There is no difference. How do you propose to censor speech if not by the threat of consequence?
You can't if you get punishment confused with consequences - but calling "punishment" "consequences" is a circular argument.
To use the cliche'd "Shouting 'fire!' in a crowded room" example: the 'consequence' is the risk of causing a dangerous stampede. Acceptable 'punishment' is what comes after you've convinced a court that the stampede actually happened, or presented compelling evidence that it was a serious risk. Unacceptable censorship is banning the discussion of combustion in a public place based on a hypothetical worst-case "stampede" scenario.
As a non-USAian it took me a while to work out that the spirit of the US Bill of Rights is to protect local government, corporations and organised religions against (specifically) the federal government, and that any benefit for individuals implicit in the letter of the law is a nice bonus.
The European convention of human rights, by contrast, seems to be mainly about enumerating all the exceptions to freedom of speech, so that the government can micro-manage your freedoms for you. Sounds cynical, but freedom is a paradox, and if you want to enshrine all human rights in law, that's the tarpit you end up in.
I think it is true, though, that both of these examples only prohibit suppression of free speech by government - they don't specifically oblige that government to prevent others from restricting your free speech (but then that really is a can of worms, and a lot of the people who pushed for Amendment 1 or Article 10 to protect their right to express their views really don't want to eat their own dogfood).
However, you should never rely on the law of the land as the last word on right and wrong, and general freedom of speech (insofar as it can be protected without descending into paradox) is a good thing.
It's kind of the paradox of democracy -- how do you square the rights of a free society against those would use those rights to advocate against them or overthrow them?
The first step is to accept that it is a paradox, that no solution is going to be perfect and you're not going to fix everything. Politely ignore anybody who speaks in absolute terms or comes up with trite little not-even-wrong aphorisms like "you have the freedom to do anything you want except the freedom to take away freedom from others".
Then, before imposing any laws, you have to remember that the acid test is not how they will be interpreted by judges and juries, but how it will be interpreted by publishers, employers, landlords, public institutions, police, security guards etc. who will tend to interpret them in the broadest, most restrictive possible way to cover their own backs.
Everything is a risk/benefit tradeoff - and the risk can never be zero.
In the case of freedom of speech, though, it's possible to be almost absolutist if you insist that any activity you do want to control (harassment, incitement to violence, etc.) must involve actions or behaviours that go beyond the words that are said or published. So, if you want to prosecute someone you should not simply have to prove that they uttered the word "fire" in a public theatre, but show evidence that they intentionally set out to cause disruption*. You can prohibit "inciting violence" if you like, but it needs to be absolutely literal, or supported by other activities. Harassment should need to include a pattern of behaviour that shows victimisation. Once you start banning speech that might induce panic, could be interpreted as inciting violence or that made the victim feel harassed the slippery slope beckons.
Unfortunately, both religious extremists and politicians do like to pretend that they have the solution to everything, while lawyers lurk to apply 20:20 hindsight to anybody who takes a risk and loses, and lawmakers who seem to think that if a legal decision misinterpreting their law is put right on the third appeal then everything is rosy.
(* Of course, although this is a popular example, they're quite rightly going to that special hell reserved for people who talk at the theatre *anyway* so free speech isn't really relevant)
Amazon decided to pull a book because of punctuation.
No, as a dozen people have posted before you, they decided to pull a book because of a technical typesetting error (Unicode minus signs in place of hyphens) that would screw up page formatting (hyphens are significant to text-wrapping and auto-hyphenation algorithms) and text-to-speech (or should I say 'textminustominusspeech'?)
I guess next time it sentence structure, or maybe using certain words too many times.
That's exactly what a decent copy editor would look at (as well as knowing when to use an m-dash, a minus sign or a hyphen) and would be a valuable service to self-publishing authors. Bring it on.
And words in sentences lead to ideas,
...and words in sentences communicate ideas more effectively when they are properly spelled, punctuated and typeset. That doesn't affect the message.
