Well, I also think that the big distinction is: You're allowed to use whatever format you damned well please. In most cases where they're talking about a government adopting "open formats", they're talking about using open formats for specific kinds of communications. More specifically, the laws force the governments themselves use open formats for documentation that is supposed to be "publicly available". So if your local/state/federal government tells you that you must download a particular form or document, they must make that document available in a format that can be read for free. If they make that document available in MS Word format, then the government is essentially *forcing* their citizens to buy Microsoft Office.
So, you know, it's not like you aren't allowed to own MS Word, and it's not as though saving a private document in MS Word format will result in police breaking your door down. The law just means that the government won't be forcing you to buy a particular piece of software, and a side-effect of this is that it encourages software developers to support open standards.
Exactly right. And what the hell is wrong with listening to advisors? I'll let you in on a secret: nobody, no matter how smart he or she is, is smart enough to understand everything. If you're smart enough to surround yourself with smart advisors, and then you're smart enough to know when to listen to them and when to ignore them, that's as smart as you're ever going to get.
They were in a lose-lose situation before they started. Ignore the problem, and the copyright law is useless. Try to enforce your rights, and the legal protections degrade, as you observed.
It's like the problem of government: Give people freedom and they run around making a big mess. Take away their freedoms and they start rebelling.
I guess my point is that their should be a middle ground between anarchy and fascism. And there should be a middle ground between having a laissez faire attitude toward professional pirating rings vs. suing some 10 year old for supposedly listening to music without a license.
Provide a service that people want for a reasonable price, and don't mistreat your customers.
And the client (the business) is driven by simple capitalism.
Right. So the judges being against them hampers their ability to win the case, which lessens the profitability of the business model. Lessen profit enough and the business model goes out the window.
Perhaps the authors of this report want to buy some prime real estate in the land of Borat?
Great. Let's use the movie "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" as evidence for our scientific discussions. You can debunk lots of myths using that movie, like the whole "Bears in ice-cream trucks will eat little kids" myth.
There is something you need to understand about how the Japanese use statistics.
Yes, because the rest of the world uses statistics in such a fair and unbiased way. What was that Twain quote again about "lies, damned lies, and statistics"?
We need to understand that energy use has environmental cost. Simply throwing more power generators at a problem doesn't fix it.
... but building new reactors is a good thing for the environment. If they're nuclear, the pollution won't be as bad (even nuclear waste isn't as big of a problem as we've been led to believe), and even if it's a coal plant or something, newer coal plants are cleaner and more efficient.
In the end, we need to try to reduce our energy use and diversify our methods for power generation. Use some wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, etc. Whatever you can. Let's not put all our eggs in one basket. But even after all that, we'll probably still need more power than can be provided by anything but fossil fuels or nuclear.
Correct, and in fact they always said that the final version of Boot Camp was going to be part of Leopard, and have never implied that it was going to be released for earlier versions of OSX.
Now, I'm not sure why they couldn't release it for Tiger, but there's nothing tricky going on. Apple is doing exactly what they said they would.
Beyond that, I highly recommend that anyone with a Mac buys *at least* an external hard drive and installs OSX on the hard drive. Unlike most operating systems, OSX will install easily onto an external hard drive, and once installed, you can boot any Mac from that hard drive. By that, I can plug a hard drive into my Macbook, hold down the "option" button while booting, and I'll be given the option of booting from the external hard drive. USB or Firewire, no problem. I can then take the same hard drive and do the same thing with an iMac or Mac Pro without worrying about the fact that it's different hardware. I don't have to load alternate drivers or anything.
What's more, if you put a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner on that hard drive (it's free), then you can use that hard drive to image systems with a couple clicks of the mouse. If your OS isn't working, you can boot from your external hard drive, back up your data, and then copy the complete system from the external hard drive to your internal hard drive, and then unplug the external hard drive and boot from the internal.
All of this is a relatively simple process and I could walk my mother through it over the phone.
I agree that the mouse was poorly designed, but I used one a few times, and it didn't really cause problems. Every once in a while you'd realize it was oriented wrong, but it didn't break anything. As long as you kept it oriented wrong it was fine.
