Agreeing to membership within the WTO is a sovereignty compromise designed to promote economic exports. As a result of membership, the USA gets protection for its exports against unfair tariffs, duties, or other illegal restraints of trade designed to exclude US exports from foreign markets. Given that until recently, the USA was a huge net exporter of manufactured goods, services, and copyrighted material, obviously WTO membership was a big deal designed to open foreign markets for US companies.
Maybe the current emotional, illogical campaign by several US politicians and political wannabes against international gaming has come about because by now the US has seen several decades of increasingly insular economic development and has become relatively decoupled from international export trade, WTO membership is no longer seen as so essential to US economic interest. Or maybe it's because the US is electing more dumb-as-a-plank politicians? Either way, the US has gained tremendously from its membership in the WTO and other countries' compliance with its market-opening directives. For the US now to turn around and persist in imposing illegal trade restraints is simply hypocritical.
Yes, it's remarkable that the US is pursuing this weird, illegal vendetta against international online gambling when recent legal decisions have conclusively proved that its actions are unsupportted by anything approximating a legal right. The NY Times apparently knew this back in 2004, but it has apparently forgot by now.
The WTO's decision regarding the inability of the US, or its constituent States, to prohibit international commerce in the culturally protected arenas of sport and gambling is clear and, for a massive bureaucracy, surprisingly understandable. I think we can expect a lot more legal cases against the US by countries with offshore gambling economies. The WTO withheld awarding Antigua and Barbuda virtually unlimited license to duplicate any or all intellectual property copyrighted within the US. That could have cost billions, and really pissed off Microsoft. In a followup case, given persistent recidivism by the defendant (the US), a larger award might be more possible.
The United States was not able to invoke successfully the GATS exceptions provisions. In this regard, the United States was not able to demonstrate that the Wire Act, the Travel Act and the Illegal Gambling Business Act are âoenecessaryâ under Articles XIV(a) and XIV(c) of the GATS (i.e. âoeexceptionsâ provisions, including for public morals) and are consistent with the requirements of the chapeau of Article XIV of the GATS;... On 7 April 2005, the report of the Appellate Body was circulated. The Appellate Body:... upheld the Panelâ(TM)s finding, albeit for different reasons, that the United Statesâ(TM) Schedule includes a commitment to grant full market access in gambling and betting services.
Sprint apparently has a roaming agreement with Verizon - if my Pre can't get a Sprint tower it'll use a Verizon tower (or so I've been told by the Sprint guys).
My Sprint phone (on a SERO plan for $30/month for everything) does have that Verizon roaming option included. You can see it itemised on the bill. It rarely has a problem with coverage.
EV-DO does not support data usage during voice calls. This sucks, as there are times when I'm on the phone and I need to look something up or send an email
I know, that really bugged me about Sprint's network, until I figured out I could use Google Voice, Skype and fring to get around that.
I know they use different approaches to personalisation. Last uses collaborative filtering, a "bottom-up" approach, whereas Pandora uses parametrised affinity allocations, a "top-down" approach. But for their users, both services promote personalised music selection, adaptive and iterative improvement of personalisation, streaming, and social networking between affinity groups.
Maybe incipient twittery could enable a person to be easily swayed by a "source" that has twice failed to produce anything beyond stern denials. I'd love to see this story go somewhere else because, if true, it would be juicy. But so far *nobody* else has managed to verify anything of what TechCrunch has claimed. Given the leakage quotient in SV, the lack of confirmation weighs heavily against the veracity of the story. It's making me file this TechCrunch "exclusive" in the same slushpile that I use for anything Apple-related from Jim Goldman and reflects poorly on their other "exclusives".
Pandora's main competition for mindshare is Last.FM. There's also a bit of a US/EU rivalry, with Pandora so strongly identified with the US and, with the Valley in particular, while Last.FM came out of a Euro milieu. I think I've noticed a very pro-Pandora coverage pattern at TechCrunch. Lots of the "Web 2 - Me Too" AdSense spam sites, sorry, gadget/tech blogs, take cues from TechCrunch, and among the iPhone-toting, US-centric crowd, Pandora is a darling.
