players can't play them... they can read the bits off the disc, but don't know how to interpret the data stream. At least, not until next summer, when the first crop of high-end Chinese FrankenPlayers with MP@HL, MPEG-4, and VC-1 codecs start to show up.
And yes, they WILL. Adding the codecs won't add much to the price, but it will give manufacturers in an increasingly-commoditized market one more feature to differentiate themselves with. Commercial support from Hollywood will be nonexistent, of course... but people burning their own discs (and porn... can't forget porn...) WILL start to make use of it. Did I mention "Porn" yet? See, most porn is about 70-90 minutes in length... encode it on the disc at 720p60 with 192kbit compressed audio, encode the "extras" at 480p60 with a lower bitrate, and it'll fit easily. And THAT is what's going to bring about the "real" immediate successor to DVD -- DVD-HD (HD-DVD encoded on redlaser discs).
Look at it this way: widespread guerrilla adoption of a hypothetical "DVD-HD" format (especially by the Porn industry) would set back HD-DVD adoption by a couple of years by removing a big chunk of the imperative -- especially for people who want something a little better than regular DVD, but are still years away from owning a 1080p60 set... but it will likely deal an outright deathblow to Blu-Ray, for being incompatible with both. Even if HD-DVD falls from the limelight, it can limp along in the shadows and bide its time for another 2-3 years while Walmart-shopping consumers grab "DVD-H" players (whose media encoding is fundamentally the same, just lower-res), then re-emerge as the natural "next step" beyond DVD-H when the market has matured a bit more, and "dual-format" HD-DVDs switch from being DVD+HD-DVD to DVD=HD=DVD.
Yes, the single "HD" flanked by "=" is intentional. It signifies the union of a single HD bitstream format in a dual-format optical disc. Pretty cool, huh? It still needs a good graphic artist to turn it into an official-looking compatibility logo to put on boxes showing that it's a disc compatible with both red- and blueviolet-laser players with HD content viewable on both, but I think you get the idea by now
I, for one, can't wait. Cheap DVD-HD next summer, dual-compatible DVD=HD=DVD next Christmas, and "real" HD-DVD (with both layers and 30-gigs to itself) eventually. All dancing on Sony's grave
The biggest problem with our patent system is that it gives WAY too much weight to "the idea", and grossly undervalues the work of actually transforming it into a practical, manufacturable, real-world product. Most cases where people scream about "obvious" patents seem to be ones where the patentholder had "an idea" and registered it long before he or anyone else had any real way of turning it into a product that could actually be manufactured and sold.
IMHO, patents should be viewed as a gradient with at least two shades... "idea" and "implementation". Patent applications should be allowed to claim that referenced patents are one or the other. If the USPTO agrees, patents judged to be "ideas" relative to the new patent would be eligible for compulsory licensing by the new patent's owner at a fairly low statutory rate that depends entirely upon the licensing fees charged by the new patent's owner (or his real profit, if the owner also is the manufacturer). So... if the USPTO decides that patent "B" is a real implementation of patent "A" that documents real solutions to real problems (like manufacturability), patent B's owner might be granted an automatic license to pay patent A's owner 10% of its own licensing fees (or profit, if the owner is also the manufacturer). The license would be documented in an appendix to Patent B itself. Someone licensing patent B would have no relationship at all with patent A's owner... all money would flow through patent B's owner. Furthermore, patent A's owner would have no say in patent B's licensing fees. If patent B's owner decides to license it free for noncommercial use, patent A's owner gets 10% of... nothing. If patent B's owner decides to license it to someone for $10 million/year for unlimited quantities made during the year, patent A's owner would get $1 million of it.
The basic idea is to make licensing as straightforward as possible, clarifying relationships and eliminating lots of lawyer intermediaries... and enabling people who REALLY deserve patent protection to sidestep the trolls. If patent A's owner sent a demand to a licensee of patent B, the USPTO's determination that B trumped A and qualified for compulsory licensing would be prima-facie evidence of non-infringement by patent B's licensee, and they could turn around and sue patent A's owner for statutory damages for harrassment.
Wii's "different-ness" is a really big advantage, because lots of people who buy an Xbox360 OR PS3 will eventually end up buying a Wii TOO. Or, if they're dying for a PS3 but can't get one by Christmas, will buy their Wii FIRST... then keep pushing the PS3 purchase off until summer or next Christmas because the Wii will keep them happy enough to willingly wait for PS3 prices to drop a bit.
