Ok so let's say you patent the wheel and I can't sell wheels, and lets even say I can't give people rides on buses that have wheels. What about building a cart to move things around in my own factory? Does that then entitle you a share of all my profits?
Really, limiting patents to products makes sense to me. I don't see what's wrong with it. Like, let's say I want to build a bus and give people rides. Those buses are going to need wheels. Suddenly there's a market for bus wheels, and someone is going to build a business to satisfy that market-- make you money off of those people.
Oh, heavens no. What you're talking about sounds like a sensible sort of patent system. What we have here is a ridiculous system where anyone can patent anything and sue anyone. And in case you're wondering how these lawsuits proceed, our legal system is relatively simple: whoever has more money to bankroll a legal team wins.
Quick version:
1. AOL CDs
2. Windows Me
3. Anything With DRM
4. McAfee Internet Security, Symantec Norton Internet Security
5. RealPlayer
6. Bonzi Buddy
7. MySpace
8. Windows Update
9. Windows Vista
10. Apple QuickTime
Pretty good list, if you ask me. Fair too-- doesn't seem biased towards anything in particular. All of those things are very annoying.
Well that obviously isn't the case given the number of subscription services which already exist, typically based on MS-DRM.
Apparently you misunderstand what I'm saying. Content owners will certainly not like "subscription models" once the DRM is cracked. They only like subscription models which entail the content expiring when the subscription expires. Subscription models which allow users to keep the content are not available.
Yeah... but now it's gotten into a bit of an arms race between advertisers and ad-blockers. There are now lots of technical means to simply block ads (which I do myself), but of course advertising is pretty vital to our economic system. Advertisers can't simply accept that they'll get no exposure and all of their ads will be blocked. Their entire purpose to is make the potential market aware of products, to shape public perception of products, etc.
The whole conflict really became apparent to me when I worked for an ad agency. They were having loads of spyware programs before I showed up, so without thinking much about it I installed an altered host file which I downloaded to reroute bad sites to localhost (among other things). Everyone was happy with the results, but the team that handled online ads started complaining after a while that they weren't seeing their own ads.
Personally, I'd love to see some sort of a new system, but I can't think of how it could work. How do you make it easy for companies to get information about their products out to the general public, for consumers to be notified of new products, for websites to get funding without charging viewers, and for consumers to learn about products they might actually want? In the abstract, the current ad system seems like a good solution. But the result ends up being abnoxious ads forced on consumers who don't want to see the ads and won't buy the product anyway.
Damn skippy. I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but why is it that people think things like the FOSS movement is "communist" while "capitalism" means "the government guarantees profitability"? Companies like Redhat and Google (both FOSS contributers) are capitalistic, ie they make profits by charging for a service. Record labels, on the other hand, rely on government intervention (i.e. "copyright" and "patents") in order to make a profit.
The last I heard, capitalism implied that the government did not control nor interfere with the market. Copyright and patents were invented as a system to encourage certain kinds of development. In effect, they're the same sort of system as giving federal grants to artists. "Copyright" is a socialist idea-- forcing people to pay for a service that's already been done in order to support an industry that the government wishes to prop up.
And since those industries which rely on intellectual property are socialist industries whose purpose is to serve the common good, we have no debt to them when they cease fuctioning in that capacity.
Umm.... WMV and RM really aren't any better. I mean, regardless of what you think of quality, they're also shitty proprietary formats. How about mpeg4?
I really hate companies that spend so much effort on trying to make me do stuff they know I don't want to do.
Well this is really a problem for advertising. Am I more likely to buy products if you harass me with annoying ads? No. Yeah, yeah, talk about psychology and how people get conditioned, but I've worked in ad agencies and even the experts acknowledge it: ads have become so annoying that people are building up an immunity to them.
That why ads keep getting more and more outlandish-- ad agencies know that they have to get your attention somehow. Unfortunately, even e-mail campaigns that people have opted in to fail because people don't want to invest the time sorting that stuff from general spam. People are using modified host files and ad blockers to block even targetted advertisements because there are too many intolerable ads on the web. It isn't clear that people would bother developing such strict ad blocking if they were only receiving ads that they might be interested in. Even where there are no technical methods in place blocking ads, people have simply gotten better at ignoring them.
And so many advertisers have sought ways to deliver targetted advertisements, but unfortunately any method for targetting is usually seen as an invasion of privacy. No one really wants their personal preferences made public so that advertisers can profile them better.
