Largely agree with what you're saying, but OTOH there's nothing unusual about this, history-wise. Like, late Brit colonies/early USA was viewed similarly by the "established players" of Britain, France, Spain, etc. -- cheapie stuff, undercut prices/wages, exporting seditious ideas, employing privateers, etc. When nations become "startups" things tend to get messy.

In one sense, China's been a great global citizen: no invasion of USSR/Russia ;-) (How tempting it must be to look north at all that lebensraum, knowing that nothing short of nukes can really stop your army....) Or the One Child program; nasty business for Chinese citizens, but the reduced population is a relief to those outside its borders. By being so insular in the past they've yet to produce a Bhopal. A millenia-spanning source of tensions/war in south Asia, yet also a powerful stablizing force. Etc.

Is it a different world these days? Is there sufficient lack of worldwide resources, arable land, political patience, clean air and water, and general margin-of-error for China to get away with these -- til now -- normal growth pangs? And if so, how to put China's feet to the fire...is the world prepared to boycott its manufacturing WalMart?

A counterfeit this detailed with printed boxes, stickers, and material in the box...

So much for, "Print is dead."

Meh; would have been funny except for the "community college" fail. (Especially since the reality of a wishfully elite church-affiliated libarts school offers much better material ;-)

OTOH, here's a submission linking to BoingBoing and mentioning CD by name, and yet no /.er has elected to remind/espouse/reveal what a turd/sham/poseur Doctorow is (as of 2100EST); I can't recall another example of this. (It's kind of exciting....like the morning in 2002 when the /. front page ran for 4 hours without a single spelling error or obvious grammatical error -- I always knew such a thing was possible, but to actually see it happen, wow.)

Not sure that anyone's mentioned being afraid of TV tracking (after all, the data's been randomized! ;-), but concern/caution seems appropriate. For instance, reality shows and similar LCD programming: first off, your TiVo stats (and have a thousand friends join you) will do little to dent network affections for such genres -- they're cheaper to produce than so-called "scripted" shows, so Survivor is always going to have a leg up in the excutive suites.

Where your viewing data will have an effect, however, is in determining which shows attract viewers that stay on the couch to watch the ads. Slashdot ran another story on TiVo data collection way back in '03; the linked BW article mentions one impact of this more-granular data -- it's possible to separate total viewership (aka old-style Nielson numbers of rating and share) from "advert stickiness", the number of viewers who watch the ads. Way back in '03 this was exemplified by comparing The Practice (lawerly drama, pre-Shatner bogosity) to The Weakest Link (cheesy semi-schadenfreude game show): Practice had an 8.9% TiVo rating, but those viewers watched only 30% of the ads. OTOH, Link had only a 0.9% rating, but its viewers stuck around for 78% of the ads. These stats open up a whole new field for the network quants: how to make a show good enough to draw an above-threshold rating/share, but crappy enough to draw the kinds of folks with nothing better to do than sit through the ads.

Now add in Google's Nov. 2009 deal to buy viewer stats from TiVo for use by Google TV Ads, and set your phasers to Irony....will producers begin formulating AVO (advertisement-viewing optimization) strategies similar to SEO shenanigans on the web?

Why one guy couldn't touch wires inside AND outside my house is anyone's guess.

For the same reason the guy in the body shop doesn't diagnose fuel injectors, and the mechanic doesn't bang out fenders. The tech who comes to your house is geared for tasks like settop changeouts, F-fitting replacements, ground rods, reworking a drop, etc. The line tech is carrying amp parts, tap plates, pole hardware, system maps, etc. and the skills to wield them.

Back when I was running a cable repair dispatch office, our cost on rolling a housecall truck was $N an hour and a tech truck ran close to $N*2.25. Less than 15% of house calls were the result of system problems; do the math.

16GB for $499; 32Gb for $599; 64GB for $699. Add $130 for 3G; carrier will be ATT -- 250MB of data per month for $14.99 or unlimited for $29.99

::sigh:: sign me up, Scotty

I should p'bly mod you down, since you're a bit off-topic -- I'm not aware of a Niven-in-film series/work that needs re-booting. But instead I'll join you in off-topic-land...Ringworld would be a perfect series of texts to adapt to film: Sets would be easy, and Weta would love the character work (just not sure if there'd be an uncanny valley prob with Chmee and Nessus ;-). There's so much published backstory that a screenwriter could go deep into "Known Space" -- showing us the rise and resolution of the Puppeteer's excess heat problem, showing us the Kzin homeworld (with maybe a few vignettes of the Man-Kzin Wars), devoting a few minutes to Phssthpok's heroic voyage to Sol System, etc. Bog, but I'd love to see a Trinoc or Bandersnatch....

