You've already gotten the usual answers: dubious claims of technological advances (always a very short list, usually stuff that was being worked on already), and utopian ideas of being able to provide a backup of human life (which would cost hundreds of trillions and doesn't really seem necessary, especially to a cynic like me who thinks that if we manage to wipe ourselves out then we're not worth backing up). Plus the usual "It could produce all kinds of stuff you don't know about" (which hardly seems like justification for spending a quarter-trillion dollars) and a vague notion of manifest destiny.
All of which are lies. They're obviously justifications because they don't want to tell you the real reason: because it's cool. And arguably, that's the best reason.
The US reached its position of power in the world largely on the back of its inventiveness. (Immensely fertile land didn't hurt, but we'd have long since tapped that out if we hadn't invented a huge array of technology to prop it up).
If a high-profile "scientific" mission (there's actually little scientific value to manned space-flight) inspires the things that bring money into America today, from Sergey Brin to Dean Kamen to Craig Venter, perhaps it's money worth spending.
Other than that, it's mostly a way to funnel vast sums of money to prop up the military contractors. Guess what Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, and Lockheed do when they're not building space-ships? And they do it in practically every Congressional district in the country.
Airplanes are much more vulnerable near airports. They're moving (comparatively) slowly and near to the ground. You can hit one with relatively low-tech equipment, with practice and some luck.
Hitting an airplane in flight, miles up and moving hundreds of miles per hour, requires much more sophisticated (and expensive, and hard to move) weaponry (or a lot of anti-aircraft fire fired for a long time, giving you plenty of time to get caught).
I'm not defending the idea; this looks like a fabulous opportunity to shovel tons of money at a military contractor for years and years and years without ever achieving anything. But they've got to seem plausible to get funding, and it is more plausible for a terrorist to try to shoot down a low-flying plane near an airport than one in transit. Not actually feasible, but more plausible.
For the technology you're describing a "smart card", and there are various implementations of that, but none have caught on.
For the crypto you're describing a one-time pad, and it has serious limitations, but there are better ways. The problem with a one-time pad is that they have to be generated and distributed securely. And you and your bank have to have identical copies of large files, which presents new security risks: anything that's duplicated doubles the possibility of compromise.
Public-key cryptography is a better solution. Rather than having identical copies of a very large number, you generated two smaller numbers (say, 200 digits long) which are mathematically related by a hard-to-apply formula. When you encrypt with one, you can decrypt with the other, and vice versa, but you can't decrypt with the same number you used to encrypt it. (Well, it is theoretically possible, but incredibly difficult.)
The math is rather too complicated to describe in a Slashdot article (it involves prime numbers, exponentiation, and modulo aritmethic) but the upshot is: yes on smart cards which encrypt every transaction security, and they need to get that accepted. "No" on the encryption you describe, but there are workable alternatives in place.
So if it's such a good idea, why haven't they done it? I'm not 100% sure. Part of it is that the credit card banks shove a lot of the costs of identity theft off onto the merchants and the card-holders, and the rest is cost-of-doing-business.
And that cost is presumably lower than implementing a complex new card system, especially if they're not convinced that it's the perfect card system such that they might have to do it again in a few years. This article shows that even really good techniques are vulnerable when a con man takes advantage of the card-holder.
Still, existing variants on the techniques you describe would cut identity theft massively, and I'm very disappointed in the banks for not using them. It would benefit them, their customers, and the merchants.
It's true: the electrons are fungible. You're getting plain old electricity from the grid, and paying a premium which goes (more or less) to the cow people.
But the cow people won't produce it for the rates the electric company is willing to pay them. It's more expensive to produce a watt-hour of juice from cow-fart than it is from coal. Without the subsidy they're paid based on the fossil-fuel rates, and they lose money. This is a way for people to say, economically, "Non-fossil fuel power is more important to us than other uses of our money."
