"3G" is a weak term that means different things in these two technology stacks. AT&T's 3G is a much better 3G than Verizon's 3G, and thus also much more expensive to roll out.
Very true, but prospective customers don't want to hear the details. AT&T can come back with a line of commercials advertising how their 3G is faster than Verizon's 3G and bam - competition. The point is that the Verizon ads aren't unfairly damaging or misleading and there's plenty of room for rebuttal by AT&T.
It is incredibly easy to be skeptical and cynical, until you have seen something that rivals the best magician's trick. From a guy who spent most of every day of his life by himself.
So did you believe the magician's claim that he has supernatural powers, too? If an old man with a stick and a talent for miming can fool you into thinking that dead wood can turn "into a straining, curving, living thing" and detect water, I've got a card trick to show you.
In my mind there was simply no way you could hold a branch and make it do that -- the branch itself wanted to do it, and did it.
I've located the source of the problem, highlighted above.
but if I legally have a box, I ought to be able to get at the data I pay for.
And if you legally have a song you ought to be able to listen to it as many times as you please. And if you legally have a movie you ought to be able to watch it in every room in the house. And if you legally have a video game you ought to be able to use it on as many computers as you wish.
Media companies feel that since media has no inherent usage limitations (transportation, duplication, accessibility, etc.) they've got to limit it purposefully. It's scary (and I'm not saying that facetiously) for someone who grew up when a product had a serial number, an owner, a size, a weight, to suddenly be in charge of selling an ephemeral product with nothing but a production cost that must be somehow recouped.
Wait until the kids that grew up with broadband are old enough to approach venture capitalists, to lobby congress, to go to court. Then we'll see some change.
The reason why streaming music is taking over is because radio is crap. Seriously, if you don't like hip hop, pop, country or classic rock, there are -no- stations other than that anymore. If you have musical tastes other than that, too bad.
You could easily write that as: "If you have musical tastes that aren't the same as the majority, too bad." But that's pretty much expected, right? Imagine liking orchestral music when big band took off. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's "crap". A lot of people like Miley Cyrus and don't care if it's not skillfully performed music. Radio, like any limited-spectrum broadcast medium, caters to the majority.
If dislike in radio genres was substantial enough to impact the music industry's bottom line (via "switchers" to streaming media) the radio stations would adjust accordingly.
I think what is increasing demand in streaming media is availability, ease of use, and cost. The state of streaming "Internet radio" 10 years ago was pitiful. Since then we have standardized technologies, better quality, and (however grudgingly) music label support. Along with reasonable costs (free in many cases!), increased access to high-bandwidth Internet connections, and more legitimacy in not owning physical albums, tapes, CDs, etc. streaming becomes a viable media delivery method.
"it's happening much faster than ever before thanks to human behaviour" that's the leap that you aren't being very convincing about. there seems to be this movement of "omgz everything humanz do is wrong!" which isn't science. global warming advocates can't remove the emotion from their arguments, which makes me suspicous.
The great thing about science is that the OP doesn't need to be convincing. Anyone can look at the data and reach a conclusion.
In case you don't want to become an expert in the field, however, and are willing to accept an overwhelming majority of existing experts, you would find that "97.4% believe that human activity is a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures." (from the OP's link).
Perhaps if you didn't accept that poll, you might find that "Only 5% believe that that human activity does not contribute to greenhouse warming; and 84% believe global climate change poses a moderate to very great danger.". And so on.
Personally I don't get it. Why is it so hard to accept? Reliance on academic authories has its pitfalls of course, but a certain point you need the humility to accept that there is no debate over this particular point among experts.
It reminds me of the "debate" over whether or not 0.999... = 1. Non-mathematicians will swear up and down that it can't be. They'll pull out everything they've got, but at the end of the day, just because you don't understand it doesn't make it so. Read with a careful eye, but c'mon, the cause of the current change in global mean temperatures is no longer a debate.
Verizon Wi-Fi is not available for PDAs, phones, desktop PCs or Macs.
Not available for desktop PCs? What exactly is the difference between a laptop and a desktop running Windows, except for form factor?
This is an incredibly stupid decision for Verizon to make, and for Boingo to go along with. Bad business sense.
It may be they lied about keeping user supplied data in house, and they may have implied that they used advanced technological means to do the transcription, but if their service does what it says I can't blame them for using human labour to do the transcription.
I don't know... an unethical service, an unscrupulous company, a management with the lack of business sense to realize this is a public relations disaster, a fiscally untenable platform, and (possibly) opens them up to legal action... I'd call that crazy.
Sure, the technology works, but the whole idea is preposterous. Who transcribes the workers' voice mail? Or is voice mail transcription reserved for the upper class? Surely it's not such an elite service to warrant that treatment, which indicates that something went wrong in the management's thinking.
In the subsequent chapter, "Flushing the Document Early," Steve explores the approach of utilizing chunked encoding in order to begin rendering the Web page before its full contents have been downloaded to the browser.
While good advice, something like this should be implemented as a natural part of the specification, or not at all. This rings to me as an attempt to manhandle HTML/Javascript/CSS into a use case for which it is not intended.
I want to see a real protocol for webpages - something between Postscript (except less document-oriented; and yes I know about NeXT's work) and a windowing environment (except more constrained). Then, to preserve the ease of user-input, a simple HTML/XML-like layer. For 99% of the sites that are constructed directly by the user, original HTML with italics, colors, fonts, etc. is sufficient. For projects beyond the scope of Joe Facebook, a true system is needed that allows seperation of design and content. But all attempts thus far to do both, frankly, suck.
Like their previous driver offering, it's not a wholehearted contribution to making an open source project better, but instead just a thing to make microsoft's own services work better when people need to use open source.
Microsoft is a corporation, after all, and I would be very surprised to see them expending resources working on open source projects that they do not actually use. This could be a gateway, a toe in the water, to starting open source projects, which then of course they would contribute to. But unlike IBM, (former) Sun, etc, Microsoft has no ties to existing open source software, so not contributing to the same isn't too surprising.
It's good to see a willingness to do even this much, but hardly a staggering change of heart. They've a long way to go yet.
I suppose you could say that. I think the point here is not that Microsoft is releasing something under an open source license, but that Microsoft sees open source as a viable approach to softare development and a real business force. Typically we expect the company to brush off open source as "anti-American" and offer pricey, Windows-only alternatives to whatever the demand might be. But now they are admitting, in a business sense, that the open source market exists and is worth working with. Sure, they're doing this to increase interoperability with their existing, closed-source projects... but that's more than just a token move.
Theoretically speaking, if we could get, say, an entire ship and all of its inhabitants to do this "quantum walk"...
Ah, but you can't. Quantum mechanics applies only to quantum particles, not big honking spaceships. Of course nobody has integrated quantum mechanics with classical mechanics yet, so you never know
The thing is, quantum mechanics is just a mathematical system that seems to work pretty well. As in, it predicts what really tiny things will do extremely well. When a quantum particle takes on different states at a time, that is a mathematical concept that, when applied, produces a result that agrees with what we actually see. It involves complex numbers, high dimensions (that don't necessarily agree with what we consider "dimensions") and other mathematical constructions. The math works great... but you have to be careful about extrapolating too far and assuming the math is the reality.
HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!