The answer is that populations drift as a group. See Ring Species. Let's do a thought experiment:
There are two colonies of large farting rodents: One lives in the northern brush where predators largely ignore them because of the smell of their flatulence, and the other group lives on a warm little island in the Mediterranean where their farts, combined with the warmth and humidity, attract bacterial infections on their eggs and genetalia. In the first group, rodents born with a slight 'deformity' that causes smellier farts, or longer or thicker hair to combat the cold, or even oilier skin and hair to keep them warm when it rains, are more able to survive. In the second group, however, rodents born with a 'deformity' that causes them to fart less, or not at all, or with decreased smell, are more fit. Furthermore, finer, sparser hair allows them to stay cool when they run from the occasional predator, and the question of dry vs. oily skin and hair seems not to matter at all.
There are hundreds of traits like this that can come up in different environments. Sinus size, leg length, bone shape, sweat glands, skin pore size, ability to digest certain toxins, ability to respond to certain plants as immune stimulants -- the list could go on forever. The 'deformities' that work propagate through the population until the individuals without them are the odd ones out. They become the 'low hanging fruit' for predators, or are simply shunned by potential mates who want the genes more suited to the environment. Speciation "has occurred" when most or all of the members of one population have become different enough from the other population that offspring don't (or very rarely) survive, and/or are infertile.
It may not even be the selected traits that are causing the speciation. It could be genes that have no selective pressure at all, that simply 'piggyback' on the same chromosomes as the enhanced genes, that cause an incompatibility. Even in identical environments, since mutations are random, two other phenomena occur: Different traits have survival advantages for different reasons, and the same feature develops independently multiple times. If a source of food goes extinct in the area (a particular family of nuts, we'll say), the rodents can go in several directions -- and probably would, if they were on opposite sides of a river or mountain, or on two nearby but well-separated islands. A rat with stronger teeth or a shorter jaw will be healthier because he can eat tougher nuts instead. A rat with longer legs, or a better tail for balance, or a longer snout can catch insects more easily. But the same physical trait can come about in several ways. Perhaps some of the rats have longer legs because of hormonal changes, whereas other rats grow an elongated spongiform pattern in their bones, while still others grow denser, thicker, longer bones because they can digest more calcium from the same food.
The rats could even have been in the population for hundreds of years, through the good times, but now that something bad has happened, they're pretty much the only ones who will survive. Survival in the island climate may have been completely neutral to hair and skin oil, or the direction of hair growth, but if the rodents had to start swimming for some reason, perhaps to avoid a new predator, those traits would start to matter very quickly. It could even be a one-time event. A pack of predators gets lost, and wanders into a rat camp; Those that are best able to climb trees, or dig a hole deep into the ground, or swim out to a rock for safety, are the only ones that survive. And, therefore, only the chromosomes containing those genes still exist for that population.
Whenever the 'standard' set of genes for one population changes, you increase the chances that they won't mix well with another set to create a viable organism. In the end, after several hundred generations, provided that the relevant traits occ
This is a good reason for why compulsory public schooling is a bad idea altogether. We live in a different world now, but most really successful people in our nation's history learned a lot from their parents, community leaders, and friends' parents. If they went to school, it was for a few years, to become numerate and literate, but then it was right back out again. The primary source of education, from adolescence through adulthood, was books -- including the majority of our founding fathers. Now, less than half of Americans read a single book in any given year, but I digress. Public schoolteachers have forever been the bottom of the barrel; I believe that school is a demotivating and only marginally educational experience for many students, but it's hard to imagine that this will change for the first time in modern history (or quite possibly, human history).
We don't think of physical strength or athletic ability as "fixed", just waiting for us to "learn to use it." We need to think of intellectual activity in the same terms that we think of physical activity.
Which is pretty much how the parent poster put it. Your genes AND your personality define limits on your ability to exert yourself physically. Your upper limits for intelligence, physical fitness, and many other traits are indeed in your DNA, but you must reach them for the limits to be relevant. If you teach a child that athletic ability does not improve with exercise, he will not be likely to exercise and obtain the corresponding benefits. The article suggests that if you teach a child that academic aptitude is not strengthened primarily through study and hard work, these, too, will be eschewed.