In the limit, enough people being willing to pay for it could reduce the amount of coal burned and replace it with methane-burning, which is marginally better for the environment. How much better, as you point out, is entirely debatable, especially relative to other energy-conserving uses of the money. Nonetheless the fact that power is fungible does not alter the fact that people subsidizing the cow-power reduces fossil fuel consumption.
(Or, more likely, reduces coal demand, lowering the price of conventionally-produced power, thus convincing people to leave the lights on all night. Or perhaps putting thousands of coal miners out of work. Or other horrible knock-on effects.)
"New protocols" are like "third parties" in politics: everybody wants an alternative, but there is no alternative which doesn't come with problems of its own.
The mail protocol isn't really the problem, at least not in ways that can't be fixed. The real problem has to do with the fact that there are reasons to be able to receive unsolicited emails. Most info@ email addresses designed to be received unsolicited. Fan mail is also unsolicited. If you type my email address off a business card, that appears to the system as an unsolicted email.
No matter what protocol you conceive, and "promiscuous" email address (that is, one that accepts email from anywhere) is going to be prone to spam. You can try to weed out the obvious ones, but no protocol can really reduce spam under those circumstances. And such things are usually better layered on top of the existing schemes; any new scheme you propose to replace it is going to be met on Slashdot with the form-letter "this is why your anti-spam idea won't work."
If you're willing to limit your email consumption to very tight circles, all sorts of protocol changes will help. But if you really want to be able to communicate globally, no new protocol is going to save you.
You just have to take a combination of approaches, many of which already exist in some form but don't have wide adoption: signed emails to whitelist in your friends, filters to weed out the obvious crap, moving the opt-in mass emails to RSS.
The closest thing I can find to a radical change is postage-stamp emails, basically a trivial fee per email to move email from zero-cost to an insignificant cost, which becomes significant only to spammers. That, too, can be layered on top of SMTP, but there are so many other issues to be worked out first (micropayments, public-key infrastructure) that it, too, will be a long time coming.
My God, I hope that number is inflated. The economics of spam are always based on, "Well, even if only 1/100 of 1% results in a purchase, it's profitable for them". If 5.6% of porn spams actually are actually clicked through, it means that spam is getting way, way more attention than the threshold, and the spams are never going away, even though only a fraction of those click-throughs result in sales. Crap.
(Looking is, for the most part, free, except that if you're clicking through porn spam you're probably doing it on an un-updated version of IE, and now you're relaying spam, too.)
In addition to what node3 said, there's also the whole trick about bringing it back. SpaceShipOne never got above 1km/s. LEO is nearly an order of magnitude greater (7.8km/s). Energy goes by the square of the velocity, so LEO requires 60 times as much energy.
And then you have to shed most of that velocity to get it back; that's equivalent to absorbing and re-radiating all the fuel you burned putting it up.
It's a long, long way from the X-Prize to commercial orbital vehicles.
Netflix and Blockbuster deal in discs, not players. Most of the movie studios will be bringing their films out in one format or the other, not both. HD-DVD has Universal; Blu-Ray has 20th Century Fox, MGM, and Sony Pictures. That means for many films, they'll have to stock one format or the other but not both, or not stock the hi-def at all. Which means overall, they have to support both formats, and it's up to their customers to have the right player if they want to see a movie from a studio aligned with one side or the other.
Three are a few studios, notably Paramount and Warner, that are going to try to do both formats. There, Blockbuster and Netflix may have some say. Netflix has stated that they'll support both formats, but until the actual discs appear I don't know what that means. They're gonna hate buying three copies of movies (HD, Blu, regular DVD), but it sounds like that's what they're gonna do.
The question is, why did they buy the SUV rather than the EV-1? At least in part, they liked the size, and felt that relatively cheap gas (remember the "gas glut"?) was worth the mileage.
But at least according to the film, more was at work than the market in that decision. They blame the oil companies for anti-market tactics like astroturf groups to oppose charging stations, as well as buying congressmen to give tax credits to SUV owners. (SUVs over 3 tons, most famously the Hummer, were treated as commercial vehicles, and given huge tax breaks. And non-enormous SUVs got to count their potential carrying capacity towards that 3 tons under a 2002 "economic stimulus package").
