Scalpers are scumbags who take advantage of the fact that people have jobs, lives, etc.
Not only do they take advantage of the fact that some people have jobs and such, they also take advantage of the fact that some people don't. I know whenever playoff tickets go on sale in my area, it's fairly common to see a ton of homeless people waiting in line. Scalpers pay them a few bucks per day plus bring them hot meals in exchange for them buying the maximum individual allotment of tickets for the scalpers.
Not only does it make it hard for people with actual lives to compete, it makes the experience highly unpleasant since you'd spending days in line with a bunch of smelly homeless people. At one point a few years ago, many fans were asking the team to record the purchaser's name and driver's license/state ID number at the time of sale and then check the ID at the gate to make sure the person who bought the ticket was the one who was using it. FIFA did something similar in the last world cup and I remember hearing it cut down on scalping somewhat...not entirely, but for an event as popular as the world cup, there will always be scalping.
Fans need help from venues, performers and ticketing outlets, etc if there is to be a reduction in scalping. The problem is that most of those people don't care about scalping. They'd rather the show sell out than risk not selling out because they discouraged scalping. Scalpers help shows sell out since they risk not reselling their tickets for shows that aren't popular. They make it back on the popular shows, but for those shows, the vendors can't charge the premium to make up for the less popular shows the way the scalpers can. So scalpers do serve a purpose, but only to ticket vendors, not ticket buyers. And that's why we'll continue to see scalping, because those with the ability to stop it also benefit from it.
I'm excited about this but it's years off before we have widespread adoption.
The nice thing about Wave is that it doesn't need to have widespread adoption to be useful right now. For example, as soon as Google's service goes live, development teams (open source or otherwise) could use Wave to manage their documentation. The collaborative editing functionality makes it very wiki like, which is already good for documentation. And the discussions could allow developer to hash out questions of how to make the documentation better or what still needs to be documented. Then they could embed just the shared-edit piece of the wave on the site under documentation so that people reading the documentation wouldn't see the discussions. And if the projects use wave to manage the mailing list, you could embed list discussions into the documentation when someone answers a common question in a through fashion.
Sure a wiki can do most of this, but Wave looks like it can offer a few extra capabilities. For instance, you can structure your wave hierarchically so that different people get involved at different stages of the wave. If our engineering team uses a local Wave server to manage client-facing documentation, we can put all the engineers at the root of the wave, so that we can discuss all the technical aspects of the documentation and all make changes to the documentation. But you can also have a second level where sales and account managers can participation in conversation about a document, and add feedback from customers. Then the last level is the embedding bot which only sees the final product, without any of the change history or conversation.
And that's just a single use case for wave. I can envision Wave being able to fully replace Exchange in a corporate environment. You could create a meeting bot that adds a meeting to the calendars of the participants in the Wave. And another bot could serve as an email gateway to both accept changes to the wave over SMTP and publish changes to waves over SMTP. There's a ton of details to work out (you don't replace a product as involved as Exchange overnight), but the ability to have "robotic" actors that implement workflows opens up a lot of possibilities for how this technology can be used. Most of these possibilities are going to depend on Wave building a community of users that provide extensions to Wave so that Wave users don't have to shoehorn standard functionality to fit a desired purpose.
So while I agree with you that we're years away from realizing the full potential of Wave, since that potential will really be driven as much by add-ons developed outside of Google as much as it is by becoming ubiquitous. There's still enough out-of-the-box uses for it to be useful as soon as it's ready for release (or into beta, in Google terms;)
The tight integration with WebKit is actually something that Chrome, by design, cannot have. The main thing that makes Chrome different from other browsers is the process separation between tabs. It does this by having a main browser process that handles network, HTTP, SSL, and the interaction with the GUI and then spawning processes for rendering and plugins. They actually had to do some work to get WebKit to render to a bitmap that could be sent via IPC to the browser thread to display to the user. Having a tight integration with the GUI toolkit breaks the separate process sandboxing that's core to the Chrome architecture since, by design, rendering processes cannot interact with those operating system resources since they run with reduced privileges.
Not that this discounts Qt as an option, but the built-in WebKit integration would have been useless for them.
Also, Qt alone would not make them cross platform. In the session at I/O, a Chrome developer mentioned that the most difficult part of Chrome, be it the Windows version or the Linux/Mac ports, was dealing with plugins. On Windows, they went with NPAPI which, according to him, was very Windows-specific and almost entirely non-portable. This means that ports to other platforms would require a similar amount of effort to support plugins. My guess is that they chose to release Chrome for Windows before other platforms because Windows as a platform did not have a browser with the performance characteristics necessary to run Google's planned web applications (like Wave). Mac has Safari and Linux has Konqueror, so Chrome isn't as important on those two platforms.
I'm assuming this is a reference to Chrome, so I thought I'd share what one of the Chrome developers said in his talk about Chrome's internals at the same conference where Wave was unveiled. Someone asked the Mac/Linux question and the answer can be summed up in 5 letters...NPAPI. As explained, NPAPI is fairly windows specific and comprised a huge chunk of the engineering effort to get the Windows version of Chrome out to the public. But given that the Windows solution is almost entirely non-portable, they'll need similar efforts for Mac and/or Linux, and even Google has resource limits.
It's been felt that releasing Chrome without plugin support would be confusing to users and make Chrome look bad, so they're waiting until they've finished plugin support before releasing official Chrome builds for non-Windows platforms. But he also mentioned that the latest Chromium builds work on Linux and Mac, so people are free to grab the code and build it themselves. There just won't be support for plugins (which, in the eyes of many Slashdotters, could be an improvement over the Windows version;-)
The other interesting tidbit was over the frequently scorned anonymous usage data string that Chrome sends along to Google quite frequently. While there's probably no way of verifying it, it was explained that that anonymous usage data gets analyzed to allow other Chrome users to pre-fetch DNS results of likely sites that a user will visit when viewing a page. For instance, a Chrome user's browser, when viewing this Slashdot story, may perform a DNS lookup of news.zdnet.co.uk since a significant percentage of the Slashdot readership has actually clicked through to the article (...insert bad joke about no one ever reading the articles here...)
Like I said, I'm not sure this can be verified, but it's a least a plausible explanation for why they try to collect that data. Given how fanatical Google tends to be over performance, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But hey...I'm a bit pre-disposed to like them after the free phone surprise, so others may feel otherwise.
Or how about as municipalities, we kick their equipment out and put in our own. The whole net neutrality battle is meaningless when you have municipally-owned last-mile infrastructure. The free market takes care of the rest since it becomes much more likely that we'd have real competition between broadband providers and customers could use net neutrality as a deciding point when selecting a provider.
Charging telcos rent for the land they use to connect to customers essentially creates a new tax for broadband users since telcos will just pass the rent fees on to the customer...it's not like there are enough competitors to stop them from doing it. We need competition in the broadband market, not some way to mitigate the quagmire we currently find ourselves in. And real competition can only be had if we create a situation where competitors can not only compete with each other on even terms but also can enter the market without such a substantial initial investment.