But, by the same token, two children of different families or different ethnicities can do the same exercises (mentally, physically, whatever) and (1) progress at a very different pace, and also (2) reach different absolute limits of ability regardless of effort.
Umm... Wiser isn't a word I would use to extoll Napoleon Bonaparte above myself, but speech is free (and cheap).
Furthermore, you are aware that Asus and Microsoft are two different companies?
If he wants to wear the tinfoil hat, what could be more damaging than making a minor, innocent-looking mistake, and then being attacked legally for it? Make no mistake: to someone without an intimate familiarity with the issues, ASUS being sued -- after releasing a top-notch product that will put Linux and FOSS in the hands of millions, no less -- for not including the source to a driver they wrote for their own hardware, looks really bad. This is the MS PR Department's dream. Whether they had anything to do with it is anyone's guess (and I suspect you're right that it is unrelated), but I challenge you to come up with a more subtle, but equally damaging, feint. And ASUS does stand to benefit from super-low-priced copies of XP for its Eee laptops.
"Oh, but you can! Though you may have to metaphorically make a deal with the devil. And by 'devil', I mean 'robot devil'. And by 'metaphorically', I mean 'Get your coat.'"
It'll probably be like the Y2K problem, or any other really serious, but solvable, looming crisis -- if huge amounts of research, development, and public education are thrown at it, and everyone is prepared, it will be monumentally underwhelming. But if you treat the proponents like crazies, and choose to believe that it isn't a problem at all, it will be a catastrophe on the order of the fall of the Roman Empire. That is, they will still be writing books about it thousands of years from now, and people will wonder how different the world might have been if only we were prepared.
I'm pretty sure the technology has been available to crafty criminals for some time now. This is an old story, as I remember reading about a homebrew project HERF gun, complete with a video of the guy stopping a car in its tracks, right here on Slashdot eight years ago. Although, the car-stopping video could be a misplaced memory that actually goes with this later story. This is the commercialization of that tech, but (and my memory may be fuzzy here) the one I remember was built with a bank of capacitors from the flash circuits of discarded one-time-use cameras.
BTW, I totally lucked out on this one, since "HERF" is such a rare term. Slashdot search tends to be abysmal for more common words.
That's the reason TO attack us. If we keep inflating our currency and not making something valuable to buy with that debt, then they've got two options: (1) Make us pay up, or (2) make us pay dearly. This is just a ridiculously huge case of what a restaurateur would do with a ne'er-do-well trying to skip out on the check. You can choose to put him to work, find a way to ostracize him so he won't eat at a restaurant in your city ever again, or you can rough him up a bit and toss him out on the street to vent your anger and deter others like him. No situation is optimal for the owner, but once the guy's eaten the food, you don't very well just let him get away with it.
All debt must be repaid; I'm afraid too many of us have forgotten that little truth. It will probably simply put a drag on our lifestyles for some time while we become the export economy and the other countries get to live it up, but it's definitely worth a bit of caution and diplomacy. Similar to your original post: It's not like we'd honor their treasury bonds in a cease-fire agreement, or It's not like we'd honor their treasury bonds to avoid UN trade sanctions, or It's not like we'd work a long, hard week for the occupying forces. Lots of things can happen, and only the rarest of truly important events seems conceivable beforehand.
I agree. I'm only 6' even, but I've been lifting weights off and on since I was a teenager (coming up on 12 years now). The BMI Pegs me as obese, but my last body fat measurement put me at 21% body fat -- a little overweight, but by no means obese. To reach obesity, actually defined as 25% or more body fat, I would have to pack on eight pounds of fat and no additional lean tissue. If I somehow shed 41.5 pounds of this fat, down to 174 pounds at roughly 2% body fat, which is quite unhealthy and can result in joint damage and organ failure (and therefore death), BMI would peg me at 23.6 -- the very top end of the "healthy" range, close to overweight, and significantly above the accepted "underweight" range, defined as a BMI of 15 to 18.5.
If you run the numbers for your 74" frame, using your lean body mass as a baseline, I'm guessing you would get similar results. BMI is all but useless.
Actually, that's wrong. According to the article, the way this bug manifests itself is that it treats file "C" as having been copied, when it actually was not committed to disk. If I understand correctly, the only file you lose would be "C" ("A,B" on the remote share, dir containing "D" on local), as it is apparently marking files for deletion as they enter the outbound I/O queue (the copy begins), instead of when the copy completes.
