This usually goes something like "I can't be unbiased so I may as well not try and I'm going to just present what I want without attempting to limit the bias."
And that's where things fall apart. It's not the idea that we can't be unbiased, it's the conclusion that follows that becomes a problem.
If you want to get into it on a real philosophic level (which I suppose is what's going on in some posts here) you'd first have to eliminate the ambiguity around what we mean when we say "bias", what an "unbiased opinion" would be, and what the value of being "unbiased" is. For example, you might argue that you can't be 99% unbiased any more than you could be 99% unique. You're either unique or you're not, biased or not.
But to sidestep some of that: there's no necessary connection between, "I can't be unbiased," and "I shouldn't bother trying to be reasonable, so instead I'll go off the deep end voicing all of my opinions no matter how unfounded they may be." Maybe none of us can be unbiased, none of us can recognize our own bias, and maybe we shouldn't even try to be unbiased. But even if so, there may still be such a thing as being right or wrong, smart or stupid, reasonable or irrational, etc.
Locking up knowledge so that only specialists get access is a stupid, destructive, elitist practice that is self defeating
It doesn't seem to me that the author was advocating "locking up knowledge". In fact, it's not clear to me that the author was really advocating anything. He seems merely to be making observations about the sort of discourse that is going on, and some of the difficulties we face in creating a truly useful discussion rather than a collection of glib remarks. Let's face it, these issues are complex. It's not merely "experts" making things more complicated than they need to be (which is sometimes a component).
You bring up physics as an example and talk about Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe". I've read that, as well as "Brief History of Time," and other similar physics books, and yes, they give you vague ideas about modern theoretical physics, and that's great. However, they don't give you a very deep understanding that qualifies you to take part in a real debate on these subjects. For example, I think relativity is conceptually simple in comparison with string theory, but I've run into quite a few people who've read these sorts of books and still don't understand why the ability to travel faster than light is theoretically equivalent to time travel.
There is value in having a deep knowledge and understanding of a topic, and real depth can't be imparted to a layman quickly and easily. That's a real problem as sciences progress and fields become increasingly specialized. The unfortunate truth is that we do rely on the authority of experts, and we must do so even though we don't have a way to measure the true expertise of those "experts".
For a computer-related analogy, it reminds me of an interview that I had for a consulting job once. I won't go into the technical details (partially because I don't remember them well), but I knew this guy through a friend of a friend... that sort of thing, and when I went in, we had a conversation that went like this (this is simplified and more blunt than the real conversation:
Him: I have this very complicated issue and I'm looking for someone who can make this work the way I want it to, and for so little money it will basically be free to me.
Me: I can't do that. I can propose this other solution which will work almost as well, or we can do it the way you want but it will be very expensive.
Him: Well, I just had an interview with a guy who said that he can do what I want for as cheap as I want it.
Me: That doesn't sound right to me. I would guess that your last interview wasn't completely honest, or else he doesn't know what he's doing.
Him: Well you're making a bad sales pitch. The last guy is telling me that he can give me exactly what I want, exactly how I want it. You're saying I can't have what I want. You understand that there's no way I can hire you.
Me: Well I won't argue with you, except to say that it seems unlikely to me that the other guy can deliver what he's promising.
I didn't get the job. I found out after the fact that the interviewer came to regret his decision, since the other interviewee couldn't, in fact, deliver on what he promised. The company wasted a lot of time and money paying for a solution that didn't work. On the other hand, how was the interviewer to know? It could have just as easily been that I was the charlatan, aiming to bilk extra money from his company for a relatively simple task? Or maybe the other interviewee was a complete techie badass who really could achieve incredible things for small amounts of money. Not being an expert himself, he had to trust someone, so naturally he chose the one with the best sounding story. Unfortunately, the best sounding story isn't always the truth.
The same holds true for personal philosophies; solving the problems that being alive presents. When you are listening to other people, you should actually listen to them. Try to see things their way. Don't bash them, even if you disagree. It doesn't hurt. It can often help. And when you're presenting a counterpoint, be genteel about it. Tact goes a very long way.
I agree strongly. One of the things I've learned over the years is that, when someone is disagreeing with you, it's almost always the case that they're thinking about something that's worth considering. They might be misunderstanding a lot of things, mixing up causes and effects, or all making all sorts of mistakes, but if you can figure out what's really at stake in the argument, it's almost always something fairly understandable if not valid.
