Even in that case, where (if?) the person was making a deliberate attempt to undermine the company using false information, I still see no reason why Yahoo, AOL, or any other middle-man company should be at all obligated to get involved.
I used to work at Kinko's, which sends out faxes for people as a service. One time the cops showed up and asked for some information about someone who had sent a fax from the store. The sending of the fax was somehow criminal in nature (I believe it was an attempt to defraud someone). We were obligated to give it to them.
AOL has the obligation to turn over the information in the event that someone uses their service to commit illegal acts. Libel is a well-established and well-tested aspect of law, so if the company actually has a libel case (see above for the two-part criteria for libel), they probably will have to give over the information.
The similar case with Verizon being supoenaed for information about a user that was serving MP3s is somewhat different. Violations of copyright law with regard to digital media are not anywhere near as well-tested. The company bringing suit can't even prove that anything illegal happened... it is possible (however unlikely) that all of the people who downloaded the songs actually had a legal right to (because they owned the CD). Verizon's role as a service provider is similarly not well-defined.
The other option, in the case of libel, is to hold AOL directly responsible. That's what would happen if a newspaper printed libelous information. But given that they don't have any feasible way to screen what their users post on the internet, that's not a practical task.
The one-time pad is impossible to break, but possible to brute-force. The big difference between the one-time pad and other systems is that the key is never reused, so that even if you manage to crack that key, the system keeps its integrity, since that key is never used for another message.
Now, just because it's "possible" doesn't mean it's feasible... but I don't exactly call 10,000 computers x 549 days feasible for one message, either. Depending on how the one-time pad is implemented, it may be more or less feasible to crack a single message than this key was, but it's not impossible.
I know this is a bit off-topic, but...how many of you actually need a computer that's faster than the top of the line out there now?
Well, let's just say you decide to buy a new computer. And the sales guy starts telling you that you could get this one for $1300, but this over here is much "faster" and it's only $1600. (Yeah, I know, I build my own too. But this article is written to be accessible to those who may not be quite so handy.) Knowing what those numbers mean is very important in making that decision. It will help people realize that they don't need that speed, just as you mention.
What you're all forgetting is, this is only an issue if you have remote management enabled, and it's not enabled by default...
(Seriously, does anyone read a thread before they post anymore?)
I'm glad they posted this. Eventually I'll go over to my mom's house and upgrade her firmware. I can't really see her crashing her own router... well, not on purpose, anyway. She might by accident trying to go to Yahoo! (which is what she calls whatever browser she happens to be using, unless it's AOL. No, not net savvy.)
My first job was at a used record store. I didn't even have a CD player when I started working there (yeah, it was 1990, but we weren't a cutting edge family) and yet, within months of getting one, I had at least 100 CD's.
Why? Because I got them at cost... used cost. $3-5 for good stuff, and cheaper for the offbeat things. Consequently, I have a whole bunch of various artists promo CDs with weird stuff like "Your Racist Friend" by They Might Be Giants remixed by Dee-Lite.
After I went to college and wasn't working there anymore, it was months before I bought another CD. That was partly because I had trouble going into a CD store without attempting to alphabetize the stock... but also because I gagged at $8.99 for a used CD.
I probably buy one or two CDs a year. I don't download much music, either; it's more trouble than I want to go to. Last time I went looking for a song and downloaded it, it was one from a CD that I legitimately own, but I can't find.
The RIAA seems to have forgotten about the law of supply and demand. If people aren't buying it, make it cheaper. Otherwise, they will find substitutes or they will do without. They're trying to increase demand by removing substitutes, but it's not an essential good... so they'll ultimately be unsuccessful. All they can succeed in doing is making using CDs so difficult that not even people who think they're worth $20 each will be willing to buy them.
There were many things leading to the downfall of OS/2, not the least of which was terrible marketing on the part of IBM, the lack of any "Killer App" for the platform, and the lack of significant bundling deals with OEM's which meant that OS/2 had to be installed by the user (a task then, as now, beyond the interest of the majority of computer users).
