The car-as-prosthesis thing is also part of the reason that, if you're in an auto accident, you're much more likely to say "he hit me" than "his car hit my car". In Soviet Russia, car IS you!
I thought the title of the submission was just figuratively describing the speed of the lawsuits by saying "1 minute later" but that's exactly what happened.
I just had an idea for an episode of Monk where someone is murdered by hacking into their pacemaker with Bluetooth and replacing the firmware with deathware. Monk figures it out because he's Monk and he's awesome.
One thing Kennedy didn't address fully was the long-term impact on Gamespot of its behavior. In the short term, they can make some cash selling ads and boosting associated review scores to please game distributors. In the long term, if their credibility is shot among the community, they will see fewer and fewer website hits as people find their reviews elsewhere. As the hits dry up, so will the advertisement money. Internet traffic can shift quite violently when better alternatives come along (e.g. the "Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook -> ?" progression), Gamespot would do well to take heed and clean up their act before they become irrelevant.
If people are worried about the effect of computing on the environment, CD's and DVD's are the last thing they should focus on. A disc is basically a very small volume of plastic and a very tiny amount of aluminum foil. Computer hardware on the other hand is riddled with toxic heavy metals and other materials, which are becoming a massive global disposal problem.
I knew I wasn't the first person to think of these things, thanks for pointing out the proper terminology. I guess my contribution, which is probably not some new concept, is to relate the concept of "rivalrous" to labor compensation as opposed to just product consumption. If I was an economics grad student instead of a EE, I might have had myself a juicy little thesis topic.
I have been giving the residuals vs. salary issue some thought recently and here are my initial conclusions. There are two categories of product, finite and infinite. "Finite" products are those that require labor to reproduce, including both goods (cars, computers, etc.) and services (customer support, waiting tables at a restaurant, etc.). Then there are products that are "infinite" (essentially intellectual property), such as scripts, movies, computer games, and recorded music. All of these things can now be reproduced infinitely with trivial effort.
Corporations that sell finite goods can only sell them once; if they want more of them to sell, they must rely on new labor efforts, for which the laborers must be compensated. Corporations that sell infinite goods can sell extremely cheap-to-produce reproductions of their products with no practical limits, and do not require more labor to make them (except for DVD pressings or servers hosting the material for example, which typically represent a tiny fraction of production costs).
Now we address fairness in each of these types of product. Finite products produce a predictable revenue, that can be examined to see if the compensation to the laborers who produced it is considered "fair." Infinite products produce a very unpredictable revenue, that can vary substantially. A movie that performs poorly can make a tenth of what a box office success can make. In this case, the "fairness" of compensation, measured by the ratio of the salary paid to the laborer to the revenue from sales, can vary wildly.
It seems to me that laborers in "infinite" production industries have a very good argument for residuals, from the perspective of fairness.
Their reasons include things like..."MS Office is cheaper than OpenOffice.org" The Burton Group, obvious whores who will say anything in exchange for cash, also said yesterday that "up is down" and "black is white" at the behest of Bizarro.
Open Source is not communism and its not socialism. Socialism and communism are centrally planned, whereas, an open source system consists of thousands of voices, each operating with their own agenda. You are correct that open source development is virtually the opposite of "communist" in the Stalinist sense, and that corporate software development is far more similar. However, Stalinist "communism" is as close to Marx's "communism" as Bush's idea of "democracy" is to Tomas Paine's conception of "democracy." The original Marxist conception of communism is the extension of democracy into the realm of production, rather than it being limited to the realm of electoral politics as in a capitalist democracy. In this sense, open source development, which is based solely on need rather than profit, i.e. "from each according to their ability (programmers), to each according to their need (users)," and in essence is a very open and democratic production process, is "communist" in the classical sense. I for one see no problem with this, but if it turns people off to use this terminology, avoid it. Open source software is actually a great success of ideas like this, because it illustrates a case of production in the absence of profit, and of complete abundance (in this case software that is trivially cheap to copy), which was a prerequisite for a communist society under Marx's original conception.
I always thought the crime model was a bit off too. If you had high crime you could just dump a bunch of police on the problem. I think reducing crime in the real world is not that simple. Also, the crime was presumably petty street crime, while white collar crime seemed to be missing from the simulation. I guess I'm just a nit-picky left-winger but those are my observations.
