2) Random chemicals in the environment are mutating the Y gene faster (so change is not coming from a benefit just a lot of random change)
All mutations in genes are random. The changes themselves aren't caused by any benefit. The changes happen no matter what.
A mutation that does not actually bring about any difference will just get passed along without effect. A mutation that changes something can have a positive or negative effect on the prospects of the person with that mutation passing it along. Over time, mutations that are either beneficial or neutral to prospects of reproduction make their way through the population.
Data centers could learn a thing or two from Scottish distilleries.
The process of distilling produces, as its waste product, absolutely pure water that is just below boiling temperature. There are rather strict environmental regulations that prohibit the distilleries from putting the water back into streams without first cooling it to the temperature of the stream. Different distilleries have come up with different solutions to this problem. Several of them maintain rather large, extremely shallow manmade lagoons, which quickly cool the water to much closer to air temperature as the water enters at one end and exits at the other. At Aberlour, they pour the water over a pile of large rocks, with the water being cool by the time it reaches the bottom. The most ingenious use is at Bowmore, where the water is used to heat an indoor public swimming pool run by the distillery for the local community.
Yes, there's potential harm to ecosystems by releasing heated water into rivers/streams, but there are ways of cooling that water that are relatively inexpensive, some of which even adding virtually no operating costs once the capital expenditures are complete.
-JMP
First off, the summary says that the military keeps requesting progressively smaller robots. This one might be 10 lbs, but there may be a 5 lbs version in the future.
As for usefulness, it depends on the application, and how mobile the robot is once it hits the ground. For example, in a firefight situation, a robot might be able to move through the crossfire (perhaps even taking a couple of bullets in the process) in a way that a human could not.
Personally, given that urban house-to-house combat is much more prevalent these days, I'd be more interested in a robot that would have no trouble climbing stairs and turning doorknobs. Better to send a robot into booby-traps than humans...
-JMP
At a company I used to work for, I got in trouble with my supervisor and the CEO upon completion of a huge project on which I was the lead developer. When we first defined the scope of the project, my immediate supervisor asked me about how many programmer-hours it would take to complete the project. After a day of going over the spec with the programmer who would be overseeing a major component of the project (I'd be building the other major component myself), I said it would take about 1400 programmer-hours.
My supervisor assumed that the 1400 hours figure was a complete BS answer, and that no project could actually take that long to build, so he lowballed it in his estimate to the higher ups as 1000 hours, figuring that his stellar management skills (that is, calling us away from working to sit in meetings to talk about why the project was so massive) would help trim the time down. Of course, my figure included assumptions that the client would surprise us with unexpected data flow and that we'd waste a whole lot of hours in meetings.
The week after the project launched, when the timesheets were compiled, it turned out that the project had taken 1375 programmer-hours to complete. My immediate supervisor was furious, because he honestly felt that I'd been kidding about the 1400 hour figure, even though I'd provided solid documentation of the breakdown of the work. (It didn't help that he didn't actually understand the project, or why it was complicated.)
That next week, the CEO gave me an hour long reaming about the project. Apparently, the company lost a huge amount of money on it. It seems that my immediate boss had reported to his superiors that his estimate of 1000 hours was based on applying a 15% overrun to my estimate of how long it would take, and that there was no way we would take longer than 1000 hours. The company had then based the price quoted to the client on the 1000 hour figure, with a reasonable profit margin on top. Of course, the 1375 hours spent on the project was well above the break-even point on what should have been a hugely profitable project for the company, all because my supervisor didn't like my estimate...
-JMP
Actually, the site is freerangekids.wordpress.com and it's the woman who caused a huge stink in the mainstream media for letting her son take the subway alone in NYC.
I'm raising my own kids in Manhattan, as I was raised here. My older son is just 3, so he's not yet old enough to cross streets by himself, but we let him run down the block when it's not too crowded, and he knows to wait for an adult at the corner. In our neighborhood, there's more of a hazard of him running into an oncoming stroller when he isn't paying attention than to falling victim to some sort of mythical pervert, especially since with the huge number of people with young kids on the sidewalks, everyone keeps an eye out for things that are truly out of place.