You do realize, of course, that:
- IBM entered into a joint marketing agreement with MS, which MS then welched on. That's half the marketing problem right there.
- While under co-development contract with IBM, MS was urging developers to build for Windows instead of OS/2... because they had "inside information" that it was going to do better (thanks to internal sabotage... yeah).
- Most of the major PC manufacturers (IBM the obvious exception) were at the time finding out, like the software developers, that Windows was the next big thing down the pipe. They got special deals to bundle Windows onto their MS-DOS machines... and they were already locked into per processor agreements on MS-DOS (not that anyone wanted to get rid of it, considering that they knew that Windows wouldn't run right under other versions of DOS, thanks to some planted error messages). Who was there to bundle with?
Yes, you're right about many of the things that caused OS/2 to fail... thing is, Microsoft was in a unique position to make those things happen (or fail to happen as the case may be), and they took full advantage of it.
I'm not an Everquest player, but this seems quite unusual. I'm assuming both that the limitation you're talking about is imposed by video memory and that you do not have 512 MB of video memory.
Perhaps you aren't using AGP texturing for one reason or another?
Everquest requires 512 MB system memory to run with all bells and whistles. 256 MB is the minimum requirement. (This applies to the Shadows of Luclin expansion and models; without those, 256 is fine.) Are there people who have 512 MB video memory? I wouldn't want to see the price on that card.
The name of the planet that Tolkien's LotR world is set on is Arda. It's not Terra (our Earth). The complete history of his world is laid down in the Silmarillion, which covers from the beginning of time, up until something like 1,000 years before the events in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. So, it's fairly clearly established that this is a different world, with a different history.
Now, I didn't really know all that until I started asking my husband (Dirtside;-) about it, to make this response. But I never did make the assumption that it was supposed to be "our" world. Had you been told that before you saw the movie, or after? How did that information "ruin" it for you?
King_TJ (in what fantasy world are you a king, I wonder? And by what credible method?) the basic problem is that you don't understand what suspension of disbelief *is*.
A good story must be consistent with its own world. The bulk of fiction uses our own world; sometimes a different time period, sometimes the present day. I found I enjoyed Deep Impact far more than Armageddon for precisely the reasons you discuss... it simply exercised my suspension of disbelief gland less. But, these were both very near-future stories based off of our current world, so I saw them in that context.
Aside from the fact that Lord of the Rings is not, at any time, set in a particular time period in our history ("Middle Earth" is not Earth, and "The Third Age" doesn't correspond to any period I know of), it belongs to a genre that explicitly does NOT root itself in our world. Therefore, suspension of disbelief is based on the internal consistency of the world, not on whether or not it matches the fossil record. Tolkien was one of the great masters at creating an internally consistent world; Middle Earth's history was completely known to him, he developed the languages of the major (non-human) races, and a dozen other details are apparent in his work that make it a paragon of fantasy literature. LotR is considered a classic fantasy novel (establishing many staples of the genre) specifically because of this amazing internal consistency. As the story unfolds, there isn't anything that reminds you that this world was made up... except for your own hyper-awareness of the world around you.
I, myself, enjoy fantasy much less than science fiction precisely for the same reasons as you... it can't happen. I don't much enjoy science fiction that's poorly executed, either... nor do I enjoy regular fiction books or movies with plot holes and continuity errors. But even a very well-done fantasy piece fails to satisfy me as much as those that *can* happen, because I am also (as you are) a realist.
This isn't the fault of the genre, however. I don't like westerns, either, and that doesn't mean there's something wrong with them. Nor is there something wrong with me; I recognize that I have different tastes from a great many of my friends and *that's fine*. I don't have to find fault with the genre of fantasy literature to justify it.
Interesting and valid points, all... though you didn't actually comment on why these things have created the superstar effect in pop music and not in classical music. I think it's for two reasons, mainly...
For one thing, classical music is heavily dependent on multiple artists, often a very large number. There are famous soloists, but by and large classical music is produced by an orchestra of a great many people. That makes "star quality" harder to develop.
