"Advanced users" using FLAC don't need you to provide some crappy tool.
Magnatune already does what you suggest, including the optional FLAC downloads. Presumably the typical musician isn't impressed with the concept, or it would have conquered the market by now.
What country would you recommend? And how much does it cost to leave the United States?
The cost of leaving isn't high, unless you have a large amount of physical assets that you intend to liquidate in one place and re-purchase elsewhere (real estate, antique furniture, stash of illicit drugs etc.)
The main difficulties are a) language barriers b) government restrictions on migration, with a likely need to obtain residence permits, work permits, etc. c) desirability of other countries, in terms of income, corruption, crime, health care, climate, natural disasters etc. d) cost of supporting yourself in a new country before you have established a new income source.
a, b and c would rule out most potential destinations.
that's why you start a SERVICE based business...and leave technological advances to others:)
Just support someone else's creations...and tweak them for specific needs.
Ha, why bother. Just patent your "technological advances" and sell the patents to the highest bidder.
Trying to run a company that does something useful for its customers, in the USA these days, seems like just asking for trouble.
The reason they're not doing this themselves because if they were to even think about trying they would be dropped down a bottomless pit of IBM et al counter patents.
Given the long history of IBM and Microsoft, I'd have thought they would already have a patent cross-licensing agreement.
These exist for Linux, but are somewhat hidden. I'm not sure about voice+video google talk, never used it.
Picasa for Linux. Google Earth for Linux (the instructions for the latter seem to be out of date: the.bin file that downloads when you visit the download page with Linux seems to be the one you want.)
The Federal Reserve has three mandates - Price Stability, Full Employment, and moderate long-term interest rates.
In a free market economy, interest rates would be set by supply and demand for saving vs borrowing. Full employment is a fantasy, hardly anybody wants to work 16 hours a day, leisure time is a valued resource. Price stability simply depends on the supply of money, and is perhaps not as important as some believe.
That's obvious. If they issue an actual hard limit, customers would hold them to it. I know I would... I have bandwidth monitoring on my network and if they cut me off too soon I'd scream bloody murder, believe me. A few hundred thousand customers clogging their support lines is what they absolutely do not want.
What, nobody is going to scream bloody murder because they think they only downloaded 25000 songs? I don't see this saving any help desk calls at all.
Now, if this robot would do the chit-chat and socializing stuff for you autonomously and then report to you the relevant information, that would be a feature.
The robot's coming-out party, and his first voyage off the third floor, came at a co-worker's anniversary celebration in late May.
Some iAnywhere employees who had not been privy to IvanAnywhere's development were shocked to find a computer-on-a-stick hobnobbing with the guests.
"There were a few people who thought this was just freaky," Paulley says. "They were a little taken aback and didn't quite believe themselves that this was actually Ivan, and he was actually there."
...
But in the three months since IvanAnywhere first went online, he has become such a normal part of the third floor at iAnywhere that co-workers barely even notice they're talking to a machine rather than to Bowman's human form.
"We are all so used to Ivan, they don't even give it a second thought," says Glenn Paulley, Bowman's boss and the originator of the IvanAnywhere idea.
"The number of Linux users has been roughly flat for the last three years."
I don't know who w3schools are, but I'm very skeptical of those figures being representative of the majority of users. 3.4% in 2005? Seems high, even now.
This is what they say about web browsers: (perhaps the same will hold for the OS)
W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to use Internet Explorer, since it comes preinstalled with Windows. Most do not seek out other browsers.
These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is used by at least 80% of the users.
Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over a five year period, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends.
Companies never like to be at the mercy of other companies, and Google is no exception.
In my experience companies are perfectly happy to be at the mercy of other companies. It's hardly unknown for a company to source software products from a single company, for example, with no easy migration path to any other product.
Or am I allowed to connect to anything and it only becomes illegal if the owner complains?
The article implies that in the UK at least, the owner doesn't need to complain, and doesn't even need to know that somebody has been arrested for using the connection.
Who cares if the burger-flipper at the local fast food joint believes that a bus can jump a 50-foot span? Sure, it highlights how not-bright a lot of society is but does it really matter if people who do no science at all have a faulty understanding of physics. All I care about is whether or not men-of-science know the truth of it.
Well, they may steal a bus one evening after drinking too much. Or worse, they may have learned everything they know about food hygiene from the same movie.
I grew up with Ghostbusters and Star Wars but I never once thought that when I grew up I'd be creeping around old libraries with a Nuclear Device as a backback or tickling an Ewok under its chin while flying my spaceship around like it was a jet fighter.
I remember watching "Land of the Giants" at a young age, noting that it was set about 20 years in the future, so making a plan to become a pilot so that I'd be able to operate the fantastic space planes that would be invented shortly.
Fortunately I never followed through with this, since the modern day airlines have taken an entirely different approach.
It's censorship... if you want it.
What's the big deal?
The filtering is supposedly to be provided for free, i.e., subscribers who don't want the filtering will still end up paying for it. They can only hope that very few subscribers will want to take up the filtering, and/or the filtering can be implemented very cheaply by the ISP.