Before I'd believe anything TechCrunch said about Last.FM, I'd want to know more about the personal and financial connections between the people running TechCrunch and the people running Pandora.
Personally, I've tried Pandora every years and it fails, epically, to even know about many of the artists I am interested in hearing. Plus, Pandora's Flash interface is just aggravating, user-hostile, and screams hipster-designer-marketroid-douchbags-in-control.
That's true, good point. I've just plugged in the old 2000-vintage Wacom to check how Photoshop registers coverage using the stylus. There seems to be an on-off signal, a pressure signal and yes, for some brushes, a time component that strengthens or re-iterates the effect when held stationary over an area.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I think one important issue with the capacitative screen as used in Apple's phone is that while it does support multitouch, it does not support different pressure levels corresponding to force applied against the screen? To get pressure sensitivity similar to a Wacom-style pad, you'd need to be using a Palm/WinMo handheld which, with resistive screens, can support different pressures applied by finger or stylus. Is this correct? If so, then it's remarkable that he managed to produce quite a nice cartoon given the limitations of the device he was using. But you have to wonder how much more efficient a similar artist could be with a more artist-friendly approach. I assume that this brushes application lets you create a swipe, then click it afterwards to increase or decrease the transparency/strength/brush effects. That's got to be a lot less intuitive than just pressing your finger/stylus more or less to get the same effect. In effect, a single gesture dimensioned using pressure has been elongated into a mutli-step gesture dimensioned with serial, semantic twiddling.
I've heard that there's this huge epidemic of software incompatibility in OSX that manifests as Just Not Enough Useful Software. Apparently the workaround suggested by Apple is to install a fresh copy of Windows XP onto the machine. This workaround is so popular that several companies now offer ways to work around this outstanding bug by enabling many different ways of installing fresh copies of Windows XP within OSX.
I've read through the methods and I can't understand why either the journal editors or the referees didn't insist on replicating each experimental setup with a simple sheet of lead (or other dense material) interposed between each cuvette and sufficient to block the direct path of any putative photonic communication. Without the demonstration of an expected null result for each experiment given this setup and a photonic communication hypothesis, I can't take this paper seriously.
My wife gets unlimited Internet and texts, unlimited off-peak minutes, and 1500 peak minutes for $50/month (plus taxes). She can tether the phone, either through USB or over Bluetooth/WiFi, and share out the 3G connection. The throughput is usually around 1500/800. This is on Sprint.
For $30/month all in I get unlimited Internet, texts, off-peak minutes, and 500 peak minutes. I suspect its far cheaper rates is part of the reason why Sprint is doing so poorly and AT&T is doing so well.
In the last conference call, the AT&T execs were quite proud of the fact that the typical Apple user on their network paid over 2x the industry standard "ARPU" (average revenue per unit). I'd guess AT&T is willing to push this a little, squeeze the Apple base, and see if it can push the ARPU up to 3x.
Microsoft probably won't let them sell one the many Windows Mobile bittorrentclients on its itunes-wannabe store, but you can install them on your phone without having to work around corporate boneheadedness using exploits.
Windows Mobile may be butt ugly (without customising it with a good skin and finger touch UI) but it's basically a blank canvas upon which to write apps. Android might get there in a few years.
I read this and thought the same thing. Have been enjoying WMWiFiRouter for a couple of years now. Binds your Windows Phone's 3G signal to the WiFi and re-broadcasts it for association by clients over WiFi or Bluetooth. Interestingly, attached clients score a higher bandwidth (~130%) of the phone's browser running a similar speed test (~1 Mbps). Obviously CPU limited. It amused me in the days before there was a 3G iPhone to let my 2G iPhone friends associate to a Windows Mobile phone using WiFi to accelerate their web browsing.
