If the FCC strikes down cancelation fees then the price of phones will suddenly increase several hundred bucks. This isn't necessarily a good thing for the market since almost everyone I know tends to go for the free phone or the 50 dollar phone when getting a new plan - no one is willing to spend several hundred dollars. At least, not in a lump sum up front.
Uhm, have you heard of the iPhone? It's several hundred dollars in a lump sum up front, and they seem to be selling well.
Not that I ever understood the obsession with boot time, either. But it's amazing how many people shut down the machine every single time they stop using it
Boot time becomes noticeable when I sit down at a computer and it demands that I reboot to install an update. It's really annoying when it happens more then once a month.
Yet, this is far from the first time a BigCorp as issued a DMCA takedown notice for material is clearly did not own the rights too. But I've never heard of a single prosecution over such fraud
Assuming Coachella hired Prince; then it's a work for hire and he doesn't own the copyright. However, it's likely that Prince's arrangement with Coachella granted him the copyright.
Radiohead has very little say in this matter. Copyright law stipulates that they (the songwriter) can get something like $0.10 per song per copy of a DVD or CD. They are also free to negotiate another price, including free. They really can't state that he has to give away performances of their song for free, because Copyright doesn't grant them that right.
The wii uses 11 watts of power at standby by default because of the WiiConnect24 feature. Nintendo designed it so it it checks in with wifi while 'off' for updates and other tasks. This right here is a good example of bad engineering. Instead of turning this on selectively (or turned on by games that might need it), its on by default and it just eats up power. Its like leaving a new CFL bulb on 24/7. That might not seem like a lot but multiply that by the units sold and you're seeing one of the worst standby machines on the market.
... it gets worse... My Wii's power supply is perpetually warm; along with my MacBook's power supply, my HTPC's (an old laptop's) power supply, and my DVR. These four devices throw just enough heat to keep my living room warm during the winter; however, they throw so much heat that I had to crank my AC during the last heat wave.
So, 11 watts might not seem like a lot, but 4-5 devices sucking 11 watts each during a heat wave will cause the air conditioners to suck even more power.
Marriage is "til death do you part", not "until we aren't happy anymore."
That's how I intend on my marrige to be when I eventually get married...
...However; such a statement ignores the harsh reality that there are real situations where a marrige must end. My mother has 12 brothers and sisters. Even though the family believes that marriage is "til death do you part", there were some abusive situations where the marrige had to end. No one should have to wait for death in order to get away from an alcoholic; or to avoid a mistake made at a very young age.
Let me temporarily step into the shoes of Joe Shmoe. I get up in the morning, brush my teeth, take a shower, get dressed and head out to my construction job. I work hard for 8-9 hours. During the day I grab some coffee and some lunch. I listen to the radio. I come home to my wife at night, picking up some groceries on the way. We have dinner together. I go hang out with the guys at the bar for a while, we chat about the game on TV and whether we like Hillary or Obama better. I head back home, help put the kids to bed and turn in.
A significant amount of people who've never sent email are the elderly, including my grandparents.
They still have trouble figuring out how to use their HDTV, DVD player, and cordless phone. They only use Skype when they visit someone who sets it up for them.
If the purpose is to somehow stimulate the local economy, I think it would make more sense to help build and expand the underlying infrastructure that would eventually lead to the desire to have top math/science experts in the region. Otherwise they will most likely just move somewhere where they're actually wanted and can be sufficiently compensated. Is there a need for physics experts when the region is severely lacking in agriculture?
From the summary:
fight poverty by identifying the kind of talent that can create wealth
Stimulating an economy is a short-term solution. Fostering talent that's able to identify ways to create wealth is a long-term solution.
funny, but you'd have to pay ASCAP / BMI fees - to the publisher of the music. Or maybe RIAA would get ASCAP / BMI in on the lawsuit fun in order to reduce the amount of distraction
you have a point, I was going to say the same thing to the parent poster. What I can add is that if there's enough of a change; it becomes a parody! Parody was decided by the Supreme Court to not be infringement.
Note that Powerset understands the difference between being acquired by and acquiring, that "buying" is equivalent to "acquiring", and that we are often able to highlight the actual answer to your question. Traditional search engines can do none of these things.
I have to call B.S. on that one. While I admire your desire to improve over existing engines, no computer can truly understand such a difference until it is capable of sprouting legs and buying and aquiring.