The best example is in the playgrounds. The kids who are old enough to cross the streets by themselves go to our local playground by themselves. (NYC recently announced a campaign to increase the number of playgrounds so that there is a playground within a 10 minute walk of every legal residence in the entire city. Estimates are that it may take fewer than a half dozen additional playgrounds to achieve that.) The youngest kids are watched by parents or caregivers. My brother described going to meet up with my kids at the playground one time, when they were with their caregiver. He described walking into the entry of the playground and standing there, looking for my kids. As he did so, he watched every single caregiver size him up, then make sure that they were between him and the kid they were taking care of. The instant he connected with my kids (and it was obvious from their caregiver's response that my brother was a welcome, familiar face), they all relaxed and went back to letting the kids be kids. In speaking to some of the caregivers, there's enough of a community in that park that an unfamiliar adult wouldn't be allowed to walk off with any kid who didn't know him/her, even if it's one of the older kids who's there alone.
One of the worst parts of the car culture in most parts of the US is that people don't interact with each other. Living in a pedestrian-centric place, there's a real sense of community. I can recognize the people who I see every single day, even if I don't actually have any interaction with them. It's how humans lived for thousands of years, and there's still something to be said for it...
-JMP
While you're absolutely right about the reasoning behind NYC, LA, and Chicago getting 212, 213, and 312, you're a little off on the 989 and 979 area codes, which are much more recent.
In the original system design, all area codes had a middle digit of 0 or 1. The convention was that a middle digit of 1 was used for area codes that only covered part of a state, while a middle digit of 0 was used for area codes that covered entire states. Furthermore, an area code could not begin with a 1 or a 0. and an area code with a middle digit of 1 couldn't have 1 as the third digit. (This left the shortest dial time area code for a statewide code as 201, which went to New Jersey.)
As early as the late 1950s, the idea of single area codes for some states went out the window (with NJ splitting into 201 and 609 in 1958) because of increasing population and proliferation of phone service.
By the late 1980s, the rules were further changed to allow for area codes with middle digits other than 1 or 0. Area codes like 989 and 979 weren't introduced until the late 1980s at the very earliest, by which point very few people were still using rotary phones. At one point, I had heard that the middle digit value of 9 was reserved for the future to allow for four digit area codes, but I can't vouch for the accuracy of that recollection. There are plenty of other rules, some of which you can see summarized here...
-JMP
Have you ever watched a baby play with a new object?
Remember that a baby is just as intelligent as an adult, they just lack all of the experience, so they approach the world with no preconceived notions, including the idea that results are repeatable until they can prove it for themselves.
A baby will try the same things over and over again, testing to see if the same thing happens. I watched my two year old go through phases where he would go through the process of changing one thing in a system, then repeat his experiment a few more times to see how that changed the outcome, then he'd try it with another change.
My mother (a scientist by training and profession) observed that it's amazing that children are born with an innate understanding of scientific method, yet somehow our society and/or education system manage to strip them of that understanding, which comes with a healthy dose of skepticism.
So maybe the trick isn't to teach them to be skeptical, but to take steps to insure that they never lose the skepticism with which they're born. Unfortunately, most people wait until it's way too late to do that.
-JMP
It's very simple. The FCC regulates two industries: Cable and Telco.
Back before the 1996 Telecom Act, the two never competed directly. Now, you've got cable companies offering phone service, telephone companies offering television service, and both offering Internet access. In some areas, the buildup of higher bandwidth infrastructure has forced cable companies to add channels in order to compete with new telco TV offerings.
Eventually, we'll likely move towards a model in which the cable and telephone companies simply sell bandwidth, and people will get most of their content through VOIP and IPTV. Until the real world implementation of the technology and the regulations catch up with the potential, the FCC is stuck regulating the services offered by these companies. As long as that's the case, added regulation on one industry means a competitive advantage for the others. If cablecos lose, telcos win.
In many communities, this can ultimately be good for consumers. Here in NYC, one cable company (Time Warner) has the monopoly on providing television access. Over the air reception is a non-starter because of all the tall buildings, and many people (myself included) have no southern line of sight for satellite. My cable company provides horrible service. As bad as the local telco is, their service is actually better than the cable company. When Verizon wires my building for FIOS (a project that's already underway), and eventually gets permission to carry TV signals here in NYC, I will actually have a choice of provider if I want to watch live TV. Time Warner has already started offering higher bandwidth Internet connections in anticipation of FIOS data rates. I look forward to seeing what else the competition will bring...
-JMP
The problem is that with Apple trading to all time highs at the beginning of the week, lots of people were shorting it, or buying puts.