Oil companies also campaigned vigorously against emissions restrictions and higher CAFE standards. In market terms, those are attempts to monetize externalized expenses.
So the cards were stacked in favor of SUVs and against the electric car. Not by the market, but precisely counter to the market, when powerful companies get a larger say in regulations than consumers do.
That's a litigation question, not a DRM question. But yeah, you can get screwed hard on it, like the George Harrison plagiarism case. I've got no advice for you on that one, except to find a less litigious country or a better lawyer.
Probably not many, but enough. I suspect that's why the price is as high as it is; that's the price they figure they can get the most profit (number of people times price).
If you've never seen people go that nuts for a pet, I'll invite you down to the advanced animal hospital in my area. You'll see people spend literally thousands of dollars to safe the life of a pet. I came very close to it myself; the poor thing died before they actually did the procedure.
They're not attached to this particular pet until after they buy it, but for people who want to grow that attached to a pet, I can see them paying this much, if it's the only way.
It may be that they have to keep the cat indoors. My cats are perfectly content to be indoor cats, with occasional supervised trips into the enclosed back yard. It's much safer for them anyway; encounters with stray and feral cats are very dangerous. There are fights, and there are infections that can be passed.
I don't think the RIAA wishes to mandate your use of DRM on what you create. They just want to use it on what they own (and force your computers and other playback devices to respect that), but you're free to distribute your own creations any way you like. (Assuming, that is, that your "creation" isn't just a remix of their creation.)
I suppose they'd be perfectly happy to have you not use DRM. They figure people will copy your work for free, you'll make no money, and quit competing with them.
That's a very good point, actually. Tax software may open them up to more liability than they want to face at the moment, but I can definitely see an online Quicken coming.
That would require a layer of security that they currently don't have in place, and I'd be curious to see if Ajax over SSL could perform well enough to make it happen. But if it can happen... yeah, that's a big deal.
Google is trying, slowly, to pull you away from your operating system. They can't do all of the fanciest things that a natively-installed application can do, but they're trying to hit a sweet spot. Why buy Excel if all you're doing is totting up a few columns? Why buy into Outlook (and, more importantly, Exchange and Windows Server) to just send a few emails? Eventually, will you need a full-blown Word installation if you're just going to bang out a letter to Grandma?
And the best part, from Google's point of view, is that because they're not trying to support all of the fancy features MS put in for business, the apps are fairly simple. The development team is a few programmers, or perhaps a dozen, rather than thousands. Let MS have the high-end.
It's not about killing MS per se, though I'm sure plenty of people at Google wouldn't be unhappy to see MS go. They're planning to leave MS the higher end applications. And they're not going into gaming. Both of those mean large markets where browser-tablets cannot go: you have to have a full OS.
But the killer app is when many people with relatively simple needs realize that they don't need a new computer, just a new browser, and stop upgrading. Or even downgrade to a browser-only tablet, or a small computer hooked to their HDTV (which, unlike regular TV, has enough resolution to really be a computer display).
And here's the final kick: they can have both, and not worry about exchanging files. That's Google's real killer app. In the coffee bar you work on the spreadsheet a bit on your wi-fi tablet, then at home switch to your box in front of the TV, and it's all the same.
Surreally, you're now looking at an ad-supported browser, with ads taking up more of your screen than you'd ever in a billion years tolerate if your OS were to do it.
From there, they may try to take more of the business market away, which will mean serious security; at least SSL. And they're not ready for that. AJAX is too slow for the additional drain of SSL. But I assume they're thinking that far ahead.
Both sides lay claim to the center in the net neutrality debate. (I hesitate to call it a debate; at least among the technical community on Slashdot it's considered largely settled, waiting only for the politicians to do whatever they'll do with it.)
The ISPs argue that net neutrality violates markets, since they should be free to charge whatever the technology will allow them to charge, and theoretically passing the savings on to the consumer. That is, an ISP which throttles some sites and gets money out of others could under-charge an ISP which is truly neutral, and that the market should be allowed to decide.
