'Reboot,' in Hollywood-speak, means "Forget cannon. Forget the comics. Forget everything. Get a focus group of our target demographic and ask them what they want. Get a committee of corporate hack writers to write what's going to sell."
That doesn't really describe some of the recent famous series' reboots. I wouldn't say that Batman Begins or Casino Royale seemed to be written by a committee of corporate hack writers based on focus group testing. Casino Royale was, from what I understand, more true to the source material than most of the other Bond films. The newer Batman movies definitely take some liberties, but generally towards making it into a more realistic, engaging, and coherent story. I even liked the Hulk reboot much better than the movie that came a few years before. It wasn't the best movie ever, but I thought it was decent.
The Superman reboot wasn't great, but I don't think it was artless. It was clearly meant to mix the current sensibilities with some of the aesthetics from the old 80s movie, and on that count it worked fairly well. If you remember Superman 1&2 fondly, then Superman Returns is probably going to kick up some pleasant nostalgia.
Not only are the current crop of reboots pretty decent, but it's actually the way culture should work. We should be retelling and reframing old stories, making them new again, and trying to keep them relevant. We don't need to throw out the classics, but "new stories" are created by putting a new spin on an old story. Personally, I would have preferred a Star Wars reboot to the creation of "Special Editions".
JUST LET THEM BE KIDS, for Christ sake! Stop acting like there is something wrong with them because they're not perfect, or act differently than you expect, or make stupid mistakes.
I think part of the problem is that the parents themselves are feeling a similar pressure. There's so much advice on how to raise your kids (both science and pop-psychology self-help crap) and how to turn them into perfect little geniuses. Meanwhile there's also a lot of pressure on how to be perfect yourself, how to eat right, how to think the right things and be happy all the time. Our culture really can't handle the idea that people aren't happy all the time. There's so much advice on grieving that assumes the goal is to "get over it" as quickly as possible. We're all supposed to be happy shiny 24-hour party people, smiling all day long, happy to talk to everyone. When you don't live up to that, there are drugs. Social anxiety disorder drugs and antidepressants.
And then on the news, there's constant news about child molesters and Amber Alerts. There's constant news about the dangers in everyday household items and everyday activities. If you let your kids run around outside, you're branded as a reckless and irresponsible parent. You're supposed to schedule your kids time 24 hours a day, including homework time, sports, hobbies, bla bla bla.
I'm not even a parent, but I could imagine how it would drive people insane.
I have a cute anecdote about a friend who graduated with a psychology degree and left her job as an assistant to become a grade school teacher because most of the psychologists at the Manhattan practice had more psychological problems than their patients.
I've always had the theory that people who are psychiatrists are psychiatrists because they're interested in the cause of psychological problems (obviously), and that people who are highly interested in psychological problems are usually trying to diagnose themselves. Therefore, a high level of psychiatrists are probably crazy.
Look, I'm not saying that social networking sites can't improve their security and become more robust and configurable platforms, but I still think information posted on them have a kind of inherent publicness.
What I mean is this: If you sent me an email with some kind of personal information, like say that you just broke up with your girlfriend and were sad, I might hesitate to share that information with others. Even if there were a couple other people on copy on the email, I might think, "Well he clearly chose to only send that to a couple of people, so maybe this isn't something he wants to be talked about outside of those people." Not that it's even necessarily a secret, but if you share something personal with me, I try to use some discretion about sharing that information with others.
However, if you put the same information onto a post on a social networking site, then in my mind it's public. If you put up a post on Facebook saying you broke up with your girlfriend and were sad, I would assume that meant that you intended for it to be public information. Now you might set it so your coworkers can't see that information or something, but that still doesn't cause the same mental trigger in me to say, "this might be private information and I should be discrete."
Now admittedly this is just me, and you might see things differently. These things are the subject of subtle social mores, and it may change over time. It's just to me that the point of social networking is to broadcast information without choosing particular recipients, and therefore it's public. If you wanted to choose particular recipients and keep the information to those recipients, you'd send an email.
As I see it, that's not really the social networking site's fault, but your friend's fault. Your friend could put up a website with your personal information and a lot of embarrassing photos.
It's not about dignity, as clearly illustrated above...Law enforcement must have grounds to conduct a search.
Then why is it ok for them to search my luggage, ask me to empty my pockets, and pat me down? They're already conducting a search, and even conducting a searching me. The only difference I see between a pat down and a body scan is that a body scan is potentially more embarrassing.
If the government *REALLY* wanted to save lives, they would help people eat healthier (which might help some of our health problems), work to improve safety in cars, pull people over for texting and driving...all things that cause many more deaths than plan crashes.
I agree entirely. Heart disease and car accidents are a couple big killers, but if you put a tax on fatty foods or talk about increasing public transportation, then people start complaining about socialism and bemoaning their loss of freedom. On the other hand, if the government suspends habeas corpus, tortures prisoners, and conducts wiretaps and invasive searches without cause, everyone's fine with it because "we're fighting terrorists". It doesn't make any sense to me.
