NASA and White House officials were criticized for drafting plans that called for new propulsion systems without linking them to timelines for manned space missions.
This is a completely backwards way of thinking. New propulsion systems are vastly more valuable than any specific space mission. Advanced propulsion systems could take the most difficult mission we might attempt today and turn it into a routine trip.
We need a willingness to develop new technologies that might take more than a few years to pay off, and even try things that might not work at all. We should tie this work to a specific goal in order to provide focus and to justify the price, but the real prize is the technology itself. Reducing fuel mass or cost to orbit by a factor of ten would open up the solar system to us.
I am afraid that resale for console games is a doomed concept. Given the increases in hard drive capacity and broadband speed, it has become very easy to offer a game for online sale. As the percentage of gamers who have these resources continues to grow, we will reach a tipping point where it makes sense to offer a full game for sale online only. (This is already the case for small console games, but is generally not true yet for full-sized games which retail for over $50.)
People will fight against this and resist it, but when push comes to shove, if the game is desirable enough it will sell. The rules of competition only apply to a certain extent. If one restaurant overcharges for a burger, you can go to another restaurant. If a company sells Halo 7 under unfavorable terms, you either accept it or you don't play that particular game.
Once a few high-profile games establish the profitability of this scheme, it won't take long for all the major companies to switch over to this model (much to the chagrin of physical retailers, who will be reduced to selling access codes rather than physical products, until they go out of business.)
I would object to this practice based on the first sale doctrine. If they want to distribute games this way, they should have to provide a mechanism for transfer of ownership. However, recent legal proceedings seem to uphold the "pretend it's not a sale" doctrine, which states that you can use trick language to call the transaction a license or a subscription, even though the purchaser is thinking of it as a sale in his mind.
This all makes me disappointed, as I enjoy getting used games at a bargain, or occasionally buying a new one and then reselling it after beating the game. I can't see myself being too excited about paying $60 for a full game, and so it will become a rare transaction. I hope that I'm wrong somehow, but it just seems inevitable.
Same here. Coincidentally, I discovered the online game "Fantastic Contraption" earlier today. It's highly recommended to fans of The Incredible Machine.
For one thing, you can make annoying animated music playing hovering popup advertisements today without using Flash.
Once HTML5 is in place, the browser will have more control over how audio and video is played. This means that the browser or a browser extension will be able to block audio and video from unapproved sites, in the same way that Flash and Javascript blockers work today.
I was amused that the article's author ("Harry McCracken" is credited) states that when he saw the round circuit boards, he felt that he "wasn't quite smart enough to understand them."
Me: "You know what a circuit board is, right?" Harry: "Sure." Me: "It's just a board with electrical components connected together." Harry: "Yup." Me: "So, this is the same thing with a round shape." Harry: "Hold on. You lost me there."
Increased security, built into the fabric of the internet, sounds like a goal everyone can support. However, to build security into the network, you must necessarily build in stronger methods of identifying the users of the system. This will make anonymity much more difficult, and will greatly increase the government's ability to track the online activities of individuals.
There are some situations where that power would be used for good, but do we really want to allow the government more power and more ability to monitor the population? I am sure that they are drooling over the possibility. The recent abuses of the FBI should give everyone a fair idea of how responsibly this power would be used.
I'm not sure what a "game-changing" technology would look like, anyhow. The internet is fundamentally about shuffling bits of data between endpoints. That much is not going to change, and the rest is just implementation. What are we going to try, sending twos?
The article starts with saying "Every hour spent sitting idle in front of the television raises the risk of premature death from heart disease by 18%". Notice that they didn't say "per day."
If your risk of death due to heart attack is 0.0001%, and you watch 8 hours of TV per day, when does death become a certainty?
0.0001 * (1.18)^(8 * N) = 1
According to Wolfram Alpha, N = 6.95584. Watch too much TV, and you'll be dead in a week!
I'm still waiting for the ideal phone service, and I hope that Google will offer it when they finish integrating Gizmo5 into Google Voice.