It's certainly not worse than Sony installing a damned *rootkit* on your computer on purpose. You're right, it did what it was designed to do, which was infect your computer with malware and break it. Now honestly, put your anti-Apple sentiments aside, which is worse: a product that is designed to damage your computer and is very effective in doing so, or a product which is designed to help you operate your computer and is effective in doing so but slightly annoying?
How can a mouse with a somewhat confusing design be "worse" than someone selling a rootkit that compromises the security of functionality of your computer? Shouldn't crappy design take a back seat to outright sabotage?
I think for geeks (and most other people, too), it'll mostly mean that it can't be your main system. If anything, geeks should be able to deal with the idea of syncing to remote servers, working in remote sessions, and things like that more easily than most people.
Of course, part of the problem isn't being "above board" (as in legal), but whether you have all your proper documentation handy and all your usage constantly audited. BSA is capable of bullying a small business even if that business has made good-faith efforts to remain on the right side of the law, particularly because smaller businesses don't have the resources to devote to jumping through every possible hoop.
Even when it's all said and done, when you're the little guy and a big guy comes after you, it doesn't matter whether you've done anything wrong. It's still going to cost you in time and money.
I understand that it's cheap to make crappy fat/suger/salt filled foods. My larger point is that it's hard to find convenient healthy foods, even if you're inclined to eat them. It's hard to find restaurants which serve healthy food, and companies aren't making prepared/packaged healthy foods. Even "health foods" and "diet foods" are usually pretty bad for you. So the end result is that, if I want a healthy diet, I have to cook for myself and eat at home every single day. I'm not a chef, I don't have time to cook every day, and I don't always want to eat at home.
I just really don't believe that it's impossible to make healthy restaurant food and healthy pre-packaged food. The reason isn't that it can't be done, and it's not that people won't buy it. It's mostly an issue of food companies trying to squeeze out an extra couple cents per serving by substituting cheap crap for quality ingredients. If these companies could save 3 cents per serving by putting arsenic in your food, if they thought they could get away with it legally and from a PR standpoint, they would.
You're like every customer who calls into customer support
If he's like a customer calling customer support, then most doctors are outsourced-to-India techs reading out of a workflow manual. Really, how can you talk about computer tech support and then go on to pretend that customers should just sit back and trust that the support techs know everything. I've both given and received my fair share of support calls, and I'll tell you right now that most technicians don't know what they're talking about. You may as well have said, "You shouldn't argue with doctors about their diagnoses just like you shouldn't argue with a used car salesman over price; it's their jobs to know about these things!"
Seriously, most of the doctors I've been to are lazy-ass bastards who simply won't bother to try to figure out what's wrong with you. They'll just put you on meds to cover the symptoms and put you on your merry way.
What annoys me is low carb stuff tastes bad, so they up the salt content, or put more of other things that improve the taste but make it bad for you in other ways.
Eating healthy means cooking a lot of your own food from ingredients, not pre-packaged food...
This annoys me too, but I just don't get it. Why is it that no one can make pre-packaged or pre-prepared food that isn't awful for you. Even when you try to buy a healthy snack-- granola bars, for example-- it's filled with high-fructose corn syrup, trans-fats, and salt. WTF?
I'll be honest here. I won't cook for myself on a regular basis. I'm busy. Or if you like, you can call me lazy. I don't really care, but my point is that I'm not going to spend loads of time cooking for myself. Now is it really impossible to make healthy frozen or ready-to-eat meals? At this point, I almost don't care if it tastes good. I just want food in my belly that isn't going to cause serious health problems.
Not exactly that simple. It's true that expending more calories than you take in should result in weight loss of some kind, because the extra energy has to come from somewhere. However, our digestive systems are incredibly complex, and it's not as simple as "calories make you fat."
