Now if you knew (somehow) that there was a 1 in 10 chance I'd gotten the calculation wrong, you're going to look at it as more of a 1 in 10 chance of getting hit... or at least way more than one in 1 million.
Yeah, I think the point is that you have to at least take that possibility of error into your calculations if you want to be very safe. But then, how do you know you've calculated that correctly?
They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time, it works every time.
Why should they only prioritize known good traffic? Why not just throttle known bad traffic (when there's congestion)?
Did you read my post about how prioritizing one protocol isn't the same as throttling all other protocols? I don't want my ISP throttling any of my traffic. In my opinion, none of my traffic should be considered "known bad traffic" by my ISP. On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense to prioritize traffic that they *know* is sensitive to delays.
Well, in fairness, scientists are wrong all the time. Not that it means anything bad for "science" as a method, but that's how the method works. You make a guess, you're wrong, and then you try to figure out why you're wrong. Science isn't the art of being right about everything the first time out.
Think about the financial problems. They were brought on partially because a bunch of very smart people developing a statistical theory that (supposedly) meant that things had a very low chance of imploding. Then they imploded anyway.
Now, when you take into account the idea that the LHC was built specifically to create a set of circumstances that don't happen frequently enough so that we can study what happens specifically because we don't know exactly what happens, then it becomes clear that it's stupid to say, "Don't worry, because we know exactly what's going to happen."
On the other hand, if you want to argue that it will do something very dangerous (e.g. create a black hole), then it falls on you to present a convincing argument. It's not enough to say, "We don't know what will happen, so obviously there's a good chance that something horrible will happen." Hell, it's technically "possible" (in the sense that anything is possible) that me getting out of bed in the morning will destroy the earth. It doesn't seem likely, though, and no one has successfully convinced me that I'm dangerous, so I'm going to get out of bed in the morning.
As for them overselling, if they had to be totally honest about how much bandwidth is available to each customer, they would have to say 'Total Bandwidth / Number of Customers = Your alotted bandwidth'.
Yeah, I think some of the complaints about "overselling bandwidth" can be slightly silly. It's as though people assume that ISPs are going to just drag a cable to your house that connects directly to "the Internet" without going through any switches or routers or anything else that could become a bottleneck at any point.
I do believe that when an ISP advertises a X Mbps connection, you should be able to test your connection to nearby servers and find that you're getting something very close to X Mbps almost all the time. If they say you have "unlimited" usage, then they shouldn't be allowed to turn around and say, "Well, you've gone over your 10 GB cap, so we're cutting you off." Expecting ISPs to guarantee a X Mbps connection to everything all the time as though you had a direct X Mbps connection to whatever server you want to connect to-- it's just not going to happen. That's not how this stuff works.
Yeah, prioritizing some traffic isn't, in theory, the same thing as throttling other traffic. To me, "throttling" suggests that they're saying "traffic using protocol X cannot use more than Y kbps," whereas "prioritizing" would be ensuring that, "whenever we have to choose between delaying protocol X or protocol Y, we always delay protocol X."
Now there are still potential issues with implementation, which protocols you chose to prioritize, and outright abuse for other purposes (such as promoting your own services or degrading competing services). However, in abstract, I don't think it's an absolutely awful idea.
We still don't have a good handle on how to give computers 'good judgement',
I guess part of my point is that some of the problems you mention might be simpler than real AI problems. Weather, for example, might be a variable that could be handled by having a human look at a weather report and designate a risk level for a given span of airspace. The AI could connect to the service, download a map, read that the route it's about to calculate runs straight through a weather advisory, and tell you, "Nope. We can't go today. Maybe if you wait a few hours, we'll see if the weather improves."
Or if you have sufficient wireless communication, the autopilot could even connect to the weather advisory service mid-flight, say, "Oops, we're headed towards a weather system that's worse than we thought when we took off. I'm going to reroute to the closest airport and we'll wait this out."
Not that the whole thing is quite that easy, but if the actual take-off/flying/landing part is all taken care of, then I think you could probably tackle the rest in order to come up with a set of flying conditions that allow you to label a situation "safe" for the AI to handle the whole flight.
