I think this is the same analogy the ACLU was using, but I disagree with it somewhat. I think a more prudent analogy would be: What if you were the owner of a wall with a sign on it that said, "Please spray-paint your opinions of [public figure] here." In both cases, teacherreview.com and the graffiti, it is obvious that the proprietor is not responsible for the what other people say, except that he does invite people to say it by using a medium he provides. IMO, that means the guy does have to take some responsibility for the content of his site, but said content is obviously not libelous or slanderous (as I understand it.) IMO, the webmaster has done nothing wrong, though I think the guy who wrote the review is a putz; he hasn't even taken the class!
The funny thing is that the same people who say "we have no idea at all on how human intelligence works" are the same who say "Deep Blue isn't really intelligent, all it's doing is a very fast search on different possible plays". If they really have no idea on what is intelligence, how can they say intelligence is not the ability to do a quick search on different possibilities?
Well, because it's not. Deep Blue is able to beat chess masters because it has enough computing power to permutate all possible moves several generations into the future and pick the best one. Obviously, no chess master's brain can do that. Deep Blue's accomplishments are NOT that significant at all. The mathematics of what it does could have easily been worked out centuries ago - it's simply the first machine capable of actually doing the math. Human chess players have intuition. Because they've played several thousand games during their lifetime, they can see a certain combination of positions on a board and just know what play to begin excercising and what predictions to focus on. They can stare at their opponent to try and see if he's bluffing. They can make instinctual decisions without predicting every move in the future. When a computer can do that, please let me know - I'll be impressed.
Every day you are confronted with thousands of choices. Most of them you make without really thinking, and most have several factors involved. Everything that you've done prior to that moment has a bearing on your current decision. You weigh actions vs. consequences. Priorities vs. Wants, etc., etc., etc. I have yet to see a machine that can make these types of decisions appropriately.
Take the example of something more fast-paced than Chess like Soccer. If you're playing defense, and a forward is running the sideline with the ball, you have very little time to move. There are a million different things you could do, but only one will save the day. The only way you could know which one is to be in that situation right then - and have to make a split second decision. So, no, we don't have AI. I don't predict we will for quite some time.
They say that it excludes some segments of our society that do not have computers or internet access.
This is the type of liberal drivel that really annoys me. To think Internet voting excludes poor people because they don't have computers is ludicrous. IF YOU DON'T HAVE A COMPUTER, GET UP AND GO TO THE POLLING STATION. For God's sake - people with money can afford to be lazy and vote by computer. So what are we gonna do, spend billions of dollars of tax money to give poor people computers so they can be lazy and vote on the Internet, too? Will that be "fair?"
PS: Not attacking you, sreo, just the annoying liberal mindset that accompanies any new innovation in this country.
I have to disagree here. It's not like bombing the security company. It's a lot more like following the patroll cars to determine if the routes they're patrolling are, infact, fair.
But as another poster in this thread mentioned, the two are not the same. Censorware is not a security product. Revealing the lists does not make it any more or less easy to circumvent the software at all, it just lets you find out if it's playing fair.
All I meant was that it has become intuitive, in the same way that, say, English is to English-speakers. But to somebody learning it whose native language is, say, Chinese, it is verging on nonsense. There are virtually no standards. But it's intuitive to you and I.
So intuitive, in fact, that that should read "you and me."
Chinese is a wonderful language; the grammar is amazingly simple and easy to master. There are exactly three pronouns (four if you're reading instead of speaking) and there is no concept of tense at all. I studied it for three years in high school, and although I've forgotten most of the words, I can still remember most of the grammatical rules.
OK, so what does this have to do with designing UI's? The answer is that, IMO, UI's need to be more like Chinese. They need to be simple and have easy, unalterable rules that exist in ALL situations. Apple was very good at this. Microsoft never was. X interfaces are absolutely awful. Apps written in different toolkits, or in raw X all look different, there is no standardization of interface items, control keys, etc. The Apple Human Interface Guidelines (sorry, no URL handy) were revolutionary not only because they described how something should look (only one widget API) but also how it should feel. i.e., you can expect this widget to ALWAYS behave the same way. This is what makes MacOS intuitive, IMO, and what makes learning MacOS apps so easy. (except for Microsoft MacOS apps, since they've tried, and failed miserably, to simply put their abominable UI on the Mac desktop.)
