Of course there will always be a market for CDs (or any physical sound carrying medium) because:
-Digital music is DRM encumbered--you can't really control what you own. And if you're on the ridiculous Napster-type plans, you're really on a music rental plan and all your music stops functioning after your membership expires. This may apply to the physical media one day to, but for now, this the rule for digital store downloads, and the exception for the physical media.
-Digital music is degraded. Perhaps this isn't essential to the casual user, and maybe storage/bandwidth gains will obviate the need for lossy compression one day, but in the meanwhile, some people (like me) are willing to pay a premium for higher fidelity.
-Digital music is virtual. There is something to be said, to the fan or collector, anyway, for owning the physical medium. You get the whole "package" as the artist intended for his/her work to presented. Cover art, booklet, sometimes creative packaging, physical medium, sense of ownership. (But if they DRM the medium, that sense of ownership gets tarnished badly)
CD sales might be taking a big "adjustment" due to online music, but there will always be a market for them. The good ones, anyway.
I think one of the big issues is whether or not a given business activity should be shut down/suspended when a patent challenger indicates infringement.
Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head. This case would not be heard by Supreme Court unless there was a matter of law that needed clarification in regard to its constitutionality. From what I gather this is the only matter that the Supremes will be considering. From the article:
EBay filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments later this month. In its filing with the Supreme Court, eBay argued that infringements should not automatically result in injunctions and shutdowns. The company also pointed out that MercExchange has not been in the online auction business since 2000, so eBay's use of Buy It Now was not sufficient to merit an injunction.
So it sounds like the issue is "when is an injunction a fair remedy?" Unfortunately, it does not sound like they will be considering whether business methods, virtual devices, etc. are patentable, which is of course what most Slashdotters are debating here. If someone has more detailed insight, that'd be great to hear.
They have names, addresses and phone numbers but no credit card numbers or social security numbers. Isn't this basically the same information you can find in the phone book?
What the hell kinda phone book do they publish in your town?!
(sorry, lameness filter is being lame, here's just the basics badly formatted)
Registrant Name Sean Rogers Registrant Organization Sean Rogers Registrant Address1 1275 Falkland Rd Registrant City Jacksonville Registrant State/Province FL Registrant Postal Code 32221 Registrant Country United States Registrant Country Code US Registrant Phone Number +95.486824101 Registrant Email gsmmax@mail.ru
FTFA: Last month, Sunbelt Software found an additional list of slightly over 1 million individual entries labeled Ibill_1m.txt on a spamming website. That list appeared to date from 2003.
Sorry, I am going to apologize for claiming you were trying to save face. I mistakenly thought were the same person as the original poster who first mentioned E=mc^2 and campfires in the same post. You are not. You're not being a jerk trying to save face. You're just being a pedant, of undetermined jerkiness. We'll assume none.
But if you're playing pedant, you should have called him out on his more egregious flaw which was to call combustion an endothermic oxidative process, when it's pretty fundamental that it's exothermic. Fire is hot.
And I humbly concur that, speaking pedantically, E=mc^2 has to do with (literally) everything in the universe.
Not sure where your studies of the physics of solar wind affecting stuff flying past Jupiter fit in with all this, but thank you for dropping some suitably irrelevant technical jargon on us. Your physics "cred" is intact.
So your claiming that E=MC^2 is not intimately and directly related to a endothermic oxidation reaction ?
Your claiming that somehow the basic principles of E=MC^2 break down when it comes to a specific type of reaction?
Christ, man. He didn't say relativistic principles break down, he said they're superfluous. It's overkill for the example. You're liberating energy in the form of chemical bonds, so the loss of mass as energy is pretty much negligible in chemical reactions, 'cause the mass-energy of the reactants utterly overwhelms the amount of energy released. Mass is, for all practical purposes, conserved.
I think chemists and physicists understood combustion pretty well before Einstein came along. There was this guy, you know, Lavoisier, he had a few things to say about stuff sticking around.
But come the hell on. If you have a graduate degree in physics you know this. You're just being a jerk to save some face.
"If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."
This is the most naive, despicably un-American sentiment of all the tripe that's thrown around in this charade that is post-9/11 paranoia.
