Yes, almost all the Flash out there is worthless, time-wasting eye candy. (The best argument of this is Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column "Flash: 99% bad".) There's a lot of untapped use, though.
I have a friend who does a lot of hardcore Flash work. (He's apparently enough of an expert that some folks asked him to narrate an instructional video on the subject.) He's convinced that Flash can do what client-side Java was once pushed for: Highly specialized UIs for specialized goals, using more fine-grained control than you can get through HTML.
I would be unconvinced, except I had seen something he had done: It was a site that let users design their own Nokia cellphone faceplate. It was a basic painting program using a faceplate-shaped painting surface, and then you could save your design and order it. The Flash app was integrated with an industrial painting machine, which would actually spray out a copy of your faceplate, and then you'd get it in the mail in a few weeks.
Flash is so commonly misused that it's easy to assume it's an entirely worthless technology. But in the right hands, it seems like it can be very useful.
Ah, but the problem there is that Sony is a recording company as well as a consumer electronics company, and as a result have been extremely slow at recognizing the market for MP3 devices. They don't want to grow one division while bankrupting the other. True, it'd be pretty sweet, but I'd expect Sony to drag their heels on something like that, regardless of what the consumer wants.
(If anybody can corroborate or deny this about Podesta, I think it'd be worth hearing. A google search for "John Podesta gospel music" returned nothing.)
But it's a mistake to assume that just because somebody writes gospel music that he's part of the religious right. Christians have, historically, been involved in all kinds of liberal crusades -- just look at all the pictures of Catholic priests in anti-war protests in the '60s. Even today, there are plenty of religious moderates -- they just don't get all the attention that the bible-thumping homophobes do.
Why do I say this? Not because I'm a Christian. In fact, I'm an atheist. But my mother is a Christian with a pretty strong faith, and our relationship is built on non-denominational stuff like mutual respect and consideration. And that includes not assuming that the most extremist members of your faith speak for you.
I don't really know what I think about the ethics of this kind of modification, but in the long term I'd be concerned about diversity of the species.
Imagine a Gattaca-like future 100 years from now, when everybody's DNA is vigorously scrubbed free of defective genes. Maybe people have different skin, hair, or eye color, just for fashion's sake, but internally we all look pretty much the same. Wouldn't this drastically increase the risk of some killer pathogen taking advantage of such a uniform field of hosts?
Nature is sloppy, but it tends to be highly resilient. Human efforts, on the other hand, tend to be much more focused, but also highly brittle.
As a further note, XP suffers a bit from the moniker, I think, from managers who hear the name and think it's an extremely risky methodology. It's actually extremely safe, in many ways. Unit Tests help you make sure you can add features and refactor without introducing new bugs. Continuous Integration helps the team minimize code collision and branching. Pair Programming and Collective Ownership help make sure that vital knowledge about the code is spread around among all the programmers, so no one person can quit and fuck up the project.
Of course, alternate terms that would reflect this fact (SafeProgramming? ComfortingProgramming? 40HourWorkWeekSoYouCanHaveALifeProgramming?) just don't seem as catchy.
It looks like we'll be stuck with fossil fuels like oil and natural gas for some time...
Sure, the new drilling technology is cool, and its engineers are to be commended. But but the tree-hugging lefty in me feels obliged to point out that our reliance on fossil fuels isn't so much an inevitability as it is a political choice we have made.
Take, for example, the recent actions of the German government to encourage wind power. Due to a plan initiated ten years ago, the state of Schleswig-Holstein now generates about 19 percent of electricity from wind, and nationwide the wind industry employs about 15,000 people.
The first way to lose a political argument is to agree with those who say "this is the only way to do it." There's always another way to do it (see also: Perl); very often, there's a better way to do it, too.
Short-term solution: Run your own "friends-and-acquaintances-only" OpenNAP Not every OpenNAP server is on Napigator. Although I don't know know anybody who's done this, I wouldn't be surprised if people are starting to set up servers and only announcing them by word-of-mouth to friends and acquaintances. This way, the RIAA will never hear about it. So you get a user base of only 20 instead of 2000, and you get a lot less songs, but you could still a decent amount of file-sharing. Not ideal, but okay for now.