Until a computer can "buy" and "aquire", such concepts are merely bits and only understood by your programmers!
Of course that would make shipping things from Japan to California quite efficient, but shipping to California to Japan would take a bit longer using this method.
So... The airships could just stay with the jetstream indefinateley. Califorinia to MA gets cheap, MA to EU gets cheap, and EU to Japan gets cheap!
Maybe some people register on DNC-lists because they know they're pushovers?
Before the DNC, my family's dinner would constantly get interrupted by telemarketers. We would get 3-4 calls between the hours of 5-7PM, from people trying to sell us stuff that we didn't want.
Before the DNC, my family's phone would ring every two hours with calls from people trying to sell us stuff that we didn't want. It got real bad with the predictive dialers, because half of the time no one would be on the other line, or they would hang up after 2 rings.
Before the DNC, my family's phone was used to make everyone in my home listen to multiple marketing pitches at the sound of a bell. It very quickly became disruptive to our lifestyle when a communication mechanism used to communicate with loved ones was disruptive.
This is why the DNC was put in place. I remember George W. Bush stating that American families should be able to eat dinner uninterrupted by telemarketers. It has less to do with pushovers then you think.
On balance Visual Studio is a far better developer environment, but that counts for nothing if you are trying to write a Mac GUI application, in which case Xcode is the only game in town as far as I know.
I often write a lot of quick-and-dirty GUI applications in my spare time. Even though I've switched to Mac, I still do my quick-and-dirty GUIs in C# because I just don't have time to learn XCode / Objective C / Cocca.
Frankly, it was faster/easier for me to learn GWT / Java / Eclipse then XCode! If only I could use that for a quick-and-dirty GUI application...
A lot of technologies are supplanted by many nerds who learn them in spare hours during nights and weekends. XCode / Objective C / Cocca is certainly possible to learn if I can find 20-40 hours to dedicate to it; but I have other things I'd rather do with my time!
Airbags are, like many other "safety" inventions, needless complications foisted on the car-buying public at large because a small percentage of lawyers insist that, as an occupant of a vehicle, you should be protected from yourself, regardless of any lack of common sense you might exhibit in the car.
Two months ago, the "safety" innovations in my Civic Hybrid saved my life. When I saw a pickup in the oncoming lane drift into my lane, I was able to jerk the wheel and honk the horn. My rear-view mirror told me that a car was too close to my tail, so I didn't slam on the brakes but stopped just fast enough that I didn't get rear-ended. My ABS brakes allowed me to keep control of the car as a slowed down, thus I kept out of the way of the tumbling pickup that landed eactly where I would have driven if I was in a car with poor handling.
These "safety" innovations saved my life because they were features that allowed me to avoid an accident. If I didn't have ABS, a rear-view mirror, or good handling, I wouldn't have been able to avoid the oncoming pickup.
DEV12345 to NET (broadcast): seek 100W, limit 0.01 cents, starting in at most 10 seconds, ref.ask# 12345_12...
SUP11 to DEV12345: bid 12345_12, 0.003, in 5s, ref.bid# 11_12345_0
SUP53 to DEV12345: bid 12345_12, 0.008, in 3s, ref.bid# 53_12345_0
SUP37 to DEV12345: bid 12345_12, 0.0029, in 8s, ref.bid# 37_12345_0...
DEV12345 to NET (broadcast): close# 12345_12, 37_12345_0, 0.0029c, 8s...
SUP37 to DEV12345: go# 37_12345_0...
[DEV12345 going ON]......
DEV12345 to SUP37: release# 37_12345_0 in 0.2s
[DEV12345 going OFF]
That's incredibly complex. I don't think my electric toothbrush charger or USB-to-wall-current adaptor will EVER support such systems. Why? Because whoever's making them isn't going to hire an engineer to implement such a protocol when the used to just use an off-the-shelf power supply.
OTOH, I could see my electric toothbrush charger turning itself off if it got a signal indicating that the grid was under a high load!
IMHO, to prevent instabilities and peaking, system can not be left blind and non-cooperative. We should have an integrated intelligent system for power delivery:
There should be an asynchronous handshaking protocol for appliances to request exact amount of additional power from the grid and to postpone activation before the grid acknowledges that it is ready to supply it.
Are you serious? Such an approach will make it impossible to build simple devices. Such a protocol will end up being more complex then the device, and stifle innovation once its purpose becomes obsolete.
