I live in Japan, which is notoriously bad for charging high prices because they can, but in the case of SMS on the cell, sure, it's pretty expensive, but they also offer email on the same device, which is less than a sixth of the price. Go figure. That and the 10,000 character limit, ability to add attachments, and being able to email back and forth to outside world, and you really gotta wonder what American companies are doing wrong.
What I find amazing about such so-called scientific reports is that they often seem to be based on a conclusion in search of a hypothesis. So, people responded most strongly to an angry face vs. a neutral face or the absence of any face (duh on the last one.) Talk about skewed! What, no happy face? What if people had reacted more strongly to that? That would have upset the conclusion just a bit.
I think the best conclusion you can draw from this is that people respond to the stimulus of an angry face vs. a neutral one because it is in an animal's nature to avoid things that might hurt them. I would sooner respond to a rock thrown at me than one just sitting on the ground, too. That doesn't necessarily mean I seek to have rocks thrown at me, does it? It's a little something called a survival instinct. Sure, there are people who are just a little bit perverse and enjoy the adrenaline rush of somebody being angry at them, but I think bringing that into the article smacks of an author who either only poorly understands their subject, or is trying too hard to make it digestable for the average person.
Getting parental consent is vitally important, but I have to say that the "scared straight" strategy might not be a bad one. After all, the problem with practicing for emergencies is that people often leave out the emergency. I remember laughing with the rest of the kids at how stupid the fire drills were; it was a way of being somewhere besides in class, but it did little for preparing us for real danger. Now fear, that's something you don't soon forget. Harsh as it may seem, it's a good way to teach people. Not nice, perhaps, but thorough.
Cells don't eat virii, virii latch themselves onto a compatible cell and then inject their own DNA into it. As for "not moving around on their own," they may not be independently motile, but they're better traveled than most animals.
That's because most people aren't actually trying to keep their fingerprints from being left behind. If I made effort and my fingerprints were captured, anyway, then I'd be concerned.
I have to agree with the general opinion here; this isn't going to help protect against piracy, nor is it going to bring prices down (after all, you're paying for a "secure experience," right?) And a lot of piracy occurs when people who have legitimately bought a copy decide to share it, which means absolutely nothing will have changed. As for the professional pirates, yes, they'll pay to get the equipment or figure out how to make it themselves. Again, zero gain.
I agree. I stopped finding the idea interesting when I got to the part that a hypothetical car that doesn't exist could outperform a hybrid car that I can buy today.
I think that there are certain words we can get away with using that a lot of people are trying to avoid, like "network." Network is a layman's term; television network, telephone network, etc. Don't be afraid.
The internet is an information network, allowing people to exchange documents, messages, pictures, video and audio with anybody in the world. All you need to participate is a computer and a connection.
Does that work for you? Any explanation after that assumes that the person you're talking to starts asking questions; this should work for a start. If they don't care, then you haven't wasted too much time or energy, either.
I recently downloaded Thunderbird 2.0 and was surprised to see that it was basically the same application as before, except that the icons were slightly prettier and I could no longer find the junk mail controls. Address book handling is still obsolete, as well as editing entries (editing a person's name is awkward, as typing a first and last name may actually require you to edit *three* fields - go figure.) One particular annoyance is that you can only store two emails for each contact. Many of my close friends have work, home, and cell phone, so this is a bit of an annoyance for me. Rule editing is also crufty; you cannot move rules across mail accounts, and there is no way to base a new rule off of an old one - also, basing a rule off of a message is only useful if it is set to filter based on that particular sender's address. Threading is over-complicated, split across two sub-menus, and rife with unnecessary options that usually end up with new users unintentionally hiding their emails.
I have always had a soft spot for the children of Netscape, but Thunderbird hasn't seen a serious reworking since it was split off from the original program. Let me know when the developers release a serious update, and I'll take another look. Until then, I will continue to use the PortableApp version of Thunderbird to check my email at work; it's not that it doesn't work, it's just that it lacks elegance.
Even if the planet is 2 times as big as our planet, it could be spinning faster than ours. This would help off set the gravitational pull on our bodies at the surface.