Not sure how you can "assess demand" for something like this with a limited trial. The "demand" would be for a substantial network of swap stations that allowed people to treat EVs like gas cars and not have to plan long trips around meal breaks at superchargers. They might expand the market to customers who have currently rejected EVs because of the charging problem: if you already have a Tesla you probably looked into the charging situation and decided that it fits your motoring needs, so you're not going to be falling over yourself to pay for a battery swap instead.
Then, the battery replacement needs to be integrated with some sort of lease scheme whereby you don't actually own the battery which (some EVs use this approach anyway) which would make sense in many ways, but if you've already bought your car, complete with battery, are you going to want to swap it out?
The other issue is the long-term scalability of the "free supercharge" model - its fine with the current level of Tesla ownership, but if EVs go mainstream provision will have to ramp up dramatically (think: whole parking lots wired up for charging) or it will be common to turn up at a station and find all the bays occupied by fully-charged cars waiting for their owners to drift back from their leisurely lunches and shopping trips. A battery-swap system might be the only way to turn round enough customers. "Free charging" certainly isn't going to be long-term sustainable - but while its there, its going to be hard to persuade people to pay for battery-swaps.
The decision was good. Apple did not have a monopoly. People could choose not to use Apple products and still listen to music.
What's more, people could choose not to use Apple's iTunes music store and still listen to music on their iPod. Reports of this case always seem to airbrush over the fact that the "lock out" only ever affected competing DRM formats: there was no problem with playing unprotected MP3 or AAC files from any source.
So let me get this straight, so people with visas and greencards can be deported for many reasons including petty crimes or mistakes on applications, which has happened, but this illegal immigrant is complaining that his rights have been violated?
People with visas etc. sign away their right to contest deportation when they fill in their landing card (or click "I agree" on the new electronic system) - along with declaring that they're not a drug dealer, convicted felon, terrorist or war criminal (so, if you turn out to be any of those, they can book you for giving false information whether or not you've actually committed any other crime in the US).
For example, a steam engine can use any heat source as fuel, so it may be useful if you can easily get wood or coal, but not diesel or electricity.
...and if you can't get wood or coal, a horse is better than a steam engine. That doesn't make a wood-powered steam car a viable alternative for the daily commute (it might be carbon neutral but it sure as hell ain't smog neutral).
IIRC, a film camera can operate at lower temperatures than a digital one.
Until you use up your 36 exposures and have to change the film wearing thick gloves. Probably why they went digital with Rosetta and all those Mars probes - not many 1 hour photo shops out there.
You're kinda repeating my point, though: you can often find a niche market for which an old technology is a perfect fit, in which case that technology will stay around for ages. That doesn't mean that it is "better" for the vast majority of uses, though.
Vinyl being analog by limitation of the medium can't contain this tracking information.
For the signal to survive being compressed to MP3, it would pretty much have to be encoded as a modulated audio signal that the encoder would treat as part of the music, and there's no technical reason why you couldn't include 'secret data' on a vinyl LP using the same technique... However, since thousands of copies are stamped out from each master (that applies to vinyl *and* CD) it wouldn't be much good as a way of tracing who made the copy.
Plus, it could interfere with the messages from Satan that you hear when you play your heavy metal LPs backwards, and He really wouldn't like that.
In other news, the last surviving makers of wax cylinders and shellac 78s are probably doing quite well from their own perspective. I'm sure that camera film will continue to be available for enthusiasts and specialist purposes for many years - just not in a high street near you. Since people still ride horses, I assume that there are still a few blacksmiths going strong. Then, a couple of years back, those people build a brand new steam locomotive... That doesn't mean that film cameras, Edison phonographs, horses or steam trains are coming back, or are better than their modern replacements.
I'd be quite unsurprised if "new" vinyl LPs end up being more widely available than "new" Audio CDs. Not because they're better, but they're more iconic and the machines that make them will be easier to keep running without huge economies of scale.
Deckard was not a replicant, according to both PKD and the screenwriter.
I don't think PKD's opinion counts, since the film was so hugely different from the book, and missed out lots of plot points like the "mood organ", the social pressure to own an animal (or an electric fake), the robot disc jockey and the whole Mercerist religion (which made the VK test look suspiciously like a test of religious dogma). Deckard was human and his memories hadn't been implanted, but everything he remembered and felt had, one way or another, been an artifice.