Mac sales have gone up, most likely to the yuppies who cannot sync the Itunes software to a Windows box and decide to buy the Mac due to the customer support representative with Mac stating, "it works better with a Mac," or the idiots logical thought process that decides a Mac is a cost effective option (cough, cough).
I bought my first Mac in November of 2006. At the time, the MacBook was considered the best notebook, as it was very powerful, thin, and rated as the best Vista notebook (with Bootcamp.) Considering Vista's poor reputation; I decided that it was worth trying MacOS, after all, I'd still be able to run Vista if I wanted to.
Overall, I'm happier with my Mac then with my Windows computers; however, Mac does have its issues. Apple's development environment is about 10 years behind Microsoft's development environment. Mac mail doesn't work on Leopard. (I met one of the developers... He gave me a bunch of lame excuses.)
Yet, even with Mac's flaws, I'm still happier using it over Windows! I ended up replacing my Creative Nomad with an iPod because I got fed up with my Nomad's crash-prone syncronization procedure. Granted, there are a few features from the Nomad that I miss; but overall, the iPod is much easier to use.
It's too bad the parent poster was anonymous... He might not see this reply
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame
I no longer use CDs. My ~400 CD collection is stored safely in boxes, in my closet.
In my car, I use an iPod. It allows me to access my large music collection in the palm of my hand, without carrying CDs from home or worrying about damaging or loosing them.
I have my entire music collection copied to my computer at work. This allows me to access any music without carrying CDs and worrying about loosing or damaging them.
About a year ago, when I upgraded my laptop, I hooked my old laptop up to my "good" stereo. This was the day that I stopped handling CDs. After this day, when I would purchase a CD, it would be inserted into a computer once, ripped, and then placed on a shelf to collect dust.
Today, all of my music purchases are downloads. There's no point in buying a CD if all it's going to do is collect dust and take up space. No one patronizes your business because it's easier to buy music from iTunes or Amazon.
There is no fair use about this.
EMI is saying when you upload a file to an on-line site you are lossing posestion of the file and it is entering the possestion of the site you uploaded the file too. It the uploader is still claiming rights to the file then a copy was made. Making an additional copy of the music is a right that only EMI can give. Never mind that all the music upload was not from EMI.
mp3tunes case was that they were not sharing the files, only available to the uploader, and they did nothing with the files except provide backup protection and allow the uploader purchaser access to them.
The lower court has already decided on this in favor of mp3tunes. This was back in March, the item released today was more in the area of a press release.
Then as you say this will boil down to laws not keeping up with the way technology is going. Chances are in most states in the US and most other countries EMI is probably right in the law.
I seem to remember copyright notices on books and CDs saying something to the degree of "you may not store this in a mechanical information retrieval system." (This is from the 80s) At the time, I had no idea what the clause meant.
Of course, I think such a clause in unenforceable; but iTunes and any kind of online music storage system will voilate such a notice.
Frankly, now that I'm 100% iTunes; I put my CD collection in boxes and stored it in the closet. What's really ironic is that all of my paid downloads (iTunes Plus and Amazon MP3s) have no copyright notice at all!
A CD is laughably simple technology, an engineer 100 years from now will build a player (in a way that may not look anything like our current players) in no time at all.
Quote a few replies discuss how complicated CDs are. The pits on a CD aren't like the bits in a wave file; they use a different kind of encoding that's easier to read. There's also some non-trivial math for error correction.
OTOH, a vinyl record, while imperfect, can be easily reverse-engineered. An engineer of the future needs only a microscope to see that it's sound. I've always dreamed of building a vault full of vinyl with gravity-powered turntables and speakers made of material designed to last for 10,000 years.
"people like me take the view that Genesis describes the evolutionary process pretty well."
An interesting comment, considering that it doesn't describe evolutionary processes at all. Unless one is referring to the talking snake.
That's because you believe that the story of Adam & Eve isn't meant to be interpreted literally. The only "fact" about the story of Adam & Eve is that it's one of the oldest known written stories.
Personally, I interpret the story of Adam & Eve as a form of historical fiction about when a group of primates became human because they stopped living from instinct and started to rely on knowledge. Thus, it's perfectly compatible with evolution as long as one realizes that no storyteller from 6-7 thousand years ago would have any idea about DNA & mutations.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, have you heard of the iPhone? It's several hundred dollars in a lump sum up front, and they seem to be selling well.