But most importantly, classical music is an art which still loses a lot in translation to a recorded medium. An orchestra, unlike a four-person rock band, can envelop you with sound... provided you're right in front of them. Classical music has a multilayered quality that benefits hugely from live performance.
Regardless of what colors the human eye can distinguish *between*, the main issue in color is the gamut. Monitors have a much larger color gamut than four-color printing (of any kind), and we can easily see the difference. Try making neon green on your inkjet printer sometime. Or even a bright blue... half the time it will come out looking navy even though it's electric on the screen.
We face a similar issue with resolution. It's not whether we can see the individual dots, but what things look like in the aggregate because of the number of dots. Yes, there is a vanishing point, or at least an issue of diminishing returns, but we can continue to see improvements in overall quality when we can't actually focus on individual pixels anymore.
There's no way to answer the question you asked. But, maybe you should be asking a different question: Am I getting what I'm paying for?
There's no way to tell from the outside how much bandwidth the provider has sold, and they're not going to tell you. All you can do is, use any of the lovely tools touted by the great geeks of/. earlier in the thread, and see if you're satisfied with the results.
Probably best way to do it is, find a few sites that you can get high throughput to (>1 Mbps) on off-peak times. Monitor those connections at peak and off-peak times for a week or so. If there's a big difference for *all* the sites, chances are your ISP is not giving you a big enough slice of the pie. If it drops for some and not others, you're looking at other parts of the internet getting bogged down. Even this is far from a perfect test, but it can rule out ISP bottleneck.
It would be very difficult to assign patents to [i]an[/i] individual. What happens if more than one person works together on developing something? Who gets to hold the patent? How does the company who created the "work for hire" decide whose name the patent goes into... the person who did most of the work, or the guy who owns most of the stock?
I agree that something needs to be done about all our IP law (patents, trademarks, and copyright, oh my!) but assigning an individual the patent rights won't necessarily do it. I do agree with the idea of non-transferability; I think that should be the case for any protected IP. It's one thing to protect an entity's right to make money off of their work, but if it's not them anymore, just doesn't make much sense.
I remember years ago, when you bought a PC, it would have a shiny sticker over the seam in the case, saying "If you break this seal, your warranty is void." Packard Bell used to sodder their parts together, even.
Nowadays, Dell advertises how easy their cases are to open up and install things into (and it's true). Pretty much any computer you can buy has *some* upgrade capability, and it doesn't void your warranty.
Now that the hardware companies realize that letting people see what's inside, and even mess around with it, doesn't hurt their product (and can actually help it), maybe software companies will make the same leap. Just because someone gets the source code with the binaries doesn't mean that they have no reason to go back to you, ever again. It just makes the product more versatile when they get it. (Heck, what percentage of the population can even *do* anything with the source?)
"The right tool" for the job of compressing audio files for playback, in my opinion, is the one with the best combination of compression (smaller file size), sound quality, and price.
Ogg yields smaller, better-quality files than mp3, and is free. The only thing MP3 has going for it is that people are used to using it. If you have a client who can better accomplish what they want to on their web site using PHP, but they INSIST on using ASP because that's what they're used to, well, fine then... but it's their own foot they're shooting, and has nothing to do with what's the best tool.
So, security through honesty? We just *shouldn't* spy on the government, so it doesn't matter whether they have protections against spying?
It is an interesting question, and does go well with the discussion a few days ago about governments requiring themselves to use open source software. The government has a responsibility (several, in fact) to us... shouldn't we be able to find out if they're keeping it? Or is it just going to be "Oooo, mustn't touch!" for us (while random-joe-terrorist is finding out the secret identities of the CIA guys monitoring their terrorist cell)?
Not that I think these guys did the "right thing," but I do think that maybe the government should be under public scrutiny.
Except that, theoretically, all those people would be finding the vulnerabilities and then they would be *fixed*... leaving you with a much harder job to break in.
