OK, vagueness of the article and the Slashdot write-up aside, This has a grand total of zero chance of happening.
Best case scenario: With a little more refining, this process could be used to clean waste-water, break down some forms of trash, and produce hydrogen pack "batteries" that could be used to power all sorts of other devices and equipment with only a small investment of electricity from some other source (including an attached hydrogen-electricity generator). Great!
One problem, from TFA: The new process demonstrates, for the first time, the real potential in capturing hydrogen from renewable sources.
That is, a hydrogen economy that is not dependant on oil for its source of hydrogen in the first place. Bush and Co. will never let that happen and you know it. This is purely a novelty since it doesn't make Halliburton more money.
Try reading the very next sentence: Property applies only to rivalrous goods, that is, things that two or more people cannot have and use simultaneously.
Property as a concept was developed thousands of years ago for rivalrous goods, and is an outgrowth of the basic fact of physics that I cannot use a spear at the same time you are using the same spear. (Replace 'spear' with any other physical object you wish.) Information as something only certain people were allowed to disseminate is about 400-500 years old, only as old as the printing press, and was created to give English publishers (NOT authors, publishers) a monopoly against Scottish publishers. (Copy-right, not use-right or copy-write.) The idea of "intellectual property" (itself a lie) is a 20th century invention by modern-day publishers intent on keeping their cartels by trying to convince people (successfully in your case, it seems) that information IS property and should be as sacrosanct as physical property. Just because Jack Valenti keeps saying it, though, doesn't make it true.
Go read "Free Culture" by Larry Lessig, which goes into the history of this question in more depth (although even he makes the "property" mistake). You can even get a legally free copy from his web site: http://www.freeculture.org/ . Although I recommend the paper version, as it is a very good book.
You're already modded troll, but I'll try to explain it to you anyway.
Nikon has both property and moral rights over their software.
Sorry, that statement is false.
1) Software is information. (So too is the data in the picture being taken.) Information is NOT property. Property applies only to rivalrous goods, that is, things that two or more people cannot have and use simultaneously. That applies to all physical objects as well as things like positions and titles (eg, there can only be one CEO of BigCorp, Inc. at a time), but not to information. Information is not a rivalrous good. If you are listening to a song, and I go and start playing a copy of the exact same song, that in no way whatsoever diminishes the quality of your copy of the song, nor your enjoyment of it. Information (including software) is NOT property. This fact of physics must be understood if you wish to understand how copyrights and patents are supposed to work.
Thus, Nikon has no property right to their software.
2) The way that rivalrous goods work is well understood (capitalism) and left to its own devices with proper property protection works reasonably well (modulo monopolies and such). Information, however, since it cannot by nature be similarly controlled, works differently. "In order to promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts", the Constitution gives Congress the right to "secure to authors and inventors for a limited time" a government-granted monopoly on information they create (and until the 70s also registered). In return, there is a public archive of that information (library of congress and USPTO) so that once that limited time monopoly expires, the information is well-archived and available to anyone, as information naturally is in the first place. That is the LEGAL basis for copyrights and patents. However, it extends only as far as the information created by the author/inventor.
There is no "moral right" over proprietary information. It is only a legal device, a bit of legal trickery, intended to "promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts".
Note that I said that copyright extends only as far as the information created by the author/inventor. Nikon's potential copyright claim on their whitebalance system does NOT extend to pictures *I* take, which under US copyright law are copyrighted (not owned, copyrighted) by me. However, because Nikon refuses to let me access that image data (my copyrighted work) without their permission (using software that they have copyrighted that they won't license to me except under very narrow terms), I now cannot access my own copyrighted material without their permission. That is a major problem.
It is the exact same issue as not being able to access your own copyrighted material in MS Word format without Microsoft's permission (which they will grant for the cost of an MS Office license and agreement to let MS break into your computer to change settings), not being able to play music which you have legally purchased without Apple's permission (granted for the cost of an iPod, and a license agreement that lets Apple break into your computer to change settings, read the iTunes license), or not being able to access your own source code without Larry McVoy's permission (granted if you promise to never consider doing anything that might compete with any of his products). It's all the same issue:
- IF copyright is valid and should be kept as is, then I shouldn't have to be beholden to someone else for MY OWN copyrighted work.
- ELSE copyright as it currently stands is bunk and needs to be trashed/reduced/reformed, in which case restricting information about how the file format works is wrong in the first place because it keeps me from getting to information I CREATED.