Like you look at something really contentious like Intelligent Design. I've talked to proponents of Intelligent Design enough to have realized that many of them aren't even interested in it as a scientific theory. The real essential point of contention is that they don't like people trying to use science to tell them that their beliefs, and even their way of life is wrong. Intelligent Design is often just seen as a way of fighting back, of "beating atheists at their own game." And fair enough, because it's true that some atheists want to use evolution as a wedge issue to claim that all religious people are stupid; I can't blame people for wanting to respond. If you can somehow bring the argument around to an admission that "evolution has happened" is not equivalent to "God doesn't exist," then suddenly you'll find that a lot of religious people are more open to evolution as a concept.
Of course, other things get involved, too. For example, sometimes a person is just feeling backed into a corner and that person feels like his ego is at stake in the argument. Now that's not entirely valid, but it's fairly understandable. And if you discover that it's the case, then sometimes you can bring that person around to your side by giving him an opportunity to agree with you without sacrificing his ego-- assuming you can invent that opportunity. Or sometimes you just have to disabuse them of the notion that they can hang their ego on this argument, just so they'll give up.
Anyway, I'm going off on tangents, but my real point here is this: whenever someone is arguing against you, it's good to assume that there's something that person believes is at risk, and that person wants to protect that at-risk thing. If you can't figure out what that at-risk thing is, then you're not very well-prepared to argue.
You got it right there, if you can't communicate complex ideas to interested parties outside your field then you don't properly understand your field.
I don't think that's true. Wouldn't you at least preserve the possibility that someone could be knowledgeable about their field but a very poor communicator? I feel like I've known lots of smart people who are just very bad at explaining their own thoughts.
Plato argued in the Republic (through Socrates) that only philosophers were suited to be rulers.
Sorry, but I feel the need to interject something here. If you're reading Plato and thinking that Plato is making clear positive arguments through Socrates, you might want to go back and reread with a more critical eye. There's a lot of evidence all around to suggest that, not only did Plato not agree with a lot of things that he had Socrates saying in the dialogs, but also, within the dialogs, Socrates didn't even believe a lot of things that Socrates was saying. The whole thing makes a lot more sense if you consider Plato's dialogs to be almost like plays, in which Socrates is a very sarcastic and tricky character.
In this particular case, it's not clear that Socrates actually believes that only philosophers are set to be rulers. He's setting up a sort of perfect/utopian society that a philosopher might dream up, and then following through on the logical conclusions and reducing the whole thing to absurdity. In many ways, what he's showing is that dreams of utopian societies eventually lead to horrific situations.
I think the whole "one way hash" argument in the blog post is a little too clever and glib, but it is pointing at a very old and troublesome philosophical question: When a bad/false argument is more seductive than the truth, how do you convince a mass of people of the truth?
Of course that raises other questions about truth and its value. Elsewhere in the Republic, this sort of question proposes the idea that leaders should be willing to lie in such a way so as to lead their people to a good end, at least in those cases where the truth is not persuasive enough. However, this proposition is also shown to be problematic.
Whenever talking about electricity in this magnitude, I always want the calculations done in "number of DeLoreans sent backward in time". From an earlier post, I'm estimating that:
1 entire power output of the north american energy grid = 410 DeLoreans sent backward in time
Whatever, this it retardedly pedantic. Insofar as this stuff is talked about, people seem to drop in whichever one of these terms they like. I've seen it talked about in tech sites, with technical people I know, and since the Kindle started getting mainstream press, I've seen it talked about on normal news websites, on TV, and among non-technical people. I've heard all of these people drop in these terms however they feel like it, and nobody is particularly concerned about the underlying technology used to have monitors that don't need backlights.
Like, what, are we going to argue about which sites are technically using "web 2.0"? Are we going to talk about which services are technically "in the cloud"?
So what benefits would e-ink provide in this case?
You get the low power-consumption of electronic ink so long as you're displaying a static picture, but something which could also be used as a monitor. That the redraw is electrically expensive is, among other things, why we don't have a "holy grail".