I smell another fancy new innovation that despite being slick and nifty further reduces the quality of sound reproduction, like over-compressed music files and cheap but stylish earbuds. I'm a cranky audiophile, I admit it.
While this is a possible scenario, there is no guarantee that this is the way it will play out. Currently the broadcast flag is in limbo. Also, there exists equipment now that will ignore the broadcast flag if it is implemented (e.g. digital tuner cards from pcHDTV.) Pressure must be put upon the legislature not to implement DRM on HDTV broadcasts, they are our airwaves after all.
Currently I have a MythTV box with an NTSC connected to analog cable and an ATSC tuner connected to an antenna for OTA channels. I don't want to have to have some damn box from the cable company in there mucking things up. If I can get my Daily Show/Colbert Report online (hopefully with the writers of the shows properly compensated) I don't think I'd probably miss cable much. I already watch premium cable content on DVD (e.g. HBO shows).
I think VCR's are and will continue to be supplanted by digital hard drive recorders (Tivo, MythTV, etc.). At any rate, the subsidized set-top boxes with ATSC tuners will output an analog signal usable by both analog TVs and VCRs, so if you want to stick with the old magnetic tape recording media, you'll be able to.
I'm quite grateful for the fact that my local PBS affiliates are able to cram four virtual channels into one physical over-the-air channel, for example. I'm not. My local PBS affiliate is cramming 4 SD channels and one HD channel onto a single channel of bandwidth. They turn off 3 of the SD channels at 7pm and turn on their HD channel which is off during the day. However, since there is another full SD channel running simultaneously, the bitrate of the HD channel is reduced to the point where there is constant aliasing and blocking. Compared to the local NBC affiliate, that runs a reduced-bitrate SD weather channel parallel to their very pretty HD channel, it just looks like crap.
I'm not that far from a flight path and planes can cause a streak of pixel loss. I used to have this same problem. I am DIRECTLY under a flightpath only about 4 miles from the airport so they get pretty low over my head. I'm convinced this is due to multipath interference (which HDTV is particularly susceptible to) since my receiving antenna gets signals both directly from the tower and also from above as the signal bounces off the metal airplane. I don't have this problem anymore because I am using a homebrew directional (DB-4) antenna instead of the not-very-directional rabbit ears I was using previously. I also have a MythTV box, using one of those wonderful pcHDTV HD-5500 cards.
why isn't Chicago or London ever destroyed? I take it you haven't been watching the new Dr. Who. In that series London is the center of the universe, where all major events in all of time are centered. Londonites must be pretty tasty too because London seems to be treated like an intergalactic buffet for numerous refugee alien populations.
Q: Do you really think the FCC is going to pump that money into tax refunds?
A: Yes (FCC/Congress), the tax refund is very important to maintaining the
_ USA wealth status quo of Corporate-welfare stud servicing (as the farmer
_ would say) the public real good.
What was good for the public in the 1960s... to 20?? will be the same always.
Folks need to accept.... Huh?
In the submitter's defense, the allowed length for submission titles is not very long. I've submitted a few stories and it is quite difficult to formulate a good title while keeping all of the relevant information (like the veracity of a story, for example). Your desired title for example would definitely not fit. That said, I agree that this story does not pass the smell test.
I was reading a linux magazine a few days ago, where the openmoko project leader said he was in talks with networks, deciding who would be the network (probably only 1) for openmoko. I think you are mistaken. The Neo 1973 phone, which is associated with the Openmoko project, is designed to be a GSM phone for use on any GSM network. This limits it to AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S., but there is not going to be a single network that the phone works on. The whole point of the thing is to be open, including not being tied to a provider. Locking it into a network (ala the iPhone) would be completely antithetical to the entire mission.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but since this is obviously the work of a salt vampire, who is more qualified to investigate?
I thought the title of the submission was just figuratively describing the speed of the lawsuits by saying "1 minute later" but that's exactly what happened.
I just had an idea for an episode of Monk where someone is murdered by hacking into their pacemaker with Bluetooth and replacing the firmware with deathware. Monk figures it out because he's Monk and he's awesome.
One thing Kennedy didn't address fully was the long-term impact on Gamespot of its behavior. In the short term, they can make some cash selling ads and boosting associated review scores to please game distributors. In the long term, if their credibility is shot among the community, they will see fewer and fewer website hits as people find their reviews elsewhere. As the hits dry up, so will the advertisement money. Internet traffic can shift quite violently when better alternatives come along (e.g. the "Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook -> ?" progression), Gamespot would do well to take heed and clean up their act before they become irrelevant.