No matter which side of that question you're on, the bottom line is that closed and proprietary file formats are BAD. They are bad for YOU, the person writing a letter, listening to music, writing software, or
without MS you have no web/html like we have today
You mean with developers not able to support a 7 year old standard, even though it would make the web a much better place, because IE still won't support all of CSS 1 much less CSS 2?
xml wouldn't get any attention if it wasn't "interwebby"
You mean if the W3C team (who were not MS employees) who developed XML hadn't thought ahead to its potential Internet use?
Or do you mean how IE is the only web browser that doesn't support XHTML, so that web developers still have to write tag-soup HTML 4 or break the standard and send XHTML as HTML in order to reach anyone using IE?
this whole XML thing is a passing phase without MS
You mean like the EU standardizing on an XML file format (OpenDocument), O'Riley and Associates publishing using an XML format (DocBook), the W3C moving EVERYTHING to XML including image formats (SVG) (yes MS is a W3C member, but they are far from the only)...
About the only thing I'll give MS credit for is breaking XSLT off from XSLFO, since the latter was taking way too long to standardize, so that now XSLT can be used independently of XSLFO, both in spec and tools. That's a good thing, I won't deny that. But given everything else they've done to hold back and stiffle the development of the "Interwebby", I'd definitely say that MS has been a net-negative on the XML-based-Internet world.
That was actually a minor slam against palmOne. Apple has a reputation of doing new and cool things. palmOne has a reputation of taking its dear sweet time to get around to some new idea, but doing a good job of it by the time they got there.
That Microsoft is now following palmOne's lead is "man bites dog" news.
Oh, this is on Brighthand. No wonder they think Microsoft is novel...
Seriously, though, there's a good one-thumb or nearly one-thumb interface out there now on the palmOne Treo 650. (Not from Microsoft, of course, so they don't acknowledge it.) It's not perfect, but the learning curve is very low. It supports both one-thumb and two-thumb interaction, or stylus interaction if you want. However, with the thumbboard and good software integration I was able to go a week with it without using the stylus in any of the included programs.
Sorry, MS, you're not being innovative. You're following palmOne. How sad is that.:-)
But improvements like these can happen only if content providers - media companies and movie studios like Disney - play along.
Once again, we see the problem of media consolidation. We don't even consider the possibility that *gasp* someone other than Disney could provide content worth watching. There are only 4 media conglomerates left, and they're all in bed with each other. None of them is going to try and get a jump on the new IPTV (or other) market, because they've all agreed that they don't feel like it. That's what being a cartel means.
They, because they have been allowed vertical monopolies (AOL/Time Warner) and government-supported monopolies on content (copyright) are able to SINGLE HANDEDLY HOLD BACK TECHNOLOGY.
This is not Promoting the Progress of Science or the Useful Arts.
I didn't used to be opposed to copyright, but the more I see, the more I wonder if it causes more problems than it's worth.
That isn't likely to happen for quite a while. Gender discrimination is complex, different discriminations interact with each other, things such as "peer-backed" discrimination tend to be ignored and there are plenty of advocates of all sorts of discrimination...
True, it's not easy. And many may find it hard to cope with this, but it's not a problem that can be handled on an institutional level. You have to first address the problem yourself, within yourself. When YOU are judging a person not on the basis of their gender (or color of their skin, or sexual preference, or whatever) but on the quality of their character and their demonstrated abilities, then you start demanding the same from those around you. If that means calling someone on it who doesn't want to be called on it, that's their problem. Eventually some will rise to your level, and become allies.
No, we won't end up with a 50/50 split in the end, probably on anything. But if everyone has taken the strength to purge themselves of of unfair bias (and maintains only fair bias, such as "if you can't do the work, I won't hire you", which is perfectly legitimate), then we'll all be healthier for it and the ratio will be wherever it "belongs".
The solution to problems in society is honorable people. Honorable people are made honorable by their own actions, not by institutions.
It may be true that, in general, men are more likely than women to write software. That doesn't mean that the way things are *now* is a perfect representation of how likely women are compared to men.
Nor does it prove that "the way things are now" is not a reasonable representation. Neither side can "prove" that the actual ratio is or isn't where it "should" be (for some arbitrary definition of "should"). However, claiming that it "should" be 50/50 for everything is, you seem to agree, inane and ignorant.