I'm not an expert, but from what I've read and what I understand, your body is capable of conserving energy, expending energy, storing energy, or dumping energy. We don't understand (at least not fully) how the digestive system works or what triggers different processes in your body. It has been demonstrated, however, that the idea of "you get fat by eating fat, you raise your cholesterol level by eating cholesterol," isn't quite sufficient. Very basically, your body *produces* these materials from other materials. Your body can make fat from foods other than fat, and can make cholesterol from foods that contain no cholesterol. In fact, (again, AFAIK) eating the right kind of fat can prevent your body to producing and storing other more dangerous forms of fat.
And the truth it, we've gotten a bit too stuck on the idea of "low fat" diets. It's definitely not just about the fat. Obesity is such a bit problem because we eat overly-processed foods packed with sugars and fats (and bad sugars and fats at that!), our portions are too big, and we don't exercise enough. If you want to do something about obesity, you should at least address those three issues.
Yeah, the e-ink is important, not just because it's easier on the eyes if you're reading a lot, but because it uses far less energy. Part of the justification for e-ink is that it only requires electricity to re-draw the page. Once you render the page to the screen, you can leave that page displaying all day long without using any electricity.
So I don't think the iPod or iPhone are direct competition for e-book devices. The only real way in which they compete is in that you might choose Audible books instead of Amazon e-books, if you're the sort who might like listening instead of reading.
Personally, I'm not sold on the Kindle yet-- I might have to play with it before I could be convinced that it's worth my money. However, I think the idea is on the right track: a device roughly the size and weight of a small-ish paperback book, very low power consumption, and a screen that can be read easily in sunlight. However, it still remains to be seen whether avid readers (the sort who might spend $400 for a book-reading device) are willing to give up actual books. For myself, I like the look and feel of books, their ruggedness, their simplicity. I like keeping the books I've read on a shelf like trophies, and giving them to friends who might enjoy them. Since everything else in my life is pretty high-tech, I like the aesthetic feel of carrying bound paper. Even if e-books are somewhat convenient, they still have to overcome a lot to find a market.
OTOH, I do think there wasa qualitative difference between GTA and Manhunt. If I had teenage kids over about 13 I'd be happy (not saying everyone would be) for them to play something like GTA. I'd probably give it another couple of years before Manhunt...
I'd agree with that, but I don't think they need two different ratings. I think both should be rated "mature", and parents should be reviewing the content of any game rated "mature" before giving it to their kids.
I know there are loads of 20-somethings playing video games, and I'm certainly not one of those people who believe that adult games shouldn't be allowed. On the other hand, let's not pretend that there are a lot of kids playing GTA.
My point is that, if parents are paying attention to the games that their kids are playing, the "M" rating should be sufficient to warn them that it contains adult subject matter. Beyond that, the parents are responsible for investigating the game in order to determine whether they want to allow their children to play it. I don't see the point in having a "Mature" rating and also having a "No, really, this is mature. Seriously. I mean, really, it's mature. Not for kids. NOT FOR KIDS!" rating.
Frankly, I don't see the purpose of the "AO" rating at all. As far as I understand it, the "M" rating means it has mature content, and parents are basically being advised not to let their kids play those games. If the ESRB's purpose is to make consumers aware of the game's content, then "M" should be a sufficient rating to let people know it's an adult game.
So why have the AO rating at all? AFAICT the purpose is twofold. First, it's an attempt to give an excuse for the fact that children are playing rated "M" games. Parents and retailers can say, "Well if it were really bad, it would be rated AO." Second, it's a way for the ESRB to effectively ban games without saying they're banning the game. They can just say it's "mature to the point of being evil," and then no one will distribute it.
Personally, I'd prefer to just be honest about whatever it is. If the ESRB has the right/ability to ban games, then let's just change "AO" to "banned". Second, let's change "M" to "your kids shouldn't be playing this, but our industry relies on bad parents buying adult games for their kids."
Did it really take so long to convince them? Were they sitting around saying, "Bah! Nobody wants speed, security, or ease-of-use!"