Not really. If you can't add your app to the menu without cracking the menu system, and you can't replace the menu without recompiling the relevant parts of the operating system / firmware, you're pretty much screwed. Writing compatible apps hasn't yet been an issue on the iPhone... Further, if you lose access to basic phone features (whose software is proprietary) in doing so, you're at an impasse with your potential userbase, at least those for whom sacrificing basic phone functionality, or replacing their firmware, is untenable.
In essence, your argument that no such "walled garden" exists can be falsified if the following is false: 'GPL software can't be used to encrypt data, because you can read the source code'. Private keys aren't part of the source. Just because most Linux mobile OS projects have been based around an ideology of freedom of access, doesn't mean another counterexample or three won't come along any day now.
Unless 3rd parties get to develop in any available language and it's just that the GUI is in Java, what's to differentiate this from what Danger (Sidekick) does? What differentiates them from billions of other handsets that run Java apps at slow speeds?
A perpetual skeptic, I'll read the announcement for my real evidence. But it sounds like a Microsoft-type ploy may be in order, where first-party apps are fundamentally better than later apps (although they both suck) not by any difference or deficiencies in the goals or capabilities of the third-party developers, but because the apps are subject to different arbitrary rules. Or like the iPhone, where 3rd-party apps to date have been relegated to Javascript and an active Internet connection... Google's motto aside, be wary. Putting other people down to make yourself look good a practice that seems to have pay off for others.
I can one-up you on that. I recently saw a security system control panel with the four-digit PIN code written in permanent marker on the plastic housing near the LCD display, and clearly labeled as such: "Security Code: 1-1-1-1". To make it even worse, the panel directly faces the unreinforced glass doors used for the business's main entrance, and is clearly legible from outside the building.
This is a very important thing, that keeps me sane. I have used Graffiti since it was a Newton program. Even though the Newton OS v2.0 had really great handwriting recognition (no joke!), Graffiti has always been much faster. I can remember taking notes using Graffiti on a Newton MessagePad 100 that I bought on clearance for $150.00 when I was in High School. It has lower CPU utilization, faster input, accurate punctuation, bullets and accented characters, and less strain on the hands -- what's not to like, other than a short training period?
Graffiti 2 destroys Palm's advantage of having sane, consistent input, and puts it back on a level playing field with every other generic PDA. Reverting to the old Graffiti is a highly recommended upgrade. I've used it on my Zire 72 since the day I bought it in 2004 without any problems; I've even used it with third-party IME's for languages the system wasn't designed to display (Chinese, Japanese).
Well, and also: If I'm going to get it for free anyway, why would I put all the bandwidth costs and server load on the artist's server, when similarly-minded fans are all willing to pick up the bandwidth bills for each other via symmetric filesharing ala BitTorrent? After all, I think the artist's investment of time, creative energy, etc. is sufficient. I could increase my donation a *little* to cover the costs of distributing it to me, but why do that when my computer can effectively barter on my behalf, with no investment of time or effort, AND get a faster, more reliable download with a torrent?
And, then I could get a copy of Windows to run in Parallels for a reasonable price. I'm pretty sure I can still get a Windows PC with XP on it as cheaply as a retail copy of the OS, if I'm willing to shop around a bit.
All the parameters should be automatic by default, especially scalebelow -- on auto, once the least-important path in the image exceeds a given complexity, the algorithm would switch to simply scaling down the previously-smallest retargeted image. All in all, pretty exciting stuff for web design. Especially if you want to take a landscape photo or some such and stretch it into a background image along one or both axes.
Umm, I don't think that visiting a federal park in your own state would exempt you from this requirement. Note the line in the summary (emphasis mine):
The IDs will be required for access to all federal areas including flights, state parks and federal buildings.
Hey, if it's all being bioengineered, why not make migratory plants? In the winter, they all swim in to shore to be harvested. Sky's the limit, right? Or perhaps we just engineer them to clump into miles-wide clusters, and throw a hook or two in to tow the whole thing to shore.
If capitalistic values really are hereditary, then no amount of societal change would have suddenly given the Japanese the prerequisite genes that allowed them to industrialize
Actually, I can't figure out what would lead you to that conclusion. Any amount of societal change (starting from the extremes of predatory or mercenary ruling classes stated above) would have done that. It's very hard to cull out a gene with no morphological expression. A change in social preference toward settled, peaceable relations would have very quickly translated into exponential growth of the upper class.