Long-term solution: All clueless legislators die off and are replaced by tech-savvy, clueful legislators. This, of course, could take a while. Unless some of us decide to get, um, aggressive about pursuing such a solution.
The obvious response to a move like this is to say: "Hey, everybody, use FreeDB." Which I agree with, but I also have to wonder: If everybody starts using FreeDB instead of CDDB, will they be able to afford it?
There's a lot of non-trivial work involved with running a database like this, and it seems like it might not scale well. If FreeDB ever gets extremely wide adoption, won't the costs of running it become nearly insurmountable? CDDB can finance this because it charges fees. IMDB is (I believe) owned by Amazon, and because its data is mostly dispensed via a web site and it can slap ad banners on the top. None of these options would appear to be available for FreeDB.
I am not posting as a nay-sayer: I'm quite ignorant about a lot of the logistics & financial considerations. I'd appreciate it if somebody more intimately familiar with the workings of FreeDB -- or any similarly large, free online DB -- would comment on this.
First of all, you're wrong about costs rising. Generally speaking, business costs decline over time. It's called technology.
It's also worth noting that many people now consider cable a common carrier. There are certain types of communications networks that are considered common carriers, in that they should only be built once and then opened on a non-monopolistic basis, because it would be economically wasteful to duplicate the network for the sake of competition on that level.
There was once a time, for example, when AT&T owned not just the phone network, but all local service and long-distance service. They argued that decoupling the network from the service didn't make any technical sense; the government eventually decided to break them up anyway. The fact that you can have a different long-distance carrier than AT&T now is a direct result of governmental interference, and I for one am happy about the results.
And guess what? AT&T's still around. They're not in such great shape -- in large part because they were a large bureaucracy, unfit to compete in a world where they no longer owned a monopolistic advantage over the phone networks -- but they're still around. I never understand why companies argue against fairness in the marketplace by saying "We're so ass-backwards here that without our unnatural monopolistic advantage, we'll perish." If I believed my company was that fucked, I'd leave and find another employer.
More then one person has noted that there are two companies being named here (AOLTimeWarner and AT&T) and argued that if you have more than one company, you cannot have a monopoly. While this might be correct semantically, it is certainly incorrect in spirit.
Depending on which dictionary you go to, monopoly is either held exclusively by one company, or by a group. (Dictionary.com uses the word "group", while Merriam-Webster just refers to a single company.) The definition of "group" is what's important here. There are many instances in business history where competitors in one field got together to agree not to compete in certain ways -- most notably by price-fixing.
Free-market economic theory would indicate that CEOs would never do this, that they would decide to compete in any way possible to eke out more market share. Yet this does happen. We have documented cases of price-fixing across all sorts of industries: legal research, oil firms, even vitamin manufacturers. There are plenty of theories as to why it happens, though my personal favorite is psychological. I think that CEOs, when they're placed in charge of vast corporations they cannot entirely control or understand, become extremely risk-averse. This is why large corporations rarely innovate; it's also why a CEO might enter into a price-fixing agreement. It's just one less thing to worry about. At least for the CEO; everybody else usually suffers, in higher prices and poorer quality.
Don't we already know that the average Windows user is already vulnerable to trojans, through a combination of confusing UI and the often less-than-clueful Windows user? The lesson here is nothing new: If you want to download all sorts of files, either learn to protect yourself from malicious.exe files on Windows, or switch to a decently secure OS.
This kind of thing could be a boon to non-Windows OSes. More virii, please!
You're misinterpreting States Rights. It doesn't mean that people get more rights, thanks to the states. It usually means states have the right to take away their citizen's rights to a greater extent than the federal government.
We should probably be wary of this. My guess is that issue will come to a basic conservative-vs-liberal axis. And it's worth noting that centers of anti-corporate leftism tend to be concentrated on the coasts. If they can influence national politics through the federal government, that helps. But if it's left up to the states, things can get much nastier.
There is a lot of precedent for this. The States Rights philosophy was used by the South by over 100 hundred years to justify their shabby treatment of black folks -- from the Civil War (1860s) to the Civil Rights Act (1960s). The federal government had to drag the southern states, kicking and screaming, into recognizing that black people were human beings.