So now that I'm done rambling, I'm not saying we should immitate MacOS - I'm saying that in order to be intuitive, there needs to be standards. The problem, of course, is that users of Open Source projects generally like to have choices. If I want to write a graphical app with Qt instead of gtk, I should be able to. If I want to use a set of nonsensical, inconsistent grammatical constructs like English instead of Chinese, I should be able to. The answer here, IMO, is that Unix OS's are not for the casual user. It was never intended that way, and I think we're kidding ourselves if we think we can make it useable for regular people.
If the USB group wants to play these games, switch to Firewire. It's much faster and supports far more devices on the same wire.
It may be faster, but the current implimentations of Firewire and USB allow 63 and 127 devices, respectively. Not that I'd ever have anywhere near 63 Firewire devices to hook up, though.
I think he was referring to DV devices, which are most certainly NOT dead. All the DV, MiniDV cameras and decks I've worked with support firewire/1394, and it's real fun to plug a camera into a firewire bus and have the video feed show up in Final Cut Pro. For DV, it's the preferred method.
Go to your local city library (not a college/university library, a municipal one) and ask them where they keep the pornography. Look for "hustler" in the periodicals section
I've already done that. My municiple library has pornographic periodicles including Playboy and Penthouse. They don't seem to subscribe to Hustler.
Just because the first amendment says the government can't restrict freedom of speech doesn't mean it has to spend tax dollars to buy porn for the library. Most libraries are pressed for cash as it is, without having to maintain porn collections in the name of free speech.
You're right - the government is not required to spend tax dollars to buy pornography to put in the libraries. This is the same type of argument being used in Holland, Mich. The point you fail to realize is that it does not cost the taxpayers money to provide unfiltered access to the Internet when they're already providing filtered access. Indeed, it costs them less, because they need not subscribe to filtering services or buy software licenses. Further, it has been proven time and time again, by the Censorware Project and others, that filtering software is inneffective, blobking harmless sites and allowing unknown pornographic sites to get through. IMHO, there is no harm in pornography if children are educated about sex in a mature, candid manner. I was, and I look at pornography, and I haven't gone postal or raped anybody yet. The Christian fundies who support this type of censorship have been too repressed by their 'faith' to approach the problem this way, however, so they resort to any means ncessary to pollute the democratic process with their warped sense of 'ethics' and ignorant emotionalism.
Just as the government has no business spending my taxes on purient magazines, it also has no right to spend it on blocking software. The blockers are technically dificult to maintain (see the bit about trying to unblock "the onion") they cost money, and they restrict legitimate research.
Exactly my point. See above. This issue is not about pornography, as the fundies in Michigan would have you believe, it's about government sponsored censorship.
If the library does not wish for people to use their computers to view the KKK resource page or fisting online, it is the prerogative of the library to do so.
No, it is most certainly NOT the library's perogative to do so. The library is an agency of the government, and as such, is subject not to it's own policies that it deems appropriate, but such ideas as freedom of speech and non-censorship. The idea that an agency of the government can do whatever the hell it wants to is the same sort of naive emotionalism that is governing the policies being pushed in Holland, Michigan. Libraries are NOT corporations. Libraries do NOT have the right to decide what they will and will not provide. That is decided by the government, and in a democratic society, therefore, ultimately by the people.
Well, seeing as about 50% of the people who are eligable to vote actually do, and 98% of those have never heard of any parties besides the dumbass-nutball-bible-thumpin republicans and the dumbass-nutball-bleeding-heart democrats, and the remaining 2% don't want to "waste" their vote on minority parties, I think the libertarian and socialist parties got about 17 votes between them.
