As long as the evidence is convincing to a jury of my peers, I have no problems with 'conspiracy to commit' prosecutions. It's when evidence is withheld from the public, or when there is questionable jury selection and following of due process that we must draw the line. Military tribunals are totally out of the question for US citizens, and are highly controversial for foreign nationals as well, if conducted with their typical level of secrecy. Transparency is the best tool we can use to diffuse the tension between security and the rule of law in this country and abroad.
Unfortunately, cases such as Jose Padilla, among others, demonstrate that this administration has been incapable of restraining themselves to non-US citizens, and has set incredibly destructive precedents for thought-crime-type cases of incarceration for theoretical planned acts of US citizens. Who knows whether any of the suspects would have actually carried out any attacks, and the evidence surrounding the cases is invariably kept concealed. This is so incredibly prone to abuse, that even if it has only been used responsibly until now (for which there is little publicly available evidence), it's still unacceptable to create this framework for abuse of US citizens, or of innocent non-US citizens as well. Unless these suspects are caught in the act of initiating their attack, with public evidence thereof, it's completely unconscionable to be holding people for suspicions of future actions, when they might very well have chickened out or changed their mind before they got to the point of carrying out their attack. I hate to be one of those 'Minority Report' type guys comparing everything to a movie, but this is nothing short of pre-crime persecution for theoretical criminal acts, with a massive potential for false positives and abuse of power.
I know it would have serious privacy implications, but I don't really see a more simple method of monetizing content while taking fair use and typical usage needs into consideration. What would you replace copyright with, keeping in mind that content creators should be rewarded for their work? I think Accessright is the most intuitive concept to grasp, and care could be taken to ensure relatively short terms of protection, putting everything into the public domain once the term is up. It's difficult to argue that the act of copying should still be the control point for IP given common usage of digital content... I'm just talking out of my rear, as I have no ties to any content industries, but that seems to me to be the most obvious fix to this problem.
I think you just touched on a more fundamental problem, that copyright is a flawed model of intellectual property protection in this digital age, where you have to copy data just to enjoy it. We make incidental copies whenever we put a CD in the CD player, which copies the data to its memory. We make copies when we put the music on our iPods, or on our computers. We make so many incidental copies during the course of normal usage, that it no longer makes sense to target the act of copying as a control point for intellectual property protection.
Sooner or later, we will have to change to Accessright protection, where particular individuals license access to content under various terms, if we want to continue to facilitate the monetizing of intellectual property content, since merely copying has lost all relevance. Now it's only a question of striking a workable balance between the property rights of licensors and licensees, and to safeguard the privacy of users of the accessright licensing system. Once this is taken care of, we will be ready to move forward with a general intuitive understanding of IP protection again. As it is now, we're trying to fit an outdated model onto an incompatible distribution medium.
That was dynamic translation at runtime, not virtualization. I think something along the lines of WINE would be the path to go for Windows backwards compatibility...
Multitouch is nice for a laptop for several reasons. The first is that the bottom portion of the laptop becomes a screen, where virtual contextual input interfaces are rendered. In a word processor, it might display a standard keyboard and trackpad (or a handwriting recognition area if preferred), but in a video or music playback app, it might show a simplified remote control interface with large, self-descriptive buttons. In a sound editor, it might show a series of knobs and dials for the various filters and adjustments and such. The point, is that custom contextual interfaces might make a lot of tasks more intuitive, and easier to perform. Combined with multitouch gestures, the possibilities are endless. Keyboards are extremely limited input devices for a lot of complex tasks.
Another advantage to this configuration is that if the clamshell design has two flush screens, you can turn it inside-out and latch it back-to-back, one of the screens can inactivate, and you get a tablet configuration, without some complex (read: fragile, shoddy) hinge mechanism.
A company like Apple, who makes both the hardware and the software, is well-positioned to roll out this type of feature in an elegant manner. Microsoft will have to coordinate with hardware vendors, so we'll see how rapidly and well-integrated they can release this type of product.
The problem is that Greenpeace is being negligent by relying on self-reporting on the companies' websites to score them. They score company A lower than company B because A doesn't report as much general environmental information on their website as B. This is despite the fact that A's products are actually much better for the environment; they use less harmful materials, they use less electricity, they use smaller packaging, etc., etc. This makes their ratings completely, fraudulently wrong for a consumer concerned with protecting the environment, and is counterproductive to their goals. You can't take the lazy way out, relying on manufacturers self-reporting their environmental impacts, if you want to have any credibility. It takes an objective 3rd party review with as many data points as possible to build a somewhat accurate picture of relative environmental friendliness. Greenpeace is only harming their own name and value by assigning these completely arbitrary scores to high-profile companies.