It's our land, so it should be our wires that run though it.
Applications shouldn't be concerned with limiting themselves so that they cannot under any circumstances slow down other applications. It's the job of the OS to provide the tools to prioritize applications according to the desires of the user.
OS X, by virtue of its Unix underpinnings, should support nice/renice to alter the priorities of processes. One would hope that with additional support for developers to make use of multiple cores, Apple would also provide users with increased ability to easily alter the priorities of processes.
This should give the best of both worlds. You can prioritize your video encoding below your other activities and it will slowly prod along in the background without you noticing all that much. But if you get up to fix yourself a sandwich and pause your DOOM game and your HD video stream, your encoding would speed up to utilize the newly available cores. And once you've made your sandwich and are ready to resume your other activities, your encoding slows back down again.
The important part is to start learning how to write these kinds of parallelized applications now so that when we have 32+ cores, applications can benefit from the extra processing power. Sure, with 4 cores, there's a good chance that you're running at least as many applications as you have cores, but once the cores start to scale up, that will no longer be the case. And Apple is doing the right thing by encouraging this type of development now so that it enables either Apple (at the OS level) or the user control over how resources are shared. That's the only way that we'll ever get the most out these multi-core machines.
Something like this has the ability to replace wires in situations where bandwidth is important and range isn't. As mentioned in the summary, A/V stuff seems like a prime candidate. Home theaters in the future may end up being as simple as plugging in a power cord for each piece of equipment and then configuring the system in software. No more worrying about how many HDMI ports a TV has, how to run speaker wire from the receiver to the speakers and other similar situations where the physical connections matter to the usage of the system. Components could even implement zeroconf or something like it to eliminate the software setup and allow individual components to adapt to the other components in the system (i.e. the TV would ignore the audio when there is a surround sound speaker setup.)
HD video and audio require a lot of bandwidth but rarely require transmission over a distance of 10-20 feet. And for this type of setup, short range may actually be a benefit since there would be no need for the kind of channels that Wi-Fi uses to account for interference from others using the same technology.
I'm pretty sure this is different from the wireless HDMI efforts that are further along, but if they can offer added benefits, it could still end up being a useful technology.
Very few people who buy iphones and the like do so for games.
This is exactly why they should be worried, not the other way around. People are already buying iPhones and iPods that offer similar gaming capabilities. This makes convincing people to shell out money for a dedicated gaming device harder since the challenge isn't convincing them why they need the device, it's convincing them why they need both devices.
I know personally I own an iPhone for two main reasons...it eliminates the need for me to carry a cell phone and an ipod and I have a real browser wherever I go. But for me to buy a DS, I now need to be convinced that I really do need to carry two devices around again. That's a tough sell since the games for the DS are both more expensive and not that much better than what's available for the iPod. Apple can sell me a game by convincing me that it's worth the $4.99 I'm paying for it. Nintendo must convince me that a game is worth $20 and that their entire game catalog is worth an additional ~$100 and the hassle of toting a dedicated gaming device with me at all times. And to top it all off, they have to convince me to get off my ass and head down to a retail store to get the game or wait the few days it takes an online vendor to get it to me. If I'm bored and want to play a game on my iPhone, I can browse for one that looks fun and be playing it 2-3 minutes later.
That's why Nintendo should be scared...they're likely to always be a better gaming platform than the iPhone/iPod. But if the iPhone and iPod can close the gap enough to convince people that it isn't worth it to have a dedicated portable gaming system, their sales will take a huge hit.
Eventually, general purpose computing will eclipse certain types of discrete electronic components...
This makes your distinction between physical hardware and software more arbitrary, not less. Hardware is increasingly just software sent to a fab in Asia to produce. If I come up with an algorithm, if I write it up in Verilog, by your standards, I get to patent it. But if I write it up in C, it's not patentable. That's nonsensical.
Software is never anything but an idea that gets written down, and patents on software are patents on ideas, which should not be possible.
Software can be an idea written down, but it can also be the result of applied research. But what does it matter? Patents cover ideas. Whether that idea is the filament used in the first light bulb or the application of FFTs or DCTs to sound compression, it's conceptually the same. In both cases, the tool used existed prior to the application for the specific purpose. And in both cases, the inventor saw the chance to apply the existing tool to a specific purpose. And in both cases, the inventor spent considerable effort applying their idea to show that it was workable. They're both just ideas. And the physical/ephemeral distinction is entirely arbitrary.
...it's software *patents* that are gumming up the works.
I understand the sentiment against software patents, since the kind that have been granted have generally been overly broad or relatively obvious, but I have a problem with invalidating all software patents. It's almost a condemnation of the field of computer science by declaring that the product of the research in the field to be unworthy of patent protection when other scientific fields enjoy that protection.
I would argue that there are algorithms that legitimately deserve patent protection. A company like Dolby labs probably spends millions employing researchers and testing new sound compression algorithms. Google probably spends millions employing researchers working on search, sorting and similar algorithms to continually improve their search offering and make it capable of handling an ever-increasing amount of data that needs to be indexed. And from what we've heard of late, financial services companies spend a ton on programmers and mathematicians to develop algorithms for analyzing data from the stock market and other sources to inform investment decisions. And those are just a few obvious examples off the top of my head...I'm sure there's many more.
I personally feel that completely abolishing software patents will do more harm than good. I'd like to see opponents of software patents argue more for a reformation of the procedures the patent issuers use to evaluate whether a software patent is legitimate. I'd like to see the USPTO hire reviewers who deal solely with software patents and can have a more informed opinion on what is actually non-obvious and what is not overly-broad. I can also see the argument that the software industry moves faster than other industries and that patent protection on algorithms like these should be shorter than it currently is.
I know it's not a popular position here on Slashdot to argue for keeping software patents, but I'm always struck by how easily people here will casually dismiss computer science without even realizing it. When you see posts here about Knuth, Dijkstra or another computer scientist of that prominence, you're likely to see almost universal reverence for their contributions in responses, and rightly so. Yet people won't see a contradiction in advocating that those types of contributions aren't eligible for patent protection. That, to me, just seems wrong.
If you want real problems, try running Java apps on a shared hosting provider sometime. The limitations of those sites will have you shouting praise for what Google is offering.
The problem you're referring to is a well-known limitation of the java platform with a planned solution. The problem is that it's been stalled and hasn't made it past the JSR stage despite being first reviewed in 2001.
That combined with the Java Resource Consumption Management API would, if implemented, give application server vendors everything they would need to make a Servlet container that could be used in a shared hosting environment.
