FUD? I don't work for the competition. In fact I am pretty dependent on Google services, and this is a source of anxiety for me. This is real concern for me. You, on the other hand, sound real defensive and like you kinda might work for Google or someone making Chromebooks.
I posted the two links I posted because I couldn't find the really dramatic ones I had seen before, and didn't feel like spending time searching for them. They're out there. But my point stands. If your Google account is blocked, it's YOUR problem. There is nobody to phone, and nobody who cares. You're not a Google customer, just an eyeball. There are account recovery options, which may or may not work. Nobody cares.
You could still use your Chromebook as a web browser, but all the nicely integrated Google services you depend on won't work, or if you use a new account, won't have your data. Your data's missing. Again, nobody is responsible.
And the Chromebook customer support centre will tell you that your Chromebook works fine, and you're welcome to open a new account. Google takes no responsibility for your missing data. Check your TOS.
And you sound like someone who's never had an accidental TOS violation or a false-positive security lockout. I have. It's mildly annoying if it happens with your bank or with Facebook. With Google if you 'live in the cloud', it could be devastating. As that first link shows. Your faith in Google only blocking your account if someone's hacked it is charming but seems overly trusting to me. What if they're wrong? What if they're right but you still need that data?
Google is a wonderful company, and their products are useful and seductive and beautifully interlinked. But they're free to use and you're not the customer. And every day a certain number of people have their Google account blocked, for one reason or another, and find that there's no recourse to Google to fix that. In fact, there's no customer service department at all.
Examples on the internet of this are easy to find: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/open-letter-to-google-why-have-you-taken-away-my-google-gmail-accounts/7873/ http://classicsynth.hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Get-Disabled-Google-Account-Back
Now imagine that this happens to you, and your laptop has just become a paperweight. And this time, you've paid for it. Hmmm.
I also love how the open letter keeps referring to the company being in the middle of a traumatic transition, whereas the corpo-shareholder-spin reply keeps assuring us that they're at the 'end' of this transition. R-i-i-i-g-h-t.
Author of anonymous letter: "You have many smart employees, many that have great ideas for the future, but unfortunately the culture at RIM does not allow us to speak openly without having to worry about the career-limiting effects."
Anonymous RIM corporate-speak response: "It is obviously difficult to address anonymous commentary and it is particularly difficult to believe that a “high level employee” in good standing with the company would choose to anonymously publish a letter on the web rather than engage their fellow executives in a constructive manner"
I'd hate to be a smart productive person at RIM right now with this kind of bullshit attitude going on. Obviously the points the employee makes are dead-on. There's too much deadwood, not enough vision, and a misplaced loyalty culture: people who speak up are in danger of losing their jobs, whereas high-level managers who make crap software just keep on making more of it.
I'll bet when the Australian team implemented the algorithm, the Chinese team instantaneously, without waiting for light to reach it, implemented it too.
I've had a Chinese iPod Nano clone in my hands. It works fine. It's ugly, with a cheap-looking finish and a fake clickwheel that's really just 5 buttons. The power and data interfaces were USB, not Apple's iPod type. BUT
It had a bigger screen, supported video, had a built-in FM radio, handled most audio and video formats, and...
it had apple logos and names all over it! More and bigger than the real iPod. Who's going to stop them?
By the way it sold for 40 dollars equivalent in China.
...I guess it's obvious that this leads to the Marching Morons, right?
For those who haven't read it, let's check Wikipedia:
"The Marching Morons" is a science fiction short story written by Cyril M. Kornbluth, originally published in Galaxy in April, 1951. It was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two after being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965.
The story is set hundreds of years in the future: the date is 7-B-936. John Barlow, a man from the past put into suspended animation by a freak accident, is revived in this future. The world seems mad to Barlow until Tinny-Peete explains the Problem of Population: due to a combination of intelligent people prudently not having children and excessive breeding by less intelligent people, the world is full of morons, with the exception of an elite few who work slavishly to keep order.
I've been saying this every time one of these articles in quantum-entangled info transmission pops up.
