Uh, what exactly do you see as being the benefit of a Linux-based PDA? I think most people believe that two of the major benefits of Linux are reliability and security, neither of which are currently big issues in the PDA market. Security is clearly a non-issue, and reliability requirements aren't even marginally as important as they are on server and desktop based applications.
On the other hand, some extremely important issues in PDA design are useability and user interface, two areas where Linux is behind many of its competitors.
Nobody except Slashdotters want to hack on their PDA. Most people want to bring up some names and addresses, jot a few notes, maybe play a game or read a document, read e-mail, browse the web. The PalmOS currently handles all these things pretty gracefully. Slashdotters, as self important as they are, are not a major market share in the PDA world, and won't make even a minor dent into the marketplace. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
The pricing issue is not a very effective barrier to Palm Computing, since they can easily offer a stripped down version that eats into Handspring's share. Even had the Visor been considerably less powerful, I would still have purchased it due to the pricing. I have just enough clutter in my life to justify a palmtop, but not enough to make the difference between 4mb RAM and 8mb significant.
Uh, have you looked at the current going prices recently? I needed to replace my Palm Pilot because the old one crapped out and was outside of warranty (an entirely different issue that I won't go into here...), and I found that it would have cost me more to get a Visor than to get a Palm IIIe. The only thing the Visor had that the IIIe didn't was the silly expansion port. Oh boy, now I can...what? Add a pager? Play MP3s? Nobody has developed any hardware that would seriously make that thing worth it, and I doubt anybody will anytime soon.
In terms of price, the Visor cost the same as the Palm IIIe, but you have to buy the Visor cradle separately! In other words, they're not winning any price battles here. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
As opposed to all those physicsts who are still doing work, unaware of the existence of quantum mechanics? For the record, "quantum physicist" is a silly, psuedo-science fiction sounding term. Nobody in physics calls themselves a "quantum physicist" any more than anybody would call themselves a "classical physicsist." * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Robin Williams was never particularly funny. He had a knack for acting weird and making people think they should be laughing at him. As he got older, he developed a knack for acting cute and making people think they should be laughing at him. He's the Salieri(sp?) of comedy. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
it's pretty easy to distinguish between serious, professional bands (yes, there are quite a few on mp3.com) and half-assed, amateur garage bands (yes, there are many of these on mp3.com).
You miss the point. I don't even like most of the music that is produced by "serious, professional bands". In fact, I like very, very little of what's produced in the music industry, mainstream or otherwise. But, I dig your point about "regular reviewers". There's some validity to that for most people. Just not for me, since nobody has even vaguely similar tastes in music to me. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
And how exactly would this star system work? This implies that there's some absolute standard of musical quality, which is clearly untrue. I wouldn't personally trust anybody random stranger's taste in music enough to even bother to download what they considered worth listening to.
This is the problem with the whole "promote your band with free music on MP3s" is concerned: most of the world happily lets the media industry tell them what's good, and aren't in a hurry to change that. Other, non media sanctioned sounds are therefore, by definiton, not worth listening to. They're not interested in wading through thousands of songs to find something that they might have missed otherwise. The media industry has lots of money, and they use it to their advantage to process signal out of the noise. A free music system has no such signal processing capability. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
t would seem to me that gene sequences are "obvious". And "obvious" things shouldn't recieve patent or will not stand up in the courts.
Uh, you're babbling. In what way is the fact that DNA sequence W at location X turns off gene Y which affects attribute Z "obvious"? * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
You cannot remove the profit motive from scientific research except in periods of war or other danger.
This isn't even remotely true. There are many projects which are financed for profitable gain. But, the vast majority of basic research is done for scientific and societal reasons. It is not true on the funding or on the individual level that it's done for profit motive. On the funding level, the government and universities don't fund particle physics research for profit, clearly. And, on the individual level, physicists get paid bumpkus compared to what they could be making elsewhere. Case in point: I left a software consulting job paying mucho dinero, with plenty of stock options, to come back to grad school. I can assure you profit motive had nothing to do with it.
If this research wasn't being financed by corporate entities, it would still get done, it would just get done much more slowly.
