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I know that i'll get downvoted, but I really think that this will not be as bad as reddit is making it to look like. The oculus team will stay independent, and will continue on the development as it were before the purchase, but now with all the advantages that an almost unlimited budget comes with.
The oculus will not display ads or anything related, it's like saying that a monitor will have ads displayed on it, it's highly improbable, remember that the oculus is still a peripeal only, and if something related happens, it'll be easy to take counter measures. The only thing that can possibly come is that facebook develops a VR telepresence service into skype or as an independet product that will use the oculus as a required peripeal to work.
we will not start seing facebook integration shit on games or apps, unless the developers directly put them into the software, but that definitely will not be a requeriment, just a 'plus'.
Another thing, oculus games will not be sold only throught facebook appstore, I still say, the oculus is only peripeal, not a platform, you can use it's API to make your application compatible with it.
The oculus development is highly dependent on smartphones screen technology, they are going to use a smartphone screen because they can't afford a custom made one, the oculus is being designed to suit on existing tech instead of creating new technology for the project. With the oculus purchase, making an especially made screen and new technology for the oculus is now a possibility. |
Turning it down for what? Sure I would take it for free. We could all find something good to do with a lot of money, but that isn't what this string is about. We are talking about giving up your life's work for that money. Not everyone would do that. I certainly wouldn't. I place a lot of value on my work. I certainly wouldn't give it up for money (assuming my immediate needs are taken care of). |
No, people are mad because they donated $10 to support an idea the company said they were going to develop, only have that company (in their minds) go on to develop something different.
That being said, I think people are overreacting just because it's Facebook when we don't really know how the change in ownership will actually affect the final product. It could be the sale gives them better resources and finances and they end up building a better product. Or it could end up that Facebook tries to profit off it in every way possible and ends up ruining the promising idea people thought they were supporting.
Also it's important to note that not everyone just pledged the minimum $10 or enough to get a dev-kit. Plenty of people donated thousands
not because they were investing to make money or just pre-ordering a product, but because they were inspired by the idea and wanted to help that idea come to fruition. Obviously not everyone who backs is going to agree with every decision the company makes and it would be impossible for everyone to get exactly what they want. However, even if the company has no financial obligations to the backers in any way, they are morally obligated to try and deliver the project they had originally promised to the best of their ability, especially since OR likely would have never gotten off the ground without their support. Now I truly believe that is what Oculus intends to do, however I don't fault people who have serious concerns to how Facebook will affect the project that they donated to, especially since Facebook seems to have other plans for the Rift than gaming which is what most people were backing it for. |
If Oculus were to sell off all the stock they made during this deal at one time how badly would it hurt FB? If it destroys FB's stock then Google can come in and acquire FB, then separate the assets FB has gathered and transfer Facebook into Google+ and at least then Oculus will still have a fighting chance. |
1) Calling something a "circlejerk" makes you come across as intelligent. /s
2) If Oculus had only gotten $250k and not $2.5m, it wouldn't have gotten nearly as much money from any investors and FaceBook wouldn't have even looked at it.
3) "We're going to need to see absolutely no change in the way it works..."
Also, historically FaceBook HAS changed products and services that they have bought to mini-satellites for FaceBook.
4) There's a difference between investing and buying. l2dictionary
5) I believe Sony will try and expand into the PC market in order to corner the market. Sony doesn't have to allow Oculus to work for PS4, but the Morpheus could work for both PS4 and PC. I could be way off base here, but I think it would be a smart move on Sony's part.
Also, I love using FaceBook. Being a Navy brat that just swore into the Army, FaceBook allows me to keep in touch with friends from all over the world. My problem is that I don't want FaceBook's intrusiveness when I game. |
Isn't that also the case for F1, especially now? I'll rephrase my question. Is it speed, power, downforce or something else which makes it advantageous to have such deep tires?
EDIT: I have this friend named Google and found the answer [here.]( |
F1 is as fake as WWE wrestling, it's not a real sport, I stopped watching it the day Baracello backed off his first race win finish line to Schumacher (who didn't even need the points) on team orders. It's supposed to be a competition of engineering and driving skill, but every-time there is a leap in engineering, it's banned, and they make all the cars the same through regulation the next year.
You'd would see more sportsmanship in a kids home made go-kart race.
F1 is nothing but an advertising delivery platform for mainly the motor industry, and FE is just that platform keeping up with consumer trends in that business. |
Account holder is deceased / incapacitated
Its been my experience that Comcast throws roadblocks for these scenarios as well. My father became incapacitated this year, requiring I establish a Guardianship and take over his affairs.
Part of establishing this was to contact Comcast, which he had television / internet in his home prior to moving into an assisted living facility.
My approach is to confirm my father had an account with the company, introduce myself, explain the health problems which have occurred and state that my father is no longer able to care for himself, then ask what company procedures are regarding submitting existing DPOA and other paperwork granting me the right to handle his affairs. This procedure has been the same for banks, social security, previous employers, phone companies, etc.
With Comcast, their phone operators have refused to deal with me. On occasions I have called in they have instructed me that I have to visit a Comcast physical location to establish myself and handle his affairs.
So, Comcast continues to send bills for an incapacitated man living in an assisted living facility without any access to the service they are charging for.
Just dropping everything, walking out during the middle of the work-day, and visiting a physical location 25 minutes across the city is not a reasonably acceptable task. I have been too busy, with priorities such as doctor/surgeon appointments that have received priority. |
We could shoot their executives. Right in the mouth. Mouth-shooting for corrupt executives. |
PLEASE READ THIS: THE ARSTECHNICA SUMMARY IS FALSE
The problem is Ars Technica is simply regurgitating defense claims, which are naturally going to be as sensational and exceptional as possible. It's quite common for the defense to make many claims that they never substantiate or later use in court. These claims are DIRECTLY CONTRADICTED BY THE FBI AFFIDAVIT, yet ArsTechnica doesn't tell you that.
Here is the affidavit for those who want to read:
"The authorities built, in part, a case for a search warrant (PDF) by turning off Internet access in three villas shared by the eight individuals arrested"
There is no indication of this in the Affidavit. Even if it did happen, evidence from such an event wasn't used.
"The notion that an individual “consents” to such searches—so that the government is free to ignore the Fourth Amendment’s explicit warrant requirement—is, in a word, absurd. Our lives cannot be private—and our personal relationships intimate—if each physical connection that links our homes to the outside world doubles as a ready-made excuse for the government to conduct a secret, suspicionless, warrantless search."
EXCEPT NO SUCH SEARCH WAS CONDUCTED. Rather, agents entered the home and observed things in plain sight. This is entirely legal, and no search warrant is deemed necessary in such cases. The reason is pretty clear: if a cop accidentally stumbles onto a drug lab, he doesn't have to leave and go get a search warrant while the criminal quickly packs up his shit and drives away.
"Nowhere in the search warrant request, however, did the authorities mention that they saw supposed wagering on computers after posing as technicians who in reality briefly disconnected the Internet."
This is patently false. Firstly, it leaves out the fact that the hotel employees saw it, and told "the authorities". Here's a quote from Page 5 Line 5 of the affidavit regarding Electrical Engineer J.S., an employee: "J.S. stated that he/she observed computer screens which look just like the ones in the casino's sports book." Secondly, later they DID come back with "the authorities", and those authorities DID see it as well. Page 7 Line 9: "SA Kung saw PHUA sitting at a laptop computer which was displaying both the website "SBOBET" and an active instant messaging window. SAs Kung and Lopez observed PHUA clicking on numbers, which SA Lopez believes, based on his training and experience, were sports wagering odds, within the SBOBET website. SA Kung observer an incoming message to PHUA stating "good luck on the hedge bet" or similar wordings." |
The truth is that people are horrible. No one has ideologies that they follow, because we are raised in a society that only makes people do things out of fear or for rewards.
I had a conversation earlier today about whether fear is a better motivator than positive reinforcement. We eventually came to this conclusion: Both fear and positive reinforcement are used as supplements for motivation. But they both have weaknesses. Fear fails when you take away adequate consequences and positive reinforcement fails when you take away the rewards. The only thing that can resist both of these weaknesses is if the source of motivation comes from the individual him/herself not from another individual trying to "motivate" someone to do something. The only way to get someone to do this is if you can make them understand your reasoning. Of course this is easier said then done. You might find it difficult to convince an Islamic extremist or a 2-year-old boy. These situations are what incentives and fear are meant for. Once you "convince" them like that, you can educate them and make them understand your point of view. This also has the added bonus of putting your views to test because you can't convince someone, there may be something wrong with them.
The problem in our society is that we've taken incentives (money) and fear (prison) to be the only way to convince individuals to do something. We grow up dependent on incentives and fear and this causes us to grow up without ever having to address our greed. Our system (and as far as I know, any other civilization's system) not only allows, but even encourages people to be greedy. So basically what I'm trying to say is that we need a way in our system to remove selfishness and greed from the individuals. The best way to solve this is by changing the culture of our people rather than the system. |
You are right, but capitalism as a whole seems to contribute. Don't take this to mean I'm against capitalism (I like the idea), it's just I now realized it might be a problem. If you could clear things up that'd be awesome.
What I mean is: take several key players, perhaps these guys were founded in 1700's or something. The point is that the've been around a long time. Now, each of them are used to trading with each other, and as profits grow, they scale up their businesses. To giant large corporations like we have today.
From there, take a retailer and a manufacturer (of say Toys). The retailer then orders, say, 100,000 of some popular toy (Barbie), and distributes it across the country into their stores. Essentially how you'd expect capitalism to work. The "best" toys are selected and sell the best, meaning that more similar toys are produced. These toys are advertised and so on.
Now take an up and coming Mom/Pop Toy store. They then try to sell what's popular, seeing as they lack marketing, lack sources, lack manufacturers, etc. They get declined by the manufacturer due to being too small (ordering, say, 100 toys instead of 100,000). It's unprofitable to deal with a small store, when you have several large stores already in agreements.
On top of that, it's difficult for a small store to contact every manufacturer to try and get deals on the popular toys/items.