You can read text faster if you're a full-word reader, but you can learn to read new words faster by phonetics. At least this is what my elementary-school teacher friends tell me.
...and my father was a polyglot who would never have dreamed of using a crappy RS five-language translator. But there are probably people who aren't you and are deaf, who might find this useful.
Those of us without a ton of money can't really decide what other people research. Acting like they're wasting *your* time doesn't really help get your point across. I'm glad you feel like you have better options than something like this, but not everyone will, and it will have some (limited) usefulness for some folks. It's not an answer, but it's not totally useless.
Open source isn't so much about who *is* looking at it, but who *can*. It's the old "Put on clean underwear in case you get in an accident!" scenario. MS knows that if anyone sees their code who doesn't work for them, they can probably get them put in jail before the person can do much of anything with the information. But OSS developers *know* that their code is out there for anyone to look at. They'll be embarrassed (or the professional equivalent thereof) if people find issues with it. Therefore, they'll be more concientious* about it.
*Can hardly believe I spelled this right on the first try. Go me!
Where this will come in handy...
on
Speech For The Deaf
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Everyone's going on about all the times this won't be useful... but think about when it will be.
- Asking for directions on a streetcorner - Finding out bus fare - Ordering dinner in a restaurant - Picking up the phone when no one else is around
And so on. There are a ton of mundane things that will be very hard for a deaf person to do without the assistance of a hearing person, but might be pretty important. A device like this might make it much, much easier and safer for a deaf person to travel alone... like I did, traveling around Europe with my crappy little Radio Shack five-language translator. Yeah, I couldn't have deep philosophical conversations in French, German or Italian (Spanish I do ok in on my own), but I could get food and a hotel room.
Depends on how you read. If you read phonetically, then yeah, works just fine. If you read by word-shape recognition, it slows you down. The two methods have pretty much alternated every few years in elementary schools, so it's probably close to evenly split in terms of the adult population.
I think these days, they (the guy in the basement with all the phones, I guess) think that phonetics (Hooked on Phonics!) is an easier, faster way to learn to read, though word-shape-recognition yields a faster reader, and usually better spellers too.
I read by word shape recognition. Massive misspellings annoy the crap out of me.
Patching problems doesn't indicate laziness or incompetence, it indicates the acknowledgement of the problem and a willingness to fix it.
So what does not patching a problem indicate? What does not patching a problem for over two years indicate? What does leaving half of your open bugs unpatched in a big "bug fix" patch indicate?
This, along with the SMS thread from yesterday, raises an interesting point. What fax, email, and SMS spam have in common is that the reception is automated. If I get a telemarketing call, I can hang up before they've had a chance to deliver their message. But, by the time I see a fax or an email or a text message so I can make that decision, they've already sent the whole thing to me. The same problem comes up with recordings left on answering machines, it seems... I hadn't encountered that yet. (BTW, many digital answering machines allow you to set a limit on the length of the message recorded, so you can cut them off at 30 seconds.)
Freedom of speech is a guarantee that the government can't prevent you from communicating an idea except for under very specific circumstances where that idea is very likely to cause harm. It is NOT a guarantee that you can inundate any particular person with your communication. Most importantly, it is not an obligation on the part of the recipient to pay for your message (in paper, toner, tied up phone lines, time spent downloading, per message fees, etc.). Maybe we need a constitutional amendment that protects the individual's right to dispose of their resources how they see fit.
Junk snail mail is a different animal, because the cost of sending out the message is (1) non-trivial and (2) borne by the sender. Between printing and postage, they are spending several cents per message, which necessarily limits their willingness to send out mail to known unwilling folks. It also ensures that the practice will be limited to "legitimate" companies (or at the very least, ones with decent-sized budgets). The self-limiting mechanisms of traditional junk mail tend to keep it at a manageable level.
We do need to re-evaluate freedom of expression in light of automated message reception. It does change the scope and mechanism of free expression a great deal, as well as shifting the costs (monetary and non-monetary) onto the recipient. I don't think that's what the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the first amendment.