I want a phone that combines the benefits of traditional cell phones with the cost savings of VoIP.
When I am away from home, the phone will act as a traditional pay-as-you-go phone.
When I am home, or in range of a recognized wifi router, the phone will switch to "IP mode". In IP mode, everything is free or nearly free, because the phone is using my broadband connection. Phone calls, texts, and data transfers are all included.
The phone will use a single number for placing and receiving calls, regardless of whether it is in IP mode.
I would not have to purchase a data plan if I don't want one. If anything, I'd choose a pay-as-you-go data plan, for that one time every few months I want to look something up when I'm away from home.
This plan would allow people who make most of their calls from home to save hundreds of dollars on their annual bill. Currently I use a combination of Skype and a pay-as-you-go phone to keep my bill low, but having multiple phone numbers is a pain.
Someone offer this, please! Whatever happened to competing on price?
A single number to identify people would be just as powerful as a SSN or driver's license number. It would make fraud so much easier. Eventually people would compile databases tying these IDs to SSNs and would distribute those online. Then we would start seeing advisories to keep your single contact number a secret!
On the positive side, perhaps this would help to convince financial institutions that simply knowing someone's SSN and mother's maiden name doesn't prove anything about identity.
Hopefully this will embarrass online storage services such as S3 into offering more reasonable prices. I've always through they were overpriced, and this seems to confirm it.
Slashdot shouldn't be linking to sites which require registration, such as the NY Times. To see the article, try this google search. The first link is page one, and the third link is page two.
Even if they enjoy their work, I still don't understand this perspective. If they're going to spend their free time doing extra coding projects, surely the work backlog is not the most exciting project they could think of to do. They could be using that extra time for personal coding projects, running a website, making a game, contributing to an open source project, or whatever else.
Furthermore, working 10-20+ extra hours a week must result in sacrifices in their personal lives, or at least it must get in the way of them developing a life. This idea that it's okay because they enjoy the work sounds like shortsightedness or flat out denial.
You only need to read the summary to see why job satisfaction in IT is so low. They see it as a problem that IT employees are less willing to work long hours for free, but I take this to be a very good sign. It's high time that IT workers stand up for themselves. I understand that the nature of the job may lead to occasional overtime work. But when required overtime is the norm, and it is not even well compensated, that is a sign of mismanagement and/or gross disrespect for employees. No wonder the workers are dissatisfied. (And this is just one of the ways many IT workers are treated poorly.)
It is really frustrating to me to see so many workers in this field willing to give up their lives for a job. It makes things so much harder for those of us who seek respect and reasonable working conditions. If I can't pay my bills, I don't go to my employer and ask for extra free money. My employer shouldn't be asking me for extra free work week after week because projects were poorly planned.
The scientific theories that are relied upon to show the LHC is safe may eventually prove to be false, or at least short-sighted. However, these same theories are what led people to consider the possibility of black hole production in the first place. If those theories are taken away, then the reason for concern also disappears.
If we are going to take the prevailing theories to be unreliable, then all that remains is common sense. Someone might raise the concern that a car collision would lead to a devastating black hole, if it happened in exactly the wrong way. There is no reason to take this concern seriously given the number of accidents which the earth has already survived. Similarly, there is no reason to think that the LHC will produce anything more dramatic than the high-energy particle collisions occurring in our atmosphere every day.
A tarnished brand would be a once-great brand whose public image has faltered. Only some of these brands fit that description. Others (Commodore, Polaroid) still are held in high regard, though they have ceased to be profitable companies.
Brands that should have made the list: Hewlett-Packard, Monster Cables, AOL, Sony. Sony is the opposite of a brand like Polaroid, in that their public image has taken some hits, but they are still doing strong business. Microsoft would have qualified as tarnished two years ago, but they've made quite a comeback.