On top of that , you have customers already familiar with large retail giants and tend to do their shopping there. With the wide selection they pick those stores over something with only a few items.
The Mom/Pop is forced (though lack of compliance) to find more niche goods in order to compete: have something other retailers don't. Since you can't get the popular stuff for cheap (or at all). This in turn only attracts niche customers. Which tends to result in things like Comic Shops, an Anime Store, etc. Only carrying the easy to get/popular stuff of those niches (since they need to stay afloat with a small customer base). But they also need to find those customers using untraditional means (Which may or may not be a problem).
Another angle is the small inventor/toy maker. Who makes a new toy and is unable to get a retailer to sell it. The large ones reject due to lack of product (unable to mass produce them), the factories reject due to lack of money (in order to mass produce), so the toy maker goes to the mom/pop stores (if they are around). And again, the toy maker has difficulty advertising because his product is limited, and in only certain select niche stores.
Combine this with a "take what's given" attitude of the populace, and you pretty much have both smaller inventors and smaller stores closing shop.
I've seen this happen a few times. And it's simply due to what appears to be the capitalism system at work. Larger retail stores can afford to have one location flop for a while, as the other branches can easily support it. They also cover general mass-populace goods to ensure sales.
In short, they are playing two different ball games. Large corporations do thing at scale, requiring tons of cash to throw around to get the products flowing. Mom/Pop can't play and require other small Mom/Pop businesses (suppliers/retailers) in order to even stay afloat. Given the wide demand of general goods (that Mom/Pop can't compete with), the giant retailer stays in business and generally ends up making Mom/Pop lose business and ultimately close.
To give an electronics example, you can't make a computer and manufacture it, without a huge initial investment. Same goes for general electronics. Which is why tech startups with investors is a thing.
Media has sort of subverted the problem by selling online and digitally. But the physical copies of the media are noticeably lacking.
I fail to see how a new Mom/Pop toy store would stay afloat in today's modern age. Unable to sell popular toys competitively, have a lack in suppliers for interesting/unique products, and a lack of reach/distribution to potential customers (with the exception of online purchases and shipping).
To rephrase, how do you make a phone that competes with the iPhone? That market is only open to large companies and people with tons of cash. How do you make a retail store that competes with Target/Walmart?
It seems that as a whole, the system puts a bias towards large/established businesses, and smaller/newer ones are forced to be niche (which could die) or simply just die out. Perhaps smaller ones could get a better location?
I don't see the solution. And I actually watched a nice little mom/pop kid's bookstore close up shop because of not enough customers. Since you could literally go to barnes&noble a few blocks away and get adult books as well. The comics store right across from the kid's book store is luckily still open, but I imagine it's because they pretty much sell niche comics/manga/general nerdy stuff which attracts quite a bit of people from the area (a pretty geeky/nerdy college). And even then, I think it's still struggling. It's a fairly small store and only has one person working at a time.
To get into food, there's the locally owned Ray's pizza, which is great as a place but kind of pricey (as expected). And there's just recently a new chain Pizza place that easily took the largest spot in the plaza and attracts the most customers out of all of the businesses (even other chains) in the area. Because it's cheap/quick/low quality and is in the exact center of everything in the largest place. They also have free pizza sometimes. It's hard to compete with that.
Ray's Pizza, while I think struggling, manages to stay afloat by working with charity drives that are ran by clubs on the college campus. Buy Pizza, some of the money is donated. Either way, it's not doing too hot. |
You, my friend, just very clearly explained why the world is the way it is.
Shareholders are the scourge of our existence. Not evil themselves, they generate evil by doing 'their job'. And that then propagates and inspires other people in the chain to be 'evil' = not working toward a beneficial goal, but rather very short term monetary rewards for a select few, while everything else goes to shit . This dynamic then enables people with strong psychopathic tendencies to rise to the top (as they 'match' the shareholders 'vision' of a leader that can deliver those short term goals).
Vicious circle established. Now ONLY people with that worldview can be at the top or in the 'higher ups'.
And becomes a way of life and/or an ideology.
Example: it is now impossible for a company to just exist and do well, they have to excel, every damn quarter or the shareholders (read: evil scumbags) will punish the company by either removing some money or replacing the CEO etc. With someone more likely to be of their very short term gain mindset.
Who will then fire some people, the firing 'theoretically' frees up money and 'streamlines' the company and the numbers look good for a short while. Rinse and repeat ... |
Did no one read this? All the quotes from Comcast and Verizon (made since the vote) said they supported the move to openness. The only quotes saying litigation was eminent was a reporter and some guy who is completely uninvolved.
Not to mention the quotes of Verizon from the past had quotes like "we think we should be able to [block competitors' content]," which looks a to me a lot like extrapolating past what the original quote meant. |
Also, politicians are being bribed by the ISPs, especially Republicans. So even if you could get America's most vocal and active voters (conservatives) to understand that ISPs took taxpayer money and just pocketed it all (something they wouldn't shut up about if it was a Democrat-aligned issue), their politicians would outright lie and twist the topic and the voters would be pacified and find something to blame Democrats about. So basically, it's impossible to get people to care about. |
I just learned yesterday that, (unfortunately) through bundling, we can get 100Mb/s for less than $100 a month. I'm so thankful I don't live in a Comcast area, but rather a place that has at least 3 different ISPs. I just made the change today to have my internet bumped up to 100, and I couldn't be more excited! |
my dad works at a prominent university doing electron microscopy and he just spent a cool 2.5 million on brand new scopes. other than the incredible magnification (he has shown me silicone atoms in their lattice) and the ability to do f transforms one of the best things for him is the huge stacks of lcd monitors so he can view multiple images/graphs at once. when the last stage comes in it will be a unit with three different beams and he can look at each image result on a seperate monitor, which speeds up the image analysis massively. |
IE8 is written to use it. And it has been back ported (for free) to an old OS that didnt have the feature.
This is just another mindless excuse to talk nonsense about MS.
The same collection of people would be hear decrying them if they didnt release IE8 for XP. |
Some media reports have concluded that Princeton discovered (or diagnosed) a WiFi issue with the iPad, sometimes reporting that the issue Princeton has seen is the cause of iPad WiFi signal issues or connectivity issues others may have described. This conclusion is inaccurate; the issue Princeton has seen is a DHCP client issue. We have not experienced (or diagnosed) any WiFi signal or connectivity issue with the iPad. |
The reddit article title is wrong. The Princeton write-up this is linked to specifically states this is not the cause of any wi-fi connectivity issues, and that they have observed no problems in that area. The DHCP lease issues affect other devices on the network. |
I figured -- the hardware isn't as powerful as it should be if they want to implement multitasking. |
Let's have a look at this post shall we? Operative words bolded.
>It's pretty damn certain that it's not any kind of conspiracy or smear campaign.
But
>It may be that these two women got pissed off at him for whatever reason
> but it's seems pretty clear that it's genuine |
Isn't it stupid expensive to go to court? Lawyer fees and all that
Why are lawyers, who happen to enjoy a state protected monopoly, so expensive?
>The reason suing them wasn't the path America took has nothing to do with protection by the state or lack of free market. Your typical Americans aren't going to sue anybody just for calling their house. Shit's expensive and complicated
In a free society you would probably get one poor dude getting annoyed by the calls. He finds out who is calling and calls a dispute resolution organization. Wallmart Disputes Resolved then finds that this company is calling hundreds of thousands of people, and loves these cases. It goes after the offender on behalf of all the victims.
Like many class action lawsuits, you might find yourself getting a letter describing the class action and if you let Wallmart sue on your behalf by signing the letter, you will get 20-100$ or so.
This doesn't happen now, because corporations enjoy the limited liability protection from the state. Telemarketers lobby congress and the FCC to pass regulations that protect them from lawsuit for damages as long as they follow "do not call". They often then ignore do not call and keep obscure records so they don't trigger a "technical violation" of the law.
When Upton Sinclair wrote his lies in "The Jungle", he hoped that laws would be passed to protect the small guys from the large meat packing houses. He was dismayed to find that the big guys simply lobbied for crazy compliance regulations that they could only meet, thus demolishing the entire small meat packing industry. |
This is actually [really simple]( and has been done effectively in audio players for years now. |
You mean if he trespassed and I was not able to forcibly remove him? Yes, he'd be infringing my property rights. He would have initiated violence by purposefully trespassing and not leaving.
>Fascism (or more accurately, corporatism) is a functionalist social theory that advocates the ability for the state to engage in transactions with private business, which benefit both the state and the business.
That is the strangest definition I've heard. I would describe fascism/corporatism as the government allowing private ownership of the means of production, but dictating how it is used. It's not about the state engaging in transactions. Transactions implies that the other party had a choice. In fascism, force is used.
>How can one be both 'anarchist' and 'capitalist'?
That's a long answer. There are many resources you can read about this. You've got me scrambling to find the best resources. It's a tough feat. There are many different people who provide many subtle differences.
Your best bet for a good intro is to just check out the [Wikipedia entry](
Check out writings from [Murray Rothbard]( most notably: [ For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto ]( He stays more toward the [Non Aggression Principle]( side.
I think [H. Hoppe]( is in the same vein as Rothbard.
David Friedman is known for [ The Machinery of Freedom ]( He is more of a consequentialist in his reasoning for anarcho capitalism, and disagrees with the two above on a few things.
There are a ton of more resources, forming a gray area of libertarianism between complete stateless anarchy with free markets and minarchism (a minimialist state that only serves to protect rights and enforce contracts). |
There was a problem with dropbox where it would accept any password for login, and not just correct passwords. This guy contacted dropbox tech support, who resolved the issue. This guy put the 'story' padded out with some personal info for relevance on pastebin to share.
S |
The firewall concept comes from the fact that this bill would allow the US Government to block otherwise law-abiding sites via a block of the DNS system - this isn't just taking down offending content, this is blowing up an entire house to kill a single cockroach, if you'll pardon the metaphor.
The reason it scares me shitless is because of the lack of due process. Someone says "Hey, my copyrighted song/movie/show/game/pile of shit is on their site without permission!", file the paperwork, and the site goes bye-bye; it is utterly inaccessable to American consumers.