It was a story about midwifes in the late fifties. One of the midwifes was a chain smoker and even smoked around children.
Yes - in the 1950s, nobody would have batted an eyelid at that (its probably a detail from the real-life memoirs the series was inspired by). My dad was in hospital with a lung infection in the 50s. They came round the ward with a cart handing out free cigarettes.
it does not in my opinion add anything to the story.
Really? It shows one aspect of how social practices and attitudes have changed in the last 50 years which is the whole bloody point of the show! Should they have quietly corrected all the now-discredited medical practices while they were at it? Perhaps they should have shown more women in senior positions instead type-casting them as midwifes and nurses?
Perhaps you should stick to watching Life on Mars instead - then you have a modern-day avatar to call the 1970s characters out on any behaviour which would not be acceptable in 2010, lest you thought the producers were endorsing it.
It is also a sell out to the smoking industry.
Just because they really are out to get you, it doesn't mean that you're not paranoid.
...and kids at the time clamoured to get a spectrum, C64 or whatever because it was a games machine and nothing else to them. Sure, you could program them but very few did.
You seem to be mourning an mythical alternate universe where 50% of kids pestered their parents for a Nascom, UK101 or a Kim 1 so that they could learn programming or digital electronics. Sorry - that was just a handful of us nerds, it never had mass appeal.
What the 1980s games boom did was create mass-market demand for computer hardware, which brought the prices down for everybody. Plus, for those of us who were interested in programming, it ensured that there was money to be made from knocking out simple games or handy utilities.
The "death of programming" came later, with increasing sophistication, when games started having the development (and marketing) budgets of a major movie instead of something you could bang out over a wet weekend, and the rise of consoles that you couldn't program yourself or sell software for...
I'm hearing lots of carping, but not a lot of citerefs of SF stories set in the far future that do honestly depict the impact advanced technology would have on society, culture, etc. at least in a way Mr. Stross would expect it to. Any/.ers have any in mind?
Well, there's the classics - both "The Time Machine" and "Brave New World" deal with societies dramatically transformed by technology, and deal with the storytelling challenges by contriving to have a contemporary narrator arrive on the scene via plot device.
Then, Asimov's Elijah Bailey sequence is really about two societies divided by their preparedness to embrace particular technologies. In fact... a society of people that are repulsed by actual physical proximity but think nothing of exposing themselves online... sound familiar?:-)
More recently, someone has already mention Iain M. Banks and The Culture... although its interesting to note that most of the actual stories just used the post-scarcity Culture as a backdrop to Special Circumstances agents interfering with more 20th-century-or-earlier-like civilisations (including 1970s Earth in "State of the Art").
Greg Egan has had a good go at tackling posthumans: most of the characters in Diaspora are intelligent software, and the remaining flesh-and-blood communities have diversified so much that different groups find it hard to communicate.
However, a lot of the "failures" pick their anachronistic societies for good dramatic reasons, not through lack of thought: I'd say that the (new) Battlestar Galactica quite deliberately made their society look like 1980s earth with spaceships. Firefly wasn't really a prediction that we'd all be wearing wild west costumes and talking cowboy in 500 years time: but that piece of whimsy saved a whole shedload of exposition about the structure of that society (also, if you're colonising, not only can horses make more horses out of grass, you can eat them if you have to: try doing that with high-tech a fusion-powered locomotion unit).
Laws trump contracts pretty much everywhere and in every circumstance.
Yes, but the laws need to exist first. UK, EU, Australia etc. tend to have stronger consumer protection laws than the US (which, AFAIK, vary state by state) and often have authorities that enforce them rather than leaving it up to individuals to sue. You'll notice that big firms like Apple are often getting slapped by the authorities in these countries (e.g. for selling extended warranties that partly duplicate statutory rights) c.f. in the US (where they get hit with class-action lawsuits instead).
NB, looks like Trading Standards have had a little chat with the hotel in TFA.
Our company prices disk storage at $10,000 per terabyte.