But since the ISPs are perilously close to a monopoly, their market argument is possibly fallacious. If a customer has only the phone company and the cable company, or possibly just one, then their "choice" may be no choice at all.
From a political standpoint, that gives Democrats an opportunity to appear to be pro-market and to cast their opponents as pro-business, which is not the same thing. Pulling that off with their existing base will prove a challenge. They may be able to make the case to unions that markets are good while opposing the power of businesses to exploit workers and customers through monopolies, but some unions (the airlines, the auto workers) have shown themselves willing to close the company rather than reduce their power. (Admittedly, it takes two to play that game, with the corporate executives taking large separation compensation while screwing both the workers and the shareholders.) Teachers' unions are similarly reluctant to allow market forces to influence the way they work.
And they'll have to find a way to reconcile any move towards markets with the compassion they've traditionally shown towards the poor, which are laudable but a drain to the economy, and therefore ammunition to anybody who accuses them of being anti-market. There's still a strong socialist-leaning contingent in the party, and that'll be a drag on any pro-market moves.
Best of luck to them. With neither party really running on fiscal and economic thoughtfulness, it may well be the Democrats' turn in the upcoming elections. We'll see if they use it wisely.
Exactly; it's legal under Russian law and the RIAA has zero pull in Russia.
However, they have considerable pull in the US, which has considerable pull in the WTO, which is something the Russians very much want to join. And the WTO supports intellectual property rights (for better or worse; I'm not taking sides here), and they have the right to demand that Russia change its laws before joining.
That's a considerable draw for the Russians. It gives them far easier access to world markets, allowing them to easily trade stuff they have in abundance (minerals, in particular) for stuff they need (food, unfortunately for them; the best agricultural areas of the Soviet Union were not in Russia).
So the Russians face a choice: continue to have lax intellectual property laws and profit $0.10 a song, or sell bauxite, oil, and iron ore on the world market.
Russia also has severe economic difficulties, for a host of reasons. Some are caused by misgovernment, both now and during the privatization in the 90s. Others are economic, due to lack of resources like fertile land and warm-water ports. Some are just due to a lack of investment in some technological areas dating back decades, and now they have to spend to play catchup.
And this isn't just about allofmp3.com; it's about intellectual property rights, which for better or worse the WTO supports. China is facing similar issues in trying to liberalize economic relations with the West.
With the US in particular losing manufacturing jobs to other countries, they're going to work that much harder to try to retain their profits on intellectual work.
I'm afraid I gotta disagree with you there, at least to a point. If your.foo domain name duplicates a.com domain name, then you're just buying trouble. If there's somebody actually there, you'll risk looking like you're surfing off their trademark, and maybe you are. Even if there isn't, people will go to the wrong web site all the time. Get popular enough that people are going to domain.foo, and the scuzzball domain squatter is going to make a ton of money off you selling to a scuzzball who puts up nothing but Google ads to people who type domain.com out of habit.
Or worse, they'll put up an exact duplicate of your page and use it to steal passwords and credit cards.
In general, non-traditional TLDs just look unprofessional to me. I'd never buy anything from a.biz domain; I just wouldn't trust the guys who own it.
For the most part I consider general-purpose TLDs a waste of time. But they do have this going in their favor: if it keeps the question asker from paying anything to the squatter, and the squatter has to continue paying his $3.25 (or whatever it is) a year to sit on the domain, along with a few thousand others... well, that makes me smile just a little. If people abandoned.com in droves, leaving the squatters holding the bag, it sure wouldn't make me unhappy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a film critic, but I am an actor and director (stage rather than film), so it's actually a pretty good call.
So good luck on your movie. I'd love to see it. And if there's a casting call, make sure I get notified.