IMHO, a big group of Xbox360 and PS3 early adopters are people also buying their first HDTV around the same time, who are dying to buy anything that says, "HDTV" on it. People who've owned HDTVs for a few years already know that the difference between a Wii's 480p and an Xbox360/PS3's 720p or 1080i is visible, but nowhere near as breathtakingly-dramatic as less-experienced HDTV owners think it will be (native 1080p60, is another matter entirely... but we're at least 5-10 years away from 1080p60 videogames even being a whispered fantasy, let alone a SKU at Best Buy).
The problem is, had they been forced to pick a single standard, it almost certainly wouldn't have been 720p. It would have been 1080i. At least by making 720p and 1080i legally co-legitimate, the door is open for networks that initially went with 1080i to someday join the civilized video universe and switch to 720p.
I firmly believe 1080i's days are numbered. 1080i is a pain to display on anything besides CRTs. As natively-720p TVs become the norm, 720p content will have a competitive advantage because it'll look better on those TVs. 720p will look better than 1080i, even on higher-end TVs that are inherently 1080p (for the moment, we'll ignore the two dozen or so wealthy individuals who can afford to spend $20k on a Faroudja 1080i->1080p deinterlacer).
For all intents and purposes, TVs internally convert 1080i to 720p by treating it like 1920 x 540 progressive and resampling it to 1280x720. As a result, 1080i viewed on a natively-720p TV has the worst of both worlds... ~50% less vertical resolution (1080i's "real" vertical resolution on NATIVELY 1080i displays is about 70% its nominal resolution due to Kell-filtering of adjacent scanlines to prevent thin horizontal high-contrast lines from flickering like a 1980s radar weather map), and reduced horizontal resolution (though it's largely an academic point, since compression reduces the "real" horizontal resolution to 1440 or fewer pixels of hard detail anyway).
Plus, progressive-scan video has a huge advantage for cable channels and smaller content producers: you can meaningfully edit progressive video on laptops and normal computers. The same can't necessarily be said for interlaced video (interlaced video that looks GOOD on a laptop will almost certainly look AWFUL on a natively-1080i display, and vice-versa). For news channels in particular, this is a very, VERY big deal. A vacationing CNN reporter with little more than a 480p camcorder, laptop, and EV-DO wireless data card can capture, edit, and upload reports with minimal ceremony and delay, while the local 1080i affiliate is still setting up the microwave link back to the station so the crew there can edit their video.
(to the tune of "Camptown Racers")
Mohammed's not Mostafa's guy,
Du da, du da.
He's not Muslim, he's Baha'i,
Du da du da day.
Persian, but not from Iran,
Du da, du da.
Born in LA, Southpark fan.
Du da du da day.
Tasered by a bully-man
Du da, du da.
Pressed da button, said to stand
Du da du da day.
CHORUS:
Theo-cons riled up,
look'in really lame.
Jumpin' to conclusions 'bout
mad mullahs and their plans,
Lawsuit comin' to UCLA...
The university's employees mishandled the situation from the start. Had the CSO responded to Mostafa's refusal by calmly announcing that he would check the IDs of everyone in the area:
* The surrounding students would have been mildly irritated
* Mostafa would have probably ended up feeling pretty silly had they unceremoniously presented their IDs, and either presented his own (if he had it) or left quickly (partly because he'd feel the angry vibe from the others who were ID'ed as well due to his complaining). By standing his ground and demanding to see ONLY Mostafa's ID, the CSO did a wonderful job of validating and reinforcing the beliefs of Mostafa and every other student on campus who thinks they're being unfairly picked on.
* Or, alternatively, the CSO could have asked for the IDs of only the students vouching for Mostafa's status as a student.
Either way, the policy's goal would be achieved: giving police an excuse to kick homeless people out of the library who'd otherwise sleep there overnight. Of course, braindamaged antisocial bullies for whom rulebooks are the equivalent of softcore porn will bitch... but they're kind of like diehard fundies whose own words do a better job of making them look like complete tools with stakes up their butts than anyone else's writings possibly could.