Until then, Java just isn't suitable for a shared hosting environment...at least not in the out-of-the-box kind of way. I have managed to string together a thin C CGI implementation that uses IPC to connect to a running Java process through JNI. It worked and actually substantially out-performed any of the scripting languages available from the hosting provider, but it took quite a bit of work to get running (mostly emulating what the Servlet API gives you for free) and the code I ended up with might not be portable to a real Servlet environment since I didn't bother implementing all of the Servlet API.
Long story short...I've felt that pain and can't wait for those two JSR's to make it into a new release of Java. I only wish Google's Java API had been available at the time.
Given strong AI, as would be necessary for your research scenario...
I'm not sure what you mean by strong AI, but there really isn't much advancement in that field that's necessary for the searching methods I described. Google is already remarkably good at determining from the few search terms you enter which internet content is most similar to what you're looking for. And Bayesian filtering, once well trained, works quite well in filtering out spam. I see no reason why a historian couldn't use a thousand or so tweets to train his or her search filter and then let the computer filter our all the meaningless crap that comprises 99% of what gets posted to Twitter.
And that methodology is possible with technology today...with increased computing power and further advancements in search and spam filtering technologies, it will only get easier in the future. That's why I said AI-like...it definitely does not have to be the kind of AI that's typically associated with that field of study. There's no need for the machine to actually understand the content it's searching, only to evaluate it based on the understanding of the person who configures the parameters of the search.
And my lame attempt at humor also would not take place in some far off sci-fi reality where computer AI has advanced to the point where we have them write textbooks from material on the internet...it would take place in the ~20 years from now era when the people shaping that world are the ones that grew up between the time when cell phones became ubiquitous and the time when input to those cell phones advanced to the point where people no longer felt the need to reduce the number of characters in messages sent by those phones. I firmly believe that we'll eventually reach the point where our input to our computing devices will be based on biofeedback so that we essentially hold the phone in our hand and simply think what we want to say rather than punching it in using keystrokes of some sort. At that point, depending on how far English has declined in the interim, we should see a return to more sensible written English. But we're in a brief period right now where that's not the case and people are learning improper English for practical purposes.
Regardless, given the advance of search technology in the past 10-15 years, I stand by my argument that historians will get a lot of help from computers when they're digging through the massive amounts of data for the important information that will help them understand the time period we're living in right now.
The age of manual digging has long since past and future historians will have even more computing power at their disposal for investigating the past. We've begun to take for granted that what used to take a trip to the library and research skills to find is now as simple as CTRL+T, CTRL+K, search terms, ENTER (FF specific, but most browsers have an equivalent). 20 years from now, searches will incorporate far more AI-like characteristics to find what we're looking for. Future historians will simply set the parameters of the search and a computer will be the one sifting through the massive number of inane tweets.
On the other hand, with the current decay of the English language, I half expect that within 20 years, you'll see text books with sentences like, "Can U BlEv George Washington had woodN tEth...LOL!" So future historians may find all those LOLs unremarkable.
No, they won't. OS X is a very different beast to a typical UNIX (or UNIX-like) system.
Just because it's got a friendly GUI interface on top of its Unix base doesn't make it not Unix. On the other hand, full POSIX compliance does make it Unix.
Of all the bits of OS X that are actually interesting and of value to users, "it's a UNIX" is a long, long, long way down the list.
It may be way way down the list for users, but it's quite a bit higher for developers. Being fully Unix compliant opens OS X up to a lot of free software that can be used to simplify the creation of an application. Users may not care that the guts of their program is relying on free software, but the developers that write the applications they do care about care that they can use BSD-licensed code or link against LGPL-licensed libraries. This allows those developers to spend more time working on the features that the users care about rather than spending time re-implementing something that's available for free.
Basically, users care about useful features and developers can give them more useful features because OS X is Unix compliant.
Here's an idea for next year's April fools that would not only be well thought out but it would also cure you of your nostalgia for "the old/."
Slashdot should bring back Jon Katz to post a single article that makes it seem like he's returning to being an editor on an ongoing basis. Just for kicks, he should double the length of his normal post and make it about some absurd topic like how CGI animation is eliminating all the "Children's Entertainer" positions that are so needed by modern pedophiles. I'm sure he could ramble for about 40 pages on the subject, especially if he spends most of his time alluding to his (in)famous past topics.
Good, no? If done with the appearance of sincerity, it could be quite funny and would help you realize that the Slashdot of yesteryear had its share of annoyances and problems too.
Then there's my other idea to temporarily reverse the sorting order for posts. (-1: Troll) posts would end up on top and the sorting tools would allow you to filter out all those (+5: Interesting) posts. It'd be chaos. Absurdly beautiful and maddening chaos.
As a native English speaker who's learned to speak Spanish, my personal opinion is that I'd prefer for everyone to speak Spanish. It has the advantage of being much simpler to learn than English due mostly to its adherence to rules (fewer irregular verbs and such) and it's a lot more pleasant to listen to all day than English. And there's something to be said for a language that makes it simple to write what you hear and say what you read regardless of whether you understand the words or not...as a Spanish teacher of mine was fond of saying, "There are no Spanish spelling bees."
I also find the "how long it takes to say" argument to be relatively pointless. Unless you're doing policy debate or having to record the disclaimer at the end of a commercial, I don't think the speed at which you talk is governed by how long it takes to say the words. For me, at least, once I became fluent, I was able to speak at the same rate that I could form the thoughts I needed to express in both English and Spanish.
But it seems that English will be the x86 of languages. There are better alternatives, but since everyone targets the most popular one, everyone else needs to target that one. There are also other advantages to English that are inherently technical. For example, if source code is encoded in UTF-8, each accented character would take up 2 bytes. Using English in source code means never having encoding issues. So I begrudgingly agree with the article's premise, if only because it's useful to standardize on something.
Another "not quite down to $150" option is the Apple TV. It's even one of Boxee's supported platforms. Cheapest model is currently $229, but that's not too far off from your number. Still, they're small, silent, have an HDMI out for hi-def and can play content bought from iTunes too. And there's a pretty active community for hacking them to do more than Apple intends for them.
Yes, but without engineers, there would be cars falling from the skies on a regular basis.
We call inventors without the knowledge to base their ideas on reality Science Fiction writers.
The poster of this article does sound like he's grounded in reality since he's professed an ability to produce part of his product, so I'm hesitant to lump him in with the all the people who have an idea but no means or ability to produce it. But I have no shortage of people coming to me with what they believe is an idea for the next big thing. They almost always offer 2% of the company or some piddly dollar amount if the company ever gets funded in exchange for a mere prototype of the product. The mindset is always the same...my idea is worth millions and the execution of the idea is so easy a caveman could do it. And that's dead wrong. There have been many, many companies that have had great ideas and failed to execute. It's not easy.