I can quite understand why maintaining 100TB of storage might indeed cost $1,000,000 over some arbitrary period, if that includes hourly backups, off-site backups, 30-minute call-out engineer support, cost of running a machine room, cost of maintaining network infrastucture and cost compliance with laws governing storage of financial records, employee/customer personal data etc.
However, (a) it doesn't follow that 101TB of storage costs $1,010,000/year (that figure will include huge fixed costs) and (b) maybe, just maybe, not everything the company stores on hard disc needs a one-size-fits-all solution with hourly backups, off-site backups, 30-minute call-out blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Your managers are protecting _your_ interests by not letting you use that drive. Show a little goddamn respect.
How about the management show the employee a little respect and let him order whatever bits of sundry equipment he needs to do his job?
I think the sort or critical thinking that bosses don't want is the sort that asks "how many hours of my time do I need to save to justify the cost of a $100 hard drive?" or "if it really costs the company $500 and takes 3 weeks to procure something that Amazon could have on my desk in 24 hours for $100, maybe its not me that should be under pressure to make efficiency savings?" or even "If its all because of legal compliance issues, why doesn't big business club together, rent a few senators and get the legislation quietly fixed in a rider to the next fisheries bill?"
Are you laboring under the illusion that the only way to pay a machine in the US is with cash?
No, just that chip+pin makes more sense for taking card payments on machines than... well, last time I remember using a card in a machine in the US it was swipe and... Hey, fingers crossed, who needs a PIN?
Plus, they do have an awful lot of those bill readers.
KFC and Burger King have been using touchscreen order & pay kiosks for some time, and I encountered it in a McD's for the first time about a month ago. The fact that we all use chip-and-PIN debit cards (and some people are already using NFC cards) probably helps - having to include the facility to feed dollar bills into a slot would put a crimp in it somewhat.
Anyone who thinks self drive is coming to a vehicle near them soon is living in cloud cuckoo land.
I wasn't aware that Google had promised to have self-driving cars in the shops for Christmas. You have to start somewhere - and since any large-scale adoption of self-driving cars is going to require the cooperation of government, that means starting the PR campaign early, not just the R&D.
I think its great that some of the billions made from the internet boom are going into blue-sky projects like self-driving cars, electric cars and space travel. Will Google be selling a viable self-driving private car before Tesla are selling a 300-mile-range compact for the price of a mid-range gas burner, or will we still be waiting when SpaceX gets to Mars? It'll be fun finding out.
Self drive cars might work on a closed track where the number of external factors are limited and can be controlled. e.g. an airport loop, or a theme park transfer.
...large business/university campuses, shopping malls, an alternative to trams/personal mass transit systems that vastly reduces the amount of "civil engineering" needed... Sounds like a business opportunity for Google to me.
Because the people who don't like emacs don't use it. No one builds software with emacs as a dependency and then tried to get every Linux environment to use it as a core dependency.
True, although GNU info... er, sorry, GNU info had a good college try at inflicting the emacs help system on the world.
So the Mac Pro doesn't really make sense anymore unless you need its graphics cards to support OpenCL applications, or you want the parallelism of 8 or 12 cores, or you need its ECC RAM.
The Mac Pro never did make financial sense unless you needed those things (or 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports).
Apple's range lacks a basic quad-i7 headless desktop with good "consumer" graphics cards - and it will go on lacking it because,
(a) as other PC manufacturers are finding, there's no bloody money in mid-range mini towers, and other PC manufacturers don't have to bankroll the development of their own operating system and loss-leading application suite.
(b) it would cannibalize sales of iMacs, Pros and laptops which do make money.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no difference. How do you propose to censor speech if not by the threat of consequence?
You can't if you get punishment confused with consequences - but calling "punishment" "consequences" is a circular argument.
To use the cliche'd "Shouting 'fire!' in a crowded room" example: the 'consequence' is the risk of causing a dangerous stampede. Acceptable 'punishment' is what comes after you've convinced a court that the stampede actually happened, or presented compelling evidence that it was a serious risk. Unacceptable censorship is banning the discussion of combustion in a public place based on a hypothetical worst-case "stampede" scenario.