Centrifugal force doesn't work that way, not to mention that, if it did, the planet would have to be spinning incredibly fast in order for the centrifugal force to offset its gravitational pull. Humans aren't that big, proportionally speaking, and you're talking about a planet five times bigger than Earth. Centrifugal force is related to your own body's inertia: it is the result of traveling very fast in one direction, and then changing that direction. In other words, your body wants to keep traveling in the same direction; that's the pull you feel when you spin on a merry-go-round.
In order for centrifugal force to cancel out even a significant portion of gravity, the planet would have to be spinning at an appreciable fraction of its own escape velocity (for the Earth, you're talking 11.2 km/s, or about 7 miles per second.) Also, the necessary spin can only be found at the equator, where you're traveling at about 465 meters per second - a bit short of what you need to feel any appreciable effect. By that same token, the poles impart no tangential motion at all, which means you would feel the full effects of that 2.25 Gs. This also means that gravity would vary depending on your distance from the equator; pretty inconvenient.
I agree that education is necessary, and that's why I said that vendors should take more responsibility and not let the default be open and unprotected. Buffalo has a new wireless hub which has a default setup where the computer is bound to the hub by a unique, encrypted key; it's a proprietary, Windows-based method, but for the non-savvy home user, that typically shouldn't be an issue. However, there is still absolutely no justification for taking advantage of people just because you can. Wrong is wrong, no matter how easy it is to get away with it.
Just like people try to excuse stealing music with the "information wants to be free" line and ignore the fact that people also want to get paid for what they do, saying that "they were asking for it" is the same excuse the school bully uses when he beats up on kids smaller and weaker than himself. If I pay for my internet service and you freeload off of me, you're as good as stealing money out of my pocket. Not all ISPs offer true unlimited bandwidth, and if some jerk soaks up my bandwidth limit for the month on P2P downloads, I'm the one who has to pay. Stealing is punishable by law, so it seems perfectly fine to me to make this criminal as well.
If you honestly feel like willingly sharing your wireless with strangers, I think that's great and very generous, and in that case, punishment is also uncalled for. To prevent this from happening, it would be good to require the authorities to question the owner of the wireless point first before prosecuting. Of course, the ISP might also have objections on the matter, since there's the likelihood that the contract the wireless point owner signs with their ISP may actually prohibit any sort of sharing, period.
As I said, temptation doesn't excuse the crime. I agree that it's a jumbled mess out there as far as naming conventions and security (or the lack thereof), but a couple of general guidelines should suffice. Ask yourself: am I paying for this? Am I at a business or public access point where they advertise the name of the network, or I can ask someone to tell me which one is which? If the answers to either of those are "no," then you probably aren't allowed to use it.
Just because you have the ability to find the network does not mean you're invited. The fact that this happens in an abstract space rather than physical (i.e. you can trespass without ever leaving the house) makes it seem more morally ambiguous, but that's just temptation inspiring you to make excuses. You're freeloading, and that's just not cool.
Incidentally, I run my network with password encryption and never have a problem with people stealing my bandwidth.
I assume you're referring to internet content producers when you say broadcasters? Traditionally two different things, since broadcasters worry more about NTSC vs. PAL, SD vs. HD, etc. Windows doesn't really figure into it.
As for reaching the widest market, you're still best off relying on Windows, because of that pesky 96% market share. I'm a Mac guy, but I still have to worry about my target audience, 9 out of 10 of which are on Windows, being able to properly see my content in the blight on humanity that is IE 6 (and a good content provider usually worries about maintaining compatibility back to even earlier, crappier versions, to a greater or lesser degree.)
I'm hoping that MS' efforts force Adobe to start lowering their prices; their monopolistic price-gouging and half-baked anti-piracy measures are starting to get on my nerves.
That would totally suck. I'd have to go to somebody's house every time they demanded to see the source? And I have to do it for free? No, thanks.;)
I think the idea is just plain silly. "...this version of Ubuntu will not include any video footage unless it also includes either the source content or access to the source content." Sounds like a weird sort of marketing spin to me, to please the "everything must be free" people. As an independent film maker, if I included video content on such a distribution, I'm also supposed to give you the raw, uncut, digitized footage, inclusive of bad takes, deletions, etc? That's not just stupid, it's impractical.