It seems to me that this was sort of "according to plan". They'd been working on updates to the Gecko engine that were supposed to improve speed for a long time. They slated that update for v3, and slated other improvements for v2.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I also think that the big distinction is: You're allowed to use whatever format you damned well please. In most cases where they're talking about a government adopting "open formats", they're talking about using open formats for specific kinds of communications. More specifically, the laws force the governments themselves use open formats for documentation that is supposed to be "publicly available". So if your local/state/federal government tells you that you must download a particular form or document, they must make that document available in a format that can be read for free. If they make that document available in MS Word format, then the government is essentially *forcing* their citizens to buy Microsoft Office.
So, you know, it's not like you aren't allowed to own MS Word, and it's not as though saving a private document in MS Word format will result in police breaking your door down. The law just means that the government won't be forcing you to buy a particular piece of software, and a side-effect of this is that it encourages software developers to support open standards.
Exactly right. And what the hell is wrong with listening to advisors? I'll let you in on a secret: nobody, no matter how smart he or she is, is smart enough to understand everything. If you're smart enough to surround yourself with smart advisors, and then you're smart enough to know when to listen to them and when to ignore them, that's as smart as you're ever going to get.
They were in a lose-lose situation before they started. Ignore the problem, and the copyright law is useless. Try to enforce your rights, and the legal protections degrade, as you observed.
It's like the problem of government: Give people freedom and they run around making a big mess. Take away their freedoms and they start rebelling.
I guess my point is that their should be a middle ground between anarchy and fascism. And there should be a middle ground between having a laissez faire attitude toward professional pirating rings vs. suing some 10 year old for supposedly listening to music without a license.
Provide a service that people want for a reasonable price, and don't mistreat your customers.
And the client (the business) is driven by simple capitalism.
Right. So the judges being against them hampers their ability to win the case, which lessens the profitability of the business model. Lessen profit enough and the business model goes out the window.
Perhaps the authors of this report want to buy some prime real estate in the land of Borat?
Great. Let's use the movie "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" as evidence for our scientific discussions. You can debunk lots of myths using that movie, like the whole "Bears in ice-cream trucks will eat little kids" myth.
There is something you need to understand about how the Japanese use statistics.
Yes, because the rest of the world uses statistics in such a fair and unbiased way. What was that Twain quote again about "lies, damned lies, and statistics"?
We need to understand that energy use has environmental cost. Simply throwing more power generators at a problem doesn't fix it.
... but building new reactors is a good thing for the environment. If they're nuclear, the pollution won't be as bad (even nuclear waste isn't as big of a problem as we've been led to believe), and even if it's a coal plant or something, newer coal plants are cleaner and more efficient.
In the end, we need to try to reduce our energy use and diversify our methods for power generation. Use some wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, etc. Whatever you can. Let's not put all our eggs in one basket. But even after all that, we'll probably still need more power than can be provided by anything but fossil fuels or nuclear.
Correct, and in fact they always said that the final version of Boot Camp was going to be part of Leopard, and have never implied that it was going to be released for earlier versions of OSX.
Now, I'm not sure why they couldn't release it for Tiger, but there's nothing tricky going on. Apple is doing exactly what they said they would.
Beyond that, I highly recommend that anyone with a Mac buys *at least* an external hard drive and installs OSX on the hard drive. Unlike most operating systems, OSX will install easily onto an external hard drive, and once installed, you can boot any Mac from that hard drive. By that, I can plug a hard drive into my Macbook, hold down the "option" button while booting, and I'll be given the option of booting from the external hard drive. USB or Firewire, no problem. I can then take the same hard drive and do the same thing with an iMac or Mac Pro without worrying about the fact that it's different hardware. I don't have to load alternate drivers or anything.
What's more, if you put a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner on that hard drive (it's free), then you can use that hard drive to image systems with a couple clicks of the mouse. If your OS isn't working, you can boot from your external hard drive, back up your data, and then copy the complete system from the external hard drive to your internal hard drive, and then unplug the external hard drive and boot from the internal.
All of this is a relatively simple process and I could walk my mother through it over the phone.
I agree that the mouse was poorly designed, but I used one a few times, and it didn't really cause problems. Every once in a while you'd realize it was oriented wrong, but it didn't break anything. As long as you kept it oriented wrong it was fine.