Call me when you've had a lawyer draw up an NDA for me to sign, you're willing to tell me your entire idea and you're willing to offer significant equity (read: equal equity with all other founders.) Until then, you're just another helpless nobody with an unrealistic dream. And approaching an engineer with the typical inventor's mindset is just as offensive as the GP's assertion. If I were the article author and I had expertise in part of what was necessary to make the product, I would draw up a basic design document, get it notarized and see a lawyer to draw up an NDA. I would then search for someone with expertise in the areas that I couldn't handle and try to convince them to co-found the company based on the prototype we developed together.
Minimizing the importance of what you're unable to do is arrogant and far too often people with what they believe to be great ideas fall prey to this.
Java is mainly a server-side technology these days. It's client side tech is floundering, both marketwise and developmentwise.
This is a situation that could change if Sun were acquired. Sun has been pushing developers to use Swing on the client side and, while Swing may be popular with developers, users don't like it because of performance and the non-native feel. But IBM would likely push developers to use SWT instead. It's being used in a surprisingly large number of applications. That most people don't realize it's being used is a testament to both it's performance and it's ability to appear native (because most of the widgets are native with a Java API). SWT gets a bad rap because its poster-child application (Eclipse) can be a resource hog and run slowly in many situations, but from my experience that's not a failing of SWT and more a reflection of the complexity involved in writing and IDE and the design decision to make the IDE so heavily extensible by third parties. If IBM did acquire Sun, I would bet that one of the first changes made to Java would be to include SWT and JFace with the 1.8 JRE.
Java's failings on the client side are, IMHO, a reflection of the lack of ubiquity of SWT and Sun's NIH syndrome when it comes to Java technologies produced outside of Sun's control. Those two barriers can be broken down if IBM acquires Sun.
There's no money in it, and I'm not talking about enough money to become a rich bastard, I'm talking about enough money to avoid poverty.
There's no money in lower education, though if you look at the hourly wage, it starts to look a bit better. But teaching at the college level and above can be quite lucrative.
I have a step-parent who was a grad school professor at a large private university. She wasn't tenured, but earned a considerable salary (almost 6-figures) considering she only taught one class per quarter. But after 20 or so years of teaching, she's got a pretty decent pension and still has excellent health coverage. And throughout her time at the university, she's supplemented her income by teaching week-long seminars that give people a bit of a crash course in what would normally be taught in a full quarter. It's true that the seminars make more money (usually between $10k and $40k per week) than the teaching at the university ever did, but the teaching made them possible. And now that she's retired and collecting a pension, she can teach more seminars and makes more money than she's ever made while working less than half of the year.
This probably isn't the case for all college professors, but I think it's also not unique. I think tenured professors that publish can make quite a bit...probably more than IT workers at similar points in their careers.
If you want to jump on why the rest of us are paying for things in specific areas of the country, you'll want to focus on New Mexico ($2), Alaska ($1.87), West Virginia ($1.83), Mississippi ($1.77), North Dakota ($1.73), Alabama ($1.71), Virginia ($1.66), Montana ($1.58) and South Dakota ($1.49).
And to answer your question from a more philosophical point of view, we all pay for roads to be built all over the country so that we have the freedom to know that we can drive wherever we want to. As a resident of California (a donor state to the tune of $0.79), I could be irked by how much New Mexico gets. But I choose to remember the vacations I've taken to New Mexico and how roads paid for with federal monies enabled me to take those vacations.
The thing with the "Liberal Media" myth is that there will always be examples that you can cite to back it up. And there are also examples you can cite from news outlets that show a conservative agenda...and from almost any news source, not just Faux News and its ilk.
The bottom line is that the media is corporate, not liberal or conservative. Almost every decision you see news papers, websites and television programs making can be explained by either corporate interest or an attempt to gain viewership/readership. It isn't about whether Gore's son or Bush's daughters got in trouble, it's because a guy getting a DWI is boring. Attractive college-age girls partying heavily is much more likely to make people (especially men) watch. Rolling Stone is also a good example of this. Their readership is primarily younger people who like popular music. Is it any wonder that they trashed the 80-something candidate that was running against a candidate half his age? They know their demographic and so they cater to it. As far as endorsements go, I fully agree with you that an unbiased news organization should not be endorsing any candidate. But when they do, people tune in or buy the paper to find out who they endorsed.
When news was the province of 3 nightly news programs on the major networks and one or two major papers in each city, there was less competition for people's attention. People in the media prided themselves on journalistic integrity and educating their viewers. But in the internet age, news programs have a lot more competition. There's 4-5 channels in the basic package I get that are dedicated to nothing but news. Every local station has an online site and there's a ton of news sites on the web. So much so that there are news aggregation sites like Google try to sift through the multitude of sources to help people find what they want. And to top it all off, there's now an army of independent bloggers that seem to be beating all the established players to each story. The point of all this is that they can't help but alter their content in order to compete. The tease for the nightly news always boils down to, "How some is stealing your money" or "How you might die" and the like. The old mantra of "If it bleeds, it leads" has been expanded upon to include any of our base desires and fears.
Yet somehow Republicans and their supporters keep trumpeting the liberal media myth that has been drummed into their heads. The pundits give them plenty of examples of this being the case. Why they do that can be adequately by the above paragraph. Listeners/Viewers/Readers love to hear about how everyone is biased against the poor GOP so they tune in. The unbiased media has been replaced by a media that is still unbiased in the traditional sense of Democrat/Republican, but is hyper-concerned with attracting mind share in order to drive up revenues. They'll report on anything that will make us pay attention to them.
The best analogy for non-technical people about what an IP address represents is to compare it to a telephone number. In both cases, it's machine-friendly number that makes it possible for machines to route information from one machine to another. The only difference is that the user of an IP address changes a lot more frequently than that of a phone number. While many judges won't have grown up around computers and won't understand internet concepts in the detail necessary to rule correctly, they will be familiar with telephones, so if they can be shown that the two technologies are conceptually similar, it can help them make the right decisions.
But back to this case, the question that the judge should have used to justify the decision one way or the other is whether it should be necessary to get a warrant to get the real-world name and address of the person who had a specific phone number on a specific date. As others have pointed out, this is not the equivalent of a wiretap. For that, there is plenty of precedent that a warrant is necessary (unless you're the president and you believe the laws of this country don't apply to you.)
I personally feel that it's perfectly acceptable for law enforcement to request the name of the person who has a specific phone number so I see no problem with them asking an ISP for the same information using a specific IP address. And, without a warrant, the ISPs cooperation should be voluntary. I do feel that there is some danger in equating an IP address with an physical address since it could lead to poor precedent on other matters (i.e. whether a ping be considered trespassing.) But on this matter, I think the court got the ruling right for the wrong reasons.
But CUPS is completely unnecessary for a lot of us home users for the reason you just stated. Work has a much nicer printer than I'd ever buy and lets me print things out for personal use. Why would I ever need a printer at home?
As long as a reasonably large number of people won't need it, shouldn't it be kept out of the core install that everyone is forced to start with? I'd much rather explicitly install something when I need it than explicitly uninstall it when I don't, especially since installs are generally a lot more reliable than uninstalls.