Also, to be conspiratorial, it's just a step on the road to total censorship. If the framework's in place to defend copyrights, why not extend the law a little further for offensive speech or community standards? Those are vested interests, too, just like defending copyright.
Furthermore, to go WAY down the slope of slippery: say SOPA passes. Say the government's getting tired of Occupy protests (or whatever else, it's just the convenient example with the media blackout of last night during the eviction), and decides to hell with those fuckers using social media to plot against their corporate overlords. So someone false-flags, goes onto a user-submission site being used for organization, and talks about how this song really spoke to them, or everyone should take a look at this clip.
But oh shit, that's a copyright violation, and by the next day, the site used to organize the protest has been blocked - at the DNS level, mind you - by the federal government, all in the name of protecting our copyright and our capitalism.
Also - hundreds of thousands of jobs a year? I'd be surprised if the music industry HAD that many jobs to bleed in the first place.
(Also, as a side note, there have been several studies and opinions proffered - at least one by the judiciary - that piracy actually costs studios/producers/etc nothing. A lot of people who pirate are people who had no intention of buying regardless; either they don't have the money or just aren't willing to part with 50 dollars to play the latest Call of Modern Medal of Battlefield 3 regardless of whether they can pirate or not. At least once, a judge has said that piracy could very well help developers and producers, since people with money who pirate quite frequently purchase the product after consuming some of it in illegitimate form.)
All that aside, though, why should we risk our First Amendment rights for capitalism and money? We already have a framework with which copyright holders can challenge infringement. This is just plain overkill. I can't think of any other law on the books that allows such flagrant massive response.
If our legislators actually cared about ending piracy, they'd consult with tech people. They'd talk about it in an open forum and shoot for something that'd actually be sustainable, stand up to judicial scrutiny itself, and give room for due process. Instead, people are jamming this bill through as fast as they can, denying the opposition any chance to testify, and only allowing the MPAA and others to testify about lost jobs and billions of dollars and how their poor children who won't get presents on Christmas unless our representatives gamble our fundamental rights just to be able to "protect copyright".
The only reason to silence the other side, to completely ignore their points is because you know, consciously know, that you're wrong, and just don't care. Money speaks stronger than morality to our politicians, and it results in laws and processes such as these. |
What you're asking for is totally possible; providing you have a reasonable home upload speed. I do something quite similar using my home server and my HTC Desire HD running ICS.
Aquire [Subsonic]( Its a great application that you can throw on a spare PC that will stream your music and video to pretty much any Android/iPhone/WinPhone7/HP Touchpad.
Install it and point it at your music and video files. It monitors these directories and any media you chuck in gets updated within it's library pretty much instantly.
You can leave the streaming and transcoding settings as they are, but if you don't mind getting your hands dirty theres a great howto [HERE]( on optimizing for for mobile devices and running on machines with multiple cores. You can set up different profiles for different devices too.
My home server is an old Core2Quad, running at 2.66GHz. My upload speed is 10Mbps, but only 4Mbps of that is dedicated to Subsonic. With that I can watch downloaded 720p TV that is transcoded on the fly to my phone's native resolution of 800x480. It works really well provided your mobile device is on wifi or has strong 3G/4G reception.
Hope this is of interest! |
I'd say some are, and many aren't. I am not (full of shit that is). I used to pirate any music I wanted to hear, any movies I wanted to watch, and any games I wanted to play.
Now, there are various ways to listen to music online without downloading it. I have subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu+, and Amazon Prime (I don't have cable any more, as a result). I've got a catalog of near 200 games on Steam, more than I'll probably ever get around to playing. My wife and I both have no problem watching what we want to watch.
I've paid for all of this, and with a few exceptions of media that the provider companies refuse to allow to be distributed in this manner, I've not pirated in years. I haven't had to - it's all available for relatively cheap and it's very easy to access. There have been countless times when I think "Should I get that movie that just came out on blu-ray?" followed up almost immediately by "Nah, I have 3 lifetimes worth of other stuff that I want to watch that's available right now without the hassle of pirating it". |
I'm not saying it's obnoxious if it doesn't work, that is a real pain in the ass. But he isn't "forced." He should take ownership of his actions, not play it off like he has no other course of action (like customer support, cancelling his service, etc) and is obligated to illegally download something. |
Dear HBO:
Your shows are awesome.
But you're fucking stupid as hell for dropping the ball on this and not collecting the EASY money by striking while the iron is hot.
I'm an HBO subscriber and EVEN I would likely pay (twice, basically) for a copy of this show- To gift it to friends most likely. In the meantime I torrent your shit with impunity (since, technically, I own a license to it since I'm a subscriber, no?) and burn it to discs and hand those out. |
I was installing a few computers in a vet clinic once. They got a phone call about a lady who's cat's tail was stuck in a CD-ROM drive and asked me what to do.
"Hold down the computer's power button until it shuts off," I said. The secretary/nurse relayed that to the woman on the phone, but she couldn't even manage that. "Unplug the power cord, then."
She asked, "which one is that?"
"All of them."
I swear, I could hear the cat's screams coming through the phone's earpiece.
She brought the cat in, with its tail still in the drive a few minutes later. When she set the cat on the 'patient' table, she dropped the computer on its foot; poor thing -- I felt so bad for that cat.
The computer didn't have any cover on the case because the woman's husband bypassed the power switch, because it "didn't turn off when he pressed it". This turned out great for me, which meant an easy extraction of the CD drive. Once I got the casing off the drive, it was the doctor's turn.
I have no idea what ended up to that cat. If I wasn't there for that day...bad things would have probably happened. Anyway, it made for a great IT horror story!
As a final note: I'm sure some of you would love to see pictures of this. Sadly, I had a Nokia Tracfone at the time without a camera. I assure you, though, this is 100% true. |
I don't think that's a very good analogy. The Wild West was sparsely populated and was above all, subject to jurisdiction. The American government could have stamped down on the Wild West. It was within their power because the Wild West consisted of sparse settlements where the majority--and the governing body--of the population lived.
Not so with the case of the Internet. The Internet is accessed by half or more of the population of the world and is much much larger than the Wild West in terms of information density and the effort required to govern the entire Internet is probably beyond the ability of any government in the world. With web browsers, we can quickly traverse large tracts of information. I could ballpark that mobility and speed at a couple of hundred miles a second in the physical world.
What's more important is that the Internet is composed of delocalized information, which has allowed it to (essentially) transcend physical existence. |
Save your Bit Coins and visit the the dark corners of the internet where anything from child sex slaves to weapons grade uranium to contract killers can be yours!
Not a good idea to be heading that way. Its speculated [citation needed] that the internet we know about (ie, searchable on google) makes up about 20% of ALL the internet. The rest is accessible by direct connection. A lot of the time, there isn't even a DNS to resolve the address, just an IP address and a port number, which you can't really get unless you have been told. |
First, I said in my very first comment that the fine was ridiculous. Whether or not everyone does it has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Everyone speeds on the road too... so cops just shouldn't give out speeding tickets? Solid logic.
Second, let's not pretend that "pirating" and "stealing" are the same thing. Hell, that's the exact argument most pro-piracy (or at least, anti-RIAA) people make.
Not sure how you got that I said stealing is okay. I only pirate albums now if they're not available for me to listen to/buy in other ways (for example, I embarrassingly downloaded the Conor Maynard album the other day because it is not yet available on iTunes or Spotify in the US). For everything else, I pretty much just use Spotify... if it's not on there, I'll buy on iTunes or Amazon.
Also, your first part of the comment seems to be saying that these fines and laws are ridiculous, but the end seems to be saying you believe people should be fined without warning. What gives? |
Well I would say it started with the late 90's early 00's. At that point CD was king and MP3 was just in it's infancy. At that point, the labels had a choice, inovate and grow with the times or begin to die a terrible terrible death (can you guess which one they chose?)
So as MP3's rise and the CD starts to die (see the closing of Tower Records and the like) the industry realized they were all but boned. They had to scramble for a solution and they decided on the legal path (again, leaving inovation by the wayside). They really had an amazing opportunity! Can you imagine if they had realized at that time that MP3 was the way to go what could have happened? They could have capitalized on a new market where music could be distrubuted with much less overhead then their current system. The costs that go into putting out a major release (a la Katy Perry or something) is incredible. Instead of pumping all that money into CD production and marketing, they would only need servers and a few guys doing viral marketing online. Profit margins go up and everyone is happy.
It also doesn't help that they have been screwing artists for years . In a standard royalty agreement, an artist is paid ~35-40% for the record. But, in their contract, it stipulates that all fees for packaging and shipping (one of the biggest scams in the contract) must be paid at a rate of about 15%, so now the royalty is reduced to 25%. Then there is the fee to your business manager (glorified accountant), and another ~5% depending on who you've signed with bringing the total to 20%. Then add manager fees, another 5%. Other associated fees (producers, engineers, etc). decreasing it to something around 10%.
Finally, after all of this the artist gets paid, right? WRONG! The record company fronted them hundreds of thousands for recording said album and that, of course, needs to be recouped. So thats about 5% at least leaving the artist with a small 1-2% of money from the album sale. And thats even on iTunes downloads at .99 a pop! (Yes, labels charge for pacakging and shipping on a digital download).
So for an album selling at $19.99, the artist gets ~.40 and on an iTunes download at $.99 they are lucky to get ~.02.
So those are two simplified reasons why the record industry is in the shitter. |
The pot calling the kettle black. |
I was merely pointing out what happened when the Nazis got control of the records, in their words "the transports run so smoothly it is a pleasure to see". About 140,000 in Amsterdam 1941, 35,000 ish left in 1945 after the end. All because of a very good record keeping system being controlled by an entity that had genocide in mind. |
Microsoft Made surface to make sure that there would be a good product to showcase Windows8/RT on. To make the OEM's step up there game and produce better products. Which the OEM's history has shown they where not likely to do. Microsoft thought Surface would jolt the OEMS and Surface would be only one of numerous RT/8 devices on the market. So dispute Microsoft limited production capabilities Surface would be just one of numerous great devices each with there own advertising campaigns. OEMs unfortunately proved that they are not capable of bring good products to the market or advertising them leaving surface as the only device being marketed. |
I think the article is a bunch of nonsense however I don't necessarily disagree with the premise.