There's the issue of context, and these rights are still subject to reason.... I suppose if the consensus is that you feel like you've been stripped of your dignity by being asked to step into one, then it probably is too far.
So no, I wouldn't say that all rules should be applied consistently all the time. I'm saying that we should apply these sorts of rules carefully, based on context, and it should be to some degree subject to what people believe to be acceptable. The rules for going to school vs. walking down the street vs. going to an event where the President will be present vs. sitting in your own home might each have different levels of security. That's fine and expected, and we shouldn't pretend that all of these situations are the same, or that the rules of one context must apply in all contexts.
Further, I'm not saying that these scanners are OK. I'm saying that I don't think I would personally be bothered by these scanners any more than I am by having my luggage scanned, emptying my pockets, taking off my shoes, walking through a metal detector, and having a security guard pat me down. Add all that up, and it doesn't bother me *personally* more to also be scanned in this way. However(!), I think that if most other people have a problem with being scanned this way, then it shouldn't be allowed.
There's quite a difference between being comfortable with your body and enjoying nude beaches...and the government telling you "strip down, you're not trusted and have no rights."
I agree with you generally, but I think there is still another side to this whole thing, which is that your rights are not quite as absolute as our talking about that sometimes implies. Like yes, I have the freedom of speech, but if someone in the House of Representatives decides to run toward the President during the state of the Union yelling "Sic semper tyrannis!" then you'd better bet he's going to be detained for a little while. There's the issue of context, and these rights are still subject to reason. Likewise there have been court decisions, I believe, that school administrators can search student lockers without probable cause-- or at least that the standard of probable cause needed is quite a bit lower.
So given this issue of context, I would say that airports are already situations where we endure a lower expectation of privacy than elsewhere. I don't know if that's a legally appropriate way of saying it, but what I mean is, we already essentially allow our bags to be searched at airports. If a police officer stopped me randomly on the street and asked to look in my bag, I'd say no. If the same police officer asks to look in the same bag when I'm going through security at an airport, I'll agree. When I showed up to the airport that day, I knew ahead of time that I'd have to allow my bags to be searched (or at least viewed through an xray machine). Likewise when I pass over the border from another country, I know that I'll be expected to have a passport. If a police officer asked me for my papers while I was just walking down the street, that would seem far more sinister to me. I've also emptied my pockets, walked through a metal detector, and allowed myself to be pat down at an airport. I wouldn't approve of police doing that randomly on the streets.
So looking at it that way, I can't quite decide whether these scanners are going too far. I suppose if the consensus is that you feel like you've been stripped of your dignity by being asked to step into one, then it probably is too far. However, I think I wouldn't really feel worse for being scanned than I feel for being asked to take my shoes off. Maybe that's just a mental defect on my part.
Maybe, but on the other hand, the fact of using facebook says something about how much you value your privacy. If you really want information to remain private, I would suggest that you just not put it on social networking sites.
Meh. Either way, "NEW stuff" is going to be rehashes of old stuff. Whether it's a "reboot" of an old property, it's still going to be Shakespeare in space or a Greek tragedy set 20 years in the future or some Isaac Asimov story rewritten. There's nothing new under the sun. The question is, will it be clever and well done?
This would fix one of the MAJOR problems with DRM.
I would stop short of saying that, and instead perhaps say that it attempts to address two of the MAJOR inherent problems with DRM. It may sound like quibbling, but I think it's an important dinstinction in that it doesn't fix the problem inherent in the system.
What I mean is that, on a conceptual level, all of these DRM schemes come down the the same thing: content owners introduce an arbitrary additional point of failure for when the user tries to access the content, set it to fail, and then they provide a system that enables the point of failure to be fixed under specific controlled circumstances. This raises two inherent problems:**
What happens if I want to do something legitimate that falls outside the specific controlled circumstances?
What happens when the system breaks?
Essentially the DRM problem can never be "fixed" because these problems are inherent in the design. The only way to allow all legitimate uses to be allowed to is allow all uses, which means that you have no more DRM. And regarding the second point, you can't design a system that never breaks.
Now KeyChest seems to be an attempt to address these problems by making the system more robust and less likely to break, and also by providing a more flexible system that allows more usages within the system. However, it doesn't "fix" the problem. If the KeyChest system breaks, then it seems like you might still be denied access to the content you've purchased. Also, there will still be restrictions which may run afoul of legitimate uses.
**(I can think of at least two more inherent problem with these DRM schemes, which is that it raises privacy concerns and opens the door to abuses such as being denied access to content you have rightfully purchased, but I won't go into those here. There's also an inherent problem for the content owner, which is that you're trying to prevent access by encrypting while also providing the key to decryption, which is a solution likely to be hacked sooner or later if people are motivated to do so.)
