Comment let's hope (Score 1) 121
Let's hope we heed the warnings of sci-fi.
If corporations were not recognized as individuals in a number of other annoying contexts (political contributions, "personal" rights, etc) then I *might* be inclined to agree. But as it stands, they've got the best of both worlds; no meaningful taxation like individuals are burdened with, but all the same protections and "rights" as well.
I think there's a maximum length after which a galaxy cannot exist; diminishing element returns from supernovae. Unfortunately I'm not sure how long it is, but it's much longer than 13 billion years; individual red dwarves can last for hundreds of billions of years. As for merger with other galaxies or destruction by a supermassive black hole though, its anyone's guess.
If the universe is under 15 billions years old, how do we know red dwarves can last 100 billion years?
But the baffling thing here is that this isn't some big company demanding a political ad be removed; it's a tiny film studio. And the film in question is free on the internet.
It just seems like there has to be a missing piece to this story.
Is it really that baffling? Let me take a stab at that missing piece:
Campaign manager: Hey tiny film studio, how do you feel about perjuring yourself to shut down this ad that's making us look bad? We'll owe ya one, and we have this funny feeling the perjury won't be prosecuted anyway.
Tinyfilmstudio: A corrupt congressman in my debt? Yes please; consider it done.
Campaign manager: I knew we'd see eye-to-eye on this one.
What do you suppose are the chances that Microsoft itself is slowing down the W3C's progress, for exactly the reason you state? It would not be the first time a company sabotaged a cooperative effort to further their own interests.
I've installed the official driver manually, and now every time there's a kernel upgrade (which seems to happen about once every other week right now), the graphical user interface breaks, and I'm dropped back to the command line. Then I have to reinstall the Nvidia driver manually again to get back to work.
This is what DKMS was invented for. As soon as nVidia starts using it in their binary driver packages, this problem will go away and all your kernel modules will be recompiled automatically when a new kernel is installed.
So, tell me how my mother should be able to handle that?
This is a total straw man and you know it, and I'm disappointed the mods didn't call you on it.
If your mother can't run one script from a command line and follow the prompts to reinstall the driver, then she probably doesn't need the extra 3D performance from a proprietary binary video driver either. Set her up with the open-source driver and kernel updates won't be a problem.
This is a case where voting with your wallet is the way to go. If they see dropping sales figures as compared to the first game that aren't matched by rising piracy figures, then that tells them that some people out there have ethical reasons not to pirate, and are opposed enough to intrusive DRM crap not to purchase. A pirate doesn't interest them, but a lost customer does.
The problem with this is that these content industries (games, movies, music, etc) have the nasty habit of defining piracy figures in terms of sales figures. So if they see falling sales figures, they will claim that as proof of a corresponding increase in piracy. I suspect this DRM lunacy will not end until at least one major company follows this kind of logic all the way to bankruptcy; sales keep going down, DRM keeps getting worse, customers keep getting more annoyed, sales go down even more, until the company is just out of business.
The real tragedy is that even then, in their dying breath, that company will claim that they went under due to piracy, not due to producing a worse and worse product (as the DRM gets more and more invasive).
To some extent I think the question of whether the globe is warming (or climate is changing, or whatever terminology comes next) is secondary.
Whether or not it's already happening in any measurable way today, I think we can all agree that it *could* happen in the future, so we (as a country, and a global society, and a species) need to be careful that it doesn't. To that end, studying human civilization's side effects on the biosphere seems obviously worthwhile.
I think the original batch of climate scientists were well-intentioned but did themselves (and us) a disservice by overplaying the initial data. They saw a potential problem in the future and tried to rally the public by saying "it's already happening!", but when that ended up not being very obviously provable, people started dismissing the entire concern. That, to me, is a huge mistake.
Maybe lifting the laws that prevent competition would help.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that the sorry state of broadband competition in the US wasn't the fault of laws, but economics: building the necessary infrastructure (coaxial cable, telephone lines, fiber, wireless hubs, cell towers, etc) is prohibitively expensive.
But that only highlights your original idea: high-speed data transfer is a kind of a natural monopoly, due to the aforementioned infrastructure needs. That makes it very much like any other utility: water, sewer, electricity, analog voice telephony, etc.
So I agree, classifying data transfer as a natural monopoly and running it (and, yes, regulating it) as a public utility just like all the other public utilities seems like the only reasonable long-term solution. Net neutrality is never going to be assured without strict regulation or strong competition, and the free market is never going to provide meaningful competition with such a high infrastructure cost to enter the market.
This is an amazing story, and everyone involved deserves all honor and appreciation for their life-saving efforts.
Nonetheless, it raises the question: how can we leverage technology to achieve this kind of effect without requiring a friend-of-a-friend with a direct line to the US State Department?
There were no doubt many other people trapped by the quake who didn't have such fortuitous Facebook connections, and many of them probably weren't found in time. Is there a way to deploy some kind of SMS-based 911 infrastructure in situations like this, even on foreign cellular networks? Could we even deploy our own mobile cellular base stations for this purpose, if the local cell network is too badly damaged? Other ideas?
I had the same reaction; I had to take a guess and type out "accessibility" in the address bar just to confirm the number of letters.
But really, can we please stop abbreviating every somewhat long word with numbers? "txtspk" (or whatever clueless news anchors are calling the SMS dialect these days) is bad enough, but if you're writing for the general public (even the slashdotting public), is it really so hard to use your words?
The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.