And your point is? You think this broadcast flag, or any of this type of DRM, is actually going to prevent cappers from recording shows, stripping commercials, and posting online? The problem is that this DRM does not impact the availability on P2P at all, but instead, ONLY affects legitimate viewers who want the features of a DVR. How do you justify that? If they're so worried about keeping access to eyeballs, maybe they should be encouraging people to get their content from them INSTEAD of from P2P, by giving people what they're looking for; convenient access to the particular content they want. No, the obvious rationale for all this is simply that NBC is run by people who are completely clueless about how to respond to internet distribution, and can't get enough of shooting themselves in the foot.
Specifically designed to offer an extensive set of frameworks and object-oriented C variant Obj-C language != designed to prevent cross-platform development. Does.Net specifically prevent cross-platform development? Just because you offer developers an advanced set of frameworks that only run on your own platform doesn't mean that you're necessarily trying to prevent interoperability, you could just be trying to attract developers with a productive environment. Mac developers don't HAVE to use Apple's frameworks; they could use Java, or strict C, or some other cross-platform language. It's because they're more productive, and they have access to more advanced features provided by the OS vendor, which helps them make better software more easily. If someone wants to make GNUstep usable and provide a set of compatible frameworks for Linux, no one is going to stop them, but it's going to be an awful lot of work to try to keep up with Apple.
Open source philosophy is not tied to any particular platform or programming language. There are thriving OS X GPL projects, such as Adium, and various other networking apps, and its community members likely don't give a rat's ass that some Linux devs aren't joining in. Other OS X devs are happy to contribute, and to use the code in their own open-source projects, and that community is no less valid than the one you choose to participate in. Obviously, it's not as fundamentally free as building on an open framework, since there is a dependence on closed source, but that's not to say that their work is any less important, or that they can't build a successful community around their work. I'm sure they won't be losing a lot of sleep from your lack of respect.
Think of it this way; even if you can't use ALL the code in GPL OS X projects, there is a relatively large userbase for that platform, and so there can potentially be more resources dedicated to developing for it, and so it's possible that significant code contributions to underlying libraries used by those projects are made possible by targetting the platform. You should be happy that people are leveraging your favorite libraries on other platforms, as that can only help make them more robust. Your comment seems awfully antisocial for someone so concerned with community...
Who gets their TV episodes from YouTube? Are you expecting BitTorrent trackers and other P2P services to start enforcing copyright? Are you expecting that they would actually be effective if so? IOW, are you freaking stupid or something? There is no way any of this will come together and amount to anything. NBC is just obviously run by idiots who don't understand the innerwebs. If they're so worried about keeping their viewership, maybe they should think about giving people what they want in a convenient manner, and at least they'll be able to have some control over the situation. Fighting against their viewers simply guarantees that they will be sidelined to irrelevance, since someone else WILL cater to them, even if it's hobbyist cappers stripping out the commercials and putting the content on P2P. Sooner or later, these distributors are going to have to give up complete control if they want the chance to keep any control at all.
I would have loved to have bought an X360 instead of a PS3, but the thing is TOO DAMN LOUD, and it's still plagued with reliability issues. A friend of mine is currently in the process of returning his FOURTH 360, in the span of less than two years. They've had all this time to get their act together, and yet the super ultimate pro version of the 360 is still the loud, unreliable piece of kit it was when it was released. If they screw up the hardware for a consumer product this badly, no matter how great their software is (and it IS great software for a game console), they're still leaving a sour taste in a lot of mouths. That's no way to improve your image as you try to break into consumer electronics. Here's hoping for a real ultra-super-duper pro version with decent cooling, and hopefully a hard drive and BluRay drive, but alas, it's probably not going to be for this generation. I can't recommend a 360 to anyone in good conscience.
When you look at Apple's revenue growth for the last couple years, a P/E of 38 isn't really extraordinary... Apple's business is growing like a market upstart.
Or you could just have their ISP disconnect them from the internet, if you can identify them, effectively taking their bullets away in the case of your analogy (maybe more of a containment barrier around the 'infected' lawn). The mob might want to go smash the infected person's property, when the more elegant solution is to to simply prevent them from doing any damage in their infected state, while offering them the tools needed to cure the infection.
