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Comment Not due to piracy? (Score 1) 311

It's a mistake to assume that the $8 billion drop in music sales is entirely due to piracy. DVDs appeared in 1998 and by 2004 DVD sales were $14 billion. VHS sales were never that high so much of that money must have been coming out of other entertainment spending. I think a lot of people stopped buy so many CDs when they started buying DVDs.

Comment Re:Mod summary up! (Score 1) 482

Well, for starters, Apple would have to license using a magnet on their connector from a company that makes kitchen wares. Every other product you'd buy would be the result of lots of seemingly unrelated patents getting licensed.

Broad patents are bad, mmkay. That's why 'on a computer' is patentable. If you think software shouldn't be patented, fine, I don't give a shit, but you should be happy 'on a computer' is enough to be considered non-infringing or you'd really see a grinding halt to innovation.

I don't have any particular problem with requiring narrow patents, but I don't think it makes much difference in this situation as it simply means that the kitchen wares company should/would apply for many magnetic power connector patents on every type of device they can think of.

Comment Re:Gambling... (Score 1) 168

... the professional poker players who, when pitted against a random bunch of other poker players, tend to win far more often than a random selection would dictate. ... But this is only against such a random selection of other poker players and only when they're human. Pitted against a computer, their results suddenly fall well within a bell curve of chance.

You clearly don't know what you are talking about or you wouldn't make such blatantly false statement.

Comment Re:Queue the libertarians.. (Score 2) 225

I guess it's hearsay to you and I since we're getting our info from the media rather than the complainant. The FBI, OTOH, have no doubt spoken to the complainant directly so it is not hearsay to them. It may still be a false complaint, of course. Or there may be a record of the threat if it was made by email or a phone call that was recorded.

Comment Re:New Zealand pays Warner Bros (Score 1) 123

You could say that New Zealand bribes Warner to get the Hobbits. From TFA: "Mr Key also announced The Hobbit will get a $20million ($15m US) tax rebate - US$7.5m per film" and "The Government will also offset U$10m of Warner Brothers' marketing costs."

The tax rebates don't cost the government anything: that's money they would have lost anyway if the movie was filmed somewhere else. So US$10M to keep hundreds of millions in foreign money in the country. That's not a bribe, that's just common sense.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 437

You are right about the difference the two possibilities makes to the numbers. But you have misstated the two interpretations:

E-books have 6% the sales that printed books have.
E-books make up 6% of book sales.

The headline can't be interpreted as the second of these because the headline says "of printed book sales". Ebooks are not printed, therefore ebooks cannot possibly make up any amount of printed book sales. Only the first interpretation is valid.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 437

If I say "bike sales are 6% of cars sales" does that also confuse you? The headline does not say that ebooks make up 6% of total sales, it says that ebook sales are 0.06 times printed book sales. If printed books sale are x then ebook sales are 0.06x.

Comment Re:Odd definition of "dead last." (Score 1) 358

Well they were comparing modern browsers and I don't know any one who considers IE8 in that category....

Just what do you consider modern? IE 8 was released in March of last year. It's actually the newest piece of software from Microsoft on my PC.

Personaly I think it was there just to show how much the IE team has really improved performance, to be homiest I am impressed.

Well I'm not. Why should I be impressed when a company the size of Microsoft takes 9 versions and 15 years to achieve acceptable performance? If they were on a par with Chrome I'd be impressed but it's not, it's slower than every other competitor except the Firefox 4.0 beta.

Comment Re:Interesting premise, but flawed arguments (Score 1) 118

So you'd limit "cyborg" to only those systems that include a direct machine-nerve interface? Seems pretty restrictive. You'd even exclude neuromancer-like mirrorshades, since they're essentially surgically implanted night vision goggles. You'd exclude most of the existing powered prostheses, which are controlled by shoulder or stump motion. No myoelectric limbs have a direct neural interface, but use EMG (if they use any biopotential signal at all), which is a neural signal amplified by residual muscle.

I wouldn't want to be that restrictive. By "directly controlled by the nervous system" I was trying to make the distinction between something operated by conventional means such as manual controls and something operated more directly but I don't think it should require a direct neural interface necessarily. So prostheses operated by stump motion would be included.

Comment Re:Interesting premise, but flawed arguments (Score 1, Insightful) 118

There's no argument that if we were to have all technology/tools removed and even lose our ability to create primitive tools the human carrying capacity of the earth would be at most a few million, maybe only a few hundred thousand. So I guess you could say that 99.99% of us are "cyborgs".

If you make the definition of "cyborg" so broad as to include any basic tool use (as Kevin Kelly does) then the term loses it's usefulness, IMHO. It's actually pretty hard to define the word. I'd want to include active prosthetics such as myoelectric limbs and cochlear implants but not artificial limbs that aren't directly controlled by the nervous system or sensors that merely modify, filter or enhance stimulus for an existing sense organ (I don't think wearing night-vision goggles makes you a cyborg). I think the term is most useful to describe people who have been enhanced beyond the human norm, not merely those using technology to replace functions they individually don't have.

Comment Re:i never know what that means... (Score 1) 231

You changed the argument. If they said "one eighth the size of an iPhone pixel" it would be no clearer whether they are talking about area or width.

My point is that statements like "eight times smaller" are ambiguous, It doesn't really matter whether it's the "eight times" or the "smaller" that causes the issue. In both cases it's simply sloppiness - there is no reason why the author couldn't be precise ("pixels 10 microns across rather than the 78 micron wide pixels in the iPhone 4"). Using terms like "eight times smaller" just causes unnecessary confusion.

Comment Re:i never know what that means... (Score 1) 231

Wow, I never thought of that phrase as ambiguous in the least. "8 times smaller/slower" always means divide by 8 and "8 times larger/faster" always means multiply by 8. I wouldn't use it in a scientific paper, but it should be okay in informal usage.

Always? "8 times faster than walking pace" is pretty obvious, sure. What about "8 times faster than a blink of an eye"?

In this case "8 times small than a iPhone pixel" are they talking about area or width?

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