All of these key escrow schemes, I guarantee, will retain the "rights" of the content creators to force you to sit through the previews, warnings, and tedious menus each time you want to watch "your" content regardless of where you play it, every time you play it.
(I'm only posting this because I want it archived with this article.)
This reminds me of the paper "The Camel Has Two Humps," which details the author's theory that some people just aren't cut out for computer programming because they lack the ability to conceptualize in a machine-friendly manner.
This is a problem that is not best served by "dumbing down" computers to be useable by people who have no business programming them, in the same manner as television shows should not be dumbed down to be readily accessible to the visually-impaired.
Why is so little effort being spent making it easy for me to repair my own car with soft, clean, lego-like tools?
If you want to be a plumber, you have to be willing to occasionally shove your arm into a pile of s#it to solve a problem. If you want to program computers, you have to be willing to occasionally shove your brain into a pile of mathematics to solve a problem.
I'll believe computer programming is "ready for the masses" when plumbing is "ready for the masses".
Today's low-bitrate MP3/AAC will be tomorrow's vinyl.
I firmly believe that you prefer what you're accustomed to hearing in the first place. Most kids today have grown up hearing nothing better than highly-compressed FM or low-bitrate MP3 music. They don't know anything better, and given the option of hearing better music, perhaps even uncompressed, with a much larger dynamic range and noise floor, they'll gravitate to what their ears and brain have been trained to appreciate.
Tomorrow's world will have "128Kbps MP3 Afficionado" publications extolling the virtues, "warmth", and "naturalness" of the low-bitrate MP3. And audiophiles will pay top-dollar for crippled hardware and overcompressed, undersampled music tracks.
I've told this story before on slashdot, but once--about 10 years ago--the shuttle flew over Austin, TX on descent to land in FL not long after sunset. We went outside to see the boiling plasma trail it left in the atmosphere, then went back inside to see it touch down 9 MINUTES LATER.
Slackware Linux, pre-1.0 kernel, roughly 1992 (my memory is hazy)... I was using it to run Common LISP much more effectively than the unfortunate ones who were using the class-provided DOS-based version of LISP with horrible memory management limitations.
This let me solve larger problems in a much more friendly development environment (including basic X windows w/ TWM) than they could. It made my university days much more tolerable and productive, right up until I was forced to use OS/2 2.1, which I also fondly remember for no other reason than I could communicate with the actual developers via email and they'd respond about issues I was having writing device drivers.
It is disingenuous to measure the "size" of the new shuffle without including the size of the cord up to and including the "remote control" portion of the headphones. In fact, since the device is nigh unusable without the bundled headphones, you should just probably find the total displacement of the whole shebang before you've found the true size of it all.
I could almost picture one of these Wall-Warts hooked up via USB2 to a DisplayLink adapter and a TV/Monitor, using a nice BlueTooth keyboard (Apple Wireless Keyboard) for a sweet little noiseless media center front-end.
Too bad the CPU is not quite capable of HD content decoding, and DisplayLink does not have Linux support yet.
This patent reads to me to be too "finger"-centric. If the claims didn't specifically limit their utility to contact of a "finger" with the device, it could be improved upon if you could press anything (even a stylus) to cause the "touch." The motion and heuristic would still be triggered just by physical contact or close proximity with the detector, whether the detector was the display itself or some other part of the device.
There's lots of ways to design around this patent. It's not the end of the world. Innovators will innovate.
I actually ask this question in all interviews I conduct. The answer is not important so much as how the candidate justifies the answer. I'm just interested to hear that the candidate has a preference and stands behind it for a valid reason that can be articulated clearly.
The choice of editor, in my book, is an ergonomic decision. Certain people are more productive using emacs, some using vi, some using nedit, and some just using notepad, depending on the task at hand.