I'm actually more interested in seeing fully automated driving than flying.
That problem actually seems like it'd be much harder, since there are so many moving and untracked solid object here on the ground.
There is a significant part of the population that uses analog TV as their primary point of communication to the outside world.
And what is being communicated? Most of the new on TV is an absolute joke. It's random/stupid scare-mongering. I can agree that weather and emergency information is useful, but in most of those cases radio is adequate. It's not as though there aren't people living perfectly functional lives without watching TV.
I think it was dumb that the government was giving coupons for receivers in the first place, but if someone has gotten this far without preparing for the changeover, then it's their own damn fault.
The pilot doesn't put enough fuel on for the flying they want to do....The pilot flies into thunderstorms, freezing rain, etc....The pilot doesn't maintain the aircraft or magic autopilot system...
I guess I was imagining that a sufficiently intelligent system might be able to account for some thing. For example, when you set the destination in your autopilot, it calculates a flight plan, calculates the needed fuel (plus some extra for safety), and checks weather reports for possible problems. Perhaps it also checks some self-diagnostics and has records of a maintenance schedule and won't fly unless the right conditions are met.
And, of course, engine failures requiring off-airport landings. The recent USAir landing in the Hudson illustrates where a skilled human is most valuable.
Perhaps in those cases you could still have the autopilot guide the plane to a decent outcome? But even if we imagined that those circumstances were always going to be fatal, it still might result in fewer fatalities than car traffic.
To be clear, I'm not trying to say your wrong, and I'm not predicting that we'll all have flying cars in the next 5 years. You raise some helpful objections. I just find the prospect slightly interesting, because I think we (as a society) will have to reevaluate many of our transportation choices in the coming decades.
I'm not saying they're doing a bang-up job right now, but they still have to convince someone to give them money somehow, or they'll simply close up shop. If you start some sort of system where they just get a guaranteed sum of money every month, then they won't even have to pretend to be useful.
On the other hand, that might be a good strategy to kill the industry completely (if that's your goal). Set up a system where we pay them for doing nothing, let them do nothing for a couple years, and then turn around and say, "Why are we paying them to do nothing? Let's discontinue that program!" It might work.
... or during those couple of years, they might be able to save money by not even pretending to do anything, thereby allowing them to allocate even more of that money to buying off Congress and forcing us to pay even more for them to do nothing. It wouldn't shock me.
Well, that survey was hardly conclusive, but I suppose it might be a symptom of the old, "only losers go into government" theory.
I've never seen it explicitly stated anywhere that I can remember, but I've heard people complain on countless occasions that the best and brightest simply don't go into government. If you're making millions and millions of dollars running a successful company, are you going to quit to make a salary that's chicken feed (relatively) working for the government?
I don't know how true that really is, though. It seems like there are some people who are very interested in public service, and are willing to sacrifice a little income.
Yeah, I always find it surprising that more people aren't concerned about the sort of vertical integration that is involved with a company like Time Warner Cable, and the potential conflicts of interest in providing "good service" for each individual service.
They own the infrastructure, they run the Voice/TV service provided over that infrastructure, and then they also run the Internet service that provides potential competition to their own Voice and TV services. In addition, they also own some of the channels provided over their own TV service, as well as owning the rights to many TV shows and movies shown on those channels.
In each case, there must be some kind of temptation to favor their own products over the competing products that they're also providing access to. To be clear, I'm not alleging that they've done anything wrong, but only that there's an inherent ethical problem. For example, let's say Netflix comes up with a plan to partner with ISPs nationwide to provide a service for video-on-demand. They go to negotiate with Time Warner Cable's ISP division to talk about the idea and negotiate a deal. Do you foresee that TWC is going to seriously consider the deal that would diminish their own video-on-demand services? Or that they might partner with Vonage to provide VoIP?
It's for this sort of reason that I think it may be wise to institute some kind of law that limits vertical integration of ISPs with other services. I've thought for some time that we should probably forbid the people who own the infrastructure (the actual hardware and cable) from providing any service, and require that they provide open access at set fees without any opportunity to negotiate special deals. Since these companies own a monopoly (or duopoly) and represent public infrastructure, they shouldn't be allowed much control over what's sent through their hardware.