It's certainly not worse than Sony installing a damned *rootkit* on your computer on purpose. You're right, it did what it was designed to do, which was infect your computer with malware and break it. Now honestly, put your anti-Apple sentiments aside, which is worse: a product that is designed to damage your computer and is very effective in doing so, or a product which is designed to help you operate your computer and is effective in doing so but slightly annoying?
How can a mouse with a somewhat confusing design be "worse" than someone selling a rootkit that compromises the security of functionality of your computer? Shouldn't crappy design take a back seat to outright sabotage?
I think for geeks (and most other people, too), it'll mostly mean that it can't be your main system. If anything, geeks should be able to deal with the idea of syncing to remote servers, working in remote sessions, and things like that more easily than most people.
Yeah, because I'm sure the writers of House make accuracy and realism their highest priorities.
Of course, part of the problem isn't being "above board" (as in legal), but whether you have all your proper documentation handy and all your usage constantly audited. BSA is capable of bullying a small business even if that business has made good-faith efforts to remain on the right side of the law, particularly because smaller businesses don't have the resources to devote to jumping through every possible hoop.
Even when it's all said and done, when you're the little guy and a big guy comes after you, it doesn't matter whether you've done anything wrong. It's still going to cost you in time and money.
I understand that it's cheap to make crappy fat/suger/salt filled foods. My larger point is that it's hard to find convenient healthy foods, even if you're inclined to eat them. It's hard to find restaurants which serve healthy food, and companies aren't making prepared/packaged healthy foods. Even "health foods" and "diet foods" are usually pretty bad for you. So the end result is that, if I want a healthy diet, I have to cook for myself and eat at home every single day. I'm not a chef, I don't have time to cook every day, and I don't always want to eat at home.
I just really don't believe that it's impossible to make healthy restaurant food and healthy pre-packaged food. The reason isn't that it can't be done, and it's not that people won't buy it. It's mostly an issue of food companies trying to squeeze out an extra couple cents per serving by substituting cheap crap for quality ingredients. If these companies could save 3 cents per serving by putting arsenic in your food, if they thought they could get away with it legally and from a PR standpoint, they would.
You're like every customer who calls into customer support
If he's like a customer calling customer support, then most doctors are outsourced-to-India techs reading out of a workflow manual. Really, how can you talk about computer tech support and then go on to pretend that customers should just sit back and trust that the support techs know everything. I've both given and received my fair share of support calls, and I'll tell you right now that most technicians don't know what they're talking about. You may as well have said, "You shouldn't argue with doctors about their diagnoses just like you shouldn't argue with a used car salesman over price; it's their jobs to know about these things!"
Seriously, most of the doctors I've been to are lazy-ass bastards who simply won't bother to try to figure out what's wrong with you. They'll just put you on meds to cover the symptoms and put you on your merry way.
What annoys me is low carb stuff tastes bad, so they up the salt content, or put more of other things that improve the taste but make it bad for you in other ways.
Eating healthy means cooking a lot of your own food from ingredients, not pre-packaged food...
This annoys me too, but I just don't get it. Why is it that no one can make pre-packaged or pre-prepared food that isn't awful for you. Even when you try to buy a healthy snack-- granola bars, for example-- it's filled with high-fructose corn syrup, trans-fats, and salt. WTF?
I'll be honest here. I won't cook for myself on a regular basis. I'm busy. Or if you like, you can call me lazy. I don't really care, but my point is that I'm not going to spend loads of time cooking for myself. Now is it really impossible to make healthy frozen or ready-to-eat meals? At this point, I almost don't care if it tastes good. I just want food in my belly that isn't going to cause serious health problems.
Not exactly that simple. It's true that expending more calories than you take in should result in weight loss of some kind, because the extra energy has to come from somewhere. However, our digestive systems are incredibly complex, and it's not as simple as "calories make you fat."
I'm not an expert, but from what I've read and what I understand, your body is capable of conserving energy, expending energy, storing energy, or dumping energy. We don't understand (at least not fully) how the digestive system works or what triggers different processes in your body. It has been demonstrated, however, that the idea of "you get fat by eating fat, you raise your cholesterol level by eating cholesterol," isn't quite sufficient. Very basically, your body *produces* these materials from other materials. Your body can make fat from foods other than fat, and can make cholesterol from foods that contain no cholesterol. In fact, (again, AFAIK) eating the right kind of fat can prevent your body to producing and storing other more dangerous forms of fat.