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Not only do they take advantage of the fact that some people have jobs and such, they also take advantage of the fact that some people don't. I know whenever playoff tickets go on sale in my area, it's fairly common to see a ton of homeless people waiting in line. Scalpers pay them a few bucks per day plus bring them hot meals in exchange for them buying the maximum individual allotment of tickets for the scalpers.
Not only does it make it hard for people with actual lives to compete, it makes the experience highly unpleasant since you'd spending days in line with a bunch of smelly homeless people. At one point a few years ago, many fans were asking the team to record the purchaser's name and driver's license/state ID number at the time of sale and then check the ID at the gate to make sure the person who bought the ticket was the one who was using it. FIFA did something similar in the last world cup and I remember hearing it cut down on scalping somewhat...not entirely, but for an event as popular as the world cup, there will always be scalping.
Fans need help from venues, performers and ticketing outlets, etc if there is to be a reduction in scalping. The problem is that most of those people don't care about scalping. They'd rather the show sell out than risk not selling out because they discouraged scalping. Scalpers help shows sell out since they risk not reselling their tickets for shows that aren't popular. They make it back on the popular shows, but for those shows, the vendors can't charge the premium to make up for the less popular shows the way the scalpers can. So scalpers do serve a purpose, but only to ticket vendors, not ticket buyers. And that's why we'll continue to see scalping, because those with the ability to stop it also benefit from it.
The nice thing about Wave is that it doesn't need to have widespread adoption to be useful right now. For example, as soon as Google's service goes live, development teams (open source or otherwise) could use Wave to manage their documentation. The collaborative editing functionality makes it very wiki like, which is already good for documentation. And the discussions could allow developer to hash out questions of how to make the documentation better or what still needs to be documented. Then they could embed just the shared-edit piece of the wave on the site under documentation so that people reading the documentation wouldn't see the discussions. And if the projects use wave to manage the mailing list, you could embed list discussions into the documentation when someone answers a common question in a through fashion.
Sure a wiki can do most of this, but Wave looks like it can offer a few extra capabilities. For instance, you can structure your wave hierarchically so that different people get involved at different stages of the wave. If our engineering team uses a local Wave server to manage client-facing documentation, we can put all the engineers at the root of the wave, so that we can discuss all the technical aspects of the documentation and all make changes to the documentation. But you can also have a second level where sales and account managers can participation in conversation about a document, and add feedback from customers. Then the last level is the embedding bot which only sees the final product, without any of the change history or conversation.
And that's just a single use case for wave. I can envision Wave being able to fully replace Exchange in a corporate environment. You could create a meeting bot that adds a meeting to the calendars of the participants in the Wave. And another bot could serve as an email gateway to both accept changes to the wave over SMTP and publish changes to waves over SMTP. There's a ton of details to work out (you don't replace a product as involved as Exchange overnight), but the ability to have "robotic" actors that implement workflows opens up a lot of possibilities for how this technology can be used. Most of these possibilities are going to depend on Wave building a community of users that provide extensions to Wave so that Wave users don't have to shoehorn standard functionality to fit a desired purpose.
So while I agree with you that we're years away from realizing the full potential of Wave, since that potential will really be driven as much by add-ons developed outside of Google as much as it is by becoming ubiquitous. There's still enough out-of-the-box uses for it to be useful as soon as it's ready for release (or into beta, in Google terms ;)
The tight integration with WebKit is actually something that Chrome, by design, cannot have. The main thing that makes Chrome different from other browsers is the process separation between tabs. It does this by having a main browser process that handles network, HTTP, SSL, and the interaction with the GUI and then spawning processes for rendering and plugins. They actually had to do some work to get WebKit to render to a bitmap that could be sent via IPC to the browser thread to display to the user. Having a tight integration with the GUI toolkit breaks the separate process sandboxing that's core to the Chrome architecture since, by design, rendering processes cannot interact with those operating system resources since they run with reduced privileges.
Not that this discounts Qt as an option, but the built-in WebKit integration would have been useless for them.
Also, Qt alone would not make them cross platform. In the session at I/O, a Chrome developer mentioned that the most difficult part of Chrome, be it the Windows version or the Linux/Mac ports, was dealing with plugins. On Windows, they went with NPAPI which, according to him, was very Windows-specific and almost entirely non-portable. This means that ports to other platforms would require a similar amount of effort to support plugins. My guess is that they chose to release Chrome for Windows before other platforms because Windows as a platform did not have a browser with the performance characteristics necessary to run Google's planned web applications (like Wave). Mac has Safari and Linux has Konqueror, so Chrome isn't as important on those two platforms.
I'm assuming this is a reference to Chrome, so I thought I'd share what one of the Chrome developers said in his talk about Chrome's internals at the same conference where Wave was unveiled. Someone asked the Mac/Linux question and the answer can be summed up in 5 letters...NPAPI. As explained, NPAPI is fairly windows specific and comprised a huge chunk of the engineering effort to get the Windows version of Chrome out to the public. But given that the Windows solution is almost entirely non-portable, they'll need similar efforts for Mac and/or Linux, and even Google has resource limits.
It's been felt that releasing Chrome without plugin support would be confusing to users and make Chrome look bad, so they're waiting until they've finished plugin support before releasing official Chrome builds for non-Windows platforms. But he also mentioned that the latest Chromium builds work on Linux and Mac, so people are free to grab the code and build it themselves. There just won't be support for plugins (which, in the eyes of many Slashdotters, could be an improvement over the Windows version ;-)
The other interesting tidbit was over the frequently scorned anonymous usage data string that Chrome sends along to Google quite frequently. While there's probably no way of verifying it, it was explained that that anonymous usage data gets analyzed to allow other Chrome users to pre-fetch DNS results of likely sites that a user will visit when viewing a page. For instance, a Chrome user's browser, when viewing this Slashdot story, may perform a DNS lookup of news.zdnet.co.uk since a significant percentage of the Slashdot readership has actually clicked through to the article (...insert bad joke about no one ever reading the articles here...)
Like I said, I'm not sure this can be verified, but it's a least a plausible explanation for why they try to collect that data. Given how fanatical Google tends to be over performance, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But hey...I'm a bit pre-disposed to like them after the free phone surprise, so others may feel otherwise.
Or how about as municipalities, we kick their equipment out and put in our own. The whole net neutrality battle is meaningless when you have municipally-owned last-mile infrastructure. The free market takes care of the rest since it becomes much more likely that we'd have real competition between broadband providers and customers could use net neutrality as a deciding point when selecting a provider.
Charging telcos rent for the land they use to connect to customers essentially creates a new tax for broadband users since telcos will just pass the rent fees on to the customer...it's not like there are enough competitors to stop them from doing it. We need competition in the broadband market, not some way to mitigate the quagmire we currently find ourselves in. And real competition can only be had if we create a situation where competitors can not only compete with each other on even terms but also can enter the market without such a substantial initial investment.