Not to mention that this Friday is the monthly expiration day for traded options. The big brokerages that underwrite most options have a vested interest in having the stock price go down by the time the market closes this Friday. There are options on about 4 million shares that expire worthless if the stock price is below 110, 3.4 million shares worth that expire worthless if the price is below 105, 5 million shares worth that are worthless if the stock is below 100, etc. The backers of those options would love nothing more than to see as many as possible expire worthless. They've been known to manipulate Apple's share price downward in the week leading into expiration. (Or at least Apple has managed to go down in the days before expiration in each of the last 6 months, even as the stock has been generally going up.)
If you want to know who stands to benefit from Apple going down, see who the big option underwriters are...
-JMP
Without DRM there'd be far less excuse to charge extra for the DRM-free version. The $1.30 version will subsidise the $1 DRM-encumbered version.
Don't ignore the other tidbit in the announcement about the re-release of the music. It's all going to be released 256kbps, rather than the current iTunes Store standard of 128kbps. So if you buy DRM-free music from iTunes, you're actually getting a higher quality rip than they previously sold. There's a very small number of people who can hear the difference, although a larger number of people think it matters. Either way, Apple has actually improved the quality of the deliverable, not just removed DRM.
At twice the bitrate, the songs use twice the bandwidth when downloaded, so Apple even has slightly higher real costs on the new downloads, although I doubt that the incremental increase in cost is as high as 30 cents per song...
-JMP
Simcity and Civ are both fantasic games, to which I've lost many months of my life, but both owe a great deal to MULE. MULE was the first economic simulation that depended on resource management, and Will Wright acknowledged that SimCity was at least in part inspired by the game. It was also one of the first, if not the first game to allow head to head multiplayer.
-JMP
In the original Day of the Jackal, the inspector is trying to determine the source of a leak, probably coming from someone at the highest level. He finally determines that it's come from one of the ministers on the board that oversees his investigation. After announcing which minister was the source of the leak by playing a tape from a wire tap, one of the ministers asks "How did you know whose telephone to tap?"
His response, "I didn't, so I tapped them all."
UK residents, welcome to the Day of the Jackal! Don't worry, the US isn't far behind you.
-JMP
Feh, he's only saying the exact same thing ("don't blame us, they made us do it!") that Microsoft says. Actions speak louder than words. Of course, this is Slashdot, so it will be proof of Apple's godliness and Microsoft's perfidy.
Except that Jobs comes off as sounding level headed and well thought out, while Bill Gates has managed to come off as whiny in his recent media appearances. Tone goes a long way towards persuasiveness.
-JMP
I bet nothing for 2 days, but ~5 within the next week.
I wouldn't take the other side of that bet. It looks like any of those early adopter companies that are running Lotus Notes (or any other third party mail client) are screwed from day 1. It seems that Microsoft put a big lock on the front door, but left the sliding glass door to the back yard wide open.
-JMP
While I don't care about a phone that plays music or video, I want a phone that has a quick, intuitive interface for placing calls and text messages to people in my address book. I find that each time I've had to replace my phone, I'm progressively less satisfied with the interface. It seems like Motorola et al are so worried about form factor that they ignore interface design.
For example, about 7 years ago I got a Motorola StarTac. It was the coolest form factor phone at the time, and had a reasonable interface. Each name in my phone directory could have multiple numbers associated with it, with each number having an icon for office, home, cell, etc. When I wanted to call someone, I first selected the name, then the appropriate icon from that person's list. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it worked reasonably well. Now I've got a Motorola RAZR, and they've somehow lost the ability to recognize that a single person can have multiple numbers. If I have office, home, and cell numbers stored for the same person, I get three entries for them, making the full list of names much longer. Not only are phone makers not making steps forward, they're moving backwards.
Given Apple's track record, I'd say they're the most likely candidates to figure out an elegant cell phone interface, and I'm looking forward to the iPhone for that reason alone. If the interface is half decent, I'll be buying one to replace my RAZR.
-JMP
I know exactly what the signing statements are. The signing statements (aside from their disregard for normal Constitutional process) represent that there is even a disconnect between the White House and Congress as controlled by the Republicans. It was only out of misguided party loyalty that Congress didn't call him on his shenanigans before. With Democrats controlling Congress (even if it's just the house, although it looks like VA and MT might tip), the President is much more likely to be called out it, reasserting the checks and balances that were built into the Constitution to prevent exactly the sort of abuses the current White House has perpetrated...
-JMP
If nothing else, maybe the new Congress will actually put this signing statement bullshit in check.
When functioning more or less as designed, our government should get exceedingly little done. It's one of the virtues of the system. Look for the House to start out by questioning Donald Rumsfeld's competence, then move on to the dwindling of civil liberties.