Isn't the idea of instantaneous information transmission outside the light cone, which can possibly even violate causality, a big enough deal on its own? The Ansible is a wonderful technology, and this stuff actually makes it possible in theory.
Why keep adding "teleportation" to the headlines, which isn't even theoretically made possible as yet?
Cool stuff the quantum dots DO enable:
Send a spaceship with a module containing a few billion qbits of entangled dots to a far star, say, 100 light years away. Hang onto the companion module.
Wait until the spaceship gets there.
Now any normal (EM-spectrum) signals you send to the far star will be delayed 100 years. Same with anything they send you. According to relativity, that's a hard limit.
But 100 years later on, war happens at far star, and using the quantum dots, someone over there sends you information about it. You get that info 100 years before it can possibly reach you. You've just received info that's 100 years in the future!
This may not be teleportation, but it's got a certain potential for spread betting:)
Nice try, but that's just what the newspapers and TV stations will say when challenged. It's pretty obvious that it's a bogus line, at least sometimes.
Or do you really believe that people are more interested in Paris Hilton's jail term than in the president wiretapping them? Those Lindsay Lohan stories really must represent the public's true interest. Look! Look at the funny monkey! Look, Britney has no panties!
It's well known, for example, that Murdoch's affiliates receive "talking points" for the day showing them what stories they should promote. Affiliates who don't toe the line risk problems.
File sharing harms the U.S. economy. That's the bottom line.
Back in 1890, when all the interesting IP was being produced in Britain, the US were unabashedly pirating all they could. And they did well.
Up until 99 years later, when the balance tipped, and the US economy started to depend on exporting its own IP. Then the US converted to the side of righteousness, joined the Berne convention, and became evangelistic about it. Meanwhile China and most of Asia and Africa are net importers of IP, and are unabashedly pirating all they can. The cycle continues.
What I think -- I think Americans should, for patriotic reasons (having nothing to do with children's morality), strongly support copyright and IP.
I think other countries should decide what's best for their own citizens.
What the propagandists are trying not to say is simply this:
"The US economy was once based on manufacturing. Our cars and buildings and aeroplanes and weapons were the best you could buy, and people bought them and America prospered. Lately people have stopped buying all those things, and we no longer manufacture anything for export but movies, music, and software.
Our economy has gone from world-leading to "service-based" in just a few decades, and our only hope of exporting something that people might want to buy is in movies, music and software. Unfortunately, all those things are now digital, and easily copied millions of times for free. Even more unfortunately, the more we try to protect our eroding export figures with DRM and IP enforcement, the more we realize that other countries don't have to play by the rules we make up. And it's those other countries that count most.
So it's time for education. Or perhaps Re-education. Time to teach everyone that, despite our own flagrant disregard for the Berne conventions and international IP rights from 1886 up until 1989 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_convention), it's vital that the world now all fall into the US party line on IP enforcement and DRM. And if we can't do it with WTO, IMF, WIPO, and Most Favored Nation status, we'll do it with propaganda.
File sharing kills babies! File sharing promotes pedophilia! File sharing is communist and fascist and Saddam-loving! File sharing destroys family values and promotes the gay agenda!
This is arguably not even censorship -- it's just blocking one problematic website in its entirety.
Since Turkey has laws against insulting Ataturk (as mentioned by another poster, in order to identify extremist muslims and keep them reasonably quiet), they did the most civilized thing they could do -- they blocked ALL of YouTube.
The alternatives were to just block that video (Like the Germans trying to ban Nazi lovers -- now THAT is censorship), or to ignore the whole thing and waive their laws.
Waiving the whole thing would be to the advantage of extremist islamists, and to the detriment of their mostly westernized and secular society, they believe, so I'd be inclined to cut them some slack.
...and how exactly will Apple's loss change this delicate balance again?
The general principle holds -- journalists don't need to reveal their sources, and can print what they can find out. There are occasional exceptions, but they have to be very important ones, related to national security. A particular company's proprietary info doesn't count.
Nice argument, but hundreds of years late. This has always been true for journalists, now it's being extended to online journalists, whether employed or freelance.