But imagine you could buy something that looked like a plain white poster rolled up in a tube. You take it home, stick on your wall, and it's a TV or computer monitor that doesn't need a backlight so long as there's enough ambient light. But then you turn off all the lights and you activate some kind of luminescent layer that acts as a backlight so that you still get a good viewing experience. You're done watching TV or whatever, and you set it to display an image and turn it off. It continues to display that image without really using any electricity.
Yeah, it's science fiction, but a lot of those individual qualities are possible in a display today. Just not all of them are available in the same display.
And I'm saying that if you want to make those distinction in terms, that's fine. Yes, there are multiple forms of "electronic ink" or "digital paper", and I'm fine with you wanting to assign whatever terms you want. But there doesn't seem to be a common consensus that any particular term is referring to any particular technology, except perhaps within companies who are trying to coin a term for branding their own products.
In common use, all of these terms just mean, "flat panel displays that don't need a backlight."
Well fine, you can make that distinction. What I'm saying is, I don't think that there's any real consensus about distinctions between those terms. Even if one or more of those terms are trademarked and referencing a particular technology, it may end up being like "xerox" or "kleenex", where the brand name becomes a generic term.
Well I guess that depends on what kind of work (and play) you're doing. Most of what I do with a computer is reading and writing text. I don't see how having the text rendered in 3D would help me.
As far as I know, e-Ink is a marketing name for a specific piece of technology
Meh. People use e-paper, e-ink, digital paper, digital ink, electronic paper, electronic ink, and maybe some other terms I haven't heard. They use them all interchangeably to mean "flat panel electronic screens that don't need a backlight." And maybe they also include the part about not needing a charge to maintain the displayed image, but only needing the charge to change the image.
I think people just haven't quite settled on a terminology here.
Yes, they are when compared to things like OLED or electronic ink. And whatever the hell these people are doing.
It seems to me the holy grail of displays would be something like full-color electronic ink with fast response times, paired with some kind of lighting scheme for when ambient lighting isn't sufficient.
I don't think Apple is selling any music with DRM anymore. They issued an announcement a few weeks ago that their transition was done. Videos and Audible books still have DRM AFAIK.
Is this really such a "big fat middle finger"? It's cementing iTunes as the default player and iTMS as the default music store, and putting Palm in the position of trying to pick up some of Apple's leftovers. Plus, if Apple doesn't like it, they can issue firmware updates and update iTunes, making everything connect some slightly different way, and suddenly Palm's stuff stops working.
If Palm really wanted to make trouble for Apple, they'd make their own alternative to iTunes, which wouldn't take much work. If they really didn't want to do it from scratch, I'm sure there are even some open source projects that could be used as a jumping-off point. And if they didn't want to make their own music store, they could probably strike a deal with Amazon. Now that would be a problem for Apple.
By setting up your own you're destroying the networking aspect.
A private site for friends will never have the pull of a world-wide LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE site.
Er... no. You could set up social networking standards and protocols that would allow various sites to enable their users to build profiles which could then be shared in a manner very similar to facebook. You'd want some kind of common authentication (OpenID) if you don't want all the profiles to be public. If anything, I'd say that by keeping a private little proprietary system, they're limiting the networking aspect.
They want all of your data, and this is just another tool for them to get at it.
...except that it sounds like they're making it all pretty open. From TFA, "The code will be open source, and developers intending to build on the platform are being given access to APIs, according to a post on the official Google blog."
So you can build your own implementation, and the whole thing is going to be P2P, so Google won't necessarily have access to your data unless you're specifically using their server.
the layout shown is hideous and provides nothing but total information overload.
Well first, I don't agree that it's so awful. Second, it's pre-release and not even a public beta. Third, it's going to be open source so you can skin it or completely rewrite the interface.
Except maybe it will be what something like Twitter, Facebook, and IM should have been from the beginning. For one thing, it sounds like it will be open and decentralized, meaning that I can set up my own Wave server, and you can set up your own Wave server, and our users can talk without any problems.
You can already do that with IM so long as we're all using Jabber, but otherwise it can get a little problematic. But I can't set up my own private facebook or twitter server, and even if I do, there's not support for my server to let people befriend and network with people on the real Facebook and Twitter.
