This idea goes exactly against what successful companies like Google and Overture are doing. This will totally turn off consumers to anyone who implements this. Good luck.
Global warming and climate change are real and undenyable. All it takes is some sampling of weather patterns over the past few hundred years (since we have been recording them) to note the drastic shifts in the past few decades.
You are absolutly right. Global warming IS happening. The temperatures have risen about 1 degree celcius in the last hundred years. The questions are:
1.) Why?
2.) Is it even possible for us to effect it?
Some people see Global Warming as a religion and want people to not even look at the facts. Even if we just did what we've been doing for the last hundred years, for the next one hundred years, temperatures will only rise by one degree. When they do rise by one degree, we will surely be out of Oil and probably even out of Coal beacuse the total supply for each at current usage levels is well under 100 years, so that leaves only a few options that can generate enough energy to fill our needs: Nuclear Fission, Hot Nuclear Fusion, Solar, Wind, Hydroelectric. What's interesting about all these choices? None of them give off CO2, the dreaded thing that causes Global Warming. So in conclusion: if you believe that that answer to question 1 is that we are causing global warming and you believe that the answer to number 2 is that we can effect global warming, why not allow humans to use up all the Oil/Coal over the next 100 years? Then we will be forced to use renewable energy sources anyhow! The temperature would probably only rise about 1 degree. I know some people will respond and say that 1 degree will destroy the earth or something, but all I know is that 1 degree didn't seem to destroy us over the last 100 years. There are many more of us here now. So unless we're teetering on some sort of plateu of death in terms of temperatures, everything will work its way out.
I see this as a great way to get rid or receipts. Lets face it, they always give you a receipt, but ever since I was able to look at my statement online, I've never worried about receipts. Think of how much paper this will save!
(shudder) to quote Bruce Schneier, you can't make water unwet, you can't make bits uncopyable.
Sure you can't make bits uncopyable, BUT you can make it very difficult for people to copy the bits. This is all that DRM attempts to do. Microsoft actually came out with an interesting paper on this several years ago. They called it the dark networks I think. It referred to the perpetual group of people that will copy software/movies/mp3s/etc without permission. This group of people is less than 5% of the population. The goal of companies that produce content that they would like to control the rights to, is to keep this group as small as possible.
But I wonder how much energy did it consume to produce those huge amounts of Hydrogen & Oxygen? Will it be lesser than the power generated by the reaction between them?
Even if it takes about the same energy to produce the chemicals, this is ok. Don't think of a fuel cell as an energy producer, it's an energy storage device. This is like a battery. When you charge a battery, you don't get a net increase in energy. You are merely moving electricity that is produced in an electric plant into the battery. The train is the same idea. With something the same size as a train, I can't see any reason not to just use a battery. In fact, you could potentially have a batery car or something like that to store the energy and it would be cheaper than fuel cells. Fuel cells are mainly interesting in automobile applications because their energy storage density is greater than Lithium batteries. Still it's good to see work being done on the fuel cell front.
I guess I don't get why IBM would have a problem with other people using their hardware specs for free. The barriers to entry are pretty big for one thing. It's not like your average Joe has a Billion dollar fab in his back yard and can use IBM's code to create a processor. The real trade secrets are in the manufacturing process. There's a big difference in making a chip and making millions of chips that cost less than $100 to mass produce.
You are bindly and ignorantly assuming that all laptops thefts come from homeless.
When did I say all laptop thefts occur due to homeless people? I just said maybe less would occur if they took care of the homeless problem. I just think the fact that the city is focusing their attention on 70 stolen laptops is crazy when there are more important problems like 14,000 homeless people.
You don't know many people who are/have been homeless, do you?
Well, as I pointed out in the previous post, there are 14,000 estimated in SF.
Rarely do people go, "well, I don't feel like having a house and I want to sleep on pavement and scrounge for food."
Yes, well this is stating the obvious. Believe it or not, there are countries that don't have homeless people (or at least they aren't homeless for more than a couple of days). In Singapore for instance, you won't see homeless people. This is because your family MUST support you if you are homeless. If there's no one in your family that can support you they take you somewhere else, but don't let you remain homeless. We could very easily do something like this here.
you sound like yet another 'homelss advocate' who would rather preserve/protect/defend people living on the street than providing real solutions.