I'm sorry for being ad hominem, but please, try to use your imagination here.
This sheep-like "nothing bad happens to good people" mentality is the type of smug, head-in-the-sand mentality that destroys free society. My folks emigrated from behind the "Iron Curtain" in the late 60s exactly to escape the sort of propoganda and easy government-sanctioned persecution that I see creeping up all around us. Let me tell you stories about family and friends fired, harrassed, jailed, and yeah, even tortured because their actions were "misinterpreted", Sometimes they were released without apology a few months later, sometimes not. Sometimes the reason for the police action was political. Sometimes they were framed by competitors. Sometimes they were "snitched" on by neighbors with vendettas. Sometimes they just had the wrong guy. When paranoia rules and every out-of-step behavior is potentially subversive (or "terroristic") it's pretty easy to wreak havoc with people's lives, either intentionally or not.
But that doesn't happen here, right? You wouldn't get labeled terrorist and jailed indefinitely for something as silly as trolling unsavory websites right? Or be charged with a crime and have your property destroyed because you had a stupid bumper sticker, right? And we'd never get so paranoid about air travel as to make a mother drink her own breast milk to prove its safe before boarding a plane, or maybe create a secret no-fly list that is impossible to audit or even acknowledge but sometimes bars toddlers from flying because they might be terrorists (along with hundreds of others, including members of Congress), right? I mean, these are good people who didn't do anything wrong. I can't imagine that there'd be a slew of kafkaesque civil rights abuses that an internal Justice Dept. investigation might uncover, right? (I won't even touch domestic wiretapping) I mean, those who have nothing to fear have nothing to hide, right? Right.
These are just small examples, and maybe not even very good one. And maybe you'll never inconvenienced like the couple in this story. But who knows. Maybe you'll be the victim of identity theft, or even framed.. Maybe you'll have to engage in some bizzare but innocent behavior. Maybe you'll want to voice an unpopular opinion, or go read/hear someone else's horrible and unpopular opinion. Or maybe it'll just be some bureaucratic "oops". But, if it does happen, and YOU find yourself interrogated by the FBI, or forced to explain some blotch on your record for the rest of your life, or maybe even jailed without charge for a few months, then you come tell me how, sure, maybe you lost three months of your life in a cell being molested by thugs, but hey, at the end, everyone figured out it was just a big mistake. So really, it was OK. We're all safer for it. God bless America.
Oh the ass dump to gas pump tech is nothin. Did you RTFA?! There was far more disturbing technology at the end. Check this out, clart :
In a separate experiment revealing another unusual business potential for cow dung, another group of researchers has successfully extracted an aromatic ingredient of vanilla from cattle dung, said Miki Tsuruta, a Sekisui Chemical Co. spokeswoman. The extracted ingredient, vanillin, can be used as fragrance in shampoo and candles, she said.
Wow. Brings a whole new meaning to "tastes like shit."
52 Credit for the elderly or disabled. Attach Schedule R 50 51 0
53a Were you totally joking on your last Slashdot post? yes
54 Hilarity of your last post (estimate) 1,000,000
55 Sense of humor of parent poster to which you replied ( 500,000,000)
56a Amount of time wasted composing this reply (minutes) like 12
b Amount of time wasted on Slashdot today (minutes) 25
c Bullshit. Really how many 250
57 Number of people your post will impress 2
58 Is one of them your mom? yes
59. That is sad. Number of people in the world are lamer than you 9,131.
Oh come on, it's not like the Republicans weren't reading your email and listening to you phone calls anyway. You just never got around to the juicy stuff. So they finally just had to come right out and ask. You see what you made them do? Gawd! You're so whiny! And you talk to your mom waaay too much, dude. Seriously. They told me. And yeah, it's probably infected, you should have it looked at.
The viruses need the single celled organisms to replicat
RTFA. Most
RTFA. Most (known) modern viruses need host cells to replicate. What if the ancient ones did it just fine? But they they got bored of it and started exerting pressure on other proto-life to do their replication for them. What if all of the rest of early life evolved under selective pressure of viruses to be good hosts for them? What if were all the viruses' evolutionary bitches? Just that, you know, things got out of hand and one day the viruses look around and cats are eating gazelles and soccer moms are buying SUVs, and they're like "WTF? Where did it all go wrong?" And then they're like, "Wellp, time to clean house. Break out the H5N1. Will start with the birds."