Focus on the problem, not the symptom. When people aren't driven in or out of a profession due to gender discrimination, the ratio of men to women in that profession will naturally achieve the level it "should" naturally have. What will that ratio be? Hell if I know, and neither do you. But once we've eliminated gender discrimination (both against AND FOR, including the ridiculous idea that both genders are identical), it will tend toward that point on its own.
Isn't it interesting that when dealing with bands the huge companies don't want, the spectrum is licensed on a renewable basis, while spectrum that is particularly valuable (to the public that owns it) is sold out-right to big conglomerates?
ALL spectrum should be licensed like this new band is supposed to be. Viacom can afford it, believe me.
At least for a change they're not trying to pretend this is a real article instead of a commercial. They're being very obvious that it's an unpaid advertisement. That's an improvement for Slashdot of late.
Does this mean that 2.6.x releases will actually be stable and reliable again? After getting burned by 2.6.8 and 2.6.9 (both of which had show-stopping bugs that, for instance, kept my CD burner from working or various USB-based devices, all of which worked again magically in 2.6.10), I'm now very wary of new "stable" kernel versions. On the one hand I'd like to stay up to date to get the latest security patches, but on the other I really don't need my USB ZIP drive to stop working every other kernel version. Handling individual security patch files is more trouble than it's worth for a home system, frankly (I'd rather have a life), so that's out. So what's a moderately security-minded user who wants a reliable system to do?
If going down another point level for bug fixes will help the problem, then I'm all for it. Just make it clear what people like me should be downloading.:-)
There is an IETF standard, XMPP. And as it is rather extensible, I'm sure it can do whatever AOL thinks they want to make their protocol do.
The problem is, other than Jabber, nobody (AFAIK) has implemented it.
to be more precise, the Jabber protocol (or its core subset anyway) was adopted by the IETF under the name XMPP. Jabber invented it, IETF adopted it. (Which is not a slam on IETF, that's how they usually work, which is fine. Just give credit where credit is due.)
- Do we know what kind of removable memory it has? (What is TransFlash??)
TransFlash is a removable flash memory format designed by SanDisk specifically for Motorola at their request. It's used in about 3-5 Motorola phones now, I think, and absolutely nowhere else. It's thin enough and small enough that you could lose it and not even realize it's gone for weeks until you need it. It's about the size as my pinky fingernail, and almost as thin. It has absolutely no redeeming qualities aside from being so insanely small that Motorola can stick a slot into their phones and say they support removable media without actually allocating serious space for it. It's FAR less useful than SD or CF, the only worthwhile removable flash media format (IMHO).
Now, in their defense, Motorola assumes that most people will put one card in their phone and leave it forever, except maybe once or twice when they replace it with a bigger one and then leave that one in forever, like a hard drive. That's probably a valid assumption, but still having a proprietary format has all the associated problems with being proprietary (no competition so high prices, can't swap between devices, etc. etc. etc.)
Having Spiner play Soong in TNG made sense. That was fine. But in the Enterprise episode of which I am speaking (set ~200 years before Data and THE Dr. Soong), they had Spiner play a different Dr. Soong who was obsessed with genetic engineering. The implication was that it was the grandfather (about) of the Dr. Soong who created data. That's the part that is stupid and unnecessary. If they'd had Spiner play someone named Dr. Johnson who was obsessed with genetic engineering, and left out the android reference at the very end, then it would have improved the show dramatically. That's what I mean.
I agree that Season 4 has the POTENTIAL to be the show's best season. Of course, after the vomit that was Season 3 with the Al Queda, er, Xindii plotline and the self-satire that was the Nazi arc, it's hard to go any lower.:-) The "lots of mini-series" concept is actually a very good idea, one they should have started a while ago. However, they manage to screw it up each time.
The Augments arc would have been good, no great, had it NOT been for Dr. Soong. Now don't get me wrong, I think Brent Spiner is a great actor and he played the part wonderfully, but name dropping just killed it. Ibid with the references to "the Briar Patch" toward the end. Berman keeps hearing that people think he's ignoring the rest of Trek, so he tries to throw in these references thinking "see, they'll like me now." Sorry Rick, you're still an ass.