But that doesn't matter, because in the US, presidents aren't elected by popular vote, anyway.
IMO, Apple acted perfectly responsibly. The Apple logo is a trademark, and if a trademark is not protected, you lose it. That means that Apple has to look around on places like themes.org for violations. Obviously, they don't care if people emulate their UI, since other themes were left intact. I think Apple acted responsibly.
The idea is not to "hurt" the companies. If a significant people put forward a little money to invest, then those people have a say at shareholders meetings. Despite popular beliefs, public corporations are ultimately accountable to their shareholders, not the Big Suits. I think it's a great idea, and would contribute $100 or so, if there was some sort of central organization. Perhaps the EFF could run it?
Not really. The reccomended booting method is via BootX, which loads as an extension during the MacOS boot. Click Linux, and the kernel is loaded from the current Mac partition. You can also boot directly via Open Firmware and skip MacOS altogether, but OF is broken on a lot of Macs and I've never gotten it to work exactly right on my PT Pro.
Ummm, AFAIK the MPAA injunction has nothing to do with shrinkwrap licenses. The claims made in that case were intellectual property ones, mainly that DeCSS is a threat to MPAA members' right to protection of intellectual property.
I don't know anything at all about the DMCA, but if that is the case, it will assuredly be struck down by the Supreme Court. The right to reverse engineer is as important to Capitalism as free speech and thought, IMNSHO. I'm not very worried.
There is such a law. You can not prevent someone from reverse engineering a product by copyright protection in the US. The argument comes down to whether or not what you're doing is reverse engineering. If you take a chip, look at it under a microscope, take it apart, and copy it, that's copying, and that's illegal. The design of the chip is intellectual property and is copyrightable. The function of the chip is not necesarily intelectual property, though. If you hand some engineers a chip in a box, and say, "we get this output from this input" and make another chip that does the same thing, there's no actual copying involved, and that's fair. The internals of the chip may be totally different, or very similar.
IANAL, but my dad is, and that's essentially how he explained it to me. I'd appreciate any corrections/clarifications.
0 to 9? I don't think you quite understand what analog means. The signal recorded on a vinyl record is a representation of the actual sound wave hitting the original microphone's diaphragm, minus electrical distortion and such. As the sylus moves up and down in the grooves of the record, it moves inside a magnetic field, generating a current, which is sent to your amplifier. The amplified current is sent to your speakers, whose magnets move in and out with the current, making sound again. Vinyl recording has nothing to do with numbers at all. Now as for which is better, I don't know. I have a few albums on vinyl that I also have on CD. The CD sounds a lot "cleaner" to me, and the recording and sampling is certainly of a higher quality, but the LP does feel more "natural" even with all the hiss and pop.
I really don't understand why you think linux doesn't have 20,000 "potentially real problems" If you count up every bug in every driver distributed with redhat you would get a huge number. how may linux laptop driver bugs are there?
Nowhere in my post did I assert that Linux does not have a lot of bugs. I didn't talk about Linux at all. In fact, I said that I accept the fact that bugs are inherrent in computer science, just like the spokesperson for Microsoft said. I further said that it surprises me that people are far more tolerant of defects in computer software than they are in any other type of product. You should probably pay attention to posts before you reply to them.
My post had nothing to do with Windows vs. Linux or any other OS, it was merely an observation about the state of the software market.
I usually don't reply to trolls, but I think I'll bite this time. I don't think it's acceptable that software, even something as enourmous as Win2000, has 20,000+ "potentially serious problems." However, I think the main issue here is what we as a society expect from software companies. Sure, I don't think anyone would buy a car with 20,000 known defects, but a lot of people would buy the software. People don't realize that software with bugs is defective! Yes, bugs are inherrant in computer science, as the spokesperson says. However, the complacency of the American consumer over what they're willing to accept in terms of software bugs is absolutely rediculous compared to the amount of regulation exercised over the quality of almost any other type of product in the US.