You've already gotten the usual answers: dubious claims of technological advances (always a very short list, usually stuff that was being worked on already), and utopian ideas of being able to provide a backup of human life (which would cost hundreds of trillions and doesn't really seem necessary, especially to a cynic like me who thinks that if we manage to wipe ourselves out then we're not worth backing up). Plus the usual "It could produce all kinds of stuff you don't know about" (which hardly seems like justification for spending a quarter-trillion dollars) and a vague notion of manifest destiny.
All of which are lies. They're obviously justifications because they don't want to tell you the real reason: because it's cool. And arguably, that's the best reason.
The US reached its position of power in the world largely on the back of its inventiveness. (Immensely fertile land didn't hurt, but we'd have long since tapped that out if we hadn't invented a huge array of technology to prop it up).
If a high-profile "scientific" mission (there's actually little scientific value to manned space-flight) inspires the things that bring money into America today, from Sergey Brin to Dean Kamen to Craig Venter, perhaps it's money worth spending.
Other than that, it's mostly a way to funnel vast sums of money to prop up the military contractors. Guess what Boeing, Northrup-Grumman, and Lockheed do when they're not building space-ships? And they do it in practically every Congressional district in the country.
How much is that in Libraries of Congress per second?
of course, you can't tell which are yours.
You do have the advantage of knowing (a) roughly when it's coming, and (b) what color it is. That certainly helps.
Airplanes are much more vulnerable near airports. They're moving (comparatively) slowly and near to the ground. You can hit one with relatively low-tech equipment, with practice and some luck.
Hitting an airplane in flight, miles up and moving hundreds of miles per hour, requires much more sophisticated (and expensive, and hard to move) weaponry (or a lot of anti-aircraft fire fired for a long time, giving you plenty of time to get caught).
I'm not defending the idea; this looks like a fabulous opportunity to shovel tons of money at a military contractor for years and years and years without ever achieving anything. But they've got to seem plausible to get funding, and it is more plausible for a terrorist to try to shoot down a low-flying plane near an airport than one in transit. Not actually feasible, but more plausible.
For the technology you're describing a "smart card", and there are various implementations of that, but none have caught on.
For the crypto you're describing a one-time pad, and it has serious limitations, but there are better ways. The problem with a one-time pad is that they have to be generated and distributed securely. And you and your bank have to have identical copies of large files, which presents new security risks: anything that's duplicated doubles the possibility of compromise.
Public-key cryptography is a better solution. Rather than having identical copies of a very large number, you generated two smaller numbers (say, 200 digits long) which are mathematically related by a hard-to-apply formula. When you encrypt with one, you can decrypt with the other, and vice versa, but you can't decrypt with the same number you used to encrypt it. (Well, it is theoretically possible, but incredibly difficult.)
The math is rather too complicated to describe in a Slashdot article (it involves prime numbers, exponentiation, and modulo aritmethic) but the upshot is: yes on smart cards which encrypt every transaction security, and they need to get that accepted. "No" on the encryption you describe, but there are workable alternatives in place.
So if it's such a good idea, why haven't they done it? I'm not 100% sure. Part of it is that the credit card banks shove a lot of the costs of identity theft off onto the merchants and the card-holders, and the rest is cost-of-doing-business.
And that cost is presumably lower than implementing a complex new card system, especially if they're not convinced that it's the perfect card system such that they might have to do it again in a few years. This article shows that even really good techniques are vulnerable when a con man takes advantage of the card-holder.
Still, existing variants on the techniques you describe would cut identity theft massively, and I'm very disappointed in the banks for not using them. It would benefit them, their customers, and the merchants.
It's true: the electrons are fungible. You're getting plain old electricity from the grid, and paying a premium which goes (more or less) to the cow people.
But the cow people won't produce it for the rates the electric company is willing to pay them. It's more expensive to produce a watt-hour of juice from cow-fart than it is from coal. Without the subsidy they're paid based on the fossil-fuel rates, and they lose money. This is a way for people to say, economically, "Non-fossil fuel power is more important to us than other uses of our money."
