...Since that's another case of the exact same thing. Every flash-based video on the Web is called a "YouTube clip," often when they're not even hosted by YouTube. Just as if someone asked if I Googled something and I said, "No, I used Yahoo," they'd think I was a jackass. "Google" = internet search, "YouTube" = flash video, "Podcast" = downloadable audio file.
For non-tech examples, see Dumpster, Kool-Aid, Post-It and Sharpie. When an innovative product gets branded successfully enough by one company, it can become a generic term.
I dunno if it really is purely wealth, power and social position. I know plenty of women who like guys who aren't attractive OR wealthy/powerful/popular.
Probably the biggest issue is that our society has a bunch of different "sexy" archetypes for men. Men can be Ashton-Kutcher-hot, young and muscular and so on, or George-Clooney-hot, older and more distinguished, or nerdy-but-hot or ravishing-seducer-hot or football-player-hot or whatever.
Women are basically judged on a single metric: how close they look to a skinny 16-year-old with big boobs. There are variations on the theme, and of course there are plenty of men and women who look for other things in women, but that's the basic societal ideal.
If we have six-year-olds running around saying "fuck" willy-nilly, all that does is ruin the shock value of a perfectly good swear word. At that point you might as well be saying "boink."
"Oh yeah, boink me harder, baby."
"If Johnson doesn't get that report in by Tuesday the whole department is boinked!"
Now where's the fun in that? We'd just have to come up with a NEW swear word so horrifying that no child would be able to pronounce it without immediately being swallowed by the jaws of Hell, and honestly, I don't really feel like digging that far into the Windows API documentation.
I can understand insisting on using Linux over Windows, but no offense, if you refuse even to run a different BROWSER within Linux, I don't think you have much room to complain about how much the world fails to "recognize" you.
Firefox is a 9.2MB download. I'm sure you can find room for it.
>>If the same games where made for PC directly, you would simply win on all fronts (even on the price; it's true that you save on the console, but you lose that by the lack of competition on games).
Hmm, "The Orange Box" is $60 for consoles and $50 for PC (retail), so it looks like about a $10 premium per game for consoles. If we say a new console costs $400 and a new computer $1000, the PC doesn't "catch up" until I buy 60 games. I've never owned more than maybe 20 games for a given console, so I'd say you're wrong.
You also forget to mention that I can play console games from my couch in the living room instead of a desk chair. And that I can play with my friends, etc.
"The NRA is not likely to change the mind of an anti-gun senator with promises of money. That senator is likely getting money from an anti-gun group already, since that group's aims match his own."
This is really bad reasoning, because it assumes that every issue has lobbyists and PACs for both sides of the issue, and that both sides are about equally well-heeled. This simply isn't the case, as anyone who's paid attention to politics for the past 7 (okay, 70) years will notice. Large corporations that pollute, injure people, mistreat their workers, lie to consumers, etc. have a lot more money that citizens' groups that oppose those things.
As a relatively minor example, take Comcast. They're pretty much a government-empowered monopoly in many places, and yet the government (to a large degree) lets them run rampant. Why? Because Comcast (obviously) has a large team of lobbyists and lots of funding, whereas pissed off customers have maybe a couple guys from poorly-funded consumer watchdog groups who also have 500 other corporate swindles to try to take care of.
That doesn't even require a blue screen! Just tell it to cancel out everything > 5 feet away and you're set. That'll be fun for webcam stuff.
Also, I'm not quite sure I'm understanding this right, but would this mean the camera is NEVER out of focus? Like, you'll be able to make out every detail of my thumbprint on the corner of the lens and also see the face of the person I'm photographing and ALSO read the inscription on the wall half a mile behind them?
One advantage the Japanese have is that often, OVAs (Original Video Animation, sometimes Original Animated Video) are based on comics or video games that already have a large fan base.
There are also plenty of direct-to-DVD movies here in the states, but they have a (largely deserved) reputation for sucking.
I'm actually betting that we never see a big direct-to-DVD-series market in the US because I bet technology will beat out the marketing shift, so that people can just order all their movies on-demand. At that point, there won't even be a difference between "cable broadcast" and "direct-to-DVD" material, except how many buttons you press on your remote to see it.