And I know that very often people come back and say, "well they wouldn't use [spam|flash bannars|whatever] if it weren't effective!" There's some truth to that, but not as much as you might think. Often, people in advertising (at various levels) have trouble gauging the real success of a given campaign, but they sell their services on the basis of the number of views they've acheived. They tell their customers (the people who want their product advertised) that X number of people will view this ad. Y number of people will receive the e-mail. In fact, the advertisers who actually place the ad often have little interest in the success of the product itself or in the satisfaction of consumers. It's enough to convince their customer that the ad is being seen.
If such a model were to magic its way into existence Apple would be happy because I'd have to buy a bigger iPod.
Right, well, of course Apple has no direct financial interest in making music distribution profitable for content owners, but they have an indirect interest because they need agreements from those content owners, or else they'll be in a heap of legal trouble for copyright infringement.
The problem is, as you say, you're only spending $5 a month and they could get $20-- which labels should theoretically be happy about. However, there are lots of people who are spending $50 a month or more, and $20 a month for unlimited (perminent) downloads cuts into those profits. Plus, you have to consider all the people who aren't really interested in new music. If I had free downloads for a month, I'd probably download everything by people like Dylan, the Beatles, etc. and then drop the service.
I'm not saying I wouldn't like that, but I do think the music industry can probably get a little more money out of me through other means. Personally, I'd probably end up spending more money if I could get albums from iTunes for $4.99. I mean, at that price, I'd probably buy more than twice the number of albums I buy now.
Also, you can just charge a nominal fee for some of these things. Let's face it-- a 1 year fee for most hosting isn't that much to begin with, and if you messed up and registered the wrong domain, you'd do that approximately once, and for that a $1 fee probably wouldn't cause anyone to flip out. But if you're registering tons of domains all the time, it will add up.
Am I wrong? Are there legitimate reasons to register tons of domains that might result in purchasing hundreds of mistaken domains in a year? Maybe I just don't get it
Well, according to the OP, it's not a "testing" period, it's a "tasting" period. But I don't know how you taste a domain, and I sure as hell don't want to know what domains like goatse.cx taste like.
What I mean about Google's ability to abuse the market is, let's say Google mistreats its customers-- where's the vendor lock-in? What's to stop you from using another service? What is going to keep you using Google's services other than "they're the best"?
I'm not saying that they absolutely can't abuse the market or this purchase must be allowed to happen, but I'm not clear why our government should intervene in this if they aren't doing anything about Microsoft's abuse or the mess of telecommunications going on in this country.
Also, and I feel dumb for saying this because it's so obvious (I'm not even an expert on these things), but you don't really need all of your applications to be multithreaded in order to benefit from multiple cores. I guess I'm assuming that I'm not the only person who runs multiple applications at the same time.
Of course, it's more likely that you'll be taking good advantage of 8 cores if your apps are multithreaded, but if you're running two single-threaded applications on a dual core system, shouldn't the OS be smart enough to push each one to a different core, meaning each application will run faster than if it were a single core system?
Also, it really doesn't seem necessary to make the iPod file system so opaque. For all Apple's touted simplicity on the surface, what's with the underlying maze of randomly-named and randomly-placed folders and and media files? How does that make anything easier?
iPods didn't start out with the opaque file system. Originally, Apple made no attempt to prevent users from transferring songs back and forth between the iPod and your computer. Then the content owners (record labels) complained that the iPod encouraged piracy and threatened to sue. This was before the iTMS. In order to appease the record labels, Apple put the music files in hidden directories with random names, and changed iTunes so that you couldn't copy music from your iPod to your library.
I always thought that Apple stayed out of the subscription model and refused to open their DRM for roughly the same reason: they have no faith in DRM, even their own.
They assume that their DRM will likely be cracked, and will only be cracked sooner if other people know exactly how it works. Further, if you have a subscription model, then it basically means unlimited access to music that you can keep forever for a low monthly fee-- no content holders are going to like that idea.
The errors you're talking about, however, effect the readability of the CD. In a sense, you're correct that this means it isn't as simple as "either the data on the CD is corrupt or it isn't". It means that some players might view it as corrupt and some won't. However, it won't result in the sort of loss in quality that takes place making analog copies. Unless the data is corrupt, the copy will sound the same.
It is true that some brands of CD-R are better or worse than other brands, but it's really an issue of how quickly the CD degrades rather than the sound quality it holds.