Slashdot Mirror
Even in that case, where (if?) the person was making a deliberate attempt to undermine the company using false information, I still see no reason why Yahoo, AOL, or any other middle-man company should be at all obligated to get involved.
I used to work at Kinko's, which sends out faxes for people as a service. One time the cops showed up and asked for some information about someone who had sent a fax from the store. The sending of the fax was somehow criminal in nature (I believe it was an attempt to defraud someone). We were obligated to give it to them.
AOL has the obligation to turn over the information in the event that someone uses their service to commit illegal acts. Libel is a well-established and well-tested aspect of law, so if the company actually has a libel case (see above for the two-part criteria for libel), they probably will have to give over the information.
The similar case with Verizon being supoenaed for information about a user that was serving MP3s is somewhat different. Violations of copyright law with regard to digital media are not anywhere near as well-tested. The company bringing suit can't even prove that anything illegal happened... it is possible (however unlikely) that all of the people who downloaded the songs actually had a legal right to (because they owned the CD). Verizon's role as a service provider is similarly not well-defined.
The other option, in the case of libel, is to hold AOL directly responsible. That's what would happen if a newspaper printed libelous information. But given that they don't have any feasible way to screen what their users post on the internet, that's not a practical task.
The one-time pad is impossible to break, but possible to brute-force. The big difference between the one-time pad and other systems is that the key is never reused, so that even if you manage to crack that key, the system keeps its integrity, since that key is never used for another message.
Now, just because it's "possible" doesn't mean it's feasible... but I don't exactly call 10,000 computers x 549 days feasible for one message, either. Depending on how the one-time pad is implemented, it may be more or less feasible to crack a single message than this key was, but it's not impossible.
Well, let's just say you decide to buy a new computer. And the sales guy starts telling you that you could get this one for $1300, but this over here is much "faster" and it's only $1600. (Yeah, I know, I build my own too. But this article is written to be accessible to those who may not be quite so handy.) Knowing what those numbers mean is very important in making that decision. It will help people realize that they don't need that speed, just as you mention.
What you're all forgetting is, this is only an issue if you have remote management enabled, and it's not enabled by default...
(Seriously, does anyone read a thread before they post anymore?)
I'm glad they posted this. Eventually I'll go over to my mom's house and upgrade her firmware. I can't really see her crashing her own router... well, not on purpose, anyway. She might by accident trying to go to Yahoo! (which is what she calls whatever browser she happens to be using, unless it's AOL. No, not net savvy.)
My first job was at a used record store. I didn't even have a CD player when I started working there (yeah, it was 1990, but we weren't a cutting edge family) and yet, within months of getting one, I had at least 100 CD's.
Why? Because I got them at cost... used cost. $3-5 for good stuff, and cheaper for the offbeat things. Consequently, I have a whole bunch of various artists promo CDs with weird stuff like "Your Racist Friend" by They Might Be Giants remixed by Dee-Lite.
After I went to college and wasn't working there anymore, it was months before I bought another CD. That was partly because I had trouble going into a CD store without attempting to alphabetize the stock... but also because I gagged at $8.99 for a used CD.
I probably buy one or two CDs a year. I don't download much music, either; it's more trouble than I want to go to. Last time I went looking for a song and downloaded it, it was one from a CD that I legitimately own, but I can't find.
The RIAA seems to have forgotten about the law of supply and demand. If people aren't buying it, make it cheaper. Otherwise, they will find substitutes or they will do without. They're trying to increase demand by removing substitutes, but it's not an essential good... so they'll ultimately be unsuccessful. All they can succeed in doing is making using CDs so difficult that not even people who think they're worth $20 each will be willing to buy them.
Veering off topic...
There were many things leading to the downfall of OS/2, not the least of which was terrible marketing on the part of IBM, the lack of any "Killer App" for the platform, and the lack of significant bundling deals with OEM's which meant that OS/2 had to be installed by the user (a task then, as now, beyond the interest of the majority of computer users).