It's so bad, in fact, that people expect the products they're buying to be defective. I use both Windows and MacOS, and am not at all phased when the box locks up and I have to hit the reset switch. But now that I think about it, shouldn't I be?
This makes me very, very happy. You'll notice that this case is almost identical to the DeCSS case, and a good precedent has been set. Sony wants to control the players not the media, just like DVDCCA wants to control their players not the media itself. Connectix's product will introduce competition into the Playstation console market, and if DVD technology is ever made open, hopefully other people will be able to offer DVD players not made by the DVDCCA collective monopoly.
OK, I'm replying to my own post. For those interested in how the World Court works, I did a little poking around on Yahoo. It's really called the International Court of Justice, and is the principal judicial "organ" of the UN. This pretty much sums it up:
The Court has a dual role: to settle in accordance with international law the legal disputes submitted to it by States, and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by duly authorized international organs and agencies.
Seems to me that it's pretty similar to the US Supreme Court in a lot of respects. Since the ICJ is really a part of the UN, it also seems to me that they wouldn't exercise too much control over the US as far as enforcement goes; if the US is ruled against it would mean the only way they would have to pay is willingly, as it would be nearly impossible to start sanctions or military actions against the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is the same analogy the ACLU was using, but I disagree with it somewhat. I think a more prudent analogy would be: What if you were the owner of a wall with a sign on it that said, "Please spray-paint your opinions of [public figure] here." In both cases, teacherreview.com and the graffiti, it is obvious that the proprietor is not responsible for the what other people say, except that he does invite people to say it by using a medium he provides. IMO, that means the guy does have to take some responsibility for the content of his site, but said content is obviously not libelous or slanderous (as I understand it.) IMO, the webmaster has done nothing wrong, though I think the guy who wrote the review is a putz; he hasn't even taken the class!
IBM is working on their new PowerPC Open Platform boards, which are very cool. Capability for an arbitrary number of CPUs and runs on a PCI bus.
here is the Big BG pullin a GPF in front of a live audience. It's got drama, comedy, conflict, and, errrr...well it's just funny.
Well, because it's not. Deep Blue is able to beat chess masters because it has enough computing power to permutate all possible moves several generations into the future and pick the best one. Obviously, no chess master's brain can do that. Deep Blue's accomplishments are NOT that significant at all. The mathematics of what it does could have easily been worked out centuries ago - it's simply the first machine capable of actually doing the math. Human chess players have intuition. Because they've played several thousand games during their lifetime, they can see a certain combination of positions on a board and just know what play to begin excercising and what predictions to focus on. They can stare at their opponent to try and see if he's bluffing. They can make instinctual decisions without predicting every move in the future. When a computer can do that, please let me know - I'll be impressed.
Every day you are confronted with thousands of choices. Most of them you make without really thinking, and most have several factors involved. Everything that you've done prior to that moment has a bearing on your current decision. You weigh actions vs. consequences. Priorities vs. Wants, etc., etc., etc. I have yet to see a machine that can make these types of decisions appropriately.
Take the example of something more fast-paced than Chess like Soccer. If you're playing defense, and a forward is running the sideline with the ball, you have very little time to move. There are a million different things you could do, but only one will save the day. The only way you could know which one is to be in that situation right then - and have to make a split second decision. So, no, we don't have AI. I don't predict we will for quite some time.
This is the type of liberal drivel that really annoys me. To think Internet voting excludes poor people because they don't have computers is ludicrous. IF YOU DON'T HAVE A COMPUTER, GET UP AND GO TO THE POLLING STATION. For God's sake - people with money can afford to be lazy and vote by computer. So what are we gonna do, spend billions of dollars of tax money to give poor people computers so they can be lazy and vote on the Internet, too? Will that be "fair?"
PS: Not attacking you, sreo, just the annoying liberal mindset that accompanies any new innovation in this country.
But as another poster in this thread mentioned, the two are not the same. Censorware is not a security product. Revealing the lists does not make it any more or less easy to circumvent the software at all, it just lets you find out if it's playing fair.