I have been predicting the fall of Facebook for a long time. I don't need to reference the fall of Rome to describe why their business model is horribly weak.
Apple may have reached a peak and might end up declining. This seems like a logical conclusion however only time will tell. In reality there is no real indication that Apple is going into decline whatsoever. |
I'm in the north east, and before I had FiOS, I was in an area where it wasn't available, and all that was available was Cox. I was paying like $60 a month for an advertised, "up to" 15/5 connection. I was lucky if I got 5/1. If you called an complained, you got the standard "It can go up to 15/5, tons of people using during peak hours, blah blah blah..." It was god damn horrible. When I moved, I picked up Verizon as soon as I could. I started at 25/25 for $40, and got about 30/25 regardless of the time. When they rolled out the "Quantum" upgrade, I was able to get that for an additional $10 a month, going up to 50/25, which caps out generally at 60/30, more than I'm paying for. |
Not just MS; Facebook, Oracle, every big player. There's plenty of unemployed 50 year old developers. Companies want the H1B's because it's cheap (like $50) to sponsor them and they can pay them less than citizens because it's easier for us to move around. They're being exploited as indentured servants. I'm referring to a current multi-million dollar lobbying campaign group being led by Zuckerberg (fwd.us) to bring in lots more H1B's. They claim it's for innovation's sake but really it's to replace Americans with cheap foreigners they can exploit who have no local families to take care of, need a job to stay in the country and will work for cheap. |
I also do IT. I've yet to see anyone who knows anything about computing on an admin level use an iPhone out of choice. It just doesn't happen. Those people want control over what is going on in their device. Easiest way to do that is to get an android.
That being said, if it works for you, good on you. Stick with it. It's just not all it's hyped up to be. There are certain use cases where it would be beneficial to the user to have similar interfaces from the macbook pro and their phone. Ease of use, great.
But charging almost 4x the cost for mid-level outdated hardware is ridiculous. Make as many salient points as you want, but there is no arguing that they make a highly over-priced and underperforming product in most cases. I'm sure there are exceptions, but the general rule of thumb is to expect to eat exorbitant costs and extra man hours trying to maintain the damn things. |
HD-DVD had actually secured the blessing of the porn industry due to tech reasons and support from HD-DVD, while Blu-Ray had been denying the request for licensing of their tech to the major porn industry.
In fact, HD-DVD was so sure of their win due to the support of the porn industry that they had planned a pre-CES party but suddenly cancelled that when the news broke of an exclusive deal between Warner Bros. and Blu-ray |
The one thing that questions me most is that I didn't search for these things. Either
a) These images that are filtered are for SOME reason blocked... yet people reblog them? I literally can't see the image and see the replacement. And then I ask... "why the hell are people reblogging an image that is blocked and can't even be seen? Is it just me, and for some odd reason, I can't see it but they see it just fine?"
Edit: the replacement being either: [image 1]( [image 2]( [image 3](
b) I can go back on my blog three years and find things even in the beginning being blocked. I tag every single post so I can find them quickly and organize them into categories and find these similar to it. Images that fall under "lmfao" or "v" (which I use to categorize images for photography in) are being filtered. A funny picture will get filtered? Why? It was solely posted to get notes and I'll remember clearly what image it was and know that it couldn't have possibly abused the guidelines in any way.
Edit: you can view more on that [right here]( |
I really don't get why people think that Yahoo is going to ruin tumblr (NSFW stuff aside). For one, even though Yahoos email/search/front-page is barely relevant (and even that statement is being generous) to most people under 50 they aren't really all that bad. Are their competing products as good as Google/MS? Resounding no. That said, they didn't ruin flickr when they acquired it (and over the past 8 years they've basically made it the de facto standard for people who want to host high-res photos online and the most recent update makes it better than the sites that are coming out trying to compete), and there has always been tons of NSFW stuff on flickr. Yahoo Groups is full of NSFW content as well.
To assume they want NSFW content off of tumblr is not an opinion I can even begin to take seriously. Some of their largest (and most used) products are (and have been for a long time) filled with NSFW content. I'd even go so far as to say that Yahoo is more NSFW friendly than Google/MS.
All that said, it's not like they advertise this, it's just something they allow. They don't want to be a porn distributor, so they don't brand themselves as such (if they did it would basically throw their over-50 searchers/news/email clients over to the competition).
If they treat tumblr as well as they treated flickr (what's their obsession with buying sites that omit "e"'s BTW) then tumblr is going to be better than ever under Yahoo. |
It implied that nobody was interested in our data, and that only aggregates were saved and used.
The statements did not imply either.
>That's like saying it's okay to steal $100 from everyone instead of just $100 from one person.
is an improper analogy.
In the case of theft, you have no choice. Your money is gone, and you are worse off than you were before the theft. You never submitted or agreed to the theft. You lose the utility of the $100.
In the case of data, you're willingly supplying google with search queries(the data), their machines interpret your query, use sophisticated search algorithms to fetch appropriate results, and supply you with several links to google indexed sites. For free.
In different terms:
You willingly submit your data, receive a world class services(email, storage, calendar, voice chat, conferencing, youtube) for free, and have the opportunity to opt out whenever you please. The fact that your queries and data is stored has been made very clear since the conception of google. No one is being deceived. No one is worse off having their data stored.
>The more data they have, the better it is for them and the more it thins your slice of the "data-pie".
So perhaps a new analogy is in order. Your life/data is like a drop of water in a ocean of other data.(Except your drop is neatly indexed, and optimized) The growth of this ocean guarantees the growth of your data's insignificance in comparison to other data. More important is that this ocean of information permits data scientists to expand their field and possibly accomplish great things in their life-times. |
Misleading headline.
They don't track. They DID track ~5 Million users (%0.005 of their userbase) for about two weeks. but it is not a current thing
They didn't track WHAT you decide to not post, but WHEN. Is it right that they did this? No. Is it 'evil'? In the implementation that facebook used? No.
So no, facebook doesn;t track what you're typing. It's more like Facebook goes "Oh, this person is writing something in their status and... they didn't post it." (As they mention in the source that this article is refencing on page 3: "...content was tracked only if at least five charachters were entered into the composer of comment box. Content was then marked as "censored" if it was not shared within the subsequent ten minutes; using this threshold allowed us to record only the presence or absence [source]( |
Aside from the Orwellian nightmare this presents, I can't help but think that introverts are absolutely screwed (thinking back to Susan Cain's TED talk). If you don't come up with enough energetic contributions in a meeting then you're a bad employee? Is there genuinely no space for people to work independently of the group dynamic?
Of course, that said it's more reasonable to assume that contributions would be measured against output (however your company measures it). If you don't contribute often but your work is good, then you're probably fine. If you contribute loads but don't produce much, you're probably full of it.
Anyway, that's my immediate kneejerk reaction |
I love how everyone in this thread appears to believe this can happen without millions of people worldwide deciding to let it happen.
It ain't like Google lied and cheated their way into the position they hold. They're providing services people like, and that plenty of people are happy to use. If those millions of people like Page's ideas, Google will keep growing.
Millions of people liking a product might not necessarily make it a "good" product... but if a company is addressing a desire that millions have for a piece of software, it's hard to argue the company is "bad" for doing so. |
From the site...
This is a huge deal. Many servers are affected. This vulnerability shipped with a large list of modern Linux OSes over a period of 2 years:
Debian Wheezy (stable), OpenSSL 1.0.1e-2+deb7u4
Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS, OpenSSL 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.11
CentOS 6.5, OpenSSL 1.0.1e-15
Fedora 18, OpenSSL 1.0.1e-4
OpenBSD 5.3 (OpenSSL 1.0.1c 10 May 2012) and 5.4 (OpenSSL 1.0.1c 10 May 2012)
FreeBSD 8.4 (OpenSSL 1.0.1e) and 9.1 (OpenSSL 1.0.1c)
NetBSD 5.0.2 (OpenSSL 1.0.1e)
OpenSUSE 12.2 (OpenSSL 1.0.1c)
>This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users. |
The $42K prosthetic cost $42K because it is a custom one-off design, fitted specifically for him.
It's like saying a Honda Accord is a better car than an Aston Martin DB5. (In fact, a Honda Accord is a much better car in many ways -- according to Top Gear, it has better performance, handling, engine, etc. But there are only a new DB5s in existence, and they were all hand-built.) |
As Barryicide pointed out the FA does consider this a medical device and regulate them.
Yes a covering could be very simple but I'm just trying to show how this was not an apples to apples comparison. I've used 3D printers and like them but I'm also going to guess the 3d printed is no where near as strong or durable as the traditional one. Sure you could cover it with a glove but as you can see with the traditional prosthetic they obviously spent time and money to make it appear as normal as possible. I'm again just showing its not a fair comparison.
Saying 3D printer has nothing but good applications is just a blatant lie. If that was true literally everything would be 3D printer. I have a 3D printer at work and absolutely love it. Jobs its not good include making things out of structural steel. Obviously you can bring up 3D laser sintering (still counts as 3D printing) but the cost is incredibly high, I'm guessing the process is fairly slow, and the cost is incredibly high. Engineers choose the best process which is a combination of cost, speed, quality, material limitations, ect. Sometimes its a hammer and nails, sometimes its a mill and lathe, sometimes its welding, and yes sometimes it is 3d printing.
It has not cut down on all major problems. It filled a gap that current processes couldnt. What its beggining to fill and expand on is medium to low cost on a small qty run, additive manufacturing for mostly plastics. If you need additive on a high qty run you would obviously go for one of the other molding processes.
Yes single prototype, I absolutely love it, 3d printing is great for. It wouldnt take an entire factory and millions before 3d printing. You would just CNC it out of aluminum. Definitely takes longer and is more expensive but its not that much cheaper, or that much faster. You make it seem like no one could make anything before the 3d printer and this is why these articles are usually horrible.