You do realize, of course, that:
- IBM entered into a joint marketing agreement with MS, which MS then welched on. That's half the marketing problem right there.
- While under co-development contract with IBM, MS was urging developers to build for Windows instead of OS/2... because they had "inside information" that it was going to do better (thanks to internal sabotage... yeah).
- Most of the major PC manufacturers (IBM the obvious exception) were at the time finding out, like the software developers, that Windows was the next big thing down the pipe. They got special deals to bundle Windows onto their MS-DOS machines... and they were already locked into per processor agreements on MS-DOS (not that anyone wanted to get rid of it, considering that they knew that Windows wouldn't run right under other versions of DOS, thanks to some planted error messages). Who was there to bundle with?
Yes, you're right about many of the things that caused OS/2 to fail... thing is, Microsoft was in a unique position to make those things happen (or fail to happen as the case may be), and they took full advantage of it.
I'm not an Everquest player, but this seems quite unusual. I'm assuming both that the limitation you're talking about is imposed by video memory and that you do not have 512 MB of video memory.
Perhaps you aren't using AGP texturing for one reason or another?
Everquest requires 512 MB system memory to run with all bells and whistles. 256 MB is the minimum requirement. (This applies to the Shadows of Luclin expansion and models; without those, 256 is fine.) Are there people who have 512 MB video memory? I wouldn't want to see the price on that card.
The name of the planet that Tolkien's LotR world is set on is Arda. It's not Terra (our Earth). The complete history of his world is laid down in the Silmarillion, which covers from the beginning of time, up until something like 1,000 years before the events in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. So, it's fairly clearly established that this is a different world, with a different history.
;-) about it, to make this response. But I never did make the assumption that it was supposed to be "our" world. Had you been told that before you saw the movie, or after? How did that information "ruin" it for you?
Now, I didn't really know all that until I started asking my husband (Dirtside
King_TJ (in what fantasy world are you a king, I wonder? And by what credible method?) the basic problem is that you don't understand what suspension of disbelief *is*.
A good story must be consistent with its own world. The bulk of fiction uses our own world; sometimes a different time period, sometimes the present day. I found I enjoyed Deep Impact far more than Armageddon for precisely the reasons you discuss... it simply exercised my suspension of disbelief gland less. But, these were both very near-future stories based off of our current world, so I saw them in that context.
Aside from the fact that Lord of the Rings is not, at any time, set in a particular time period in our history ("Middle Earth" is not Earth, and "The Third Age" doesn't correspond to any period I know of), it belongs to a genre that explicitly does NOT root itself in our world. Therefore, suspension of disbelief is based on the internal consistency of the world, not on whether or not it matches the fossil record. Tolkien was one of the great masters at creating an internally consistent world; Middle Earth's history was completely known to him, he developed the languages of the major (non-human) races, and a dozen other details are apparent in his work that make it a paragon of fantasy literature. LotR is considered a classic fantasy novel (establishing many staples of the genre) specifically because of this amazing internal consistency. As the story unfolds, there isn't anything that reminds you that this world was made up... except for your own hyper-awareness of the world around you.
I, myself, enjoy fantasy much less than science fiction precisely for the same reasons as you... it can't happen. I don't much enjoy science fiction that's poorly executed, either... nor do I enjoy regular fiction books or movies with plot holes and continuity errors. But even a very well-done fantasy piece fails to satisfy me as much as those that *can* happen, because I am also (as you are) a realist.
This isn't the fault of the genre, however. I don't like westerns, either, and that doesn't mean there's something wrong with them. Nor is there something wrong with me; I recognize that I have different tastes from a great many of my friends and *that's fine*. I don't have to find fault with the genre of fantasy literature to justify it.
Neither do you.
Interesting and valid points, all... though you didn't actually comment on why these things have created the superstar effect in pop music and not in classical music. I think it's for two reasons, mainly...
For one thing, classical music is heavily dependent on multiple artists, often a very large number. There are famous soloists, but by and large classical music is produced by an orchestra of a great many people. That makes "star quality" harder to develop.