"For regular sauce, the first thing you need to do is make sure that you do not just go out and start decapitating zombies left and right. Do you understand? Do not start decapitating zombies left and right!"
This is an excellent point, with no clear answer. I think the best solution is white-hat hackers working for governments or ISPs in a covert manner, and if there turns out to be some harm caused by the 'good' worm, that will have to be accepted as a risk of having a machine on the net with a known vulnerability. You can't really give legal immunity to some group of people to go mess with other people's machines, as that will be abused as shoddy patches get pushed out with very real harmful consequences, possibly even worse than the malware authors, who at least have a vested interest in keeping infected machines working fairly normally. If this were a covert operation, the ones in charge would also have an interest in keeping the infected machine working normally, so that they are not noticed, hopefully leading to a better user experience than if we had some official god-like organization empowered to install whatever they want on anyone's computer.
I say fight fire with fire, and let those who would try to shut down the botnets use similar tactics of anonymity as the botnet creators themselves, letting the chips fall where they may. Combine this with ISP-level monitoring of infected computers, only allowing them to connect to trusted sites hosting the patches they might need, and we have a reasonably effective countermeasure that doesn't rely on taking away the property rights of computer owners.
It's very difficult to do a hostile takeover of a privately held company. A hostile takeover is where a buyer makes an offer directly to shareholders of a publicly-traded company to buy their shares at a certain price above their market value, in the hopes of obtaining a controlling interest in the target company. This is a fairly straightforward procedure, as it's easy to find all the major shareholders in a public company. In a private company, the shareholders are not disclosed, and eBay would actually have to find each stockholder and make them personal offers. It's very possible that the majority stake is owned by the people currently running Craigslist (Craig, the CEO, other chief executives), who might be extremely unlikely to accept eBay's offers, no matter how high they are, if they have an emotional attachment to the company.
This is probably nothing more than trying to push Craigslist to monetize their site more, showing ads, charging for more services and raising their rates, in the hopes of increasing their revenue, and that it might push people away from Craigslist in favor of eBay.
Are you kidding me? On the Way? eBay is already pure, distilled evil and incompetence. The recent requirement to use Paypal for all transactions, the substantial rate hikes; everything they do is to leverage their captive userbase and squeeze more revenue out of them. They know they're the only serious worldwide game in town for what they do, and they're intent on exploiting that to the fullest. I, for one, can't wait to see them dethroned by someone and reduced to irrelevance, now that they've worn out all their goodwill.
Ummm, no. If we lose morale and pull out of Iraq, that is a GOOD thing. It was wrong to go there, and it's still wrong to be there now. No amount of sugar coating of the situation is going to make it more reasonable or successful. If you're counting on US media coverage to win this war, then it's already lost. To further spread misinformation, for any amount of time, is reprehensible. Having an open media means that an unjust or unpopular war will be criticized. If we can't bear the criticism, then that's a clear sign that we shouldn't be in the war in question. You can't just push a democratic country into a poorly-justified war, and expect a free pass.
I see this type of development as a preliminary step towards creating virtual artificial intelligence representations of ourselves. As we observe the way the user parses information on their computer, the decisions they make, the type of sources they prefer, we build up a sort of virtual image of their thought patterns. Over time, this will evolve into fairly sophisticated AI reflections of ourselves, for the purpose of acting like personal agents to scour the internet for us and find the information we might be interested in. If we could duplicate ourselves infinitely and turn ourselves loose on the internet, the wealth of relevant data at our disposal would grow tremendously. As these personal agents learn our thought patters over the years, they might even be capable of forming social relationships for us, finding other people who might share our interests and agendas. These agents could even continue to function long after the person it was modeled from is dead, possibly acting as a living reflection of your personality for your descendants. This market drive will be the catalyst for technology allowing us to eventually transfer our minds and personalities onto a computer.
It could be used if there was an efficient method of storing excess solar energy. They do an interesting thing in France with their nuclear/hydroelectric grid setup, where excess nuclear power is used to pump water from a downstream dam to an upstream one. In effect, the two dams are a large battery, releasing water from the upper to the lower to release the energy, and pumping it back upstream to recharge it. Other alternatives would be storing excess energy as hydrogen through water electrolysis, and recombining in a fuel cell to release the energy, though the economics of fuel cell catalytic membranes are not quite ready for this. Add to these solutions the superconducting "Supergrid" planned for the US, and you can load balance across the continent as different areas have different levels of solar exposure and usage requirements. These problems are solvable, and solar really could replace coal as the principle source of power for the US grid, with some ingenuity. It's just a question of how badly we want it.