> Now, if the song crapped on the good 'ol U.S. of A., you'd have Trey's head wouldn't you? Er, no. That's really stupid. There are plenty of songs, articles, editorials, books, poems, paintings, comic strips, movies, plays, and performance art productions that "crap on the good 'ol U.S. of A.," and I don't find them offensive in the least. Furthermore, "Blame Canada" isn't crapping on Canada, it's "crapping" on American racisim, xenophobia, and violence. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
IMHO, Blame Canada was one of the weakest songs in the production, but was chosen because it was the least offensive. Uncle Fukkah was by far my favorite, but there was no possible way that anything short of a total lyrics overhaul would make it prime-time friendly. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Datek sucks. I have a big chunk of money there, and they've mishandled a lot of stuff, to the extent that they even, to this day, incorrectly list the price of one of the securities I own, and refuse to fix it, chalking it up to a "glitch" and giving me a cheezy workaround. And even the workaround stopped working when they redid their site. I'd recommend AGAINST Datek.
(And, if you want to know why I keep my money there even if it sucks, it's because I'm too lazy to go through all the paperwork to change it do a different brokerage.)
Turbo Pascal?! I think you could have come up with some better examples than Turbo Pascal...TP bloating was the REASON I learned x86 machine code (back in the day...) * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
You wrote: So was this a case of targetting deeper pockets You also wrote: Methinks the plaintiff took the wrong approach. If you're aware that the plaintiff was trying to make money, in what way do you feel their approach was "wrong"? Was it morally wrong? Was it ethically wrong? Was it legally wrong? Or was it simply explotative?
I think you'd have a hard time arguing that their approach was either legally wrong (it's clearly allowed by law.) And, while it may be argued that the courts are designed to uphold our moral standards, I think the current rash of tort suits similar to this one implies that our society does not disapprove of this type of behavior (talk-radio DJ's excepted.) Finally, there are perhaps ethical questions, but I think you would have a hard time arguing that the courts are supposed to uphold our ethical values.
Methinks the plaintiff took the wrong approach. Suing the imposter for something like wire fraud would seemingly make more sense; or if Prodigy had failed to act by removing the accounts involved upon showing that t'was an imposter, for negligence.
You're missing the point of the lawsuit. The defendant wanted lots and lots of money. The imposter (who is not named in the article, and perhaps is still unknown) doesn't have lots and lots of money. Prodigy does. It would make more sense to sue the person who was responsible if your aim in filing suit was retributive, or even preventative (see my earlier comments in a different story on punitive, preventative, and rehabilatative punishments), but clearly, the plaintiff just thought this would be a good way to make a shitload of money.
In case you hadn't noticed, that's the motivation behind a lot of tort suits, and it's one of the reasons that the court system is overflowing with them.
One school of thought thinks that criminals must be punished as much as required so that they are corrected or something.
Hm, very "insightful." There are, in fact, three different justifications for typical penal systems, as I was just discussing with my girlfriend last night.
Preventative: If I perpetrate this crime, I will be forced to do something unpleasant, so I will not perpetrate this crime.
Rehabilatative: I committed a crime, so now I am in this program that will teach me that my ways were bad, and give me a chance a a new life.
Punitive: You committed a crime, and now you'll pay for it.
The major reason for most of the confusion about our penal system and whether certain types of punishments are justified is that our constitution and our laws do not make it clear which of the above is the aim of our penal system, and, in fact, nobody knows. Some examples:
Proponents of the death penalty generally think of it as preventative. Opponents of the death penalty think that it's primarily punitive. Letting the parents of a slain child watch as the killer is executed strongly argues that it's punitive.
The state of New York charges some absurdly high cost for long distance calls from state prisons, like $1.25 a minute or something. Is it right to exploit inmates like this? That depends. If the punishment is preventative, then sure, it's fine. if it's rehabiltative, then it's not. The widespread use of the word "correctional facility" implies that it's intended to be rehabilitative, but the explotation of prisoners for slave labor implies otherwise.
The idea that "dumbing down" America is the product of nerfarious influences is a myth propagated by the intellocracy to validate their own worth, because they want people to be judged solely on their intelligence (which is a prevailing sentiment around here, I might add.)