If it all works as designed, the government will be back to doing nothing in no time. Think that isn't what the founders had in mind? Read The Federalist Papers, in which Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison made the case (in extreme detail) for the various provisions of the Constitution. They predicted an aweful lot of the sort of abuses the system has faced over the years...
-JMP
We'll start with bacteria and move our way up to humans!;)
Hopefully this would eventually allow risky medial treatments to be simulated before they have to be performed with a scan of the patients physiology as a reference.
The scientific community is already working on it, as you might well imagine. Take a look here for a list of published databases of protein interactions and metabolic pathways. The drug companies are throwing money at developing systems that can use this sort of data to (for example) predict negative drug interactions well before a new drug gets anywhere near clinical trials. They're also being used to better understand exactly how existing drugs work, trying to isolate causes of desired effects from those of side effects. This is an emerging field, applying well studied (in computer science) principles of graph theory to biological networks that are only now being mapped.
-JMP
True breakthroughs in technology are best identified the way economists identify recessions -- that is to say after the fact.
The biggest innovations come from basic research, and one of the common characteristics of basic research is that the researchers don't know what they're looking for, they're just looking.
Just look at some of the examples you point to that we use in everyday life. The way in which most of the western world functions right now would be substantially different without all sorts of things that people barely noticed at the time researchers discovered the last piece that fell into place to make it a reality.
No, we don't have a cure for cancer yet, but there's no saying that when a cure for cancer comes around it won't turn out that the discovery depended on technologies developed over the last 25 years.
For a perfect example, look at RSA encryption. The major innovation of RSA was to pair together a couple of extremely old math tricks that had previously been thought of as cute but useless. Does that mean that the breakthrough for RSA should be credited to Fermat or Sun Tzu? It certainly took until the last few decades to recognize the value of their work...
-JMP
Remember that there is one thing that the cable company is selling you--bandwidth.
I've been of the opinion that an a la carte system would only work if the cable company charged customers for the amount of bandwidth a channel uses as well as whatever charge the channel's owner specifies should be passed along to customers. Part of the problem with cable systems right now is that the people who are using the most bandwidth for their television viewing are the ones paying the least to the cable company, that is the people who have not switched from analog to digital. I don't mind if the spectrum includes lots of stuff I don't want to watch, since tastes vary, but don't include things that take up huge bandwidth that no one would pay for at the expense of things I would be willing to pay for.
I have an HDTV and have been requesting additional HD channels from my cableco for the last 3 years, yet the excuse has always been lack of bandwidth. My apartment faces the wrong direction to use a dish, and because of all the tall buildings around I can't get an over the air signal, so if I want to watch HD I either have to have cable or spend lots of time downloading. Oddly, it's the people paying ~$25/month to the cable company who keep the people paying >$125/month from having the bandwidth to get the channels we want. (Since the bandwidth needed for 1 analog channel can hold ~4 HD channels or ~8 SD channels.)
-JMP
My six month old still gets a little confused when the phone gets held to his ear and he hears a familiar voice coming from it. I think we'll hold off on buying him a cell phone until he's old enough not to use it as a teething toy.;-)
The event is called the Apple World Wide Developers Conference.
Steve Jobs talked about the new version of the OS and new high end boxes. These are the products that will most directly impact the lives and work of those who develop software for Apple systems. This conference has never been about targetting consumers. It's all about things that matter to developers.
The next version of the iPod, the next revision of the iMac and laptops, as well as any other devices Apple has up its sleeve (iPhone, Tivo-esque Mac Mini settop box, tablet, etc.) are all consumer focused items. Anything Apple wants to release to consumers will be released a little closer to the holiday season, making it harder for imitators to be able to produce knockoffs in time for Christmas. Anyone who thought they'd see an iPhone, new iPod, or any other strictly consumer-centric item at WWDC has put their desire for new gadgets ahead of Apple's desire to maximize its profits. That said, stay tuned for a product announcement sometime before October with Apple's slate of holiday season offerings.
-JMP
Exactly the same thing can be said of movies and Broadway shows.
In all of these cases, production costs have risen faster than the incomes of the target consumers. As that happens, investors are loathe to have a failure on their hands, so they take fewer risks. For a perfect example, after the successes of Lion King and The Producers, look at how many films turned into Broadway musicals. Do we really need a musical theater adaptation of The Wedding Singer? Innovation has moved off-off-Broadway, where costs are lower.