No way man. The solution to poverty is never a free handout as you've clearly pointed out. The solution is to make it unatractive to be homeless in San Francisco. This can be done without being cruel.
Just 18 laptop computer robberies were logged in 2004, but the figure jumped to 48 last year. There were 18 as of the end of March, a pace that could surpass 70 crimes this year.
Maybe if the city would figure out a way to get the 14000 homeless people in San Francisco off the street, there would be less stolen laptops. Priorities, priorities, priorities.
It's different. Most places in America, you can't live normally without driving. Sad, perhaps, but true.
First of all, I totally disagree with the premise of this post. Cars are a good thing. They allow people to travel and get a broader perspective, enjoy time with their families, communte to work, be more productive, etc. But enough of stating the obvious. It's true that they emit CO2, but were quickly solving this problem as we speak and hybrids cut the emissions down by a lot. I would not be surprised to see electric cars that actually work in the next 10 - 20 years.
...because you're probably the most obese people on earth, which doesn't get any better by you sitting in cars and at desks all day.
Incorrect. See this URL: here there are more overweight people in the Middle East, Latin America, and Easter Europe.
Secondly, you don't have much of public transportation because noone would use it.
Again wrong. In big cities like San Francisco, New York, etc...many people do use public transportation. Maybe the reason many americans don't is because they live in rural areas. It just doesn't make sense to have the rapid transit go out to the ranch. With such a huge amount of land and 300 million people, it's pretty spread out.
Our population density is *half* of yours, we pay about $6/gallon already.
Not sure where you live, but many countries tax gasoline excessively. That is most likely why you pay more for gas. This is very unfortunate, but it's not American's fault that your government is doing this.
Full Quote: "We want to urge all system builders -- indeed, all Partners -- not to supply naked PCs. It is a risk to your customers and a risk to your business -- with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services," wrote Alexander.
The post says that if you buy an OS you're going to get a visit from MSFT, but the guy doesn't say anything like that. The risk he mentions seems to refer to the loss of opportunities to market software and services.
the privilege against self-incrimination does not apply to corporations or other collective entities.
Yes, corporations can't self-incriminate themselves and they can't even be incriminated at all. That is they can only be sued civily. There are obvious reasons for this. First and foremost, you cannot send a corporation to jail. You can however try the directors or officers of the corporations for criminal charges if they committed crimes in which the corporation is civily liable. But the only recourse against a corporation is a financial recourse.
Yeah, baby, it'll be higher than all the other guys', you just have to give me some time...
I sincerely hope you were referring to your IQ score when you said it will be higher than all the other guys'. The "yeah baby" made me picture Mike Meyers in Austin Powers. Bad visual.
Your conclusion that because Al-Qaeda is primative, terror attacks will not occur online is not a good one. We can't limit our defense to one group. There are many possible threats. Think back to Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh and you'll know that terrorism is not limited to Al-Qaeda. I'm glad that the government is working to protect us in this manner as well as more traditional ways.
Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year to put off introducing a new ".xxx" domain for pornography on the internet.
I'm sure there was pressure from some Christian organizations, but if I remember it correctly, the real pressure was from countries that didn't like the idea (China is one that comes to mind). Anyone else remember it that way?
I love it. In all seriousness, the future is in wi-fi mp3 players. I want to store my mp3s on a disk drive somewhere and stream them. That means the mp3 player could actually be REALLY small and still store unlimited mp3s. This time is would seriously be unlimited if you're willing to pay for the storage on the server.
Sure they do, if you buy unlimited discs. You could also buy more flash drives for your mp3 player and carry them around or you could be satisfied with the hour after hour of songs most mp3 players offer (4 gB with the iPod nano). To say that mini discs have unlimited storage is intelectually dishonest. That's like saying that floppy disks have unlimited storage.
Sorry, this is BS. You really cannot be serious. Let me summarize your argument: You believe that because drug companies already have patents, they don't want to develop new drugs because they can just sell drugs they already have patents on. If that's the case, why are all the drug companies spending billions on R&D? Are they just doing it for fun? No, they want to come up with treatments for diseases. Have you considered the possibility that it's not easy to come up with genetic treatments? Also, have you considered that the FDA might be the one responsible for only approving 20 drugs last year?