Oh, and another problem-- if you create the server with all the music and then allow people access, assuming there's no DRM, what's to stop someone from downloading the whole catalog of music and setting up their own free distribution service?
Your solution doesn't even address the issue of piracy.
First, there's the problem with measuring, "work out how much money the record companies make from sales." Whose numbers do you trust? Second, there's the issue of distribution of the money. Who gets what share of the money? Third there's the problem that once this system is put into place, there's no way of measuring how much money the record companies would have made this year if this system were not put in place. So how do you determine whether the amount should rise or fall year-to-year.
And if that weren't enough, it leaves no incentive for record companies to do anything useful ever again. They can just kick back and collect their checks.
allow google to track visitors to the website (at a cost of $750,000 it appears)
Any additional information on that? I'd read about the Youtube being allowed to store some kind of cookie, but from reading about it, I'd come to the impression that it just that Youtube movies automatically track certain things, and it would have become one of those "how do you omit someone from tracking without keeping track of them to know to omit them?" issues.
I'm just wondering if there's any more information out on that. It seemed kind of weird to me that the Whitehouse had chosen to use gmail for interim addresses and also chosen to use Youtube for video, but I hadn't heard anyone that was able to tie it together credibly into an actual conspiracy theory.
I don't know about John W. Thompson, but my gut response to this was, "Could he look for someone who runs a company that doesn't suck?" Thompson might not be responsible, but *someone* has been running Symantec into the ground for several years now-- at least as far as product quality is concerned.
As far as technology goes, I'd be much more pleased if I felt like the administration were looking for people with pro-freedom and pro-consumer tendencies.
Maybe MS is preying on the fact that most consumers will be too stupid to know they're buying more than they need, or too elitist to buy just what they will use instead of getting "Ultimate". Either way, they make more money.
Or else that people will buy a computer without investigating the options ahead of time, end up with Home Basic, find that they're missing a feature they need, and then they'll upgrade all the way to Ultimate when all they really wanted was the Business edition.
It may be a different problem, but it's a related problem. TV isn't really doing much to "server the public interest", and therefore it doesn't make sense for the government to subsidize equipment for the purpose of keeping broadcasters' ad revenue up.
One question that comes to my mind: could advanced autopilot tech lead to more ubiquitous personal aircraft?
I don't really know anything about it, but I've always assumed that one of the big hurdles preventing us from having "flying cars" (by which I don't necessarily mean an actual car, but something lots of individuals could buy and fly under casual circumstances) is the difficulty of learning to fly safely. If you could program a destination and have the entire trip flown by an autopilot, from takeoff to landing, would that help the situation?
I don't think Microsoft trying to stop people using a single CD-Key and install them on 50 machines a bad move on their part.
I do. First, it's not necessarily about wanting to use a single CD key on everything, but rather that if I have 50 computers and documentation of 50 licenses, why should I have to endure the extra overhead of tracking which license goes to which computer? When I go to reinstall, why should I have to track down the specific code that was used by that computer rather than use the nearest handy key? (again, assuming I know I have 50 licenses and 50 computers) And what about imaging? Why should I have another thing to worry about when I want to put the same image on 50 computers?
It's not necessarily going to cause problems for everyone all the time, but if you find yourself in a situation where it is a hassle, it's pretty striking how needless a hassle it is.
I think the 5 minute phone call isn't too much to ask, so we'll have to disagree.
Last time I did it (which admittedly was a couple years ago because I refuse to deal with activation anymore), I was on hold for about half an hour. Even then, it's not so much an issue of a half hour being "too much" as the idea that 1 minute can be "too much" if I can't control when it happens. I could be in the middle of something urgent, and I don't want that sort of issue getting in my way.
Beyond the specific trouble it has caused me in the past, I just think it shows that Microsoft's priorities are completely out of whack. When they go to spend time and money developing products, the fact that they're spending any of it on this activation crap indicates to me that Microsoft is more interested in promoting their own economic/political cause than in providing a good product. I would much rather see every development dollar being spent on making the product more convenient for me, rather than less so.