-JMP
Slashdot Mirror
All mutations in genes are random. The changes themselves aren't caused by any benefit. The changes happen no matter what.
A mutation that does not actually bring about any difference will just get passed along without effect. A mutation that changes something can have a positive or negative effect on the prospects of the person with that mutation passing it along. Over time, mutations that are either beneficial or neutral to prospects of reproduction make their way through the population.
Data centers could learn a thing or two from Scottish distilleries.
The process of distilling produces, as its waste product, absolutely pure water that is just below boiling temperature. There are rather strict environmental regulations that prohibit the distilleries from putting the water back into streams without first cooling it to the temperature of the stream. Different distilleries have come up with different solutions to this problem. Several of them maintain rather large, extremely shallow manmade lagoons, which quickly cool the water to much closer to air temperature as the water enters at one end and exits at the other. At Aberlour, they pour the water over a pile of large rocks, with the water being cool by the time it reaches the bottom. The most ingenious use is at Bowmore, where the water is used to heat an indoor public swimming pool run by the distillery for the local community.
Yes, there's potential harm to ecosystems by releasing heated water into rivers/streams, but there are ways of cooling that water that are relatively inexpensive, some of which even adding virtually no operating costs once the capital expenditures are complete.
-JMP
First off, the summary says that the military keeps requesting progressively smaller robots. This one might be 10 lbs, but there may be a 5 lbs version in the future.
As for usefulness, it depends on the application, and how mobile the robot is once it hits the ground. For example, in a firefight situation, a robot might be able to move through the crossfire (perhaps even taking a couple of bullets in the process) in a way that a human could not.
Personally, given that urban house-to-house combat is much more prevalent these days, I'd be more interested in a robot that would have no trouble climbing stairs and turning doorknobs. Better to send a robot into booby-traps than humans...
-JMP
At a company I used to work for, I got in trouble with my supervisor and the CEO upon completion of a huge project on which I was the lead developer. When we first defined the scope of the project, my immediate supervisor asked me about how many programmer-hours it would take to complete the project. After a day of going over the spec with the programmer who would be overseeing a major component of the project (I'd be building the other major component myself), I said it would take about 1400 programmer-hours.
My supervisor assumed that the 1400 hours figure was a complete BS answer, and that no project could actually take that long to build, so he lowballed it in his estimate to the higher ups as 1000 hours, figuring that his stellar management skills (that is, calling us away from working to sit in meetings to talk about why the project was so massive) would help trim the time down. Of course, my figure included assumptions that the client would surprise us with unexpected data flow and that we'd waste a whole lot of hours in meetings.
The week after the project launched, when the timesheets were compiled, it turned out that the project had taken 1375 programmer-hours to complete. My immediate supervisor was furious, because he honestly felt that I'd been kidding about the 1400 hour figure, even though I'd provided solid documentation of the breakdown of the work. (It didn't help that he didn't actually understand the project, or why it was complicated.)
That next week, the CEO gave me an hour long reaming about the project. Apparently, the company lost a huge amount of money on it. It seems that my immediate boss had reported to his superiors that his estimate of 1000 hours was based on applying a 15% overrun to my estimate of how long it would take, and that there was no way we would take longer than 1000 hours. The company had then based the price quoted to the client on the 1000 hour figure, with a reasonable profit margin on top. Of course, the 1375 hours spent on the project was well above the break-even point on what should have been a hugely profitable project for the company, all because my supervisor didn't like my estimate...
-JMP
Actually, the site is freerangekids.wordpress.com and it's the woman who caused a huge stink in the mainstream media for letting her son take the subway alone in NYC.
I'm raising my own kids in Manhattan, as I was raised here. My older son is just 3, so he's not yet old enough to cross streets by himself, but we let him run down the block when it's not too crowded, and he knows to wait for an adult at the corner. In our neighborhood, there's more of a hazard of him running into an oncoming stroller when he isn't paying attention than to falling victim to some sort of mythical pervert, especially since with the huge number of people with young kids on the sidewalks, everyone keeps an eye out for things that are truly out of place.
The best example is in the playgrounds. The kids who are old enough to cross the streets by themselves go to our local playground by themselves. (NYC recently announced a campaign to increase the number of playgrounds so that there is a playground within a 10 minute walk of every legal residence in the entire city. Estimates are that it may take fewer than a half dozen additional playgrounds to achieve that.) The youngest kids are watched by parents or caregivers. My brother described going to meet up with my kids at the playground one time, when they were with their caregiver. He described walking into the entry of the playground and standing there, looking for my kids. As he did so, he watched every single caregiver size him up, then make sure that they were between him and the kid they were taking care of. The instant he connected with my kids (and it was obvious from their caregiver's response that my brother was a welcome, familiar face), they all relaxed and went back to letting the kids be kids. In speaking to some of the caregivers, there's enough of a community in that park that an unfamiliar adult wouldn't be allowed to walk off with any kid who didn't know him/her, even if it's one of the older kids who's there alone.