To me, that's always been the #1 problem with social networking sites on the Internet. You can't set up your own, but instead your left to make a new account on whatever site is cool this week. Like what if instead of being able to set up my own webpage, I had to set up a webpage on whatever hosting company was trendy, and then rewrite it based on that host's protocols?
Yeah, I just don't think it matters if it's deterministic. Even disregarding the vagueness that quantum mechanics brings to the determinism question, thinking about our behavior in terms of physical/chemical reactions doesn't really help us make decisions.
Almost whenever you hear someone say, "[X] is just [Y]," they're almost always oversimplifying and disregarding noteworthy complexity in order to be glib. Our actions may be the result of pre-determined physical reactions in some sense, but it's not "just" the result of pre-determined physical reactions.
When we get down to it, physics determines all of our actions. Our decisions and actions are all a result of physical phenomena.
You may be right on a certain level, but that explanation fails to help us.
I mean, fine, all my actions are the result of physics. Now what? What kind of job should I get? What kind of society should I form? Even a simple question like, should I eat cereal for breakfast, or just skip it and drink a cup of coffee? Saying that my choice in each case will be caused by physical reactions doesn't help me make any of those decisions.
Ideas matter, too, and they do have an effect on what decisions we make. If you didn't believe that, then you wouldn't be pushing the idea that physics determines our actions.
Of course this has some people who live perfect little lives, and always get what they want, questioning the new classification. The so called "disorder"...
Is this supposed to be funny, or is the submitter suffering from some embitterment himself?
I know some people love having their personality labelled as a "disorder" because they believe it then excuses their actions. But also having a label like this can help people cope. Having a label can help you wrap your head around your own thoughts and behaviors, make you feel like you're not uniquely screwed up and alone, and figure out what steps might help you improve.
Yeah, I don't think people understand those concepts very well. I find it very frustrating the way people think that capitalism is a governmental system and a moral system rather than an economic system.
Living in a capitalist economic system does not require that the government is controlled by industry, nor does it require that all of your personal motivations are driven by desire for profit. You can have a capitalistic system where people are free to spend money the way they want and still have people spend money on things that benefit the common good. You can have a capitalistic system wherein people choose to share.
Well yeah, I think the only thing in question there is "cheap". We could argue about whether $1/track is already cheap, and if not, how cheap it should be. But the problem is, these companies want to play too many games with the whole system.
You can get it cheap right now, but only from an exclusive partner. Or you can get a poor-quality version in two months for a ridiculously large cost. Or you can get a high-quality version now, but it will only play on this one particular device, and you'll have to buy it again if you want to play it on anything else. Or you can play a not-particularly high quality version from our website using a retarded player that doesn't work very well.
Why should customers have to sort through all that? Why does every businessman seem to think that the customer/consumer should spend all the customer's time figuring out the businessman's particular industry, learn to play by all the businessman's rules, and then buy whatever it is that the businessman is peddling? What ever happened to business meeting the customer's needs and wants, and seeing "profits" as the fair reward for servicing the customer well? Instead, "profits" are seen as the business's entitlement that the customer owes them.
Well the direct financial incentive to record music will be reduced if copyright goes away. I don't see a way around that. On the other hand, there will still be indirect financial incentives.
Beyond that, it's never been entirely clear to me that the financial incentives were what was motivating the creation of music. I think you could make music recording illegal, and force people to pay to record their music, and people would still do it at a loss. The quality of the recording might suffer somewhat, in that there might not be the money floating around to pay for a $10K microphone, but I have no doubt that people would still play music and record music if copyrights went away.
Sure, I could now carry around (if I was young) a digital camera, and a photo printer, with the requisite cords, some ink, and a ream of paper
Part of my point was that in order to really replace Polaroid cameras, someone would need to come up with an all-in-one device that had the digital camera, photo printer, ink, and paper built-in. It would have to be as small and light as a polaroid, take as many pictures without recharging, hold as many pictures at a time, print as fast as a polaroid develops, etc. Until that happens, we haven't really replaced the polaroid, but it has nothing to do with the analog/digital issue. But still, it's a niche market. They were a niche market even 20 years ago.
But beyond that, yes, there's sentimentality from people who remember when polaroid was huge. My point was, that will go away when we get old and die. Sorry if that's depressing, but it's probably true.
Slashdot Mirror
This usually goes something like "I can't be unbiased so I may as well not try and I'm going to just present what I want without attempting to limit the bias."