Boot time becomes noticeable when I sit down at a computer and it demands that I reboot to install an update. It's really annoying when it happens more then once a month.
Assuming Coachella hired Prince; then it's a work for hire and he doesn't own the copyright. However, it's likely that Prince's arrangement with Coachella granted him the copyright.
Radiohead has very little say in this matter. Copyright law stipulates that they (the songwriter) can get something like $0.10 per song per copy of a DVD or CD. They are also free to negotiate another price, including free. They really can't state that he has to give away performances of their song for free, because Copyright doesn't grant them that right.
I bet if someone squeezes the new red spot, a giant plume of sticky white puss will come out!
That's because the Flying Spaghettii Monster only designed us to live with smoke from volcanoes and dust from deserts!
... it gets worse... My Wii's power supply is perpetually warm; along with my MacBook's power supply, my HTPC's (an old laptop's) power supply, and my DVR. These four devices throw just enough heat to keep my living room warm during the winter; however, they throw so much heat that I had to crank my AC during the last heat wave.
So, 11 watts might not seem like a lot, but 4-5 devices sucking 11 watts each during a heat wave will cause the air conditioners to suck even more power.
That's how I intend on my marrige to be when I eventually get married...
...However; such a statement ignores the harsh reality that there are real situations where a marrige must end. My mother has 12 brothers and sisters. Even though the family believes that marriage is "til death do you part", there were some abusive situations where the marrige had to end. No one should have to wait for death in order to get away from an alcoholic; or to avoid a mistake made at a very young age.
A significant amount of people who've never sent email are the elderly, including my grandparents.
They still have trouble figuring out how to use their HDTV, DVD player, and cordless phone. They only use Skype when they visit someone who sets it up for them.
From the summary:
fight poverty by identifying the kind of talent that can create wealthStimulating an economy is a short-term solution. Fostering talent that's able to identify ways to create wealth is a long-term solution.
you have a point, I was going to say the same thing to the parent poster. What I can add is that if there's enough of a change; it becomes a parody! Parody was decided by the Supreme Court to not be infringement.
I have to call B.S. on that one. While I admire your desire to improve over existing engines, no computer can truly understand such a difference until it is capable of sprouting legs and buying and aquiring.
Until a computer can "buy" and "aquire", such concepts are merely bits and only understood by your programmers!
So... The airships could just stay with the jetstream indefinateley. Califorinia to MA gets cheap, MA to EU gets cheap, and EU to Japan gets cheap!
Before the DNC, my family's dinner would constantly get interrupted by telemarketers. We would get 3-4 calls between the hours of 5-7PM, from people trying to sell us stuff that we didn't want.
Before the DNC, my family's phone would ring every two hours with calls from people trying to sell us stuff that we didn't want. It got real bad with the predictive dialers, because half of the time no one would be on the other line, or they would hang up after 2 rings.
Before the DNC, my family's phone was used to make everyone in my home listen to multiple marketing pitches at the sound of a bell. It very quickly became disruptive to our lifestyle when a communication mechanism used to communicate with loved ones was disruptive.
This is why the DNC was put in place. I remember George W. Bush stating that American families should be able to eat dinner uninterrupted by telemarketers. It has less to do with pushovers then you think.
Don't forget that the uranium mine and refinement plant(s) take up space!
I often write a lot of quick-and-dirty GUI applications in my spare time. Even though I've switched to Mac, I still do my quick-and-dirty GUIs in C# because I just don't have time to learn XCode / Objective C / Cocca.
Frankly, it was faster/easier for me to learn GWT / Java / Eclipse then XCode! If only I could use that for a quick-and-dirty GUI application...
A lot of technologies are supplanted by many nerds who learn them in spare hours during nights and weekends. XCode / Objective C / Cocca is certainly possible to learn if I can find 20-40 hours to dedicate to it; but I have other things I'd rather do with my time!
Two months ago, the "safety" innovations in my Civic Hybrid saved my life. When I saw a pickup in the oncoming lane drift into my lane, I was able to jerk the wheel and honk the horn. My rear-view mirror told me that a car was too close to my tail, so I didn't slam on the brakes but stopped just fast enough that I didn't get rear-ended. My ABS brakes allowed me to keep control of the car as a slowed down, thus I kept out of the way of the tumbling pickup that landed eactly where I would have driven if I was in a car with poor handling.