There's really no way to draw a dividing line between legitimate marketing and spam except whether people agreed to receive it. If your friends didn't want the ads, then it's spam.
My question is -- if I buy a Japanese CD through iTunes US, will I have to pay an "Import" price on it? Will it cost me 3x as much?
Can I get the "domestic" price by switching to the iTunes Japan site?
Are the bits cheaper that way?
Well, of course not, since everything costs the same on iTunes. But I bet the labels would prefer it this way. This may be why those "import" tunes are just unavailable on the US store instead.
solar panels do nothing about demand for foreign oil. The vast majority of electrical power in this country (U.S.) is generated from coal.
...there's an indirect effect in some cases. If you're getting free power from the Sun, you can switch from oil to electric heating. Do this a million times and you do reduce dependence on foreign oil.
Agreed that there are plenty of copies of encyclopedias out there. And that it's pretty good insurance compared to previous civilizations. But I'd still be interested in a deliberate product made to last, for 2 reasons:
* Little of the stuff in encyclopedias is practical for helping rebuild civilization. If I'm in the next generation or two after the collapse, I'm not interested that James Watt invented the steam engine in 1765 -- I want to see how to invent it myself. Slanting the details in this practical way is an important part.
* Printed encyclopedias have been printed less and less lately, as digital versions are coming to dominate. Eventually only libraries will have copies. Libraries will become scarce resources after a civilization collapse. Great for paleoanthropologists, again not so good for children of survivors.
Slashdot Mirror
FUD? I don't work for the competition. In fact I am pretty dependent on Google services, and this is a source of anxiety for me. This is real concern for me. You, on the other hand, sound real defensive and like you kinda might work for Google or someone making Chromebooks.
I posted the two links I posted because I couldn't find the really dramatic ones I had seen before, and didn't feel like spending time searching for them. They're out there. But my point stands. If your Google account is blocked, it's YOUR problem. There is nobody to phone, and nobody who cares. You're not a Google customer, just an eyeball. There are account recovery options, which may or may not work. Nobody cares.
You could still use your Chromebook as a web browser, but all the nicely integrated Google services you depend on won't work, or if you use a new account, won't have your data. Your data's missing. Again, nobody is responsible.
And the Chromebook customer support centre will tell you that your Chromebook works fine, and you're welcome to open a new account. Google takes no responsibility for your missing data. Check your TOS.
And you sound like someone who's never had an accidental TOS violation or a false-positive security lockout. I have. It's mildly annoying if it happens with your bank or with Facebook. With Google if you 'live in the cloud', it could be devastating. As that first link shows. Your faith in Google only blocking your account if someone's hacked it is charming but seems overly trusting to me. What if they're wrong? What if they're right but you still need that data?
Google is a wonderful company, and their products are useful and seductive and beautifully interlinked. But they're free to use and you're not the customer. And every day a certain number of people have their Google account blocked, for one reason or another, and find that there's no recourse to Google to fix that. In fact, there's no customer service department at all.
Examples on the internet of this are easy to find:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/open-letter-to-google-why-have-you-taken-away-my-google-gmail-accounts/7873/
http://classicsynth.hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Get-Disabled-Google-Account-Back
Now imagine that this happens to you, and your laptop has just become a paperweight. And this time, you've paid for it. Hmmm.
I also love how the open letter keeps referring to the company being in the middle of a traumatic transition, whereas the corpo-shareholder-spin reply keeps assuring us that they're at the 'end' of this transition. R-i-i-i-g-h-t.
Author of anonymous letter:
"You have many smart employees, many that have great ideas for the future, but unfortunately the culture at RIM does not allow us to speak openly without having to worry about the career-limiting effects."
Anonymous RIM corporate-speak response:
"It is obviously difficult to address anonymous commentary and it is particularly difficult to believe that a “high level employee” in good standing with the company would choose to anonymously publish a letter on the web rather than engage their fellow executives in a constructive manner"
I'd hate to be a smart productive person at RIM right now with this kind of bullshit attitude going on. Obviously the points the employee makes are dead-on. There's too much deadwood, not enough vision, and a misplaced loyalty culture: people who speak up are in danger of losing their jobs, whereas high-level managers who make crap software just keep on making more of it.