Kinda like that. But less anthropormorphically.........or MORE so?!
I have a system I want to *nix-ify, but I've spent more time reading about, deciding between various distributions that finally, I just never have gotten around to doing it. It is such a cost to learn the idiosyncracies of a distribution that making the commitment itself was a decision I've just put off.
This is was why Apple's approach, while often cutthroat and narrow often feels elegant and less stressful.
Yes, well, there is always variability in these things. And the reasons people give for their choices are often nothing like the actual reasons (See, famously, Nisbett and Wilson, 1977).
Well, all depends on what they view as the "first choice to be made", and what as the "well-if-I-can't-make-up-my-mind-I'll-just-chose-x " choice.
Yes, the context of a decision drives the perceived options. So, I understand your point about framing the decision as a choice between a flavor of Vista and another OS, with yet other Vista flavors as defaults, thereby leveraging the "alternative default" bias in MS's favor. And I admit this is an emprical question, and it's not clear how this will play out. However, I don't feel like the framing you suggest is parsimonious. The overwhelming prepotency when faced with a choice is not to choose at all. Indeed, all the time spent considering a choice is just a continuous series of decisions not to choose in time. The research, thinking, weighing that goes into the economic problem MS poses to its customers is itself a cost, in addition to the base cost of upgrading. The more complex MS makes this problem, the higher the cost. The first choice is whether this deliberation is itself cost effective or aversive. Furthermore, unlike the scenario you suggest, a novel choice is almost never seen as a default. Indeed, it's generally the status quo that is the default, or barring that, the choice that is most differentiated from the others.
Furthermore, as I hinted before, many of the factors that drive these sorts of consumer decisions are implicit--not available to conscious examination. That is not to say that an elaborate explicit framework of reasoning won't be given by the chooser to explain their decision, but it's often not the actual determining factor. For example, people like Dan Gilbert and Barry Schwartz have shown many times that the more difficult a decision is, the more deliberation is required, the less satisfied people will be with their final choice, no matter what it is. This may be counterintuitive, because, given the choice, almost all of us would RATHER be given more options, more time to decide, more chances to "undo" our choices. But, the truth is, all these things leave people less pleased with the final outcome. Perhaps mainly because they've had all this opportunity to allow their imaginations to "own" the alternatives, and really scrutinize the shortcomings of their choice, making a lot of negatives and contrasts more salient than they might be if you just had to choose, had less time or options to choose from, and then had to live with the results.
Point is, you can imagine more buyer's remorse with MS's plan. Did I buy more features than I need? Did I shortchange myself features that I will eventually use? If you wanted to be alarmist, you might even argue that this arrangement promotes piracy, as curious or disgruntled customers want to see "what they're missing" with other Vista flavors, or feel "justified" in pirating another flavor after having invested a sizable amount in some less satisfactory flavor.
Six is the upper limit of choices that the average person wants to deal with. That doesn't mean people function better having their "choice" capacity maxed out. In fact, as I posted elsewhere in the thread, being presented with multiple similar options that are difficult to choose among drives people to make alternative choices (such as deciding not to choose at all).
Actually this could backfire. Having multiple choices that are difficult to choose among drives people to alternatives. People are systematically irrational in this way. If somebody prefers A over B, then they should continue to prefer A over B even if choice C suddenly becomes available, right? Wrong. Often they will go to *B* is it's too hard to choose between A and C, and all three choices are close in value. A famous study illustrating this had people choose their compensation for participating in a quick study. They could choose between this fancy pen (told it was worth around, say, $5) and like $3 cash. People almost invariably took the pen. However, when other people were given their choice between two different but comparable pens, each worth around $5, and $3 cash, they just took the cash. They didn't have a good reason to pick one pen over the other (says one theory), or the cost of debating the choice was higher than their preference over the third alternative (says another theory), so they go for the neutral, third alternative. There have been many, many similar experimental examples.