I have used this to downloaded GBs of torrents to my laptop. For $30/month to Sprint for phone and unlimited texts and internet it's an awesome deal.
The Primates journal is a good place to look for info.
The question then is why are the primates at the low end of the sleep budget? Your dietary thesis is interesting and represents one popular line of teleological reasoning for our waking budgets.
Getting back to the issue at hand, my thesis is that were it possible to simulate human consciousness, it may be necessary to simulate the sleeping as well as the waking state.
How long would you live in the wild, if you never woke up?
Consider this: most apex predators spend 15-28 hours asleep during a 24-hour cycle, waking only to hunt, establish or re-establish dominance, and to sleep. Being awake and mobile and *not* productive (as defined by these fitness activities) exposes you to risk, and burns calories needlessly. If you have a safe place to sleep (cave/tree/burrow) then that's a win.
Even herbivores, with a requirement for a long ingestion period for their sustenance, spend a huge proportion of their time asleep. They have simply evolved ways to enter the sleep state while remaining standing, and enable their long digestion process to continue.
We are the anomaly. And it's unclear how much of our sleep-wake cycle, tilted as it is so far towards the waking state, is a very recent artifact of our cultural development where automated timekeeping societies seem to have increased fitness over non-timekeeping societies.
While you're asleep your brain and body are engaged a massive set of synchronised, necessary metabolic activities and cognitive processed that are essential for "you" to exist. Proof? Eliminate sleep from a human and see how long before death or derangement ensues.
One lecture I had from a sleep biologist impressed me immensely. He was demonstrating all the different cycles that are engaged or differently regulated during human sleep. Then there were a bunch of comparitive analyses of other, similar organisms. The biggest mystery about sleep is not why we spend so much time asleep, said he, but why we spend so much time awake. The waking state is so inefficient from a reproductive and safety perspective that it's mind-boggling.
Anyway, don't dismiss sleep as that "nothing" that happens between wake states. It's a big something... we just don't know what exactly yet.
When the expectation *is* convenience, your thesis dissolves.
It simply isn't "endless" if you only have to do it once. Around two years ago I specified my favourite font and type size in my ereader. I also selected my preferred autoscroll speed. I haven't had to change them since. Total time spent: around 5 minutes.
If "everyone else" can manage playlists, friend lists, GMail themes, cable boxes, and voicemail (among others), they can manage ereader customisation. I think you have an unusually pessimistic view of people's abilities, or their desire for control over their environment.
Most publications require articles to be submitted in LaTeX, which only outputs PDF, DVI and PS documents
This is generally true for technical publications, but less true in life and health sciences where many publications accept other submission formats. However, having had to originally write articles in plain old TeX before LaTex became common (and even, sadly, nroff), and having had to wrestle with defining output bounds, this is not an easy problem to solve. But I'm confident that new generations of developers and designers will solve it as paper becomes increasingly deprecated for technical documents.
Obviously a Kindle TeX parser or LaTex editor is required...
What you say may be true but, hopefully, as people replace printed output with screen readers, PDFs will come to be seen again as an output option, not a final source document format. BP (Before PDFs), postscript was simply one of a number of output choices. Adobe has been effectively racing the beam ever since, adding endless cruft onto this creaky, inflexible format to promote its popularity.
The experience of reading a PDF on any small screen device, versus reading the same content through an ereader, is so qualitatively different that I don't PDFs can maintain their mindshare. All that zooming in and out, dragging, pinching, clicking. It's just tedious and needlessly complicated.