Most of the replies so far show a glaring lack of knowledge of what USB3 really is. Honestly, it only bears a passing resemblance to its predecessors, and is a closer relative to PCIe. If you want more technical information, Denali has a good whitepaper (registration required):
Those working in the public trust should familiarize themselves with proper responses to people who would willingly surrender their privacy because they think they've got nothing to hide. I found the following paper quite helpful:
The first thing that came to my mind was this exchange from Alien:
Ripley: Ash, that transmission - Mother's deciphered part of it. It doesn't look like an S.O.S. Ash: What is it, then? Ripley: Well, I, it looks like a warning. I'm gonna go out after them. Ash: What's the point? I mean by the, the time it takes to get there, you'll, they'll know if it's a warning or not, yes?
Since this device just takes existing data from the brain and feeds it back in, it's hard to believe it would be of any help, or we would have evolved the same thing.
This calls to mind an exchange between Dirk Gently and Richard MacDuff in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency":
Richard: "Well there was probably some detail of it I missed, but..."
Dirk: "Oh, without question. But the benefit of questioning somebody under hypnosis is that it allows the questioner to see the scene in much greater detail than the subject was even aware of at the time. The girl Sarah, for instance. Do you recall what she was wearing?"
Richard: "Er, no," said Richard, vaguely, "a dress of some kind, I suppose."
Dirk: "Colour? Fabric?"
Richard: "Well, I can't remember, it was dark. She was sitting several places away from me. I hardly glimpsed her."
Dirk: "She was wearing a dark blue cotton velvet dress gathered to a dropped waist. It had raglan sleeves gathered to the cuffs, a white Peter Pan collar and six small pearl buttons down the front - the third one down had a small thread hanging off it. She had long dark hair pulled back with a red butterfly hairgrip."
Richard: "If you're going to tell me you know all that from looking at a scuff mark on my shoes, like Sherlock Holmes, then I'm afraid I don't believe you."
Dirk: "No, no," said Dirk, "it's much simpler than that. You told me yourself under hypnosis."
Richard: "Not true," he said, "I don't even know what a Peter Pan collar is."
Dirk: "But I do and you described it to me perfectly accurately."
I know that's just fiction, but there's a grain of truth to it. You see a lot more than you choose to pay attention to in the moment. Thank you, Mr. Adams, may you rest in peace.
Then that version could design a yet more improved version, even more quickly, and so on.
I disagree that the AI will have a human-like motivation (drive) to want to improve, since it will most likely be affected differently by the passage of time and typical mortality issues that motivate humans to improve and/or change.
More likely is an AI that knows it is smarter than us, but rests on its laurels because it's a gifted underachiever. Or, one that acts like an autistic savant. If lucky, a high-functioning one.
I forget where I got most of this list, but here is a handy reference to check your own thought processes:
Bandwagon effect: n. The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to Groupthink.
Bias blind spot: n. The tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases.
Choice-supportive bias: n. The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
Confirmation bias: n. The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Congruence bias: n. The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.
Contrast effect: n. The enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
Disconfirmation bias: n. The tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and accept uncritically information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
Endowment effect: n. The tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
Focusing effect: n. Prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
Hyperbolic discounting: n. The tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
Illusion of control: n. The tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
Impact bias: n. The tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
Information bias: n. The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
Loss aversion: n. The tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains.
Neglect of Probability: n. The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
Mere exposure effect: n. The tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
Color psychology: n. The tendency for cultural symbolism of certain colors to affect affective reasoning.
Omission Bias: n. The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
Outcome Bias: n. The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Planning fallacy: n. The tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
Post-purchase rationalization: n. The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was good value.
Pseudocertainty effect: n. The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
Rosy retrospection: n. The tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.
Selective perception: n. The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Status quo bias: n. The tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
Von Restorff effect: n. The tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
Zeigarnik effect: n. The tendency for people to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.
Zero-risk bias: n. Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Ambiguity effect: n. The avoidance of options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown".
Anchoring: n. The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
Anthropic bias: n. The tendency for one's evidence to be biased by observation selection effects.
This previous topic seemed to cover it pretty well. Not only do they assert the right to search, they assert the right to make a copy of your computer's contents as you pass through customs.
I wonder if the right to search your physical belongings is limited in any way, or whether they assert the right to make a photocopy of any printed document that you may have with you. Imaging taking your personal journal or diary along on a trip and having someone insist that they must photocopy it to pass through customs. How are your "papers and effects" a perceived threat to anyone while traveling, and how can one be secure in them anymore?