So, if people are stressed or stymied by having to choose among even two copies of Windows, much less six, and they have been at all flirting with an alternative option (i.e., another OS, or just don't bother upgrading at all), this could easily put them over the edge.
by Anonymous Coward... Don't say I didn't warn you.
Oh don't worry. When ths whole google charade goes to hell, we'll all know, the whole world will remember, and look back with regret and chagrin on the fact that you, yes you, Some Anonymous Coward Guy on this Nerd News Website That Like The Really Geeky IT Guy at My Work Swears Is Really Good, fairly warned us, nay, verily beseeched us, each and every one of us. Yes, you , you stepped forward, stepped up like a man to say, "I am not afraid of ridicule and derision, I am not afraid of accountability and responsibility. For I must do What's Right, and tell them all the Truth...on this I shall stake my Honor and my Good Name." And, truly, your Good Name will be on the lips of many fools when the unraveling of google comes. "O!" they will cry, "We were so blind! So deaf! What fools were we to not heed the sage and stern warnings of that kind and wise teacher, Mr. Anonymous Coward!"
"When he prophesied that BSD is dying, we did not listen! When he foretold the second coming of SCO, we did not heed! When he foresaw Apple's imminent demise, we turned our backs! And now, when his fearful vision portends the certain unraveling of Google, we,
like mindless lemmings, pay neither mind nor heed, but march
ceasely off the windswept crags of our insolent hubris
and toward our certain doom!
Save us, Mr. Anonymous Coward! Save us from our ignorance! Save us
from ourselves!"
*maybe the brain has some fractal structure too, I suspect so. But the Sun is a) bigger and b) the turbulence probably goes to smaller scales than cellular structure sizes.
I think most neuroscientists mean the brain is the most "functionally complex" not "mechanically compex" system. This may seem a subjective, arbitrary designation--except consider that neither the sun, nor any other celestial body, nor any other system in the universe, is as observably conscious, self-aware, or sentient, nor demonstrates the abilities to reason, feel, communicate, create, and manipulate the environment to the extent afforded by the human brain.
No other system that we know of.
So the brain isn't the most complicated structure but it may well be the most difficult to simulate in such a way that you can recover its interesting characteristics. I don't think there's a good word for that.
No, if this is as powerful an oxidizer as they say, those stains won't form in the first place. The same way oxidizing cleaners break up stains, this stuff would be like having a constant coating of bleach on your bathroom surfaces. Furthermore, due to the "superhydrophilicity" of this titanium dioxide coating (as the article mentions), water will not form droplets (tension cannot be maintained), and thus you have a constant sheeting effect, allowing the surface to be very washable. There's a reason they use this stuff on self-cleaning windows on skyscrapers--it's not for the disinfecting action! It actually breaks up and releases the fine organic crud that makes stains in the first place.
My favorite news outlet was reporting on this like 7 years ago.
Truly, the cyberdump was heralded long ago.
From that article:
Scoscia noted that "Number 2.0," as Silicon Valley insiders have dubbed it, will be cross-platform compatible and fully 2K Flushes compliant. In addition, he said, it will feature significantly wider, more comfortable bandwidth to accommodate even the most massive user download.
Slashdot Mirror
This story is just baiting people, but anyway....
Of course there will always be a market for CDs (or any physical sound carrying medium) because:
-Digital music is DRM encumbered--you can't really control what you own. And if you're on the ridiculous Napster-type plans, you're really on a music rental plan and all your music stops functioning after your membership expires. This may apply to the physical media one day to, but for now, this the rule for digital store downloads, and the exception for the physical media.
-Digital music is degraded. Perhaps this isn't essential to the casual user, and maybe storage/bandwidth gains will obviate the need for lossy compression one day, but in the meanwhile, some people (like me) are willing to pay a premium for higher fidelity.
-Digital music is virtual. There is something to be said, to the fan or collector, anyway, for owning the physical medium. You get the whole "package" as the artist intended for his/her work to presented. Cover art, booklet, sometimes creative packaging, physical medium, sense of ownership. (But if they DRM the medium, that sense of ownership gets tarnished badly)
CD sales might be taking a big "adjustment" due to online music, but there will always be a market for them. The good ones, anyway.