But most importantly, classical music is an art which still loses a lot in translation to a recorded medium. An orchestra, unlike a four-person rock band, can envelop you with sound... provided you're right in front of them. Classical music has a multilayered quality that benefits hugely from live performance.
Regardless of what colors the human eye can distinguish *between*, the main issue in color is the gamut. Monitors have a much larger color gamut than four-color printing (of any kind), and we can easily see the difference. Try making neon green on your inkjet printer sometime. Or even a bright blue... half the time it will come out looking navy even though it's electric on the screen.
We face a similar issue with resolution. It's not whether we can see the individual dots, but what things look like in the aggregate because of the number of dots. Yes, there is a vanishing point, or at least an issue of diminishing returns, but we can continue to see improvements in overall quality when we can't actually focus on individual pixels anymore.
There's no way to answer the question you asked. But, maybe you should be asking a different question: Am I getting what I'm paying for?
/. earlier in the thread, and see if you're satisfied with the results.
There's no way to tell from the outside how much bandwidth the provider has sold, and they're not going to tell you. All you can do is, use any of the lovely tools touted by the great geeks of
Probably best way to do it is, find a few sites that you can get high throughput to (>1 Mbps) on off-peak times. Monitor those connections at peak and off-peak times for a week or so. If there's a big difference for *all* the sites, chances are your ISP is not giving you a big enough slice of the pie. If it drops for some and not others, you're looking at other parts of the internet getting bogged down. Even this is far from a perfect test, but it can rule out ISP bottleneck.
It would be very difficult to assign patents to [i]an[/i] individual. What happens if more than one person works together on developing something? Who gets to hold the patent? How does the company who created the "work for hire" decide whose name the patent goes into... the person who did most of the work, or the guy who owns most of the stock?
I agree that something needs to be done about all our IP law (patents, trademarks, and copyright, oh my!) but assigning an individual the patent rights won't necessarily do it. I do agree with the idea of non-transferability; I think that should be the case for any protected IP. It's one thing to protect an entity's right to make money off of their work, but if it's not them anymore, just doesn't make much sense.
I remember years ago, when you bought a PC, it would have a shiny sticker over the seam in the case, saying "If you break this seal, your warranty is void." Packard Bell used to sodder their parts together, even.
Nowadays, Dell advertises how easy their cases are to open up and install things into (and it's true). Pretty much any computer you can buy has *some* upgrade capability, and it doesn't void your warranty.
Now that the hardware companies realize that letting people see what's inside, and even mess around with it, doesn't hurt their product (and can actually help it), maybe software companies will make the same leap. Just because someone gets the source code with the binaries doesn't mean that they have no reason to go back to you, ever again. It just makes the product more versatile when they get it. (Heck, what percentage of the population can even *do* anything with the source?)
"The right tool" for the job of compressing audio files for playback, in my opinion, is the one with the best combination of compression (smaller file size), sound quality, and price.
Ogg yields smaller, better-quality files than mp3, and is free. The only thing MP3 has going for it is that people are used to using it. If you have a client who can better accomplish what they want to on their web site using PHP, but they INSIST on using ASP because that's what they're used to, well, fine then... but it's their own foot they're shooting, and has nothing to do with what's the best tool.
So, security through honesty? We just *shouldn't* spy on the government, so it doesn't matter whether they have protections against spying?
It is an interesting question, and does go well with the discussion a few days ago about governments requiring themselves to use open source software. The government has a responsibility (several, in fact) to us... shouldn't we be able to find out if they're keeping it? Or is it just going to be "Oooo, mustn't touch!" for us (while random-joe-terrorist is finding out the secret identities of the CIA guys monitoring their terrorist cell)?
Not that I think these guys did the "right thing," but I do think that maybe the government should be under public scrutiny.
Except that, theoretically, all those people would be finding the vulnerabilities and then they would be *fixed*... leaving you with a much harder job to break in.
Hahaha! I used MS Word to check the spelling... and it didn't flag it! ;-) Go Microsoft!