It's our land, so it should be our wires that run though it.
Applications shouldn't be concerned with limiting themselves so that they cannot under any circumstances slow down other applications. It's the job of the OS to provide the tools to prioritize applications according to the desires of the user.
OS X, by virtue of its Unix underpinnings, should support nice/renice to alter the priorities of processes. One would hope that with additional support for developers to make use of multiple cores, Apple would also provide users with increased ability to easily alter the priorities of processes.
This should give the best of both worlds. You can prioritize your video encoding below your other activities and it will slowly prod along in the background without you noticing all that much. But if you get up to fix yourself a sandwich and pause your DOOM game and your HD video stream, your encoding would speed up to utilize the newly available cores. And once you've made your sandwich and are ready to resume your other activities, your encoding slows back down again.
The important part is to start learning how to write these kinds of parallelized applications now so that when we have 32+ cores, applications can benefit from the extra processing power. Sure, with 4 cores, there's a good chance that you're running at least as many applications as you have cores, but once the cores start to scale up, that will no longer be the case. And Apple is doing the right thing by encouraging this type of development now so that it enables either Apple (at the OS level) or the user control over how resources are shared. That's the only way that we'll ever get the most out these multi-core machines.
Almost useless isn't useless.
Something like this has the ability to replace wires in situations where bandwidth is important and range isn't. As mentioned in the summary, A/V stuff seems like a prime candidate. Home theaters in the future may end up being as simple as plugging in a power cord for each piece of equipment and then configuring the system in software. No more worrying about how many HDMI ports a TV has, how to run speaker wire from the receiver to the speakers and other similar situations where the physical connections matter to the usage of the system. Components could even implement zeroconf or something like it to eliminate the software setup and allow individual components to adapt to the other components in the system (i.e. the TV would ignore the audio when there is a surround sound speaker setup.)
HD video and audio require a lot of bandwidth but rarely require transmission over a distance of 10-20 feet. And for this type of setup, short range may actually be a benefit since there would be no need for the kind of channels that Wi-Fi uses to account for interference from others using the same technology.
I'm pretty sure this is different from the wireless HDMI efforts that are further along, but if they can offer added benefits, it could still end up being a useful technology.
This is exactly why they should be worried, not the other way around. People are already buying iPhones and iPods that offer similar gaming capabilities. This makes convincing people to shell out money for a dedicated gaming device harder since the challenge isn't convincing them why they need the device, it's convincing them why they need both devices.
I know personally I own an iPhone for two main reasons...it eliminates the need for me to carry a cell phone and an ipod and I have a real browser wherever I go. But for me to buy a DS, I now need to be convinced that I really do need to carry two devices around again. That's a tough sell since the games for the DS are both more expensive and not that much better than what's available for the iPod. Apple can sell me a game by convincing me that it's worth the $4.99 I'm paying for it. Nintendo must convince me that a game is worth $20 and that their entire game catalog is worth an additional ~$100 and the hassle of toting a dedicated gaming device with me at all times. And to top it all off, they have to convince me to get off my ass and head down to a retail store to get the game or wait the few days it takes an online vendor to get it to me. If I'm bored and want to play a game on my iPhone, I can browse for one that looks fun and be playing it 2-3 minutes later.
That's why Nintendo should be scared...they're likely to always be a better gaming platform than the iPhone/iPod. But if the iPhone and iPod can close the gap enough to convince people that it isn't worth it to have a dedicated portable gaming system, their sales will take a huge hit.
This makes your distinction between physical hardware and software more arbitrary, not less. Hardware is increasingly just software sent to a fab in Asia to produce. If I come up with an algorithm, if I write it up in Verilog, by your standards, I get to patent it. But if I write it up in C, it's not patentable. That's nonsensical.
Software can be an idea written down, but it can also be the result of applied research. But what does it matter? Patents cover ideas. Whether that idea is the filament used in the first light bulb or the application of FFTs or DCTs to sound compression, it's conceptually the same. In both cases, the tool used existed prior to the application for the specific purpose. And in both cases, the inventor saw the chance to apply the existing tool to a specific purpose. And in both cases, the inventor spent considerable effort applying their idea to show that it was workable. They're both just ideas. And the physical/ephemeral distinction is entirely arbitrary.
I understand the sentiment against software patents, since the kind that have been granted have generally been overly broad or relatively obvious, but I have a problem with invalidating all software patents. It's almost a condemnation of the field of computer science by declaring that the product of the research in the field to be unworthy of patent protection when other scientific fields enjoy that protection.
I would argue that there are algorithms that legitimately deserve patent protection. A company like Dolby labs probably spends millions employing researchers and testing new sound compression algorithms. Google probably spends millions employing researchers working on search, sorting and similar algorithms to continually improve their search offering and make it capable of handling an ever-increasing amount of data that needs to be indexed. And from what we've heard of late, financial services companies spend a ton on programmers and mathematicians to develop algorithms for analyzing data from the stock market and other sources to inform investment decisions. And those are just a few obvious examples off the top of my head...I'm sure there's many more.
I personally feel that completely abolishing software patents will do more harm than good. I'd like to see opponents of software patents argue more for a reformation of the procedures the patent issuers use to evaluate whether a software patent is legitimate. I'd like to see the USPTO hire reviewers who deal solely with software patents and can have a more informed opinion on what is actually non-obvious and what is not overly-broad. I can also see the argument that the software industry moves faster than other industries and that patent protection on algorithms like these should be shorter than it currently is.
I know it's not a popular position here on Slashdot to argue for keeping software patents, but I'm always struck by how easily people here will casually dismiss computer science without even realizing it. When you see posts here about Knuth, Dijkstra or another computer scientist of that prominence, you're likely to see almost universal reverence for their contributions in responses, and rightly so. Yet people won't see a contradiction in advocating that those types of contributions aren't eligible for patent protection. That, to me, just seems wrong.
The problem you're referring to is a well-known limitation of the java platform with a planned solution. The problem is that it's been stalled and hasn't made it past the JSR stage despite being first reviewed in 2001.
See either: Project Barcelona or the Java Isolates JSR.
That combined with the Java Resource Consumption Management API would, if implemented, give application server vendors everything they would need to make a Servlet container that could be used in a shared hosting environment.
Until then, Java just isn't suitable for a shared hosting environment...at least not in the out-of-the-box kind of way. I have managed to string together a thin C CGI implementation that uses IPC to connect to a running Java process through JNI. It worked and actually substantially out-performed any of the scripting languages available from the hosting provider, but it took quite a bit of work to get running (mostly emulating what the Servlet API gives you for free) and the code I ended up with might not be portable to a real Servlet environment since I didn't bother implementing all of the Servlet API.
Long story short...I've felt that pain and can't wait for those two JSR's to make it into a new release of Java. I only wish Google's Java API had been available at the time.