These "safety" innovations saved my life because they were features that allowed me to avoid an accident. If I didn't have ABS, a rear-view mirror, or good handling, I wouldn't have been able to avoid the oncoming pickup.
Are you serious???
DEV12345 to NET (broadcast): seek 100W, limit 0.01 cents, starting in at most 10 seconds, ref.ask# 12345_12That's incredibly complex. I don't think my electric toothbrush charger or USB-to-wall-current adaptor will EVER support such systems. Why? Because whoever's making them isn't going to hire an engineer to implement such a protocol when the used to just use an off-the-shelf power supply.
OTOH, I could see my electric toothbrush charger turning itself off if it got a signal indicating that the grid was under a high load!
Are you serious? Such an approach will make it impossible to build simple devices. Such a protocol will end up being more complex then the device, and stifle innovation once its purpose becomes obsolete.
Here's the user agent that my iPhone sends:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3
I love the fact that I wrote my own web server to spit out the client's header to the console...
Don't you hate it when the "user friendly" version is harder to use?
You have a bad attitude.
Mac sales have gone up, most likely to the yuppies who cannot sync the Itunes software to a Windows box and decide to buy the Mac due to the customer support representative with Mac stating, "it works better with a Mac," or the idiots logical thought process that decides a Mac is a cost effective option (cough, cough).I bought my first Mac in November of 2006. At the time, the MacBook was considered the best notebook, as it was very powerful, thin, and rated as the best Vista notebook (with Bootcamp.) Considering Vista's poor reputation; I decided that it was worth trying MacOS, after all, I'd still be able to run Vista if I wanted to.
Overall, I'm happier with my Mac then with my Windows computers; however, Mac does have its issues. Apple's development environment is about 10 years behind Microsoft's development environment. Mac mail doesn't work on Leopard. (I met one of the developers... He gave me a bunch of lame excuses.)
Yet, even with Mac's flaws, I'm still happier using it over Windows! I ended up replacing my Creative Nomad with an iPod because I got fed up with my Nomad's crash-prone syncronization procedure. Granted, there are a few features from the Nomad that I miss; but overall, the iPod is much easier to use.
It's too bad the parent poster was anonymous... He might not see this reply
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blameI no longer use CDs. My ~400 CD collection is stored safely in boxes, in my closet.
In my car, I use an iPod. It allows me to access my large music collection in the palm of my hand, without carrying CDs from home or worrying about damaging or loosing them.
I have my entire music collection copied to my computer at work. This allows me to access any music without carrying CDs and worrying about loosing or damaging them.
About a year ago, when I upgraded my laptop, I hooked my old laptop up to my "good" stereo. This was the day that I stopped handling CDs. After this day, when I would purchase a CD, it would be inserted into a computer once, ripped, and then placed on a shelf to collect dust.
Today, all of my music purchases are downloads. There's no point in buying a CD if all it's going to do is collect dust and take up space. No one patronizes your business because it's easier to buy music from iTunes or Amazon.
I seem to remember copyright notices on books and CDs saying something to the degree of "you may not store this in a mechanical information retrieval system." (This is from the 80s) At the time, I had no idea what the clause meant.
Of course, I think such a clause in unenforceable; but iTunes and any kind of online music storage system will voilate such a notice.
Frankly, now that I'm 100% iTunes; I put my CD collection in boxes and stored it in the closet. What's really ironic is that all of my paid downloads (iTunes Plus and Amazon MP3s) have no copyright notice at all!
Quote a few replies discuss how complicated CDs are. The pits on a CD aren't like the bits in a wave file; they use a different kind of encoding that's easier to read. There's also some non-trivial math for error correction.
OTOH, a vinyl record, while imperfect, can be easily reverse-engineered. An engineer of the future needs only a microscope to see that it's sound. I've always dreamed of building a vault full of vinyl with gravity-powered turntables and speakers made of material designed to last for 10,000 years.
That's because you believe that the story of Adam & Eve isn't meant to be interpreted literally. The only "fact" about the story of Adam & Eve is that it's one of the oldest known written stories.
Personally, I interpret the story of Adam & Eve as a form of historical fiction about when a group of primates became human because they stopped living from instinct and started to rely on knowledge. Thus, it's perfectly compatible with evolution as long as one realizes that no storyteller from 6-7 thousand years ago would have any idea about DNA & mutations.