Maybe Siri is awesome, but the author of this article (as far as I can tell) has never used it. He's talking about something which is going to 'change everything' and he's not even used it!
We have a journalist trumping up a tech that no one has used yet! He's a totally schilling for Apple.
There will be incentive, but the powers that be may fight it.
Apple has no incentive to support such a thing.
Google though, I don't think would care.
MS, I'm not sure.
It depends on which groups you think want to lock developers in, and which want pitch a big tent. So far Apple seems intent on fostering as much developer lock-in as possible (they might call it "commitment"), as one of the major draws of their platforms is that many apps are exclusive to them. This will become less relevant with time as Android slowly gnaws away at them, but they will never give in. Google only wants people to use the internet, so they will support whatever makes that happen more. They may not make such a tool chain, but they wouldn't stop it from being implemented or deployed (anyone can make anything run on Android after all). MS, I dunno. It would seem to be in their interest, but they may not let go of their MS-uber-alles mindset.
The most dangerous thing is about this is that now when a glitch or bug or malware causes a plane to blow up a wedding, it means no one is responsible. No one ordered it, and no one can be punished for it.
I like your comment, but I think the beauty of Black and White is that its completely legitimate to play the game either way. You can't make people sit out a few rounds when they kill a civilian. The game can't be preachy or its not actually fun. A good game can't bash its players over the head for not playing "right." In B & W you could be evil, but it had natural consequences. Your tower would be all dark, your people afraid of you. It had advantages though (sacrificing peons for quick power). The beauty of the game was that most people choose to be good. Its actually more difficult to be perfectly good in that game than evil because its so easy to accidentally kill people (just as in war).
Being good was incentivized because it was more challenging. You don't have to "slap their hands" to make them behave, you simply have to make it as real as possible.
Hasn't Peter Molyneux (creator of Black and White, Fable, and other games with open-ended player ethics) said he's always found in games where players could choose good or evil that most people will choose good? I remember playing Back and White, the most frustrating thing was that the controls were imprecise enough that it was easy to accidentally kill people (this may have been by design) and I felt bad that the people had died.
The GTA series would tend to go against this notion, but I think that's not quite a fair comparison. GTA is a game where evil behavior is the only thing to do in the game.
I saw let them kill civilians, let their character's be evil, but let their be consequences. I don't mean make them get court-martialed (that doesn't sound like a fun game), but let there be a practical effect. For instance, if you had to use informants, killing civilians might mean you can't work with them as much, and have to work with the dangerous mob, maybe your activities result in the end of the game being about installing a brutal autocrat, rather than schools for girls and voting. (As you can tell, I have never played these games and so I don't know what the actual purpose is.)
Hey, is Samsung wants to make a tablet, why can't they just make it have a circular screen? Or a spherical one? Apple did a lot of innovation on that rectanglular screen and that wont have samsung stealing their IP!
(Note: The tab has a differently sized and shaped screen than the iPad)
If the Tab uses iPad's design, how is it that I can tell them apart?
Apple says they are the same, but they aren't at all. They are different sizes, weights, thicknesses. The OS looks different and works differently. They are clearly different objects.
Apple is doing this because the Tab was the first tablet which was from a design sense superior to the iPad. It's thinner and lighter.
What are you talking about? The Soyuz rocket has the best track record of any launch vehicle. It's an incredibly well-designed rocket which has not been improved in over a decade.
I get your point, limited supplies lead to hoarding. However, if you define hoarding as "spending very little" and the denominations of currency are discrete, then eventually this results in no spending. With bitcoin its just as easy and possible to spend 1 BTC as it is to spend 0.0000001 BTC. So you can hoard your bitcoins, and still spend very few of them.
So yes, deflation may happen, but the floor is much lower than it is with normal currencies.
Also, I am not, at the moment, convinced that most people are not spending bitcoins.
Which says: "According to bitcoinwatch.com, the best source of Bitcoin data, more than a million dollars' worth of bitcoins were traded on June 13." "By early August, less than half a million dollars in bitcoins were being used in transactions; even the currency's value had been cut in half."
So they say the USD value of all bitcoin transactions (I am guessing per day) more than halved in this one month period. That shows that people are spending less. (note: they say transactions, which differs from trades. Transactions are when one entity gives bitcoins to another, theoretically in exchange for goods or service. This differs from trade volume, which is simply exchanging BTC for USD or whatever).
If look today though at bitcoinwatch.com I see there were 6,476 transactions in the past 24 hours involving 394,474.39 BTC, and the current value of the BTC is ~$6.50 USD, which gives us ~$2.5 million USD in BTC traded in the past day at an avg of $386 per transaction.