3D printing is a buzz word. When you look at the majority of the articles about it 3D printing had very little to do with what made it worth being an article. This one is a perfect example. To me it seems like they just had a better design than the prosthetic that person had. I'm not sure there isnt a better prosthetic on the market considering I've seen videos of ones that seem to have incredible percision and control. This one is probably not legally allowed to be sold. It does what most do and compare the material cost to the complete cost of one on the market. I would bet if they had machined a 50$ prosthetic there wouldnt be an article for it. |
The $500 price tag isn't stateside. That's for a DIY kit from Robohand - a semi-commercial organization in South Africa, which mainly services Africa.
e-NABLE is a volunteer network of hobbyists, most of whom have 3d printers. When we find someone who could use one of these devices, the nearest available member with a printer sets out to build it, and so far I don't think a single user has actually been charged for one of our devices.
The nice thing about people with 3d printers, is we tend to be huge nerds. When some community we haven't checked in a few weeks says "Hey, there's a kid without a hand near you, do you want to print one?" we usually forget all about the material costs and jump right in.
I've spent about $60 making a device for a local five year old, and I'll never mention that cost to her father. |
These aren't even remotely similar devices, and the 3d printed hand did not come even close to outperforming the commercial prosthesis in a way that makes sense from the standpoint of a commercial prosthesis.
First, as a preface to my probable rant below, I'm all for 3d printing, I've got lots of experience using mills and additive printers, but I can't stand this sensationalization of 3d printing in situations it can't be applied.
For starters, these costs are not even comparable. This is comparing the bare materials cost for a prosthesis, versus the cost of designing, testing, manufacturing, and commercially selling a prosthesis that is wildly more complex than the 3d printed one. The cyborg beast takes at least a few hours to assemble.
Judging by the quoted cost and a quick glance at the parts for the hand, this wasn't printed out of solid ABS, but rather a shell with a supporting structure inside. This means that not only is the arm weaker than it looks, but it's also extremely weak to compressive forces. A shell-printed cube bigger than about 1'' is usually weak enough that if you press on a face with your thumb, you can break the shell.
The article brushes strength issues aside, saying something like "if something breaks, you can just print a replacement part," which doesn't make sense for most users, since a) they don't have a 3d printer at home b) printing takes time, usually quite a bit of it, and c) assembly time is, once again, not factored in.
Another thing is the control system. The beast is a mechanical prosthesis, so any power it has comes from the flexing of your wrist. If you have weak wrists, you're SOL with mechanical, unlike myoelectric, which is what the expensive prosthesis uses. For myoelectic control, you still need to be able to move the appendage, but all you need is muscle contraction, and after that all motion is motorized, so you can feasibly get a lot more power with myoelectric. (The user mentioned trouble gripping, but he mentioned specifically gripping boxes, which I believe is troublesome largely because the myoelectric prosthesis doesn't have an articulated wrist, rather than actual strength issues). |
I can see how you would get that from those two sentences, but no.
Most ideas for new social systems I have read about seem to start from the position of an ideal - a thing that is wanted, and that appeals to a lot of people - and then try to work out how to get there. I think this methodology is back to front. I think first we need to understand what is possible and then work out how we can best make that work with what we want.
I don't think that we have much control over society. Instead I think that it is an emergent phenomena that results from non equilibrium thermodynamics and the mathematically chaotic processes that result from our interactions. Sure, all our individual actions form society, but what takes hold is not something that any one person decides. What control we do have lies in identifying the bifurcation points (In a pile of sand, it is the first grain that shifts to cause a landslide.)
The social systems that succeed are those that most successfully create and export the largest amount of entropy from their environment. This is particularly obvious with free-market democracy. Any system that is going to replace it has to be more successful at this than free market democracy and it will also have to solve some of the problems that it has (Global warming is a major failing from the point of non equilibrium thermodynamics. One we will pay for.)
Society changes due to innovations that make new ways of living possible. Agriculture and writing (or more precisely, book keeping) made large scale civilization possible. Money and the movable type printing press made freemarket democracy possible. I think that the internet makes it possible for another major change. It makes it possible for our society - our social network - to have much stronger feedback mechanisms that we have barley begun to scratch the surface of. Along with the internet - and connected to it - are other new technologies like surveillance and automation that are also changing the potentials.
We don't forget inventions once we have them. Surveillance is not going away. We have to some how deal with the reality it presents us with. Rather than wish for a world in which this technology is somehow gotten rid of, I turn it on its head. If we have to have it, then lets make it work for us rather than against us. The same technology that can be used to create a dystopian hell could be used to create an emergent peer based society. One in which no person or group of people can be in control when it is against the interests of the majority. This is why I say 'leaders that are chosen from the best of us' and 'judges that are the fairest'. These are not people who choose those roles, but people who our emergent social network chooses in a far more dynamic and less corruptible way than we have at present. |
I went to business school in the early 80's, trickle down was considered a fact by almost everybody. I live in what some Americans consider a socialist country, and we have a Social Democrat leading the government, and they still believe this stupid shit, and lowered company taxes as late as last year, to stimulate investments and create jobs! |
If your issues are being managed by restarting your phone, then it's a fair guess that you have some kind of natural software corruption that just happens through normal use. It's not planned, but it does happen after someone has been using the phone for a while so it's easy to make a cynical assumption that it was timed to the release of a new model.
You should look into doing a software restore of the phone and/or go through it and delete stuff that you no longer need.
Another way to look at it is this: if Apple had planned a way to disable your phone over time, they could have just bricked it. Making it fail slowly over time would be a really complex task since you have to figure out how to make the phone annoying to use without being so heavy-handed that everyone with a twitter account figures out the scheme. Remember "Antenna-gate" for the iPhone 4? Apple's products undergo a lot of scrutiny. The odds are low a systematic disabling of the phone would go unnoticed.
Additionally, one "secret" I know about Apple is that the people who write and test the software tend to belong to very small groups. Only a dozen or so were working on iPhone software testing as of 2011. These guys have their hands full just trying to get the bugs out of the phones they haven't released yet. This leaves no time to plant bugs in older models. |
A long time ago my housemate had the phone line in his name and he signed up for Qwest long distance for some reason (we're in California). Guess he got a good rate? Anyway when he moved out he cancelled the phone line, but you don't really cancel long distance service in the US. Through some accounting error his long distance account ended up with a balance of $0.05. Five measly cents.
He never bothered changing his address so every month a bill would show up from Qwest for five cents. After the first one I just sort of ignored them. This went on for years. After like two years I finally opened one up because I was just going to pay the damn bill. But what did I find? An invoice with a note that said "Due to the low outstanding balance there is no need to pay this month." There wasn't actually a return envelope or pay slip or anything.
I stayed at this place for a few more years and eventually the bills stopped showing up. I like to think that some intern wrote a quick computer script that went through and cleared out all of the accounts that were in this state thereby saving Qwest thousands of dollars. As someone who works in telecom though I highly doubt that because we all know telco billing systems are far too complicated for anyone to figure out. |
I just moved in and signed up for then a week ago. My apt is wired and ready to go so I just got the self installation kit and received it on Thursday Plugged everything in and nothing worked. So I called them and they said that the service order wasn't supposed to be out it until Monday. Since I was out of town on the weekend I said okay and waited till Monday.
Monday came and nothing worked. None of their trouble shooting worked and of course they need to send a tech out. The worst part is that the next available slot for them to come out is next Tuesday!
I would cancel them but my only other choice is AT&T and I cannot stand their service. |
umm no. When OP moved in he was offered bother internet and cable. The price for the internet was $49.99 and the cable was free due to a contract with his complex. At the time though there was a promotion going on for the same internet plan (same speeds any everything) but only if it wasn't bundled. Since OP didn't need cable he canceled it and took the promotion. After the promotion period ended his price was $53, and they added back the free cable. the $49.99 was another promotion going on that wasn't included in his contract/plan, so he wasn't entitled to switch to it.
The fault it OP's and I doubt the communication wasn't an issue as I bet in his plan the cable was to be added back and OP didn't read it properly. They aren't charging him extra. |
I had a similar issue when they changed my speed from 12 mbps to 50mbps. I was confused and somewhat ticked off with my price jumping from $20 to $50 for internet alone, so when I talked to them, they said that they had grandfathered the 12 mbps, something I hadn't been told about. I then told them to drop it to 20 mbps which was more than enough for me, but then they dragged it down to 3 mbps while claiming they were providing 20 mbps as I had authorized. In the end, I had to drop their asses, close the account, then reopen it. |
Virgin wireless services cosistently "short change" me about 10% EVERY.FUCKIN.TIME!
How come Vodafone CAN tell me down to the Mb, how much data I've used
BUT
Virgin, says, that although "they know" when I've 'used up' my pre-paid data limit! ,
BUT they cannot tell me 'within 200 MEGABYTES (out of 4Gigs prepaid) MY exact data usage?
WTF?
I pay for say 4 gigabytes but will only get 3.6-7gig(including uploads) everytime
I have a dozen screen shots of this ... and yet they can't/wont tell me how this SNAFU works? |
I've experienced something like this. I called in to complain about my internet. I had low signal strength, the tech came out and changed out a splitter from the main line.
The next day I still would randomly drop and the modem log lit up with errors. So I called back in to complain again and guy at Comcast asks me about getting cable. Like I wanted more services while I am complaining about what I already have. I told the guy I do not want cable I am good with what I have.
So three days later ups shows up with 2 big boxes. Great what did my SO buy now? Open up the boxes and they contain TV reception boxes.
WTF, I told the guy I did not want cable. I called in, the next guy explained the last person signed me up for a "free package" for 1 year.
I asked them what would happen after that year, he stated I would be billed $89 a month!
I told the guy to remove the TV service because Comcast fraudulently entered me into the TV contract. To which I get a response is "that is not my department I will have to send you over to the retention department."
After another hour I finally get the service removed.