Another example of incompetence and stupidity: the first actual police officer to encounter Mostafa apparently proceeded straight to the "grab him and drag him out" strategy, as opposed to looking straight at him (while maintaining a nonthreatening, respectful distance) and calmly informing him in a "look, I really don't want to do this, but..." tone of voice that he WOULD be forcibly removed if he didn't leave voluntarily, and that if he were subject to forcible removal and resisted, he could be tased and/or subject to real, honest-to-god arrest... something that might very well have not occurred to him up to that point.
God knows, if I were pissed and embarrassed about having been singled-out for an ID check (or believed myself to have been), threw in the towel & conceded defeat by heading towards the door, and THEN had a cop grab my arm so he could bully me some more and rub some more salt into the wounds... yeah, I'd have probably reflexively tried pushing him away and had some angry words for him too.
I second that. GPRS data is cruel and unusual punishment. EDGE isn't broadband by any measure, but it IS fast enough to be tolerable. It makes me sick to think that the TrollTech GreenPhone gave up EDGE to use the slightly-cheaper GPRS-only chipset and shave a whopping $5 or so off the manufacturing cost of a phone meant to sell for $500+.
And no gamepad? Jesus Christ, would it *really* kill phone manufacturers to just bite the bullet and give us a decent analog (hell, even digital) gamepad for once? It might not be the ultimate gaming platform, but can it AT LEAST try to not be completely dysfunctional for games?
Somewhere, in a parallel universe, Nintendo is about to unleash the PhoneBoy and experience the hottest-selling Christmas item in history -- a "must have" item for kids AND their parents (ok, at least their dads). A phone, with real keypad. A transflective color touchscreen with Graffiti handwriting recognition. AccessLinux for Palm. A Zodiac-like analog gamepad on one side, a digital gamepad on the other, with two thumb-able buttons flanking each. SD or MicroSD. WiFi. Bluetooth. MP3 playback, via headphones or A2DC. And a cool feature that lets you plug 4 GBA cartridges into the charging base and upload them to flash (playable for 48 hours or however long the cartridge has been continuously plugged into the base, whichever is less... a reasonable compromise between convenience and copy protection).
Sigh.
And better yet, unsigned thirdparty removal tools won't be able to touch it.
... and as we all know, it's not going to happen. At least, not unless everyone buying it within the first hour gets it for 50% off, or something comparably generous. Go on... try to even think of ONE person you know who'd be there. Microsoft killed any genuine enthusiasm anyone has ever had for Vista long ago. Now, the very THOUGHT of anyone clamoring in front of a store at midnight to buy a copy just seems laughably ridiculous.
I bet everyone CAN'T WAIT until new laptops from HP, Dell, etc. come with marketing-partner crapware wedged into signed kernel-level drivers that can't be blown away short of going out and buying a full copy of Vista (since new PCs from major companies almost NEVER come with untainted install disks, and Microsoft will almost certainly decide that the mutilated mess provided by the vendor on the lame "restore disk" doesn't qualify for "upgrade" pricing...)
Sigh. Remember when people actually used to LOOK FORWARD to new versions of Windows, and installed them at the first opportunity?
OK, imagine this scene: crowds of people lined up outside CompUSA, Best Buy, and other stores, waiting for the store to open at the stroke of Midnight so they can buy Vista. Palpable energy and enthusiasm runs through the crowd. Everyone is happy.
Actually, considering the piddlingly short distance that Acela Express actually RUNS at 150mph, its existence at public expense is borderline criminal... if only because it gives rail a bad name.
We don't need more High-Speed(TM) Rail. At least, not at this nanosecond in time. We DO need a LOT more Reasonable-Speed Rail (80-110mph), with frequent & on-time service between all those city pairs that are further than anyone *really* wants to drive, but not really far enough apart to justify the hours of stressful active waiting & misery air travel entails.
Make it exceptionally convenient and pleasant to take a train (onboard internet is a given), with travel times that are at least as fast as driving, with onboard car rental & key distribution and cars ready to be driven away immediately after arrival at the station, for a cost that's less than twice what someone driving themselves would pay, and rail travel WILL become popular.
Just to repeat... as long as air travel remains a miserable experience to avoid at any cost, rail doesn't have to even TRY to be as fast. Given a choice between 2-3 hours of stressful misery or 3-5 hours surfing the net, eating, or just hanging out in the lounge car getting trashed on $8.95 bottles of Miller Lite watching ESPN on the overhead TVs, most people WILL choose the more pleasant alternative.