One of the worst parts of the car culture in most parts of the US is that people don't interact with each other. Living in a pedestrian-centric place, there's a real sense of community. I can recognize the people who I see every single day, even if I don't actually have any interaction with them. It's how humans lived for thousands of years, and there's still something to be said for it...
-JMP
While you're absolutely right about the reasoning behind NYC, LA, and Chicago getting 212, 213, and 312, you're a little off on the 989 and 979 area codes, which are much more recent.
In the original system design, all area codes had a middle digit of 0 or 1. The convention was that a middle digit of 1 was used for area codes that only covered part of a state, while a middle digit of 0 was used for area codes that covered entire states. Furthermore, an area code could not begin with a 1 or a 0. and an area code with a middle digit of 1 couldn't have 1 as the third digit. (This left the shortest dial time area code for a statewide code as 201, which went to New Jersey.)
As early as the late 1950s, the idea of single area codes for some states went out the window (with NJ splitting into 201 and 609 in 1958) because of increasing population and proliferation of phone service.
By the late 1980s, the rules were further changed to allow for area codes with middle digits other than 1 or 0. Area codes like 989 and 979 weren't introduced until the late 1980s at the very earliest, by which point very few people were still using rotary phones. At one point, I had heard that the middle digit value of 9 was reserved for the future to allow for four digit area codes, but I can't vouch for the accuracy of that recollection. There are plenty of other rules, some of which you can see summarized here...
-JMP
Remember that a baby is just as intelligent as an adult, they just lack all of the experience, so they approach the world with no preconceived notions, including the idea that results are repeatable until they can prove it for themselves.
A baby will try the same things over and over again, testing to see if the same thing happens. I watched my two year old go through phases where he would go through the process of changing one thing in a system, then repeat his experiment a few more times to see how that changed the outcome, then he'd try it with another change.
My mother (a scientist by training and profession) observed that it's amazing that children are born with an innate understanding of scientific method, yet somehow our society and/or education system manage to strip them of that understanding, which comes with a healthy dose of skepticism.
So maybe the trick isn't to teach them to be skeptical, but to take steps to insure that they never lose the skepticism with which they're born. Unfortunately, most people wait until it's way too late to do that.
-JMP
It's very simple. The FCC regulates two industries: Cable and Telco.
Back before the 1996 Telecom Act, the two never competed directly. Now, you've got cable companies offering phone service, telephone companies offering television service, and both offering Internet access. In some areas, the buildup of higher bandwidth infrastructure has forced cable companies to add channels in order to compete with new telco TV offerings.
Eventually, we'll likely move towards a model in which the cable and telephone companies simply sell bandwidth, and people will get most of their content through VOIP and IPTV. Until the real world implementation of the technology and the regulations catch up with the potential, the FCC is stuck regulating the services offered by these companies. As long as that's the case, added regulation on one industry means a competitive advantage for the others. If cablecos lose, telcos win.
In many communities, this can ultimately be good for consumers. Here in NYC, one cable company (Time Warner) has the monopoly on providing television access. Over the air reception is a non-starter because of all the tall buildings, and many people (myself included) have no southern line of sight for satellite. My cable company provides horrible service. As bad as the local telco is, their service is actually better than the cable company. When Verizon wires my building for FIOS (a project that's already underway), and eventually gets permission to carry TV signals here in NYC, I will actually have a choice of provider if I want to watch live TV. Time Warner has already started offering higher bandwidth Internet connections in anticipation of FIOS data rates. I look forward to seeing what else the competition will bring...
-JMP
The problem is that with Apple trading to all time highs at the beginning of the week, lots of people were shorting it, or buying puts.
Not to mention that this Friday is the monthly expiration day for traded options. The big brokerages that underwrite most options have a vested interest in having the stock price go down by the time the market closes this Friday. There are options on about 4 million shares that expire worthless if the stock price is below 110, 3.4 million shares worth that expire worthless if the price is below 105, 5 million shares worth that are worthless if the stock is below 100, etc. The backers of those options would love nothing more than to see as many as possible expire worthless. They've been known to manipulate Apple's share price downward in the week leading into expiration. (Or at least Apple has managed to go down in the days before expiration in each of the last 6 months, even as the stock has been generally going up.)