Right about now is when I'd expect you to say, "But they're a private corporation and this is capitalism. Of course they're going to pursue their own economic/political causes first!" I guess that's true. On the other hand, this is capitalism, and of course I'm going to pursue my own economic/political causes. That means not giving money to corporations who don't put me (as their customer) first. That's how the system works. When capitalism works, it works because people don't patronize companies that don't serve their customers well.
So I have every right not to buy their product, and every right to be vocal about the reasons why. You also have every right not to find my reasons compelling, but you must have some level of interest or else you wouldn't respond.
Sure. I'd agree that there is such a thing as age-appropriate violence (or whatever terminology you'd like to use). That is to say, children's entertainment probably shouldn't be sanitized of all violence and conflicts, and that including some kinds of violence without the full gory detail is probably a good idea.
The issue in my mind is not some kind of absolute, but more of an issue of degree. I haven't been able to get much detail on this particular FPS, but it seems unlikely to me that something called "Blood Frontier" would become suddenly child-friendly just because there are a couple fewer red pixels when you shoot someone.
I'm guessing that it's more like-- I forget which fighting game it was, but years ago there was some Street Fighter/Virtua Fighter-ish game where when you punched someone, there was a little flash of red. It wasn't the slightest bit gory, but parents got mad because that little flash of red was supposed to be blood, so the makers caved and changed the color of that flash to blue. Suddenly parents were happy.
So to a large degree I'm asking the question, "Does the appearance of blood make this game completely inappropriate for 5 year olds, and if so, does simply removing blood suddenly make this game appropriate for 5 year olds?" And I'm guessing the answer is "no."
You'll recognize the difference, quickly, between what causes nightmares and what does not....Kids freak out much more over the sight of a shootout where the walls are being splashed with blood, and one where people just fall over.
So your aim is to make sure you expose your kids to violence, but just to make sure that they don't get nightmares about it?
I dunno, but I might wonder whether "my kids are too young to be exposed to depictions of bloody gun violence," should be considered a much different statement than, "my kids are too young to be exposed to depictions of gun violence." If your kids are constantly being exposed to violence, maybe it's best that they are a bit horrified by it.
I really am not trying to be snarky, but I don't think you read my post very well and perhaps missed the point. I was saying I'm not the sort who thinks that kids need to be highly sheltered from video game violence. I don't think pretending to kill people is all that big of a deal.
On the other hand, I have some understanding of why parents get concerned about these things, and I think it's fine for parents to believe that their children shouldn't be exposed to that sort of thing. In those cases, I think it's incumbent on the parents to pay attention to what their kids are seeing/playing and censor their own child's experience without infringing on the rest of our rights. I don't think it's the job of the government (or society at large) to censor reality, movies, television, or video games so as to protect your child from experiencing something that you don't happen to believe is appropriate.
Still, if I imagine being such a parent, and I don't allow my child to play violent video games, then I simply can't imagine that censoring the blood would be satisfying. If you're afraid that violent games will send the message that "violence is OK," then a bloodless violent game will only send the message, "violence is ok so long as you don't see the blood."
And this weirdness is just highlighted for me in the fact that it's actually called "kid mode", as though the game is now an appropriate children's game because the blood has been removed. It's like if Rockstar released a separate version of GTA with all the same content except that it didn't render blood, edited out the swear words, and covered the strippers a little bit more, and called it "GTA for ages 10 and under". That'd be a pretty lame attempt at being child-friendly.
including a kid-mode, which optionally turns off the blood â" a nice option for a change
Why is it that people think turning off blood makes things "kid friendly"? Are you still running around killing people?
I'm not the sort of person who's a big believe in sheltering children, but if you are that sort of person, does simply censoring blood make the game OK to play? I think if I were the sort of parent that didn't want my kids to play violent games, then censoring a little gore wouldn't really make them acceptable.
On the other hand, some parents are a little crazy, so whatever. I just think it's weird to censor blood out of a FPS called "Blood Frontier", and then call it "kid mode".