In the limit, enough people being willing to pay for it could reduce the amount of coal burned and replace it with methane-burning, which is marginally better for the environment. How much better, as you point out, is entirely debatable, especially relative to other energy-conserving uses of the money. Nonetheless the fact that power is fungible does not alter the fact that people subsidizing the cow-power reduces fossil fuel consumption.
(Or, more likely, reduces coal demand, lowering the price of conventionally-produced power, thus convincing people to leave the lights on all night. Or perhaps putting thousands of coal miners out of work. Or other horrible knock-on effects.)
"New protocols" are like "third parties" in politics: everybody wants an alternative, but there is no alternative which doesn't come with problems of its own.
The mail protocol isn't really the problem, at least not in ways that can't be fixed. The real problem has to do with the fact that there are reasons to be able to receive unsolicited emails. Most info@ email addresses designed to be received unsolicited. Fan mail is also unsolicited. If you type my email address off a business card, that appears to the system as an unsolicted email.
No matter what protocol you conceive, and "promiscuous" email address (that is, one that accepts email from anywhere) is going to be prone to spam. You can try to weed out the obvious ones, but no protocol can really reduce spam under those circumstances. And such things are usually better layered on top of the existing schemes; any new scheme you propose to replace it is going to be met on Slashdot with the form-letter "this is why your anti-spam idea won't work."
If you're willing to limit your email consumption to very tight circles, all sorts of protocol changes will help. But if you really want to be able to communicate globally, no new protocol is going to save you.
You just have to take a combination of approaches, many of which already exist in some form but don't have wide adoption: signed emails to whitelist in your friends, filters to weed out the obvious crap, moving the opt-in mass emails to RSS.
The closest thing I can find to a radical change is postage-stamp emails, basically a trivial fee per email to move email from zero-cost to an insignificant cost, which becomes significant only to spammers. That, too, can be layered on top of SMTP, but there are so many other issues to be worked out first (micropayments, public-key infrastructure) that it, too, will be a long time coming.
I suppose BPO is probably more likely Business Process Outsourcing.
(Thanks, wikipedia. No thanks, editors: the term isn't even used in the linked article.)
My God, I hope that number is inflated. The economics of spam are always based on, "Well, even if only 1/100 of 1% results in a purchase, it's profitable for them". If 5.6% of porn spams actually are actually clicked through, it means that spam is getting way, way more attention than the threshold, and the spams are never going away, even though only a fraction of those click-throughs result in sales. Crap.
(Looking is, for the most part, free, except that if you're clicking through porn spam you're probably doing it on an un-updated version of IE, and now you're relaying spam, too.)
In addition to what node3 said, there's also the whole trick about bringing it back. SpaceShipOne never got above 1km/s. LEO is nearly an order of magnitude greater (7.8km/s). Energy goes by the square of the velocity, so LEO requires 60 times as much energy.
And then you have to shed most of that velocity to get it back; that's equivalent to absorbing and re-radiating all the fuel you burned putting it up.
It's a long, long way from the X-Prize to commercial orbital vehicles.
Netflix and Blockbuster deal in discs, not players. Most of the movie studios will be bringing their films out in one format or the other, not both. HD-DVD has Universal; Blu-Ray has 20th Century Fox, MGM, and Sony Pictures. That means for many films, they'll have to stock one format or the other but not both, or not stock the hi-def at all. Which means overall, they have to support both formats, and it's up to their customers to have the right player if they want to see a movie from a studio aligned with one side or the other.
Three are a few studios, notably Paramount and Warner, that are going to try to do both formats. There, Blockbuster and Netflix may have some say. Netflix has stated that they'll support both formats, but until the actual discs appear I don't know what that means. They're gonna hate buying three copies of movies (HD, Blu, regular DVD), but it sounds like that's what they're gonna do.
The question is, why did they buy the SUV rather than the EV-1? At least in part, they liked the size, and felt that relatively cheap gas (remember the "gas glut"?) was worth the mileage.