And did totally "pwning" the parent poster bring you lasting happiness? ;)
I think one of the big issues is whether or not a given business activity should be shut down/suspended when a patent challenger indicates infringement.
Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head. This case would not be heard by Supreme Court unless there was a matter of law that needed clarification in regard to its constitutionality. From what I gather this is the only matter that the Supremes will be considering. From the article:
EBay filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments later this month. In its filing with the Supreme Court, eBay argued that infringements should not automatically result in injunctions and shutdowns. The company also pointed out that MercExchange has not been in the online auction business since 2000, so eBay's use of Buy It Now was not sufficient to merit an injunction.
So it sounds like the issue is "when is an injunction a fair remedy?" Unfortunately, it does not sound like they will be considering whether business methods, virtual devices, etc. are patentable, which is of course what most Slashdotters are debating here. If someone has more detailed insight, that'd be great to hear.
Yeah, some very cursory research reveals 5sec.us is a host domain for all sorts of spam and trojan badness.
They have names, addresses and phone numbers but no credit card numbers or social security numbers. Isn't this basically the same information you can find in the phone book?
What the hell kinda phone book do they publish in your town?!
And can you send me a copy?
Anyone know if this guy is a known spammer? He's now upgraded to trafficking in stolen property.
http://www.whois.net/whois.cgi2?d=5sec.us
(sorry, lameness filter is being lame, here's just the basics badly formatted)
Registrant Name Sean Rogers
Registrant Organization Sean Rogers
Registrant Address1 1275 Falkland Rd
Registrant City Jacksonville
Registrant State/Province FL
Registrant Postal Code 32221
Registrant Country United States
Registrant Country Code US
Registrant Phone Number +95.486824101
Registrant Email gsmmax@mail.ru
Last month, Sunbelt Software found an additional list of slightly over 1 million individual entries labeled Ibill_1m.txt on a spamming website. That list appeared to date from 2003.
Hmm.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Ibill_1m.txt Thaaaat doesn't look good.
Sorry, I am going to apologize for claiming you were trying to save face. I mistakenly thought were the same person as the original poster who first mentioned E=mc^2 and campfires in the same post. You are not. You're not being a jerk trying to save face. You're just being a pedant, of undetermined jerkiness. We'll assume none.
But if you're playing pedant, you should have called him out on his more egregious flaw which was to call combustion an endothermic oxidative process, when it's pretty fundamental that it's exothermic. Fire is hot.
And I humbly concur that, speaking pedantically, E=mc^2 has to do with (literally) everything in the universe.
Not sure where your studies of the physics of solar wind affecting stuff flying past Jupiter fit in with all this, but thank you for dropping some suitably irrelevant technical jargon on us. Your physics "cred" is intact.
So your claiming that E=MC^2 is not intimately and directly related to a endothermic oxidation reaction ?
Your claiming that somehow the basic principles of E=MC^2 break down when it comes to a specific type of reaction?
Christ, man. He didn't say relativistic principles break down, he said they're superfluous. It's overkill for the example. You're liberating energy in the form of chemical bonds, so the loss of mass as energy is pretty much negligible in chemical reactions, 'cause the mass-energy of the reactants utterly overwhelms the amount of energy released. Mass is, for all practical purposes, conserved.
I think chemists and physicists understood combustion pretty well before Einstein came along. There was this guy, you know, Lavoisier, he had a few things to say about stuff sticking around.
But come the hell on. If you have a graduate degree in physics you know this. You're just being a jerk to save some face.
"If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."
This is the most naive, despicably un-American sentiment of all the tripe that's thrown around in this charade that is post-9/11 paranoia.
I'm sorry for being ad hominem, but please, try to use your imagination here.