Yeah, it really boggles my mind that Apple doesn't have Pages save in ODF, given the tiny marketshare Pages has. Heck, you can't even export to ODF, last I checked.
Well, he coded for Fermilab. That tells us first off that he's probably in touch with the scientific community and should be able to make informed and rational arguments on issues like teaching evolution, stem cell research, global warming, etc. His experience as a coder may be relevant to his understanding of tech policy issues such as Internet censorship and monitoring (in the US and abroad), Net neutrality, and so on.
Will there ever be a legislative task that makes him say, "Thank God I know FORTRAN?" Of course not. That phrase has never been uttered without irony in any situation in the annals of human history. But decades of experience as a programmer and as a scientist undoubtedly inform his worldview in important ways.
Well, if it really DID become legal, you'd probably be set. Services like Pandora and Last.fm would almost immediately stick in a "Download it Now" button. A week later, someone would set up a website with a torrent list of guaranteed high-quality rips with full ID3 data and fund the project by selling t-shirts and ads on the site. And so on.
A big part of the reason P2P is so chaotic is because it IS illegal, and black markets don't tend to have great customer service.
I think the tax is idiotic and unfair, but this isn't one of the issues I'm worried about. Keeping data like this ordered and organized is one of those things that an Internet startup could handle easily.
>>In addition, nobody really understands the point of an encyclopedia anymore.
The point of an encyclopedia is to condense as much knowledge as possible so that it fits on one bookshelf. My laptop takes up considerably less than one bookshelf, so why the hell would I care how many articles are in the encyclopedia I access through it? As long as the individual articles are reasonably sized and well-organized, the existence of a bunch of "unimportant" articles I'll never use doesn't bother me at all.
Research project: go read Diderot's Encyclopedie from the 18th century. Dude put in like 20 pages on how industrial looms were built, BECAUSE HE COULD, and because he believed, despite the elitist naysayers of his time, that even this "low-class" knowledge had value.
What the hell is "diversity" in this case? My high school was 96% white, but by 1900 standards it would probably be incredibly "diverse," with folks of English, German, Polish, Irish, and even (gasp!) Jewish "descent" intermingling. But ironically, once this "diversity" reaches a critical mass and a few generations pass, it all gets folded into the norm and nobody considers it "diverse" anymore.
So if this guy's right and "diversity" has a caustic effect on community, we need to hurry up and start making babies with people of other races so that racial "diversity" is no longer discernible in a generation or two. (Attractive nonwhite ladies, I'm ready to do my part.)
Anyway, I've seen plenty of science reporting with the same flaws TFA pointed out that had no "political correctness" value at all - stuff about mathematical constants in astrophysics, etc. - all using the same "underdog" theme.
>> What I foresee eventually happening is that Hollywood and the creative types in the world will come to realize that the public isn't willing and or able to support them.
Yeah, I can't see how they've let that ten BILLION dollars revenue delude them into thinking the public values their products.
>> I'd bet that over 80% of the people who pirate a movie would simply go without if they suddenly couldn't get a free copy of it.
At least when the MPAA pulls numbers out of its ass, it's thoughtful enough to take some efforts to hide that "methodology."
Maybe the summary is bad or something, but I'm pretty sure *I* could change a Wikipedia entry on me without screwing the guy who invented it... did Jimbo's "abuse of power" there amount to anything that anyone with a web browser couldn't replicate?
Your point about EA making too many sequels would be a lot more biting if you didn't have to start at 5 because the current owners have ALREADY MADE FOUR OF THEM.
Huh? What's "this data" that you want made public? Your bank PIN number? Access to your computer's hard drive for every passing botnet? That's just dumb.
You can be as pro-"transparency" as you want, but you have to admit there are some very valid pieces of data that should remain private. Personally, I don't really care if people can see who my friends are through Facebook, but that doesn't mean I'm unworried by government data-gathering and privacy erosion.