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Now if you knew (somehow) that there was a 1 in 10 chance I'd gotten the calculation wrong, you're going to look at it as more of a 1 in 10 chance of getting hit ... or at least way more than one in 1 million.
Yeah, I think the point is that you have to at least take that possibility of error into your calculations if you want to be very safe. But then, how do you know you've calculated that correctly?
They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time, it works every time.
Why should they only prioritize known good traffic? Why not just throttle known bad traffic (when there's congestion)?
Did you read my post about how prioritizing one protocol isn't the same as throttling all other protocols? I don't want my ISP throttling any of my traffic. In my opinion, none of my traffic should be considered "known bad traffic" by my ISP. On the other hand, it makes a lot of sense to prioritize traffic that they *know* is sensitive to delays.
Well, in fairness, scientists are wrong all the time. Not that it means anything bad for "science" as a method, but that's how the method works. You make a guess, you're wrong, and then you try to figure out why you're wrong. Science isn't the art of being right about everything the first time out.
Think about the financial problems. They were brought on partially because a bunch of very smart people developing a statistical theory that (supposedly) meant that things had a very low chance of imploding. Then they imploded anyway.
Now, when you take into account the idea that the LHC was built specifically to create a set of circumstances that don't happen frequently enough so that we can study what happens specifically because we don't know exactly what happens, then it becomes clear that it's stupid to say, "Don't worry, because we know exactly what's going to happen."
On the other hand, if you want to argue that it will do something very dangerous (e.g. create a black hole), then it falls on you to present a convincing argument. It's not enough to say, "We don't know what will happen, so obviously there's a good chance that something horrible will happen." Hell, it's technically "possible" (in the sense that anything is possible) that me getting out of bed in the morning will destroy the earth. It doesn't seem likely, though, and no one has successfully convinced me that I'm dangerous, so I'm going to get out of bed in the morning.
As for them overselling, if they had to be totally honest about how much bandwidth is available to each customer, they would have to say 'Total Bandwidth / Number of Customers = Your alotted bandwidth'.
Yeah, I think some of the complaints about "overselling bandwidth" can be slightly silly. It's as though people assume that ISPs are going to just drag a cable to your house that connects directly to "the Internet" without going through any switches or routers or anything else that could become a bottleneck at any point.
I do believe that when an ISP advertises a X Mbps connection, you should be able to test your connection to nearby servers and find that you're getting something very close to X Mbps almost all the time. If they say you have "unlimited" usage, then they shouldn't be allowed to turn around and say, "Well, you've gone over your 10 GB cap, so we're cutting you off." Expecting ISPs to guarantee a X Mbps connection to everything all the time as though you had a direct X Mbps connection to whatever server you want to connect to-- it's just not going to happen. That's not how this stuff works.
Yeah, prioritizing some traffic isn't, in theory, the same thing as throttling other traffic. To me, "throttling" suggests that they're saying "traffic using protocol X cannot use more than Y kbps," whereas "prioritizing" would be ensuring that, "whenever we have to choose between delaying protocol X or protocol Y, we always delay protocol X."
Now there are still potential issues with implementation, which protocols you chose to prioritize, and outright abuse for other purposes (such as promoting your own services or degrading competing services). However, in abstract, I don't think it's an absolutely awful idea.
We still don't have a good handle on how to give computers 'good judgement',
I guess part of my point is that some of the problems you mention might be simpler than real AI problems. Weather, for example, might be a variable that could be handled by having a human look at a weather report and designate a risk level for a given span of airspace. The AI could connect to the service, download a map, read that the route it's about to calculate runs straight through a weather advisory, and tell you, "Nope. We can't go today. Maybe if you wait a few hours, we'll see if the weather improves."
Or if you have sufficient wireless communication, the autopilot could even connect to the weather advisory service mid-flight, say, "Oops, we're headed towards a weather system that's worse than we thought when we took off. I'm going to reroute to the closest airport and we'll wait this out."
Not that the whole thing is quite that easy, but if the actual take-off/flying/landing part is all taken care of, then I think you could probably tackle the rest in order to come up with a set of flying conditions that allow you to label a situation "safe" for the AI to handle the whole flight.
I'm actually more interested in seeing fully automated driving than flying.