Organization or corporation impedes others?
Corporations are required to.
Government "Organizations" do for bribes or "for the common good". No sign of these situations here.
I'm not sure what's behind these two.
Monoculture == universal risks == universal interest in them being prevented, solved, and patched.
None the less, there will be bugs and hacks and security holes. Generally speaking, the more diversity there is, the less likely everything will be vulnerable to the same attack and (in the case of a virus) the more slowly the infection will spread.
This isn't just a software thing. You see it everywhere in ecosystems and in the evolution of individual species. Diversity is required for there to be resilience.
I'm not recommending monoculture and think it's impossible in the current browser situation, but such high interest in its maintenance may make it more of a community project than it is now.
It's also possible that such high interest would lead to consolidation of power and raise a very high barrier to entry into the community. When things become important, entrenched interests tend to take hold.
I'd expect them to at least have their own domain name. It doesn't cost THAT much and looks far more professional.
Depends on the domain name, though, right?
But really, why do you care whether people are using their own domain name for their email address? I'm technical enough to set up my own domain and mail server, but sometimes being good at a tech job means weighing the pros and cons and coming up with the best overall solution. I have a few domains, but I don't use them for anything professional, and I wouldn't particularly want prospective employers looking at the related websites.
I could buy a domain just for job hunting (which, depending on my prospective employer, may or may not seem more professional), but then I'd have to set up a mail server. If I do it at home, I don't have great facilities to make sure it's reliable, fast, and responsive. If I set it up on a hosted server, then it's really not giving me practical benefits over a webmail provider like Hotmail or Gmail. I could use Google Apps, but that would provide no benefit over Gmail besides allowing me to use my own domain.
So in the best case scenario, I've spent a small amount of time and money to host a single email address for no benefit except that it might possible look more professional to someone (again, depending on my domain name choice and the personal tastes of whoever is looking at my resume). Yeah, maybe it's still worth it if it gets me a job, but it also seems like a slightly inefficient waste of time. If I were reviewing resumes, it might impress me more to see someone use efficient, effective, available solutions rather than to spend time and money on a domain for the sake of vanity or keeping up appearances.
Yeah, I remember Firefox before it was Firefox (as I'm sure many others do), and I don't remember such clear, specific, and grand plans regarding IE's lock in. It was more that Mozilla's suite had a relatively small but loyal following, and a good portion of that following was displeased by various problems with the suite. For one, it was slow. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of the blame fell on the idea that too much was being crammed into one app (it was a browser, email client, newgroups, HTML editor, and chat client), and it was bloated. Firefox (I think when I first used it, it was Phoenix) was a very lightweight application that seemed to be little beyond the HTML renderer with a toolbar. It was fast, and its UI looked much more native in Windows.
As it became popular, Mozilla may have developed much different goals for Firefox. I don't know the internal politics of the Mozilla Foundation. Certainly at a certain point, the whole "Spread Firefox" thing certainly was about increasing adoption and increasing support for web standards, thereby weakening Microsoft's lock-in. I'm not sure it makes sense to call that the "original impulse behind Firefox," but it was a goal for Firefox that many people had. And still have.
Would the Mozilla folks let it be? No... Firefox is effectively a commercial product now. As happens to nearly every commercial software product that meets its users needs and original design goals, the software will come to experience feature bloat as the developers try to keep the attention of its userbase.
That has been common, but it's not universal. Take OSX as a counter-example. Apple just released 10.6, which didn't offer many new features but was more aimed at stripping out bloat, increasing efficiency, and preparing for the future. Open source software has an additional safeguard against the sort of bloat you're describing in that, if it becomes sufficiently bloated that people are unhappy, the project can be forked.
Not that you're completely wrong, since it is pretty common that software packages reach a certain point of being "feature complete" and then stagnate and bloat. I don't think it's inevitable, but probably it's happens because (a) the fun stuff is done, and the developers don't want to put in the boring work of making incremental efficiency improvements; and (b) no one of sufficient imagination is working on the project to develop a vision for where it should go in the future. Because of these two factors, instead of continually refining and updating the software or pushing off into a particular new direction, the developers will just tack on whatever improvements that they can think of and hope that it sells.
A simpler solution is fork Chromium and port XUL to run on top of WebKit and V8.
I don't really know whether it'd be good or bad, but I'd be disappointed to see Mozilla switch to WebKit. Nothing against WebKit, but do we really want for every browser to be using the same rendering engine? Diversity in the software ecosystem is a good thing, if you ask me.
In the meantime they can continue Gecko 1.9 development and try to bring in more of WebKit and V8 into the codebase.
In ways kinda like what happened with KHTML and WebKit.
It was probably a little easier to bring improvements from WebKit into KHTML, since WebKit was based on KHTML in the first place.