I'll bet when the Australian team implemented the algorithm, the Chinese team instantaneously, without waiting for light to reach it, implemented it too.
I call entanglement!
I've had a Chinese iPod Nano clone in my hands. It works fine. It's ugly, with a cheap-looking finish and a fake clickwheel that's really just 5 buttons. The power and data interfaces were USB, not Apple's iPod type. BUT
It had a bigger screen, supported video, had a built-in FM radio, handled most audio and video formats, and...
it had apple logos and names all over it! More and bigger than the real iPod. Who's going to stop them?
By the way it sold for 40 dollars equivalent in China.
Yes, there's a definite correlation between kink and smarts.
But there's also one between kink and mental illness.
And yes, it's transitive too. (smart ~ mentally ill)
No idea where, if anywhere, the causality lies.
For those who haven't read it, let's check Wikipedia:
"The Marching Morons" is a science fiction short story written by Cyril M. Kornbluth, originally published in Galaxy in April, 1951. It was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two after being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965.
The story is set hundreds of years in the future: the date is 7-B-936. John Barlow, a man from the past put into suspended animation by a freak accident, is revived in this future. The world seems mad to Barlow until Tinny-Peete explains the Problem of Population: due to a combination of intelligent people prudently not having children and excessive breeding by less intelligent people, the world is full of morons, with the exception of an elite few who work slavishly to keep order.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
Mod parent up.
:)
I've been saying this every time one of these articles in quantum-entangled info transmission pops up.
Isn't the idea of instantaneous information transmission outside the light cone, which can possibly even violate causality, a big enough deal on its own? The Ansible is a wonderful technology, and this stuff actually makes it possible in theory.
Why keep adding "teleportation" to the headlines, which isn't even theoretically made possible as yet?
Cool stuff the quantum dots DO enable:
Send a spaceship with a module containing a few billion qbits of entangled dots to a far star, say, 100 light years away. Hang onto the companion module.
Wait until the spaceship gets there.
Now any normal (EM-spectrum) signals you send to the far star will be delayed 100 years. Same with anything they send you. According to relativity, that's a hard limit.
But 100 years later on, war happens at far star, and using the quantum dots, someone over there sends you information about it. You get that info 100 years before it can possibly reach you. You've just received info that's 100 years in the future!
This may not be teleportation, but it's got a certain potential for spread betting
Found a new job for "Mordac, preventer of interoperability"
f
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mordac_icon.gi
Nice try, but that's just what the newspapers and TV stations will say when challenged. It's pretty obvious that it's a bogus line, at least sometimes.
Or do you really believe that people are more interested in Paris Hilton's jail term than in the president wiretapping them? Those Lindsay Lohan stories really must represent the public's true interest. Look! Look at the funny monkey! Look, Britney has no panties!
It's well known, for example, that Murdoch's affiliates receive "talking points" for the day showing them what stories they should promote. Affiliates who don't toe the line risk problems.
File sharing harms the U.S. economy. That's the bottom line.
Back in 1890, when all the interesting IP was being produced in Britain, the US were unabashedly pirating all they could. And they did well.
Up until 99 years later, when the balance tipped, and the US economy started to depend on exporting its own IP. Then the US converted to the side of righteousness, joined the Berne convention, and became evangelistic about it. Meanwhile China and most of Asia and Africa are net importers of IP, and are unabashedly pirating all they can. The cycle continues.
What I think -- I think Americans should, for patriotic reasons (having nothing to do with children's morality), strongly support copyright and IP.
I think other countries should decide what's best for their own citizens.
And let the market work out as it may.
What the propagandists are trying not to say is simply this:
"The US economy was once based on manufacturing. Our cars and buildings and aeroplanes and weapons were the best you could buy, and people bought them and America prospered. Lately people have stopped buying all those things, and we no longer manufacture anything for export but movies, music, and software.