Today, state-level referendums are an often-used weapon in the conservative arsenal, used to push hardline culturally conservative agendas on issues such as gay marriage, abortion, prayer in school, abstinence education, and drug policy. There are a number of well-funded conservative organizations that have national-scale funding and use it to focus on a few states at a time. And since it doesn't happen on the national level, it doesn't receive as much scrutiny in the press.
I don't really worry about this. I have enough faith in the average user that I would accept them to reject introduction of this new technology. Explain it to them in 30 seconds, even without our information-should-be-free bias, and they'll furrow their brow and start questioning it. "So I should pay more for a hard drive that offers me less control over the content? How again does that benefit me?"
So let the hard drive industry push ahead with their own plans. If they want another rerun of DivX, that's fine with me.
This reminds me of an article written after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Caspar Weinberger was trying to excuse the actions of Deng Xiaopeng by pointing out that Deng's son had been paralyzed during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960's, so Deng had a good excuse to be afraid of change, and to overreact. Weinberger was trying to excuse Deng's political actions ("Let's run over college students with tanks") by pointing out his cultural history ("Don't judge him; those Chinese folks have been through some fucked-up shit"). And numerous other commentators have tried to excuse China's appalling human rights record by pointing to its culture. That may explain it, but it doesn't excuse it. There were Chinese dissidents who were shot in the head after Tiananmen, and then their families were billed for the cost of the bullet -- but those dissidents are somehow less Chinese than the cadres in power? Sheesh.
On a more personal note, I'm of South Korean descent, and I occasionally hear cultural explanations for South Korea's poor practices of democracy. (Corruption, repression of the press, etc., etc.) I often find those excuses condescending -- you think just because I was born in a different country that I can't understand the Bill of Rights? I'd rather you hate the oppressive leadership in South Korea along with me.
It's pretty simple: Find a legal advocacy organization such as the American Civil Liberties Union and ask them if they'd be interested in turning your situation as a test case. The unconstitutionality of a law can't be determined when the law is signed; it can only be determined after the fact, when that law is applied to an actual situation involving actual people. This means that although the ACLU has a big staff of lawyers and law students who do the legal research & court litigation, they can't initiate the lawsuits themselves. They need to find a plaintiff directly affected by the law in question, so they can initiate the suit.
So, if you want to really stir some shit up, you can call them and see if they can use your situation as a test case. We know for a fact that the ACLU thinks that censorware in public institutions is unconstitional. (I also know some of the law students there, so I'll tell you that they're pretty nice people, too.) You could be that test case, if you felt you were up for it -- you wouldn't have to pay a dime in lawyer's fees, but you'd probably have to spend a lot of time in courtrooms, and talking to reporters. But who knows, some people really like that stuff. Good luck.
I'm not sure why we care so much what happens to Napster. Every part of the network has been cloned open-source, so Napster the company can go bankrupt tomorrow and it won't change a thing. Here's my prediction of what will happen:
Under legal pressure, Napster implements subscription fees, anti-RIAA-copying measures, etc., etc.
All the users say "Damn, Napster sucks now."
The few clueful users who know about using a Napster client with Napigator and OpenNAP tell their friends about it, and the word spreads quickly.
The RIAA tries to sue, but realizes that since all the technologies they're trying to control are open-source, stopping every service provider is a nearby impossible demand.
The RIAA is crushed under the weight of its litigation staff, and ceases to be. The end.
The RIAA might have done better to be a little friendly to Napster and just try to control it. There's going to be a day when they miss having one central enemy to push around.
Not that I'm a big fan of litigation, but since you're talking about the police -- who are about as good at internal reform as, say, the CIA -- lawsuits may be your best in forcing changes in policy. I think it's quite fair to say that the threat of having your dorm room raided because you posted trash-talk online constitutes a pretty major violation to the First Amendment. It would be well within the jurisdiction of organizations like the ACLU or the EFF to take Kent State to court over this, and I hope they do so.
You could look at it through the Anti-Censorware Proxy. That should help. Or, maybe it'd work to just look at it using the IP address instead of the domain name.
What else could a small robot with cameras be used for anyway?