What definition of proper are you using? If I bought a movie using your system, I'd need to buy a new TV and a new video player, despite the fact that I already own a TV and several video players. The cost of the movie and the hardware would be increased, with none of that extra cost going to the movie's creators.
The advertisements for the movie would tell people to "buy" it when they'd really just be getting a limited license, with their first sale doctrine rights sidelined. The movie would stop working if there was a network connection issue, if I moved to someplace without the right cellular service, or if the DRM servers ever went down. I couldn't lend the movie out, take it with me to a friend's, or convert it to use on other devices. The extra complexity of this system would probably cause many people to have technical difficulties watching the movie they had already paid for. (This is a frequent problem with HDCP.) Once the movie goes into the public domain, my great-grandchildren couldn't rescue a copy of it because the DRM servers would be long gone.
Proper? Christ! Proper for control freak movie execs, but that's all.
Can someone explain to me why every discussion related to Cory Doctorow always descends into arguing over the man, rather than the message he is addressing? This topic is on Slashdot not just because it was Cory who made the speech, but because what he said is very relevant and well spoken. He isn't a legal expert, but he is a person with writing and publishing experience who is passionate about copyright issues, and willing to try a different approach with his own works.
I am strongly against the DRM craze and the idea of "licensing" content rather than selling copies. I am glad to see this topic being discussed, and I hope there are many others like Cory raising these questions and making people aware of what is at stake.
Of all the ridiculously priced items out there, why did he pick these batteries? Batteries for laptops need to be smaller, lighter, and more careful about heat dissipation than those in a lawnmower. The 66% premium sounds about right, just like the premium one has to pay for the rest of a laptop compared to a big old desktop PC.
If he wants to rant about prices, how about laptop accessories? I wanted to buy a second wall charger for my laptop, but they were charging $75 for it. What about the price of any cable or charger sold at chain stores? Radio Shack, who used to sell packs of resistors to me for 50 cents, wanted me to pay $25 for a USB cable. It's as if they want me to buy everything online.
And I won't even start on text messages and other cell phone baloney. Ranting about that could be a full time job.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the last person he should see - his problem is too much doting!
This is a completely backwards way of thinking. New propulsion systems are vastly more valuable than any specific space mission. Advanced propulsion systems could take the most difficult mission we might attempt today and turn it into a routine trip.
We need a willingness to develop new technologies that might take more than a few years to pay off, and even try things that might not work at all. We should tie this work to a specific goal in order to provide focus and to justify the price, but the real prize is the technology itself. Reducing fuel mass or cost to orbit by a factor of ten would open up the solar system to us.
Finally, a FOSS response to Microsoft Bob!
I am afraid that resale for console games is a doomed concept. Given the increases in hard drive capacity and broadband speed, it has become very easy to offer a game for online sale. As the percentage of gamers who have these resources continues to grow, we will reach a tipping point where it makes sense to offer a full game for sale online only. (This is already the case for small console games, but is generally not true yet for full-sized games which retail for over $50.)
People will fight against this and resist it, but when push comes to shove, if the game is desirable enough it will sell. The rules of competition only apply to a certain extent. If one restaurant overcharges for a burger, you can go to another restaurant. If a company sells Halo 7 under unfavorable terms, you either accept it or you don't play that particular game.
Once a few high-profile games establish the profitability of this scheme, it won't take long for all the major companies to switch over to this model (much to the chagrin of physical retailers, who will be reduced to selling access codes rather than physical products, until they go out of business.)
I would object to this practice based on the first sale doctrine. If they want to distribute games this way, they should have to provide a mechanism for transfer of ownership. However, recent legal proceedings seem to uphold the "pretend it's not a sale" doctrine, which states that you can use trick language to call the transaction a license or a subscription, even though the purchaser is thinking of it as a sale in his mind.
This all makes me disappointed, as I enjoy getting used games at a bargain, or occasionally buying a new one and then reselling it after beating the game. I can't see myself being too excited about paying $60 for a full game, and so it will become a rare transaction. I hope that I'm wrong somehow, but it just seems inevitable.