So intuitive, in fact, that that should read "you and me ."
Chinese is a wonderful language; the grammar is amazingly simple and easy to master. There are exactly three pronouns (four if you're reading instead of speaking) and there is no concept of tense at all. I studied it for three years in high school, and although I've forgotten most of the words, I can still remember most of the grammatical rules.
OK, so what does this have to do with designing UI's? The answer is that, IMO, UI's need to be more like Chinese. They need to be simple and have easy, unalterable rules that exist in ALL situations. Apple was very good at this. Microsoft never was. X interfaces are absolutely awful. Apps written in different toolkits, or in raw X all look different, there is no standardization of interface items, control keys, etc. The Apple Human Interface Guidelines (sorry, no URL handy) were revolutionary not only because they described how something should look (only one widget API) but also how it should feel. i.e., you can expect this widget to ALWAYS behave the same way. This is what makes MacOS intuitive, IMO, and what makes learning MacOS apps so easy. (except for Microsoft MacOS apps, since they've tried, and failed miserably, to simply put their abominable UI on the Mac desktop.)
So now that I'm done rambling, I'm not saying we should immitate MacOS - I'm saying that in order to be intuitive, there needs to be standards. The problem, of course, is that users of Open Source projects generally like to have choices. If I want to write a graphical app with Qt instead of gtk, I should be able to. If I want to use a set of nonsensical, inconsistent grammatical constructs like English instead of Chinese, I should be able to. The answer here, IMO, is that Unix OS's are not for the casual user. It was never intended that way, and I think we're kidding ourselves if we think we can make it useable for regular people.
Just my $0.04.
It may be faster, but the current implimentations of Firewire and USB allow 63 and 127 devices, respectively. Not that I'd ever have anywhere near 63 Firewire devices to hook up, though.
I think he was referring to DV devices, which are most certainly NOT dead. All the DV, MiniDV cameras and decks I've worked with support firewire/1394, and it's real fun to plug a camera into a firewire bus and have the video feed show up in Final Cut Pro. For DV, it's the preferred method.
I've already done that. My municiple library has pornographic periodicles including Playboy and Penthouse. They don't seem to subscribe to Hustler.
Just because the first amendment says the government can't restrict freedom of speech doesn't mean it has to spend tax dollars to buy porn for the library. Most libraries are pressed for cash as it is, without having to maintain porn collections in the name of free speech.
You're right - the government is not required to spend tax dollars to buy pornography to put in the libraries. This is the same type of argument being used in Holland, Mich. The point you fail to realize is that it does not cost the taxpayers money to provide unfiltered access to the Internet when they're already providing filtered access. Indeed, it costs them less, because they need not subscribe to filtering services or buy software licenses. Further, it has been proven time and time again, by the Censorware Project and others, that filtering software is inneffective, blobking harmless sites and allowing unknown pornographic sites to get through. IMHO, there is no harm in pornography if children are educated about sex in a mature, candid manner. I was, and I look at pornography, and I haven't gone postal or raped anybody yet. The Christian fundies who support this type of censorship have been too repressed by their 'faith' to approach the problem this way, however, so they resort to any means ncessary to pollute the democratic process with their warped sense of 'ethics' and ignorant emotionalism.
Just as the government has no business spending my taxes on purient magazines, it also has no right to spend it on blocking software. The blockers are technically dificult to maintain (see the bit about trying to unblock "the onion") they cost money, and they restrict legitimate research.
Exactly my point. See above. This issue is not about pornography, as the fundies in Michigan would have you believe, it's about government sponsored censorship.
No, it is most certainly NOT the library's perogative to do so. The library is an agency of the government, and as such, is subject not to it's own policies that it deems appropriate, but such ideas as freedom of speech and non-censorship. The idea that an agency of the government can do whatever the hell it wants to is the same sort of naive emotionalism that is governing the policies being pushed in Holland, Michigan. Libraries are NOT corporations. Libraries do NOT have the right to decide what they will and will not provide. That is decided by the government, and in a democratic society, therefore, ultimately by the people.