From what I get from this experience is a Comcast employee must get some kind of bonus for signing people up with new services or treated with their jobs to meet numbers. Comcast is actively deceiving clients with these kinds of tactics |
personally, the surface sounds like it would be a better choice, mostly because that the convertibles have never been that great, they seem a bit unbalanced in overall design. In saying that, the surface actually can double as a laptop for all/any of your productivity needs because of the keyboard attachment. Specifications wise, they are more or less the same. But the surface can have more powerful models unlike the laptop, which may be able to have the hard drive or ram upgraded at the most. |
16 years ago, in 1998, Citicorp announced a merger with Travelers to became Citigroup. Only a year later in 1999 the remaining restrictions left by the Glass-Steagall Act that were put in place during the Great Depression to prevent mergers like this were overturned by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. This act allowed the Citigroup merger to occur at the behest of these two companies and furthermore did not grant any regulatory powers to the SEC after the merger. Particularly, a Senator by the name of Phil Gramm from Texas was the main proponent of this bill. (Read more [here](
Here we are in 2014 witnessing nearly the same exact thing minus the merger-restrictive legislation. Mergers will continue to happen unless some executive authority steps in. Unfortunately that executive authority, whether it be congressmen, senators or the DOJ, will continue to be inadequate source of change until some legislation is put in to prevent them from being bought out by companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Statistically, in regards to the American Jobs Creation Act, the politicians produced 22,000% return on investment after having been "purchased" and the law put into effect ([Source]( It's statistics like these that sicken me and is why the American public needs to become aware so that real change can happen. No real long lasting anti-monopoly legislation can be put in place without first removing money from politics. It's by no means an easy task and is a real issue that the entire country needs to address.
This is not the whole story. Please continue to read more on how all of this came to be and why the depression that occurred in 2007-2008 has its roots within the deregulation that began around the 1970's and was greatly influenced by the previously mentioned Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act:
I'll leave you with one last quote |
Actually no this isn't my job, I'm just a student who has done his homework and has paid attention in history and macroeconomics.
In regards to the "DOD angle," I have never heard of that position before but I would consider that speculation/conspiracy. It does "make sense" or seems reasonable but take it with a grain of salt. A good rule of thumb in general is the expression "correlation does not equal causation." In other words, just because a particular theory lines up with a particular set of events does not mean it is actually causing those events. For example, a car is driving in a thunderstorm and it breaks down as its battery has gone dead. Now does that mean that the thunderstorm caused the battery to die? Not necessarily, the car just happened to be in the middle of the storm when the battery's charge was used up.
But again, nothing is as powerful and as influential as a dollar bill. Even looking back into the gilded age in the late 1880's to the early 1910's and beyond (when the NSA didn't exist), companies like Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan became monopolies by buying out all of their competitors. That style of monopoly is the classic example, however we are in a very different day and age where the government has not updated laws ( cough net neutrality) and corporations like Citigroup, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable, have become beasts let loose. The modern monopolies are no longer clearly visible like they once were, and can't be effectively controlled by anyone other the government. Next comes the government who becomes bought out by these corporations and their partners through lobbying, and the extremely generous donations that they hand out to help keep their favorite politicians in office.
Ultimately, it all comes back to the people to become informed and get active. It all starts with the American people, that's where real change comes from. As an individual person I am insignificant, all I can do is inform others and encourage them to get involved. But as a group, united together as the citizens of a nation, with one aim to remove money and lobbying from politics, we are an insuperable force. I'm not advocating an anti-government position, all I am saying is that certain big changes are needed and no small organization of people is going to make that happen alone. It is a collective effort. |
I found a Seagate 5TB at Newegg for $200 on sale.](
If you bulk ordered those, you'd need 635 / 5 = 127 of them.
127 * $200.00 = $25 400.00
This is assuming you have the sort of network to handle incoming data of that magnitude and the right setup to store it.
For reference, that's more than the base models of many sedans and V6 muscle cars (<$25k). |
I'm a broadcast engineer
This is actually because the law was passed without any discussion with technical TV people of how it is to be done. Since this happened so quickly, there hasn't been a really good piece of gear that can effectively control the baseline audio level.
Since nearly all audio is embedded in programing and Master Controls do not have volume control (and many are controlling multiple channels at once) the CALM act compliance has to be controlled via an automatic device. Setting the automatic device via tone does not work correctly because of the nature of audio tracks; some parts of shows are quiet, some are loud.
What makes it even worse, is that the settings can actually make the commercials louder than they would have been in the first place due to setting malfunctions.
I got this working acceptably at my old station but it took me weeks of trial an error. I work in a medium to large market with lots of resources. Many stations are barely getting by right now. |
Can you just put " |
Interestingly enough, I always hated writing cursive (not sure if this really is the correct translation but that's the word the article uses so lets go with that). I thought it was stupid and overly complicated.
Much later I noticed that the letters on my handwriting begun to resemble those of that cursive style. Sure I had noticed these small "lines" that happen when your pen still slightly touches the paper between letters. But my revelation happened when I noticed that fast written small "s" looks just like the weird glyph that they teach as small cursive "s". Those extra not-fully-lifted-pen lines make the s and r letter look like their cursive counterparts. That was the major thing I found cursive hand writing stupid. Because small "s" and "r" looked nothing like their regular forms.
So what the hell? Why do you teach the kids cursive "because it's faster"? That does not make them faster writers. Instead they should learn to write more - increased speed would naturally form their handwriting. It's totally redundant to make kids focus on second set of alphabet. Instead they could learn more interesting things.
Daaamn, that was some long-ass post. |
Well I'm sorry that you're bitter and angry about the situation.
I'm not bitching from my computer, I'm running a grass fed beef farm, supplying food to my local area which has enormous amounts less embedded energy in it.
The issue is not technological, it's political. There are a variety of technologies which are feasible, and not implemented to a high degree because of the political process and general ignorance of the issues in the population and the political leadership.
We could put economic incentives behind things other than solar panels. Buses are hugely economical, and the more buses that run, and the more full they are, the better. If we incentivized people to bus, bike and walk, we could have big impacts on emissions, without any new technology at all.
If we started to back off of corn and soybean subsidies, we could reduce the market incentives to run CAFOs and we could encourage more local meat production. If we changed USDA regulations, we could create significantly more freedom for smaller butcher shops to sell their meat across state lines, allowing distant producers to fill in the gap formed by the decrease in market share of less profitable CAFOs.
These are purely political issues.
I'm not talking about how it sucks that Musk's hyper loop isn't already wisking me around the world. That's an obvious engineering hurdle, which I'd be thrilled to see some development on, but it's not my complaint, and I don't think it's his either. There is a marked reluctance in America specifically, and globally to a lesser extent to embrace the solutions that have already been worked out and have no more engineering hurdles to overcome.
I think that your comment about it taking 30-50 years is a bit optimistic, and that in reality, we are not set on a course for accomplishing this process within that window, and we will have many serious failures in our infrastructure because we are not actively pursuing the implementation of completed solutions nor are we funding the future solutions as well as we could. |
Keep in mind that coal is, in fact, a fossil fuel, and coal liquefaction is what supplied Nazi Germany (the Fischer-Tropsch process, and more commonly hydration)
As well, synthetics supplied a mere 9% of Germany's at the beginning of the war, to as high as 50% by some sources in 1943, and only 24% in the desperate final year.
The reason for the decline, and important to consider in the context of war, is the vulnerability of the hydration plants. The first directed air raids were flown against 5 (of 12-14) hydration plants on May 12th, 1944. By June 30th, 1944, production of synthetic fuel had declined by 90%. In contrast, strikes on the Ploiesti Oilfields (a point source for 35% of Germany's oil), including Operation Tidal Wave on August 1st, 1943, produced a negligible effect (Tidal Wave in particular was a disaster). It wasn't until the Transportation Plan campaign was extended to Romania that oil availability was severely curtailed, due to attacks on the rail hubs.
Hydrated oil, despite being the most militarily viable, still has an issue of being low octane. Even with tetraethyl lead added, the Germans could only obtain approximate 87 octane. High octane is essential for high performance aircraft (115 is what Mustangs and Griffon Spits were burning by war's end), and the lack of good fuel crippled several outstanding aircraft. The D-model FW in particular would lose ~50mph (about 20%) off its top speed with even the best coal gas, as well as 10,000 feet off its max flight altitude (and no doubt massive problems with carb icing). Flying hours were restricted rather than fly with bad fuel (although much flying and dying was done with bad fuel).
In short, even if Nazi Germany was 100% synthetic fuelled, fuel would still have been an issue.
Also worth noting that supplying America, at 1 billion barrels/year (vs. the 3rd Reich at 71 million barrels for 1943, the highest year) would be a challenge on a whole other level. (The knock-on effect on steel production would also be interesting; anthracite is the best coking coal and the best liquefying coal)
By the same token, South Africa, despite being 72% coal powered (more than half of all their coal is burned to make power) in 2012, and with all the benefits of 70 years of technology, can't produce enough synthetic oil to power the Nazi war machine. The Sasol Coal-to-Liquid plants consume 37 million short tons of coal (15% of total production) and produce 58.4 million barrels / year of gasoline and diesel (also, this only represents 30% of their domestic consumption, so South Africa is in exactly the same position as the Nazis, and would not be a better example).
Final point of contention, Japan would also not have been a better example. Oil was certainly a major contributing factor in the starting of the war, but they were not as dramatically limited by lack of oil. No panzers running out of gas in the Ardennes, no Dolfo Galland grounding his fighters rather than use brown gas. The reason their limiting was not as dramatic was simple: they'd lost the war before oil became a problem. They simply didn't have the industrial base, including steel and oil, for a sustained war (for example, 550,000 tons of shipbuilding to America's 3.2 million). As soon as the Japanese started losing, they had no means to stop. Attrition of forces in the Solomon Islands campaign of 1942 was simply the end of the line. Beyond that point, too much of everything was missing. Too many pilots had died, and the Japanese had a terrible training infrastructure, leading to The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot and the eventual loss of any air capabilities that didn't involve smashing planes into ships. Too many aircraft carriers gone, leaving the surface fleet to the mercy of American air power. A complete lack of anti-submarine capability, and a total failure to develop any saw their island get strangled in a noose Dönitz could only dream of. The protracted and bloody end to the war saw oil become a factor, but only in the case of Yamato's one-way trip (although they may have had enough gas and declined to issue it to a suicide mission) and the fuelling of kamikaze drivers. Not a vastly better example. |
Most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels. Electrolysis(using electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen) is very inefficient. We get most of our hydrogen from Natural gas production. |
Yeah despite being the poster child for conservatives and Reaganomics being the "model of Republican success" (quotes to denote sarcasm, it was pretty terrible), he spent more money than any president before him by a long shot, and even spent a lot of it in typically liberal fashion. |
What a shocker. People are actually friendly.