Eventually, they will get bitten when they change computers a few times, find that they've used up all their iTunes licenses because they never bothered to de-authorize their old computers, and now have to call Apple support for help because their music won't play anymore. Random issues like this will present roadblocks, and the solution is inevitably to convert any DRM'd content to standard format and stop buying the DRM'd content. I know several relatively un-geeky people who regularly shopped from the iTunes Store and were bit by this, and have now learned their lesson. Ultimately, everyone will discover that DRM sucks, and that they should avoid it if possible.
Don't forget to dissolve your toe-prints and fingerprints with industrial cleaner... And always cover yourself in random people's DNA... Wear a full-body disguise to obscure your physical features... Hell, just order delivery.
Except that Apple never advertised a 1920x1280x24 screen; they merely stated 'millions of colors', which according to your second argument, should be what the observer "perceives" with a 1920x1280x18 resolution dithered color display. If the color perception is the only relevant criterion to measure against Apple's claim of color display, then their dithered 6BPP monitors should qualify. The millions of perceived colors ARE displayed, just not at the same resolution as a 24BPP display; but as you point out, it was never made clear in Apple marketing literature that you get the "millions of colors" at any particular resolution, and so technically, Apple didn't make any false statements about their displays, but merely left it ambiguous enough that people might be confused. This is pretty different from saying that Apple falsely advertised their displays' capabilities. It's unfortunate that people misinterpreted the product specs, but I don't think it's reasonable to claim that the specs were inaccurate, merely uninformative.
I agree completely. I'm a big Futurama fan, and I've watched every episode, and I thought the movie Bender's Big Score sucked ass. They must have changed their writing staff or rushed production, because the humor was just lame. The next one had better not be this bad, or I'll have to write Futurama off as a total loss.
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As long as the evidence is convincing to a jury of my peers, I have no problems with 'conspiracy to commit' prosecutions. It's when evidence is withheld from the public, or when there is questionable jury selection and following of due process that we must draw the line. Military tribunals are totally out of the question for US citizens, and are highly controversial for foreign nationals as well, if conducted with their typical level of secrecy. Transparency is the best tool we can use to diffuse the tension between security and the rule of law in this country and abroad.
Unfortunately, cases such as Jose Padilla, among others, demonstrate that this administration has been incapable of restraining themselves to non-US citizens, and has set incredibly destructive precedents for thought-crime-type cases of incarceration for theoretical planned acts of US citizens. Who knows whether any of the suspects would have actually carried out any attacks, and the evidence surrounding the cases is invariably kept concealed. This is so incredibly prone to abuse, that even if it has only been used responsibly until now (for which there is little publicly available evidence), it's still unacceptable to create this framework for abuse of US citizens, or of innocent non-US citizens as well. Unless these suspects are caught in the act of initiating their attack, with public evidence thereof, it's completely unconscionable to be holding people for suspicions of future actions, when they might very well have chickened out or changed their mind before they got to the point of carrying out their attack. I hate to be one of those 'Minority Report' type guys comparing everything to a movie, but this is nothing short of pre-crime persecution for theoretical criminal acts, with a massive potential for false positives and abuse of power.
I know it would have serious privacy implications, but I don't really see a more simple method of monetizing content while taking fair use and typical usage needs into consideration. What would you replace copyright with, keeping in mind that content creators should be rewarded for their work? I think Accessright is the most intuitive concept to grasp, and care could be taken to ensure relatively short terms of protection, putting everything into the public domain once the term is up. It's difficult to argue that the act of copying should still be the control point for IP given common usage of digital content... I'm just talking out of my rear, as I have no ties to any content industries, but that seems to me to be the most obvious fix to this problem.
I think you just touched on a more fundamental problem, that copyright is a flawed model of intellectual property protection in this digital age, where you have to copy data just to enjoy it. We make incidental copies whenever we put a CD in the CD player, which copies the data to its memory. We make copies when we put the music on our iPods, or on our computers. We make so many incidental copies during the course of normal usage, that it no longer makes sense to target the act of copying as a control point for intellectual property protection.