That problem actually seems like it'd be much harder, since there are so many moving and untracked solid object here on the ground.
There is a significant part of the population that uses analog TV as their primary point of communication to the outside world.
And what is being communicated? Most of the new on TV is an absolute joke. It's random/stupid scare-mongering. I can agree that weather and emergency information is useful, but in most of those cases radio is adequate. It's not as though there aren't people living perfectly functional lives without watching TV.
I think it was dumb that the government was giving coupons for receivers in the first place, but if someone has gotten this far without preparing for the changeover, then it's their own damn fault.
The pilot doesn't put enough fuel on for the flying they want to do....The pilot flies into thunderstorms, freezing rain, etc....The pilot doesn't maintain the aircraft or magic autopilot system...
I guess I was imagining that a sufficiently intelligent system might be able to account for some thing. For example, when you set the destination in your autopilot, it calculates a flight plan, calculates the needed fuel (plus some extra for safety), and checks weather reports for possible problems. Perhaps it also checks some self-diagnostics and has records of a maintenance schedule and won't fly unless the right conditions are met.
And, of course, engine failures requiring off-airport landings. The recent USAir landing in the Hudson illustrates where a skilled human is most valuable.
Perhaps in those cases you could still have the autopilot guide the plane to a decent outcome? But even if we imagined that those circumstances were always going to be fatal, it still might result in fewer fatalities than car traffic.
To be clear, I'm not trying to say your wrong, and I'm not predicting that we'll all have flying cars in the next 5 years. You raise some helpful objections. I just find the prospect slightly interesting, because I think we (as a society) will have to reevaluate many of our transportation choices in the coming decades.
I'm not saying they're doing a bang-up job right now, but they still have to convince someone to give them money somehow, or they'll simply close up shop. If you start some sort of system where they just get a guaranteed sum of money every month, then they won't even have to pretend to be useful.
On the other hand, that might be a good strategy to kill the industry completely (if that's your goal). Set up a system where we pay them for doing nothing, let them do nothing for a couple years, and then turn around and say, "Why are we paying them to do nothing? Let's discontinue that program!" It might work.
... or during those couple of years, they might be able to save money by not even pretending to do anything, thereby allowing them to allocate even more of that money to buying off Congress and forcing us to pay even more for them to do nothing. It wouldn't shock me.
Well, that survey was hardly conclusive, but I suppose it might be a symptom of the old, "only losers go into government" theory.
I've never seen it explicitly stated anywhere that I can remember, but I've heard people complain on countless occasions that the best and brightest simply don't go into government. If you're making millions and millions of dollars running a successful company, are you going to quit to make a salary that's chicken feed (relatively) working for the government?
I don't know how true that really is, though. It seems like there are some people who are very interested in public service, and are willing to sacrifice a little income.
Yeah, I always find it surprising that more people aren't concerned about the sort of vertical integration that is involved with a company like Time Warner Cable, and the potential conflicts of interest in providing "good service" for each individual service.
They own the infrastructure, they run the Voice/TV service provided over that infrastructure, and then they also run the Internet service that provides potential competition to their own Voice and TV services. In addition, they also own some of the channels provided over their own TV service, as well as owning the rights to many TV shows and movies shown on those channels.
In each case, there must be some kind of temptation to favor their own products over the competing products that they're also providing access to. To be clear, I'm not alleging that they've done anything wrong, but only that there's an inherent ethical problem. For example, let's say Netflix comes up with a plan to partner with ISPs nationwide to provide a service for video-on-demand. They go to negotiate with Time Warner Cable's ISP division to talk about the idea and negotiate a deal. Do you foresee that TWC is going to seriously consider the deal that would diminish their own video-on-demand services? Or that they might partner with Vonage to provide VoIP?
It's for this sort of reason that I think it may be wise to institute some kind of law that limits vertical integration of ISPs with other services. I've thought for some time that we should probably forbid the people who own the infrastructure (the actual hardware and cable) from providing any service, and require that they provide open access at set fees without any opportunity to negotiate special deals. Since these companies own a monopoly (or duopoly) and represent public infrastructure, they shouldn't be allowed much control over what's sent through their hardware.