That seems like a lot per transaction, but without rawer data I can't say how much this differs from the median transaction size. Otherwise it looks like people are buying expensive things mostly, possibly drugs from The Silk Road.
It's currently not apparent to me how to get all the historical data and look at trends in transaction volume, but it seems good to me (at least compared to the low numbers JAMES SUROWIECKI uses.
The only caveat I can see is that we cannot know how many of these transactions are people moving money between different "wallets" they own (the bitcoin equivalent of an account) as the identity is anonymous. It could be the vast majority of these transactions is the result of people shuffling money from one hand or the other.
I think the truth is that nothing has intrinsic value. Value is, by its very nature, a subjective thing. If gold caused autism it would still have value, because people keep it in vaults anyway.
Oil has value as an energy source, but that differs from intrinsic value, as for someone to value it they have to care about energy.
Plus, if we were on an oil standard, that would be insane. We'd immediately stop burning oil and have no energy, then everyone would build solar, wind, nuclear, hydroelectirc etc, power stations like mad to make up the difference. At this point the oil has no value as we would have replaced it with superior technology, its use as a form of currency would be as meaningless as gold's.
I've read somewhere though, that there are a lot of good reasons gold is an ideal unit of trade. It's rare (but not too rare), its easy to work and shape, melts at a relatively low temperature, is too soft to be useful as a structural material (copper in this way could not be a good unit of trade because people would smarter to use it to make tools and weapons), does not tarnish or corrode, not easily counterfeited, etc.
These properties are not present in any other element.
There's an important thing you're both missing though, bitcoins are divisible by 8 decimal places. That means its possible for things to cost very few bitcoins in a way which is not possible in current monetary systems. Even if bitcoins have a very high trade value you will still be able to spend it 0.00000001 BTC at a time.
I think that increases the ability to hoard them as much as you like, AND still spend them. I dunno if this completely nullifies the argument though. I think people mistake BTC as being a digital version of a dollar, when its not quite that close. It is more like gold if it were possible to trade gold by the atom.
This is actually a really interesting legal case about data ownership and privacy. What expectation of privacy do you have while using someone else's computer? Do I have the legal right to intercept data when my friends use my computer with my permission? Do I need to offer them a EULA?
I'd think you have no right to intercept data, even if they computer is stolen (assuming this is not an employment scenario). Afterall, you don't have the right to record phone calls between two other parties just because the phone is stolen, or not the property of the phone owner.
I think their argument is that facebook does not readily make available information for you to know what you're giving them. Essentially, facebook knows most people would not be ok with some of the things they do, so they hide the information.
I think its likely anon will execute something, and it will probably make facebook's login not work for 10 mins for people in Slovenia or something else very minor. However, even this small event would probably make CNN, and then they might start asking questions about facebook and its privacy practices.
This would be something facebook would not like, and might harm them, if even very slightly.
You can actually do this already. You can either use the "chrome to phone" extension or just click "save to my maps" in your browser and then open up the saved map on your phone. It's actually a very useful feature when travelling, as you can pin several POI's on your computer before you leave, and then find them when you're walking around.
The problem is most prosecutors won't risk losing good will with a police dept by prosecuting cops in these matters.
How can the police be held to the law if the prosecutors have conflicts of interest? Shouldn't there be a standing special prosecutor to handle such claims?
It should be a crime, punishable with jail time, for an officer to intimidate anyone who is not committing a crime.
Law enforcement should defer to the citizen, not the other way around. An officer should not use their power to impede a citizen without damn good reason, and they should beg the pardon of the citizen if they are mistaken.
I've never understood why law enforcement officials are given special deferment when they say accidentally kill someone. I would expect the opposite. I would expect that its ESPECIALLY bad when a trained person who holds and guards the public trust fails at their job and considered criminally egregious when this is the result of gross negligence or incompetence.
It seems that violent crime goes down every year, yet police budgets go up and up.
Search engines are popular or unpopular based on their ability to retrieve requested information. When "personalization" crosses into biasing your views outside the point of utility, it becomes undesirable to the consumer.
There is no evidence this is happening, and many reasons to think it never will.
Most people aren't like the dittoheads who listen to Rush, they actually want a rounded point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe Siri is awesome, but the author of this article (as far as I can tell) has never used it. He's talking about something which is going to 'change everything' and he's not even used it!
We have a journalist trumping up a tech that no one has used yet! He's a totally schilling for Apple.
Disgusting.
A microscopist would call this "deconvolution."
Yes, because Gmail, Gcal, and Docs are just horrible horrible things all around. There are no good webapps at all!
There will be incentive, but the powers that be may fight it.
Apple has no incentive to support such a thing.
Google though, I don't think would care.
MS, I'm not sure.