And the Vulcan/Siranite arc. It did a decent (but not great) job of patching up all of the problems B&B have created with the Vulcans (although I will NEVER EVER forgive them for the "Vulcans are all homophobes" episode), and laid additional groundwork for the founding of the Federation with Earth as the center, because they're the ones who got the two big powers, Vulcans and Andorians, to stop shooting at each other. That is good, and no more campy than the rest of the series... right up until the last scene in which the former Vulcan leader meets up with the Romulan to whine. See, it's not really his fault, he isn't really responsible for trying to start a war, he was being controlled by the evil bad guy Romulans. That echos a common thread in modern American culture, that nothing is ever one's own fault, it's always because of *insert lame excuse here*. So you can't be held accountable for your actions. Star Trek, that bastion of humanism that it used to be, should be standing up AGAINST that sort of thing, not encouraging it. That last scene completely ruined what was otherwise a halfway decent plot arc.
Of course, throwing in Brent Spiner wasn't enough to bring ratings up, so let's pull out TWO old names. You'd think they'd have learned their lesson after "Generations". If you have to advertise the name of your guest star to get people to watch, then you're doing something wrong.
Fire B&B, take a few years off, hire some REAL writers (I can think of plenty of Sci-Fi writers who would do a better job, even if they haven't been intimately involved in Trek), and try again in 5-10 years, after people have forgotten just how bad Trek has become.
I grew up on TNG. Watching Berman at work, well... take the feeling you get watching "Phantom Menace" if you grew up on Star Wars and multiply it by a factor of 4 (as any good engineer does with anything. Bless you Scottie.)
On the one hand, downloading music from "unauthorized" sources such as P2P networks will get million dollar fines and, if the companies get their way, jail time, when there is actually no evidence that they are causing a loss of revenue (even if they are technically violating copyright law).
Meanwhile, people who write spyware, break into computers and DELETE data, shut down networks, and attack DNS servers in order to disrupt all traffic on the Net (roughly the online equivalent of putting tacks all over a major expressway junction) get.... what? Really, I have no problem with seeing these people get 20-life hard time.
When will the people who [ run the country | have money | bought Congress ] realize who the real threat to the Internet and to their bottom line is? It's not cheap Britney Spears fans. It's the people trying to break the Internet in order to get better advertising.
Oh wait, I forgot. Advertising is always good, because companies do it, so they can't object when someone tries to advertise. Silly me. Greedy SOBs have to stick together.
Honest question here. Isn't one of the best sources of hydrogen for such things hydrocarbons? Which are plentiful in, you guessed it, oil? Breaking water is not very efficient and requires electricity in the first place. So how does a "hydrogen economy" free us from dependence on oil? Where does the hydrogen come from that it's so clean?
Telling someone who has never edited HTML by hand to just jump in to HTML and PHP with a text editor is not a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver.
Telling someone who has never edited HTML by hand to just use Dreamweaver and click and drool is not a suitable replacement for someone with a clue. The answer is for people to use WYSIWYG editors only long enough to learn how HTML works, then start writing REAL code. I'm FAR more productive with Kate (glorified text editor/project manager for KDE) than I am with any WYSIWYG editor. If all I knew was Dreamweaver, my pages would be 10x the size, less manageable, and less standards-compliant.
Do the Internet a favor, people! Write your web pages by hand. Web browser authors will thank you, as will your visitors. If it gets to be too many pages, that's what PHP (or hell, ASP or JSP if you must) is for.
(Yes, I'm being an elitist prick about it. But when the quality is so vastly different, it matters. People should be able to USE things without knowing how they work, but not BUILD things without knowing how they work. There is a difference.)
This was a clever hack but I'm sure Palm sells stuff with WiFi for a little more than the Treo 650 goes for.
OK, so you don't know what you're talking about. palmOne (there is no such company as "Palm" anymore, hasn't been for a year) sells exactly ONE model with integrated Wi-Fi, the Tungsten C. They also support Wi-Fi on 3 other models via their Wi-Fi SD card, which is an imperfect solution. (It takes up the card slot.) The Treo 650 price varies with the carrier, but is typically in the $500-$600 rage or up. It's NOT a cheap product.
Meanwhile, most new Dell PPCs and HP PPCs come with Wi-Fi now, and the PPC world is now being inundated with variants on the BlueAngel/Harrier design: Bluetooth, GSM/GPRS, AND Wi-Fi. All three wireless types in one fairly nice handheld. (Still uses Windows Mobile, which bites, and it's not against-the-face-friendly, but it's still a good device.)
Your point about "don't buy cheap and then complain" is valid, but has nothing to do with this issue. The Treo 650 is NOT cheap, it's a top-shelf product. Other products in similar price ranges all have Wi-Fi. You're NOT getting what you paid for here, that's what people are upset about.