This sheep-like "nothing bad happens to good people" mentality is the type of smug, head-in-the-sand mentality that destroys free society. My folks emigrated from behind the "Iron Curtain" in the late 60s exactly to escape the sort of propoganda and easy government-sanctioned persecution that I see creeping up all around us. Let me tell you stories about family and friends fired, harrassed, jailed, and yeah, even tortured because their actions were "misinterpreted", Sometimes they were released without apology a few months later, sometimes not. Sometimes the reason for the police action was political. Sometimes they were framed by competitors. Sometimes they were "snitched" on by neighbors with vendettas. Sometimes they just had the wrong guy. When paranoia rules and every out-of-step behavior is potentially subversive (or "terroristic") it's pretty easy to wreak havoc with people's lives, either intentionally or not.
But that doesn't happen here, right? You wouldn't get labeled terrorist and jailed indefinitely for something as silly as trolling unsavory websites right? Or be charged with a crime and have your property destroyed because you had a stupid bumper sticker, right? And we'd never get so paranoid about air travel as to make a mother drink her own breast milk to prove its safe before boarding a plane, or maybe create a secret no-fly list that is impossible to audit or even acknowledge but sometimes bars toddlers from flying because they might be terrorists (along with hundreds of others, including members of Congress), right? I mean, these are good people who didn't do anything wrong. I can't imagine that there'd be a slew of kafkaesque civil rights abuses that an internal Justice Dept. investigation might uncover, right? (I won't even touch domestic wiretapping) I mean, those who have nothing to fear have nothing to hide, right? Right.
These are just small examples, and maybe not even very good one. And maybe you'll never inconvenienced like the couple in this story. But who knows. Maybe you'll be the victim of identity theft, or even framed.. Maybe you'll have to engage in some bizzare but innocent behavior. Maybe you'll want to voice an unpopular opinion, or go read/hear someone else's horrible and unpopular opinion. Or maybe it'll just be some bureaucratic "oops". But, if it does happen, and YOU find yourself interrogated by the FBI, or forced to explain some blotch on your record for the rest of your life, or maybe even jailed without charge for a few months, then you come tell me how, sure, maybe you lost three months of your life in a cell being molested by thugs, but hey, at the end, everyone figured out it was just a big mistake. So really, it was OK. We're all safer for it. God bless America.
Its amazing what scientists can create.
Oh the ass dump to gas pump tech is nothin. Did you RTFA?! There was far more disturbing technology at the end. Check this out, clart :
In a separate experiment revealing another unusual business potential for cow dung, another group of researchers has successfully extracted an aromatic ingredient of vanilla from cattle dung, said Miki Tsuruta, a Sekisui Chemical Co. spokeswoman. The extracted ingredient, vanillin, can be used as fragrance in shampoo and candles, she said.
Wow. Brings a whole new meaning to "tastes like shit."
k, here's some of what I filled out....
-----
50 Education credits. Attach Form 8863 263.
51 Retirement savings contributions credit. 85.
52 Credit for the elderly or disabled. Attach Schedule R 50 51 0
53a Were you totally joking on your last Slashdot post? yes
54 Hilarity of your last post (estimate) 1,000,000
55 Sense of humor of parent poster to which you replied ( 500,000,000)
56a Amount of time wasted composing this reply (minutes) like 12
b Amount of time wasted on Slashdot today (minutes) 25
c Bullshit. Really how many 250
57 Number of people your post will impress 2
58 Is one of them your mom? yes
59. That is sad. Number of people in the world are lamer than you 9,131.
60. Add 1 to line 59. This is your UID.
----
See, my life is an open book.
Hmmm...Let's take a look.
Form 1040
---snip----
34 Student loan interest deduction (see page 33)
35 Tuition and fees deduction (see page 34)
36 Add lines 34 and 35 here
37a Oh, BTW, do think gays should marry?
b Seriously?
38 Domestic production acitivities deduction. Attach Form 8903-35
39 Subtract the number of unborn children murdered this year from line 34
40 Total value of stock or other securities sold this year
41a Interest earned from personal savings
b Interest taken in your personal salvation
42 On a scale of 1-10 rate how awesome your president is here
43 Multiply line 42 by the total of lines 28, 36, 38, 39. This is your refund.
-----
Man! You are RIGHT. I need to read that shit more closely.