You talk about having data made "open" like that'd level the playing field, but that doesn't work. The government can DO a hell of a lot more with that kind of information than private citizens can, because they (by definition) has a monopoly on the authorized use of force. If I read the CIA's emails and find out that they've been doing bad things, the best I can do is hope that my tiny little vote for the lesser of two evils will eventually lead to an erosion in their power somewhere down the line. If the CIA reads MY emails and decides they don't like my political leanings, they can just swing by my house in a black van and nobody will ever see me again. Corporations are almost as bad; they may not be able to bust down my door quite so indiscreetly, but they've got the cash to buy media and lawyers that'll outweigh anything a private citizen can muster.
My guess is they'll do what they do now, and charge the same price for ANY connection that doesn't require dialing in with a modem.
90% of people with broadband probably only need 300kbit anyway, for browsing the Net and checking email. But they end up paying $40+/mo for faster, "unlimited" connections, because cable companies have monopolies or oligopolies on access and they don't offer low-bandwidth plans.
Heck, my parents (in rural New Jersey) are still paying Comcast $45/mo for ONE-WAY CABLE, meaning they need to dial in with a phone modem and send outgoing data at 56k. From what I hear, Comcast could upgrade our area to real 2-way cable just by spending a couple grand to update some hardware on their end. Why don't they? No competition, and thus no incentive to provide a non-terrible user experience.
"...the popularity and record sales of the gaming industry would seem to indicate rising stock for gaming as an art form in the US."
Um... does not follow. What the heck does commercial success have to do with viability as an art form?
People seem to make this same argument over and over. "Video games make more money than movies, so they MUST be an art form!" What the heck? Does everything that makes money count as art? The average high-class prostitute probably makes more money than the average jazz musician; does this make her the better "artist"?
It's either the crassest, most commercial rationale ever, or it's a very subtle critique of culture. Maybe it's actually true that whenever a society dumps enough money into a particular luxury, it eventually feels obligated to lionize it as an important "cultural form," like Art-with-a-capital-A.
Slashdot Mirror
...Since that's another case of the exact same thing. Every flash-based video on the Web is called a "YouTube clip," often when they're not even hosted by YouTube. Just as if someone asked if I Googled something and I said, "No, I used Yahoo," they'd think I was a jackass. "Google" = internet search, "YouTube" = flash video, "Podcast" = downloadable audio file.
For non-tech examples, see Dumpster, Kool-Aid, Post-It and Sharpie. When an innovative product gets branded successfully enough by one company, it can become a generic term.
I dunno if it really is purely wealth, power and social position. I know plenty of women who like guys who aren't attractive OR wealthy/powerful/popular.
Probably the biggest issue is that our society has a bunch of different "sexy" archetypes for men. Men can be Ashton-Kutcher-hot, young and muscular and so on, or George-Clooney-hot, older and more distinguished, or nerdy-but-hot or ravishing-seducer-hot or football-player-hot or whatever.
Women are basically judged on a single metric: how close they look to a skinny 16-year-old with big boobs. There are variations on the theme, and of course there are plenty of men and women who look for other things in women, but that's the basic societal ideal.
The MS-DOS port of "Mortal Kombat" comes to mind...
We're protecting the swear words, not the kids.
If we have six-year-olds running around saying "fuck" willy-nilly, all that does is ruin the shock value of a perfectly good swear word. At that point you might as well be saying "boink."
"Oh yeah, boink me harder, baby."
"If Johnson doesn't get that report in by Tuesday the whole department is boinked!"
Now where's the fun in that? We'd just have to come up with a NEW swear word so horrifying that no child would be able to pronounce it without immediately being swallowed by the jaws of Hell, and honestly, I don't really feel like digging that far into the Windows API documentation.
I can understand insisting on using Linux over Windows, but no offense, if you refuse even to run a different BROWSER within Linux, I don't think you have much room to complain about how much the world fails to "recognize" you.
Firefox is a 9.2MB download. I'm sure you can find room for it.
Yes indeed.
(speaking into microphone) We certainly wouldn't want THAT. Nosirree.
>>If the same games where made for PC directly, you would simply win on all fronts (even on the price; it's true that you save on the console, but you lose that by the lack of competition on games).
Hmm, "The Orange Box" is $60 for consoles and $50 for PC (retail), so it looks like about a $10 premium per game for consoles. If we say a new console costs $400 and a new computer $1000, the PC doesn't "catch up" until I buy 60 games. I've never owned more than maybe 20 games for a given console, so I'd say you're wrong.