But that doesn't matter, because in the US, presidents aren't elected by popular vote, anyway.
Nah, the Chinese had that figured out long before Gutenberg, along with gunpowder and other nifty stuff.
Dude, relax. I think it's supposed to be a little funny. Lighten up.
IMO, Apple acted perfectly responsibly. The Apple logo is a trademark, and if a trademark is not protected, you lose it. That means that Apple has to look around on places like themes.org for violations. Obviously, they don't care if people emulate their UI, since other themes were left intact. I think Apple acted responsibly.
The idea is not to "hurt" the companies. If a significant people put forward a little money to invest, then those people have a say at shareholders meetings. Despite popular beliefs, public corporations are ultimately accountable to their shareholders, not the Big Suits. I think it's a great idea, and would contribute $100 or so, if there was some sort of central organization. Perhaps the EFF could run it?
Not really. The reccomended booting method is via BootX, which loads as an extension during the MacOS boot. Click Linux, and the kernel is loaded from the current Mac partition. You can also boot directly via Open Firmware and skip MacOS altogether, but OF is broken on a lot of Macs and I've never gotten it to work exactly right on my PT Pro.
Ummm, AFAIK the MPAA injunction has nothing to do with shrinkwrap licenses. The claims made in that case were intellectual property ones, mainly that DeCSS is a threat to MPAA members' right to protection of intellectual property.
I don't know anything at all about the DMCA, but if that is the case, it will assuredly be struck down by the Supreme Court. The right to reverse engineer is as important to Capitalism as free speech and thought, IMNSHO. I'm not very worried.
IANAL, but my dad is, and that's essentially how he explained it to me. I'd appreciate any corrections/clarifications.
0 to 9? I don't think you quite understand what analog means. The signal recorded on a vinyl record is a representation of the actual sound wave hitting the original microphone's diaphragm, minus electrical distortion and such. As the sylus moves up and down in the grooves of the record, it moves inside a magnetic field, generating a current, which is sent to your amplifier. The amplified current is sent to your speakers, whose magnets move in and out with the current, making sound again. Vinyl recording has nothing to do with numbers at all. Now as for which is better, I don't know. I have a few albums on vinyl that I also have on CD. The CD sounds a lot "cleaner" to me, and the recording and sampling is certainly of a higher quality, but the LP does feel more "natural" even with all the hiss and pop.
Nowhere in my post did I assert that Linux does not have a lot of bugs. I didn't talk about Linux at all. In fact, I said that I accept the fact that bugs are inherrent in computer science, just like the spokesperson for Microsoft said. I further said that it surprises me that people are far more tolerant of defects in computer software than they are in any other type of product. You should probably pay attention to posts before you reply to them.
My post had nothing to do with Windows vs. Linux or any other OS, it was merely an observation about the state of the software market.
talk about being a troll.
Perhaps you should apply that to yourself.
It's so bad, in fact, that people expect the products they're buying to be defective. I use both Windows and MacOS, and am not at all phased when the box locks up and I have to hit the reset switch. But now that I think about it, shouldn't I be?
This makes me very, very happy. You'll notice that this case is almost identical to the DeCSS case, and a good precedent has been set. Sony wants to control the players not the media, just like DVDCCA wants to control their players not the media itself. Connectix's product will introduce competition into the Playstation console market, and if DVD technology is ever made open, hopefully other people will be able to offer DVD players not made by the DVDCCA collective monopoly.
The Court has a dual role: to settle in accordance with international law the legal disputes submitted to it by States, and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by duly authorized international organs and agencies.
Seems to me that it's pretty similar to the US Supreme Court in a lot of respects. Since the ICJ is really a part of the UN, it also seems to me that they wouldn't exercise too much control over the US as far as enforcement goes; if the US is ruled against it would mean the only way they would have to pay is willingly, as it would be nearly impossible to start sanctions or military actions against the US.
For a basic summery, see their Court at a Glance document.