Our economy has gone from world-leading to "service-based" in just a few decades, and our only hope of exporting something that people might want to buy is in movies, music and software. Unfortunately, all those things are now digital, and easily copied millions of times for free. Even more unfortunately, the more we try to protect our eroding export figures with DRM and IP enforcement, the more we realize that other countries don't have to play by the rules we make up. And it's those other countries that count most.
So it's time for education. Or perhaps Re-education. Time to teach everyone that, despite our own flagrant disregard for the Berne conventions and international IP rights from 1886 up until 1989 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_convention), it's vital that the world now all fall into the US party line on IP enforcement and DRM. And if we can't do it with WTO, IMF, WIPO, and Most Favored Nation status, we'll do it with propaganda.
File sharing kills babies! File sharing promotes pedophilia! File sharing is communist and fascist and Saddam-loving! File sharing destroys family values and promotes the gay agenda!
I've wanted to say this for a long time.
And they really WILL make a spaceship modeled on Einstein's head.
t he_palm_islands.php
They have a little fetish for cute stuff like that.
http://guide.theemiratesnetwork.com/living/dubai/
If the "drug not available to humans" erased ALL memories prior to its use, the rats might also still have the same results regarding the two tones.
This is arguably not even censorship -- it's just blocking one problematic website in its entirety.
Since Turkey has laws against insulting Ataturk (as mentioned by another poster, in order to identify extremist muslims and keep them reasonably quiet), they did the most civilized thing they could do -- they blocked ALL of YouTube.
The alternatives were to just block that video (Like the Germans trying to ban Nazi lovers -- now THAT is censorship), or to ignore the whole thing and waive their laws.
Waiving the whole thing would be to the advantage of extremist islamists, and to the detriment of their mostly westernized and secular society, they believe, so I'd be inclined to cut them some slack.
Just like a mathematician, to have an imaginary i floating around somewhere.
Those guys are complex.
...and how exactly will Apple's loss change this delicate balance again?
The general principle holds -- journalists don't need to reveal their sources, and can print what they can find out. There are occasional exceptions, but they have to be very important ones, related to national security. A particular company's proprietary info doesn't count.
Nothing has changed.
Nice argument, but hundreds of years late. This has always been true for journalists, now it's being extended to online journalists, whether employed or freelance.
Not such a big deal.
Nice (and very old) discussion on this point if you look up the first Usenet spam, Canter & Siegel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canter_&_Siegel ) also ( http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,19098,00 .html _) and from 1994, some reaction to them: http://groups.google.se/group/news.admin.misc/brow se_thread/thread/34588f6adcaf2c79/ad6060b1bd82c185 ?lnk=st&q=cantor+siegel+&rnum=10#ad6060b1bd82c185
There's really no way to draw a dividing line between legitimate marketing and spam except whether people agreed to receive it. If your friends didn't want the ads, then it's spam.
This guy has actually understood what's going on. Cynical and sad, but I believe obvious too.
My question is -- if I buy a Japanese CD through iTunes US, will I have to pay an "Import" price on it? Will it cost me 3x as much?
Can I get the "domestic" price by switching to the iTunes Japan site?
Are the bits cheaper that way?
Well, of course not, since everything costs the same on iTunes. But I bet the labels would prefer it this way. This may be why those "import" tunes are just unavailable on the US store instead.
Agreed that there are plenty of copies of encyclopedias out there. And that it's pretty good insurance compared to previous civilizations. But I'd still be interested in a deliberate product made to last, for 2 reasons:
* Little of the stuff in encyclopedias is practical for helping rebuild civilization. If I'm in the next generation or two after the collapse, I'm not interested that James Watt invented the steam engine in 1765 -- I want to see how to invent it myself. Slanting the details in this practical way is an important part.
* Printed encyclopedias have been printed less and less lately, as digital versions are coming to dominate. Eventually only libraries will have copies. Libraries will become scarce resources after a civilization collapse. Great for paleoanthropologists, again not so good for children of survivors.