Can someone tell me why this is bad news? Why is the assumption that innovation will be followed by excessive litigation? Even though there have been patent lawsuits that are meritless, I can only see the amount of innovation in this area as a good thing.
Only if you consider IT management to not be part of IT. I however disagree. IT management is not general purpose management. The best IT managers tend to grock technology.
Sun could have charged money for the Java JDK. They chose not to. It's very easy to argume that at least one customer would have been willing to pay money, thus there are "substantial damages".
Don't you see any difference in your comparison? Sun chose to give away free stuff in order to sell their servers. In the case of Microsoft/Linux, these are two different entities. Also, Microsoft doesn't sell servers, they only sell their OS, so they can't monitize with hardware like Sun does.
Think about what you're taking for granted.
An exectuive could easily say that the lawsuit is not worth the risk and financial outlay.
No, I'm not taking this for granted. Unfortunatly for your argument's sake, this is not the case. Balmer has not said that the risk and financial outlay do not justify making a lawsuit. This is your opinion.
Contrary to what you believe corporations are not required to sue to defend patents. IBM has/had a patent on measuring bra cups sizes. Do you see them suing anyone?
I never said that corporations are required to defend all patents. CEO's are required to do what's in the best interest of the shareholders. That's who hires them. You keep making straw man arguments that are completely different than the case we're talking about. We're talking about Linux potentially infringing on Microsoft patents, not bra cup sizes.
Did you even read my post? I said, IF there are "substantial damages to the corporations ability to make money". Obviously, if there's a sane reason to do otherwise, then it hasn't damaged their ability to make money substantially. You don't have to go with the lowest bidder on contracts, but if the lowest bidder has a better deal overall, you can't give the contract to your friends. This is a similar case, Balmer can't just say, hey Linux is a good OS and the people who created it have a good heart even though they're destroying our business model and infringing on our intellectual property rights. It just doesn't work that way. Think about what you're objecting to. What do you want Balmer to say, "Even if Linux is illegally infringing on our patents we won't have any strategy to protect our shareholders because we think it's the right thing to do." Nothing short of that will make you people happy.
Slashdot Mirror
This idea goes exactly against what successful companies like Google and Overture are doing. This will totally turn off consumers to anyone who implements this. Good luck.
Global warming and climate change are real and undenyable. All it takes is some sampling of weather patterns over the past few hundred years (since we have been recording them) to note the drastic shifts in the past few decades.
You are absolutly right. Global warming IS happening. The temperatures have risen about 1 degree celcius in the last hundred years. The questions are:
1.) Why?
2.) Is it even possible for us to effect it?
Some people see Global Warming as a religion and want people to not even look at the facts. Even if we just did what we've been doing for the last hundred years, for the next one hundred years, temperatures will only rise by one degree. When they do rise by one degree, we will surely be out of Oil and probably even out of Coal beacuse the total supply for each at current usage levels is well under 100 years, so that leaves only a few options that can generate enough energy to fill our needs: Nuclear Fission, Hot Nuclear Fusion, Solar, Wind, Hydroelectric. What's interesting about all these choices? None of them give off CO2, the dreaded thing that causes Global Warming. So in conclusion: if you believe that that answer to question 1 is that we are causing global warming and you believe that the answer to number 2 is that we can effect global warming, why not allow humans to use up all the Oil/Coal over the next 100 years? Then we will be forced to use renewable energy sources anyhow! The temperature would probably only rise about 1 degree. I know some people will respond and say that 1 degree will destroy the earth or something, but all I know is that 1 degree didn't seem to destroy us over the last 100 years. There are many more of us here now. So unless we're teetering on some sort of plateu of death in terms of temperatures, everything will work its way out.
I see this as a great way to get rid or receipts. Lets face it, they always give you a receipt, but ever since I was able to look at my statement online, I've never worried about receipts. Think of how much paper this will save!
(shudder) to quote Bruce Schneier, you can't make water unwet, you can't make bits uncopyable.
Sure you can't make bits uncopyable, BUT you can make it very difficult for people to copy the bits. This is all that DRM attempts to do. Microsoft actually came out with an interesting paper on this several years ago. They called it the dark networks I think. It referred to the perpetual group of people that will copy software/movies/mp3s/etc without permission. This group of people is less than 5% of the population. The goal of companies that produce content that they would like to control the rights to, is to keep this group as small as possible.
