What they lost in copyright, they regained with frivolous and overreaching patents.
Personally, I think the whole idea of "intellectual property" is absurd from the start. Owning an idea? Ridiculous. It is my humble prediction that so called "intellectual property" will one day be the downfall of capitalism as we know it. Or rather, it will make capitalism obsolete.
Sure, but one nick in the plastic coating and the paper is compromised. That's certainly not something I'd be anxious to fly around with. No, wait, it WOULD make me anxious to fly around with that covering the plane. Maybe if you could somehow infuse the paper with a water proofing...
compared to the people who don't know enough to request XP when they buy a new system.
Nice ad hominem. The people who want, or don't ask for something other than, Vista, well, they're just ignorant, ain't they?
Oh pull the stick out of your ass and relax. I don't think that was meant as a personal attack. It is true that most people don't really know or care much about the differences between XP and Vista. This doesn't imply that they're "ignorant" in a pejorative sense. It just means they don't care or haven't bothered to learn.
But text messaging usually gets to its destination within a few minutes
So does email.
and announces its presence.
So does email. I hear a small "ding."
For much of the population, it will also be read within minutes, making it much more useful for certain situations than email. A beeping noise also ensures it tends to get to those who might not check email very often.
But constantly being interrupted by messsages/phone calls/email has been shown to dramatically reduce productivity. It is not something I would want to encourage in teh work place except for the few people who really need to get instant alerts for things such as server problems. So sure text messaging/paging has its place, but it is not going to replace email.
Okay, assume this is another company who has gotten a court order to get your e-mails for a proceeding. Now, if they want the e-mails for their own discovery, they'll have a lawyer sift through them for any related to the discovery. That's funny when you think about having a bunch of silly, boring, personal e-mails in the company files.
I still don't understand how you're using "funny?" Why is it funny and why? Again, if I have a court order to read my email, I have bigger things to worry about than having a few personal messages mixed in with my company email. What's the big deal?
That's not that bad anymore. Pick: 1) ICQ/AIM 2) MSN/Yahoo and 3) Gtalk, which is a part of gmail anyway. That's three accounts, one of which is an email also.
Eh? ICQ and AIM are different services, aren't they? Wikipedia mentions that there is some "Beta" cross communication, but I don't know how that works. MSN and Yahoo are in direct competition... I'm not aware of any cross communication there. And then there's Gtalk.
So that is 4 accounts, at best. The different account also means you have to publish and maintain several different identities. Then there are problems (I have found) using different IM clients.... particularly when trying to exchange files. Not sure if it is firewalls or what.
When it is all said and done, I don't bother to publicly publish my IM identity like i might email.
And it's absolutely hilarious to imagine whoever is responsible for the court order paying a lawyer to sift through those boring messages.
I don't understand your meaning.
Re:Not if today's kids are like I was.
on
Kids Say Email is Dead
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Strange policy your employer has. I've never sent a personal email from my company account, nor have I ever made a personal phone call from a company phone. Unless I've given them a business card, my friends and family don't even know how to contact me at work. And why should they?
I dunno... in case of emergency? Maybe if your cell phone is not getting a signal, is misplaced, or is uncharged?
I have a cell phone for personal calls
So what difference does it make whether you get a personal call on your cell phone or your desk phone? Either way you're taking/making a personal call on company time. Seems like a pretty arbitrary distinction to me.
What if your cell phone is paid for by your company? Do you just not get any personal calls except for at home? Would you own two different cell phones?
Do you really want your personal emails archived along with every other corporate email in perpetuity?
Well, I'm not going to be passing love notes on the corporate email. Besides those types of messages, why not? What do I care?
So the next time the company is issued a court order to produce a log of emails, all your personal junk is in there too and made public record for anyone to see?
Dude, if there's a court order to see my corporate email, I'm going to have bigger things to worry about than having some boring personal messages go public.:-P
Well I myself kind of disagree with the article's conclusion as well, but this is not an argument against it. That young people today grow up without using email as their communication tool of choice means they will be more efficient at using the means they're more accustomed to.
I grew up not using snail-mail. Instead we passed notes on paper, as did most kids at the time. It was the "poor man's" version of snail-mail. Only faster (for our purposes) and less formal. It worked because everyone I knew was in the same building 5 days of the week. But guess what? It never left school. Businesses did not start passing notes around by hand even though that is what kids were accustomed to when they were young. The fact is that businesses need more robust, universal forms of communication. And that is email... like it or not. Social networks will not work in the real world for the same reason that passing notes around school wouldn't work... it isn't robust and universal. Doesn't matter if kids are accustomed to using social networks.
Think of it the same way as of Google Docs http://docs.google.com/ - these are going to be 'just' better than the usual MS Word stuff at the moment they implement the entire MS Word's feature set. Once Google Docs type of software hits the market AND there are people who know how to use it AND prefer it to emailing the stupid files, business will switch over to use it. The concept of people obligatory running in-corporate weblogs may seem too bizarre right now but I won't be surprised if it will happen in say 10-15 years - the time needed for these youngsters of today to mature.
But in this case, there is a real need for a better way to exchange documents over the internet. Email has always been very problematic when it comes to sharting documents. For examples, many mail servers simply won't transmit messages over a certain size. Or certain file types. There has to be some technical and/or business reason for a paradigm shift. Just because kids become accustomed to using something isn't enough.
-matthew
Re:muggles still use e-mail, mail, phones, etc.
on
Kids Say Email is Dead
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Less portable" is a significant difference.... at least when you grow up and leave your little adolescent social circle for the real world. The reason telephone, email, and snail-mail are still in such wide use today is that they are ubiquitous. You can reach just about anyone with them. A PM on a social networking site is limited to that social networking site. It cannot become a primary means of communication in the long term. Instant Messaging has a similar limitation. Several times I've tried to establish IM as a primary means of communication with people and it often comes down to "Oh, I don't have an _____ account." So you either get an account with every major service or you fall back to more universal (though perhaps slower) means of communication such as email.
The bugs in Firefox are not nearly as significant as the shortcomings of XUL. XUL is definitly better for programming "rich" applications than HTML, but once you start using it you realize that the Mozilla team only developed XUL just enough to get the browser up and running. Last time I used XUL there were big parts that just didn't get any attention. And even if all the widgets did function as they were meant to, they'd still be a more limiting than common desktop toolkits. And then there's Javascript, which also shows its limitations when an app starts to get rather complex. Javascript, despite being object oriented on the surface, doesn't even have a proper class inheritance system.
the apps include a very simple word processor and a spreadsheet that could work from a server hosted within the company intranet... this would be a very useful project indeed. Basic features would do - no need for all that fancy schmancy stuff.
Because hardly anybody WANTs a simple speadsheet and word processor. Particular businesses with an intranet. People LIKE the fancy-schmancy stuff. Putting it on the intranet doesn't make a simple spreadsheet program any more attractive than if it was on your desktop. Simple (often free) spreadsheet and word processor programs have been around, like, forever, but people just go out and buy MS Office anyway. That is just the way it is.
I wonder who actually pays for these tools? Seems like such a tool would be freely downloadable after teh first purchase. I mean, it isn't like the author is going to try to sue you or anything (though maybe he'll DDoS your download site). It would be like a drug dealer calling the cops because someone stole his supply.
Y-chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve are separated by at least 30,000 years. So that doesn't tell really suggest that they necessarily came from the same place. A lot of migration can happen in 30,000 years.
Um, what good does it do to cover the operation if you're just going to push air through it and blow the moistened air away?
Anyway, I thought about it more and realized that you could aerate the water outside of the system (by passing bubbles through it, perhaps) and circulate it back into the sealed growing chambers. That way you would never expose the system to the dry desert wind. Still, I imagine you'd need some fresh water source. Plenty of water would be pulled out with the harvested algae.
So, for people who have played a lot of IV, how are the non-military victories? Are they better than just building spaceships?
A full blown military victory (world conquest) is actually pretty difficult in a normal speed game in IV, IMO. Depending on teh size of the map and the number of civs. Playing Epic or Marathon speeds make it easier, if only because you have more time to move units around... even if you're not technically producing them faster. Spaceship victory often becomes the "default" win for me unless I'm just so far ahead of anyone else.
But generally speaking, military conquest is just more fun. But you still need to play diplomacy. You can't just go to war with everyone and expect to win like older versions of Civ. Also, larger civs take a big hit to their economy. So you could dominate nearly half the world and still have some a much smaller civ going neck and neck with you as far as technology. And if you're not careful, they'll get the spaceship before you.
Anyway, I just started playing the "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization" mod for Civ IV and it several new dimensions to the game. A big one is the concept of Unique Historical Victories (UHV). Each civ gets its own set of victory conditions based loosely on real history. For example, China has to have 2 Taoist Pagotas and 2 Confucius Acadamies by 1000 AD, no cities lost to Barbarians or Mongols by 1300 or so, and 120 military units by 1600. It is a real challenge. If you get bored trying to reach one Civ's victory conditions you can try another civ and get a completely different game. You can also play multiple civs at a time if you want. Oh, and different civs start at different, more realistic, times in the game. Normally in Civilization, all civs are created more or less equal. Not so in Rhye's and Fall.
Also, there is a concept of Civ stability in Rhye's mod. You could be kicking ass all over the place and suddenly lose half or even all of your cities to revolt or the resurrection of another civ if you don't maintain stability.
Sure, but you have to get the water from somewhere to run such an operation in a desert. Don't you have to circulate the air to "feed" the algae? Won't that cause significant evaporation?
You don't want to use valuable fresh water for that. If you pipe in sea water (assuming you can grow the right kind of algae in sea water), I imagine you might have trouble with salinity levels as the water evaporates from the constant air circulation.
I don't really think there is much of a comparison. I played around with Miro when it was called Democracy Player. And it was much much more than just a player. It was supposed to be this whole way of managing, subscribing to, and downloading video. It is like iTunes with some free "channels" and a program guide, but it also includes things like a Bittorrent client.
I never really got into it if only because I don't care to use my computer like a TV. Most of my major video downloads to directly to a MythTV box running Torrentflux. Watching anything more than an amusing 5 minute video short on my computer isn't very appealing.
So I presume you are against the police using spyware as a tool in all circumstances?
This isn't about how and when police should use wiretaps. It is about companies ignoring their ethical obligation to detect any and all "spyware." Hence the note to self: "Never by anything from Checkpoint" They either can't be trusted to do the job you pay them to do.
For an example of why this whitelisting is a problem regardless of whether or not individual wiretapping cases are legit: What if a criminal decides to utilize the police spyware? How hard can it be to take a machine has been "bugged" by the police, find the binary, and copy it for your own use... and do your dirty work undetected? All it takes is one clever hacker to dissect the police keylogger and distribute it amongst his friends....
Slashdot Mirror
What they lost in copyright, they regained with frivolous and overreaching patents.
Personally, I think the whole idea of "intellectual property" is absurd from the start. Owning an idea? Ridiculous. It is my humble prediction that so called "intellectual property" will one day be the downfall of capitalism as we know it. Or rather, it will make capitalism obsolete.
-matthew
Sure, but one nick in the plastic coating and the paper is compromised. That's certainly not something I'd be anxious to fly around with. No, wait, it WOULD make me anxious to fly around with that covering the plane. Maybe if you could somehow infuse the paper with a water proofing...
In triplicate, no less!
Oh pull the stick out of your ass and relax. I don't think that was meant as a personal attack. It is true that most people don't really know or care much about the differences between XP and Vista. This doesn't imply that they're
"ignorant" in a pejorative sense. It just means they don't care or haven't bothered to learn.
-matthew
So does email.
So does email. I hear a small "ding."
But constantly being interrupted by messsages/phone calls/email has been shown to dramatically reduce productivity. It is not something I would want to encourage in teh work place except for the few people who really need to get instant alerts for things such as server problems. So sure text messaging/paging has its place, but it is not going to replace email.
-matthew
I still don't understand how you're using "funny?" Why is it funny and why? Again, if I have a court order to read my email, I have bigger things to worry about than having a few personal messages mixed in with my company email. What's the big deal?
-mathtew
Eh? ICQ and AIM are different services, aren't they? Wikipedia mentions that there is some "Beta" cross communication, but I don't know how that works. MSN and Yahoo are in direct competition... I'm not aware of any cross communication there. And then there's Gtalk.
So that is 4 accounts, at best. The different account also means you have to publish and maintain several different identities. Then there are problems (I have found) using different IM clients.... particularly when trying to exchange files. Not sure if it is firewalls or what.
When it is all said and done, I don't bother to publicly publish my IM identity like i might email.
-matthew
I don't understand your meaning.
I dunno... in case of emergency? Maybe if your cell phone is not getting a signal, is misplaced, or is uncharged?
So what difference does it make whether you get a personal call on your cell phone or your desk phone? Either way you're taking/making a personal call on company time. Seems like a pretty arbitrary distinction to me.
What if your cell phone is paid for by your company? Do you just not get any personal calls except for at home? Would you own two different cell phones?
Well, I'm not going to be passing love notes on the corporate email. Besides those types of messages, why not? What do I care?
Dude, if there's a court order to see my corporate email, I'm going to have bigger things to worry about than having some boring personal messages go public.
-matthew
I grew up not using snail-mail. Instead we passed notes on paper, as did most kids at the time. It was the "poor man's" version of snail-mail. Only faster (for our purposes) and less formal. It worked because everyone I knew was in the same building 5 days of the week. But guess what? It never left school. Businesses did not start passing notes around by hand even though that is what kids were accustomed to when they were young. The fact is that businesses need more robust, universal forms of communication. And that is email... like it or not. Social networks will not work in the real world for the same reason that passing notes around school wouldn't work... it isn't robust and universal. Doesn't matter if kids are accustomed to using social networks.
But in this case, there is a real need for a better way to exchange documents over the internet. Email has always been very problematic when it comes to sharting documents. For examples, many mail servers simply won't transmit messages over a certain size. Or certain file types. There has to be some technical and/or business reason for a paradigm shift. Just because kids become accustomed to using something isn't enough.
-matthew
"Less portable" is a significant difference.... at least when you grow up and leave your little adolescent social circle for the real world. The reason telephone, email, and snail-mail are still in such wide use today is that they are ubiquitous. You can reach just about anyone with them. A PM on a social networking site is limited to that social networking site. It cannot become a primary means of communication in the long term. Instant Messaging has a similar limitation. Several times I've tried to establish IM as a primary means of communication with people and it often comes down to "Oh, I don't have an _____ account." So you either get an account with every major service or you fall back to more universal (though perhaps slower) means of communication such as email.
-matthew
The bugs in Firefox are not nearly as significant as the shortcomings of XUL. XUL is definitly better for programming "rich" applications than HTML, but once you start using it you realize that the Mozilla team only developed XUL just enough to get the browser up and running. Last time I used XUL there were big parts that just didn't get any attention. And even if all the widgets did function as they were meant to, they'd still be a more limiting than common desktop toolkits. And then there's Javascript, which also shows its limitations when an app starts to get rather complex. Javascript, despite being object oriented on the surface, doesn't even have a proper class inheritance system.
-matthew
And http://www.karppinen.fi/pyro/
Because hardly anybody WANTs a simple speadsheet and word processor. Particular businesses with an intranet. People LIKE the fancy-schmancy stuff. Putting it on the intranet doesn't make a simple spreadsheet program any more attractive than if it was on your desktop. Simple (often free) spreadsheet and word processor programs have been around, like, forever, but people just go out and buy MS Office anyway. That is just the way it is.
-matthew
Ahh, Virus Creation Lab. What memories. Brings me back to the days when viruses were pleasure, not business.
I wonder who actually pays for these tools? Seems like such a tool would be freely downloadable after teh first purchase. I mean, it isn't like the author is going to try to sue you or anything (though maybe he'll DDoS your download site). It would be like a drug dealer calling the cops because someone stole his supply.
-matthew
Y-chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve are separated by at least 30,000 years. So that doesn't tell really suggest that they necessarily came from the same place. A lot of migration can happen in 30,000 years.
-matthew
Unfortunately all that dead algae gets broken down by bacteria and a lot of the CO2 goes back into the water/atmosphere.
Um, what good does it do to cover the operation if you're just going to push air through it and blow the moistened air away?
Anyway, I thought about it more and realized that you could aerate the water outside of the system (by passing bubbles through it, perhaps) and circulate it back into the sealed growing chambers. That way you would never expose the system to the dry desert wind. Still, I imagine you'd need some fresh water source. Plenty of water would be pulled out with the harvested algae.
-matthew
A full blown military victory (world conquest) is actually pretty difficult in a normal speed game in IV, IMO. Depending on teh size of the map and the number of civs. Playing Epic or Marathon speeds make it easier, if only because you have more time to move units around... even if you're not technically producing them faster. Spaceship victory often becomes the "default" win for me unless I'm just so far ahead of anyone else.
But generally speaking, military conquest is just more fun. But you still need to play diplomacy. You can't just go to war with everyone and expect to win like older versions of Civ. Also, larger civs take a big hit to their economy. So you could dominate nearly half the world and still have some a much smaller civ going neck and neck with you as far as technology. And if you're not careful, they'll get the spaceship before you.
Anyway, I just started playing the "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization" mod for Civ IV and it several new dimensions to the game. A big one is the concept of Unique Historical Victories (UHV). Each civ gets its own set of victory conditions based loosely on real history. For example, China has to have 2 Taoist Pagotas and 2 Confucius Acadamies by 1000 AD, no cities lost to Barbarians or Mongols by 1300 or so, and 120 military units by 1600. It is a real challenge. If you get bored trying to reach one Civ's victory conditions you can try another civ and get a completely different game. You can also play multiple civs at a time if you want. Oh, and different civs start at different, more realistic, times in the game. Normally in Civilization, all civs are created more or less equal. Not so in Rhye's and Fall.
Also, there is a concept of Civ stability in Rhye's mod. You could be kicking ass all over the place and suddenly lose half or even all of your cities to revolt or the resurrection of another civ if you don't maintain stability.
Civ IV is the best Civ yet, by far.
-matthew
Sure, but you have to get the water from somewhere to run such an operation in a desert. Don't you have to circulate the air to "feed" the algae? Won't that cause significant evaporation?
You don't want to use valuable fresh water for that. If you pipe in sea water (assuming you can grow the right kind of algae in sea water), I imagine you might have trouble with salinity levels as the water evaporates from the constant air circulation.
-matthew
I don't really think there is much of a comparison. I played around with Miro when it was called Democracy Player. And it was much much more than just a player. It was supposed to be this whole way of managing, subscribing to, and downloading video. It is like iTunes with some free "channels" and a program guide, but it also includes things like a Bittorrent client.
I never really got into it if only because I don't care to use my computer like a TV. Most of my major video downloads to directly to a MythTV box running Torrentflux. Watching anything more than an amusing 5 minute video short on my computer isn't very appealing.
-matthew
This isn't about how and when police should use wiretaps. It is about companies ignoring their ethical obligation to detect any and all "spyware." Hence the note to self: "Never by anything from Checkpoint" They either can't be trusted to do the job you pay them to do.
For an example of why this whitelisting is a problem regardless of whether or not individual wiretapping cases are legit: What if a criminal decides to utilize the police spyware? How hard can it be to take a machine has been "bugged" by the police, find the binary, and copy it for your own use... and do your dirty work undetected? All it takes is one clever hacker to dissect the police keylogger and distribute it amongst his friends....
-matthew
Um, how can you have judicial oversight for a blanket whitelist?
-matthew
Sure, why not? Fight the power.
-matthew