You say people don't care about being able to customise their reading experience to their own preferences but I think you're wrong. It's simply that most people haven't been given the opportunity to do so. Similar de facto regimes of non-choice have existed in the past, but they have usually faded away as markets have matured and delivered more competitors or regulation offering options.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreeing to membership within the WTO is a sovereignty compromise designed to promote economic exports. As a result of membership, the USA gets protection for its exports against unfair tariffs, duties, or other illegal restraints of trade designed to exclude US exports from foreign markets. Given that until recently, the USA was a huge net exporter of manufactured goods, services, and copyrighted material, obviously WTO membership was a big deal designed to open foreign markets for US companies.
Maybe the current emotional, illogical campaign by several US politicians and political wannabes against international gaming has come about because by now the US has seen several decades of increasingly insular economic development and has become relatively decoupled from international export trade, WTO membership is no longer seen as so essential to US economic interest. Or maybe it's because the US is electing more dumb-as-a-plank politicians? Either way, the US has gained tremendously from its membership in the WTO and other countries' compliance with its market-opening directives. For the US now to turn around and persist in imposing illegal trade restraints is simply hypocritical.
Yes, it's remarkable that the US is pursuing this weird, illegal vendetta against international online gambling when recent legal decisions have conclusively proved that its actions are unsupportted by anything approximating a legal right. The NY Times apparently knew this back in 2004, but it has apparently forgot by now.
The WTO's decision regarding the inability of the US, or its constituent States, to prohibit international commerce in the culturally protected arenas of sport and gambling is clear and, for a massive bureaucracy, surprisingly understandable. I think we can expect a lot more legal cases against the US by countries with offshore gambling economies. The WTO withheld awarding Antigua and Barbuda virtually unlimited license to duplicate any or all intellectual property copyrighted within the US. That could have cost billions, and really pissed off Microsoft. In a followup case, given persistent recidivism by the defendant (the US), a larger award might be more possible.
Sprint apparently has a roaming agreement with Verizon - if my Pre can't get a Sprint tower it'll use a Verizon tower (or so I've been told by the Sprint guys).
My Sprint phone (on a SERO plan for $30/month for everything) does have that Verizon roaming option included. You can see it itemised on the bill. It rarely has a problem with coverage.
EV-DO does not support data usage during voice calls. This sucks, as there are times when I'm on the phone and I need to look something up or send an email
I know, that really bugged me about Sprint's network, until I figured out I could use Google Voice, Skype and fring to get around that.
they aren't really even similar services at all
I know they use different approaches to personalisation. Last uses collaborative filtering, a "bottom-up" approach, whereas Pandora uses parametrised affinity allocations, a "top-down" approach. But for their users, both services promote personalised music selection, adaptive and iterative improvement of personalisation, streaming, and social networking between affinity groups.
How are they *not* similar?
Maybe incipient twittery could enable a person to be easily swayed by a "source" that has twice failed to produce anything beyond stern denials. I'd love to see this story go somewhere else because, if true, it would be juicy. But so far *nobody* else has managed to verify anything of what TechCrunch has claimed. Given the leakage quotient in SV, the lack of confirmation weighs heavily against the veracity of the story. It's making me file this TechCrunch "exclusive" in the same slushpile that I use for anything Apple-related from Jim Goldman and reflects poorly on their other "exclusives".
Pandora's main competition for mindshare is Last.FM. There's also a bit of a US/EU rivalry, with Pandora so strongly identified with the US and, with the Valley in particular, while Last.FM came out of a Euro milieu. I think I've noticed a very pro-Pandora coverage pattern at TechCrunch. Lots of the "Web 2 - Me Too" AdSense spam sites, sorry, gadget/tech blogs, take cues from TechCrunch, and among the iPhone-toting, US-centric crowd, Pandora is a darling.
Before I'd believe anything TechCrunch said about Last.FM, I'd want to know more about the personal and financial connections between the people running TechCrunch and the people running Pandora.
Personally, I've tried Pandora every years and it fails, epically, to even know about many of the artists I am interested in hearing. Plus, Pandora's Flash interface is just aggravating, user-hostile, and screams hipster-designer-marketroid-douchbags-in-control.