The fact that somebody can get wealthy without being brilliant is not, in fact, a bad thing. It's a good thing. At the risk of sounding condescending, it means that people with meager intellectual resources or mental disabilites can still make a living and survive. Natural selection is not an ethical principle. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
New material? Honestly, what new material are you asking for? Do you want physics teachers to teach students about CPT symmetry?
Students in this country aren't learning the basics, which is clearly a more pressing issue. You can't expect a chemistry teacher to care about the fact that there are 118 elements rather than 109 if the students don't understand the difference between an s and a p orbital. I think this is probably the LEAST pressing education issue in this country.
> guess i forgot to mention that i'm trained as a scientist If you're a trained scientist, go and read the journal article. There really isn't any point in having more detail in what's effectively a press release. You either get the 30,000 feet overview, or you go and read the journal.
If, as you say, you only get your news from the web, go to the professor's web site. They'll usually have something there about what they're working on in much greater detail than the article you just read, and will often have journal references to what they've published. The reason that these things are so short are almost never grant/secrecy related. They're because the press media has a very short attention span for technical articles that don't have the words "black hole," "genetically modified," or "Y2K" in them. * mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Slashdot Mirror
All of your claims are factually incorrect. Look at the Visor product details page.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
On the other hand, some extremely important issues in PDA design are useability and user interface, two areas where Linux is behind many of its competitors.
Nobody except Slashdotters want to hack on their PDA. Most people want to bring up some names and addresses, jot a few notes, maybe play a game or read a document, read e-mail, browse the web. The PalmOS currently handles all these things pretty gracefully. Slashdotters, as self important as they are, are not a major market share in the PDA world, and won't make even a minor dent into the marketplace.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Uh, have you looked at the current going prices recently? I needed to replace my Palm Pilot because the old one crapped out and was outside of warranty (an entirely different issue that I won't go into here...), and I found that it would have cost me more to get a Visor than to get a Palm IIIe. The only thing the Visor had that the IIIe didn't was the silly expansion port. Oh boy, now I can...what? Add a pager? Play MP3s? Nobody has developed any hardware that would seriously make that thing worth it, and I doubt anybody will anytime soon.
In terms of price, the Visor cost the same as the Palm IIIe, but you have to buy the Visor cradle separately! In other words, they're not winning any price battles here.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
As opposed to all those physicsts who are still doing work, unaware of the existence of quantum mechanics? For the record, "quantum physicist" is a silly, psuedo-science fiction sounding term. Nobody in physics calls themselves a "quantum physicist" any more than anybody would call themselves a "classical physicsist."
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Robin Williams was never particularly funny. He had a knack for acting weird and making people think they should be laughing at him. As he got older, he developed a knack for acting cute and making people think they should be laughing at him. He's the Salieri(sp?) of comedy.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
You miss the point. I don't even like most of the music that is produced by "serious, professional bands". In fact, I like very, very little of what's produced in the music industry, mainstream or otherwise. But, I dig your point about "regular reviewers". There's some validity to that for most people. Just not for me, since nobody has even vaguely similar tastes in music to me.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
This is the problem with the whole "promote your band with free music on MP3s" is concerned: most of the world happily lets the media industry tell them what's good, and aren't in a hurry to change that. Other, non media sanctioned sounds are therefore, by definiton, not worth listening to. They're not interested in wading through thousands of songs to find something that they might have missed otherwise. The media industry has lots of money, and they use it to their advantage to process signal out of the noise. A free music system has no such signal processing capability.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Uh, you're babbling. In what way is the fact that DNA sequence W at location X turns off gene Y which affects attribute Z "obvious"?
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
This isn't even remotely true. There are many projects which are financed for profitable gain. But, the vast majority of basic research is done for scientific and societal reasons. It is not true on the funding or on the individual level that it's done for profit motive. On the funding level, the government and universities don't fund particle physics research for profit, clearly. And, on the individual level, physicists get paid bumpkus compared to what they could be making elsewhere. Case in point: I left a software consulting job paying mucho dinero, with plenty of stock options, to come back to grad school. I can assure you profit motive had nothing to do with it.