Fixed that for ya.
Same here. Coincidentally, I discovered the online game "Fantastic Contraption" earlier today. It's highly recommended to fans of The Incredible Machine.
http://fantasticcontraption.com/
Looking forward to the merger of Xfinity with the Sy Fy channel...
"XSyFynyty"
For one thing, you can make annoying animated music playing hovering popup advertisements today without using Flash.
Once HTML5 is in place, the browser will have more control over how audio and video is played. This means that the browser or a browser extension will be able to block audio and video from unapproved sites, in the same way that Flash and Javascript blockers work today.
I was amused that the article's author ("Harry McCracken" is credited) states that when he saw the round circuit boards, he felt that he "wasn't quite smart enough to understand them."
Me: "You know what a circuit board is, right?"
Harry: "Sure."
Me: "It's just a board with electrical components connected together."
Harry: "Yup."
Me: "So, this is the same thing with a round shape."
Harry: "Hold on. You lost me there."
Increased security, built into the fabric of the internet, sounds like a goal everyone can support. However, to build security into the network, you must necessarily build in stronger methods of identifying the users of the system. This will make anonymity much more difficult, and will greatly increase the government's ability to track the online activities of individuals.
There are some situations where that power would be used for good, but do we really want to allow the government more power and more ability to monitor the population? I am sure that they are drooling over the possibility. The recent abuses of the FBI should give everyone a fair idea of how responsibly this power would be used.
I'm not sure what a "game-changing" technology would look like, anyhow. The internet is fundamentally about shuffling bits of data between endpoints. That much is not going to change, and the rest is just implementation. What are we going to try, sending twos?
The article starts with saying "Every hour spent sitting idle in front of the television raises the risk of premature death from heart disease by 18%". Notice that they didn't say "per day."
If your risk of death due to heart attack is 0.0001%, and you watch 8 hours of TV per day, when does death become a certainty?
0.0001 * (1.18)^(8 * N) = 1
According to Wolfram Alpha, N = 6.95584. Watch too much TV, and you'll be dead in a week!
I'm still waiting for the ideal phone service, and I hope that Google will offer it when they finish integrating Gizmo5 into Google Voice.
I want a phone that combines the benefits of traditional cell phones with the cost savings of VoIP.
This plan would allow people who make most of their calls from home to save hundreds of dollars on their annual bill. Currently I use a combination of Skype and a pay-as-you-go phone to keep my bill low, but having multiple phone numbers is a pain.
Someone offer this, please! Whatever happened to competing on price?
A single number to identify people would be just as powerful as a SSN or driver's license number. It would make fraud so much easier. Eventually people would compile databases tying these IDs to SSNs and would distribute those online. Then we would start seeing advisories to keep your single contact number a secret!
On the positive side, perhaps this would help to convince financial institutions that simply knowing someone's SSN and mother's maiden name doesn't prove anything about identity.
Yes, it will happen. No, it won't stop development. Depending what you mean by autonomous, it may have already happened.
Hopefully this will embarrass online storage services such as S3 into offering more reasonable prices. I've always through they were overpriced, and this seems to confirm it.
Slashdot shouldn't be linking to sites which require registration, such as the NY Times. To see the article, try this google search. The first link is page one, and the third link is page two.
Even if they enjoy their work, I still don't understand this perspective. If they're going to spend their free time doing extra coding projects, surely the work backlog is not the most exciting project they could think of to do. They could be using that extra time for personal coding projects, running a website, making a game, contributing to an open source project, or whatever else.
Furthermore, working 10-20+ extra hours a week must result in sacrifices in their personal lives, or at least it must get in the way of them developing a life. This idea that it's okay because they enjoy the work sounds like shortsightedness or flat out denial.