Oh, and another problem-- if you create the server with all the music and then allow people access, assuming there's no DRM, what's to stop someone from downloading the whole catalog of music and setting up their own free distribution service?
Your solution doesn't even address the issue of piracy.
First, there's the problem with measuring, "work out how much money the record companies make from sales." Whose numbers do you trust? Second, there's the issue of distribution of the money. Who gets what share of the money? Third there's the problem that once this system is put into place, there's no way of measuring how much money the record companies would have made this year if this system were not put in place. So how do you determine whether the amount should rise or fall year-to-year.
And if that weren't enough, it leaves no incentive for record companies to do anything useful ever again. They can just kick back and collect their checks.
allow google to track visitors to the website (at a cost of $750,000 it appears)
Any additional information on that? I'd read about the Youtube being allowed to store some kind of cookie, but from reading about it, I'd come to the impression that it just that Youtube movies automatically track certain things, and it would have become one of those "how do you omit someone from tracking without keeping track of them to know to omit them?" issues.
I'm just wondering if there's any more information out on that. It seemed kind of weird to me that the Whitehouse had chosen to use gmail for interim addresses and also chosen to use Youtube for video, but I hadn't heard anyone that was able to tie it together credibly into an actual conspiracy theory.
I don't know about John W. Thompson, but my gut response to this was, "Could he look for someone who runs a company that doesn't suck?" Thompson might not be responsible, but *someone* has been running Symantec into the ground for several years now-- at least as far as product quality is concerned.
As far as technology goes, I'd be much more pleased if I felt like the administration were looking for people with pro-freedom and pro-consumer tendencies.
Maybe MS is preying on the fact that most consumers will be too stupid to know they're buying more than they need, or too elitist to buy just what they will use instead of getting "Ultimate". Either way, they make more money.
Or else that people will buy a computer without investigating the options ahead of time, end up with Home Basic, find that they're missing a feature they need, and then they'll upgrade all the way to Ultimate when all they really wanted was the Business edition.
It may be a different problem, but it's a related problem. TV isn't really doing much to "server the public interest", and therefore it doesn't make sense for the government to subsidize equipment for the purpose of keeping broadcasters' ad revenue up.
One question that comes to my mind: could advanced autopilot tech lead to more ubiquitous personal aircraft?
I don't really know anything about it, but I've always assumed that one of the big hurdles preventing us from having "flying cars" (by which I don't necessarily mean an actual car, but something lots of individuals could buy and fly under casual circumstances) is the difficulty of learning to fly safely. If you could program a destination and have the entire trip flown by an autopilot, from takeoff to landing, would that help the situation?
I don't think Microsoft trying to stop people using a single CD-Key and install them on 50 machines a bad move on their part.
I do. First, it's not necessarily about wanting to use a single CD key on everything, but rather that if I have 50 computers and documentation of 50 licenses, why should I have to endure the extra overhead of tracking which license goes to which computer? When I go to reinstall, why should I have to track down the specific code that was used by that computer rather than use the nearest handy key? (again, assuming I know I have 50 licenses and 50 computers) And what about imaging? Why should I have another thing to worry about when I want to put the same image on 50 computers?
It's not necessarily going to cause problems for everyone all the time, but if you find yourself in a situation where it is a hassle, it's pretty striking how needless a hassle it is.
I think the 5 minute phone call isn't too much to ask, so we'll have to disagree.
Last time I did it (which admittedly was a couple years ago because I refuse to deal with activation anymore), I was on hold for about half an hour. Even then, it's not so much an issue of a half hour being "too much" as the idea that 1 minute can be "too much" if I can't control when it happens. I could be in the middle of something urgent, and I don't want that sort of issue getting in my way.
Beyond the specific trouble it has caused me in the past, I just think it shows that Microsoft's priorities are completely out of whack. When they go to spend time and money developing products, the fact that they're spending any of it on this activation crap indicates to me that Microsoft is more interested in promoting their own economic/political cause than in providing a good product. I would much rather see every development dollar being spent on making the product more convenient for me, rather than less so.