Sooner or later, we will have to change to Accessright protection, where particular individuals license access to content under various terms, if we want to continue to facilitate the monetizing of intellectual property content, since merely copying has lost all relevance. Now it's only a question of striking a workable balance between the property rights of licensors and licensees, and to safeguard the privacy of users of the accessright licensing system. Once this is taken care of, we will be ready to move forward with a general intuitive understanding of IP protection again. As it is now, we're trying to fit an outdated model onto an incompatible distribution medium.
That was dynamic translation at runtime, not virtualization. I think something along the lines of WINE would be the path to go for Windows backwards compatibility...
Multitouch is nice for a laptop for several reasons. The first is that the bottom portion of the laptop becomes a screen, where virtual contextual input interfaces are rendered. In a word processor, it might display a standard keyboard and trackpad (or a handwriting recognition area if preferred), but in a video or music playback app, it might show a simplified remote control interface with large, self-descriptive buttons. In a sound editor, it might show a series of knobs and dials for the various filters and adjustments and such. The point, is that custom contextual interfaces might make a lot of tasks more intuitive, and easier to perform. Combined with multitouch gestures, the possibilities are endless. Keyboards are extremely limited input devices for a lot of complex tasks.
Another advantage to this configuration is that if the clamshell design has two flush screens, you can turn it inside-out and latch it back-to-back, one of the screens can inactivate, and you get a tablet configuration, without some complex (read: fragile, shoddy) hinge mechanism.
A company like Apple, who makes both the hardware and the software, is well-positioned to roll out this type of feature in an elegant manner. Microsoft will have to coordinate with hardware vendors, so we'll see how rapidly and well-integrated they can release this type of product.
The problem is that Greenpeace is being negligent by relying on self-reporting on the companies' websites to score them. They score company A lower than company B because A doesn't report as much general environmental information on their website as B. This is despite the fact that A's products are actually much better for the environment; they use less harmful materials, they use less electricity, they use smaller packaging, etc., etc. This makes their ratings completely, fraudulently wrong for a consumer concerned with protecting the environment, and is counterproductive to their goals. You can't take the lazy way out, relying on manufacturers self-reporting their environmental impacts, if you want to have any credibility. It takes an objective 3rd party review with as many data points as possible to build a somewhat accurate picture of relative environmental friendliness. Greenpeace is only harming their own name and value by assigning these completely arbitrary scores to high-profile companies.
And your point is? You think this broadcast flag, or any of this type of DRM, is actually going to prevent cappers from recording shows, stripping commercials, and posting online? The problem is that this DRM does not impact the availability on P2P at all, but instead, ONLY affects legitimate viewers who want the features of a DVR. How do you justify that? If they're so worried about keeping access to eyeballs, maybe they should be encouraging people to get their content from them INSTEAD of from P2P, by giving people what they're looking for; convenient access to the particular content they want. No, the obvious rationale for all this is simply that NBC is run by people who are completely clueless about how to respond to internet distribution, and can't get enough of shooting themselves in the foot.
Specifically designed to offer an extensive set of frameworks and object-oriented C variant Obj-C language != designed to prevent cross-platform development. Does .Net specifically prevent cross-platform development? Just because you offer developers an advanced set of frameworks that only run on your own platform doesn't mean that you're necessarily trying to prevent interoperability, you could just be trying to attract developers with a productive environment. Mac developers don't HAVE to use Apple's frameworks; they could use Java, or strict C, or some other cross-platform language. It's because they're more productive, and they have access to more advanced features provided by the OS vendor, which helps them make better software more easily. If someone wants to make GNUstep usable and provide a set of compatible frameworks for Linux, no one is going to stop them, but it's going to be an awful lot of work to try to keep up with Apple.
Open source philosophy is not tied to any particular platform or programming language. There are thriving OS X GPL projects, such as Adium, and various other networking apps, and its community members likely don't give a rat's ass that some Linux devs aren't joining in. Other OS X devs are happy to contribute, and to use the code in their own open-source projects, and that community is no less valid than the one you choose to participate in. Obviously, it's not as fundamentally free as building on an open framework, since there is a dependence on closed source, but that's not to say that their work is any less important, or that they can't build a successful community around their work. I'm sure they won't be losing a lot of sleep from your lack of respect.