And that's where things fall apart. It's not the idea that we can't be unbiased, it's the conclusion that follows that becomes a problem.
If you want to get into it on a real philosophic level (which I suppose is what's going on in some posts here) you'd first have to eliminate the ambiguity around what we mean when we say "bias", what an "unbiased opinion" would be, and what the value of being "unbiased" is. For example, you might argue that you can't be 99% unbiased any more than you could be 99% unique. You're either unique or you're not, biased or not.
But to sidestep some of that: there's no necessary connection between, "I can't be unbiased," and "I shouldn't bother trying to be reasonable, so instead I'll go off the deep end voicing all of my opinions no matter how unfounded they may be." Maybe none of us can be unbiased, none of us can recognize our own bias, and maybe we shouldn't even try to be unbiased. But even if so, there may still be such a thing as being right or wrong, smart or stupid, reasonable or irrational, etc.
Locking up knowledge so that only specialists get access is a stupid, destructive, elitist practice that is self defeating
It doesn't seem to me that the author was advocating "locking up knowledge". In fact, it's not clear to me that the author was really advocating anything. He seems merely to be making observations about the sort of discourse that is going on, and some of the difficulties we face in creating a truly useful discussion rather than a collection of glib remarks. Let's face it, these issues are complex. It's not merely "experts" making things more complicated than they need to be (which is sometimes a component).
You bring up physics as an example and talk about Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe". I've read that, as well as "Brief History of Time," and other similar physics books, and yes, they give you vague ideas about modern theoretical physics, and that's great. However, they don't give you a very deep understanding that qualifies you to take part in a real debate on these subjects. For example, I think relativity is conceptually simple in comparison with string theory, but I've run into quite a few people who've read these sorts of books and still don't understand why the ability to travel faster than light is theoretically equivalent to time travel.
There is value in having a deep knowledge and understanding of a topic, and real depth can't be imparted to a layman quickly and easily. That's a real problem as sciences progress and fields become increasingly specialized. The unfortunate truth is that we do rely on the authority of experts, and we must do so even though we don't have a way to measure the true expertise of those "experts".
For a computer-related analogy, it reminds me of an interview that I had for a consulting job once. I won't go into the technical details (partially because I don't remember them well), but I knew this guy through a friend of a friend... that sort of thing, and when I went in, we had a conversation that went like this (this is simplified and more blunt than the real conversation:
Him: I have this very complicated issue and I'm looking for someone who can make this work the way I want it to, and for so little money it will basically be free to me.
Me: I can't do that. I can propose this other solution which will work almost as well, or we can do it the way you want but it will be very expensive.
Him: Well, I just had an interview with a guy who said that he can do what I want for as cheap as I want it.
Me: That doesn't sound right to me. I would guess that your last interview wasn't completely honest, or else he doesn't know what he's doing.
Him: Well you're making a bad sales pitch. The last guy is telling me that he can give me exactly what I want, exactly how I want it. You're saying I can't have what I want. You understand that there's no way I can hire you.
Me: Well I won't argue with you, except to say that it seems unlikely to me that the other guy can deliver what he's promising.
I didn't get the job. I found out after the fact that the interviewer came to regret his decision, since the other interviewee couldn't, in fact, deliver on what he promised. The company wasted a lot of time and money paying for a solution that didn't work. On the other hand, how was the interviewer to know? It could have just as easily been that I was the charlatan, aiming to bilk extra money from his company for a relatively simple task? Or maybe the other interviewee was a complete techie badass who really could achieve incredible things for small amounts of money. Not being an expert himself, he had to trust someone, so naturally he chose the one with the best sounding story. Unfortunately, the best sounding story isn't always the truth.
The same holds true for personal philosophies; solving the problems that being alive presents. When you are listening to other people, you should actually listen to them. Try to see things their way. Don't bash them, even if you disagree. It doesn't hurt. It can often help. And when you're presenting a counterpoint, be genteel about it. Tact goes a very long way.
I agree strongly. One of the things I've learned over the years is that, when someone is disagreeing with you, it's almost always the case that they're thinking about something that's worth considering. They might be misunderstanding a lot of things, mixing up causes and effects, or all making all sorts of mistakes, but if you can figure out what's really at stake in the argument, it's almost always something fairly understandable if not valid.