If you want to know who stands to benefit from Apple going down, see who the big option underwriters are...
-JMP
Without DRM there'd be far less excuse to charge extra for the DRM-free version. The $1.30 version will subsidise the $1 DRM-encumbered version.
Don't ignore the other tidbit in the announcement about the re-release of the music. It's all going to be released 256kbps, rather than the current iTunes Store standard of 128kbps. So if you buy DRM-free music from iTunes, you're actually getting a higher quality rip than they previously sold. There's a very small number of people who can hear the difference, although a larger number of people think it matters. Either way, Apple has actually improved the quality of the deliverable, not just removed DRM.
At twice the bitrate, the songs use twice the bandwidth when downloaded, so Apple even has slightly higher real costs on the new downloads, although I doubt that the incremental increase in cost is as high as 30 cents per song...
-JMP
Simcity and Civ are both fantasic games, to which I've lost many months of my life, but both owe a great deal to MULE. MULE was the first economic simulation that depended on resource management, and Will Wright acknowledged that SimCity was at least in part inspired by the game. It was also one of the first, if not the first game to allow head to head multiplayer.
-JMP
They've just seen too many movies.
In the original Day of the Jackal, the inspector is trying to determine the source of a leak, probably coming from someone at the highest level. He finally determines that it's come from one of the ministers on the board that oversees his investigation. After announcing which minister was the source of the leak by playing a tape from a wire tap, one of the ministers asks "How did you know whose telephone to tap?"
His response, "I didn't, so I tapped them all."
UK residents, welcome to the Day of the Jackal! Don't worry, the US isn't far behind you.
-JMP
Feh, he's only saying the exact same thing ("don't blame us, they made us do it!") that Microsoft says. Actions speak louder than words. Of course, this is Slashdot, so it will be proof of Apple's godliness and Microsoft's perfidy.
Except that Jobs comes off as sounding level headed and well thought out, while Bill Gates has managed to come off as whiny in his recent media appearances. Tone goes a long way towards persuasiveness.
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I bet nothing for 2 days, but ~5 within the next week.
I wouldn't take the other side of that bet. It looks like any of those early adopter companies that are running Lotus Notes (or any other third party mail client) are screwed from day 1. It seems that Microsoft put a big lock on the front door, but left the sliding glass door to the back yard wide open.
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While I don't care about a phone that plays music or video, I want a phone that has a quick, intuitive interface for placing calls and text messages to people in my address book. I find that each time I've had to replace my phone, I'm progressively less satisfied with the interface. It seems like Motorola et al are so worried about form factor that they ignore interface design.
For example, about 7 years ago I got a Motorola StarTac. It was the coolest form factor phone at the time, and had a reasonable interface. Each name in my phone directory could have multiple numbers associated with it, with each number having an icon for office, home, cell, etc. When I wanted to call someone, I first selected the name, then the appropriate icon from that person's list. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it worked reasonably well. Now I've got a Motorola RAZR, and they've somehow lost the ability to recognize that a single person can have multiple numbers. If I have office, home, and cell numbers stored for the same person, I get three entries for them, making the full list of names much longer. Not only are phone makers not making steps forward, they're moving backwards.
Given Apple's track record, I'd say they're the most likely candidates to figure out an elegant cell phone interface, and I'm looking forward to the iPhone for that reason alone. If the interface is half decent, I'll be buying one to replace my RAZR.
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it was not some great intention or design. If he wanted to do 1 first, he would have.
If he'd made episode 1 first, and it was anything like the film that was released, there would never have been more than one Star Wars film...
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I know exactly what the signing statements are. The signing statements (aside from their disregard for normal Constitutional process) represent that there is even a disconnect between the White House and Congress as controlled by the Republicans. It was only out of misguided party loyalty that Congress didn't call him on his shenanigans before. With Democrats controlling Congress (even if it's just the house, although it looks like VA and MT might tip), the President is much more likely to be called out it, reasserting the checks and balances that were built into the Constitution to prevent exactly the sort of abuses the current White House has perpetrated...
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If nothing else, maybe the new Congress will actually put this signing statement bullshit in check.
When functioning more or less as designed, our government should get exceedingly little done. It's one of the virtues of the system. Look for the House to start out by questioning Donald Rumsfeld's competence, then move on to the dwindling of civil liberties.