It strikes me, however, that even if this would constitute some sort of monopoly, it doesn't touch Microsoft in terms of harm to the consumer. First, I'm still not sure how Google can really abuse the market, even if they do control a large portion of it. People will still be able to use different search engines and different ad services. Plus, if Google somehow ruins the online ad market, it harms... well.... the online ad market. Am I the only one who's not entirely scared by that? I guess I don't buy the idea that, absent of ads, people would simply stop putting content on the web.
Maybe I'm screwy, but I care much more about the OS and Office Suite markets. I'm not expert enough to know whether they should take action to stop this deal with Doubleclick, but Microsoft appealing to anti-trust laws means they accept the validity of the principle.
3) no real reason to upgrade. Right, well I found BitLocker to be a perfect reason. To each his own; I can see where you're coming from but there are people that disagree with you.
Wow, one of the three people on Earth who have a genuine reason to use BitLocker, and he's posting right here on slashdot! This is an exciting.
Yes, obviously, the ideal situation is to have open-source solutions so that we aren't at the mercy of anyone. However, failing that, it's better to have multiple companies battling it out instead of a single company in control. So if people are moving away from Microsoft toward Google, good. When there's a 50/50 split between the two, it will be harder for Microsoft to abuse their own customers. When Google breaks 60% of the corporate e-mail/calendar market, that's when I'll start worrying about whether Google will "stay nice".
Yeah, sure, except... Java stinks. No, I know there are programmers who like it a lot. However, as shocking as it may be, web applications are more portable, faster, less annoying, and even more reliable. I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to know what the problem is with Java, but it's an unacceptable solution. For my purposes (as an admin and user), I'd almost rather people be creating Flash applications. I'm sad to say it, but either way I need some crappy plugin. At least Flash runs at an ok speed and doesn't crash my browser very often.
Right. I don't see a purpose for singling the Wikipedia out among sources of information. It's not entirely reliable, but few sources are. Either way, whatever the reason for blocking Wikipedia, I can see two reasonable options for schools:
Block all sites by default, and only allow access to a whitelisted group of sites that are known to be reliable and appropriate
Don't filter websites at all (except maybe for normal stuff, i.e. porn) and actually educate your students about the appropriate use of internet resources
Personally, I think either option if fine depending on the age of the students. The younger the students, the more likely I'd be to advise option #1.
But why block the Wikipedia particularly? It's not a bad source of information, it's just not authoritative enough to be a citation-worthy source for research-- but then, neither are normal encyclopedias. Encyclopedic sources are a good place to begin research, get an overview, and get a general idea of your subject. Good research-- and this is what schools should be stressing-- involves collecting information from any source available to you, while seeking to weigh the reliability of each source and each piece of information.
If you're seeking to understand a subject, there might be very useful information in the Wikipedia-- just don't expect, "It's in the Wikipedia," to be sufficient grounds for making claims in your papers. In other words, you must cite your sources, and the Wikipedia is generally not an acceptable source.
Are you kidding? On some computers I can hear electric noise caused by mouse movements even without spekers connected to the computer.
My only thought there is that maybe you have an internal speaker that's making noise? I mean, I wasn't talking about CRT buzz (which I can hear) but an actual static coming out of the speakers. Cell phones will also cause interference on speakers, as will strong/close radio signals. However, it's not as though you can hear EM fields on their own. Obviously you can get things through speakers because of induction, but I don't know what else besides speakers could be making noise.
The article describes "lack of sync" options with Google apps. Yawn. I've written my own for now, I agree it's a bit of a nuisance. Does anybody think for a moment these gaps aren't going to be filled soon?
If you've written your own, maybe you want to open the source code to everyone else? These gaps might be filled soon, but they aren't filled yet. Besides, the problem isn't just "syncing", but rather a lack of consistency.
If I'm working on a Word document, I can upload that to Google, and I'll probably lose some formatting and features. Then, once on Google's apps, I have to work in a different interface. Then I have to make sure things are syncing constantly, and finally I can export it back into a Word document and I'm back working in Word with a different interface and feature-set again. Plus, I have to continually sync everything to make sure my copies aren't out of date. And then, finally, what happens if I accidently edit both the local and remote copy? Where is my tool for reconciling these?
What really needs to happen is some sort of melding between web apps and local apps. If I'm going to use Google's word processor, I need to be able to cache everything locally, including the documents and the application itself, so that I can continue to work when my internet connection drops. If I go on a day trip far away from the Internet, I need to still be able to edit those documents locally without planning ahead. Finally, if both the online and local copies get edited, Google needs a tool that can display the changes and let me reconcile them.