Like you look at something really contentious like Intelligent Design. I've talked to proponents of Intelligent Design enough to have realized that many of them aren't even interested in it as a scientific theory. The real essential point of contention is that they don't like people trying to use science to tell them that their beliefs, and even their way of life is wrong. Intelligent Design is often just seen as a way of fighting back, of "beating atheists at their own game." And fair enough, because it's true that some atheists want to use evolution as a wedge issue to claim that all religious people are stupid; I can't blame people for wanting to respond. If you can somehow bring the argument around to an admission that "evolution has happened" is not equivalent to "God doesn't exist," then suddenly you'll find that a lot of religious people are more open to evolution as a concept.
Of course, other things get involved, too. For example, sometimes a person is just feeling backed into a corner and that person feels like his ego is at stake in the argument. Now that's not entirely valid, but it's fairly understandable. And if you discover that it's the case, then sometimes you can bring that person around to your side by giving him an opportunity to agree with you without sacrificing his ego-- assuming you can invent that opportunity. Or sometimes you just have to disabuse them of the notion that they can hang their ego on this argument, just so they'll give up.
Anyway, I'm going off on tangents, but my real point here is this: whenever someone is arguing against you, it's good to assume that there's something that person believes is at risk, and that person wants to protect that at-risk thing. If you can't figure out what that at-risk thing is, then you're not very well-prepared to argue.
You got it right there, if you can't communicate complex ideas to interested parties outside your field then you don't properly understand your field.
I don't think that's true. Wouldn't you at least preserve the possibility that someone could be knowledgeable about their field but a very poor communicator? I feel like I've known lots of smart people who are just very bad at explaining their own thoughts.
Plato argued in the Republic (through Socrates) that only philosophers were suited to be rulers.
Sorry, but I feel the need to interject something here. If you're reading Plato and thinking that Plato is making clear positive arguments through Socrates, you might want to go back and reread with a more critical eye. There's a lot of evidence all around to suggest that, not only did Plato not agree with a lot of things that he had Socrates saying in the dialogs, but also, within the dialogs, Socrates didn't even believe a lot of things that Socrates was saying. The whole thing makes a lot more sense if you consider Plato's dialogs to be almost like plays, in which Socrates is a very sarcastic and tricky character.
In this particular case, it's not clear that Socrates actually believes that only philosophers are set to be rulers. He's setting up a sort of perfect/utopian society that a philosopher might dream up, and then following through on the logical conclusions and reducing the whole thing to absurdity. In many ways, what he's showing is that dreams of utopian societies eventually lead to horrific situations.
I think the whole "one way hash" argument in the blog post is a little too clever and glib, but it is pointing at a very old and troublesome philosophical question: When a bad/false argument is more seductive than the truth, how do you convince a mass of people of the truth?
Of course that raises other questions about truth and its value. Elsewhere in the Republic, this sort of question proposes the idea that leaders should be willing to lie in such a way so as to lead their people to a good end, at least in those cases where the truth is not persuasive enough. However, this proposition is also shown to be problematic.
Whenever talking about electricity in this magnitude, I always want the calculations done in "number of DeLoreans sent backward in time". From an earlier post, I'm estimating that:
1 entire power output of the north american energy grid = 410 DeLoreans sent backward in time
Whatever, this it retardedly pedantic. Insofar as this stuff is talked about, people seem to drop in whichever one of these terms they like. I've seen it talked about in tech sites, with technical people I know, and since the Kindle started getting mainstream press, I've seen it talked about on normal news websites, on TV, and among non-technical people. I've heard all of these people drop in these terms however they feel like it, and nobody is particularly concerned about the underlying technology used to have monitors that don't need backlights.
Like, what, are we going to argue about which sites are technically using "web 2.0"? Are we going to talk about which services are technically "in the cloud"?
So what benefits would e-ink provide in this case?
You get the low power-consumption of electronic ink so long as you're displaying a static picture, but something which could also be used as a monitor. That the redraw is electrically expensive is, among other things, why we don't have a "holy grail".