The point I'm trying to make is that the result was the same, for similar reasons, but the means probably differed. Whereas in the west, the ruling families may have 'seeded' the peasant class with their highly-motivated and better-educated offspring, in the east it could have been the opposite: The predatory ruling class declined, and the peasant class, with those same nascent genes, obtained the resources to fill that void and establish a society in which education, civility, and productive labor are rewarded.
I'm reminded of an argument put forth in Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God: If, once we reach a certain level of technological sophistication, it takes only hundreds or thousands of years to either annihilate ourselves or transfer our consciousness into a virtual world, what are the chances that any two types of intelligent life could exist contemporaneously anywhere in the universe, provided that a sufficiently intelligent species develops science and technology only after developing for several billion years?
We're not even confident that our social experiment will last right now. We've had 120 years or so of real technology -- and there's no guarantee that resource constraints, political strife, or any number of environmental factors won't return us to subsistence farming within a few more generations. The real question is, given not only the incredibly large size of the universe, but also the almost incomprehensibly-long timelines, what are the chances that two intelligent species will be concurrently intelligent, civilized, and looking for each other... and furthermore, what is the chance that we are one of them (and at this very moment)?
If anybody is planning to benchmark this running common apps, I'd also be very interested to see how the approach to hiding memory latency works on more pedestrian applications like video encoding and pattern recognition (and maybe even thread-heavy GUI's).
IIRC (I researched this proc years ago for a University paper), it tries to hide latency by switching thread contexts whenever there is a cache miss or branch misprediction. The crossbar should help a little with cache-related stalls, but the core would already have switched to another thread in any case. So, if there are complex paths of execution, you'd only run them a fraction of the time, on cores that are pretty bare-bones to start with. HPC is probably still better off with single-processor systems, even with the addition of per-core FPU's in Niagara 2, but the Niagara architecture could be really great as a coordinating hub and reporting center for a number of networked number-crunching machines.
That's still nothing compared to when the Beijing Evening News translated and reprinted an Onion article about Congress going on strike and threatening to move to another city because they wanted a retractible dome, better seating and parking, and more concession stands and bathrooms for the Capitol Building, complete with illustrations. They had to issue a formal retraction.
I agree that more young people should vote -- I don't think the boomers waited until their thirties to start voting, and neither should we. But let's get back to the question at hand, Is the internet a suitable medium for political advertising? And, more pertinently, is it an appropriate medium to capture the interest of a younger, disaffected generation? The intent of Japan's law here is to limit the public's exposure to the politicians' direct message.
Most recent grassroots campaigns are started online. AFAIK, nobody is talking about stopping community efforts to get the word out about a candidate. The potential benefit is in keeping the politicians and their paid interests offline and limiting their exposure to the public. It prevents the most well-funded candidate or political action committee from having multiple staffers constantly astroturfing on myspace, or bombarding you with advertisements. And, it should cause the size of the campaign to more closely reflect the number of people who genuinely want the candidate elected.
This is probably part of the reason the boomer generation has been able to behave the way they do -- they receive all of their information top-down. Perhaps if they weren't inundated by thirteen political advertisements per hour on TV and radio, and didn't have flyers in their mailboxes weekly, they could be a little curious about what's really going on. And if every article about a candidate online couldn't link back to that person's propaganda-filled website, that could be good, too. As it is, most people think they already know what's relevant. So, while it's far from certainty, restrictions like this may be a solution to the passiveness and complacency you mention above.
But caring isn't enough. We have to go further and start convincing our parents and bosses to think again. Like it or not, a lot of this complacency and feeling helpless is justified: The Baby Boomer generation is 77 million people here in the US, compared to 44 million people for other age groups over the same time span. In Japan, it's worse. Their social safety nets are even *better* at causing children to be a net liability instead of an asset. That means people, through greater perceived benefits, are more deeply committed to the status quo, and there are fewer young people to oppose the system.