You also forget to mention that I can play console games from my couch in the living room instead of a desk chair. And that I can play with my friends, etc.
"The NRA is not likely to change the mind of an anti-gun senator with promises of money. That senator is likely getting money from an anti-gun group already, since that group's aims match his own."
This is really bad reasoning, because it assumes that every issue has lobbyists and PACs for both sides of the issue, and that both sides are about equally well-heeled. This simply isn't the case, as anyone who's paid attention to politics for the past 7 (okay, 70) years will notice. Large corporations that pollute, injure people, mistreat their workers, lie to consumers, etc. have a lot more money that citizens' groups that oppose those things.
As a relatively minor example, take Comcast. They're pretty much a government-empowered monopoly in many places, and yet the government (to a large degree) lets them run rampant. Why? Because Comcast (obviously) has a large team of lobbyists and lots of funding, whereas pissed off customers have maybe a couple guys from poorly-funded consumer watchdog groups who also have 500 other corporate swindles to try to take care of.
That doesn't even require a blue screen! Just tell it to cancel out everything > 5 feet away and you're set. That'll be fun for webcam stuff.
Also, I'm not quite sure I'm understanding this right, but would this mean the camera is NEVER out of focus? Like, you'll be able to make out every detail of my thumbprint on the corner of the lens and also see the face of the person I'm photographing and ALSO read the inscription on the wall half a mile behind them?
Man, this thing sounds really cool.
And they've been around for decades there.
One advantage the Japanese have is that often, OVAs (Original Video Animation, sometimes Original Animated Video) are based on comics or video games that already have a large fan base.
There are also plenty of direct-to-DVD movies here in the states, but they have a (largely deserved) reputation for sucking.
I'm actually betting that we never see a big direct-to-DVD-series market in the US because I bet technology will beat out the marketing shift, so that people can just order all their movies on-demand. At that point, there won't even be a difference between "cable broadcast" and "direct-to-DVD" material, except how many buttons you press on your remote to see it.
Yeah, it really boggles my mind that Apple doesn't have Pages save in ODF, given the tiny marketshare Pages has. Heck, you can't even export to ODF, last I checked.
Well, he coded for Fermilab. That tells us first off that he's probably in touch with the scientific community and should be able to make informed and rational arguments on issues like teaching evolution, stem cell research, global warming, etc. His experience as a coder may be relevant to his understanding of tech policy issues such as Internet censorship and monitoring (in the US and abroad), Net neutrality, and so on.
Will there ever be a legislative task that makes him say, "Thank God I know FORTRAN?" Of course not. That phrase has never been uttered without irony in any situation in the annals of human history. But decades of experience as a programmer and as a scientist undoubtedly inform his worldview in important ways.
Well, if it really DID become legal, you'd probably be set. Services like Pandora and Last.fm would almost immediately stick in a "Download it Now" button. A week later, someone would set up a website with a torrent list of guaranteed high-quality rips with full ID3 data and fund the project by selling t-shirts and ads on the site. And so on.
A big part of the reason P2P is so chaotic is because it IS illegal, and black markets don't tend to have great customer service.
I think the tax is idiotic and unfair, but this isn't one of the issues I'm worried about. Keeping data like this ordered and organized is one of those things that an Internet startup could handle easily.
>>In addition, nobody really understands the point of an encyclopedia anymore.
The point of an encyclopedia is to condense as much knowledge as possible so that it fits on one bookshelf. My laptop takes up considerably less than one bookshelf, so why the hell would I care how many articles are in the encyclopedia I access through it? As long as the individual articles are reasonably sized and well-organized, the existence of a bunch of "unimportant" articles I'll never use doesn't bother me at all.
Research project: go read Diderot's Encyclopedie from the 18th century. Dude put in like 20 pages on how industrial looms were built, BECAUSE HE COULD, and because he believed, despite the elitist naysayers of his time, that even this "low-class" knowledge had value.
I'm not even sure those results make sense.