No, freedom of speech is the freedom to offend (or rather, "criticize") your government.
I think you're confusing laws like the 1st Amendment to the USA Constitution, or article 10 or the European convention on human rights with the wider, concept of freedom of speech as an ideal. Even the 1st Amendment goes further than you suggest, but I think you've hit on the original motivation behind it.
As a non-USAian it took me a while to work out that the spirit of the US Bill of Rights is to protect local government, corporations and organised religions against (specifically) the federal government, and that any benefit for individuals implicit in the letter of the law is a nice bonus.
The European convention of human rights, by contrast, seems to be mainly about enumerating all the exceptions to freedom of speech, so that the government can micro-manage your freedoms for you. Sounds cynical, but freedom is a paradox, and if you want to enshrine all human rights in law, that's the tarpit you end up in.
I think it is true, though, that both of these examples only prohibit suppression of free speech by government - they don't specifically oblige that government to prevent others from restricting your free speech (but then that really is a can of worms, and a lot of the people who pushed for Amendment 1 or Article 10 to protect their right to express their views really don't want to eat their own dogfood).
However, you should never rely on the law of the land as the last word on right and wrong, and general freedom of speech (insofar as it can be protected without descending into paradox) is a good thing.
It's kind of the paradox of democracy -- how do you square the rights of a free society against those would use those rights to advocate against them or overthrow them?
The first step is to accept that it is a paradox, that no solution is going to be perfect and you're not going to fix everything. Politely ignore anybody who speaks in absolute terms or comes up with trite little not-even-wrong aphorisms like "you have the freedom to do anything you want except the freedom to take away freedom from others".
Then, before imposing any laws, you have to remember that the acid test is not how they will be interpreted by judges and juries, but how it will be interpreted by publishers, employers, landlords, public institutions, police, security guards etc. who will tend to interpret them in the broadest, most restrictive possible way to cover their own backs.
Everything is a risk/benefit tradeoff - and the risk can never be zero.
In the case of freedom of speech, though, it's possible to be almost absolutist if you insist that any activity you do want to control (harassment, incitement to violence, etc.) must involve actions or behaviours that go beyond the words that are said or published. So, if you want to prosecute someone you should not simply have to prove that they uttered the word "fire" in a public theatre, but show evidence that they intentionally set out to cause disruption*. You can prohibit "inciting violence" if you like, but it needs to be absolutely literal, or supported by other activities. Harassment should need to include a pattern of behaviour that shows victimisation. Once you start banning speech that might induce panic, could be interpreted as inciting violence or that made the victim feel harassed the slippery slope beckons.
Unfortunately, both religious extremists and politicians do like to pretend that they have the solution to everything, while lawyers lurk to apply 20:20 hindsight to anybody who takes a risk and loses, and lawmakers who seem to think that if a legal decision misinterpreting their law is put right on the third appeal then everything is rosy.
(* Of course, although this is a popular example, they're quite rightly going to that special hell reserved for people who talk at the theatre *anyway* so free speech isn't really relevant)
Amazon decided to pull a book because of punctuation.
No, as a dozen people have posted before you, they decided to pull a book because of a technical typesetting error (Unicode minus signs in place of hyphens) that would screw up page formatting (hyphens are significant to text-wrapping and auto-hyphenation algorithms) and text-to-speech (or should I say 'textminustominusspeech'?)
I guess next time it sentence structure, or maybe using certain words too many times.
That's exactly what a decent copy editor would look at (as well as knowing when to use an m-dash, a minus sign or a hyphen) and would be a valuable service to self-publishing authors. Bring it on.
And words in sentences lead to ideas,
...and words in sentences communicate ideas more effectively when they are properly spelled, punctuated and typeset. That doesn't affect the message.
and assess demand" for a swapping service.
Not sure how you can "assess demand" for something like this with a limited trial. The "demand" would be for a substantial network of swap stations that allowed people to treat EVs like gas cars and not have to plan long trips around meal breaks at superchargers. They might expand the market to customers who have currently rejected EVs because of the charging problem: if you already have a Tesla you probably looked into the charging situation and decided that it fits your motoring needs, so you're not going to be falling over yourself to pay for a battery swap instead.