Trains have one big advantage over jets: their ability to limit the scope of damage, and significantly greater self-help options for potential victims. A small bomb big enough to kill lots of people on a jet (if only due to fumes or schrapnel in a wide-open cabin) won't do quite as much damage in even a crowded railcar, where you'll never have more than a hundred or so people in any one area at any one time. Plus, passenger trains have another strategic advantage over planes: they can stop quickly, and people can get out. If they're really desperate, they can even break the window and take their chances jumping out of a coach rolling at 20-30mph to avoid being engulfed by flames. That's a wee bit harder to do at 500mph @ 25,000 feet.
In a worst-case scenario, future trains could run with DMUs (www.coloradorailcar.com) redundantly tethered together by rf, optical, and track-based communication... programmed to run a few hundred feet apart and take their high-level instructions from the engineer in the lead cab. In other words, they neatly pull into the station and park close together, but depart a few seconds apart to put a hundred feet or more between each DMU.
Track-based security? Build some Segway-like robots that run a thousand feet and a few miles ahead of each passenger train, and run periodically over the tracks in between trains, digitizing the vicinity and relaying the info to the railroad's computers, which compare the track images constantly and escalate to a human when they see something questionable, and automatically stop the trains if they recognize something that clearly indicates something is wrong with the track up ahead. In particular, if they see something that changed between the "mile-ahead" robot and "thousand-feet-ahead" robot.
But in any case, the main advantage of trains is that you can live with a higher level of risk, because it's a lot harder to literally make a dent in trains. The fact is, compared to even a normal Amtrak train, a crowded New York subway or PATH train is *infinitely* "better" as a target if you want to hurt the most people possible. If someone blew up a small bomb in a private compartment, the deaths won't reach much beyond the adjacent compartment or two. If they blew up a small bomb in a coach car, they'd take out a few dozen poor people and senior citizens... but probably NOT the powerful individuals who normally fly in First- or Business-class, and are accompanied by a few hundred unfortunate others (all packed like sardines in a wide-open compartment). Even if they derailed the train at 80-100mph (the fastest trains are ever likely to REALLY run in America at any point over the next 25-50 years), simply providing passengers with seatbelts and encouraging them to keep them fastened while seated would probably cut the fatality rate down to almost nothing.
In short, there's no financially-viable way to ever make rail travel a "sealed" environment the way officials like to *pretend* air travel is, but intercity rail makes a shitty target, especially in America, because you're talking about vehicles that by law have to be capable of surviving a head-on 80-100mph collision with a mile-long freight train, with only a few dozen people in any one car, and lots of steel to contain the effects of a bomb blast.
Now, I don't think rail (especially the 100-110mph variety) will ever replace flying for thousand+ mile trips, but if even a few regional networks (say, Miami-WPB to Orlando & Tampa, Houston-Austin-Dallas, pacific coast, Chicago region, Atlanta-Carolinas-Southeast) were to become viable with travel times no worse than driving (say, 4 hours Miami to Orlando or Tampa, gradually falling to 3 hours as the track gets incrementally improved to 110mph), regional air travel would be a lot less attractive. Ironically, if security grief continues and regional rail goes upscale, 15 years from now, it might be POOR people who endure air travel hell, while business and affluent travelers take trains that are a little slower than air travel, but enormously more pleasant travel environments.
Well, I'd argue that it became immoral the moment it dragged innocent bystanders (the people who parked their cars) into the crossfire and turned them into collateral damage.
If one of the cars' owners flew down to Florida and was arrested for destroying the CEO's car with a baseball bat, this is the kind of case where the prosecutor would have to legally try to bind and gag the defense in court so they couldn't let the jury know WHY the defendant destroyed the CEO's car... because if they did, no jury in America would convict him or her, even if it were beyond doubt that the facts of the case indicated that he did, in fact, break the law.
Actually, the $5500 probably DID go to pay the salary of a full-time employee whose main/only job was to write the software for the city's garage.
It's hard to criticize the fee without knowing the other facts, since it probably WOULD be semi-justified during the first few years of operation when the software were under constant refinement by an employee working mainly on their garage... but it would be downright immoral if they expected to be raking in $5,500/month 30, 40, and 50 years from now as well. That said, it would have been much better (if only for public relations' sake) for RP to have licensed the software in perpetuity with the garage purchase, then had a separate contract charging for revisions and rewrites (so they could technically decide at any time they were happy with the software "as is", but keep up development as long as RP's developer(s) could keep improving it enough to make it worth the city's money).