Yeah, I personally wouldn't have *much* of an aversion to AOL addresses. AOL has been pretty silly for the past several years, but I know a few people who are still using an AOL email account from 15 years ago because that's the email address that their friends and family know. These days, I wouldn't really judge anyone too harshly based on which free webmail service they use. I probably have addresses floating out there for AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, Excite, Netscape (yeah, they had free webmail for a while) and a bunch of other companies. You settle on using one (or a couple) and after a while that company might stop being your favorite one, but switching email addresses is annoying too.
But anyway, what I would probably judge more harshly is if someone was using the email address that came with their ISP, e.g. comcast.net, verizon.net, optimum.net. Those email addresses just reek of, "I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, but when the ISP tech came to my house, this was the email address he set me up with."
Any organization that gets that kind of control eventually capitalizes on it.
Worse, any organization that gets too much control will impede the progress of others.
Capitalizing on success is fine. I don't have a problem with Microsoft making money from their browser. I have a problem with IE being the de facto standard and stifling all innovations that Microsoft chooses not to implement in their browser.
And notice I'm not even talking about any misbehavior on Microsoft's part. The point is that monoculture is bad. Monoculture means no competition, which means no innovation that the monoculture doesn't approve of. Plus, on a side note, monoculture means that a single security hole will necessarily be shared by everyone.
Do you know of a wireless router that can get a throughput of 600Mbps? I thought the 802.11n topped out at 300Mbps, but I've never actually gotten anything close to that in reality.
I hate to bring cars into this (obligatory car analogy?) but it's kind of like saying that it's an opportunity to become a mechanic if the new car you buy needs a lot of "under the hood" tweaking to get to run correctly.
The problem with the car analogy is that, with computers, there isn't as great a divide between "using" and "maintaining". Though few people do as much as installing their own car stereos or even changing their own oil, most people install software on their computer at some point. The skills of installing or uninstalling applications and moving/copying files are central to maintaining a computer, but they're also part of a normal user's repertoire.
Though I fully understand that most people don't want to know the ins and outs of computer repair, I do advise that all computer users learn to back up their files, reformat the hard drive, and install their system from scratch. With modern operating systems, it's not even a difficult process, and if you don't know how to do that much, then I don't know how you could be sure you're backing up everything you need to.
All users should know how to back up their own systems, at least. If I had to compare computers to car repair, I wouldn't compare system backup and reinstallation of the OS to something like replacing an engine. It'd be more like learning how to control a skid, or maybe knowing how to change a tire.
Given that the intent here seems to be for media streaming, it would seem silly to not include sound. From what people are saying, it sounds like it's just doing something like this:
Your wireless router has an HDMI port that you wire to your TV. Your computer then encodes its output in real-time to a streaming video format and sends that to your router. Your router has enough processing power to decode the stream, and pipes the output to your TV.
If this description is accurate, then it's not really new amazing technology. Your router is already a computer, so it would just need enough processing power to decode video. It's not hard these days to put good H264 decoding into a small package; you'd just have to be willing to incur the expense of the chipset capable of doing it. Really, you're just talking about standard video streaming over an 802.11n network.
I don't say that to bash the idea. If the setup is useful to people, then it seems like a good use of existing and well-tested technology. If you build wireless networking and video decoding into TVs directly, I could definitely see that having some fine uses, provided it's standardized and implemented well.
That may be lossless, but I'm quite sure that's not uncompressed.
I've read that 3Gbps number elsewhere, but it makes sense if you do a quick calculation. 1920(width)x1080(height)x24(bits per pixel)=50Mb per frame. So if it's 24 frames per second, that's just over 1Gb per second. 1080p/60 would then be 2.986 Gbps.
I'm sure you can do quite a lot with lossless compression, but I don't know how much. 38Mbps sounds like amazing compression, though, for it to be completely lossless, and I was under the impression (perhaps mistaken) that MPEG2 wasn't lossless. But anyway, clearly you can compress video quite a lot without hurting video dramatically. If you encode 1080p at 20Mbps, it still looks good.
That doesn't sound quite right to me. 1080i is the same resolution as 1080p but interlaced, which would lead me to guess that it would require half the bandwidth of 1080p.
I mean, I think the 3Ghz number is for 1080p/60, completely uncompressed. So I figure 1080i/24 is about 600Mbps, and you may be able to run that through some kind of lossless compression and bring that down a bit. However, I suspect that your 20Mbps number is based on a lossy compression (high-quality though it may be).
802.11n doesn't have the bandwidth for lossless video of a decent resolution. Uncompressed 1080p is something like 3Gbps, right?
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have wireless connections pushing 3Gbps. We just aren't there yet. You can get decent video quality at 802.11n rates, though. More than anything, I'm just a little surprised by the idea that they're able to do real-time high quality transcoding.