I'm not sure what you mean by strong AI, but there really isn't much advancement in that field that's necessary for the searching methods I described. Google is already remarkably good at determining from the few search terms you enter which internet content is most similar to what you're looking for. And Bayesian filtering, once well trained, works quite well in filtering out spam. I see no reason why a historian couldn't use a thousand or so tweets to train his or her search filter and then let the computer filter our all the meaningless crap that comprises 99% of what gets posted to Twitter.
And that methodology is possible with technology today...with increased computing power and further advancements in search and spam filtering technologies, it will only get easier in the future. That's why I said AI-like...it definitely does not have to be the kind of AI that's typically associated with that field of study. There's no need for the machine to actually understand the content it's searching, only to evaluate it based on the understanding of the person who configures the parameters of the search.
And my lame attempt at humor also would not take place in some far off sci-fi reality where computer AI has advanced to the point where we have them write textbooks from material on the internet...it would take place in the ~20 years from now era when the people shaping that world are the ones that grew up between the time when cell phones became ubiquitous and the time when input to those cell phones advanced to the point where people no longer felt the need to reduce the number of characters in messages sent by those phones. I firmly believe that we'll eventually reach the point where our input to our computing devices will be based on biofeedback so that we essentially hold the phone in our hand and simply think what we want to say rather than punching it in using keystrokes of some sort. At that point, depending on how far English has declined in the interim, we should see a return to more sensible written English. But we're in a brief period right now where that's not the case and people are learning improper English for practical purposes.
Regardless, given the advance of search technology in the past 10-15 years, I stand by my argument that historians will get a lot of help from computers when they're digging through the massive amounts of data for the important information that will help them understand the time period we're living in right now.
The age of manual digging has long since past and future historians will have even more computing power at their disposal for investigating the past. We've begun to take for granted that what used to take a trip to the library and research skills to find is now as simple as CTRL+T, CTRL+K, search terms, ENTER (FF specific, but most browsers have an equivalent). 20 years from now, searches will incorporate far more AI-like characteristics to find what we're looking for. Future historians will simply set the parameters of the search and a computer will be the one sifting through the massive number of inane tweets.
On the other hand, with the current decay of the English language, I half expect that within 20 years, you'll see text books with sentences like, "Can U BlEv George Washington had woodN tEth...LOL!" So future historians may find all those LOLs unremarkable.
No, they won't. OS X is a very different beast to a typical UNIX (or UNIX-like) system.
Just because it's got a friendly GUI interface on top of its Unix base doesn't make it not Unix. On the other hand, full POSIX compliance does make it Unix.
Of all the bits of OS X that are actually interesting and of value to users, "it's a UNIX" is a long, long, long way down the list.
It may be way way down the list for users, but it's quite a bit higher for developers. Being fully Unix compliant opens OS X up to a lot of free software that can be used to simplify the creation of an application. Users may not care that the guts of their program is relying on free software, but the developers that write the applications they do care about care that they can use BSD-licensed code or link against LGPL-licensed libraries. This allows those developers to spend more time working on the features that the users care about rather than spending time re-implementing something that's available for free.
Basically, users care about useful features and developers can give them more useful features because OS X is Unix compliant.
You must not have gotten to the chapter entitled "Advanced Cat" (page 2). Cat can also be used as a target for piped output.
Try: ~# wget -o /dev/null -O - http://www.slashdot.org/ | cat | cat | cat | grep $somethingfunny
~#
Voila! No temp file needed. And all due to the power of cat (hint: the third one is the most important.)
Here's an idea for next year's April fools that would not only be well thought out but it would also cure you of your nostalgia for "the old /."
Slashdot should bring back Jon Katz to post a single article that makes it seem like he's returning to being an editor on an ongoing basis. Just for kicks, he should double the length of his normal post and make it about some absurd topic like how CGI animation is eliminating all the "Children's Entertainer" positions that are so needed by modern pedophiles. I'm sure he could ramble for about 40 pages on the subject, especially if he spends most of his time alluding to his (in)famous past topics.
Good, no? If done with the appearance of sincerity, it could be quite funny and would help you realize that the Slashdot of yesteryear had its share of annoyances and problems too.
Then there's my other idea to temporarily reverse the sorting order for posts. (-1: Troll) posts would end up on top and the sorting tools would allow you to filter out all those (+5: Interesting) posts. It'd be chaos. Absurdly beautiful and maddening chaos.
As a native English speaker who's learned to speak Spanish, my personal opinion is that I'd prefer for everyone to speak Spanish. It has the advantage of being much simpler to learn than English due mostly to its adherence to rules (fewer irregular verbs and such) and it's a lot more pleasant to listen to all day than English. And there's something to be said for a language that makes it simple to write what you hear and say what you read regardless of whether you understand the words or not...as a Spanish teacher of mine was fond of saying, "There are no Spanish spelling bees."
I also find the "how long it takes to say" argument to be relatively pointless. Unless you're doing policy debate or having to record the disclaimer at the end of a commercial, I don't think the speed at which you talk is governed by how long it takes to say the words. For me, at least, once I became fluent, I was able to speak at the same rate that I could form the thoughts I needed to express in both English and Spanish.
But it seems that English will be the x86 of languages. There are better alternatives, but since everyone targets the most popular one, everyone else needs to target that one. There are also other advantages to English that are inherently technical. For example, if source code is encoded in UTF-8, each accented character would take up 2 bytes. Using English in source code means never having encoding issues. So I begrudgingly agree with the article's premise, if only because it's useful to standardize on something.
Another "not quite down to $150" option is the Apple TV. It's even one of Boxee's supported platforms. Cheapest model is currently $229, but that's not too far off from your number. Still, they're small, silent, have an HDMI out for hi-def and can play content bought from iTunes too. And there's a pretty active community for hacking them to do more than Apple intends for them.
Yes, but without engineers, there would be cars falling from the skies on a regular basis.
We call inventors without the knowledge to base their ideas on reality Science Fiction writers.
The poster of this article does sound like he's grounded in reality since he's professed an ability to produce part of his product, so I'm hesitant to lump him in with the all the people who have an idea but no means or ability to produce it. But I have no shortage of people coming to me with what they believe is an idea for the next big thing. They almost always offer 2% of the company or some piddly dollar amount if the company ever gets funded in exchange for a mere prototype of the product. The mindset is always the same...my idea is worth millions and the execution of the idea is so easy a caveman could do it. And that's dead wrong. There have been many, many companies that have had great ideas and failed to execute. It's not easy.
Call me when you've had a lawyer draw up an NDA for me to sign, you're willing to tell me your entire idea and you're willing to offer significant equity (read: equal equity with all other founders.) Until then, you're just another helpless nobody with an unrealistic dream. And approaching an engineer with the typical inventor's mindset is just as offensive as the GP's assertion. If I were the article author and I had expertise in part of what was necessary to make the product, I would draw up a basic design document, get it notarized and see a lawyer to draw up an NDA. I would then search for someone with expertise in the areas that I couldn't handle and try to convince them to co-found the company based on the prototype we developed together.