It depends on which groups you think want to lock developers in, and which want pitch a big tent. So far Apple seems intent on fostering as much developer lock-in as possible (they might call it "commitment"), as one of the major draws of their platforms is that many apps are exclusive to them. This will become less relevant with time as Android slowly gnaws away at them, but they will never give in. Google only wants people to use the internet, so they will support whatever makes that happen more. They may not make such a tool chain, but they wouldn't stop it from being implemented or deployed (anyone can make anything run on Android after all). MS, I dunno. It would seem to be in their interest, but they may not let go of their MS-uber-alles mindset.
The most dangerous thing is about this is that now when a glitch or bug or malware causes a plane to blow up a wedding, it means no one is responsible. No one ordered it, and no one can be punished for it.
A monitor calibration tool is not a spectrophotometer, its a spectroradiometer.
I like your comment, but I think the beauty of Black and White is that its completely legitimate to play the game either way. You can't make people sit out a few rounds when they kill a civilian. The game can't be preachy or its not actually fun. A good game can't bash its players over the head for not playing "right." In B & W you could be evil, but it had natural consequences. Your tower would be all dark, your people afraid of you. It had advantages though (sacrificing peons for quick power). The beauty of the game was that most people choose to be good. Its actually more difficult to be perfectly good in that game than evil because its so easy to accidentally kill people (just as in war).
Being good was incentivized because it was more challenging. You don't have to "slap their hands" to make them behave, you simply have to make it as real as possible.
Hasn't Peter Molyneux (creator of Black and White, Fable, and other games with open-ended player ethics) said he's always found in games where players could choose good or evil that most people will choose good? I remember playing Back and White, the most frustrating thing was that the controls were imprecise enough that it was easy to accidentally kill people (this may have been by design) and I felt bad that the people had died.
The GTA series would tend to go against this notion, but I think that's not quite a fair comparison. GTA is a game where evil behavior is the only thing to do in the game.
I saw let them kill civilians, let their character's be evil, but let their be consequences. I don't mean make them get court-martialed (that doesn't sound like a fun game), but let there be a practical effect. For instance, if you had to use informants, killing civilians might mean you can't work with them as much, and have to work with the dangerous mob, maybe your activities result in the end of the game being about installing a brutal autocrat, rather than schools for girls and voting. (As you can tell, I have never played these games and so I don't know what the actual purpose is.)
Hey, is Samsung wants to make a tablet, why can't they just make it have a circular screen? Or a spherical one? Apple did a lot of innovation on that rectanglular screen and that wont have samsung stealing their IP!
(Note: The tab has a differently sized and shaped screen than the iPad)
If the Tab uses iPad's design, how is it that I can tell them apart?
Apple says they are the same, but they aren't at all. They are different sizes, weights, thicknesses. The OS looks different and works differently. They are clearly different objects.
Apple is doing this because the Tab was the first tablet which was from a design sense superior to the iPad. It's thinner and lighter.
Apple has to stop this.
What are you talking about? The Soyuz rocket has the best track record of any launch vehicle. It's an incredibly well-designed rocket which has not been improved in over a decade.
I get your point, limited supplies lead to hoarding. However, if you define hoarding as "spending very little" and the denominations of currency are discrete, then eventually this results in no spending. With bitcoin its just as easy and possible to spend 1 BTC as it is to spend 0.0000001 BTC. So you can hoard your bitcoins, and still spend very few of them.
So yes, deflation may happen, but the floor is much lower than it is with normal currencies.
Also, I am not, at the moment, convinced that most people are not spending bitcoins.
Krugman gets his data from a second article:
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38392/
Which says:
"According to bitcoinwatch.com, the best source of Bitcoin data, more than a million dollars' worth of bitcoins were traded on June 13."
"By early August, less than half a million dollars in bitcoins were being used in transactions; even the currency's value had been cut in half."
So they say the USD value of all bitcoin transactions (I am guessing per day) more than halved in this one month period. That shows that people are spending less. (note: they say transactions, which differs from trades. Transactions are when one entity gives bitcoins to another, theoretically in exchange for goods or service. This differs from trade volume, which is simply exchanging BTC for USD or whatever).
If look today though at bitcoinwatch.com I see there were 6,476 transactions in the past 24 hours involving 394,474.39 BTC, and the current value of the BTC is ~$6.50 USD, which gives us ~$2.5 million USD in BTC traded in the past day at an avg of $386 per transaction.
That seems like a lot per transaction, but without rawer data I can't say how much this differs from the median transaction size. Otherwise it looks like people are buying expensive things mostly, possibly drugs from The Silk Road.
It's currently not apparent to me how to get all the historical data and look at trends in transaction volume, but it seems good to me (at least compared to the low numbers JAMES SUROWIECKI uses.