I went to a gay get together, and I didn't get hit on (I'm straight and apparently ugly enough to not proposition) and people were friendly and warm and genuine.
I got into firearms, and other people were more than happy to share their input and love of their sport of choice there also. |
Well that sounds very virtuous and noble, but this country is a democracy. Experiences such as mass unemployment and malnutrition during the Great Depression (itself due to the excesses of unregulated capitalism) motivated people in great numbers to vote for those government services that you find so distasteful. |
Though I truly do appreciate you encouraging people to look inward for their own happiness (because that's the only place anyone will ever find it), I'm going to have to slightly disagree with you here.
The people that are still pissed about this aren't necessarily people who feel personally powerless and/or victimized. There are people who feel angry about this exactly because;
>there's all kinds of people less fortunate than you. People without homes, people without any money to their names. Can you really go on pretending they're not alone? Grieving widows, the broken-hearted, directionless drifters who have given up.
The point is that the constitutional rights that have been infringed upon by this institution apply to those people, as well. That's why some of us are pissed, and we're gonna be pissed for a while, because the kind of changes that need to be made in order to reestablish our faith in the government take time. Now sure, I'm personally a bit irked that someone's been snooping on my email, search history, phone calls, whatever. But I am royally pissed at the fact that this institution feels it needs to keep a documented record of the grieving widow's phone call to her mother in her very personal time of weakness and despair. I'm pissed that the directionless drifter can't use the internet at the library to look up his options for shelters for the night without becoming a data point in a government database. I'm pissed that the guy with zero money gets treated like a criminal by the authorities merely for having no money. Fuck that noise.
We are not all potential criminals just waiting for a chance to strike out at the government. We do not need to be monitored and controlled, and any institution that believes that we do needs to be questioned on its motives and aspirations. When the answers to those questions are "unavailable", shrouded in deceitful language, or just flat out blatant lies, then you not only have every right to be pissed and untrusting, you have a responsibility to be so. Not for yourself, but for those that are unaware that they're being watched as a potential threat to the institution that they are inherently a part of. You need to keep being angry... not loud and incoherent, but angry and effective, in order to keep fighting for these people. If one voice is to become silent, whether out of fear, ignorance, suppression, or complacency, we must then speak with the impetus of two voices. The less people that get angry about this, the more angry those who are angry must become.
The top comments in this thread are claiming that this is still fucked up, because this shit is still fucked up. Winding down the phone metadata program is merely clipping the toenails off a foot that needs to be completely amputated (and I use this analogy because the NSA has become a foot that the government uses to stand itself on, squashing the inalienable rights of every citizen underneath).
You're also right that this shit is poison and eventually eats at your humanity, but it's not a personal bitterness and cynicism that's doing that. It's the rise of the "unchallengeable authority" that an institution can now "legally" hold over it's people. That's the poison that's slowly, yet unyieldingly, spreading throughout the system. Positive thinking ain't gonna make that shit go away. We need positive action to change this, but we won't get that if people don't remain angry about it. |
To be frank, the Freedom Act almost seems worse in certain aspects. Where the Patriot Act was much too broad, and had more room for interpretation, the Freedom Act turns some of the more worrisome interpretations into law, so there's no more ambiguity, and the things that courts are now ruling illegal, all of those will become legal.
I'm worried that after the Patriot Act lapses, and the Freedom Act become enacted, the American public will see it as a victory, but in reality, all we've done is add an extra step in the process of the NSA getting all our information. I could even see it as a benefit for them, as they were literally running out of space to hold all of the data they were collecting, and now the telecom industry will be asked to hold the information, and they'll work in some sort of streamlined system to get "Warrants", or whatever it is that they need to continue the wiretapping / spying.
I realize that there may be some benefits to the Freedom Act over the Patriot Act, but I do not want to give them the right to conduct these illegal searches. It's as if there's been a massive problem with buying votes in a country, and just as the citizens start to gain legal ground, the government says "Alright, we admit that buying votes is not legal, it's time to regulate these branches that ARE buying votes, and enforce restrictions on how they buy votes."
In my ideal, fantasy-world, I would let the Patriot Act sunset, and would not allow for the Freedom Act. |
As far as I understand the only thing you really risk is getting banned from forums (see [this conversation, from the administrator over at the 8chan imageboard]( Because Hola lets people pay to use your connection to post on those forums, the forum will think you're the one posting stuff that's against the rules and ban you. This only counts for anonymous forums though, since reddit for example would ban the account of the poster instead of their IP. I doubt, however, you can ever really be held liable for someone doing stuff like DDOS'ing through your connection, if this is even possible. See /u/sneakybells's post about deniable plausibility for more on that.
It's probably best to turn Hola off when you're not using it (if not for security reasons, do it just to minimize bandwith usage) , or maybe even to pay for a proper VPN (OP's suggestion, I wouldn't do this) if you're sensitive about this stuff.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I use Hola occasionaly (I always turn it off when I don't need it) and this news won't really change anything for me. Should it?
Still |
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted, you’re right, this has been possible for a couple of weeks, for sure. Confusion might have arisen because it has been rolled out to all accounts just now. New GMail features tend to appear only in a subset of user accounts, and I doubt that Google would openly post about a new feature until it’s available on all accounts. |
From chuck_the_plant below:
>Don’t know why you’re being downvoted, you’re right, this has been possible for a couple of weeks, for sure. Confusion might have arisen because it has been rolled out to all accounts just now. New GMail features tend to appear only in a subset of user accounts, and I doubt that Google would openly post about a new feature until it’s available on all accounts.
> |
The deleted comment was:
>Filming police is illegal in three states. Yet it remains legal federally. Explain. (by [interweb_repairman](
My response:
If there is no federal law regarding the specific state law then the state law is applicable. There are not federal laws for a lot of things. That doesn't mean they are legal (or illegal) by default
In the example you provide, it isn't the video recording that is illegal. It's the audio recording that violates those three states "all parties informed" provision of their wiretapping law.
The federal version of this law states that at least one party must know about the recording. A state is free to require more than one party because the federal does not explicitly deny them that right. The federal law would have to be reworked to throw something in like "...and no state may require more than one party to be informed of the tap".
In addition, I believe the federal version may also only apply to communications across state lines. |
I used to work as a customer service tech for an ISP, helped various internet issues and such. This was actually a fairly common occurrence. A person would call in and ask why there internet wasn't working and they were actually trying to connect through dial up to get online. Id ask why they were trying to connect using that. After exhausting all options they were under the presumption that AOL was still required to connect even after getting our internet service. I'd tell them they didnt need to keep paying AOL in order to keep their email and then I'd connect them with AOL so they could cancel their service. |
I remember on this one TV show I watched 10 years ago, the host got the audience to chant "Stop the piracy! Stop the piracy!"
The show only showed one side of the problem with piracy, and I remember thinking "Stupid bitch".
The same applies today. Stopping piracy is very simple - BRING THE PRICE DOWN DRAMATICALLY. So that people can actually afford to pay for entertainment.
Forget SD, people want HD content lately. Legal HD content where I live (aka Blueray) just to give you an idea 1 BD disk costs more than my monthly internet fee. Besides this, I hate wasting petrol to go out and have to buy media, and I hate hard copies of anything. I see it as wasteful, when we're living in the digital era.
Why the fuck should movie stars get paid so much? Why so much profit down the chain. It is supposed to be entertainment!
In Roman times entertainment was provided to the people as a way to appease them. You would think with all the problems in this world, we might get the luxury of cheaper entertainment, but NO, they want to milk every last drop!
It's simple - If I can't afford the movie - I can't. At this point in time legally purchasing stuff on a regular basis is too expensive - everyone is a frigging pirate - even church goers.
It's pretty simple:
& |
Yeah, I completely agree. I guess it just seems like people always seem to forget that when they talk about Anonymous now, couldn't it be a completely different group of people than it was, say, a few weeks ago? It's not like they have badges or something.
Maybe the [poorly thought out] analogy I'd use is what if rioters all over the world suddenly started saying they were part of a worldwide rioter collective known as, uh, WRC whose rather vague goal was that of "rioting until the powers that be release their authoritarian stranglehold on the peoples of the world". Would our entire perspective and strategy in dealing with these rioters change? I would think not, they'd still be rioters with vastly differing regional goals and motivations, despite the common affiliation with WRC.
Yet I feel like now that we've got the name "Anonymous" being thrown around, what used to be viewed as an unremarkable, nameless, and disorganized group of amateur "hackers" is suddenly treated like a cohesive and focused "group", even though little has changed about the actual constituents of that group. |
Last night I was ensured by two different employees, three times, that I would absolutely be able to come back today and get a price match. Before I pressed the "Yes" button on the credit card machine, I asked again if she was positive, and she replied, "absolutely."
Sure enough, they wouldn't price match today. They said tens of people had returned the tablet because Best Buy refused to price match. I reminded the G.M. of the store know how many people they're pissing off, and would likely never buy from Best Buy again, and how Best Buy looks like the bad guys, not HP. I returned the tablet and got a condescending "thank you" from the G.M., to which I replied, "go fuck yourself."
I came home and bought a 16gb version from a seller on eBay for $120. |
That is not always the worst part. The quality of teaching has gone down hill quite a bit over time. Pay has stayed the same and cost of living has gone up. Giving teachers the attitude to not give a fuck. Not all teachers are bad, just a lot of them now. I found there was 1-2 amazing teachers in each school. Still this could be a strictly California thing and or a place with higher living costs thing.