Then, the battery replacement needs to be integrated with some sort of lease scheme whereby you don't actually own the battery which (some EVs use this approach anyway) which would make sense in many ways, but if you've already bought your car, complete with battery, are you going to want to swap it out?
The other issue is the long-term scalability of the "free supercharge" model - its fine with the current level of Tesla ownership, but if EVs go mainstream provision will have to ramp up dramatically (think: whole parking lots wired up for charging) or it will be common to turn up at a station and find all the bays occupied by fully-charged cars waiting for their owners to drift back from their leisurely lunches and shopping trips. A battery-swap system might be the only way to turn round enough customers. "Free charging" certainly isn't going to be long-term sustainable - but while its there, its going to be hard to persuade people to pay for battery-swaps.
The decision was good. Apple did not have a monopoly. People could choose not to use Apple products and still listen to music.
What's more, people could choose not to use Apple's iTunes music store and still listen to music on their iPod. Reports of this case always seem to airbrush over the fact that the "lock out" only ever affected competing DRM formats: there was no problem with playing unprotected MP3 or AAC files from any source.
So let me get this straight, so people with visas and greencards can be deported for many reasons including petty crimes or mistakes on applications, which has happened, but this illegal immigrant is complaining that his rights have been violated?
People with visas etc. sign away their right to contest deportation when they fill in their landing card (or click "I agree" on the new electronic system) - along with declaring that they're not a drug dealer, convicted felon, terrorist or war criminal (so, if you turn out to be any of those, they can book you for giving false information whether or not you've actually committed any other crime in the US).
For example, a steam engine can use any heat source as fuel, so it may be useful if you can easily get wood or coal, but not diesel or electricity.
...and if you can't get wood or coal, a horse is better than a steam engine. That doesn't make a wood-powered steam car a viable alternative for the daily commute (it might be carbon neutral but it sure as hell ain't smog neutral).
IIRC, a film camera can operate at lower temperatures than a digital one.
Until you use up your 36 exposures and have to change the film wearing thick gloves. Probably why they went digital with Rosetta and all those Mars probes - not many 1 hour photo shops out there.
You're kinda repeating my point, though: you can often find a niche market for which an old technology is a perfect fit, in which case that technology will stay around for ages. That doesn't mean that it is "better" for the vast majority of uses, though.
Vinyl being analog by limitation of the medium can't contain this tracking information.
For the signal to survive being compressed to MP3, it would pretty much have to be encoded as a modulated audio signal that the encoder would treat as part of the music, and there's no technical reason why you couldn't include 'secret data' on a vinyl LP using the same technique... However, since thousands of copies are stamped out from each master (that applies to vinyl *and* CD) it wouldn't be much good as a way of tracing who made the copy.
Plus, it could interfere with the messages from Satan that you hear when you play your heavy metal LPs backwards, and He really wouldn't like that.
In other news, the last surviving makers of wax cylinders and shellac 78s are probably doing quite well from their own perspective. I'm sure that camera film will continue to be available for enthusiasts and specialist purposes for many years - just not in a high street near you. Since people still ride horses, I assume that there are still a few blacksmiths going strong. Then, a couple of years back, those people build a brand new steam locomotive... That doesn't mean that film cameras, Edison phonographs, horses or steam trains are coming back, or are better than their modern replacements.
I'd be quite unsurprised if "new" vinyl LPs end up being more widely available than "new" Audio CDs. Not because they're better, but they're more iconic and the machines that make them will be easier to keep running without huge economies of scale.
Deckard was not a replicant, according to both PKD and the screenwriter.
I don't think PKD's opinion counts, since the film was so hugely different from the book, and missed out lots of plot points like the "mood organ", the social pressure to own an animal (or an electric fake), the robot disc jockey and the whole Mercerist religion (which made the VK test look suspiciously like a test of religious dogma). Deckard was human and his memories hadn't been implanted, but everything he remembered and felt had, one way or another, been an artifice.