Perhaps a little real-world experience is just what the younger generation needs so they can feel ready to decide for themselves. But I hardly think online advertising and second life pavilions are the best way to convince them that there is a real world in need of their attention, and that they should start to give a rat's ass about what happens beyond the walls of their apartments.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is that populations drift as a group. See Ring Species. Let's do a thought experiment:
There are two colonies of large farting rodents: One lives in the northern brush where predators largely ignore them because of the smell of their flatulence, and the other group lives on a warm little island in the Mediterranean where their farts, combined with the warmth and humidity, attract bacterial infections on their eggs and genetalia. In the first group, rodents born with a slight 'deformity' that causes smellier farts, or longer or thicker hair to combat the cold, or even oilier skin and hair to keep them warm when it rains, are more able to survive. In the second group, however, rodents born with a 'deformity' that causes them to fart less, or not at all, or with decreased smell, are more fit. Furthermore, finer, sparser hair allows them to stay cool when they run from the occasional predator, and the question of dry vs. oily skin and hair seems not to matter at all.
There are hundreds of traits like this that can come up in different environments. Sinus size, leg length, bone shape, sweat glands, skin pore size, ability to digest certain toxins, ability to respond to certain plants as immune stimulants -- the list could go on forever. The 'deformities' that work propagate through the population until the individuals without them are the odd ones out. They become the 'low hanging fruit' for predators, or are simply shunned by potential mates who want the genes more suited to the environment. Speciation "has occurred" when most or all of the members of one population have become different enough from the other population that offspring don't (or very rarely) survive, and/or are infertile.
It may not even be the selected traits that are causing the speciation. It could be genes that have no selective pressure at all, that simply 'piggyback' on the same chromosomes as the enhanced genes, that cause an incompatibility. Even in identical environments, since mutations are random, two other phenomena occur: Different traits have survival advantages for different reasons, and the same feature develops independently multiple times. If a source of food goes extinct in the area (a particular family of nuts, we'll say), the rodents can go in several directions -- and probably would, if they were on opposite sides of a river or mountain, or on two nearby but well-separated islands. A rat with stronger teeth or a shorter jaw will be healthier because he can eat tougher nuts instead. A rat with longer legs, or a better tail for balance, or a longer snout can catch insects more easily. But the same physical trait can come about in several ways. Perhaps some of the rats have longer legs because of hormonal changes, whereas other rats grow an elongated spongiform pattern in their bones, while still others grow denser, thicker, longer bones because they can digest more calcium from the same food.
The rats could even have been in the population for hundreds of years, through the good times, but now that something bad has happened, they're pretty much the only ones who will survive. Survival in the island climate may have been completely neutral to hair and skin oil, or the direction of hair growth, but if the rodents had to start swimming for some reason, perhaps to avoid a new predator, those traits would start to matter very quickly. It could even be a one-time event. A pack of predators gets lost, and wanders into a rat camp; Those that are best able to climb trees, or dig a hole deep into the ground, or swim out to a rock for safety, are the only ones that survive. And, therefore, only the chromosomes containing those genes still exist for that population.
Whenever the 'standard' set of genes for one population changes, you increase the chances that they won't mix well with another set to create a viable organism. In the end, after several hundred generations, provided that the relevant traits occ
This is a good reason for why compulsory public schooling is a bad idea altogether. We live in a different world now, but most really successful people in our nation's history learned a lot from their parents, community leaders, and friends' parents. If they went to school, it was for a few years, to become numerate and literate, but then it was right back out again. The primary source of education, from adolescence through adulthood, was books -- including the majority of our founding fathers. Now, less than half of Americans read a single book in any given year, but I digress. Public schoolteachers have forever been the bottom of the barrel; I believe that school is a demotivating and only marginally educational experience for many students, but it's hard to imagine that this will change for the first time in modern history (or quite possibly, human history).
Which is pretty much how the parent poster put it. Your genes AND your personality define limits on your ability to exert yourself physically. Your upper limits for intelligence, physical fitness, and many other traits are indeed in your DNA, but you must reach them for the limits to be relevant. If you teach a child that athletic ability does not improve with exercise, he will not be likely to exercise and obtain the corresponding benefits. The article suggests that if you teach a child that academic aptitude is not strengthened primarily through study and hard work, these, too, will be eschewed.
But, by the same token, two children of different families or different ethnicities can do the same exercises (mentally, physically, whatever) and (1) progress at a very different pace, and also (2) reach different absolute limits of ability regardless of effort.
Umm ... Wiser isn't a word I would use to extoll Napoleon Bonaparte above myself, but speech is free (and cheap).
Furthermore, you are aware that Asus and Microsoft are two different companies?If he wants to wear the tinfoil hat, what could be more damaging than making a minor, innocent-looking mistake, and then being attacked legally for it? Make no mistake: to someone without an intimate familiarity with the issues, ASUS being sued -- after releasing a top-notch product that will put Linux and FOSS in the hands of millions, no less -- for not including the source to a driver they wrote for their own hardware, looks really bad. This is the MS PR Department's dream. Whether they had anything to do with it is anyone's guess (and I suspect you're right that it is unrelated), but I challenge you to come up with a more subtle, but equally damaging, feint. And ASUS does stand to benefit from super-low-priced copies of XP for its Eee laptops.
"Oh, but you can! Though you may have to metaphorically make a deal with the devil. And by 'devil', I mean 'robot devil'. And by 'metaphorically', I mean 'Get your coat.'"
It'll probably be like the Y2K problem, or any other really serious, but solvable, looming crisis -- if huge amounts of research, development, and public education are thrown at it, and everyone is prepared, it will be monumentally underwhelming. But if you treat the proponents like crazies, and choose to believe that it isn't a problem at all, it will be a catastrophe on the order of the fall of the Roman Empire. That is, they will still be writing books about it thousands of years from now, and people will wonder how different the world might have been if only we were prepared.
I'm pretty sure the technology has been available to crafty criminals for some time now. This is an old story, as I remember reading about a homebrew project HERF gun, complete with a video of the guy stopping a car in its tracks, right here on Slashdot eight years ago. Although, the car-stopping video could be a misplaced memory that actually goes with this later story. This is the commercialization of that tech, but (and my memory may be fuzzy here) the one I remember was built with a bank of capacitors from the flash circuits of discarded one-time-use cameras.
BTW, I totally lucked out on this one, since "HERF" is such a rare term. Slashdot search tends to be abysmal for more common words.
That's the reason TO attack us. If we keep inflating our currency and not making something valuable to buy with that debt, then they've got two options: (1) Make us pay up, or (2) make us pay dearly. This is just a ridiculously huge case of what a restaurateur would do with a ne'er-do-well trying to skip out on the check. You can choose to put him to work, find a way to ostracize him so he won't eat at a restaurant in your city ever again, or you can rough him up a bit and toss him out on the street to vent your anger and deter others like him. No situation is optimal for the owner, but once the guy's eaten the food, you don't very well just let him get away with it.
All debt must be repaid; I'm afraid too many of us have forgotten that little truth. It will probably simply put a drag on our lifestyles for some time while we become the export economy and the other countries get to live it up, but it's definitely worth a bit of caution and diplomacy. Similar to your original post: It's not like we'd honor their treasury bonds in a cease-fire agreement, or It's not like we'd honor their treasury bonds to avoid UN trade sanctions, or It's not like we'd work a long, hard week for the occupying forces. Lots of things can happen, and only the rarest of truly important events seems conceivable beforehand.
I agree. I'm only 6' even, but I've been lifting weights off and on since I was a teenager (coming up on 12 years now). The BMI Pegs me as obese, but my last body fat measurement put me at 21% body fat -- a little overweight, but by no means obese. To reach obesity, actually defined as 25% or more body fat, I would have to pack on eight pounds of fat and no additional lean tissue. If I somehow shed 41.5 pounds of this fat, down to 174 pounds at roughly 2% body fat, which is quite unhealthy and can result in joint damage and organ failure (and therefore death), BMI would peg me at 23.6 -- the very top end of the "healthy" range, close to overweight, and significantly above the accepted "underweight" range, defined as a BMI of 15 to 18.5.
If you run the numbers for your 74" frame, using your lean body mass as a baseline, I'm guessing you would get similar results. BMI is all but useless.
Actually, that's wrong. According to the article, the way this bug manifests itself is that it treats file "C" as having been copied, when it actually was not committed to disk. If I understand correctly, the only file you lose would be "C" ("A,B" on the remote share, dir containing "D" on local), as it is apparently marking files for deletion as they enter the outbound I/O queue (the copy begins), instead of when the copy completes.
Not really. If you can't add your app to the menu without cracking the menu system, and you can't replace the menu without recompiling the relevant parts of the operating system / firmware, you're pretty much screwed. Writing compatible apps hasn't yet been an issue on the iPhone... Further, if you lose access to basic phone features (whose software is proprietary) in doing so, you're at an impasse with your potential userbase, at least those for whom sacrificing basic phone functionality, or replacing their firmware, is untenable.
In essence, your argument that no such "walled garden" exists can be falsified if the following is false: 'GPL software can't be used to encrypt data, because you can read the source code'. Private keys aren't part of the source. Just because most Linux mobile OS projects have been based around an ideology of freedom of access, doesn't mean another counterexample or three won't come along any day now.
Unless 3rd parties get to develop in any available language and it's just that the GUI is in Java, what's to differentiate this from what Danger (Sidekick) does? What differentiates them from billions of other handsets that run Java apps at slow speeds?
A perpetual skeptic, I'll read the announcement for my real evidence. But it sounds like a Microsoft-type ploy may be in order, where first-party apps are fundamentally better than later apps (although they both suck) not by any difference or deficiencies in the goals or capabilities of the third-party developers, but because the apps are subject to different arbitrary rules. Or like the iPhone, where 3rd-party apps to date have been relegated to Javascript and an active Internet connection... Google's motto aside, be wary. Putting other people down to make yourself look good a practice that seems to have pay off for others.
Then, it sounds like we need a lethal, compulsory video game with a computer security theme.
I can one-up you on that. I recently saw a security system control panel with the four-digit PIN code written in permanent marker on the plastic housing near the LCD display, and clearly labeled as such: "Security Code: 1-1-1-1". To make it even worse, the panel directly faces the unreinforced glass doors used for the business's main entrance, and is clearly legible from outside the building.
This is a very important thing, that keeps me sane. I have used Graffiti since it was a Newton program. Even though the Newton OS v2.0 had really great handwriting recognition (no joke!), Graffiti has always been much faster. I can remember taking notes using Graffiti on a Newton MessagePad 100 that I bought on clearance for $150.00 when I was in High School. It has lower CPU utilization, faster input, accurate punctuation, bullets and accented characters, and less strain on the hands -- what's not to like, other than a short training period?
Graffiti 2 destroys Palm's advantage of having sane, consistent input, and puts it back on a level playing field with every other generic PDA. Reverting to the old Graffiti is a highly recommended upgrade. I've used it on my Zire 72 since the day I bought it in 2004 without any problems; I've even used it with third-party IME's for languages the system wasn't designed to display (Chinese, Japanese).
Well, and also: If I'm going to get it for free anyway, why would I put all the bandwidth costs and server load on the artist's server, when similarly-minded fans are all willing to pick up the bandwidth bills for each other via symmetric filesharing ala BitTorrent? After all, I think the artist's investment of time, creative energy, etc. is sufficient. I could increase my donation a *little* to cover the costs of distributing it to me, but why do that when my computer can effectively barter on my behalf, with no investment of time or effort, AND get a faster, more reliable download with a torrent?
And, then I could get a copy of Windows to run in Parallels for a reasonable price. I'm pretty sure I can still get a Windows PC with XP on it as cheaply as a retail copy of the OS, if I'm willing to shop around a bit.
But, in this situation, good luck staying in the jury pool past the first round of questioning.
Exactly. I keep seeing this as an extension to HTML, and what I'm coming up with is this (or the same in CSS, actually):
All the parameters should be automatic by default, especially scalebelow -- on auto, once the least-important path in the image exceeds a given complexity, the algorithm would switch to simply scaling down the previously-smallest retargeted image. All in all, pretty exciting stuff for web design. Especially if you want to take a landscape photo or some such and stretch it into a background image along one or both axes.
Umm, I don't think that visiting a federal park in your own state would exempt you from this requirement. Note the line in the summary (emphasis mine):
Hey, if it's all being bioengineered, why not make migratory plants? In the winter, they all swim in to shore to be harvested. Sky's the limit, right? Or perhaps we just engineer them to clump into miles-wide clusters, and throw a hook or two in to tow the whole thing to shore.
Actually, I can't figure out what would lead you to that conclusion. Any amount of societal change (starting from the extremes of predatory or mercenary ruling classes stated above) would have done that. It's very hard to cull out a gene with no morphological expression. A change in social preference toward settled, peaceable relations would have very quickly translated into exponential growth of the upper class.