You can read text faster if you're a full-word reader, but you can learn to read new words faster by phonetics. At least this is what my elementary-school teacher friends tell me.
...and my father was a polyglot who would never have dreamed of using a crappy RS five-language translator. But there are probably people who aren't you and are deaf, who might find this useful.
Those of us without a ton of money can't really decide what other people research. Acting like they're wasting *your* time doesn't really help get your point across. I'm glad you feel like you have better options than something like this, but not everyone will, and it will have some (limited) usefulness for some folks. It's not an answer, but it's not totally useless.
Open source isn't so much about who *is* looking at it, but who *can*. It's the old "Put on clean underwear in case you get in an accident!" scenario. MS knows that if anyone sees their code who doesn't work for them, they can probably get them put in jail before the person can do much of anything with the information. But OSS developers *know* that their code is out there for anyone to look at. They'll be embarrassed (or the professional equivalent thereof) if people find issues with it. Therefore, they'll be more concientious* about it.
*Can hardly believe I spelled this right on the first try. Go me!
Everyone's going on about all the times this won't be useful... but think about when it will be.
- Asking for directions on a streetcorner
- Finding out bus fare
- Ordering dinner in a restaurant
- Picking up the phone when no one else is around
And so on. There are a ton of mundane things that will be very hard for a deaf person to do without the assistance of a hearing person, but might be pretty important. A device like this might make it much, much easier and safer for a deaf person to travel alone... like I did, traveling around Europe with my crappy little Radio Shack five-language translator. Yeah, I couldn't have deep philosophical conversations in French, German or Italian (Spanish I do ok in on my own), but I could get food and a hotel room.
Depends on how you read. If you read phonetically, then yeah, works just fine. If you read by word-shape recognition, it slows you down. The two methods have pretty much alternated every few years in elementary schools, so it's probably close to evenly split in terms of the adult population.
I think these days, they (the guy in the basement with all the phones, I guess) think that phonetics (Hooked on Phonics!) is an easier, faster way to learn to read, though word-shape-recognition yields a faster reader, and usually better spellers too.
I read by word shape recognition. Massive misspellings annoy the crap out of me.
Patching problems doesn't indicate laziness or incompetence, it indicates the acknowledgement of the problem and a willingness to fix it.
So what does not patching a problem indicate? What does not patching a problem for over two years indicate? What does leaving half of your open bugs unpatched in a big "bug fix" patch indicate?
This, along with the SMS thread from yesterday, raises an interesting point. What fax, email, and SMS spam have in common is that the reception is automated. If I get a telemarketing call, I can hang up before they've had a chance to deliver their message. But, by the time I see a fax or an email or a text message so I can make that decision, they've already sent the whole thing to me. The same problem comes up with recordings left on answering machines, it seems... I hadn't encountered that yet. (BTW, many digital answering machines allow you to set a limit on the length of the message recorded, so you can cut them off at 30 seconds.)
Freedom of speech is a guarantee that the government can't prevent you from communicating an idea except for under very specific circumstances where that idea is very likely to cause harm. It is NOT a guarantee that you can inundate any particular person with your communication. Most importantly, it is not an obligation on the part of the recipient to pay for your message (in paper, toner, tied up phone lines, time spent downloading, per message fees, etc.). Maybe we need a constitutional amendment that protects the individual's right to dispose of their resources how they see fit.
Junk snail mail is a different animal, because the cost of sending out the message is (1) non-trivial and (2) borne by the sender. Between printing and postage, they are spending several cents per message, which necessarily limits their willingness to send out mail to known unwilling folks. It also ensures that the practice will be limited to "legitimate" companies (or at the very least, ones with decent-sized budgets). The self-limiting mechanisms of traditional junk mail tend to keep it at a manageable level.
We do need to re-evaluate freedom of expression in light of automated message reception. It does change the scope and mechanism of free expression a great deal, as well as shifting the costs (monetary and non-monetary) onto the recipient. I don't think that's what the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the first amendment.