You only need to read the summary to see why job satisfaction in IT is so low. They see it as a problem that IT employees are less willing to work long hours for free, but I take this to be a very good sign. It's high time that IT workers stand up for themselves. I understand that the nature of the job may lead to occasional overtime work. But when required overtime is the norm, and it is not even well compensated, that is a sign of mismanagement and/or gross disrespect for employees. No wonder the workers are dissatisfied. (And this is just one of the ways many IT workers are treated poorly.)
It is really frustrating to me to see so many workers in this field willing to give up their lives for a job. It makes things so much harder for those of us who seek respect and reasonable working conditions. If I can't pay my bills, I don't go to my employer and ask for extra free money. My employer shouldn't be asking me for extra free work week after week because projects were poorly planned.
The scientific theories that are relied upon to show the LHC is safe may eventually prove to be false, or at least short-sighted. However, these same theories are what led people to consider the possibility of black hole production in the first place. If those theories are taken away, then the reason for concern also disappears.
If we are going to take the prevailing theories to be unreliable, then all that remains is common sense. Someone might raise the concern that a car collision would lead to a devastating black hole, if it happened in exactly the wrong way. There is no reason to take this concern seriously given the number of accidents which the earth has already survived. Similarly, there is no reason to think that the LHC will produce anything more dramatic than the high-energy particle collisions occurring in our atmosphere every day.
I've been wanting to read J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories. It would have been lovely to find it on Project Gutenberg.
A tarnished brand would be a once-great brand whose public image has faltered. Only some of these brands fit that description. Others (Commodore, Polaroid) still are held in high regard, though they have ceased to be profitable companies.
Brands that should have made the list: Hewlett-Packard, Monster Cables, AOL, Sony. Sony is the opposite of a brand like Polaroid, in that their public image has taken some hits, but they are still doing strong business. Microsoft would have qualified as tarnished two years ago, but they've made quite a comeback.
What definition of proper are you using? If I bought a movie using your system, I'd need to buy a new TV and a new video player, despite the fact that I already own a TV and several video players. The cost of the movie and the hardware would be increased, with none of that extra cost going to the movie's creators.
The advertisements for the movie would tell people to "buy" it when they'd really just be getting a limited license, with their first sale doctrine rights sidelined. The movie would stop working if there was a network connection issue, if I moved to someplace without the right cellular service, or if the DRM servers ever went down. I couldn't lend the movie out, take it with me to a friend's, or convert it to use on other devices. The extra complexity of this system would probably cause many people to have technical difficulties watching the movie they had already paid for. (This is a frequent problem with HDCP.) Once the movie goes into the public domain, my great-grandchildren couldn't rescue a copy of it because the DRM servers would be long gone.
Proper? Christ! Proper for control freak movie execs, but that's all.
Can someone explain to me why every discussion related to Cory Doctorow always descends into arguing over the man, rather than the message he is addressing? This topic is on Slashdot not just because it was Cory who made the speech, but because what he said is very relevant and well spoken. He isn't a legal expert, but he is a person with writing and publishing experience who is passionate about copyright issues, and willing to try a different approach with his own works.
I am strongly against the DRM craze and the idea of "licensing" content rather than selling copies. I am glad to see this topic being discussed, and I hope there are many others like Cory raising these questions and making people aware of what is at stake.
It has to be a glitch with Chrome, as the source code of Bruce's site doesn't specify any favicon.
On my PC, Chrome does not show a favicon, and neither does Firefox.
Of all the ridiculously priced items out there, why did he pick these batteries? Batteries for laptops need to be smaller, lighter, and more careful about heat dissipation than those in a lawnmower. The 66% premium sounds about right, just like the premium one has to pay for the rest of a laptop compared to a big old desktop PC.
If he wants to rant about prices, how about laptop accessories? I wanted to buy a second wall charger for my laptop, but they were charging $75 for it. What about the price of any cable or charger sold at chain stores? Radio Shack, who used to sell packs of resistors to me for 50 cents, wanted me to pay $25 for a USB cable. It's as if they want me to buy everything online.
And I won't even start on text messages and other cell phone baloney. Ranting about that could be a full time job.