And the truth it, we've gotten a bit too stuck on the idea of "low fat" diets. It's definitely not just about the fat. Obesity is such a bit problem because we eat overly-processed foods packed with sugars and fats (and bad sugars and fats at that!), our portions are too big, and we don't exercise enough. If you want to do something about obesity, you should at least address those three issues.
[/rant]
Do you really imagine that this device will *replace* MP3 players?
What seemed silliest to me is the idea that it plays MP3s. Who is spending $400 on an e-book reader and doesn't own an mp3 player?
Yeah, the e-ink is important, not just because it's easier on the eyes if you're reading a lot, but because it uses far less energy. Part of the justification for e-ink is that it only requires electricity to re-draw the page. Once you render the page to the screen, you can leave that page displaying all day long without using any electricity.
So I don't think the iPod or iPhone are direct competition for e-book devices. The only real way in which they compete is in that you might choose Audible books instead of Amazon e-books, if you're the sort who might like listening instead of reading.
Personally, I'm not sold on the Kindle yet-- I might have to play with it before I could be convinced that it's worth my money. However, I think the idea is on the right track: a device roughly the size and weight of a small-ish paperback book, very low power consumption, and a screen that can be read easily in sunlight. However, it still remains to be seen whether avid readers (the sort who might spend $400 for a book-reading device) are willing to give up actual books. For myself, I like the look and feel of books, their ruggedness, their simplicity. I like keeping the books I've read on a shelf like trophies, and giving them to friends who might enjoy them. Since everything else in my life is pretty high-tech, I like the aesthetic feel of carrying bound paper. Even if e-books are somewhat convenient, they still have to overcome a lot to find a market.
OTOH, I do think there wasa qualitative difference between GTA and Manhunt. If I had teenage kids over about 13 I'd be happy (not saying everyone would be) for them to play something like GTA. I'd probably give it another couple of years before Manhunt...
I'd agree with that, but I don't think they need two different ratings. I think both should be rated "mature", and parents should be reviewing the content of any game rated "mature" before giving it to their kids.
I know there are loads of 20-somethings playing video games, and I'm certainly not one of those people who believe that adult games shouldn't be allowed. On the other hand, let's not pretend that there are a lot of kids playing GTA.
My point is that, if parents are paying attention to the games that their kids are playing, the "M" rating should be sufficient to warn them that it contains adult subject matter. Beyond that, the parents are responsible for investigating the game in order to determine whether they want to allow their children to play it. I don't see the point in having a "Mature" rating and also having a "No, really, this is mature. Seriously. I mean, really, it's mature. Not for kids. NOT FOR KIDS!" rating.
Frankly, I don't see the purpose of the "AO" rating at all. As far as I understand it, the "M" rating means it has mature content, and parents are basically being advised not to let their kids play those games. If the ESRB's purpose is to make consumers aware of the game's content, then "M" should be a sufficient rating to let people know it's an adult game.
So why have the AO rating at all? AFAICT the purpose is twofold. First, it's an attempt to give an excuse for the fact that children are playing rated "M" games. Parents and retailers can say, "Well if it were really bad, it would be rated AO." Second, it's a way for the ESRB to effectively ban games without saying they're banning the game. They can just say it's "mature to the point of being evil," and then no one will distribute it.
Personally, I'd prefer to just be honest about whatever it is. If the ESRB has the right/ability to ban games, then let's just change "AO" to "banned". Second, let's change "M" to "your kids shouldn't be playing this, but our industry relies on bad parents buying adult games for their kids."
Did it really take so long to convince them? Were they sitting around saying, "Bah! Nobody wants speed, security, or ease-of-use!"
It seems to me that this was sort of "according to plan". They'd been working on updates to the Gecko engine that were supposed to improve speed for a long time. They slated that update for v3, and slated other improvements for v2.