If people are worried about the effect of computing on the environment, CD's and DVD's are the last thing they should focus on. A disc is basically a very small volume of plastic and a very tiny amount of aluminum foil. Computer hardware on the other hand is riddled with toxic heavy metals and other materials, which are becoming a massive global disposal problem.
IANAE: I Am Not An Economist
I knew I wasn't the first person to think of these things, thanks for pointing out the proper terminology. I guess my contribution, which is probably not some new concept, is to relate the concept of "rivalrous" to labor compensation as opposed to just product consumption. If I was an economics grad student instead of a EE, I might have had myself a juicy little thesis topic.
I have been giving the residuals vs. salary issue some thought recently and here are my initial conclusions. There are two categories of product, finite and infinite. "Finite" products are those that require labor to reproduce, including both goods (cars, computers, etc.) and services (customer support, waiting tables at a restaurant, etc.). Then there are products that are "infinite" (essentially intellectual property), such as scripts, movies, computer games, and recorded music. All of these things can now be reproduced infinitely with trivial effort.
Corporations that sell finite goods can only sell them once; if they want more of them to sell, they must rely on new labor efforts, for which the laborers must be compensated. Corporations that sell infinite goods can sell extremely cheap-to-produce reproductions of their products with no practical limits, and do not require more labor to make them (except for DVD pressings or servers hosting the material for example, which typically represent a tiny fraction of production costs).
Now we address fairness in each of these types of product. Finite products produce a predictable revenue, that can be examined to see if the compensation to the laborers who produced it is considered "fair." Infinite products produce a very unpredictable revenue, that can vary substantially. A movie that performs poorly can make a tenth of what a box office success can make. In this case, the "fairness" of compensation, measured by the ratio of the salary paid to the laborer to the revenue from sales, can vary wildly.
It seems to me that laborers in "infinite" production industries have a very good argument for residuals, from the perspective of fairness.
I always thought the crime model was a bit off too. If you had high crime you could just dump a bunch of police on the problem. I think reducing crime in the real world is not that simple. Also, the crime was presumably petty street crime, while white collar crime seemed to be missing from the simulation. I guess I'm just a nit-picky left-winger but those are my observations.
Is there a Belgium of wireless networking?
I smell another fancy new innovation that despite being slick and nifty further reduces the quality of sound reproduction, like over-compressed music files and cheap but stylish earbuds. I'm a cranky audiophile, I admit it.
(I say this even though I didn't RTFA of course.)
Yes, I think the European Commission has some fundamental misconceptions about DRM. To paraphrase a great Spanish swordsman:
"You keep using that acronym. I do not think it means what you think it means."
While this is a possible scenario, there is no guarantee that this is the way it will play out. Currently the broadcast flag is in limbo. Also, there exists equipment now that will ignore the broadcast flag if it is implemented (e.g. digital tuner cards from pcHDTV.) Pressure must be put upon the legislature not to implement DRM on HDTV broadcasts, they are our airwaves after all.
Amen.
Currently I have a MythTV box with an NTSC connected to analog cable and an ATSC tuner connected to an antenna for OTA channels. I don't want to have to have some damn box from the cable company in there mucking things up. If I can get my Daily Show/Colbert Report online (hopefully with the writers of the shows properly compensated) I don't think I'd probably miss cable much. I already watch premium cable content on DVD (e.g. HBO shows).
I think VCR's are and will continue to be supplanted by digital hard drive recorders (Tivo, MythTV, etc.). At any rate, the subsidized set-top boxes with ATSC tuners will output an analog signal usable by both analog TVs and VCRs, so if you want to stick with the old magnetic tape recording media, you'll be able to.
In the submitter's defense, the allowed length for submission titles is not very long. I've submitted a few stories and it is quite difficult to formulate a good title while keeping all of the relevant information (like the veracity of a story, for example). Your desired title for example would definitely not fit. That said, I agree that this story does not pass the smell test.
Kindle? As in kindling? As in a bonfire? Books and bonfires?
The only logical conclusion is that Amazon is a front for Neo-Nazis.
(kidcharles - Godwining threads with a single post since the dawn of the intertubes!)