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'Reboot,' in Hollywood-speak, means "Forget cannon. Forget the comics. Forget everything. Get a focus group of our target demographic and ask them what they want. Get a committee of corporate hack writers to write what's going to sell."
That doesn't really describe some of the recent famous series' reboots. I wouldn't say that Batman Begins or Casino Royale seemed to be written by a committee of corporate hack writers based on focus group testing. Casino Royale was, from what I understand, more true to the source material than most of the other Bond films. The newer Batman movies definitely take some liberties, but generally towards making it into a more realistic, engaging, and coherent story. I even liked the Hulk reboot much better than the movie that came a few years before. It wasn't the best movie ever, but I thought it was decent.
The Superman reboot wasn't great, but I don't think it was artless. It was clearly meant to mix the current sensibilities with some of the aesthetics from the old 80s movie, and on that count it worked fairly well. If you remember Superman 1&2 fondly, then Superman Returns is probably going to kick up some pleasant nostalgia.
Not only are the current crop of reboots pretty decent, but it's actually the way culture should work. We should be retelling and reframing old stories, making them new again, and trying to keep them relevant. We don't need to throw out the classics, but "new stories" are created by putting a new spin on an old story. Personally, I would have preferred a Star Wars reboot to the creation of "Special Editions".
JUST LET THEM BE KIDS, for Christ sake! Stop acting like there is something wrong with them because they're not perfect, or act differently than you expect, or make stupid mistakes.
I think part of the problem is that the parents themselves are feeling a similar pressure. There's so much advice on how to raise your kids (both science and pop-psychology self-help crap) and how to turn them into perfect little geniuses. Meanwhile there's also a lot of pressure on how to be perfect yourself, how to eat right, how to think the right things and be happy all the time. Our culture really can't handle the idea that people aren't happy all the time. There's so much advice on grieving that assumes the goal is to "get over it" as quickly as possible. We're all supposed to be happy shiny 24-hour party people, smiling all day long, happy to talk to everyone. When you don't live up to that, there are drugs. Social anxiety disorder drugs and antidepressants.
And then on the news, there's constant news about child molesters and Amber Alerts. There's constant news about the dangers in everyday household items and everyday activities. If you let your kids run around outside, you're branded as a reckless and irresponsible parent. You're supposed to schedule your kids time 24 hours a day, including homework time, sports, hobbies, bla bla bla.
I'm not even a parent, but I could imagine how it would drive people insane.
I have a cute anecdote about a friend who graduated with a psychology degree and left her job as an assistant to become a grade school teacher because most of the psychologists at the Manhattan practice had more psychological problems than their patients.
I've always had the theory that people who are psychiatrists are psychiatrists because they're interested in the cause of psychological problems (obviously), and that people who are highly interested in psychological problems are usually trying to diagnose themselves. Therefore, a high level of psychiatrists are probably crazy.
Look, I'm not saying that social networking sites can't improve their security and become more robust and configurable platforms, but I still think information posted on them have a kind of inherent publicness.
What I mean is this: If you sent me an email with some kind of personal information, like say that you just broke up with your girlfriend and were sad, I might hesitate to share that information with others. Even if there were a couple other people on copy on the email, I might think, "Well he clearly chose to only send that to a couple of people, so maybe this isn't something he wants to be talked about outside of those people." Not that it's even necessarily a secret, but if you share something personal with me, I try to use some discretion about sharing that information with others.
However, if you put the same information onto a post on a social networking site, then in my mind it's public. If you put up a post on Facebook saying you broke up with your girlfriend and were sad, I would assume that meant that you intended for it to be public information. Now you might set it so your coworkers can't see that information or something, but that still doesn't cause the same mental trigger in me to say, "this might be private information and I should be discrete."
Now admittedly this is just me, and you might see things differently. These things are the subject of subtle social mores, and it may change over time. It's just to me that the point of social networking is to broadcast information without choosing particular recipients, and therefore it's public. If you wanted to choose particular recipients and keep the information to those recipients, you'd send an email.
As I see it, that's not really the social networking site's fault, but your friend's fault. Your friend could put up a website with your personal information and a lot of embarrassing photos.
It's not about dignity, as clearly illustrated above...Law enforcement must have grounds to conduct a search.
Then why is it ok for them to search my luggage, ask me to empty my pockets, and pat me down? They're already conducting a search, and even conducting a searching me. The only difference I see between a pat down and a body scan is that a body scan is potentially more embarrassing.
If the government *REALLY* wanted to save lives, they would help people eat healthier (which might help some of our health problems), work to improve safety in cars, pull people over for texting and driving...all things that cause many more deaths than plan crashes.
I agree entirely. Heart disease and car accidents are a couple big killers, but if you put a tax on fatty foods or talk about increasing public transportation, then people start complaining about socialism and bemoaning their loss of freedom. On the other hand, if the government suspends habeas corpus, tortures prisoners, and conducts wiretaps and invasive searches without cause, everyone's fine with it because "we're fighting terrorists". It doesn't make any sense to me.