From what I've read, this is one of those situations where basically everyone involved has mud on their hands... two entities, both trying to screw, extort, and exploit each other, and ensuring that nobody will ever want to do business with EITHER party again.
Assuming the cars were trapped because the software recognized its license had expired and refused to operate (as opposed to merely being fragile and needing constant tweaking and babysitting by Robotic Parking staff), this was an INCREDIBLY stupid stunt to pull.
Absolutely, positively NOBODY with a gram of sanity is going to want to do business with them going forward. Smart move, guys.
The SMART way to timebomb the software (if it truly had to be done) would have been to program a soft landing... enabling the removal of cars already in the garage without restriction, and maybe even allowing new cars to be parked, but adding progressively longer delays (with obvious system messages, like "Delaying for 90 seconds due to software license expiration") to give the garage's owners time to digest the situation and react. Progressively annoying someone into action is one thing... holding them ransom with a metaphorical gun to their head is another matter entirely. I wouldn't be HAPPY with the former, but I'd be positively OUTRAGED over the latter.
I turned 18 in October of my Senior year in high school. I tried to sign my own permission form for a field trip (crossing out "son/daughter/ward" and writing "SELF" above) and hand it in, but was told I couldn't. Over the next few weeks, I pursued the matter up the bureaucracy chain until I finally got an appointment with the principal himself, trying to get someone to quote the exact written rule that actually prohibited legally-adult students from signing their own permission slips. The best I got was, "Look, that's just the way it is. If you don't like it, get a lawyer and take it up with the school board."
My mom thought I was being silly... my dad was semi-amused... but neither would finance the lawyer, which unfortunately ended the matter there since I didn't personally have the cash to pursue the matter further.
Looking back, I'm convinced that if hell exists, people die, then are forced to relive high school over and over for all eternity. I feel sorry for today's high school students. Things were bad in the late 80s, but dear god... the crap kids have to endure NOW from AuthoriNazi administrators is just over the top.
That's exactly how Chinese names days of the week and months of the year (with, I believe, one exception).
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:(
January? one month. (literally, the character for "one" followed by the character for "month")
February? two month.
March? three month.
November? ten one month.
December? ten two month.
Monday? one day.
Tuesday? two day.
Saturday? six day.
Sunday? ummm.... I don't remember that one. I think it's the one exception that has a special name.
Chinese expresses the NUMBER of something by sticking a "measure word" (with a character of its own) between the number and word. So "two month" is "February", but "two of month" is "two months".
For the record, "Chinese numbers" fall halfway between Roman numerals and spelled English numbers as far as use. It's legitimate to write numbers entirely with Chinese characters, but it's not unusual to use western digits. However, it would be completely wrong to use western digits to name a month. Using ASCII to approximate mangled Chinese, the Chinese character for "1" is a horizontal stroke. For now, let's pretend it's "-". The Chinese character for "10" is a vertical stroke and horizontal stroke vaguely resembling "+". Mangling the language even more, you can kind of pretend that "B" vaguely resembles the Chinese character for "month"... and "#" is a miserable approximation of "the measure word". So...
- B = January
- # B = one month
+ B = October
+ # B = ten months
+ - B = November
+ - # B = eleven months
HOWEVER
"1 B" does NOT mean "January". The western "1" would probably be read as "- # B", but I don't know enough Chinese to know for sure.
Apologies to anyone Chinese for the mangled ASCII approximations... I know some characters, but don't know how to write them in Pinyin. I can, however, "kind of" type them using Wubihua... but Microsoft thoughtfully omitted that particular IME from American copies of WinXP. Bastards. So I can't type them right this instant.
The unfortunate residents of South Florida (myself included) are stuck with what is, beyond any shadow of doubt, the WORST power company on Earth. Thanks to the bastards at FPL, who've historically done everything in their power to fight any and all attempts by communities to bury power lines, South Florida has the power grid of a rural village in a poor third-world country. We're talking about a company that sucks so badly, even middle-aged British housewives in small towns know who "FPL" is and why they suck (not to demean such housewives, but simply to point out an illustrative demographic group that has absolutely no reason to know or care who south Florida's power company is... but actually DOES know because it's been on the news so much).