But imagine you could buy something that looked like a plain white poster rolled up in a tube. You take it home, stick on your wall, and it's a TV or computer monitor that doesn't need a backlight so long as there's enough ambient light. But then you turn off all the lights and you activate some kind of luminescent layer that acts as a backlight so that you still get a good viewing experience. You're done watching TV or whatever, and you set it to display an image and turn it off. It continues to display that image without really using any electricity.
Yeah, it's science fiction, but a lot of those individual qualities are possible in a display today. Just not all of them are available in the same display.
And I'm saying that if you want to make those distinction in terms, that's fine. Yes, there are multiple forms of "electronic ink" or "digital paper", and I'm fine with you wanting to assign whatever terms you want. But there doesn't seem to be a common consensus that any particular term is referring to any particular technology, except perhaps within companies who are trying to coin a term for branding their own products.
In common use, all of these terms just mean, "flat panel displays that don't need a backlight."
Well fine, you can make that distinction. What I'm saying is, I don't think that there's any real consensus about distinctions between those terms. Even if one or more of those terms are trademarked and referencing a particular technology, it may end up being like "xerox" or "kleenex", where the brand name becomes a generic term.
Well I guess that depends on what kind of work (and play) you're doing. Most of what I do with a computer is reading and writing text. I don't see how having the text rendered in 3D would help me.
As far as I know, e-Ink is a marketing name for a specific piece of technology
Meh. People use e-paper, e-ink, digital paper, digital ink, electronic paper, electronic ink, and maybe some other terms I haven't heard. They use them all interchangeably to mean "flat panel electronic screens that don't need a backlight." And maybe they also include the part about not needing a charge to maintain the displayed image, but only needing the charge to change the image.
I think people just haven't quite settled on a terminology here.
Yes, they are when compared to things like OLED or electronic ink. And whatever the hell these people are doing.
It seems to me the holy grail of displays would be something like full-color electronic ink with fast response times, paired with some kind of lighting scheme for when ambient lighting isn't sufficient.
Not a huge deal, considering Apple doesn't sell AAC Protected songs anymore.
I don't think Apple is selling any music with DRM anymore. They issued an announcement a few weeks ago that their transition was done. Videos and Audible books still have DRM AFAIK.
Is this really such a "big fat middle finger"? It's cementing iTunes as the default player and iTMS as the default music store, and putting Palm in the position of trying to pick up some of Apple's leftovers. Plus, if Apple doesn't like it, they can issue firmware updates and update iTunes, making everything connect some slightly different way, and suddenly Palm's stuff stops working.
If Palm really wanted to make trouble for Apple, they'd make their own alternative to iTunes, which wouldn't take much work. If they really didn't want to do it from scratch, I'm sure there are even some open source projects that could be used as a jumping-off point. And if they didn't want to make their own music store, they could probably strike a deal with Amazon. Now that would be a problem for Apple.
By setting up your own you're destroying the networking aspect.
A private site for friends will never have the pull of a world-wide LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE site.
Er... no. You could set up social networking standards and protocols that would allow various sites to enable their users to build profiles which could then be shared in a manner very similar to facebook. You'd want some kind of common authentication (OpenID) if you don't want all the profiles to be public. If anything, I'd say that by keeping a private little proprietary system, they're limiting the networking aspect.
They want all of your data, and this is just another tool for them to get at it.
...except that it sounds like they're making it all pretty open. From TFA, "The code will be open source, and developers intending to build on the platform are being given access to APIs, according to a post on the official Google blog."
So you can build your own implementation, and the whole thing is going to be P2P, so Google won't necessarily have access to your data unless you're specifically using their server.
the layout shown is hideous and provides nothing but total information overload.
Well first, I don't agree that it's so awful. Second, it's pre-release and not even a public beta. Third, it's going to be open source so you can skin it or completely rewrite the interface.
Sounds good to me.
Except maybe it will be what something like Twitter, Facebook, and IM should have been from the beginning. For one thing, it sounds like it will be open and decentralized, meaning that I can set up my own Wave server, and you can set up your own Wave server, and our users can talk without any problems.
You can already do that with IM so long as we're all using Jabber, but otherwise it can get a little problematic. But I can't set up my own private facebook or twitter server, and even if I do, there's not support for my server to let people befriend and network with people on the real Facebook and Twitter.