But I wonder how much energy did it consume to produce those huge amounts of Hydrogen & Oxygen? Will it be lesser than the power generated by the reaction between them?
Even if it takes about the same energy to produce the chemicals, this is ok. Don't think of a fuel cell as an energy producer, it's an energy storage device. This is like a battery. When you charge a battery, you don't get a net increase in energy. You are merely moving electricity that is produced in an electric plant into the battery. The train is the same idea. With something the same size as a train, I can't see any reason not to just use a battery. In fact, you could potentially have a batery car or something like that to store the energy and it would be cheaper than fuel cells. Fuel cells are mainly interesting in automobile applications because their energy storage density is greater than Lithium batteries. Still it's good to see work being done on the fuel cell front.
I guess I don't get why IBM would have a problem with other people using their hardware specs for free. The barriers to entry are pretty big for one thing. It's not like your average Joe has a Billion dollar fab in his back yard and can use IBM's code to create a processor. The real trade secrets are in the manufacturing process. There's a big difference in making a chip and making millions of chips that cost less than $100 to mass produce.
Well, it's probably not a penthouse suite, but shelter is better than no shelter.
You are bindly and ignorantly assuming that all laptops thefts come from homeless.
When did I say all laptop thefts occur due to homeless people? I just said maybe less would occur if they took care of the homeless problem. I just think the fact that the city is focusing their attention on 70 stolen laptops is crazy when there are more important problems like 14,000 homeless people.
You don't know many people who are/have been homeless, do you?
Well, as I pointed out in the previous post, there are 14,000 estimated in SF.
Rarely do people go, "well, I don't feel like having a house and I want to sleep on pavement and scrounge for food."
Yes, well this is stating the obvious. Believe it or not, there are countries that don't have homeless people (or at least they aren't homeless for more than a couple of days). In Singapore for instance, you won't see homeless people. This is because your family MUST support you if you are homeless. If there's no one in your family that can support you they take you somewhere else, but don't let you remain homeless. We could very easily do something like this here.
you sound like yet another 'homelss advocate' who would rather preserve/protect/defend people living on the street than providing real solutions.
No way man. The solution to poverty is never a free handout as you've clearly pointed out. The solution is to make it unatractive to be homeless in San Francisco. This can be done without being cruel.
Just 18 laptop computer robberies were logged in 2004, but the figure jumped to 48 last year. There were 18 as of the end of March, a pace that could surpass 70 crimes this year.
Maybe if the city would figure out a way to get the 14000 homeless people in San Francisco off the street, there would be less stolen laptops. Priorities, priorities, priorities.
It's different. Most places in America, you can't live normally without driving. Sad, perhaps, but true.
...because you're probably the most obese people on earth, which doesn't get any better by you sitting in cars and at desks all day.
First of all, I totally disagree with the premise of this post. Cars are a good thing. They allow people to travel and get a broader perspective, enjoy time with their families, communte to work, be more productive, etc. But enough of stating the obvious. It's true that they emit CO2, but were quickly solving this problem as we speak and hybrids cut the emissions down by a lot. I would not be surprised to see electric cars that actually work in the next 10 - 20 years.
Incorrect. See this URL: here there are more overweight people in the Middle East, Latin America, and Easter Europe.
Secondly, you don't have much of public transportation because noone would use it.
Again wrong. In big cities like San Francisco, New York, etc...many people do use public transportation. Maybe the reason many americans don't is because they live in rural areas. It just doesn't make sense to have the rapid transit go out to the ranch. With such a huge amount of land and 300 million people, it's pretty spread out.
Our population density is *half* of yours, we pay about $6/gallon already.
Not sure where you live, but many countries tax gasoline excessively. That is most likely why you pay more for gas. This is very unfortunate, but it's not American's fault that your government is doing this.
Full Quote: "We want to urge all system builders -- indeed, all Partners -- not to supply naked PCs. It is a risk to your customers and a risk to your business -- with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services," wrote Alexander.
The post says that if you buy an OS you're going to get a visit from MSFT, but the guy doesn't say anything like that. The risk he mentions seems to refer to the loss of opportunities to market software and services.
the privilege against self-incrimination does not apply to corporations or other collective entities.