Honestly with the laptop distraction thing, I think that is complete BS again it is a human issue. At my business we encourage laptops for strictly digital information means. As long as the people you hire are trustworthy enough to actually act as professional things can be quite a bit more productive. |
nope, I didn't because I read the rest of the post. Future reference: |
And you're incorrect, the tablet design is novel. If a tablet absolutely has to be a flat, black, pane of glass with a single button on it, what about [this]( prior art, or [this bad boy](
Just because all the tablet makers have copied Apple's design in an attempt to create a commercially successful device doesn't mean they have the right to do so in violation of a design patent or that Apple shouldn't be allowed to stop the infringement. Don't like it? Lobby Congress, support more meaningful patent reform, donate to the EFF, etc. |
The intertropical convergence, or ITC, is an area of consistently severe weather near the equator. As is often the case, it has spawned a string of very large thunderstorms, some of which stretch into the stratosphere. Unlike some of the other planes's crews flying in the region this evening, the crew of AF447 has not studied the pattern of storms and requested a divergence around the area of most intense activity. (Salpu and Tasil are two air-traffic-position reporting points.)
How is it that no one questions this ?
I doubt that this storm pattern was something brand new that nature threw at us. Furthermore, my father is a transport pilot in the air force (10,000+ hours) and he brought up some interesting points about the fact that the pilots did not fly AROUND the storm.
The problem is one of money .
On any given route, the airlines are supposed to fly a certain number of people + bags so that they can have enough fuel for 'emergencies' or diversions. Basically, fuel consumption goes up based on how many people and their bags you carry.
The airlines often exceed this limit by drawing a flight path to a closer location and 'diverting' the flight to the actual location.
So say the flight path is drawn from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon and then the flight is 'diverted' from there to Paris. This allows the airline to legally carry another 2-5 passengers = more $$$ per flight.
Unfortunately, this means that if there is a huge storm you pretty much have to risk it and fly through it or above it. But unfortunately the unnaturally warm weather made it impossible to fly above the storm clouds.
This is probably one of the reasons why the Air France pilots didn't choose to fly AROUND those storm clouds. The intensity and danger of Atlantic storm clusters is quite well known to airline pilots worldwide.
Blaming the pilots is really an easy way out for Air France. Sure, they were at fault but there is more to it than that. These practices haven't been discussed anywhere in the press and that is truly sad. |
How do I transfer my domain name to a new registrar?
> If you wish to move your domain name from one ICANN-accredited registrar to another, you may initiate the transfer process by contacting the registrar to which you wish to transfer the name. This registrar is required to confirm your intent to transfer your domain name using the Initial Authorization for Registrar Transfer form (1). If you do not respond or return the form to the registrar, your transfer request will not be processed.
> Your current registrar may also choose to verify your intent to transfer using the Confirmation of Registrar Transfer Request form (2).
The first form (1) can be requested by the RECEIVING registrar that it be mailed to them (although they can also, and usually do, include optional methods such as email, fax, or confirming through their website).
The second form (2) is the only one that GoDaddy can use, and it says " If you want to proceed with this transfer, you do not need to respond to this message." |
I was in a similar situation in having renewed a few recently. In the end I picked namecheap.com since they offered to honor my domains' expiration dates AND add a year. So for example one of my domains was set to expire in January of 2015 but now, after moving to namecheap and paying 6.99 it is now set to expire in January of 2016. |
I haven't been able to transfer my domain off of godaddy for the past couple days. When I created the domain back in 2005 I used an old adelphia email address that we no longer have access to. A couple years ago I updated my godaddy account with my new gmail account but my domainsbyproxy account never was updated. I've been trying to get privacy disabled so that I can transfer out but i can't get into my domainsbyproxy account to disable it. Multiple emails and one phone call later I had to fill out a form to change my email and send in a copy of my drivers license to get my email changed. I am told that I have to wait 3 business days to get that approved and it might not get approved. |
So, remember when home prices started tanking in 2008? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started hemorrhaging money and had to eventually be bailed out by the federal government, at enormous taxpayer expense. Want to guess who stood up on the floor of the US Senate and denied that they were in trouble the whole time? Then-Senator Chris Dodd.
As a follow-up question, want to guess which senator was the number one recipient of campaign funds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Yup: Chris Dodd. That's the way he's always played the game. |
Economic models of industrial dynamics are traditionally based in Schumpeterian theories of producer innovation. Recently, this framework has been advanced toward models of open innovation in which production and innovation occur over networks of firms. However, a further extension is toward consumer-producer co-creation in which consumers also enter into the process of both production and innovation through the provenance of new web-based technologies that enable devoted microcommunities of consumers to engage in the process of production and innovation. (Potts et all 2008: 459).
Actually a lot of academic research has noted this shift in the production value chain. New digital media has a huge say in this development, because of its modular structure and numerical representation which make it very easy to manipulate.
Axel Bruns calls this melting between producer and user for "produsage" and it builds on »the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement« and »Whether in this chain participants act more as users (utilizing existing resources) or more as producers (adding new information) varies over time and across tasks; overall, they take on a hybrid user/producer role which inextricably interweaves both forms of participation, and thereby become produsers«.
Within this development lies huge potential in various fields including cultural politics. The internet can be seen as playing a huge factor in the democratizing of culture (as in all social groups has equal access to cultural products). It also plays a huge factor in what we can call a cultural democracy (where everyone has a right to express themselves creatively. youtube.com is a good example of this).
Edit : This also influence how artists work. The french art critic Nicholas Bourriaud writes that artists today: »rather than transfigure a raw element (blank canvas, clay, etc.), they remix available forms and make use of data. In a universe of products for sale, preexisting forms, signals already emitted, buildings already constructed, paths marked out by their predecessors, artists no longer consider the artistic field (and here one could add television, cinema, or literature) a museum containing works that must be cited or "surpassed," as the modernist ideology of originality would have it, but so many storehouses filled with tools that should be used, stockpiles of data to manipulate and present.« (Bourriaud 2002)
Edit 2 : Excuse my spelling. English is not my first language.
Edit 3 : |
Peripheral Comment: In the TV ad at the bottom (which I remember hearing at the time cost an astronomical amount just for the song license) they emphasize using the computer to learn. That's often been how computers are pushed, and is in some ways legitimate. But look at the ad now. All those massive bulky monitors. And have you been to a poorer high school in the last few years? They are throwing that stuff away at a rate that is ridiculous. Every classroom has a computer now, or three or five. But none of them work. All of them are enormous and do almost nothing. What a waste of effort and hardware. At the school I worked at last the backstage area was literally stacked full -- length, width, and height -- of computers they were waiting to get the budget to dispose of.
So we can not do that again. It's absurd. Hardware goes old too fast to outfit poor schools with it.
What do we need instead? I have two ideas on that and people seem to hate them, which tells me I might be on to something.
First idea: Outfit schools with high end book printing systems. Tie that to the internet and you've got good old fashioned text books on every subject forever. It's true they'll need ink and paper supplies, but that tech won't change quickly and is more reasonable.
Second idea: The internet offers so much and should be leveraged beyond just as a source for physical books. So what can we do about hardware? Use what is there: Cell phones. I don't know how that would work exactly, but they are becoming ubiquitous even in third world nations. I had kids in my district writing whole papers on their side-kicks, because that's what they had. Yes, it is a terrible solution, but frankly, so is the web for much of what we've put on top of it. It's a case of imperfectness being vastly trumped by the availability . |
Film industry worker here. We are concerned because for the past 10 years budjets for new projects have disapeared and studio profits have sky rocketed.
Reality TV leaned out the industry and actually helped along the cream of the crop. As did DVD sales.
So what we are seeing is eager film entrepreneurs developing new media risking everything financially but still depending on studios to pick them up or buy their un fleshed out concepts.
It's scary to throw down the cost of a house to film a low budget project only to have it rejected by studios and have no "Direct to consumer" venue.
Studios are interested in profits not quality programming. Programming isn't sold, commercials are sold. TV and movie media is now a vehicle for advertising less a entertainment commodious that is purchased for it's merit. |
It would be a whole lot easier if we only had to hover in the middle of the right screen rather than at a corner. Doesn't that logically make sense since that's where touch users go to get the charm bar? In the Developer preview I found it really easy to just go to the middle of the left side of the screen to switch between the metro apps. On a touchpad on a laptop it was really enjoyable. It seems like the consumer preview went back a step by forcing the user to go from the corner, and then to the top of the screen. In addition, Shutdown and restart NEEDS to be accessible from the bottom left hand corner, the average user will not know what to do otherwise.
As for search, while yes I do find it awesome that I can type a song in the search bar and open up the lyrics app, I need an easier way to search for when I'm in something like the people app and I'm browsing through my contacts. I want to just start typing and initialize the search. It's simply not intuitive enough, and that's how reviewers and consumers will be judging your product.
Finally at last, there are two additional UI changes that need to be made, and they are drastic but they make sense.
The first, is that you need to integrate metro apps into the desktop taskbar (or some sort of taskbar at least, maybe even just move the metro app manager to the bottom). Personally, I love the Metro UI (I own a WP phone), I think it's clean and really intuitive, but the problem is that most people aren't going to be living in a Metro UI entirely and there needs to be a graceful transition between the desktop and the metro interface.
To do that, you need to have one simple and unified place to manage your applications, it's really just that simple. You don't want your user wondering every time whether or not to find the application in the metro UI or on the taskbar, especially since there will probably be some WPF based Metro apps coming.
From a software engineering aspect, I can understand why it might be incredibly difficult to combine the two, but it has to happen. The taskbar is intuitive, the combination of the metro manager and the taskbar is not.
The last UI change I might suggest is to have the options bar enabled by default. Talk to your Windows Phone team, there's a reason why they don't have that bar hidden by default like android does :).
Hopefully you read this, sorry for the long post, I am really looking forward to Windows 8, but there are a few fundamental flaws that need to be addressed. |
Actually, that's not how Android works. On Android, a badly behaved app can continue to run in the background and suck up the battery. In Windows 8, metro apps behave like iOS apps. If they aren't running the foreground they are completely suspended, except for a few constrained types of background tasks they can run like playing music or receiving push notifications.
Desktop apps continue to behave as they always have - free to run wild in the background. |
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