Think of it this way; even if you can't use ALL the code in GPL OS X projects, there is a relatively large userbase for that platform, and so there can potentially be more resources dedicated to developing for it, and so it's possible that significant code contributions to underlying libraries used by those projects are made possible by targetting the platform. You should be happy that people are leveraging your favorite libraries on other platforms, as that can only help make them more robust. Your comment seems awfully antisocial for someone so concerned with community...
Who gets their TV episodes from YouTube? Are you expecting BitTorrent trackers and other P2P services to start enforcing copyright? Are you expecting that they would actually be effective if so? IOW, are you freaking stupid or something? There is no way any of this will come together and amount to anything. NBC is just obviously run by idiots who don't understand the innerwebs. If they're so worried about keeping their viewership, maybe they should think about giving people what they want in a convenient manner, and at least they'll be able to have some control over the situation. Fighting against their viewers simply guarantees that they will be sidelined to irrelevance, since someone else WILL cater to them, even if it's hobbyist cappers stripping out the commercials and putting the content on P2P. Sooner or later, these distributors are going to have to give up complete control if they want the chance to keep any control at all.
I would have loved to have bought an X360 instead of a PS3, but the thing is TOO DAMN LOUD, and it's still plagued with reliability issues. A friend of mine is currently in the process of returning his FOURTH 360, in the span of less than two years. They've had all this time to get their act together, and yet the super ultimate pro version of the 360 is still the loud, unreliable piece of kit it was when it was released. If they screw up the hardware for a consumer product this badly, no matter how great their software is (and it IS great software for a game console), they're still leaving a sour taste in a lot of mouths. That's no way to improve your image as you try to break into consumer electronics. Here's hoping for a real ultra-super-duper pro version with decent cooling, and hopefully a hard drive and BluRay drive, but alas, it's probably not going to be for this generation. I can't recommend a 360 to anyone in good conscience.
When you look at Apple's revenue growth for the last couple years, a P/E of 38 isn't really extraordinary... Apple's business is growing like a market upstart.
Or you could just have their ISP disconnect them from the internet, if you can identify them, effectively taking their bullets away in the case of your analogy (maybe more of a containment barrier around the 'infected' lawn). The mob might want to go smash the infected person's property, when the more elegant solution is to to simply prevent them from doing any damage in their infected state, while offering them the tools needed to cure the infection.
"For regular sauce, the first thing you need to do is make sure that you do not just go out and start decapitating zombies left and right. Do you understand? Do not start decapitating zombies left and right!"
This is an excellent point, with no clear answer. I think the best solution is white-hat hackers working for governments or ISPs in a covert manner, and if there turns out to be some harm caused by the 'good' worm, that will have to be accepted as a risk of having a machine on the net with a known vulnerability. You can't really give legal immunity to some group of people to go mess with other people's machines, as that will be abused as shoddy patches get pushed out with very real harmful consequences, possibly even worse than the malware authors, who at least have a vested interest in keeping infected machines working fairly normally. If this were a covert operation, the ones in charge would also have an interest in keeping the infected machine working normally, so that they are not noticed, hopefully leading to a better user experience than if we had some official god-like organization empowered to install whatever they want on anyone's computer.
I say fight fire with fire, and let those who would try to shut down the botnets use similar tactics of anonymity as the botnet creators themselves, letting the chips fall where they may. Combine this with ISP-level monitoring of infected computers, only allowing them to connect to trusted sites hosting the patches they might need, and we have a reasonably effective countermeasure that doesn't rely on taking away the property rights of computer owners.
So YOU'RE the one responsible for my machine rebooting all the time. Prepare to receive a note from my lawyer...
Or hell, maybe Craigslist DID dilute their shares inappropriately...
It's very difficult to do a hostile takeover of a privately held company. A hostile takeover is where a buyer makes an offer directly to shareholders of a publicly-traded company to buy their shares at a certain price above their market value, in the hopes of obtaining a controlling interest in the target company. This is a fairly straightforward procedure, as it's easy to find all the major shareholders in a public company. In a private company, the shareholders are not disclosed, and eBay would actually have to find each stockholder and make them personal offers. It's very possible that the majority stake is owned by the people currently running Craigslist (Craig, the CEO, other chief executives), who might be extremely unlikely to accept eBay's offers, no matter how high they are, if they have an emotional attachment to the company.
This is probably nothing more than trying to push Craigslist to monetize their site more, showing ads, charging for more services and raising their rates, in the hopes of increasing their revenue, and that it might push people away from Craigslist in favor of eBay.