(That said, I still want to get a GSM/EDGE Treo 650 when it comes out. The lack of Wi-Fi is just annoyingly stupid.)
Slashdot Mirror
OK, vagueness of the article and the Slashdot write-up aside, This has a grand total of zero chance of happening.
Best case scenario: With a little more refining, this process could be used to clean waste-water, break down some forms of trash, and produce hydrogen pack "batteries" that could be used to power all sorts of other devices and equipment with only a small investment of electricity from some other source (including an attached hydrogen-electricity generator). Great!
One problem, from TFA:
The new process demonstrates, for the first time, the real potential in capturing hydrogen from renewable sources.
That is, a hydrogen economy that is not dependant on oil for its source of hydrogen in the first place. Bush and Co. will never let that happen and you know it. This is purely a novelty since it doesn't make Halliburton more money.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Try reading the very next sentence: Property applies only to rivalrous goods, that is, things that two or more people cannot have and use simultaneously.
Property as a concept was developed thousands of years ago for rivalrous goods, and is an outgrowth of the basic fact of physics that I cannot use a spear at the same time you are using the same spear. (Replace 'spear' with any other physical object you wish.) Information as something only certain people were allowed to disseminate is about 400-500 years old, only as old as the printing press, and was created to give English publishers (NOT authors, publishers) a monopoly against Scottish publishers. (Copy-right, not use-right or copy-write.) The idea of "intellectual property" (itself a lie) is a 20th century invention by modern-day publishers intent on keeping their cartels by trying to convince people (successfully in your case, it seems) that information IS property and should be as sacrosanct as physical property. Just because Jack Valenti keeps saying it, though, doesn't make it true.
Go read "Free Culture" by Larry Lessig, which goes into the history of this question in more depth (although even he makes the "property" mistake). You can even get a legally free copy from his web site: http://www.freeculture.org/ . Although I recommend the paper version, as it is a very good book.
You're already modded troll, but I'll try to explain it to you anyway.
Nikon has both property and moral rights over their software.
Sorry, that statement is false.
1) Software is information. (So too is the data in the picture being taken.) Information is NOT property. Property applies only to rivalrous goods, that is, things that two or more people cannot have and use simultaneously. That applies to all physical objects as well as things like positions and titles (eg, there can only be one CEO of BigCorp, Inc. at a time), but not to information. Information is not a rivalrous good. If you are listening to a song, and I go and start playing a copy of the exact same song, that in no way whatsoever diminishes the quality of your copy of the song, nor your enjoyment of it. Information (including software) is NOT property. This fact of physics must be understood if you wish to understand how copyrights and patents are supposed to work.
Thus, Nikon has no property right to their software.
2) The way that rivalrous goods work is well understood (capitalism) and left to its own devices with proper property protection works reasonably well (modulo monopolies and such). Information, however, since it cannot by nature be similarly controlled, works differently. "In order to promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts", the Constitution gives Congress the right to "secure to authors and inventors for a limited time" a government-granted monopoly on information they create (and until the 70s also registered). In return, there is a public archive of that information (library of congress and USPTO) so that once that limited time monopoly expires, the information is well-archived and available to anyone, as information naturally is in the first place. That is the LEGAL basis for copyrights and patents. However, it extends only as far as the information created by the author/inventor.
There is no "moral right" over proprietary information. It is only a legal device, a bit of legal trickery, intended to "promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts".
Note that I said that copyright extends only as far as the information created by the author/inventor. Nikon's potential copyright claim on their whitebalance system does NOT extend to pictures *I* take, which under US copyright law are copyrighted (not owned, copyrighted) by me. However, because Nikon refuses to let me access that image data (my copyrighted work) without their permission (using software that they have copyrighted that they won't license to me except under very narrow terms), I now cannot access my own copyrighted material without their permission. That is a major problem.
It is the exact same issue as not being able to access your own copyrighted material in MS Word format without Microsoft's permission (which they will grant for the cost of an MS Office license and agreement to let MS break into your computer to change settings), not being able to play music which you have legally purchased without Apple's permission (granted for the cost of an iPod, and a license agreement that lets Apple break into your computer to change settings, read the iTunes license), or not being able to access your own source code without Larry McVoy's permission (granted if you promise to never consider doing anything that might compete with any of his products). It's all the same issue:
- IF copyright is valid and should be kept as is, then I shouldn't have to be beholden to someone else for MY OWN copyrighted work.