Some things that I said in my post:
There's the issue of context, and these rights are still subject to reason.... I suppose if the consensus is that you feel like you've been stripped of your dignity by being asked to step into one, then it probably is too far.
So no, I wouldn't say that all rules should be applied consistently all the time. I'm saying that we should apply these sorts of rules carefully, based on context, and it should be to some degree subject to what people believe to be acceptable. The rules for going to school vs. walking down the street vs. going to an event where the President will be present vs. sitting in your own home might each have different levels of security. That's fine and expected, and we shouldn't pretend that all of these situations are the same, or that the rules of one context must apply in all contexts.
Further, I'm not saying that these scanners are OK. I'm saying that I don't think I would personally be bothered by these scanners any more than I am by having my luggage scanned, emptying my pockets, taking off my shoes, walking through a metal detector, and having a security guard pat me down. Add all that up, and it doesn't bother me *personally* more to also be scanned in this way. However(!), I think that if most other people have a problem with being scanned this way, then it shouldn't be allowed.
There's quite a difference between being comfortable with your body and enjoying nude beaches...and the government telling you "strip down, you're not trusted and have no rights."
I agree with you generally, but I think there is still another side to this whole thing, which is that your rights are not quite as absolute as our talking about that sometimes implies. Like yes, I have the freedom of speech, but if someone in the House of Representatives decides to run toward the President during the state of the Union yelling "Sic semper tyrannis!" then you'd better bet he's going to be detained for a little while. There's the issue of context, and these rights are still subject to reason. Likewise there have been court decisions, I believe, that school administrators can search student lockers without probable cause-- or at least that the standard of probable cause needed is quite a bit lower.
So given this issue of context, I would say that airports are already situations where we endure a lower expectation of privacy than elsewhere. I don't know if that's a legally appropriate way of saying it, but what I mean is, we already essentially allow our bags to be searched at airports. If a police officer stopped me randomly on the street and asked to look in my bag, I'd say no. If the same police officer asks to look in the same bag when I'm going through security at an airport, I'll agree. When I showed up to the airport that day, I knew ahead of time that I'd have to allow my bags to be searched (or at least viewed through an xray machine). Likewise when I pass over the border from another country, I know that I'll be expected to have a passport. If a police officer asked me for my papers while I was just walking down the street, that would seem far more sinister to me. I've also emptied my pockets, walked through a metal detector, and allowed myself to be pat down at an airport. I wouldn't approve of police doing that randomly on the streets.
So looking at it that way, I can't quite decide whether these scanners are going too far. I suppose if the consensus is that you feel like you've been stripped of your dignity by being asked to step into one, then it probably is too far. However, I think I wouldn't really feel worse for being scanned than I feel for being asked to take my shoes off. Maybe that's just a mental defect on my part.
Maybe, but on the other hand, the fact of using facebook says something about how much you value your privacy. If you really want information to remain private, I would suggest that you just not put it on social networking sites.
Lets get some NEW stuff
Meh. Either way, "NEW stuff" is going to be rehashes of old stuff. Whether it's a "reboot" of an old property, it's still going to be Shakespeare in space or a Greek tragedy set 20 years in the future or some Isaac Asimov story rewritten. There's nothing new under the sun. The question is, will it be clever and well done?
This would fix one of the MAJOR problems with DRM.
I would stop short of saying that, and instead perhaps say that it attempts to address two of the MAJOR inherent problems with DRM. It may sound like quibbling, but I think it's an important dinstinction in that it doesn't fix the problem inherent in the system.
What I mean is that, on a conceptual level, all of these DRM schemes come down the the same thing: content owners introduce an arbitrary additional point of failure for when the user tries to access the content, set it to fail, and then they provide a system that enables the point of failure to be fixed under specific controlled circumstances. This raises two inherent problems:**
Essentially the DRM problem can never be "fixed" because these problems are inherent in the design. The only way to allow all legitimate uses to be allowed to is allow all uses, which means that you have no more DRM. And regarding the second point, you can't design a system that never breaks.
Now KeyChest seems to be an attempt to address these problems by making the system more robust and less likely to break, and also by providing a more flexible system that allows more usages within the system. However, it doesn't "fix" the problem. If the KeyChest system breaks, then it seems like you might still be denied access to the content you've purchased. Also, there will still be restrictions which may run afoul of legitimate uses.
**(I can think of at least two more inherent problem with these DRM schemes, which is that it raises privacy concerns and opens the door to abuses such as being denied access to content you have rightfully purchased, but I won't go into those here. There's also an inherent problem for the content owner, which is that you're trying to prevent access by encrypting while also providing the key to decryption, which is a solution likely to be hacked sooner or later if people are motivated to do so.)