Right about now is when I'd expect you to say, "But they're a private corporation and this is capitalism. Of course they're going to pursue their own economic/political causes first!" I guess that's true. On the other hand, this is capitalism, and of course I'm going to pursue my own economic/political causes. That means not giving money to corporations who don't put me (as their customer) first. That's how the system works. When capitalism works, it works because people don't patronize companies that don't serve their customers well.
So I have every right not to buy their product, and every right to be vocal about the reasons why. You also have every right not to find my reasons compelling, but you must have some level of interest or else you wouldn't respond.
Sure. I'd agree that there is such a thing as age-appropriate violence (or whatever terminology you'd like to use). That is to say, children's entertainment probably shouldn't be sanitized of all violence and conflicts, and that including some kinds of violence without the full gory detail is probably a good idea.
The issue in my mind is not some kind of absolute, but more of an issue of degree. I haven't been able to get much detail on this particular FPS, but it seems unlikely to me that something called "Blood Frontier" would become suddenly child-friendly just because there are a couple fewer red pixels when you shoot someone.
I'm guessing that it's more like-- I forget which fighting game it was, but years ago there was some Street Fighter/Virtua Fighter-ish game where when you punched someone, there was a little flash of red. It wasn't the slightest bit gory, but parents got mad because that little flash of red was supposed to be blood, so the makers caved and changed the color of that flash to blue. Suddenly parents were happy.
So to a large degree I'm asking the question, "Does the appearance of blood make this game completely inappropriate for 5 year olds, and if so, does simply removing blood suddenly make this game appropriate for 5 year olds?" And I'm guessing the answer is "no."
You'll recognize the difference, quickly, between what causes nightmares and what does not....Kids freak out much more over the sight of a shootout where the walls are being splashed with blood, and one where people just fall over.
So your aim is to make sure you expose your kids to violence, but just to make sure that they don't get nightmares about it?
I dunno, but I might wonder whether "my kids are too young to be exposed to depictions of bloody gun violence," should be considered a much different statement than, "my kids are too young to be exposed to depictions of gun violence." If your kids are constantly being exposed to violence, maybe it's best that they are a bit horrified by it.
If you make it up, how do you know that it will be unique?
I really am not trying to be snarky, but I don't think you read my post very well and perhaps missed the point. I was saying I'm not the sort who thinks that kids need to be highly sheltered from video game violence. I don't think pretending to kill people is all that big of a deal.
On the other hand, I have some understanding of why parents get concerned about these things, and I think it's fine for parents to believe that their children shouldn't be exposed to that sort of thing. In those cases, I think it's incumbent on the parents to pay attention to what their kids are seeing/playing and censor their own child's experience without infringing on the rest of our rights. I don't think it's the job of the government (or society at large) to censor reality, movies, television, or video games so as to protect your child from experiencing something that you don't happen to believe is appropriate.
Still, if I imagine being such a parent, and I don't allow my child to play violent video games, then I simply can't imagine that censoring the blood would be satisfying. If you're afraid that violent games will send the message that "violence is OK," then a bloodless violent game will only send the message, "violence is ok so long as you don't see the blood."
And this weirdness is just highlighted for me in the fact that it's actually called "kid mode", as though the game is now an appropriate children's game because the blood has been removed. It's like if Rockstar released a separate version of GTA with all the same content except that it didn't render blood, edited out the swear words, and covered the strippers a little bit more, and called it "GTA for ages 10 and under". That'd be a pretty lame attempt at being child-friendly.
including a kid-mode, which optionally turns off the blood â" a nice option for a change
Why is it that people think turning off blood makes things "kid friendly"? Are you still running around killing people?
I'm not the sort of person who's a big believe in sheltering children, but if you are that sort of person, does simply censoring blood make the game OK to play? I think if I were the sort of parent that didn't want my kids to play violent games, then censoring a little gore wouldn't really make them acceptable.
On the other hand, some parents are a little crazy, so whatever. I just think it's weird to censor blood out of a FPS called "Blood Frontier", and then call it "kid mode".
So you can have all the fun of running KDE 4 on the amazing stability, security, and versatility of Windows?