Minimizing the importance of what you're unable to do is arrogant and far too often people with what they believe to be great ideas fall prey to this.
This is a situation that could change if Sun were acquired. Sun has been pushing developers to use Swing on the client side and, while Swing may be popular with developers, users don't like it because of performance and the non-native feel. But IBM would likely push developers to use SWT instead. It's being used in a surprisingly large number of applications. That most people don't realize it's being used is a testament to both it's performance and it's ability to appear native (because most of the widgets are native with a Java API). SWT gets a bad rap because its poster-child application (Eclipse) can be a resource hog and run slowly in many situations, but from my experience that's not a failing of SWT and more a reflection of the complexity involved in writing and IDE and the design decision to make the IDE so heavily extensible by third parties. If IBM did acquire Sun, I would bet that one of the first changes made to Java would be to include SWT and JFace with the 1.8 JRE.
Java's failings on the client side are, IMHO, a reflection of the lack of ubiquity of SWT and Sun's NIH syndrome when it comes to Java technologies produced outside of Sun's control. Those two barriers can be broken down if IBM acquires Sun.
There's no money in lower education, though if you look at the hourly wage, it starts to look a bit better. But teaching at the college level and above can be quite lucrative.
I have a step-parent who was a grad school professor at a large private university. She wasn't tenured, but earned a considerable salary (almost 6-figures) considering she only taught one class per quarter. But after 20 or so years of teaching, she's got a pretty decent pension and still has excellent health coverage. And throughout her time at the university, she's supplemented her income by teaching week-long seminars that give people a bit of a crash course in what would normally be taught in a full quarter. It's true that the seminars make more money (usually between $10k and $40k per week) than the teaching at the university ever did, but the teaching made them possible. And now that she's retired and collecting a pension, she can teach more seminars and makes more money than she's ever made while working less than half of the year.
This probably isn't the case for all college professors, but I think it's also not unique. I think tenured professors that publish can make quite a bit...probably more than IT workers at similar points in their careers.
Because people all over the country pay for a lot of things for people in specific areas of the country. Washinton is a donor state receiving $0.88 for each dollar its citizens paid in Federal income tax. And given that Microsoft has its headquarters in Redmond, the city and the county are almost assuredly subsidizing at an even higher rate.
If you want to jump on why the rest of us are paying for things in specific areas of the country, you'll want to focus on New Mexico ($2), Alaska ($1.87), West Virginia ($1.83), Mississippi ($1.77), North Dakota ($1.73), Alabama ($1.71), Virginia ($1.66), Montana ($1.58) and South Dakota ($1.49).
And to answer your question from a more philosophical point of view, we all pay for roads to be built all over the country so that we have the freedom to know that we can drive wherever we want to. As a resident of California (a donor state to the tune of $0.79), I could be irked by how much New Mexico gets. But I choose to remember the vacations I've taken to New Mexico and how roads paid for with federal monies enabled me to take those vacations.
The thing with the "Liberal Media" myth is that there will always be examples that you can cite to back it up. And there are also examples you can cite from news outlets that show a conservative agenda...and from almost any news source, not just Faux News and its ilk.
The bottom line is that the media is corporate, not liberal or conservative. Almost every decision you see news papers, websites and television programs making can be explained by either corporate interest or an attempt to gain viewership/readership. It isn't about whether Gore's son or Bush's daughters got in trouble, it's because a guy getting a DWI is boring. Attractive college-age girls partying heavily is much more likely to make people (especially men) watch. Rolling Stone is also a good example of this. Their readership is primarily younger people who like popular music. Is it any wonder that they trashed the 80-something candidate that was running against a candidate half his age? They know their demographic and so they cater to it. As far as endorsements go, I fully agree with you that an unbiased news organization should not be endorsing any candidate. But when they do, people tune in or buy the paper to find out who they endorsed.
When news was the province of 3 nightly news programs on the major networks and one or two major papers in each city, there was less competition for people's attention. People in the media prided themselves on journalistic integrity and educating their viewers. But in the internet age, news programs have a lot more competition. There's 4-5 channels in the basic package I get that are dedicated to nothing but news. Every local station has an online site and there's a ton of news sites on the web. So much so that there are news aggregation sites like Google try to sift through the multitude of sources to help people find what they want. And to top it all off, there's now an army of independent bloggers that seem to be beating all the established players to each story. The point of all this is that they can't help but alter their content in order to compete. The tease for the nightly news always boils down to, "How some is stealing your money" or "How you might die" and the like. The old mantra of "If it bleeds, it leads" has been expanded upon to include any of our base desires and fears.
Yet somehow Republicans and their supporters keep trumpeting the liberal media myth that has been drummed into their heads. The pundits give them plenty of examples of this being the case. Why they do that can be adequately by the above paragraph. Listeners/Viewers/Readers love to hear about how everyone is biased against the poor GOP so they tune in. The unbiased media has been replaced by a media that is still unbiased in the traditional sense of Democrat/Republican, but is hyper-concerned with attracting mind share in order to drive up revenues. They'll report on anything that will make us pay attention to them.
The best analogy for non-technical people about what an IP address represents is to compare it to a telephone number. In both cases, it's machine-friendly number that makes it possible for machines to route information from one machine to another. The only difference is that the user of an IP address changes a lot more frequently than that of a phone number. While many judges won't have grown up around computers and won't understand internet concepts in the detail necessary to rule correctly, they will be familiar with telephones, so if they can be shown that the two technologies are conceptually similar, it can help them make the right decisions.
But back to this case, the question that the judge should have used to justify the decision one way or the other is whether it should be necessary to get a warrant to get the real-world name and address of the person who had a specific phone number on a specific date. As others have pointed out, this is not the equivalent of a wiretap. For that, there is plenty of precedent that a warrant is necessary (unless you're the president and you believe the laws of this country don't apply to you.)
I personally feel that it's perfectly acceptable for law enforcement to request the name of the person who has a specific phone number so I see no problem with them asking an ISP for the same information using a specific IP address. And, without a warrant, the ISPs cooperation should be voluntary. I do feel that there is some danger in equating an IP address with an physical address since it could lead to poor precedent on other matters (i.e. whether a ping be considered trespassing.) But on this matter, I think the court got the ruling right for the wrong reasons.
But CUPS is completely unnecessary for a lot of us home users for the reason you just stated. Work has a much nicer printer than I'd ever buy and lets me print things out for personal use. Why would I ever need a printer at home?
As long as a reasonably large number of people won't need it, shouldn't it be kept out of the core install that everyone is forced to start with? I'd much rather explicitly install something when I need it than explicitly uninstall it when I don't, especially since installs are generally a lot more reliable than uninstalls.