It was a story about midwifes in the late fifties. One of the midwifes was a chain smoker and even smoked around children.
Yes - in the 1950s, nobody would have batted an eyelid at that (its probably a detail from the real-life memoirs the series was inspired by). My dad was in hospital with a lung infection in the 50s. They came round the ward with a cart handing out free cigarettes.
it does not in my opinion add anything to the story.
Really? It shows one aspect of how social practices and attitudes have changed in the last 50 years which is the whole bloody point of the show! Should they have quietly corrected all the now-discredited medical practices while they were at it? Perhaps they should have shown more women in senior positions instead type-casting them as midwifes and nurses?
Perhaps you should stick to watching Life on Mars instead - then you have a modern-day avatar to call the 1970s characters out on any behaviour which would not be acceptable in 2010, lest you thought the producers were endorsing it.
It is also a sell out to the smoking industry.
Just because they really are out to get you, it doesn't mean that you're not paranoid.
...and kids at the time clamoured to get a spectrum, C64 or whatever because it was a games machine and nothing else to them. Sure, you could program them but very few did.
You seem to be mourning an mythical alternate universe where 50% of kids pestered their parents for a Nascom, UK101 or a Kim 1 so that they could learn programming or digital electronics. Sorry - that was just a handful of us nerds, it never had mass appeal.
What the 1980s games boom did was create mass-market demand for computer hardware, which brought the prices down for everybody. Plus, for those of us who were interested in programming, it ensured that there was money to be made from knocking out simple games or handy utilities.
The "death of programming" came later, with increasing sophistication, when games started having the development (and marketing) budgets of a major movie instead of something you could bang out over a wet weekend, and the rise of consoles that you couldn't program yourself or sell software for...
I'm hearing lots of carping, but not a lot of citerefs of SF stories set in the far future that do honestly depict the impact advanced technology would have on society, culture, etc. at least in a way Mr. Stross would expect it to. Any /.ers have any in mind?
Well, there's the classics - both "The Time Machine" and "Brave New World" deal with societies dramatically transformed by technology, and deal with the storytelling challenges by contriving to have a contemporary narrator arrive on the scene via plot device.
Then, Asimov's Elijah Bailey sequence is really about two societies divided by their preparedness to embrace particular technologies. In fact... a society of people that are repulsed by actual physical proximity but think nothing of exposing themselves online... sound familiar? :-)
More recently, someone has already mention Iain M. Banks and The Culture... although its interesting to note that most of the actual stories just used the post-scarcity Culture as a backdrop to Special Circumstances agents interfering with more 20th-century-or-earlier-like civilisations (including 1970s Earth in "State of the Art").
Greg Egan has had a good go at tackling posthumans: most of the characters in Diaspora are intelligent software, and the remaining flesh-and-blood communities have diversified so much that different groups find it hard to communicate.
However, a lot of the "failures" pick their anachronistic societies for good dramatic reasons, not through lack of thought: I'd say that the (new) Battlestar Galactica quite deliberately made their society look like 1980s earth with spaceships. Firefly wasn't really a prediction that we'd all be wearing wild west costumes and talking cowboy in 500 years time: but that piece of whimsy saved a whole shedload of exposition about the structure of that society (also, if you're colonising, not only can horses make more horses out of grass, you can eat them if you have to: try doing that with high-tech a fusion-powered locomotion unit).
Nah, space isn't for silly things like computers - it's for important things like non-stick frying pans and biros that write upside down*.
(The comms satellites, GPS, remote sensing and general coolness of landing robots on comets and stuff might count for something, too)
* Don't bother with the snopes links - I'm being silly.
Laws trump contracts pretty much everywhere and in every circumstance.
Yes, but the laws need to exist first. UK, EU, Australia etc. tend to have stronger consumer protection laws than the US (which, AFAIK, vary state by state) and often have authorities that enforce them rather than leaving it up to individuals to sue. You'll notice that big firms like Apple are often getting slapped by the authorities in these countries (e.g. for selling extended warranties that partly duplicate statutory rights) c.f. in the US (where they get hit with class-action lawsuits instead).