But at least according to the film, more was at work than the market in that decision. They blame the oil companies for anti-market tactics like astroturf groups to oppose charging stations, as well as buying congressmen to give tax credits to SUV owners. (SUVs over 3 tons, most famously the Hummer, were treated as commercial vehicles, and given huge tax breaks. And non-enormous SUVs got to count their potential carrying capacity towards that 3 tons under a 2002 "economic stimulus package").
Oil companies also campaigned vigorously against emissions restrictions and higher CAFE standards. In market terms, those are attempts to monetize externalized expenses.
So the cards were stacked in favor of SUVs and against the electric car. Not by the market, but precisely counter to the market, when powerful companies get a larger say in regulations than consumers do.
That's a litigation question, not a DRM question. But yeah, you can get screwed hard on it, like the George Harrison plagiarism case. I've got no advice for you on that one, except to find a less litigious country or a better lawyer.
Probably not many, but enough. I suspect that's why the price is as high as it is; that's the price they figure they can get the most profit (number of people times price).
If you've never seen people go that nuts for a pet, I'll invite you down to the advanced animal hospital in my area. You'll see people spend literally thousands of dollars to safe the life of a pet. I came very close to it myself; the poor thing died before they actually did the procedure.
They're not attached to this particular pet until after they buy it, but for people who want to grow that attached to a pet, I can see them paying this much, if it's the only way.
It may be that they have to keep the cat indoors. My cats are perfectly content to be indoor cats, with occasional supervised trips into the enclosed back yard. It's much safer for them anyway; encounters with stray and feral cats are very dangerous. There are fights, and there are infections that can be passed.
I don't think the RIAA wishes to mandate your use of DRM on what you create. They just want to use it on what they own (and force your computers and other playback devices to respect that), but you're free to distribute your own creations any way you like. (Assuming, that is, that your "creation" isn't just a remix of their creation.)
I suppose they'd be perfectly happy to have you not use DRM. They figure people will copy your work for free, you'll make no money, and quit competing with them.
Actually, real programmers use cat.
That's a very good point, actually. Tax software may open them up to more liability than they want to face at the moment, but I can definitely see an online Quicken coming.
That would require a layer of security that they currently don't have in place, and I'd be curious to see if Ajax over SSL could perform well enough to make it happen. But if it can happen... yeah, that's a big deal.
Google's killer app is your web browser.
Google is trying, slowly, to pull you away from your operating system. They can't do all of the fanciest things that a natively-installed application can do, but they're trying to hit a sweet spot. Why buy Excel if all you're doing is totting up a few columns? Why buy into Outlook (and, more importantly, Exchange and Windows Server) to just send a few emails? Eventually, will you need a full-blown Word installation if you're just going to bang out a letter to Grandma?
And the best part, from Google's point of view, is that because they're not trying to support all of the fancy features MS put in for business, the apps are fairly simple. The development team is a few programmers, or perhaps a dozen, rather than thousands. Let MS have the high-end.
It's not about killing MS per se, though I'm sure plenty of people at Google wouldn't be unhappy to see MS go. They're planning to leave MS the higher end applications. And they're not going into gaming. Both of those mean large markets where browser-tablets cannot go: you have to have a full OS.
But the killer app is when many people with relatively simple needs realize that they don't need a new computer, just a new browser, and stop upgrading. Or even downgrade to a browser-only tablet, or a small computer hooked to their HDTV (which, unlike regular TV, has enough resolution to really be a computer display).
And here's the final kick: they can have both, and not worry about exchanging files. That's Google's real killer app. In the coffee bar you work on the spreadsheet a bit on your wi-fi tablet, then at home switch to your box in front of the TV, and it's all the same.
Surreally, you're now looking at an ad-supported browser, with ads taking up more of your screen than you'd ever in a billion years tolerate if your OS were to do it.
From there, they may try to take more of the business market away, which will mean serious security; at least SSL. And they're not ready for that. AJAX is too slow for the additional drain of SSL. But I assume they're thinking that far ahead.
Both sides lay claim to the center in the net neutrality debate. (I hesitate to call it a debate; at least among the technical community on Slashdot it's considered largely settled, waiting only for the politicians to do whatever they'll do with it.)