- ELSE copyright as it currently stands is bunk and needs to be trashed/reduced/reformed, in which case restricting information about how the file format works is wrong in the first place because it keeps me from getting to information I CREATED.
No matter which side of that question you're on, the bottom line is that closed and proprietary file formats are BAD. They are bad for YOU, the person writing a letter, listening to music, writing software, or
without MS you have no web/html like we have today
You mean with developers not able to support a 7 year old standard, even though it would make the web a much better place, because IE still won't support all of CSS 1 much less CSS 2?
xml wouldn't get any attention if it wasn't "interwebby"
You mean if the W3C team (who were not MS employees) who developed XML hadn't thought ahead to its potential Internet use?
Or do you mean how IE is the only web browser that doesn't support XHTML, so that web developers still have to write tag-soup HTML 4 or break the standard and send XHTML as HTML in order to reach anyone using IE?
this whole XML thing is a passing phase without MS
You mean like the EU standardizing on an XML file format (OpenDocument), O'Riley and Associates publishing using an XML format (DocBook), the W3C moving EVERYTHING to XML including image formats (SVG) (yes MS is a W3C member, but they are far from the only)...
About the only thing I'll give MS credit for is breaking XSLT off from XSLFO, since the latter was taking way too long to standardize, so that now XSLT can be used independently of XSLFO, both in spec and tools. That's a good thing, I won't deny that. But given everything else they've done to hold back and stiffle the development of the "Interwebby", I'd definitely say that MS has been a net-negative on the XML-based-Internet world.
That was actually a minor slam against palmOne. Apple has a reputation of doing new and cool things. palmOne has a reputation of taking its dear sweet time to get around to some new idea, but doing a good job of it by the time they got there.
That Microsoft is now following palmOne's lead is "man bites dog" news.
Oh, this is on Brighthand. No wonder they think Microsoft is novel...
:-)
Seriously, though, there's a good one-thumb or nearly one-thumb interface out there now on the palmOne Treo 650. (Not from Microsoft, of course, so they don't acknowledge it.) It's not perfect, but the learning curve is very low. It supports both one-thumb and two-thumb interaction, or stylus interaction if you want. However, with the thumbboard and good software integration I was able to go a week with it without using the stylus in any of the included programs.
Sorry, MS, you're not being innovative. You're following palmOne. How sad is that.
This is, without a doubt, the most surreal thing I've seen today.
:-)
And that's saying something.
(Seriously, though, that's actually a very good use of Flash. Now if only all Flash commercials were that cool.)
But improvements like these can happen only if content providers - media companies and movie studios like Disney - play along.
Once again, we see the problem of media consolidation. We don't even consider the possibility that *gasp* someone other than Disney could provide content worth watching. There are only 4 media conglomerates left, and they're all in bed with each other. None of them is going to try and get a jump on the new IPTV (or other) market, because they've all agreed that they don't feel like it. That's what being a cartel means.
They, because they have been allowed vertical monopolies (AOL/Time Warner) and government-supported monopolies on content (copyright) are able to SINGLE HANDEDLY HOLD BACK TECHNOLOGY.
This is not Promoting the Progress of Science or the Useful Arts.
I didn't used to be opposed to copyright, but the more I see, the more I wonder if it causes more problems than it's worth.
Wow! And I didn't think they could do anything more kill Star Trek. Good ol' Paramount, they can always find a new way to destroy that series. :-)
(No, I don't like South Park.)
That isn't likely to happen for quite a while. Gender discrimination is complex, different discriminations interact with each other, things such as "peer-backed" discrimination tend to be ignored and there are plenty of advocates of all sorts of discrimination...
True, it's not easy. And many may find it hard to cope with this, but it's not a problem that can be handled on an institutional level. You have to first address the problem yourself, within yourself. When YOU are judging a person not on the basis of their gender (or color of their skin, or sexual preference, or whatever) but on the quality of their character and their demonstrated abilities, then you start demanding the same from those around you. If that means calling someone on it who doesn't want to be called on it, that's their problem. Eventually some will rise to your level, and become allies.
No, we won't end up with a 50/50 split in the end, probably on anything. But if everyone has taken the strength to purge themselves of of unfair bias (and maintains only fair bias, such as "if you can't do the work, I won't hire you", which is perfectly legitimate), then we'll all be healthier for it and the ratio will be wherever it "belongs".
The solution to problems in society is honorable people. Honorable people are made honorable by their own actions, not by institutions.