Organization or corporation impedes others? Corporations are required to. Government "Organizations" do for bribes or "for the common good". No sign of these situations here.
I'm not sure what's behind these two.
Monoculture == universal risks == universal interest in them being prevented, solved, and patched.
None the less, there will be bugs and hacks and security holes. Generally speaking, the more diversity there is, the less likely everything will be vulnerable to the same attack and (in the case of a virus) the more slowly the infection will spread.
This isn't just a software thing. You see it everywhere in ecosystems and in the evolution of individual species. Diversity is required for there to be resilience.
I'm not recommending monoculture and think it's impossible in the current browser situation, but such high interest in its maintenance may make it more of a community project than it is now.
It's also possible that such high interest would lead to consolidation of power and raise a very high barrier to entry into the community. When things become important, entrenched interests tend to take hold.
I'd expect them to at least have their own domain name. It doesn't cost THAT much and looks far more professional.
Depends on the domain name, though, right?
But really, why do you care whether people are using their own domain name for their email address? I'm technical enough to set up my own domain and mail server, but sometimes being good at a tech job means weighing the pros and cons and coming up with the best overall solution. I have a few domains, but I don't use them for anything professional, and I wouldn't particularly want prospective employers looking at the related websites.
I could buy a domain just for job hunting (which, depending on my prospective employer, may or may not seem more professional), but then I'd have to set up a mail server. If I do it at home, I don't have great facilities to make sure it's reliable, fast, and responsive. If I set it up on a hosted server, then it's really not giving me practical benefits over a webmail provider like Hotmail or Gmail. I could use Google Apps, but that would provide no benefit over Gmail besides allowing me to use my own domain.
So in the best case scenario, I've spent a small amount of time and money to host a single email address for no benefit except that it might possible look more professional to someone (again, depending on my domain name choice and the personal tastes of whoever is looking at my resume). Yeah, maybe it's still worth it if it gets me a job, but it also seems like a slightly inefficient waste of time. If I were reviewing resumes, it might impress me more to see someone use efficient, effective, available solutions rather than to spend time and money on a domain for the sake of vanity or keeping up appearances.
Yeah, I remember Firefox before it was Firefox (as I'm sure many others do), and I don't remember such clear, specific, and grand plans regarding IE's lock in. It was more that Mozilla's suite had a relatively small but loyal following, and a good portion of that following was displeased by various problems with the suite. For one, it was slow. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of the blame fell on the idea that too much was being crammed into one app (it was a browser, email client, newgroups, HTML editor, and chat client), and it was bloated. Firefox (I think when I first used it, it was Phoenix) was a very lightweight application that seemed to be little beyond the HTML renderer with a toolbar. It was fast, and its UI looked much more native in Windows.
As it became popular, Mozilla may have developed much different goals for Firefox. I don't know the internal politics of the Mozilla Foundation. Certainly at a certain point, the whole "Spread Firefox" thing certainly was about increasing adoption and increasing support for web standards, thereby weakening Microsoft's lock-in. I'm not sure it makes sense to call that the "original impulse behind Firefox," but it was a goal for Firefox that many people had. And still have.
Would the Mozilla folks let it be? No... Firefox is effectively a commercial product now. As happens to nearly every commercial software product that meets its users needs and original design goals, the software will come to experience feature bloat as the developers try to keep the attention of its userbase.
That has been common, but it's not universal. Take OSX as a counter-example. Apple just released 10.6, which didn't offer many new features but was more aimed at stripping out bloat, increasing efficiency, and preparing for the future. Open source software has an additional safeguard against the sort of bloat you're describing in that, if it becomes sufficiently bloated that people are unhappy, the project can be forked.
Not that you're completely wrong, since it is pretty common that software packages reach a certain point of being "feature complete" and then stagnate and bloat. I don't think it's inevitable, but probably it's happens because (a) the fun stuff is done, and the developers don't want to put in the boring work of making incremental efficiency improvements; and (b) no one of sufficient imagination is working on the project to develop a vision for where it should go in the future. Because of these two factors, instead of continually refining and updating the software or pushing off into a particular new direction, the developers will just tack on whatever improvements that they can think of and hope that it sells.
A simpler solution is fork Chromium and port XUL to run on top of WebKit and V8.
I don't really know whether it'd be good or bad, but I'd be disappointed to see Mozilla switch to WebKit. Nothing against WebKit, but do we really want for every browser to be using the same rendering engine? Diversity in the software ecosystem is a good thing, if you ask me.
In the meantime they can continue Gecko 1.9 development and try to bring in more of WebKit and V8 into the codebase. In ways kinda like what happened with KHTML and WebKit.
It was probably a little easier to bring improvements from WebKit into KHTML, since WebKit was based on KHTML in the first place.