NB, looks like Trading Standards have had a little chat with the hotel in TFA.
Retail or not, contracts are binding.
In the UK, national trading standards laws trump point-of-sale contracts in retail transactions.
...because otherwise you'd need to take a lawyer with you every time you bought groceries.
"Is this testing whether I'm a republican or a lesbian, Mr Deckard?"
Just don't ask the subjects about their mother...
Our company prices disk storage at $10,000 per terabyte.
I can quite understand why maintaining 100TB of storage might indeed cost $1,000,000 over some arbitrary period, if that includes hourly backups, off-site backups, 30-minute call-out engineer support, cost of running a machine room, cost of maintaining network infrastucture and cost compliance with laws governing storage of financial records, employee/customer personal data etc.
However, (a) it doesn't follow that 101TB of storage costs $1,010,000/year (that figure will include huge fixed costs) and (b) maybe, just maybe, not everything the company stores on hard disc needs a one-size-fits-all solution with hourly backups, off-site backups, 30-minute call-out blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Your managers are protecting _your_ interests by not letting you use that drive. Show a little goddamn respect.
How about the management show the employee a little respect and let him order whatever bits of sundry equipment he needs to do his job?
I think the sort or critical thinking that bosses don't want is the sort that asks "how many hours of my time do I need to save to justify the cost of a $100 hard drive?" or "if it really costs the company $500 and takes 3 weeks to procure something that Amazon could have on my desk in 24 hours for $100, maybe its not me that should be under pressure to make efficiency savings?" or even "If its all because of legal compliance issues, why doesn't big business club together, rent a few senators and get the legislation quietly fixed in a rider to the next fisheries bill?"
Are you laboring under the illusion that the only way to pay a machine in the US is with cash?
No, just that chip+pin makes more sense for taking card payments on machines than... well, last time I remember using a card in a machine in the US it was swipe and... Hey, fingers crossed, who needs a PIN?
Plus, they do have an awful lot of those bill readers.
KFC and Burger King have been using touchscreen order & pay kiosks for some time, and I encountered it in a McD's for the first time about a month ago. The fact that we all use chip-and-PIN debit cards (and some people are already using NFC cards) probably helps - having to include the facility to feed dollar bills into a slot would put a crimp in it somewhat.
Anyone who thinks self drive is coming to a vehicle near them soon is living in cloud cuckoo land.
I wasn't aware that Google had promised to have self-driving cars in the shops for Christmas. You have to start somewhere - and since any large-scale adoption of self-driving cars is going to require the cooperation of government, that means starting the PR campaign early, not just the R&D.
I think its great that some of the billions made from the internet boom are going into blue-sky projects like self-driving cars, electric cars and space travel. Will Google be selling a viable self-driving private car before Tesla are selling a 300-mile-range compact for the price of a mid-range gas burner, or will we still be waiting when SpaceX gets to Mars? It'll be fun finding out.
Self drive cars might work on a closed track where the number of external factors are limited and can be controlled. e.g. an airport loop, or a theme park transfer.
...large business/university campuses, shopping malls, an alternative to trams/personal mass transit systems that vastly reduces the amount of "civil engineering" needed... Sounds like a business opportunity for Google to me.
Because the people who don't like emacs don't use it. No one builds software with emacs as a dependency and then tried to get every Linux environment to use it as a core dependency.
True, although GNU info... er, sorry, GNU info had a good college try at inflicting the emacs help system on the world.
So the Mac Pro doesn't really make sense anymore unless you need its graphics cards to support OpenCL applications, or you want the parallelism of 8 or 12 cores, or you need its ECC RAM.
The Mac Pro never did make financial sense unless you needed those things (or 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports).
Apple's range lacks a basic quad-i7 headless desktop with good "consumer" graphics cards - and it will go on lacking it because,
(a) as other PC manufacturers are finding, there's no bloody money in mid-range mini towers, and other PC manufacturers don't have to bankroll the development of their own operating system and loss-leading application suite.
(b) it would cannibalize sales of iMacs, Pros and laptops which do make money.