Slashdot Mirror
All of these key escrow schemes, I guarantee, will retain the "rights" of the content creators to force you to sit through the previews, warnings, and tedious menus each time you want to watch "your" content regardless of where you play it, every time you play it.
(I'm only posting this because I want it archived with this article.)
This reminds me of the paper "The Camel Has Two Humps," which details the author's theory that some people just aren't cut out for computer programming because they lack the ability to conceptualize in a machine-friendly manner.
This is a problem that is not best served by "dumbing down" computers to be useable by people who have no business programming them, in the same manner as television shows should not be dumbed down to be readily accessible to the visually-impaired.
Why is so little effort being spent making it easy for me to repair my own car with soft, clean, lego-like tools?
If you want to be a plumber, you have to be willing to occasionally shove your arm into a pile of s#it to solve a problem.
If you want to program computers, you have to be willing to occasionally shove your brain into a pile of mathematics to solve a problem.
I'll believe computer programming is "ready for the masses" when plumbing is "ready for the masses".
It's all about the tubes, people.
Today's low-bitrate MP3/AAC will be tomorrow's vinyl.
I firmly believe that you prefer what you're accustomed to hearing in the first place. Most kids today have grown up hearing nothing better than highly-compressed FM or low-bitrate MP3 music. They don't know anything better, and given the option of hearing better music, perhaps even uncompressed, with a much larger dynamic range and noise floor, they'll gravitate to what their ears and brain have been trained to appreciate.
Tomorrow's world will have "128Kbps MP3 Afficionado" publications extolling the virtues, "warmth", and "naturalness" of the low-bitrate MP3. And audiophiles will pay top-dollar for crippled hardware and overcompressed, undersampled music tracks.
Please do not destroy vital network apparatus.
I've told this story before on slashdot, but once--about 10 years ago--the shuttle flew over Austin, TX on descent to land in FL not long after sunset. We went outside to see the boiling plasma trail it left in the atmosphere, then went back inside to see it touch down 9 MINUTES LATER.
Fast, indeed.
Slackware Linux, pre-1.0 kernel, roughly 1992 (my memory is hazy)... I was using it to run Common LISP much more effectively than the unfortunate ones who were using the class-provided DOS-based version of LISP with horrible memory management limitations.
This let me solve larger problems in a much more friendly development environment (including basic X windows w/ TWM) than they could. It made my university days much more tolerable and productive, right up until I was forced to use OS/2 2.1, which I also fondly remember for no other reason than I could communicate with the actual developers via email and they'd respond about issues I was having writing device drivers.
Good times.
I'm sure within a few hours of "mowmylawn.com" being up there will be an auto-redirect from "mowdownmybegonias.com"
It is disingenuous to measure the "size" of the new shuffle without including the size of the cord up to and including the "remote control" portion of the headphones. In fact, since the device is nigh unusable without the bundled headphones, you should just probably find the total displacement of the whole shebang before you've found the true size of it all.
I could almost picture one of these Wall-Warts hooked up via USB2 to a DisplayLink adapter and a TV/Monitor, using a nice BlueTooth keyboard (Apple Wireless Keyboard) for a sweet little noiseless media center front-end.
Too bad the CPU is not quite capable of HD content decoding, and DisplayLink does not have Linux support yet.
That's just me dreaming and wishing...
This patent reads to me to be too "finger"-centric. If the claims didn't specifically limit their utility to contact of a "finger" with the device, it could be improved upon if you could press anything (even a stylus) to cause the "touch." The motion and heuristic would still be triggered just by physical contact or close proximity with the detector, whether the detector was the display itself or some other part of the device.
There's lots of ways to design around this patent. It's not the end of the world. Innovators will innovate.
I actually ask this question in all interviews I conduct. The answer is not important so much as how the candidate justifies the answer. I'm just interested to hear that the candidate has a preference and stands behind it for a valid reason that can be articulated clearly.
The choice of editor, in my book, is an ergonomic decision. Certain people are more productive using emacs, some using vi, some using nedit, and some just using notepad, depending on the task at hand.