To me, that's always been the #1 problem with social networking sites on the Internet. You can't set up your own, but instead your left to make a new account on whatever site is cool this week. Like what if instead of being able to set up my own webpage, I had to set up a webpage on whatever hosting company was trendy, and then rewrite it based on that host's protocols?
Yeah, I just don't think it matters if it's deterministic. Even disregarding the vagueness that quantum mechanics brings to the determinism question, thinking about our behavior in terms of physical/chemical reactions doesn't really help us make decisions.
Almost whenever you hear someone say, "[X] is just [Y]," they're almost always oversimplifying and disregarding noteworthy complexity in order to be glib. Our actions may be the result of pre-determined physical reactions in some sense, but it's not "just" the result of pre-determined physical reactions.
When we get down to it, physics determines all of our actions. Our decisions and actions are all a result of physical phenomena.
You may be right on a certain level, but that explanation fails to help us.
I mean, fine, all my actions are the result of physics. Now what? What kind of job should I get? What kind of society should I form? Even a simple question like, should I eat cereal for breakfast, or just skip it and drink a cup of coffee? Saying that my choice in each case will be caused by physical reactions doesn't help me make any of those decisions.
Ideas matter, too, and they do have an effect on what decisions we make. If you didn't believe that, then you wouldn't be pushing the idea that physics determines our actions.
Of course this has some people who live perfect little lives, and always get what they want, questioning the new classification. The so called "disorder"...
Is this supposed to be funny, or is the submitter suffering from some embitterment himself?
I know some people love having their personality labelled as a "disorder" because they believe it then excuses their actions. But also having a label like this can help people cope. Having a label can help you wrap your head around your own thoughts and behaviors, make you feel like you're not uniquely screwed up and alone, and figure out what steps might help you improve.
Yeah, I don't think people understand those concepts very well. I find it very frustrating the way people think that capitalism is a governmental system and a moral system rather than an economic system.
Living in a capitalist economic system does not require that the government is controlled by industry, nor does it require that all of your personal motivations are driven by desire for profit. You can have a capitalistic system where people are free to spend money the way they want and still have people spend money on things that benefit the common good. You can have a capitalistic system wherein people choose to share.
How you accomplish that is a different problem.
Well yeah, I think the only thing in question there is "cheap". We could argue about whether $1/track is already cheap, and if not, how cheap it should be. But the problem is, these companies want to play too many games with the whole system.
You can get it cheap right now, but only from an exclusive partner. Or you can get a poor-quality version in two months for a ridiculously large cost. Or you can get a high-quality version now, but it will only play on this one particular device, and you'll have to buy it again if you want to play it on anything else. Or you can play a not-particularly high quality version from our website using a retarded player that doesn't work very well.
Why should customers have to sort through all that? Why does every businessman seem to think that the customer/consumer should spend all the customer's time figuring out the businessman's particular industry, learn to play by all the businessman's rules, and then buy whatever it is that the businessman is peddling? What ever happened to business meeting the customer's needs and wants, and seeing "profits" as the fair reward for servicing the customer well? Instead, "profits" are seen as the business's entitlement that the customer owes them.
Well the direct financial incentive to record music will be reduced if copyright goes away. I don't see a way around that. On the other hand, there will still be indirect financial incentives.
Beyond that, it's never been entirely clear to me that the financial incentives were what was motivating the creation of music. I think you could make music recording illegal, and force people to pay to record their music, and people would still do it at a loss. The quality of the recording might suffer somewhat, in that there might not be the money floating around to pay for a $10K microphone, but I have no doubt that people would still play music and record music if copyrights went away.
Sure, I could now carry around (if I was young) a digital camera, and a photo printer, with the requisite cords, some ink, and a ream of paper
Part of my point was that in order to really replace Polaroid cameras, someone would need to come up with an all-in-one device that had the digital camera, photo printer, ink, and paper built-in. It would have to be as small and light as a polaroid, take as many pictures without recharging, hold as many pictures at a time, print as fast as a polaroid develops, etc. Until that happens, we haven't really replaced the polaroid, but it has nothing to do with the analog/digital issue. But still, it's a niche market. They were a niche market even 20 years ago.
But beyond that, yes, there's sentimentality from people who remember when polaroid was huge. My point was, that will go away when we get old and die. Sorry if that's depressing, but it's probably true.