Yeah, I personally wouldn't have *much* of an aversion to AOL addresses. AOL has been pretty silly for the past several years, but I know a few people who are still using an AOL email account from 15 years ago because that's the email address that their friends and family know. These days, I wouldn't really judge anyone too harshly based on which free webmail service they use. I probably have addresses floating out there for AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, Excite, Netscape (yeah, they had free webmail for a while) and a bunch of other companies. You settle on using one (or a couple) and after a while that company might stop being your favorite one, but switching email addresses is annoying too.
But anyway, what I would probably judge more harshly is if someone was using the email address that came with their ISP, e.g. comcast.net, verizon.net, optimum.net. Those email addresses just reek of, "I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, but when the ISP tech came to my house, this was the email address he set me up with."
Any organization that gets that kind of control eventually capitalizes on it.
Worse, any organization that gets too much control will impede the progress of others.
Capitalizing on success is fine. I don't have a problem with Microsoft making money from their browser. I have a problem with IE being the de facto standard and stifling all innovations that Microsoft chooses not to implement in their browser.
And notice I'm not even talking about any misbehavior on Microsoft's part. The point is that monoculture is bad. Monoculture means no competition, which means no innovation that the monoculture doesn't approve of. Plus, on a side note, monoculture means that a single security hole will necessarily be shared by everyone.
Do you know of a wireless router that can get a throughput of 600Mbps? I thought the 802.11n topped out at 300Mbps, but I've never actually gotten anything close to that in reality.
I hate to bring cars into this (obligatory car analogy?) but it's kind of like saying that it's an opportunity to become a mechanic if the new car you buy needs a lot of "under the hood" tweaking to get to run correctly.
The problem with the car analogy is that, with computers, there isn't as great a divide between "using" and "maintaining". Though few people do as much as installing their own car stereos or even changing their own oil, most people install software on their computer at some point. The skills of installing or uninstalling applications and moving/copying files are central to maintaining a computer, but they're also part of a normal user's repertoire.
Though I fully understand that most people don't want to know the ins and outs of computer repair, I do advise that all computer users learn to back up their files, reformat the hard drive, and install their system from scratch. With modern operating systems, it's not even a difficult process, and if you don't know how to do that much, then I don't know how you could be sure you're backing up everything you need to.
All users should know how to back up their own systems, at least. If I had to compare computers to car repair, I wouldn't compare system backup and reinstallation of the OS to something like replacing an engine. It'd be more like learning how to control a skid, or maybe knowing how to change a tire.
Given that the intent here seems to be for media streaming, it would seem silly to not include sound. From what people are saying, it sounds like it's just doing something like this:
Your wireless router has an HDMI port that you wire to your TV. Your computer then encodes its output in real-time to a streaming video format and sends that to your router. Your router has enough processing power to decode the stream, and pipes the output to your TV.
If this description is accurate, then it's not really new amazing technology. Your router is already a computer, so it would just need enough processing power to decode video. It's not hard these days to put good H264 decoding into a small package; you'd just have to be willing to incur the expense of the chipset capable of doing it. Really, you're just talking about standard video streaming over an 802.11n network.
I don't say that to bash the idea. If the setup is useful to people, then it seems like a good use of existing and well-tested technology. If you build wireless networking and video decoding into TVs directly, I could definitely see that having some fine uses, provided it's standardized and implemented well.
Uncompressed 1080p video using MPEG2 is 38.0 mbps
That may be lossless, but I'm quite sure that's not uncompressed.
I've read that 3Gbps number elsewhere, but it makes sense if you do a quick calculation. 1920(width)x1080(height)x24(bits per pixel)=50Mb per frame. So if it's 24 frames per second, that's just over 1Gb per second. 1080p/60 would then be 2.986 Gbps.
I'm sure you can do quite a lot with lossless compression, but I don't know how much. 38Mbps sounds like amazing compression, though, for it to be completely lossless, and I was under the impression (perhaps mistaken) that MPEG2 wasn't lossless. But anyway, clearly you can compress video quite a lot without hurting video dramatically. If you encode 1080p at 20Mbps, it still looks good.
That doesn't sound quite right to me. 1080i is the same resolution as 1080p but interlaced, which would lead me to guess that it would require half the bandwidth of 1080p.
I mean, I think the 3Ghz number is for 1080p/60, completely uncompressed. So I figure 1080i/24 is about 600Mbps, and you may be able to run that through some kind of lossless compression and bring that down a bit. However, I suspect that your 20Mbps number is based on a lossy compression (high-quality though it may be).
802.11n doesn't have the bandwidth for lossless video of a decent resolution. Uncompressed 1080p is something like 3Gbps, right?
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have wireless connections pushing 3Gbps. We just aren't there yet. You can get decent video quality at 802.11n rates, though. More than anything, I'm just a little surprised by the idea that they're able to do real-time high quality transcoding.