What's not clear to me, however, is whether a traditional web browser is the appropriate solution for this. It may be that, rather than making "web applications", we need a different framework that allows the sort of flexibility that web apps allow but with the consistency of desktop apps. Maybe a web browser should go back to reading static HTML and a new sort of generic remote application framework needs to be developed-- but who the hell is going to do that?
Slashdot Mirror
Ok so let's say you patent the wheel and I can't sell wheels, and lets even say I can't give people rides on buses that have wheels. What about building a cart to move things around in my own factory? Does that then entitle you a share of all my profits?
Really, limiting patents to products makes sense to me. I don't see what's wrong with it. Like, let's say I want to build a bus and give people rides. Those buses are going to need wheels. Suddenly there's a market for bus wheels, and someone is going to build a business to satisfy that market-- make you money off of those people.
Yes, I agree. How dare people try to move away from entrenched abusive monopolistic companies! I hope some lives get ruined.
Oh, heavens no. What you're talking about sounds like a sensible sort of patent system. What we have here is a ridiculous system where anyone can patent anything and sue anyone. And in case you're wondering how these lawsuits proceed, our legal system is relatively simple: whoever has more money to bankroll a legal team wins.
Quick version:
1. AOL CDs
2. Windows Me
3. Anything With DRM
4. McAfee Internet Security, Symantec Norton Internet Security
5. RealPlayer
6. Bonzi Buddy
7. MySpace
8. Windows Update
9. Windows Vista
10. Apple QuickTime
Pretty good list, if you ask me. Fair too-- doesn't seem biased towards anything in particular. All of those things are very annoying.
Apparently you misunderstand what I'm saying. Content owners will certainly not like "subscription models" once the DRM is cracked. They only like subscription models which entail the content expiring when the subscription expires. Subscription models which allow users to keep the content are not available.
Yeah... but now it's gotten into a bit of an arms race between advertisers and ad-blockers. There are now lots of technical means to simply block ads (which I do myself), but of course advertising is pretty vital to our economic system. Advertisers can't simply accept that they'll get no exposure and all of their ads will be blocked. Their entire purpose to is make the potential market aware of products, to shape public perception of products, etc.
The whole conflict really became apparent to me when I worked for an ad agency. They were having loads of spyware programs before I showed up, so without thinking much about it I installed an altered host file which I downloaded to reroute bad sites to localhost (among other things). Everyone was happy with the results, but the team that handled online ads started complaining after a while that they weren't seeing their own ads.
Personally, I'd love to see some sort of a new system, but I can't think of how it could work. How do you make it easy for companies to get information about their products out to the general public, for consumers to be notified of new products, for websites to get funding without charging viewers, and for consumers to learn about products they might actually want? In the abstract, the current ad system seems like a good solution. But the result ends up being abnoxious ads forced on consumers who don't want to see the ads and won't buy the product anyway.
I don't know a better solution.
Damn skippy. I'm going on a bit of a tangent here, but why is it that people think things like the FOSS movement is "communist" while "capitalism" means "the government guarantees profitability"? Companies like Redhat and Google (both FOSS contributers) are capitalistic, ie they make profits by charging for a service. Record labels, on the other hand, rely on government intervention (i.e. "copyright" and "patents") in order to make a profit.
The last I heard, capitalism implied that the government did not control nor interfere with the market. Copyright and patents were invented as a system to encourage certain kinds of development. In effect, they're the same sort of system as giving federal grants to artists. "Copyright" is a socialist idea-- forcing people to pay for a service that's already been done in order to support an industry that the government wishes to prop up.
And since those industries which rely on intellectual property are socialist industries whose purpose is to serve the common good, we have no debt to them when they cease fuctioning in that capacity.
Umm.... WMV and RM really aren't any better. I mean, regardless of what you think of quality, they're also shitty proprietary formats. How about mpeg4?
Well this is really a problem for advertising. Am I more likely to buy products if you harass me with annoying ads? No. Yeah, yeah, talk about psychology and how people get conditioned, but I've worked in ad agencies and even the experts acknowledge it: ads have become so annoying that people are building up an immunity to them.
That why ads keep getting more and more outlandish-- ad agencies know that they have to get your attention somehow. Unfortunately, even e-mail campaigns that people have opted in to fail because people don't want to invest the time sorting that stuff from general spam. People are using modified host files and ad blockers to block even targetted advertisements because there are too many intolerable ads on the web. It isn't clear that people would bother developing such strict ad blocking if they were only receiving ads that they might be interested in. Even where there are no technical methods in place blocking ads, people have simply gotten better at ignoring them.