If this research wasn't being financed by corporate entities, it would still get done, it would just get done much more slowly.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
> Now, if the song crapped on the good 'ol U.S. of A., you'd have Trey's head wouldn't you? Er, no. That's really stupid. There are plenty of songs, articles, editorials, books, poems, paintings, comic strips, movies, plays, and performance art productions that "crap on the good 'ol U.S. of A.," and I don't find them offensive in the least. Furthermore, "Blame Canada" isn't crapping on Canada, it's "crapping" on American racisim, xenophobia, and violence.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
IMHO, Blame Canada was one of the weakest songs in the production, but was chosen because it was the least offensive. Uncle Fukkah was by far my favorite, but there was no possible way that anything short of a total lyrics overhaul would make it prime-time friendly.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
(And, if you want to know why I keep my money there even if it sucks, it's because I'm too lazy to go through all the paperwork to change it do a different brokerage.)
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Turbo Pascal?! I think you could have come up with some better examples than Turbo Pascal...TP bloating was the REASON I learned x86 machine code (back in the day...)
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
So was this a case of targetting deeper pockets
You also wrote:
Methinks the plaintiff took the wrong approach.
If you're aware that the plaintiff was trying to make money, in what way do you feel their approach was "wrong"? Was it morally wrong? Was it ethically wrong? Was it legally wrong? Or was it simply explotative?
I think you'd have a hard time arguing that their approach was either legally wrong (it's clearly allowed by law.) And, while it may be argued that the courts are designed to uphold our moral standards, I think the current rash of tort suits similar to this one implies that our society does not disapprove of this type of behavior (talk-radio DJ's excepted.) Finally, there are perhaps ethical questions, but I think you would have a hard time arguing that the courts are supposed to uphold our ethical values.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
You're missing the point of the lawsuit. The defendant wanted lots and lots of money. The imposter (who is not named in the article, and perhaps is still unknown) doesn't have lots and lots of money. Prodigy does. It would make more sense to sue the person who was responsible if your aim in filing suit was retributive, or even preventative (see my earlier comments in a different story on punitive, preventative, and rehabilatative punishments), but clearly, the plaintiff just thought this would be a good way to make a shitload of money.
In case you hadn't noticed, that's the motivation behind a lot of tort suits, and it's one of the reasons that the court system is overflowing with them.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
"I'm tired, tired of being admired, tired of love uninspired...let's face it boys, I'm tired!"
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Hm, very "insightful." There are, in fact,
three different justifications for typical penal systems, as I was just discussing with my girlfriend last night.
Preventative: If I perpetrate this crime, I will be forced to do something unpleasant, so I will not perpetrate this crime.
Rehabilatative: I committed a crime, so now I am in this program that will teach me that my ways were bad, and give me a chance a a new life.
Punitive: You committed a crime, and now you'll pay for it.
The major reason for most of the confusion about our penal system and whether certain types of punishments are justified is that our constitution and our laws do not make it clear which of the above is the aim of our penal system, and, in fact, nobody knows. Some examples:
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
The fact that somebody can get wealthy without being brilliant is not, in fact, a bad thing. It's a good thing. At the risk of sounding condescending, it means that people with meager intellectual resources or mental disabilites can still make a living and survive. Natural selection is not an ethical principle.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
- I don't believe in the Messiah.
- I am right.
- At least half of the people interviewed do believe in the Messiah.
- Therefore, half of the people interviewed are wrong.
- Only stupid people are wrong.
- Therefore, half of the people interviewed are stupid.
Am I missing part of it? Or does it just sound less well thought out when it's actually presented?* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
Students in this country aren't learning the basics, which is clearly a more pressing issue. You can't expect a chemistry teacher to care about the fact that there are 118 elements rather than 109 if the students don't understand the difference between an s and a p orbital. I think this is probably the LEAST pressing education issue in this country.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
If you're a trained scientist, go and read the journal article. There really isn't any point in having more detail in what's effectively a press release. You either get the 30,000 feet overview, or you go and read the journal.
If, as you say, you only get your news from the web, go to the professor's web site. They'll usually have something there about what they're working on in much greater detail than the article you just read, and will often have journal references to what they've published. The reason that these things are so short are almost never grant/secrecy related. They're because the press media has a very short attention span for technical articles that don't have the words "black hole," "genetically modified," or "Y2K" in them.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *