I find it interesting that quite a few of the scientists writing for the public these days seem to be asssembling a dogma of what is "scientific" and what is not. Science is a method of investigation, not a belief system. The best they can say against these "pseudoscientific" disciplines is that they have not used scientific method to prove their claims, which may or may not be true. But this is only meaningful is you accept their hidden premise, that scientific method is the only reliable way to draw conclusions about the nature of the universe. Most scientists don't even seem to believe this one. While not part of the classic scientific method, statistical correlation and mathmatical proof both seem to get a lot of respect from the scientific crowd.
The phenonemon that the mainstream sceintists have labeled psuedoscience have generally neither been proven or disproven by science. Many of them probably cannot be addressed by traditional experimentation, such as astrology. Other have been "disproven" by case studies. If these twelve people who claim to have ESP can't be proven to in a lab, then no one must have it. Bad science, of course. Failure to repeat an experiment proving something does not equate to disproving it.
As far as strict science goes, these things must be unknowns. I find it amusing at times, how many scientists are willing to publicly state beliefs they can't prove. I guess that makes them like the rest of us.
A blind friend of mine had an entirely voice based PDA. There was no screen, obviosly. Simple keys for user input, high speed voice for user interface/data output. It really was more of a overblown organizer, not a general-purpose handheld, and my friend didn't get much use from it.
I have no problem with people saying that alternative medicine techniques are not proven effective. This is perfectly acceptable, and I'd be the last to say you're under obligation to disprove their claims. Essentially, you're saying "I don't know if they work, and neither do these people." Admitting ignorance is the starting point of science.
But when you make statements of the type "Homeopathy is ineffective" or "Alternative meedicines are like snake oil", you are now making your own independant assertion about the universe. And to claim you are being scientific about these assertions, you must back them up through experimentation.
Some might say it was a fairly new (500 yr old) synthesis of a variety of much older African belief systems, along with a dash of Christian saint-worship.
It seems like a lot of the crowd around here are most interested in science when it leads to something with the trappings of modern technology. This has very little to do with the scientific method, though.
I hear my fellow/.-ers happily denouncing alternative medicine practices because they lack FDA-sanctioned double-blind studies to support them. What is being overlooked is that the scientific method need be applied in the same way to denounce a principle as it would be to assert it. All the lack of studies say is that we cannot state with any certainty anything, positive or negative, about the effectiveness of these treatments.
Everyone is very happy to speak of pseudo-science, but to attack a alternative treatment without being willing to apply scientific method to it is an indulgence in pseudo-science. We've got a situation of considerable chauvinism in the scientific community. The fact that a system of treatment has been used for hundreds of years by Chinese peasants means only that it will never be examined scientifically. Me, I've got no agenda but curiousity. I imagine some of these alternative medical treatments will work (Accupuncture seems to have an inside track), while others will be easy to eliminate (homeopathy comes to mind, along with those as-seen-on-tv copper-magnetic bracelets). But it would be nice to see science applied braodly, and not only to the tech/medical regimes idea of legitimate areas of study.
Exhange an initial secret through another protocol, use this secret to generate a an never-ending stream of pseudo-random bits, and use this stream as a one-time pad...
Does anyone know if there is an effort to repair WEP? The exploit that was used to break it was a data leak due to the format of packets and their initalizers. It seems like it woud be semi-easy to fix it without starting from scratch protocol-wise. It makes me curious about this, as we watch companies push out higher bit, WEP as if it mattered anymore.
I think the key point was it being open source. But you're right, in the proprietary software and hardware world, PS2 fills the niche, although in its current hard drive-free form, it doesn't offer quite all the flexibility of a general purpose computer.
I'm not quite sure qwhy everyone is so insistant on games for Linux. So far, the prime excellance of Linux is as a network server OS. Now if game developers want to spend time on Linux ports, good for them, but I don't think it warrants a political movement. I think people some times discount Linux as an OS, because they see it trying to be all things to all people, and the first one a consumer would lay hands on (games or desktop productivity), it doesn't do that great.
What we really need is an open source OS written to be the perfect game platform, putting development ease, hardware support, and performance above all else. Imagin getting a game on a self-booting CD/DVD, that boots you into the a fast, BSOD-free environment. Code it to use Windows hardware drivers and various filesystems for installs, and you'd have something worth developing for.
Actually, good optics were used to correct flawed optics. It wasn't a software solution, but rather a corrective lens that was added to get the good results.
Truthfully, both were done, the corrective lens at a later date, as indicated in the mission press info.
While the launch on the Space Shuttle Discovery more than 3 years ago
was flawless, Hubble was not. Two months after HST was deployed into
orbit 370 miles (595.5 km) high, Hubble produced a disquieting discovery
not about space, but about itself. The curvature of its primary mirror was
slightly Q but significantly Q incorrect. Near the edge, the mirror is too flat
by an amount equal to 1/50th the width of a human hair.
A NASA investigative board later determined that the flaw was caused by
the incorrect adjustment of a testing device used in building the mirror.
The device, called a Rnull corrector,S was used to check the mirror
curvature during manufacture.
The result is a focusing defect or spherical aberration. Instead of being
focused into a sharp point, light collected by the mirror is spread over a
larger area in a fuzzy halo. Images of extended objects, such as stars, planets
and galaxies, are blurred.
NASA has been coping with HubbleUs fuzzy vision with computer
processing to sharpen images. For bright objects, this technique has yielded
breathtaking detail never seen from the ground. NASA also has been
concentrating on the analysis of ultraviolet light, which ground-based
telescopes cannot see because of the EarthUs intervening atmosphere.
Keep in mind that good postprocessing can factor out all sorts of predicatable equipment shortcomings. When the Hubble Telescope went up with a seriously flawed mirror, good software made it possible to get scientifically valid results without replacing the flawed optics. A similar approach might be useful here, if you're interested in this aspect of the problem.
Also, keeping benchmarking data such as a color test image in field in each of you data images could allow for per-image calibration and factor out some of the unpredictability of consumer imaging. This could be easily automated in software.
Don't use consumer low end devices where color is an important factor. Scanners in particular tend to change their color characteristics after calibrations, with changes in lamp temperature and other environmental factors.
Don't take pictures with low end cameras and use them for later analysis, particularly when looking for positional data. Compression artifacts stand to introduce substantial errors even on low compression settings. If you can turn off compression entirely, this may be an option. Live capture from a video stream would probably give you better images not limited by the device's intended use.
Keep in mind the low quality of lenses on most digital cameras and camcorders and the possibility of geometrical abberations near the edges.
Get some good visual benchmarks.
Consider that the cost savings may not bear out the work needed to make sense of the data. Commodity products are not made for precision.
I'm really impressed by this approach to traffic control. "Your web site has been accessed too many times, so it has to sit in time out for the rest of the day."
Keep in mind in what follows that I am a staunch UNIX advocate and currently run a installation of around 500 student lab machines.
I think this article features some fairly arbitrary hardware configs, in some cases, just plain wrong. For one thing, a single two processor Sun Server is by no means sufficient to run 500 SunRays. Anyone who had glanced at the documentation would know this. We run ~20 of these on a Sun 220R without much headroom. Obviously, the dual UltrasparcIII model he specs is a fair bit faster, but not 25x faster. He's equally arbitrary with storage: 1TB for the Windows solution, 2TB for the UNIX. And it is a bit of a stretch to consider using a SunRay to be the same quality of experience as a dedicated 900mhz CPU. He's also totally neglected the cost of networking, which for the required private interconnect with Sun Ray's, is quite substantial in a multi site facility. Also, trying to use one SunRay server, no matter how powerful, across a campus environement of multiple labs, will not work to any sort of satisfaction.
This may seem like nitpicking, but it effects all his later conclusions. To turn this into a workable configuration would require at least several more servers, as well as a bunch of dedicated and idiosyncratic networks. Also, SunRays are quirky, high-maintenance machines, with a history of high hardware failure. Suddenly, we're not talking about a prt time single administrator (never really possible in a educational lab environment anyway), but a fair sized support staff. And a constant string of complaints about available software until the end of the labs' lives.
Also, is he serious about a SPARCstation 10 as an administration workstation?
The questions is, if the author cannot get the hardware plans right, can we trust his analysis in other issues? Considering that he presents most of his information without references, I would say probably not. With naive assertions such as UNIX users will suffer no downtime or server failures, I would say almost certainly not.
The author begs the question, in his article, how can we know he is a true authority on False Authority Syndrome
Think about it, in the article, he comments primarily on the following:
The degree of authoritative knowledge that the average quoted virus authority has.
How various new agencies in general go about finding authorities to quote
How and why people act as false authorities on viruses
In general, this article is all about issues of sociology and psychology. The author does not, however, give us any credentials to let us know he is a True Authority in these matters. All we get to know about him is he is a virus software programmer and online journalist. For that matter, nearly all of his evidence is anecdotal.
So I really have to wonder, should we expect an expert and computer viruses to know more about psychology than a computer security expert knows about viruses.
I have a graduate student in the employ of my office that is quite an accomplished programmer. Of the people I work with, he'd be the first I'd ask if I had an obscure programming question that was stumping me. He is doing thesis work on making web resources more accessible. I wonder how slashdot rates in this area.
He does his work under Solaris with a braille screen reader. He uses a versions of "screen" that is hacked for screen reader support.
About a year ago, the responsibility of running the Novell implementation for my workstation group fell in my lap. As a tried and true UNIX admin, I wanted nothing to do with any dinosaur from the early PC era, but I decided to take a look for curiosity's sake.
What I found was probably the purest implementation of a network server I've ever seen. Since its heyday in the late 80's, Novell has packed in all sorts of features that haven't even been addressed in other NOS camps. You could think that UNIX excels as an app server, but only if you've never used Netware.
Like automated application deployment through Zenworks. Very cool. To put a new app on all your users' desktops, you install it once on the server. From that point on the user gets a icon on his machine for it. The first time her runs it, all files and registry settings are cached on his machine. From then on it runs with hard drive local speed. Until you want to update it. Then the next time he runs it he gets the new version.
Per user central configuration is nice too. you control on a per user and per workstation basis which applications are offered, in a way that to the user is identical to him running them off his harddrive.
The filesystem is great, very sophisticated ACLS. The volume management is the easiest and most robust I've seen. Of course everything is logging based and speed optimized.
Everything is controlled through the NDS directory. It is LDAP aware, making synchronization with UNIX machines a breeze. You can even get NDS PAM modules and authenticate your UNIX users out of there. Controlling the filesystem through the directory is in particular a nice touch.
Clustering servers for failthrough is easy. IPX is long gone, unless you need it, but the Service Location Protocol makes it easy for clients to find new servers with no hardcoding.
I really hope Netware isn't dead anytime soon, because I shudder at the thought of the work it would take to run my current NT labs without it.
There is no information gathering "off of the unwary". If you install it, the happy cartoon cat makes it clear that they will be gathering information from you, and how they plan to use it.
I agree. Also, is what happened here an actual violation of the law in question? My CueCat's literature made it pretty obvious that this was a free gift. Digital Convergence is making no effort to collect any payment of any kind for the thing. Neither are they limiting its use in particular. Nothing that came with my device said I had to return it if I didn't agree to the EULA o even that I couldn't write software for it. No one has told me, thus far, what I can and cannot do with the the actual physical device. As far as I can tell, what they send people does constitute as a free gift.
People may not like the license that comes with the software, but any 'free' software you're given, including gnu stuff, comes with a license restricting your actions.
As for the "cease and desist" orders, those are a different issue. They have nothing to do with restrictions based on the contents of the box they send you. As far as I can tell, DC has not been trying to stop the use of the software, just its distribution. The very fact that they make a developer's license available indicates that they consider the use of 3rd party software on their device an acceptable possibility. Yes, they are trying to run a fairly rediculous closed standard of a device that is easy to figure out. Dumb, but not illegal.
Just for my two cents, it seems kind of lame to try and drive a company out of business whose prime sin is that, in their quest to give us all free gadgets, didn't do it on the terms we most desired. True, their response to the whole thing lacks some degree of class and may constitute a minor legal violation. Still, there are far more pressing issues. Woe to the soceity whose members waste their political and civic activism on CueCat and Napster.
It seems like everyone takes the attitude that this is a victory for the corporation, and not for the artist, that it is really the corporations that are getting hurt when you pirate. I'm curious how many users here would put their money where their mouth is on this issue. If you pirate an disks worth of MP3s, send $1 to the artist in question. The way it works now, you are screwing the corp, but you're also screwing the artist who has, in theory, done something fairly nice for you by making music that you would want to listen to. OpenMind(tm)
Re:I don't know what frightens me more...
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
>Even with the best genes in the world, you can still turn out to be socially >inept or dumber than a bag of hummers. =)
There's a hell of an image.
Re:s/human genome project/nuclear energy/g
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
I always find it a bit surprising how easy it is too sell America as the least capable nation in the world of doing thing x. In this case, its using the genome responsibly, but I've seen this pessimistic sentiment expressed before on a multitude of issues. Me, I'd want some more convincing examples than septuplets and magazine ads for eggs. The world is not filled with the abominations we've created with our current biological knowledge. As least capable nations go, we managed to keep our nuclear imp mostly in the bottle for some decades now. Go bug France if you're looking technological recklessness. Is it really eugenics that you're afraid of? Now I'll admit, I've read some genuinely disturbing literature about eugenics, but those scenarios always involved a dictatorial government imposing these agendas on the people. Without the dystopian government, it is a far less fearsome spector. Even if the map allows one to genetically identify personality traits, nothing will be forcing the parents to do anything about it. I think that it will only be an issue among the wealthy for the most part, as indeed, to this point, they've been the only people to even give a nod to eugenics, or "quality control". My policy in this has not changed for years: whatever the rich want to do to screw up their kids is none of my business. Is it a scary thing that rich people will be able to say boost their kids IQ and poor people will not? Yeah, but far less scary than cancer. You may as well say that in the early 80s the development of the PC is a bad thing because its just another way for the kids of rich folks to get an edge.
I think that the reason that the computer industry is so full of younger people right now is that due to the way recent computing history has unfolded. It is fairly true that right now most of the expertise in the highly marketable skills is concentrated in people under 30. Right now employers are looking for people who are expert in paradigms that are in their infancy. Java, XML, HTML, common object paradigms, network programming, even C++ are skills that have not been the focus of degree programs for very long, if at all. For that matter, they're not really the kind of skills that are so overwhelmingly useful that old school hackers feel the need to spend their free time learning them. The people who know these things well are those that have had the time to learn them in the last 6 or so years, mainly people who are just now out of college. The olders hackers are more set in the business world application development niche. But this shift in skills is mainly because of the reorganization of the computing world around the internet. With luck, the standards and tools that drive the industry will settle down after a while and the industry will become less "trendy", and programming as a career might be a viable option. If not, well anyone becoming a programmer now can't be too surprised by the need to continuously reeducate oneself. As we, the hackers who take this for granted age, the industry may learn to value our experience over the cheapness of the pups.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it interesting that quite a few of the scientists writing for the public these days seem to be asssembling a dogma of what is "scientific" and what is not. Science is a method of investigation, not a belief system. The best they can say against these "pseudoscientific" disciplines is that they have not used scientific method to prove their claims, which may or may not be true. But this is only meaningful is you accept their hidden premise, that scientific method is the only reliable way to draw conclusions about the nature of the universe. Most scientists don't even seem to believe this one. While not part of the classic scientific method, statistical correlation and mathmatical proof both seem to get a lot of respect from the scientific crowd.
The phenonemon that the mainstream sceintists have labeled psuedoscience have generally neither been proven or disproven by science. Many of them probably cannot be addressed by traditional experimentation, such as astrology. Other have been "disproven" by case studies. If these twelve people who claim to have ESP can't be proven to in a lab, then no one must have it. Bad science, of course. Failure to repeat an experiment proving something does not equate to disproving it.
As far as strict science goes, these things must be unknowns. I find it amusing at times, how many scientists are willing to publicly state beliefs they can't prove. I guess that makes them like the rest of us.
A blind friend of mine had an entirely voice based PDA. There was no screen, obviosly. Simple keys for user input, high speed voice for user interface/data output. It really was more of a overblown organizer, not a general-purpose handheld, and my friend didn't get much use from it.
I have no problem with people saying that alternative medicine techniques are not proven effective. This is perfectly acceptable, and I'd be the last to say you're under obligation to disprove their claims. Essentially, you're saying "I don't know if they work, and neither do these people." Admitting ignorance is the starting point of science.
But when you make statements of the type "Homeopathy is ineffective" or "Alternative meedicines are like snake oil", you are now making your own independant assertion about the universe. And to claim you are being scientific about these assertions, you must back them up through experimentation.
Some might say it was a fairly new (500 yr old) synthesis of a variety of much older African belief systems, along with a dash of Christian saint-worship.
It seems like a lot of the crowd around here are most interested in science when it leads to something with the trappings of modern technology. This has very little to do with the scientific method, though.
/.-ers happily denouncing alternative medicine practices because they lack FDA-sanctioned double-blind studies to support them. What is being overlooked is that the scientific method need be applied in the same way to denounce a principle as it would be to assert it. All the lack of studies say is that we cannot state with any certainty anything, positive or negative, about the effectiveness of these treatments.
I hear my fellow
Everyone is very happy to speak of pseudo-science, but to attack a alternative treatment without being willing to apply scientific method to it is an indulgence in pseudo-science. We've got a situation of considerable chauvinism in the scientific community. The fact that a system of treatment has been used for hundreds of years by Chinese peasants means only that it will never be examined scientifically. Me, I've got no agenda but curiousity. I imagine some of these alternative medical treatments will work (Accupuncture seems to have an inside track), while others will be easy to eliminate (homeopathy comes to mind, along with those as-seen-on-tv copper-magnetic bracelets). But it would be nice to see science applied braodly, and not only to the tech/medical regimes idea of legitimate areas of study.
Hmm...
Exhange an initial secret through another protocol, use this secret to generate a an never-ending stream of pseudo-random bits, and use this stream as a one-time pad...
Yep, we've already got this algorithm.
Does anyone know if there is an effort to repair WEP? The exploit that was used to break it was a data leak due to the format of packets and their initalizers. It seems like it woud be semi-easy to fix it without starting from scratch protocol-wise. It makes me curious about this, as we watch companies push out higher bit, WEP as if it mattered anymore.
I think the key point was it being open source. But you're right, in the proprietary software and hardware world, PS2 fills the niche, although in its current hard drive-free form, it doesn't offer quite all the flexibility of a general purpose computer.
I'm not quite sure qwhy everyone is so insistant on games for Linux. So far, the prime excellance of Linux is as a network server OS. Now if game developers want to spend time on Linux ports, good for them, but I don't think it warrants a political movement. I think people some times discount Linux as an OS, because they see it trying to be all things to all people, and the first one a consumer would lay hands on (games or desktop productivity), it doesn't do that great.
What we really need is an open source OS written to be the perfect game platform, putting development ease, hardware support, and performance above all else. Imagin getting a game on a self-booting CD/DVD, that boots you into the a fast, BSOD-free environment. Code it to use Windows hardware drivers and various filesystems for installs, and you'd have something worth developing for.
Truthfully, both were done, the corrective lens at a later date, as indicated in the mission press info.
While the launch on the Space Shuttle Discovery more than 3 years ago
was flawless, Hubble was not. Two months after HST was deployed into
orbit 370 miles (595.5 km) high, Hubble produced a disquieting discovery
not about space, but about itself. The curvature of its primary mirror was
slightly Q but significantly Q incorrect. Near the edge, the mirror is too flat
by an amount equal to 1/50th the width of a human hair.
A NASA investigative board later determined that the flaw was caused by
the incorrect adjustment of a testing device used in building the mirror.
The device, called a Rnull corrector,S was used to check the mirror
curvature during manufacture.
The result is a focusing defect or spherical aberration. Instead of being
focused into a sharp point, light collected by the mirror is spread over a
larger area in a fuzzy halo. Images of extended objects, such as stars, planets
and galaxies, are blurred.
NASA has been coping with HubbleUs fuzzy vision with computer
processing to sharpen images. For bright objects, this technique has yielded
breathtaking detail never seen from the ground. NASA also has been
concentrating on the analysis of ultraviolet light, which ground-based
telescopes cannot see because of the EarthUs intervening atmosphere.
Keep in mind that good postprocessing can factor out all sorts of predicatable equipment shortcomings. When the Hubble Telescope went up with a seriously flawed mirror, good software made it possible to get scientifically valid results without replacing the flawed optics. A similar approach might be useful here, if you're interested in this aspect of the problem.
Also, keeping benchmarking data such as a color test image in field in each of you data images could allow for per-image calibration and factor out some of the unpredictability of consumer imaging. This could be easily automated in software.