Uh, how about spying on people who don't like the government? Once upon a time, the CIA & FBI had extensive files on John Lennon, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, not to mention pro-democracy groups all around the world. Why do you sound so happy that intelligence organizations might have this? I'm not comforted by the thought that I might express a negative opinion of Bush at a dinner party and have that fact noted in my permanent federal file...
The importance of clear design
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 5
In his book Visual Explanations, Edward Tufte -- an expert in the field of visualizing data -- notes that the failure of O-rings was discussed before the Challenger launched, and NASA engineers were unable to convince the brass to cancel the Challenger launch. The failure of the engineers to make their case can largely be attributed to poor chart design.
The engineers decided to present their data by wrapping it in distracting rocket icons. The rockets were organized, left to right, by date, but the real variable they needed emphasize was the relation of temperature to O-ring failure, not of date to O-ring failure. (The forecast temperature that morning was 25-30 degrees F, far below any previous launch temperature.) Tufte includes a chart he would've used, which forgoes date (and those cute rockets) in favor of a clear relationship between temperature and O-ring failure -- a chart that very possibly could've convinced management to cancel the launch.
This is what good information design is about. It's not about using fancy pictures to obscure data -- it's about using visual elements to highlight and emphasize the relationships between data. It's an important skill, and unfortunately it seems to be in very short supply.
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
-- Albert Einstein
Jakob Nielsen's most recent Alertbox column makes the point that as more mobile devices try to do everything all at once -- MP3 player, cell-phone, PDA, wireless web browser -- the cell-phone as we know it will be ill-suited to adapt. PDAs are much more versatile, since they don't have a space-hogging keypad, and don't need to be long enough to reach from the ear to the mouth. He suggests that the dominant way of making phone calls will be with a PDA and an earpiece-microphone attachment. Voila, cancer problem solved!
I have to say, though, I've seen people walking down the street talking into their earpieces, and I'm having a hard time adjusting to the sight. Maybe we'll get used to that sight after time, though.
Although I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to try to fuck with SyncML this way, I don't know if they'd be able to. This is a move which depends on portable devices just as much as it depends on desktop PCs, and that's an area where MS has very little penetration. Their palmtops are pretty well-established, but they still don't beat PalmOS in terms of numbers, and have absolutely zero presence among cell-phones.
Of course, you could make the point that the Windows desktop is the ultimate destination of most syncing operations, which gives them some control. However, Microsoft would need to convince third-part developers (Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, etc.) it's worth the trouble to support it. And if those developers signed on, MS would still need to give out a well-defined protocol, and even if MS made them sign a bunch of non-disclosure agreements, there are so many parties involved that the odds of leakage are decent. Once that protocol gets out, it's not so hard to hop on board and write your own version in Linux/MacOS/Be/whatever.
As a side note, I think one of the big trends to watch in portable devices is convergence. Nobody wants to carry around a cell phone, PDA, and MP3 player -- they'd rather have all those functions in one gadget if possible. This convergence is fast approaching -- there's that Handspring Visor cell-phone module, for example, and that Samsung MP3-player/cell phone. Although Microsoft's PocketPC (WinCE) is a pretty respectable entry, I would expect the company to be behind the curve in terms of device convergence, since it's primarily a software company, and not a consumer products company. So their small leverage in the handheld world will probably shrink even further.
FIRST off, one of the BEST things that a company losing money can do is merge with another company. It adds more capital, and more impact, and more sales potential, and usually leads to increased efficiency by elimination of extra positions that arent needed under the new structure.
Before you start replying saying I am wrong, go look at a few businesses that have gone through mergers. There is a reason that stocks raise on the news. It almost always brings more value to a company.
Mergers aren't nearly that simple. Although they can bring good value to a company by allowing them to selectively combine the best elements of both, the actual work behind is extremely tough. Merging two corporate cultures is extremely difficult, especially when you start laying off the redundant employees. Morale and understanding of the company mission can drop precipitiously if this isn't done right. And it's easy to misgauge what to keep and what to discard from each company.