It would also be inconvenient for anybody providing Internet access on a small scale, e.g., a wireless access point or a network for a block of apartments, if they now have to provide this filtering option.
The mobile phone? Being able to be in instant communication with practically any other person no matter where you or they are in the world? I'd say that's a life-changing invention at least on a par with the internet.
I don't think the mobile phone is very significant compared to the Internet. The Internet is still giving the world a good shaking up.
I suppose you are right and the mobile phone has changed a lot of people's lives, although not mine as it turns out. If I lost my mobile phone tomorrow, it would probably be months before I bothered to replace it, but I would be completely lost without an Internet connection.
The problem that some see is progress is moving too fast now, faster than before as advancement occurs on an ever smaller scale. The future as seen in movies like Blade Runner made sense at their time because we had just had several decades of very rapid mechanical advance culminating with the space race. For the most part we hadn't yet collectively realised that as our focus shifted from mechanical advancement to information advancement we'd start seeing the signs some interpret as an impending singularity. The future of a few years ago looks ridiculous now. We imagined the flying cars but just barely the internet. We got teh interwebz and lost the will to make the flying cars.
The Internet - that's one life-changing invention of the last 40 years. I can't think of any others at the moment. It's hardly a case of "progress is moving too fast". The space race never lived up to expectations, we were supposed to have colonised Jupiter by now.
Besides, there's a funny paradox at work here: those who have the skills to pull off an attack like this also have the skills to earn an income that's legitimate, without all the risks. I'm tempted from time to time to make use of my skills in a bad way when I think about how easy it is for me to wreak havoc - but the risks of doing so have always stopped me far short. I enjoy my day job, since its nature is fundamentally altruistic. So I'm harmless.
I don't have a day job, but still can't be bothered wreaking havoc. I suppose you need to have a particular enthusiasm for it.
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"Advanced users" using FLAC don't need you to provide some crappy tool.
Magnatune already does what you suggest, including the optional FLAC downloads. Presumably the typical musician isn't impressed with the concept, or it would have conquered the market by now.
The cost of leaving isn't high, unless you have a large amount of physical assets that you intend to liquidate in one place and re-purchase elsewhere (real estate, antique furniture, stash of illicit drugs etc.)
The main difficulties are a) language barriers b) government restrictions on migration, with a likely need to obtain residence permits, work permits, etc. c) desirability of other countries, in terms of income, corruption, crime, health care, climate, natural disasters etc. d) cost of supporting yourself in a new country before you have established a new income source.
a, b and c would rule out most potential destinations.
Ha, why bother. Just patent your "technological advances" and sell the patents to the highest bidder.
Trying to run a company that does something useful for its customers, in the USA these days, seems like just asking for trouble.
An auction wouldn't have to close within moments of opening.
Here's a list from Wikipedia.
If you want to spend hours, try Distributed Proofreaders.
These exist for Linux, but are somewhat hidden. I'm not sure about voice+video google talk, never used it.
Picasa for Linux. Google Earth for Linux (the instructions for the latter seem to be out of date: the .bin file that downloads when you visit the download page with Linux seems to be the one you want.)
Oddly enough this is discussed in the article:
The robot's coming-out party, and his first voyage off the third floor, came at a co-worker's anniversary celebration in late May.
Some iAnywhere employees who had not been privy to IvanAnywhere's development were shocked to find a computer-on-a-stick hobnobbing with the guests.
"There were a few people who thought this was just freaky," Paulley says. "They were a little taken aback and didn't quite believe themselves that this was actually Ivan, and he was actually there."
But in the three months since IvanAnywhere first went online, he has become such a normal part of the third floor at iAnywhere that co-workers barely even notice they're talking to a machine rather than to Bowman's human form.
"We are all so used to Ivan, they don't even give it a second thought," says Glenn Paulley, Bowman's boss and the originator of the IvanAnywhere idea.
This is what they say about web browsers: (perhaps the same will hold for the OS)
In my experience companies are perfectly happy to be at the mercy of other companies. It's hardly unknown for a company to source software products from a single company, for example, with no easy migration path to any other product.
Perhaps Google is the exception after all.
Infectious cancer is apparently possible, check out "devil facial tumour disease".
I remember watching "Land of the Giants" at a young age, noting that it was set about 20 years in the future, so making a plan to become a pilot so that I'd be able to operate the fantastic space planes that would be invented shortly.
Fortunately I never followed through with this, since the modern day airlines have taken an entirely different approach.
The filtering is supposedly to be provided for free, i.e., subscribers who don't want the filtering will still end up paying for it. They can only hope that very few subscribers will want to take up the filtering, and/or the filtering can be implemented very cheaply by the ISP.
It would also be inconvenient for anybody providing Internet access on a small scale, e.g., a wireless access point or a network for a block of apartments, if they now have to provide this filtering option.
I don't think the mobile phone is very significant compared to the Internet. The Internet is still giving the world a good shaking up.
I suppose you are right and the mobile phone has changed a lot of people's lives, although not mine as it turns out. If I lost my mobile phone tomorrow, it would probably be months before I bothered to replace it, but I would be completely lost without an Internet connection.