The only caveat I can see is that we cannot know how many of these transactions are people moving money between different "wallets" they own (the bitcoin equivalent of an account) as the identity is anonymous. It could be the vast majority of these transactions is the result of people shuffling money from one hand or the other.
Naturally, I am probably missing something.
I should restate: "if it were practical to trade gold by the atom"
Hammering your gold coins into leaf yourself and being able to credibly verify its mass, quality, and composition is not practical.
I think the truth is that nothing has intrinsic value. Value is, by its very nature, a subjective thing. If gold caused autism it would still have value, because people keep it in vaults anyway.
Oil has value as an energy source, but that differs from intrinsic value, as for someone to value it they have to care about energy.
Plus, if we were on an oil standard, that would be insane. We'd immediately stop burning oil and have no energy, then everyone would build solar, wind, nuclear, hydroelectirc etc, power stations like mad to make up the difference. At this point the oil has no value as we would have replaced it with superior technology, its use as a form of currency would be as meaningless as gold's.
I've read somewhere though, that there are a lot of good reasons gold is an ideal unit of trade. It's rare (but not too rare), its easy to work and shape, melts at a relatively low temperature, is too soft to be useful as a structural material (copper in this way could not be a good unit of trade because people would smarter to use it to make tools and weapons), does not tarnish or corrode, not easily counterfeited, etc.
These properties are not present in any other element.
There's an important thing you're both missing though, bitcoins are divisible by 8 decimal places. That means its possible for things to cost very few bitcoins in a way which is not possible in current monetary systems. Even if bitcoins have a very high trade value you will still be able to spend it 0.00000001 BTC at a time.
I think that increases the ability to hoard them as much as you like, AND still spend them. I dunno if this completely nullifies the argument though. I think people mistake BTC as being a digital version of a dollar, when its not quite that close. It is more like gold if it were possible to trade gold by the atom.
This is actually a really interesting legal case about data ownership and privacy. What expectation of privacy do you have while using someone else's computer? Do I have the legal right to intercept data when my friends use my computer with my permission? Do I need to offer them a EULA?
I'd think you have no right to intercept data, even if they computer is stolen (assuming this is not an employment scenario). Afterall, you don't have the right to record phone calls between two other parties just because the phone is stolen, or not the property of the phone owner.
I think their argument is that facebook does not readily make available information for you to know what you're giving them. Essentially, facebook knows most people would not be ok with some of the things they do, so they hide the information.
I think its likely anon will execute something, and it will probably make facebook's login not work for 10 mins for people in Slovenia or something else very minor. However, even this small event would probably make CNN, and then they might start asking questions about facebook and its privacy practices.
This would be something facebook would not like, and might harm them, if even very slightly.
I hope if one is found nearby they will name it Hyundai +4904/-56.
You can actually do this already. You can either use the "chrome to phone" extension or just click "save to my maps" in your browser and then open up the saved map on your phone. It's actually a very useful feature when travelling, as you can pin several POI's on your computer before you leave, and then find them when you're walking around.
Complain fail.
I'm not following, whats this law?
The problem is most prosecutors won't risk losing good will with a police dept by prosecuting cops in these matters.
How can the police be held to the law if the prosecutors have conflicts of interest? Shouldn't there be a standing special prosecutor to handle such claims?
It should be a crime, punishable with jail time, for an officer to intimidate anyone who is not committing a crime.
Law enforcement should defer to the citizen, not the other way around. An officer should not use their power to impede a citizen without damn good reason, and they should beg the pardon of the citizen if they are mistaken.
I've never understood why law enforcement officials are given special deferment when they say accidentally kill someone. I would expect the opposite. I would expect that its ESPECIALLY bad when a trained person who holds and guards the public trust fails at their job and considered criminally egregious when this is the result of gross negligence or incompetence.
It seems that violent crime goes down every year, yet police budgets go up and up.
Don't think this couldn't be done optically, or with RFID, or wifi, or NFC.
The idea itself is powerful, an obvious weakness in a pathetic implementation does not weaken it.
Of course, this will never happen as long as consumers refuse to buy technology which disobeys them. Oh wait, damn...
Then don't plant Monsanto crops. Monsanto isn't forcing people to buy anything. It just happens they have the best varieties.
I mean, if Monsanto was offering people such a bad business proposition, why would they be doing it?
Search engines are popular or unpopular based on their ability to retrieve requested information. When "personalization" crosses into biasing your views outside the point of utility, it becomes undesirable to the consumer.
There is no evidence this is happening, and many reasons to think it never will.
Most people aren't like the dittoheads who listen to Rush, they actually want a rounded point of view.