I can't find any studies to cite, but I've heard that mergers and eventual shareholder value have about a 50/50 record. I can personally attest to one case of a negative consolidation: I was a regular freelancer at an independent newspaper that was bought by a corporate chain. Upper management waffled on making any decisive moves with their new acquisition for over a whole year, which stuck everyone in this organizational limbo. Nobody felt like they could commit to anything at the company 'cause they didn't know if they'd be all fired or promoted the next day. As a result of the malaise, the entire editorial management had left within a year's time.
And, sure, stock prices often go up when mergers are announced. But most of the people in the stock market -- just like most people in general -- are sheep. I thought everybody on Slashdot already knew that.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a friend who does a lot of hardcore Flash work. (He's apparently enough of an expert that some folks asked him to narrate an instructional video on the subject.) He's convinced that Flash can do what client-side Java was once pushed for: Highly specialized UIs for specialized goals, using more fine-grained control than you can get through HTML.
I would be unconvinced, except I had seen something he had done: It was a site that let users design their own Nokia cellphone faceplate. It was a basic painting program using a faceplate-shaped painting surface, and then you could save your design and order it. The Flash app was integrated with an industrial painting machine, which would actually spray out a copy of your faceplate, and then you'd get it in the mail in a few weeks.
Flash is so commonly misused that it's easy to assume it's an entirely worthless technology. But in the right hands, it seems like it can be very useful.
Ah, but the problem there is that Sony is a recording company as well as a consumer electronics company, and as a result have been extremely slow at recognizing the market for MP3 devices. They don't want to grow one division while bankrupting the other. True, it'd be pretty sweet, but I'd expect Sony to drag their heels on something like that, regardless of what the consumer wants.
But it's a mistake to assume that just because somebody writes gospel music that he's part of the religious right. Christians have, historically, been involved in all kinds of liberal crusades -- just look at all the pictures of Catholic priests in anti-war protests in the '60s. Even today, there are plenty of religious moderates -- they just don't get all the attention that the bible-thumping homophobes do.
Why do I say this? Not because I'm a Christian. In fact, I'm an atheist. But my mother is a Christian with a pretty strong faith, and our relationship is built on non-denominational stuff like mutual respect and consideration. And that includes not assuming that the most extremist members of your faith speak for you.
Imagine a Gattaca-like future 100 years from now, when everybody's DNA is vigorously scrubbed free of defective genes. Maybe people have different skin, hair, or eye color, just for fashion's sake, but internally we all look pretty much the same. Wouldn't this drastically increase the risk of some killer pathogen taking advantage of such a uniform field of hosts?
Nature is sloppy, but it tends to be highly resilient. Human efforts, on the other hand, tend to be much more focused, but also highly brittle.
Temporary mirror up here.
Of course, alternate terms that would reflect this fact (SafeProgramming? ComfortingProgramming? 40HourWorkWeekSoYouCanHaveALifeProgramming?) just don't seem as catchy.
Sure, the new drilling technology is cool, and its engineers are to be commended. But but the tree-hugging lefty in me feels obliged to point out that our reliance on fossil fuels isn't so much an inevitability as it is a political choice we have made.
Take, for example, the recent actions of the German government to encourage wind power. Due to a plan initiated ten years ago, the state of Schleswig-Holstein now generates about 19 percent of electricity from wind, and nationwide the wind industry employs about 15,000 people.
The first way to lose a political argument is to agree with those who say "this is the only way to do it." There's always another way to do it (see also: Perl); very often, there's a better way to do it, too.
Not every OpenNAP server is on Napigator. Although I don't know know anybody who's done this, I wouldn't be surprised if people are starting to set up servers and only announcing them by word-of-mouth to friends and acquaintances. This way, the RIAA will never hear about it. So you get a user base of only 20 instead of 2000, and you get a lot less songs, but you could still a decent amount of file-sharing. Not ideal, but okay for now.
Long-term solution: All clueless legislators die off and are replaced by tech-savvy, clueful legislators.
This, of course, could take a while. Unless some of us decide to get, um, aggressive about pursuing such a solution.
There's a lot of non-trivial work involved with running a database like this, and it seems like it might not scale well. If FreeDB ever gets extremely wide adoption, won't the costs of running it become nearly insurmountable? CDDB can finance this because it charges fees. IMDB is (I believe) owned by Amazon, and because its data is mostly dispensed via a web site and it can slap ad banners on the top. None of these options would appear to be available for FreeDB.