That's true, good point. I've just plugged in the old 2000-vintage Wacom to check how Photoshop registers coverage using the stylus. There seems to be an on-off signal, a pressure signal and yes, for some brushes, a time component that strengthens or re-iterates the effect when held stationary over an area.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I think one important issue with the capacitative screen as used in Apple's phone is that while it does support multitouch, it does not support different pressure levels corresponding to force applied against the screen? To get pressure sensitivity similar to a Wacom-style pad, you'd need to be using a Palm/WinMo handheld which, with resistive screens, can support different pressures applied by finger or stylus. Is this correct? If so, then it's remarkable that he managed to produce quite a nice cartoon given the limitations of the device he was using. But you have to wonder how much more efficient a similar artist could be with a more artist-friendly approach. I assume that this brushes application lets you create a swipe, then click it afterwards to increase or decrease the transparency/strength/brush effects. That's got to be a lot less intuitive than just pressing your finger/stylus more or less to get the same effect. In effect, a single gesture dimensioned using pressure has been elongated into a mutli-step gesture dimensioned with serial, semantic twiddling.
I've heard that there's this huge epidemic of software incompatibility in OSX that manifests as Just Not Enough Useful Software. Apparently the workaround suggested by Apple is to install a fresh copy of Windows XP onto the machine. This workaround is so popular that several companies now offer ways to work around this outstanding bug by enabling many different ways of installing fresh copies of Windows XP within OSX.
I've read through the methods and I can't understand why either the journal editors or the referees didn't insist on replicating each experimental setup with a simple sheet of lead (or other dense material) interposed between each cuvette and sufficient to block the direct path of any putative photonic communication. Without the demonstration of an expected null result for each experiment given this setup and a photonic communication hypothesis, I can't take this paper seriously.
TechCrunch sucks at Pandora's teat
Pandora is often the official "DJ" at TechCrunch clusterfucks
Oh yeah, all this plus long distance. And with Skype and fring on the phone, also international.
My wife gets unlimited Internet and texts, unlimited off-peak minutes, and 1500 peak minutes for $50/month (plus taxes). She can tether the phone, either through USB or over Bluetooth/WiFi, and share out the 3G connection. The throughput is usually around 1500/800. This is on Sprint.
For $30/month all in I get unlimited Internet, texts, off-peak minutes, and 500 peak minutes. I suspect its far cheaper rates is part of the reason why Sprint is doing so poorly and AT&T is doing so well.
In the last conference call, the AT&T execs were quite proud of the fact that the typical Apple user on their network paid over 2x the industry standard "ARPU" (average revenue per unit). I'd guess AT&T is willing to push this a little, squeeze the Apple base, and see if it can push the ARPU up to 3x.
Microsoft probably won't let them sell one the many Windows Mobile bittorrent clients on its itunes-wannabe store, but you can install them on your phone without having to work around corporate boneheadedness using exploits.
Windows Mobile may be butt ugly (without customising it with a good skin and finger touch UI) but it's basically a blank canvas upon which to write apps. Android might get there in a few years.
I read this and thought the same thing. Have been enjoying WMWiFiRouter for a couple of years now. Binds your Windows Phone's 3G signal to the WiFi and re-broadcasts it for association by clients over WiFi or Bluetooth. Interestingly, attached clients score a higher bandwidth (~130%) of the phone's browser running a similar speed test (~1 Mbps). Obviously CPU limited. It amused me in the days before there was a 3G iPhone to let my 2G iPhone friends associate to a Windows Mobile phone using WiFi to accelerate their web browsing.
I have used this to downloaded GBs of torrents to my laptop. For $30/month to Sprint for phone and unlimited texts and internet it's an awesome deal.
There's so little difference between humans and, say, the chimp/pan that they are virtually the same species. We are the third chimpanzee. Like us, chimps seem to be happiest with close to ten hours of sleep per day.
The Primates journal is a good place to look for info.