Yes, corporations can't self-incriminate themselves and they can't even be incriminated at all. That is they can only be sued civily. There are obvious reasons for this. First and foremost, you cannot send a corporation to jail. You can however try the directors or officers of the corporations for criminal charges if they committed crimes in which the corporation is civily liable. But the only recourse against a corporation is a financial recourse.
Yeah, baby, it'll be higher than all the other guys', you just have to give me some time...
I sincerely hope you were referring to your IQ score when you said it will be higher than all the other guys'. The "yeah baby" made me picture Mike Meyers in Austin Powers. Bad visual.
Your conclusion that because Al-Qaeda is primative, terror attacks will not occur online is not a good one. We can't limit our defense to one group. There are many possible threats. Think back to Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh and you'll know that terrorism is not limited to Al-Qaeda. I'm glad that the government is working to protect us in this manner as well as more traditional ways.
Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year to put off introducing a new ".xxx" domain for pornography on the internet.
I'm sure there was pressure from some Christian organizations, but if I remember it correctly, the real pressure was from countries that didn't like the idea (China is one that comes to mind). Anyone else remember it that way?
I love it. In all seriousness, the future is in wi-fi mp3 players. I want to store my mp3s on a disk drive somewhere and stream them. That means the mp3 player could actually be REALLY small and still store unlimited mp3s. This time is would seriously be unlimited if you're willing to pay for the storage on the server.
MiniDisc offers unlimited storage space.
Sure they do, if you buy unlimited discs. You could also buy more flash drives for your mp3 player and carry them around or you could be satisfied with the hour after hour of songs most mp3 players offer (4 gB with the iPod nano). To say that mini discs have unlimited storage is intelectually dishonest. That's like saying that floppy disks have unlimited storage.
Sorry, this is BS. You really cannot be serious. Let me summarize your argument: You believe that because drug companies already have patents, they don't want to develop new drugs because they can just sell drugs they already have patents on. If that's the case, why are all the drug companies spending billions on R&D? Are they just doing it for fun? No, they want to come up with treatments for diseases. Have you considered the possibility that it's not easy to come up with genetic treatments? Also, have you considered that the FDA might be the one responsible for only approving 20 drugs last year?
Can someone tell me why this is bad news? Why is the assumption that innovation will be followed by excessive litigation? Even though there have been patent lawsuits that are meritless, I can only see the amount of innovation in this area as a good thing.
Only if you consider IT management to not be part of IT. I however disagree. IT management is not general purpose management. The best IT managers tend to grock technology.
Device Developed To Help Socially Challenged
It's called a computer.
Sun could have charged money for the Java JDK. They chose not to. It's very easy to argume that at least one customer would have been willing to pay money, thus there are "substantial damages".
Don't you see any difference in your comparison? Sun chose to give away free stuff in order to sell their servers. In the case of Microsoft/Linux, these are two different entities. Also, Microsoft doesn't sell servers, they only sell their OS, so they can't monitize with hardware like Sun does.
Think about what you're taking for granted. An exectuive could easily say that the lawsuit is not worth the risk and financial outlay.
No, I'm not taking this for granted. Unfortunatly for your argument's sake, this is not the case. Balmer has not said that the risk and financial outlay do not justify making a lawsuit. This is your opinion.
Contrary to what you believe corporations are not required to sue to defend patents. IBM has/had a patent on measuring bra cups sizes. Do you see them suing anyone?
I never said that corporations are required to defend all patents. CEO's are required to do what's in the best interest of the shareholders. That's who hires them. You keep making straw man arguments that are completely different than the case we're talking about. We're talking about Linux potentially infringing on Microsoft patents, not bra cup sizes.
Did you even read my post? I said, IF there are "substantial damages to the corporations ability to make money". Obviously, if there's a sane reason to do otherwise, then it hasn't damaged their ability to make money substantially. You don't have to go with the lowest bidder on contracts, but if the lowest bidder has a better deal overall, you can't give the contract to your friends. This is a similar case, Balmer can't just say, hey Linux is a good OS and the people who created it have a good heart even though they're destroying our business model and infringing on our intellectual property rights. It just doesn't work that way. Think about what you're objecting to. What do you want Balmer to say, "Even if Linux is illegally infringing on our patents we won't have any strategy to protect our shareholders because we think it's the right thing to do." Nothing short of that will make you people happy.