I am not posting as a nay-sayer: I'm quite ignorant about a lot of the logistics & financial considerations. I'd appreciate it if somebody more intimately familiar with the workings of FreeDB -- or any similarly large, free online DB -- would comment on this.
It's also worth noting that many people now consider cable a common carrier. There are certain types of communications networks that are considered common carriers, in that they should only be built once and then opened on a non-monopolistic basis, because it would be economically wasteful to duplicate the network for the sake of competition on that level.
There was once a time, for example, when AT&T owned not just the phone network, but all local service and long-distance service. They argued that decoupling the network from the service didn't make any technical sense; the government eventually decided to break them up anyway. The fact that you can have a different long-distance carrier than AT&T now is a direct result of governmental interference, and I for one am happy about the results.
And guess what? AT&T's still around. They're not in such great shape -- in large part because they were a large bureaucracy, unfit to compete in a world where they no longer owned a monopolistic advantage over the phone networks -- but they're still around. I never understand why companies argue against fairness in the marketplace by saying "We're so ass-backwards here that without our unnatural monopolistic advantage, we'll perish." If I believed my company was that fucked, I'd leave and find another employer.
Depending on which dictionary you go to, monopoly is either held exclusively by one company, or by a group. (Dictionary.com uses the word "group", while Merriam-Webster just refers to a single company.) The definition of "group" is what's important here. There are many instances in business history where competitors in one field got together to agree not to compete in certain ways -- most notably by price-fixing.
Free-market economic theory would indicate that CEOs would never do this, that they would decide to compete in any way possible to eke out more market share. Yet this does happen. We have documented cases of price-fixing across all sorts of industries: legal research, oil firms, even vitamin manufacturers. There are plenty of theories as to why it happens, though my personal favorite is psychological. I think that CEOs, when they're placed in charge of vast corporations they cannot entirely control or understand, become extremely risk-averse. This is why large corporations rarely innovate; it's also why a CEO might enter into a price-fixing agreement. It's just one less thing to worry about. At least for the CEO; everybody else usually suffers, in higher prices and poorer quality.
This kind of thing could be a boon to non-Windows OSes. More virii, please!
We should probably be wary of this. My guess is that issue will come to a basic conservative-vs-liberal axis. And it's worth noting that centers of anti-corporate leftism tend to be concentrated on the coasts. If they can influence national politics through the federal government, that helps. But if it's left up to the states, things can get much nastier.
There is a lot of precedent for this. The States Rights philosophy was used by the South by over 100 hundred years to justify their shabby treatment of black folks -- from the Civil War (1860s) to the Civil Rights Act (1960s). The federal government had to drag the southern states, kicking and screaming, into recognizing that black people were human beings.
Today, state-level referendums are an often-used weapon in the conservative arsenal, used to push hardline culturally conservative agendas on issues such as gay marriage, abortion, prayer in school, abstinence education, and drug policy. There are a number of well-funded conservative organizations that have national-scale funding and use it to focus on a few states at a time. And since it doesn't happen on the national level, it doesn't receive as much scrutiny in the press.
So let the hard drive industry push ahead with their own plans. If they want another rerun of DivX, that's fine with me.
On a more personal note, I'm of South Korean descent, and I occasionally hear cultural explanations for South Korea's poor practices of democracy. (Corruption, repression of the press, etc., etc.) I often find those excuses condescending -- you think just because I was born in a different country that I can't understand the Bill of Rights? I'd rather you hate the oppressive leadership in South Korea along with me.
So, if you want to really stir some shit up, you can call them and see if they can use your situation as a test case. We know for a fact that the ACLU thinks that censorware in public institutions is unconstitional. (I also know some of the law students there, so I'll tell you that they're pretty nice people, too.) You could be that test case, if you felt you were up for it -- you wouldn't have to pay a dime in lawyer's fees, but you'd probably have to spend a lot of time in courtrooms, and talking to reporters. But who knows, some people really like that stuff. Good luck.
- Under legal pressure, Napster implements subscription fees, anti-RIAA-copying measures, etc., etc.
- All the users say "Damn, Napster sucks now."