The original stories have everything modern films want: hetero-sex (Teela Brown and tons of rishathra), cool boats (Long Shot, Needle, flycycles), battles (esp. in the 3rd Ringworld book), McGuyverisms, and huge "message" potential (nudge-nudge, Mr. Cameron) from the role of ARM in Earth culture, to Flatlanders vs. Belters, to Puppeteers-as-power-elite, to Chmee's journey of learning patience and diplomacy, and the ultimate fun of Niven's alternate Genesis tale of the Pak.

So if any "reboot" is broad enough to attempt restoring science fiction films to former glory, I'm with ya on Ringworld. Or, another great way to go would be either of two sets of work by Herbert -- Destination: Void is tragically undervalued (along with its follow-on works); it's the earliest fiction I know of that tackles construction principles of an AI. Or Herbert's two Jorg McKie books (Whipping Star and mostly The Dosadi Experiment...maybe the Tea Partiers could get excited enough about the Bureau of Sabotage to let the subtle consciousness-raising that Dosadi's solution induces soak in undetected.....

You misread. The relevant paragraph is, "We used a one-dimensional model for this project," says co-author Wladimir Lyra, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysics at the Museum. "Three dimensional models are so computationally expensive that we could only follow the evolution of disks for about 100 orbits -- about 1,000 years. We want to see what happens over the entire multimillion year lifetime of a disk."

Another vote for Sonos. It's the wife-friendliest, kid-friendliest, overnight-visitor-friendliest, drunk-out-of-your-mind-friendliest system out there. Install and setup is a breeze -- truly as easy as the diagram portrays. The mesh network is excellent, or you can run it wired. You can source music from your computer/CD player/iPod, or let Sonos grab internet radio streams or services like last.fm, Sirius, Rhapsody, etc. Use Sonos to feed your own amplifier(s), or buy amplified Sonos nodes.

Slashdot covered 'em when they were new; many favorable comments. They were kick-ass at launch; these days they're miles better. Totally modular, so the system can grow as budget/desire dictates. The secure mesh network is excellent, or you can run 'em wired with CAT5. The new handheld controllers are great, or use an iPhone, iPod touch, or computer. (I've never hooked one up for a linux user, but Wine should do the job just fine.)

Simply to demonstrate that it's rarely as easy as "if they'd just do XYZ their world would be rosy"...

By specifying a hard path for the .xml file, your code assumes that users have left their iTunes Library file in the default location. If the library file has been moved -- say, to an external drive along with content files to make the entire library portable -- your code will produce, at best, access to an old .xml file (and at worst, a completely empty .xml file).

On a Mac, the most-recently used iTunes Music Library.xml file is best located by reading the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iApps.plist file for the "iTunesRecentDatabasePaths" item, and extracting the .xml file's path. (For example, run defaults read com.apple.iApps iTunesRecentDatabasePaths in a shell script.) The equivalent item in a Windows "plist" file would be iTunes Library XML Location in the "iTunes Prefs.xml" file in the user's Application Data folder.

You're asking papers to turn back the clock.... Newspapers have used "3rd party ad servers" for quite some time now; regional or nat'l campaigns where rates, art, copy, etc. are provided by an agency and sold under "co-op" programs that split costs between local outlets and national manufacturers/distributors. All the paper has to do is insert local affiliate info, drop the block into their page layout, and keep paperwork on billing; it's a pretty good system. Why force each paper to deal with each advertiser "from scratch"?

The paper itself can also serve the role of 3rd party ad server -- the outstate edition of a large metro daily is going to print different ads (and news) than the city edition (if I live in BFE, what do I care about the prices/products in Big City? Let the ads be responsive to the market where they're being displayed).

Getting rid of 3rd party ad servers would benefit...who? If I'm in New York reading an e-newspaper that's hosted in California, why should the 'net be forced to make all the hops to serve me CA ads? A sharp 3rd party ad serving outfit is going to have a server close to my location, saving hops; it's also going to serve up ads that relate to my "geographic" -- featuring local/regional outlets, promotions, products, etc. The paper gets to concentrate on what it does best -- serve content -- while the ad server folks take care of what they do best -- speed up load times, geo-coordinate the ads, compile stats, assess usage, etc.

Did I miss the elitist newsletter that told us all we had to say science fiction was crap now?

No, you just didn't see Transformers.