And so many advertisers have sought ways to deliver targetted advertisements, but unfortunately any method for targetting is usually seen as an invasion of privacy. No one really wants their personal preferences made public so that advertisers can profile them better.
And I know that very often people come back and say, "well they wouldn't use [spam|flash bannars|whatever] if it weren't effective!" There's some truth to that, but not as much as you might think. Often, people in advertising (at various levels) have trouble gauging the real success of a given campaign, but they sell their services on the basis of the number of views they've acheived. They tell their customers (the people who want their product advertised) that X number of people will view this ad. Y number of people will receive the e-mail. In fact, the advertisers who actually place the ad often have little interest in the success of the product itself or in the satisfaction of consumers. It's enough to convince their customer that the ad is being seen.
Right, well, of course Apple has no direct financial interest in making music distribution profitable for content owners, but they have an indirect interest because they need agreements from those content owners, or else they'll be in a heap of legal trouble for copyright infringement.
The problem is, as you say, you're only spending $5 a month and they could get $20-- which labels should theoretically be happy about. However, there are lots of people who are spending $50 a month or more, and $20 a month for unlimited (perminent) downloads cuts into those profits. Plus, you have to consider all the people who aren't really interested in new music. If I had free downloads for a month, I'd probably download everything by people like Dylan, the Beatles, etc. and then drop the service.
I'm not saying I wouldn't like that, but I do think the music industry can probably get a little more money out of me through other means. Personally, I'd probably end up spending more money if I could get albums from iTunes for $4.99. I mean, at that price, I'd probably buy more than twice the number of albums I buy now.
Also, you can just charge a nominal fee for some of these things. Let's face it-- a 1 year fee for most hosting isn't that much to begin with, and if you messed up and registered the wrong domain, you'd do that approximately once, and for that a $1 fee probably wouldn't cause anyone to flip out. But if you're registering tons of domains all the time, it will add up.
Am I wrong? Are there legitimate reasons to register tons of domains that might result in purchasing hundreds of mistaken domains in a year? Maybe I just don't get it
Well, according to the OP, it's not a "testing" period, it's a "tasting" period. But I don't know how you taste a domain, and I sure as hell don't want to know what domains like goatse.cx taste like.
What I mean about Google's ability to abuse the market is, let's say Google mistreats its customers-- where's the vendor lock-in? What's to stop you from using another service? What is going to keep you using Google's services other than "they're the best"?
I'm not saying that they absolutely can't abuse the market or this purchase must be allowed to happen, but I'm not clear why our government should intervene in this if they aren't doing anything about Microsoft's abuse or the mess of telecommunications going on in this country.
Also, and I feel dumb for saying this because it's so obvious (I'm not even an expert on these things), but you don't really need all of your applications to be multithreaded in order to benefit from multiple cores. I guess I'm assuming that I'm not the only person who runs multiple applications at the same time.
Of course, it's more likely that you'll be taking good advantage of 8 cores if your apps are multithreaded, but if you're running two single-threaded applications on a dual core system, shouldn't the OS be smart enough to push each one to a different core, meaning each application will run faster than if it were a single core system?
iPods didn't start out with the opaque file system. Originally, Apple made no attempt to prevent users from transferring songs back and forth between the iPod and your computer. Then the content owners (record labels) complained that the iPod encouraged piracy and threatened to sue. This was before the iTMS. In order to appease the record labels, Apple put the music files in hidden directories with random names, and changed iTunes so that you couldn't copy music from your iPod to your library.
So that's what's "with" that.
I always thought that Apple stayed out of the subscription model and refused to open their DRM for roughly the same reason: they have no faith in DRM, even their own.
They assume that their DRM will likely be cracked, and will only be cracked sooner if other people know exactly how it works. Further, if you have a subscription model, then it basically means unlimited access to music that you can keep forever for a low monthly fee-- no content holders are going to like that idea.
Dude, I have no intention of goosling you. The only person I goosle is my wife.
The errors you're talking about, however, effect the readability of the CD. In a sense, you're correct that this means it isn't as simple as "either the data on the CD is corrupt or it isn't". It means that some players might view it as corrupt and some won't. However, it won't result in the sort of loss in quality that takes place making analog copies. Unless the data is corrupt, the copy will sound the same.
It is true that some brands of CD-R are better or worse than other brands, but it's really an issue of how quickly the CD degrades rather than the sound quality it holds.