The point I'm trying to make is that the result was the same, for similar reasons, but the means probably differed. Whereas in the west, the ruling families may have 'seeded' the peasant class with their highly-motivated and better-educated offspring, in the east it could have been the opposite: The predatory ruling class declined, and the peasant class, with those same nascent genes, obtained the resources to fill that void and establish a society in which education, civility, and productive labor are rewarded.
I'm reminded of an argument put forth in Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God: If, once we reach a certain level of technological sophistication, it takes only hundreds or thousands of years to either annihilate ourselves or transfer our consciousness into a virtual world, what are the chances that any two types of intelligent life could exist contemporaneously anywhere in the universe, provided that a sufficiently intelligent species develops science and technology only after developing for several billion years?
We're not even confident that our social experiment will last right now. We've had 120 years or so of real technology -- and there's no guarantee that resource constraints, political strife, or any number of environmental factors won't return us to subsistence farming within a few more generations. The real question is, given not only the incredibly large size of the universe, but also the almost incomprehensibly-long timelines, what are the chances that two intelligent species will be concurrently intelligent, civilized, and looking for each other ... and furthermore, what is the chance that we are one of them (and at this very moment)?
If anybody is planning to benchmark this running common apps, I'd also be very interested to see how the approach to hiding memory latency works on more pedestrian applications like video encoding and pattern recognition (and maybe even thread-heavy GUI's).
IIRC (I researched this proc years ago for a University paper), it tries to hide latency by switching thread contexts whenever there is a cache miss or branch misprediction. The crossbar should help a little with cache-related stalls, but the core would already have switched to another thread in any case. So, if there are complex paths of execution, you'd only run them a fraction of the time, on cores that are pretty bare-bones to start with. HPC is probably still better off with single-processor systems, even with the addition of per-core FPU's in Niagara 2, but the Niagara architecture could be really great as a coordinating hub and reporting center for a number of networked number-crunching machines.
That's still nothing compared to when the Beijing Evening News translated and reprinted an Onion article about Congress going on strike and threatening to move to another city because they wanted a retractible dome, better seating and parking, and more concession stands and bathrooms for the Capitol Building, complete with illustrations. They had to issue a formal retraction.
I agree that more young people should vote -- I don't think the boomers waited until their thirties to start voting, and neither should we. But let's get back to the question at hand, Is the internet a suitable medium for political advertising? And, more pertinently, is it an appropriate medium to capture the interest of a younger, disaffected generation? The intent of Japan's law here is to limit the public's exposure to the politicians' direct message.
Most recent grassroots campaigns are started online. AFAIK, nobody is talking about stopping community efforts to get the word out about a candidate. The potential benefit is in keeping the politicians and their paid interests offline and limiting their exposure to the public. It prevents the most well-funded candidate or political action committee from having multiple staffers constantly astroturfing on myspace, or bombarding you with advertisements. And, it should cause the size of the campaign to more closely reflect the number of people who genuinely want the candidate elected.
This is probably part of the reason the boomer generation has been able to behave the way they do -- they receive all of their information top-down. Perhaps if they weren't inundated by thirteen political advertisements per hour on TV and radio, and didn't have flyers in their mailboxes weekly, they could be a little curious about what's really going on. And if every article about a candidate online couldn't link back to that person's propaganda-filled website, that could be good, too. As it is, most people think they already know what's relevant. So, while it's far from certainty, restrictions like this may be a solution to the passiveness and complacency you mention above.
But caring isn't enough. We have to go further and start convincing our parents and bosses to think again. Like it or not, a lot of this complacency and feeling helpless is justified: The Baby Boomer generation is 77 million people here in the US, compared to 44 million people for other age groups over the same time span. In Japan, it's worse. Their social safety nets are even *better* at causing children to be a net liability instead of an asset. That means people, through greater perceived benefits, are more deeply committed to the status quo, and there are fewer young people to oppose the system.
Perhaps a little real-world experience is just what the younger generation needs so they can feel ready to decide for themselves. But I hardly think online advertising and second life pavilions are the best way to convince them that there is a real world in need of their attention, and that they should start to give a rat's ass about what happens beyond the walls of their apartments.