- The few clueful users who know about using a Napster client with Napigator and OpenNAP tell their friends about it, and the word spreads quickly.
- The RIAA tries to sue, but realizes that since all the technologies they're trying to control are open-source, stopping every service provider is a nearby impossible demand.
- The RIAA is crushed under the weight of its litigation staff, and ceases to be. The end.
The RIAA might have done better to be a little friendly to Napster and just try to control it. There's going to be a day when they miss having one central enemy to push around.Not that I'm a big fan of litigation, but since you're talking about the police -- who are about as good at internal reform as, say, the CIA -- lawsuits may be your best in forcing changes in policy. I think it's quite fair to say that the threat of having your dorm room raided because you posted trash-talk online constitutes a pretty major violation to the First Amendment. It would be well within the jurisdiction of organizations like the ACLU or the EFF to take Kent State to court over this, and I hope they do so.
You could look at it through the Anti-Censorware Proxy. That should help. Or, maybe it'd work to just look at it using the IP address instead of the domain name.
Uh, how about spying on people who don't like the government? Once upon a time, the CIA & FBI had extensive files on John Lennon, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, not to mention pro-democracy groups all around the world. Why do you sound so happy that intelligence organizations might have this? I'm not comforted by the thought that I might express a negative opinion of Bush at a dinner party and have that fact noted in my permanent federal file ...
The engineers decided to present their data by wrapping it in distracting rocket icons. The rockets were organized, left to right, by date, but the real variable they needed emphasize was the relation of temperature to O-ring failure, not of date to O-ring failure. (The forecast temperature that morning was 25-30 degrees F, far below any previous launch temperature.) Tufte includes a chart he would've used, which forgoes date (and those cute rockets) in favor of a clear relationship between temperature and O-ring failure -- a chart that very possibly could've convinced management to cancel the launch.
This is what good information design is about. It's not about using fancy pictures to obscure data -- it's about using visual elements to highlight and emphasize the relationships between data. It's an important skill, and unfortunately it seems to be in very short supply.
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
-- Albert Einstein
I have to say, though, I've seen people walking down the street talking into their earpieces, and I'm having a hard time adjusting to the sight. Maybe we'll get used to that sight after time, though.
Of course, you could make the point that the Windows desktop is the ultimate destination of most syncing operations, which gives them some control. However, Microsoft would need to convince third-part developers (Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, etc.) it's worth the trouble to support it. And if those developers signed on, MS would still need to give out a well-defined protocol, and even if MS made them sign a bunch of non-disclosure agreements, there are so many parties involved that the odds of leakage are decent. Once that protocol gets out, it's not so hard to hop on board and write your own version in Linux/MacOS/Be/whatever.
As a side note, I think one of the big trends to watch in portable devices is convergence. Nobody wants to carry around a cell phone, PDA, and MP3 player -- they'd rather have all those functions in one gadget if possible. This convergence is fast approaching -- there's that Handspring Visor cell-phone module, for example, and that Samsung MP3-player/cell phone. Although Microsoft's PocketPC (WinCE) is a pretty respectable entry, I would expect the company to be behind the curve in terms of device convergence, since it's primarily a software company, and not a consumer products company. So their small leverage in the handheld world will probably shrink even further.
Mergers aren't nearly that simple. Although they can bring good value to a company by allowing them to selectively combine the best elements of both, the actual work behind is extremely tough. Merging two corporate cultures is extremely difficult, especially when you start laying off the redundant employees. Morale and understanding of the company mission can drop precipitiously if this isn't done right. And it's easy to misgauge what to keep and what to discard from each company.
I can't find any studies to cite, but I've heard that mergers and eventual shareholder value have about a 50/50 record. I can personally attest to one case of a negative consolidation: I was a regular freelancer at an independent newspaper that was bought by a corporate chain. Upper management waffled on making any decisive moves with their new acquisition for over a whole year, which stuck everyone in this organizational limbo. Nobody felt like they could commit to anything at the company 'cause they didn't know if they'd be all fired or promoted the next day. As a result of the malaise, the entire editorial management had left within a year's time.
And, sure, stock prices often go up when mergers are announced. But most of the people in the stock market -- just like most people in general -- are sheep. I thought everybody on Slashdot already knew that.