The ISPs argue that net neutrality violates markets, since they should be free to charge whatever the technology will allow them to charge, and theoretically passing the savings on to the consumer. That is, an ISP which throttles some sites and gets money out of others could under-charge an ISP which is truly neutral, and that the market should be allowed to decide.
But since the ISPs are perilously close to a monopoly, their market argument is possibly fallacious. If a customer has only the phone company and the cable company, or possibly just one, then their "choice" may be no choice at all.
From a political standpoint, that gives Democrats an opportunity to appear to be pro-market and to cast their opponents as pro-business, which is not the same thing. Pulling that off with their existing base will prove a challenge. They may be able to make the case to unions that markets are good while opposing the power of businesses to exploit workers and customers through monopolies, but some unions (the airlines, the auto workers) have shown themselves willing to close the company rather than reduce their power. (Admittedly, it takes two to play that game, with the corporate executives taking large separation compensation while screwing both the workers and the shareholders.) Teachers' unions are similarly reluctant to allow market forces to influence the way they work.
And they'll have to find a way to reconcile any move towards markets with the compassion they've traditionally shown towards the poor, which are laudable but a drain to the economy, and therefore ammunition to anybody who accuses them of being anti-market. There's still a strong socialist-leaning contingent in the party, and that'll be a drag on any pro-market moves.
Best of luck to them. With neither party really running on fiscal and economic thoughtfulness, it may well be the Democrats' turn in the upcoming elections. We'll see if they use it wisely.
Liberal, I'll grant you. Anti-Bush, ditto. But where do you find "socialist"?
Exactly; it's legal under Russian law and the RIAA has zero pull in Russia.
However, they have considerable pull in the US, which has considerable pull in the WTO, which is something the Russians very much want to join. And the WTO supports intellectual property rights (for better or worse; I'm not taking sides here), and they have the right to demand that Russia change its laws before joining.
That's a considerable draw for the Russians. It gives them far easier access to world markets, allowing them to easily trade stuff they have in abundance (minerals, in particular) for stuff they need (food, unfortunately for them; the best agricultural areas of the Soviet Union were not in Russia).
So the Russians face a choice: continue to have lax intellectual property laws and profit $0.10 a song, or sell bauxite, oil, and iron ore on the world market.
Russia also has severe economic difficulties, for a host of reasons. Some are caused by misgovernment, both now and during the privatization in the 90s. Others are economic, due to lack of resources like fertile land and warm-water ports. Some are just due to a lack of investment in some technological areas dating back decades, and now they have to spend to play catchup.
And this isn't just about allofmp3.com; it's about intellectual property rights, which for better or worse the WTO supports. China is facing similar issues in trying to liberalize economic relations with the West.
With the US in particular losing manufacturing jobs to other countries, they're going to work that much harder to try to retain their profits on intellectual work.
I'm afraid I gotta disagree with you there, at least to a point. If your .foo domain name duplicates a .com domain name, then you're just buying trouble. If there's somebody actually there, you'll risk looking like you're surfing off their trademark, and maybe you are. Even if there isn't, people will go to the wrong web site all the time. Get popular enough that people are going to domain.foo, and the scuzzball domain squatter is going to make a ton of money off you selling to a scuzzball who puts up nothing but Google ads to people who type domain.com out of habit.
.biz domain; I just wouldn't trust the guys who own it.
.com in droves, leaving the squatters holding the bag, it sure wouldn't make me unhappy.
Or worse, they'll put up an exact duplicate of your page and use it to steal passwords and credit cards.
In general, non-traditional TLDs just look unprofessional to me. I'd never buy anything from a
For the most part I consider general-purpose TLDs a waste of time. But they do have this going in their favor: if it keeps the question asker from paying anything to the squatter, and the squatter has to continue paying his $3.25 (or whatever it is) a year to sit on the domain, along with a few thousand others... well, that makes me smile just a little. If people abandoned
Didn't realize that was a "visa waiver" rather than a visa. Cool. Thanks.