I'm really impressed by this approach to traffic control. "Your web site has been accessed too many times, so it has to sit in time out for the rest of the day."
Keep in mind in what follows that I am a staunch UNIX advocate and currently run a installation of around 500 student lab machines.
I think this article features some fairly arbitrary hardware configs, in some cases, just plain wrong. For one thing, a single two processor Sun Server is by no means sufficient to run 500 SunRays. Anyone who had glanced at the documentation would know this. We run ~20 of these on a Sun 220R without much headroom. Obviously, the dual UltrasparcIII model he specs is a fair bit faster, but not 25x faster. He's equally arbitrary with storage: 1TB for the Windows solution, 2TB for the UNIX. And it is a bit of a stretch to consider using a SunRay to be the same quality of experience as a dedicated 900mhz CPU. He's also totally neglected the cost of networking, which for the required private interconnect with Sun Ray's, is quite substantial in a multi site facility. Also, trying to use one SunRay server, no matter how powerful, across a campus environement of multiple labs, will not work to any sort of satisfaction.
This may seem like nitpicking, but it effects all his later conclusions. To turn this into a workable configuration would require at least several more servers, as well as a bunch of dedicated and idiosyncratic networks. Also, SunRays are quirky, high-maintenance machines, with a history of high hardware failure. Suddenly, we're not talking about a prt time single administrator (never really possible in a educational lab environment anyway), but a fair sized support staff. And a constant string of complaints about available software until the end of the labs' lives.
Also, is he serious about a SPARCstation 10 as an administration workstation?
The questions is, if the author cannot get the hardware plans right, can we trust his analysis in other issues? Considering that he presents most of his information without references, I would say probably not. With naive assertions such as UNIX users will suffer no downtime or server failures, I would say almost certainly not.
The author begs the question, in his article, how can we know he is a true authority on False Authority Syndrome
Think about it, in the article, he comments primarily on the following:
- The degree of authoritative knowledge that the average quoted virus authority has.
- How various new agencies in general go about finding authorities to quote
- How and why people act as false authorities on viruses
In general, this article is all about issues of sociology and psychology. The author does not, however, give us any credentials to let us know he is a True Authority in these matters. All we get to know about him is he is a virus software programmer and online journalist. For that matter, nearly all of his evidence is anecdotal.So I really have to wonder, should we expect an expert and computer viruses to know more about psychology than a computer security expert knows about viruses.
I have a graduate student in the employ of my office that is quite an accomplished programmer. Of the people I work with, he'd be the first I'd ask if I had an obscure programming question that was stumping me. He is doing thesis work on making web resources more accessible. I wonder how slashdot rates in this area. He does his work under Solaris with a braille screen reader. He uses a versions of "screen" that is hacked for screen reader support.
About a year ago, the responsibility of running the Novell implementation for my workstation group fell in my lap. As a tried and true UNIX admin, I wanted nothing to do with any dinosaur from the early PC era, but I decided to take a look for curiosity's sake.
What I found was probably the purest implementation of a network server I've ever seen. Since its heyday in the late 80's, Novell has packed in all sorts of features that haven't even been addressed in other NOS camps. You could think that UNIX excels as an app server, but only if you've never used Netware.
Like automated application deployment through Zenworks. Very cool. To put a new app on all your users' desktops, you install it once on the server. From that point on the user gets a icon on his machine for it. The first time her runs it, all files and registry settings are cached on his machine. From then on it runs with hard drive local speed. Until you want to update it. Then the next time he runs it he gets the new version.
Per user central configuration is nice too. you control on a per user and per workstation basis which applications are offered, in a way that to the user is identical to him running them off his harddrive.
The filesystem is great, very sophisticated ACLS. The volume management is the easiest and most robust I've seen. Of course everything is logging based and speed optimized.
Everything is controlled through the NDS directory. It is LDAP aware, making synchronization with UNIX machines a breeze. You can even get NDS PAM modules and authenticate your UNIX users out of there. Controlling the filesystem through the directory is in particular a nice touch.
Clustering servers for failthrough is easy. IPX is long gone, unless you need it, but the Service Location Protocol makes it easy for clients to find new servers with no hardcoding.
I really hope Netware isn't dead anytime soon, because I shudder at the thought of the work it would take to run my current NT labs without it.