What the hell is "diversity" in this case? My high school was 96% white, but by 1900 standards it would probably be incredibly "diverse," with folks of English, German, Polish, Irish, and even (gasp!) Jewish "descent" intermingling. But ironically, once this "diversity" reaches a critical mass and a few generations pass, it all gets folded into the norm and nobody considers it "diverse" anymore.
So if this guy's right and "diversity" has a caustic effect on community, we need to hurry up and start making babies with people of other races so that racial "diversity" is no longer discernible in a generation or two. (Attractive nonwhite ladies, I'm ready to do my part.)
Anyway, I've seen plenty of science reporting with the same flaws TFA pointed out that had no "political correctness" value at all - stuff about mathematical constants in astrophysics, etc. - all using the same "underdog" theme.
I mean, I guess Phobos has the "fear" covered...
>> What I foresee eventually happening is that Hollywood and the creative types in the world will come to realize that the public isn't willing and or able to support them. Yeah, I can't see how they've let that ten BILLION dollars revenue delude them into thinking the public values their products. >> I'd bet that over 80% of the people who pirate a movie would simply go without if they suddenly couldn't get a free copy of it. At least when the MPAA pulls numbers out of its ass, it's thoughtful enough to take some efforts to hide that "methodology."
Maybe the summary is bad or something, but I'm pretty sure *I* could change a Wikipedia entry on me without screwing the guy who invented it... did Jimbo's "abuse of power" there amount to anything that anyone with a web browser couldn't replicate?
Dammit, I spent like thirty seconds wondering what the hell the "IT reason" tag was for.
Safari (for Mac) has a downloadable ad-blocker addon called PithHelmet; I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it appear for the iPhone at some point.
Your point about EA making too many sequels would be a lot more biting if you didn't have to start at 5 because the current owners have ALREADY MADE FOUR OF THEM.
Huh? What's "this data" that you want made public? Your bank PIN number? Access to your computer's hard drive for every passing botnet? That's just dumb.
You can be as pro-"transparency" as you want, but you have to admit there are some very valid pieces of data that should remain private. Personally, I don't really care if people can see who my friends are through Facebook, but that doesn't mean I'm unworried by government data-gathering and privacy erosion.
You talk about having data made "open" like that'd level the playing field, but that doesn't work. The government can DO a hell of a lot more with that kind of information than private citizens can, because they (by definition) has a monopoly on the authorized use of force. If I read the CIA's emails and find out that they've been doing bad things, the best I can do is hope that my tiny little vote for the lesser of two evils will eventually lead to an erosion in their power somewhere down the line. If the CIA reads MY emails and decides they don't like my political leanings, they can just swing by my house in a black van and nobody will ever see me again. Corporations are almost as bad; they may not be able to bust down my door quite so indiscreetly, but they've got the cash to buy media and lawyers that'll outweigh anything a private citizen can muster.
I always thought his artificial intelligence research was a bit suspicious...
My guess is they'll do what they do now, and charge the same price for ANY connection that doesn't require dialing in with a modem.
90% of people with broadband probably only need 300kbit anyway, for browsing the Net and checking email. But they end up paying $40+/mo for faster, "unlimited" connections, because cable companies have monopolies or oligopolies on access and they don't offer low-bandwidth plans.
Heck, my parents (in rural New Jersey) are still paying Comcast $45/mo for ONE-WAY CABLE, meaning they need to dial in with a phone modem and send outgoing data at 56k. From what I hear, Comcast could upgrade our area to real 2-way cable just by spending a couple grand to update some hardware on their end. Why don't they? No competition, and thus no incentive to provide a non-terrible user experience.
"...the popularity and record sales of the gaming industry would seem to indicate rising stock for gaming as an art form in the US."
Um... does not follow. What the heck does commercial success have to do with viability as an art form?
People seem to make this same argument over and over. "Video games make more money than movies, so they MUST be an art form!" What the heck? Does everything that makes money count as art? The average high-class prostitute probably makes more money than the average jazz musician; does this make her the better "artist"?
It's either the crassest, most commercial rationale ever, or it's a very subtle critique of culture. Maybe it's actually true that whenever a society dumps enough money into a particular luxury, it eventually feels obligated to lionize it as an important "cultural form," like Art-with-a-capital-A.