It strikes me, however, that even if this would constitute some sort of monopoly, it doesn't touch Microsoft in terms of harm to the consumer. First, I'm still not sure how Google can really abuse the market, even if they do control a large portion of it. People will still be able to use different search engines and different ad services. Plus, if Google somehow ruins the online ad market, it harms... well.... the online ad market. Am I the only one who's not entirely scared by that? I guess I don't buy the idea that, absent of ads, people would simply stop putting content on the web.
Maybe I'm screwy, but I care much more about the OS and Office Suite markets. I'm not expert enough to know whether they should take action to stop this deal with Doubleclick, but Microsoft appealing to anti-trust laws means they accept the validity of the principle.
Wow, one of the three people on Earth who have a genuine reason to use BitLocker, and he's posting right here on slashdot! This is an exciting.
Yes, obviously, the ideal situation is to have open-source solutions so that we aren't at the mercy of anyone. However, failing that, it's better to have multiple companies battling it out instead of a single company in control. So if people are moving away from Microsoft toward Google, good. When there's a 50/50 split between the two, it will be harder for Microsoft to abuse their own customers. When Google breaks 60% of the corporate e-mail/calendar market, that's when I'll start worrying about whether Google will "stay nice".
Yeah, sure, except... Java stinks. No, I know there are programmers who like it a lot. However, as shocking as it may be, web applications are more portable, faster, less annoying, and even more reliable. I'm not technically knowledgeable enough to know what the problem is with Java, but it's an unacceptable solution. For my purposes (as an admin and user), I'd almost rather people be creating Flash applications. I'm sad to say it, but either way I need some crappy plugin. At least Flash runs at an ok speed and doesn't crash my browser very often.
Right. I don't see a purpose for singling the Wikipedia out among sources of information. It's not entirely reliable, but few sources are. Either way, whatever the reason for blocking Wikipedia, I can see two reasonable options for schools:
Personally, I think either option if fine depending on the age of the students. The younger the students, the more likely I'd be to advise option #1.
But why block the Wikipedia particularly? It's not a bad source of information, it's just not authoritative enough to be a citation-worthy source for research-- but then, neither are normal encyclopedias. Encyclopedic sources are a good place to begin research, get an overview, and get a general idea of your subject. Good research-- and this is what schools should be stressing-- involves collecting information from any source available to you, while seeking to weigh the reliability of each source and each piece of information.
If you're seeking to understand a subject, there might be very useful information in the Wikipedia-- just don't expect, "It's in the Wikipedia," to be sufficient grounds for making claims in your papers. In other words, you must cite your sources, and the Wikipedia is generally not an acceptable source.
Are you kidding? On some computers I can hear electric noise caused by mouse movements even without spekers connected to the computer.
My only thought there is that maybe you have an internal speaker that's making noise? I mean, I wasn't talking about CRT buzz (which I can hear) but an actual static coming out of the speakers. Cell phones will also cause interference on speakers, as will strong/close radio signals. However, it's not as though you can hear EM fields on their own. Obviously you can get things through speakers because of induction, but I don't know what else besides speakers could be making noise.
The article describes "lack of sync" options with Google apps. Yawn. I've written my own for now, I agree it's a bit of a nuisance. Does anybody think for a moment these gaps aren't going to be filled soon?
If you've written your own, maybe you want to open the source code to everyone else? These gaps might be filled soon, but they aren't filled yet. Besides, the problem isn't just "syncing", but rather a lack of consistency.
If I'm working on a Word document, I can upload that to Google, and I'll probably lose some formatting and features. Then, once on Google's apps, I have to work in a different interface. Then I have to make sure things are syncing constantly, and finally I can export it back into a Word document and I'm back working in Word with a different interface and feature-set again. Plus, I have to continually sync everything to make sure my copies aren't out of date. And then, finally, what happens if I accidently edit both the local and remote copy? Where is my tool for reconciling these?
What really needs to happen is some sort of melding between web apps and local apps. If I'm going to use Google's word processor, I need to be able to cache everything locally, including the documents and the application itself, so that I can continue to work when my internet connection drops. If I go on a day trip far away from the Internet, I need to still be able to edit those documents locally without planning ahead. Finally, if both the online and local copies get edited, Google needs a tool that can display the changes and let me reconcile them.
What's not clear to me, however, is whether a traditional web browser is the appropriate solution for this. It may be that, rather than making "web applications", we need a different framework that allows the sort of flexibility that web apps allow but with the consistency of desktop apps. Maybe a web browser should go back to reading static HTML and a new sort of generic remote application framework needs to be developed-- but who the hell is going to do that?