There is no information gathering "off of the unwary". If you install it, the happy cartoon cat makes it clear that they will be gathering information from you, and how they plan to use it.
I agree. Also, is what happened here an actual violation of the law in question? My CueCat's literature made it pretty obvious that this was a free gift. Digital Convergence is making no effort to collect any payment of any kind for the thing. Neither are they limiting its use in particular. Nothing that came with my device said I had to return it if I didn't agree to the EULA o even that I couldn't write software for it. No one has told me, thus far, what I can and cannot do with the the actual physical device. As far as I can tell, what they send people does constitute as a free gift.
People may not like the license that comes with the software, but any 'free' software you're given, including gnu stuff, comes with a license restricting your actions.
As for the "cease and desist" orders, those are a different issue. They have nothing to do with restrictions based on the contents of the box they send you. As far as I can tell, DC has not been trying to stop the use of the software, just its distribution. The very fact that they make a developer's license available indicates that they consider the use of 3rd party software on their device an acceptable possibility. Yes, they are trying to run a fairly rediculous closed standard of a device that is easy to figure out. Dumb, but not illegal.
You have your wish.
http://www.cuecat.com/getcat.html
Just for my two cents, it seems kind of lame to try and drive a company out of business whose prime sin is that, in their quest to give us all free gadgets, didn't do it on the terms we most desired. True, their response to the whole thing lacks some degree of class and may constitute a minor legal violation. Still, there are far more pressing issues. Woe to the soceity whose members waste their political and civic activism on CueCat and Napster.
It seems like everyone takes the attitude that this is a victory for the corporation, and not for the artist, that it is really the corporations that are getting hurt when you pirate. I'm curious how many users here would put their money where their mouth is on this issue. If you pirate an disks worth of MP3s, send $1 to the artist in question. The way it works now, you are screwing the corp, but you're also screwing the artist who has, in theory, done something fairly nice for you by making music that you would want to listen to.
OpenMind(tm)
>inept or dumber than a bag of hummers. =)
There's a hell of an image.
I always find it a bit surprising how easy it is too sell America as the least capable nation in the world of doing thing x. In this case, its using the genome responsibly, but I've seen this pessimistic sentiment expressed before on a multitude of issues. Me, I'd want some more convincing examples than septuplets and magazine ads for eggs. The world is not filled with the abominations we've created with our current biological knowledge. As least capable nations go, we managed to keep our nuclear imp mostly in the bottle for some decades now. Go bug France if you're looking technological recklessness. Is it really eugenics that you're afraid of? Now I'll admit, I've read some genuinely disturbing literature about eugenics, but those scenarios always involved a dictatorial government imposing these agendas on the people. Without the dystopian government, it is a far less fearsome spector. Even if the map allows one to genetically identify personality traits, nothing will be forcing the parents to do anything about it. I think that it will only be an issue among the wealthy for the most part, as indeed, to this point, they've been the only people to even give a nod to eugenics, or "quality control". My policy in this has not changed for years: whatever the rich want to do to screw up their kids is none of my business. Is it a scary thing that rich people will be able to say boost their kids IQ and poor people will not? Yeah, but far less scary than cancer. You may as well say that in the early 80s the development of the PC is a bad thing because its just another way for the kids of rich folks to get an edge.
I think that the reason that the computer industry is so full of younger people right now is that due to the way recent computing history has unfolded. It is fairly true that right now most of the expertise in the highly marketable skills is concentrated in people under 30. Right now employers are looking for people who are expert in paradigms that are in their infancy. Java, XML, HTML, common object paradigms, network programming, even C++ are skills that have not been the focus of degree programs for very long, if at all. For that matter, they're not really the kind of skills that are so overwhelmingly useful that old school hackers feel the need to spend their free time learning them. The people who know these things well are those that have had the time to learn them in the last 6 or so years, mainly people who are just now out of college. The olders hackers are more set in the business world application development niche. But this shift in skills is mainly because of the reorganization of the computing world around the internet. With luck, the standards and tools that drive the industry will settle down after a while and the industry will become less "trendy", and programming as a career might be a viable option. If not, well anyone becoming a programmer now can't be too surprised by the need to continuously reeducate oneself. As we, the hackers who take this for granted age, the industry may learn to value our experience over the cheapness of the pups.