Oh come on, it's not like the Republicans weren't reading your email and listening to you phone calls anyway. You just never got around to the juicy stuff. So they finally just had to come right out and ask. You see what you made them do? Gawd! You're so whiny! And you talk to your mom waaay too much, dude. Seriously. They told me. And yeah, it's probably infected, you should have it looked at.
apologies. suffering from an anti-preview button virus. i'm its bitch.
The viruses need the single celled organisms to replicat
....or MORE so?!
RTFA. Most
RTFA. Most (known) modern viruses need host cells to replicate. What if the ancient ones did it just fine? But they they got bored of it and started exerting pressure on other proto-life to do their replication for them. What if all of the rest of early life evolved under selective pressure of viruses to be good hosts for them? What if were all the viruses' evolutionary bitches? Just that, you know, things got out of hand and one day the viruses look around and cats are eating gazelles and soccer moms are buying SUVs, and they're like "WTF? Where did it all go wrong?" And then they're like, "Wellp, time to clean house. Break out the H5N1. Will start with the birds."
Kinda like that. But less anthropormorphically.....
dum dum DUM.
You are absoultely right.
I have a system I want to *nix-ify, but I've spent more time reading about, deciding between various distributions that finally, I just never have gotten around to doing it. It is such a cost to learn the idiosyncracies of a distribution that making the commitment itself was a decision I've just put off.
This is was why Apple's approach, while often cutthroat and narrow often feels elegant and less stressful.
Gullible people. I'd chose the cash...
x " choice.
Yes, well, there is always variability in these things. And the reasons people give for their choices are often nothing like the actual reasons (See, famously, Nisbett and Wilson, 1977).
Well, all depends on what they view as the "first choice to be made", and what as the "well-if-I-can't-make-up-my-mind-I'll-just-chose-
Yes, the context of a decision drives the perceived options. So, I understand your point about framing the decision as a choice between a flavor of Vista and another OS, with yet other Vista flavors as defaults, thereby leveraging the "alternative default" bias in MS's favor. And I admit this is an emprical question, and it's not clear how this will play out. However, I don't feel like the framing you suggest is parsimonious. The overwhelming prepotency when faced with a choice is not to choose at all. Indeed, all the time spent considering a choice is just a continuous series of decisions not to choose in time. The research, thinking, weighing that goes into the economic problem MS poses to its customers is itself a cost, in addition to the base cost of upgrading. The more complex MS makes this problem, the higher the cost. The first choice is whether this deliberation is itself cost effective or aversive. Furthermore, unlike the scenario you suggest, a novel choice is almost never seen as a default. Indeed, it's generally the status quo that is the default, or barring that, the choice that is most differentiated from the others.
Furthermore, as I hinted before, many of the factors that drive these sorts of consumer decisions are implicit--not available to conscious examination. That is not to say that an elaborate explicit framework of reasoning won't be given by the chooser to explain their decision, but it's often not the actual determining factor. For example, people like Dan Gilbert and Barry Schwartz have shown many times that the more difficult a decision is, the more deliberation is required, the less satisfied people will be with their final choice, no matter what it is. This may be counterintuitive, because, given the choice, almost all of us would RATHER be given more options, more time to decide, more chances to "undo" our choices. But, the truth is, all these things leave people less pleased with the final outcome. Perhaps mainly because they've had all this opportunity to allow their imaginations to "own" the alternatives, and really scrutinize the shortcomings of their choice, making a lot of negatives and contrasts more salient than they might be if you just had to choose, had less time or options to choose from, and then had to live with the results.
Point is, you can imagine more buyer's remorse with MS's plan. Did I buy more features than I need? Did I shortchange myself features that I will eventually use? If you wanted to be alarmist, you might even argue that this arrangement promotes piracy, as curious or disgruntled customers want to see "what they're missing" with other Vista flavors, or feel "justified" in pirating another flavor after having invested a sizable amount in some less satisfactory flavor.
Six is the upper limit of choices that the average person wants to deal with. That doesn't mean people function better having their "choice" capacity maxed out. In fact, as I posted elsewhere in the thread, being presented with multiple similar options that are difficult to choose among drives people to make alternative choices (such as deciding not to choose at all).