It may be true that, in general, men are more likely than women to write software. That doesn't mean that the way things are *now* is a perfect representation of how likely women are compared to men.
Nor does it prove that "the way things are now" is not a reasonable representation. Neither side can "prove" that the actual ratio is or isn't where it "should" be (for some arbitrary definition of "should"). However, claiming that it "should" be 50/50 for everything is, you seem to agree, inane and ignorant.
Focus on the problem, not the symptom. When people aren't driven in or out of a profession due to gender discrimination, the ratio of men to women in that profession will naturally achieve the level it "should" naturally have. What will that ratio be? Hell if I know, and neither do you. But once we've eliminated gender discrimination (both against AND FOR, including the ridiculous idea that both genders are identical), it will tend toward that point on its own.
A technology where the chilling effect of software patents is a GOOD thing. Let's hope this is another area that goes stagnant due to patents.
Isn't it interesting that when dealing with bands the huge companies don't want, the spectrum is licensed on a renewable basis, while spectrum that is particularly valuable (to the public that owns it) is sold out-right to big conglomerates?
ALL spectrum should be licensed like this new band is supposed to be. Viacom can afford it, believe me.
At least for a change they're not trying to pretend this is a real article instead of a commercial. They're being very obvious that it's an unpaid advertisement. That's an improvement for Slashdot of late.
Sad.
Does this mean that 2.6.x releases will actually be stable and reliable again? After getting burned by 2.6.8 and 2.6.9 (both of which had show-stopping bugs that, for instance, kept my CD burner from working or various USB-based devices, all of which worked again magically in 2.6.10), I'm now very wary of new "stable" kernel versions. On the one hand I'd like to stay up to date to get the latest security patches, but on the other I really don't need my USB ZIP drive to stop working every other kernel version. Handling individual security patch files is more trouble than it's worth for a home system, frankly (I'd rather have a life), so that's out. So what's a moderately security-minded user who wants a reliable system to do?
:-)
If going down another point level for bug fixes will help the problem, then I'm all for it. Just make it clear what people like me should be downloading.
There is an IETF standard, XMPP. And as it is rather extensible, I'm sure it can do whatever AOL thinks they want to make their protocol do.
The problem is, other than Jabber, nobody (AFAIK) has implemented it.
to be more precise, the Jabber protocol (or its core subset anyway) was adopted by the IETF under the name XMPP. Jabber invented it, IETF adopted it. (Which is not a slam on IETF, that's how they usually work, which is fine. Just give credit where credit is due.)
Aw, they had such a great opportunity to rid us of those self-important louts and the missed it!
- Do we know what kind of removable memory it has? (What is TransFlash??)
TransFlash is a removable flash memory format designed by SanDisk specifically for Motorola at their request. It's used in about 3-5 Motorola phones now, I think, and absolutely nowhere else. It's thin enough and small enough that you could lose it and not even realize it's gone for weeks until you need it. It's about the size as my pinky fingernail, and almost as thin. It has absolutely no redeeming qualities aside from being so insanely small that Motorola can stick a slot into their phones and say they support removable media without actually allocating serious space for it. It's FAR less useful than SD or CF, the only worthwhile removable flash media format (IMHO).
Now, in their defense, Motorola assumes that most people will put one card in their phone and leave it forever, except maybe once or twice when they replace it with a bigger one and then leave that one in forever, like a hard drive. That's probably a valid assumption, but still having a proprietary format has all the associated problems with being proprietary (no competition so high prices, can't swap between devices, etc. etc. etc.)
Well, not only did they not imply anything of the sort in the episode, that would have made it even dumber. :-)
Having Spiner play Soong in TNG made sense. That was fine. But in the Enterprise episode of which I am speaking (set ~200 years before Data and THE Dr. Soong), they had Spiner play a different Dr. Soong who was obsessed with genetic engineering. The implication was that it was the grandfather (about) of the Dr. Soong who created data. That's the part that is stupid and unnecessary. If they'd had Spiner play someone named Dr. Johnson who was obsessed with genetic engineering, and left out the android reference at the very end, then it would have improved the show dramatically. That's what I mean.
I agree that Season 4 has the POTENTIAL to be the show's best season. Of course, after the vomit that was Season 3 with the Al Queda, er, Xindii plotline and the self-satire that was the Nazi arc, it's hard to go any lower. :-) The "lots of mini-series" concept is actually a very good idea, one they should have started a while ago. However, they manage to screw it up each time.