Are you kidding me? On the Way? eBay is already pure, distilled evil and incompetence. The recent requirement to use Paypal for all transactions, the substantial rate hikes; everything they do is to leverage their captive userbase and squeeze more revenue out of them. They know they're the only serious worldwide game in town for what they do, and they're intent on exploiting that to the fullest. I, for one, can't wait to see them dethroned by someone and reduced to irrelevance, now that they've worn out all their goodwill.
Ummm, no. If we lose morale and pull out of Iraq, that is a GOOD thing. It was wrong to go there, and it's still wrong to be there now. No amount of sugar coating of the situation is going to make it more reasonable or successful. If you're counting on US media coverage to win this war, then it's already lost. To further spread misinformation, for any amount of time, is reprehensible. Having an open media means that an unjust or unpopular war will be criticized. If we can't bear the criticism, then that's a clear sign that we shouldn't be in the war in question. You can't just push a democratic country into a poorly-justified war, and expect a free pass.
I see this type of development as a preliminary step towards creating virtual artificial intelligence representations of ourselves. As we observe the way the user parses information on their computer, the decisions they make, the type of sources they prefer, we build up a sort of virtual image of their thought patterns. Over time, this will evolve into fairly sophisticated AI reflections of ourselves, for the purpose of acting like personal agents to scour the internet for us and find the information we might be interested in. If we could duplicate ourselves infinitely and turn ourselves loose on the internet, the wealth of relevant data at our disposal would grow tremendously. As these personal agents learn our thought patters over the years, they might even be capable of forming social relationships for us, finding other people who might share our interests and agendas. These agents could even continue to function long after the person it was modeled from is dead, possibly acting as a living reflection of your personality for your descendants. This market drive will be the catalyst for technology allowing us to eventually transfer our minds and personalities onto a computer.
It could be used if there was an efficient method of storing excess solar energy. They do an interesting thing in France with their nuclear/hydroelectric grid setup, where excess nuclear power is used to pump water from a downstream dam to an upstream one. In effect, the two dams are a large battery, releasing water from the upper to the lower to release the energy, and pumping it back upstream to recharge it. Other alternatives would be storing excess energy as hydrogen through water electrolysis, and recombining in a fuel cell to release the energy, though the economics of fuel cell catalytic membranes are not quite ready for this. Add to these solutions the superconducting "Supergrid" planned for the US, and you can load balance across the continent as different areas have different levels of solar exposure and usage requirements. These problems are solvable, and solar really could replace coal as the principle source of power for the US grid, with some ingenuity. It's just a question of how badly we want it.
Eventually, they will get bitten when they change computers a few times, find that they've used up all their iTunes licenses because they never bothered to de-authorize their old computers, and now have to call Apple support for help because their music won't play anymore. Random issues like this will present roadblocks, and the solution is inevitably to convert any DRM'd content to standard format and stop buying the DRM'd content. I know several relatively un-geeky people who regularly shopped from the iTunes Store and were bit by this, and have now learned their lesson. Ultimately, everyone will discover that DRM sucks, and that they should avoid it if possible.
Don't forget to dissolve your toe-prints and fingerprints with industrial cleaner... And always cover yourself in random people's DNA... Wear a full-body disguise to obscure your physical features... Hell, just order delivery.
Except that Apple never advertised a 1920x1280x24 screen; they merely stated 'millions of colors', which according to your second argument, should be what the observer "perceives" with a 1920x1280x18 resolution dithered color display. If the color perception is the only relevant criterion to measure against Apple's claim of color display, then their dithered 6BPP monitors should qualify. The millions of perceived colors ARE displayed, just not at the same resolution as a 24BPP display; but as you point out, it was never made clear in Apple marketing literature that you get the "millions of colors" at any particular resolution, and so technically, Apple didn't make any false statements about their displays, but merely left it ambiguous enough that people might be confused. This is pretty different from saying that Apple falsely advertised their displays' capabilities. It's unfortunate that people misinterpreted the product specs, but I don't think it's reasonable to claim that the specs were inaccurate, merely uninformative.
I agree completely. I'm a big Futurama fan, and I've watched every episode, and I thought the movie Bender's Big Score sucked ass. They must have changed their writing staff or rushed production, because the humor was just lame. The next one had better not be this bad, or I'll have to write Futurama off as a total loss.