Actually this could backfire. Having multiple choices that are difficult to choose among drives people to alternatives. People are systematically irrational in this way. If somebody prefers A over B, then they should continue to prefer A over B even if choice C suddenly becomes available, right? Wrong. Often they will go to *B* is it's too hard to choose between A and C, and all three choices are close in value. A famous study illustrating this had people choose their compensation for participating in a quick study. They could choose between this fancy pen (told it was worth around, say, $5) and like $3 cash. People almost invariably took the pen. However, when other people were given their choice between two different but comparable pens, each worth around $5, and $3 cash, they just took the cash. They didn't have a good reason to pick one pen over the other (says one theory), or the cost of debating the choice was higher than their preference over the third alternative (says another theory), so they go for the neutral, third alternative. There have been many, many similar experimental examples.
So, if people are stressed or stymied by having to choose among even two copies of Windows, much less six, and they have been at all flirting with an alternative option (i.e., another OS, or just don't bother upgrading at all), this could easily put them over the edge.
(This comes for the reason-based choice work of Eldar Shafir and others)
by Anonymous Coward ...
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Oh don't worry. When ths whole google charade goes to hell, we'll all know, the whole world will remember, and look back with regret and chagrin on the fact that you, yes you, Some Anonymous Coward Guy on this Nerd News Website That Like The Really Geeky IT Guy at My Work Swears Is Really Good, fairly warned us, nay, verily beseeched us, each and every one of us. Yes, you , you stepped forward, stepped up like a man to say, "I am not afraid of ridicule and derision, I am not afraid of accountability and responsibility. For I must do What's Right, and tell them all the Truth...on this I shall stake my Honor and my Good Name." And, truly, your Good Name will be on the lips of many fools when the unraveling of google comes. "O!" they will cry, "We were so blind! So deaf! What fools were we to not heed the sage and stern warnings of that kind and wise teacher, Mr. Anonymous Coward!"
"When he prophesied that BSD is dying, we did not listen!
When he foretold the second coming of SCO, we did not heed!
When he foresaw Apple's imminent demise, we turned our backs!
And now, when his fearful vision portends the certain unraveling of Google, we,
like mindless lemmings, pay neither mind nor heed, but march
ceasely off the windswept crags of our insolent hubris
and toward our certain doom!
Save us, Mr. Anonymous Coward! Save us from our ignorance! Save us
from ourselves!"
Oh, yeah. You'll show them all.
*maybe the brain has some fractal structure too, I suspect so. But the Sun is a) bigger and b) the turbulence probably goes to smaller scales than cellular structure sizes.
I think most neuroscientists mean the brain is the most "functionally complex" not "mechanically compex" system. This may seem a subjective, arbitrary designation--except consider that neither the sun, nor any other celestial body, nor any other system in the universe, is as observably conscious, self-aware, or sentient, nor demonstrates the abilities to reason, feel, communicate, create, and manipulate the environment to the extent afforded by the human brain.
No other system that we know of.
So the brain isn't the most complicated structure but it may well be the most difficult to simulate in such a way that you can recover its interesting characteristics. I don't think there's a good word for that.
The word is "emergence."
the only thing they've ever had going for them was that stupid cow.
Yeah but you know what they say...Moo' money, moo' problems.
I'll get my coat.
No, if this is as powerful an oxidizer as they say, those stains won't form in the first place. The same way oxidizing cleaners break up stains, this stuff would be like having a constant coating of bleach on your bathroom surfaces. Furthermore, due to the "superhydrophilicity" of this titanium dioxide coating (as the article mentions), water will not form droplets (tension cannot be maintained), and thus you have a constant sheeting effect, allowing the surface to be very washable. There's a reason they use this stuff on self-cleaning windows on skyscrapers--it's not for the disinfecting action! It actually breaks up and releases the fine organic crud that makes stains in the first place.
My favorite news outlet was reporting on this like 7 years ago.
Truly, the cyberdump was heralded long ago.
From that article:
Scoscia noted that "Number 2.0," as Silicon Valley insiders have dubbed it, will be cross-platform compatible and fully 2K Flushes compliant. In addition, he said, it will feature significantly wider, more comfortable bandwidth to accommodate even the most massive user download.