FPL's historical attitude can be accurately summed up as, "We hate underground lines with a passion, but if you solve all of our problems, even the ones we currently tolerate, and make our lives absolutely perfect at ${inflated_unholy_cost}, we'll think about letting you have your lines buried." When they came up with their post-Wilma $100 billion+ estimate, they didn't mention that the lion's share of the cost was for easement acquisition. See, they won't bury lines in the 10 foot wide backyard easement they already have... they want the city to give them a brand new one, adjacent to a road, because it makes their jobs easier.
My heart bleeds for them. Not.
It's a fact -- for the past few years prior to Wilma, FPL did basically NO preventative maintenance. None. Nada. Zip. See, it cut their operating costs, boosted their stock price, and made their shareholders happy. Their customers? We don't matter. It's not like we can take our business elsewhere.
Last year, I lost my power at THREE PM IN THE AFTERNOON the day Katrina hit (the eye reached Dade County a little before midnight). Judging from the clock on the wall, about a half hour before I even got home from work and last-minute shopping. I'll give partial credit to FPL for having it fixed two days later... then take it right back for the fact that my power never even should have gone off before 10pm at the absolute earliest. Wilma? Shudder. I had no power for FIFTEEN DAYS -- the first 12 of which passed without seeing a FPL truck ANYWHERE. And I don't live out in the swamp... I live practically right in the middle of urban Dade County (northwest Coral Gables). Bastards. The best part is that I actually HAD DSL throughout the entire post-hurricane aftermath, not counting ~5 hours or so two days AFTER Wilma when my ISP temporarily ran out of diesel for THEIR generator.
IMHO, FPL should be fined liquidated damages for each day beyond some threshold that some number of customers (say, 100,000 or 25% of a county) remain without power, with those fines used to subsidize the undergrounding of power lines in the affected area. If FPL ended up forfeiting most/all of their shareholder dividends for 2 or 3 years in a row, I suspect their stock price would tank, and line burial would suddenly become a very, VERY high corporate priority for them.
And don't even get me *started* on FPL's DAILY power outages during the summer. At my office (in Doral... the area west of the airport), we literally have to have UPSes for everything, because the power goes out long enough to reboot anything NOT protected by one AT LEAST a half-dozen times over any two-week period. And during really bad weeks (like the past one), it's flickered so many times I've lost count. I even have to have my ****ing LAPTOP (well, its docking station) on a UPS now (a few days ago, Windows crashed after informing me that the docking station was improperly disconnected following a ~3 second power outage. Grrrrrrrr....). At home? Same story. Anything with a timer has a UPS (the $29.99 ones OfficeMax and Office Depot were selling like mad a few years ago). Before I opened them up and cut the wires to their piezo alarms, they used to wake me up in the middle of the night at least once or twice a week (you guessed it... due to FPL's infamo
There's a perfectly good reason why unionization wouldn't work... programmers passionately HATE bureaucracy, and do their best to ignore or actively subvert it. Especially bureaucracy they can't get fired for subverting, like the union boss who tells them they aren't allowed to load Photoshop and spend 5 minutes editing an image, but instead have to fill out a proper request to have an official Graphics Developer II make the changes in 2 or 3 days and get back to them. Can you even IMAGINE the reaction from a developer upon being told by a union rep that he's not allowed to manage his own test server, because that's the job of Server Administrator IV?
If programmers ever DID unionize, it would never work unless they managed to be completely independent of "normal" unions. The nanosecond they smelled union-mandated bureaucracy that doesn't directly serve their own immediate interests, they'd ignore/subvert it. The problem is, even if programmers DID form such a magical union, it would disintegrate within a matter of weeks, because none of them would be interested in actually ADMINISTERING it... and the moment they brought in "normal" union-type administrators, who tried to act like "normal" union administrators, the programmers would get mad and dissolve the union.
... which is precisely why so many adults who USED to love videogames now own Gamecubes instead of XBoxen and PS2s. Sure, most Nintendo games have some kind of superficial story... but most of the time, it's obvious that the game came first, and the story came about 3 days before the packaging materials went to press. That's a GOOD thing. Nintendo, more than anyone else, understands that good graphics are necessary, but are not in and of themselves sufficient for a great game. There are a few notable exceptions (like Zelda), but for the most part, even progressive games like Super Monkey Ball II can be enjoyed a level or two at a time.