Most of the replies so far show a glaring lack of knowledge of what USB3 really is. Honestly, it only bears a passing resemblance to its predecessors, and is a closer relative to PCIe. If you want more technical information, Denali has a good whitepaper (registration required):
http://www.denali.com/en/events/usb3_whitepaper/?EB20090105
In case anyone's curious, it was the Netpliance i-Opener:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener
A friend of mine bought two when they went under. He had grand plans to hack them, but life got in the way.
Those working in the public trust should familiarize themselves with proper responses to people who would willingly surrender their privacy because they think they've got nothing to hide. I found the following paper quite helpful:
"I've Got Nothing to Hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, by Daniel Solove.
All I have to say is, "Yeah!" quickly followed by, "Oh, crap!"
They can call it DOS.
At least the BBspot Mailbag is entertaining. No, I'm not providing a link.
(Oh, and idle.slashdot.org should just redirect to a site that's good at it.)
This was previously discussed on Slashdot (I seem to have a deep memory of topics previously discussed) here:
This Place is Not a Place of Honor
I liked the idea of the Most Gross Danger iconography, personally.
The first thing that came to my mind was this exchange from Alien:
Ripley: Ash, that transmission - Mother's deciphered part of it. It doesn't look like an S.O.S.
Ash: What is it, then?
Ripley: Well, I, it looks like a warning. I'm gonna go out after them.
Ash: What's the point? I mean by the, the time it takes to get there, you'll, they'll know if it's a warning or not, yes?
This calls to mind an exchange between Dirk Gently and Richard MacDuff in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency":
I know that's just fiction, but there's a grain of truth to it. You see a lot more than you choose to pay attention to in the moment. Thank you, Mr. Adams, may you rest in peace.
I disagree that the AI will have a human-like motivation (drive) to want to improve, since it will most likely be affected differently by the passage of time and typical mortality issues that motivate humans to improve and/or change.
More likely is an AI that knows it is smarter than us, but rests on its laurels because it's a gifted underachiever. Or, one that acts like an autistic savant. If lucky, a high-functioning one.
I forget where I got most of this list, but here is a handy reference to check your own thought processes:
Bandwagon effect: n. The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to Groupthink.
Bias blind spot: n. The tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases.
Choice-supportive bias: n. The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
Confirmation bias: n. The tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
Congruence bias: n. The tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.
Contrast effect: n. The enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
Disconfirmation bias: n. The tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and accept uncritically information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
Endowment effect: n. The tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
Focusing effect: n. Prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
Hyperbolic discounting: n. The tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
Illusion of control: n. The tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
Impact bias: n. The tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
Information bias: n. The tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
Loss aversion: n. The tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains.
Neglect of Probability: n. The tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
Mere exposure effect: n. The tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
Color psychology: n. The tendency for cultural symbolism of certain colors to affect affective reasoning.
Omission Bias: n. The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
Outcome Bias: n. The tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
Planning fallacy: n. The tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
Post-purchase rationalization: n. The tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was good value.
Pseudocertainty effect: n. The tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
Rosy retrospection: n. The tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.
Selective perception: n. The tendency for expectations to affect perception.
Status quo bias: n. The tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
Von Restorff effect: n. The tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
Zeigarnik effect: n. The tendency for people to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.
Zero-risk bias: n. Preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.
Ambiguity effect: n. The avoidance of options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown".
Anchoring: n. The tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
Anthropic bias: n. The tendency for one's evidence to be biased by observation selection effects.
Attentio
Wow, so YOU'RE the other person who's seen that movie.
I thought the clerk at VideoRama was lying to me.
The percentage of Mac laptops can be overwhelmingly large in certain niches, which reminds me of this photo I saw not too long ago.
This previous topic seemed to cover it pretty well. Not only do they assert the right to search, they assert the right to make a copy of your computer's contents as you pass through customs.
I wonder if the right to search your physical belongings is limited in any way, or whether they assert the right to make a photocopy of any printed document that you may have with you. Imaging taking your personal journal or diary along on a trip and having someone insist that they must photocopy it to pass through customs. How are your "papers and effects" a perceived threat to anyone while traveling, and how can one be secure in them anymore?