Video is not the same as software, no matter how you try to objectify it. Not to mention, most video is edited in proprietary applications that don't run on Linux. If you want my original project files, good luck with that; it's going to take a different OS and cost you several thousand dollars for the software to be able to actually open them.
The lack of technical knowledge of the victim does not excuse the morality of the person taking advantage of them. By that same argument, you could also claim that ignorance of the law doesn't excuse breaking it (which, conveniently enough for the government and tax collectors, is usually the case.) If you'd like a different analogy, just because my water hose is left outside does not make me at fault for somebody stealing my water. Just because a woman wears sexy clothing doesn't mean she's asking for it. If you steal from others, you're a criminal. Somebody else making the crime easy for someone doesn't make the culprit any less a criminal, it just throws their general lack of class into sharper relief.
We were supposed to switch over to Internet2 after ten years of reserved use for universities and private corporations. I wonder when the deadline for that is? I forget exactly what year they started it, but the ten years should be up very soon.
"Modern" school systems are paralyzed with the fear that they'll get in trouble if their students don't make adequate passing grades. If we can control the information that students have access to, we can do everything short of holding the pen (or keyboard) for them so they can write it.
In Japan, for example, a student in a so-called "low-level" school can do absolutely nothing but attend class and make a passing grade. They aren't required to submit any homework, participate, or even stay awake, for that matter. They might occasionally have to endure some sort of counseling session, but that's about it. They have been classified by the system as stupid, and teachers take a "well, it can't be helped" approach to teaching them. And then people wonder why their society is slowly spiralling down the drain.
We were merely saying that, as teachers, we have seen too many years of great ideas poorly implemented, and that this has all the hallmarks of a big mistake. You need infrastructure in order to carry out the wonderful vision you've described, and that simply doesn't exist. To be fair, the linked articles are lacking in detail, but just putting the technology in the hands of the children isn't enough; you're going to need to train the children on how to use the technology, and you're going to have to train the teachers (and adults are not famous for rapidly adapting to new technology.) In most cases, the knee-jerk response to teachers asking for training and funds in such situations is, "Can't you just get by with what you've got?" as if the instruction manual that comes with your average MP3 player would open up the world of audio-visual recording.
To give you a for instance: a former school I taught at bought two new laptops and a wireless network for teacher use, and then forbade the teachers from connecting to the Interweb "except when absolutely necessary," for fear that they might catch something from the tubes, or that some malicious hacker would download all the students' address information and go on a stalking spree. I even pointed out to them that if you want to get really paranoid, even "except when absolutely necessary" was too long (since nowadays it only takes a few minutes for an unprotected computer to get owned), that these computers were anything *but* unprotected, and that they had no business putting sensitive information on a networked computer, anyway. These protests and attempts at reason fell upon deaf ears, and the wireless network continues unused to this day.
It's the correct usage of both servicing and mating. After all, regardless of whether or not you use a condom (arguably for the purpose of preventing the exchange of DNA and somebody becoming pregnant), it's still called mating. If you want, you could refer to it as regurgitating instead.:)
Actually, my main reason for buying a Nintendo DS is so that I can study my Japanese kanji. Admittedly, this doesn't really impact the American market, but it's a definite educational tool, and very significant for at least one nation of people.
As a teacher, I completely believe you. I also agree that I would sooner see this as a pay raise for me than spent on an iPod that will get lost, stolen, or broken within six months and never hold even one lecture related to class. The irony of this kind of idea is that they'll give these kids the iPods and completely fail to give the schools the resources to record and publish anything that could go on the iPods. Do the schools also get recording equipment? Does anybody at the school know how to make a website, or an RSS feed?
The only thing the kids are going to learn is that the government really does waste their parents' tax money on cool stuff.
The problem is, nobody's yet figured out a way to make 30 copies and then take the blackboards home with them. It's not like audio lectures are a new thing here, plus there's that whole "saving paper" idea.
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I live in Japan, which is notoriously bad for charging high prices because they can, but in the case of SMS on the cell, sure, it's pretty expensive, but they also offer email on the same device, which is less than a sixth of the price. Go figure. That and the 10,000 character limit, ability to add attachments, and being able to email back and forth to outside world, and you really gotta wonder what American companies are doing wrong.
What I find amazing about such so-called scientific reports is that they often seem to be based on a conclusion in search of a hypothesis. So, people responded most strongly to an angry face vs. a neutral face or the absence of any face (duh on the last one.) Talk about skewed! What, no happy face? What if people had reacted more strongly to that? That would have upset the conclusion just a bit.
I think the best conclusion you can draw from this is that people respond to the stimulus of an angry face vs. a neutral one because it is in an animal's nature to avoid things that might hurt them. I would sooner respond to a rock thrown at me than one just sitting on the ground, too. That doesn't necessarily mean I seek to have rocks thrown at me, does it? It's a little something called a survival instinct. Sure, there are people who are just a little bit perverse and enjoy the adrenaline rush of somebody being angry at them, but I think bringing that into the article smacks of an author who either only poorly understands their subject, or is trying too hard to make it digestable for the average person.
Getting parental consent is vitally important, but I have to say that the "scared straight" strategy might not be a bad one. After all, the problem with practicing for emergencies is that people often leave out the emergency. I remember laughing with the rest of the kids at how stupid the fire drills were; it was a way of being somewhere besides in class, but it did little for preparing us for real danger. Now fear, that's something you don't soon forget. Harsh as it may seem, it's a good way to teach people. Not nice, perhaps, but thorough.
Cells don't eat virii, virii latch themselves onto a compatible cell and then inject their own DNA into it. As for "not moving around on their own," they may not be independently motile, but they're better traveled than most animals.
No, because she was manufactured, not self-made. Hence her current melt-down. You can only stand to have your life run for you for so long.
That's because you're only a "bad guy" if you lose.
That's because most people aren't actually trying to keep their fingerprints from being left behind. If I made effort and my fingerprints were captured, anyway, then I'd be concerned.
I have to agree with the general opinion here; this isn't going to help protect against piracy, nor is it going to bring prices down (after all, you're paying for a "secure experience," right?) And a lot of piracy occurs when people who have legitimately bought a copy decide to share it, which means absolutely nothing will have changed. As for the professional pirates, yes, they'll pay to get the equipment or figure out how to make it themselves. Again, zero gain.
I agree. I stopped finding the idea interesting when I got to the part that a hypothetical car that doesn't exist could outperform a hybrid car that I can buy today.
I think that there are certain words we can get away with using that a lot of people are trying to avoid, like "network." Network is a layman's term; television network, telephone network, etc. Don't be afraid.
The internet is an information network, allowing people to exchange documents, messages, pictures, video and audio with anybody in the world. All you need to participate is a computer and a connection.
Does that work for you? Any explanation after that assumes that the person you're talking to starts asking questions; this should work for a start. If they don't care, then you haven't wasted too much time or energy, either.
I recently downloaded Thunderbird 2.0 and was surprised to see that it was basically the same application as before, except that the icons were slightly prettier and I could no longer find the junk mail controls. Address book handling is still obsolete, as well as editing entries (editing a person's name is awkward, as typing a first and last name may actually require you to edit *three* fields - go figure.) One particular annoyance is that you can only store two emails for each contact. Many of my close friends have work, home, and cell phone, so this is a bit of an annoyance for me. Rule editing is also crufty; you cannot move rules across mail accounts, and there is no way to base a new rule off of an old one - also, basing a rule off of a message is only useful if it is set to filter based on that particular sender's address. Threading is over-complicated, split across two sub-menus, and rife with unnecessary options that usually end up with new users unintentionally hiding their emails.
I have always had a soft spot for the children of Netscape, but Thunderbird hasn't seen a serious reworking since it was split off from the original program. Let me know when the developers release a serious update, and I'll take another look. Until then, I will continue to use the PortableApp version of Thunderbird to check my email at work; it's not that it doesn't work, it's just that it lacks elegance.
Even if the planet is 2 times as big as our planet, it could be spinning faster than ours. This would help off set the gravitational pull on our bodies at the surface.
Centrifugal force doesn't work that way, not to mention that, if it did, the planet would have to be spinning incredibly fast in order for the centrifugal force to offset its gravitational pull. Humans aren't that big, proportionally speaking, and you're talking about a planet five times bigger than Earth. Centrifugal force is related to your own body's inertia: it is the result of traveling very fast in one direction, and then changing that direction. In other words, your body wants to keep traveling in the same direction; that's the pull you feel when you spin on a merry-go-round.
In order for centrifugal force to cancel out even a significant portion of gravity, the planet would have to be spinning at an appreciable fraction of its own escape velocity (for the Earth, you're talking 11.2 km/s, or about 7 miles per second.) Also, the necessary spin can only be found at the equator, where you're traveling at about 465 meters per second - a bit short of what you need to feel any appreciable effect. By that same token, the poles impart no tangential motion at all, which means you would feel the full effects of that 2.25 Gs. This also means that gravity would vary depending on your distance from the equator; pretty inconvenient.
I agree that education is necessary, and that's why I said that vendors should take more responsibility and not let the default be open and unprotected. Buffalo has a new wireless hub which has a default setup where the computer is bound to the hub by a unique, encrypted key; it's a proprietary, Windows-based method, but for the non-savvy home user, that typically shouldn't be an issue. However, there is still absolutely no justification for taking advantage of people just because you can. Wrong is wrong, no matter how easy it is to get away with it.
Just like people try to excuse stealing music with the "information wants to be free" line and ignore the fact that people also want to get paid for what they do, saying that "they were asking for it" is the same excuse the school bully uses when he beats up on kids smaller and weaker than himself. If I pay for my internet service and you freeload off of me, you're as good as stealing money out of my pocket. Not all ISPs offer true unlimited bandwidth, and if some jerk soaks up my bandwidth limit for the month on P2P downloads, I'm the one who has to pay. Stealing is punishable by law, so it seems perfectly fine to me to make this criminal as well.
If you honestly feel like willingly sharing your wireless with strangers, I think that's great and very generous, and in that case, punishment is also uncalled for. To prevent this from happening, it would be good to require the authorities to question the owner of the wireless point first before prosecuting. Of course, the ISP might also have objections on the matter, since there's the likelihood that the contract the wireless point owner signs with their ISP may actually prohibit any sort of sharing, period.
As I said, temptation doesn't excuse the crime. I agree that it's a jumbled mess out there as far as naming conventions and security (or the lack thereof), but a couple of general guidelines should suffice. Ask yourself: am I paying for this? Am I at a business or public access point where they advertise the name of the network, or I can ask someone to tell me which one is which? If the answers to either of those are "no," then you probably aren't allowed to use it.
Just because you have the ability to find the network does not mean you're invited. The fact that this happens in an abstract space rather than physical (i.e. you can trespass without ever leaving the house) makes it seem more morally ambiguous, but that's just temptation inspiring you to make excuses. You're freeloading, and that's just not cool.
Incidentally, I run my network with password encryption and never have a problem with people stealing my bandwidth.
I assume you're referring to internet content producers when you say broadcasters? Traditionally two different things, since broadcasters worry more about NTSC vs. PAL, SD vs. HD, etc. Windows doesn't really figure into it.
As for reaching the widest market, you're still best off relying on Windows, because of that pesky 96% market share. I'm a Mac guy, but I still have to worry about my target audience, 9 out of 10 of which are on Windows, being able to properly see my content in the blight on humanity that is IE 6 (and a good content provider usually worries about maintaining compatibility back to even earlier, crappier versions, to a greater or lesser degree.)
I'm hoping that MS' efforts force Adobe to start lowering their prices; their monopolistic price-gouging and half-baked anti-piracy measures are starting to get on my nerves.
That would totally suck. I'd have to go to somebody's house every time they demanded to see the source? And I have to do it for free? No, thanks. ;)
I think the idea is just plain silly. "...this version of Ubuntu will not include any video footage unless it also includes either the source content or access to the source content." Sounds like a weird sort of marketing spin to me, to please the "everything must be free" people. As an independent film maker, if I included video content on such a distribution, I'm also supposed to give you the raw, uncut, digitized footage, inclusive of bad takes, deletions, etc? That's not just stupid, it's impractical.
Video is not the same as software, no matter how you try to objectify it. Not to mention, most video is edited in proprietary applications that don't run on Linux. If you want my original project files, good luck with that; it's going to take a different OS and cost you several thousand dollars for the software to be able to actually open them.
The lack of technical knowledge of the victim does not excuse the morality of the person taking advantage of them. By that same argument, you could also claim that ignorance of the law doesn't excuse breaking it (which, conveniently enough for the government and tax collectors, is usually the case.) If you'd like a different analogy, just because my water hose is left outside does not make me at fault for somebody stealing my water. Just because a woman wears sexy clothing doesn't mean she's asking for it. If you steal from others, you're a criminal. Somebody else making the crime easy for someone doesn't make the culprit any less a criminal, it just throws their general lack of class into sharper relief.
We were supposed to switch over to Internet2 after ten years of reserved use for universities and private corporations. I wonder when the deadline for that is? I forget exactly what year they started it, but the ten years should be up very soon.
"Modern" school systems are paralyzed with the fear that they'll get in trouble if their students don't make adequate passing grades. If we can control the information that students have access to, we can do everything short of holding the pen (or keyboard) for them so they can write it.
In Japan, for example, a student in a so-called "low-level" school can do absolutely nothing but attend class and make a passing grade. They aren't required to submit any homework, participate, or even stay awake, for that matter. They might occasionally have to endure some sort of counseling session, but that's about it. They have been classified by the system as stupid, and teachers take a "well, it can't be helped" approach to teaching them. And then people wonder why their society is slowly spiralling down the drain.
You mock this because you've obviously never had Oklahoma pork barbeque. Truly, it will make your taste buds weep with joy.
We were merely saying that, as teachers, we have seen too many years of great ideas poorly implemented, and that this has all the hallmarks of a big mistake. You need infrastructure in order to carry out the wonderful vision you've described, and that simply doesn't exist. To be fair, the linked articles are lacking in detail, but just putting the technology in the hands of the children isn't enough; you're going to need to train the children on how to use the technology, and you're going to have to train the teachers (and adults are not famous for rapidly adapting to new technology.) In most cases, the knee-jerk response to teachers asking for training and funds in such situations is, "Can't you just get by with what you've got?" as if the instruction manual that comes with your average MP3 player would open up the world of audio-visual recording.
To give you a for instance: a former school I taught at bought two new laptops and a wireless network for teacher use, and then forbade the teachers from connecting to the Interweb "except when absolutely necessary," for fear that they might catch something from the tubes, or that some malicious hacker would download all the students' address information and go on a stalking spree. I even pointed out to them that if you want to get really paranoid, even "except when absolutely necessary" was too long (since nowadays it only takes a few minutes for an unprotected computer to get owned), that these computers were anything *but* unprotected, and that they had no business putting sensitive information on a networked computer, anyway. These protests and attempts at reason fell upon deaf ears, and the wireless network continues unused to this day.
It's the correct usage of both servicing and mating. After all, regardless of whether or not you use a condom (arguably for the purpose of preventing the exchange of DNA and somebody becoming pregnant), it's still called mating. If you want, you could refer to it as regurgitating instead. :)
Actually, my main reason for buying a Nintendo DS is so that I can study my Japanese kanji. Admittedly, this doesn't really impact the American market, but it's a definite educational tool, and very significant for at least one nation of people.
As a teacher, I completely believe you. I also agree that I would sooner see this as a pay raise for me than spent on an iPod that will get lost, stolen, or broken within six months and never hold even one lecture related to class. The irony of this kind of idea is that they'll give these kids the iPods and completely fail to give the schools the resources to record and publish anything that could go on the iPods. Do the schools also get recording equipment? Does anybody at the school know how to make a website, or an RSS feed?
The only thing the kids are going to learn is that the government really does waste their parents' tax money on cool stuff.
Yeah, my very fine Casio Ex-word, and my Edict-based dictionary both agree that nenpi is strictly mileage.
The problem is, nobody's yet figured out a way to make 30 copies and then take the blackboards home with them. It's not like audio lectures are a new thing here, plus there's that whole "saving paper" idea.