If it all works as designed, the government will be back to doing nothing in no time. Think that isn't what the founders had in mind? Read The Federalist Papers, in which Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison made the case (in extreme detail) for the various provisions of the Constitution. They predicted an aweful lot of the sort of abuses the system has faced over the years...
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...and claim that "plays for sure" is an advertising claim that Microsoft has now failed to live up to. :-)
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We'll start with bacteria and move our way up to humans! ;)
Hopefully this would eventually allow risky medial treatments to be simulated before they have to be performed with a scan of the patients physiology as a reference.
The scientific community is already working on it, as you might well imagine. Take a look here for a list of published databases of protein interactions and metabolic pathways. The drug companies are throwing money at developing systems that can use this sort of data to (for example) predict negative drug interactions well before a new drug gets anywhere near clinical trials. They're also being used to better understand exactly how existing drugs work, trying to isolate causes of desired effects from those of side effects. This is an emerging field, applying well studied (in computer science) principles of graph theory to biological networks that are only now being mapped.
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True breakthroughs in technology are best identified the way economists identify recessions -- that is to say after the fact.
The biggest innovations come from basic research, and one of the common characteristics of basic research is that the researchers don't know what they're looking for, they're just looking.
Just look at some of the examples you point to that we use in everyday life. The way in which most of the western world functions right now would be substantially different without all sorts of things that people barely noticed at the time researchers discovered the last piece that fell into place to make it a reality.
No, we don't have a cure for cancer yet, but there's no saying that when a cure for cancer comes around it won't turn out that the discovery depended on technologies developed over the last 25 years.
For a perfect example, look at RSA encryption. The major innovation of RSA was to pair together a couple of extremely old math tricks that had previously been thought of as cute but useless. Does that mean that the breakthrough for RSA should be credited to Fermat or Sun Tzu? It certainly took until the last few decades to recognize the value of their work...
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Remember that there is one thing that the cable company is selling you--bandwidth.
I've been of the opinion that an a la carte system would only work if the cable company charged customers for the amount of bandwidth a channel uses as well as whatever charge the channel's owner specifies should be passed along to customers. Part of the problem with cable systems right now is that the people who are using the most bandwidth for their television viewing are the ones paying the least to the cable company, that is the people who have not switched from analog to digital. I don't mind if the spectrum includes lots of stuff I don't want to watch, since tastes vary, but don't include things that take up huge bandwidth that no one would pay for at the expense of things I would be willing to pay for.
I have an HDTV and have been requesting additional HD channels from my cableco for the last 3 years, yet the excuse has always been lack of bandwidth. My apartment faces the wrong direction to use a dish, and because of all the tall buildings around I can't get an over the air signal, so if I want to watch HD I either have to have cable or spend lots of time downloading. Oddly, it's the people paying ~$25/month to the cable company who keep the people paying >$125/month from having the bandwidth to get the channels we want. (Since the bandwidth needed for 1 analog channel can hold ~4 HD channels or ~8 SD channels.)
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My six month old still gets a little confused when the phone gets held to his ear and he hears a familiar voice coming from it. I think we'll hold off on buying him a cell phone until he's old enough not to use it as a teething toy. ;-)
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The event is called the Apple World Wide Developers Conference.
Steve Jobs talked about the new version of the OS and new high end boxes. These are the products that will most directly impact the lives and work of those who develop software for Apple systems. This conference has never been about targetting consumers. It's all about things that matter to developers.
The next version of the iPod, the next revision of the iMac and laptops, as well as any other devices Apple has up its sleeve (iPhone, Tivo-esque Mac Mini settop box, tablet, etc.) are all consumer focused items. Anything Apple wants to release to consumers will be released a little closer to the holiday season, making it harder for imitators to be able to produce knockoffs in time for Christmas. Anyone who thought they'd see an iPhone, new iPod, or any other strictly consumer-centric item at WWDC has put their desire for new gadgets ahead of Apple's desire to maximize its profits. That said, stay tuned for a product announcement sometime before October with Apple's slate of holiday season offerings.
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Exactly the same thing can be said of movies and Broadway shows.
In all of these cases, production costs have risen faster than the incomes of the target consumers. As that happens, investors are loathe to have a failure on their hands, so they take fewer risks. For a perfect example, after the successes of Lion King and The Producers, look at how many films turned into Broadway musicals. Do we really need a musical theater adaptation of The Wedding Singer? Innovation has moved off-off-Broadway, where costs are lower.
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