The biggest problem with most XBox/PS2/PC games is their determination to be lifestyles rather than games. Most Nintendo games (as in, games made BY Nintendo, not necessarily games FOR a Nintendo platform) bend over backwards to have at least one or two play modes to accommodate people who just want to insert a metaphorical quarter, enjoy a few minutes of gratification, then go do something else. In particular, they have some mode where you can quickly launch the game with some sensible set of defaults... unlike most of the XBox games I've seen, where starting a new game involves forcibly making more choices than setting up Active Directory under Windows 2000 Server (and is about as much fun).
As usual, there's a grain of truth on both sides. If you massively widen a freeway, but do nothing else, congestion on the roads leading to it increases because the improved road becomes SO GOOD, people go WAY out of the way to use it. Ultimately, you need to make EVERY freeway as good as the first, and improve the roads that lead to them. And probably build a few new freeways, too.
The favorite slogan of environmentalists and city planners, "You can't build your way out of congestion," is only true if you finish the slogan with "...one or two lanes at a time." The truth is, if you pull out all the stops and aggressively improve every facet of a city's road network, from freeways to alleys, you CAN reduce congestion. Houston is living proof. Demand isn't infinite... it just appears to be because most existing road networks are so grossly overcapacity. Houston is a grand experiment... and one that so far, appears to be working brilliantly.
The key isn't to keep building new roads farther and farther from the core... it's to keep improving the roads WITHIN the core so the core becomes every bit as convenient and accessible to drivers as the local mall. Building a new four-lane freeway 20 miles further out into suburbia just brings commuters into the misery faster, and gives others an excuse to flee there. Replacing the creaky old six-lane freeway with dysfunctional exits that staggers above the crack addicts downtown on spindly pilings with a shiny new sixteen-lane road in a trench with a half-dozen cantilevered transition lanes above, in contrast, makes the downtown area desirable and accessible. Of course, then the habitual handwringers will bitch and moan about developers bulldozing everything in sight and displacing poor people to build $600k condos and million-dollar townhomes... but hey, you can't please everyone, so you might as well start with the ones who actually pay the city's bills....
Air conditioning was only invented in the last century. Surely it was inhabited for thousands of years before?
Actually, it wasn't. At least, not year-round south of Orlando. OK, there were a few hardy/masochistic individuals who lived in south Florida all year... but anyone else with the slightest opportunity to do so fled north at the first hint of June, and didn't come back until November or December.
Air conditioning is what makes it possible for normal, middle-class people to willingly live in Florida all year. If A/C vanished from the earth tomorrow, Miami would be largely abandoned by its populace within a year. People in highrises near the coast (with slightly better breezes) might stick around a tiny bit longer, but for the most part, the metro area would be depopulated.
Sounds like the ad for a position I saw back in '97 that required "five years of Java and Javascript". At that instant in time, I seriously doubt whether the lead members of the JAVA DEVELOPMENT TEAM AT SUN, including Gosling HIMSELF, could have met that particular requirement. Nor, for that matter, could the team that developed Javascript-nee-Livescript at Netscape (which, five years earlier in early 1992, didn't even exist as a company, let alone as a product). I sent them an anonymous letter asking whether they were really looking for high-pressure salespeople instead, since the only applicants they were going to get claiming to meet their stated criteria would be people able to tell baldfaced lies with a straight face....
Copy protection in the old days (80s/early 90s C64/Amiga/etc) was annoying, but "modern" copy protection steps completely over the bounds of decency because it destabilizes, slows down, and otherwise corrupts every computer it runs on. It's "malware" in every sense of the word, because it negatively impacts the system's functioning long after the protected game is run. Often... long after it's deleted in disgust.
In the old days, all you had to do to get your computer "back to normal" was reboot and put the game's floppies back in the drawer. Now, you have to reinstall Windows. Or physically yank out the quarrantined hard drive you run games from, and put your other 3 drives back in after checking to make sure the optical drives are empty and shutting down.
It's high time a new site like resellerratings.com went up to publicize copy protection issues with new games. Game vendors have to learn that it's NOT ACCEPTABLE for them to treat customers' computers like their personal property and feel free to wantonly vandalize them at will.