The question then is why are the primates at the low end of the sleep budget? Your dietary thesis is interesting and represents one popular line of teleological reasoning for our waking budgets.
Getting back to the issue at hand, my thesis is that were it possible to simulate human consciousness, it may be necessary to simulate the sleeping as well as the waking state.
How long would you live in the wild, if you never woke up?
Consider this: most apex predators spend 15-28 hours asleep during a 24-hour cycle, waking only to hunt, establish or re-establish dominance, and to sleep. Being awake and mobile and *not* productive (as defined by these fitness activities) exposes you to risk, and burns calories needlessly. If you have a safe place to sleep (cave/tree/burrow) then that's a win.
Even herbivores, with a requirement for a long ingestion period for their sustenance, spend a huge proportion of their time asleep. They have simply evolved ways to enter the sleep state while remaining standing, and enable their long digestion process to continue.
We are the anomaly. And it's unclear how much of our sleep-wake cycle, tilted as it is so far towards the waking state, is a very recent artifact of our cultural development where automated timekeeping societies seem to have increased fitness over non-timekeeping societies.
I don't rely on epidemiologists to solve quantum physics problems. Similarly, I don't rely on physicists to solve vampire plague problems.
while I was "asleep" (i.e. unaware)
While you're asleep your brain and body are engaged a massive set of synchronised, necessary metabolic activities and cognitive processed that are essential for "you" to exist. Proof? Eliminate sleep from a human and see how long before death or derangement ensues.
One lecture I had from a sleep biologist impressed me immensely. He was demonstrating all the different cycles that are engaged or differently regulated during human sleep. Then there were a bunch of comparitive analyses of other, similar organisms. The biggest mystery about sleep is not why we spend so much time asleep, said he, but why we spend so much time awake. The waking state is so inefficient from a reproductive and safety perspective that it's mind-boggling.
Anyway, don't dismiss sleep as that "nothing" that happens between wake states. It's a big something... we just don't know what exactly yet.
it looks like we might get the AI thing solved in at least 50 years.
It's *always* ~50 years away.
Endless customization is for geeks
When the expectation *is* convenience, your thesis dissolves.
It simply isn't "endless" if you only have to do it once. Around two years ago I specified my favourite font and type size in my ereader. I also selected my preferred autoscroll speed. I haven't had to change them since. Total time spent: around 5 minutes.
If "everyone else" can manage playlists, friend lists, GMail themes, cable boxes, and voicemail (among others), they can manage ereader customisation. I think you have an unusually pessimistic view of people's abilities, or their desire for control over their environment.
Most publications require articles to be submitted in LaTeX, which only outputs PDF, DVI and PS documents
This is generally true for technical publications, but less true in life and health sciences where many publications accept other submission formats. However, having had to originally write articles in plain old TeX before LaTex became common (and even, sadly, nroff), and having had to wrestle with defining output bounds, this is not an easy problem to solve. But I'm confident that new generations of developers and designers will solve it as paper becomes increasingly deprecated for technical documents.
Obviously a Kindle TeX parser or LaTex editor is required...
What you say may be true but, hopefully, as people replace printed output with screen readers, PDFs will come to be seen again as an output option, not a final source document format. BP (Before PDFs), postscript was simply one of a number of output choices. Adobe has been effectively racing the beam ever since, adding endless cruft onto this creaky, inflexible format to promote its popularity.
The experience of reading a PDF on any small screen device, versus reading the same content through an ereader, is so qualitatively different that I don't PDFs can maintain their mindshare. All that zooming in and out, dragging, pinching, clicking. It's just tedious and needlessly complicated.
You say people don't care about being able to customise their reading experience to their own preferences but I think you're wrong. It's simply that most people haven't been given the opportunity to do so. Similar de facto regimes of non-choice have existed in the past, but they have usually faded away as markets have matured and delivered more competitors or regulation offering options.