The Augments arc would have been good, no great, had it NOT been for Dr. Soong. Now don't get me wrong, I think Brent Spiner is a great actor and he played the part wonderfully, but name dropping just killed it. Ibid with the references to "the Briar Patch" toward the end. Berman keeps hearing that people think he's ignoring the rest of Trek, so he tries to throw in these references thinking "see, they'll like me now." Sorry Rick, you're still an ass.
And the Vulcan/Siranite arc. It did a decent (but not great) job of patching up all of the problems B&B have created with the Vulcans (although I will NEVER EVER forgive them for the "Vulcans are all homophobes" episode), and laid additional groundwork for the founding of the Federation with Earth as the center, because they're the ones who got the two big powers, Vulcans and Andorians, to stop shooting at each other. That is good, and no more campy than the rest of the series... right up until the last scene in which the former Vulcan leader meets up with the Romulan to whine. See, it's not really his fault, he isn't really responsible for trying to start a war, he was being controlled by the evil bad guy Romulans. That echos a common thread in modern American culture, that nothing is ever one's own fault, it's always because of *insert lame excuse here*. So you can't be held accountable for your actions. Star Trek, that bastion of humanism that it used to be, should be standing up AGAINST that sort of thing, not encouraging it. That last scene completely ruined what was otherwise a halfway decent plot arc.
Of course, throwing in Brent Spiner wasn't enough to bring ratings up, so let's pull out TWO old names. You'd think they'd have learned their lesson after "Generations". If you have to advertise the name of your guest star to get people to watch, then you're doing something wrong.
Fire B&B, take a few years off, hire some REAL writers (I can think of plenty of Sci-Fi writers who would do a better job, even if they haven't been intimately involved in Trek), and try again in 5-10 years, after people have forgotten just how bad Trek has become.
I grew up on TNG. Watching Berman at work, well... take the feeling you get watching "Phantom Menace" if you grew up on Star Wars and multiply it by a factor of 4 (as any good engineer does with anything. Bless you Scottie.)
Here's where our laws are truly screwed up.
On the one hand, downloading music from "unauthorized" sources such as P2P networks will get million dollar fines and, if the companies get their way, jail time, when there is actually no evidence that they are causing a loss of revenue (even if they are technically violating copyright law).
Meanwhile, people who write spyware, break into computers and DELETE data, shut down networks, and attack DNS servers in order to disrupt all traffic on the Net (roughly the online equivalent of putting tacks all over a major expressway junction) get.... what? Really, I have no problem with seeing these people get 20-life hard time.
When will the people who [ run the country | have money | bought Congress ] realize who the real threat to the Internet and to their bottom line is? It's not cheap Britney Spears fans. It's the people trying to break the Internet in order to get better advertising.
Oh wait, I forgot. Advertising is always good, because companies do it, so they can't object when someone tries to advertise. Silly me. Greedy SOBs have to stick together.
Honest question here. Isn't one of the best sources of hydrogen for such things hydrocarbons? Which are plentiful in, you guessed it, oil? Breaking water is not very efficient and requires electricity in the first place. So how does a "hydrogen economy" free us from dependence on oil? Where does the hydrogen come from that it's so clean?
Not intended as a troll, honest question.
Telling someone who has never edited HTML by hand to just jump in to HTML and PHP with a text editor is not a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver.
Telling someone who has never edited HTML by hand to just use Dreamweaver and click and drool is not a suitable replacement for someone with a clue. The answer is for people to use WYSIWYG editors only long enough to learn how HTML works, then start writing REAL code. I'm FAR more productive with Kate (glorified text editor/project manager for KDE) than I am with any WYSIWYG editor. If all I knew was Dreamweaver, my pages would be 10x the size, less manageable, and less standards-compliant.
Do the Internet a favor, people! Write your web pages by hand. Web browser authors will thank you, as will your visitors. If it gets to be too many pages, that's what PHP (or hell, ASP or JSP if you must) is for.
(Yes, I'm being an elitist prick about it. But when the quality is so vastly different, it matters. People should be able to USE things without knowing how they work, but not BUILD things without knowing how they work. There is a difference.)
This was a clever hack but I'm sure Palm sells stuff with WiFi for a little more than the Treo 650 goes for.
OK, so you don't know what you're talking about. palmOne (there is no such company as "Palm" anymore, hasn't been for a year) sells exactly ONE model with integrated Wi-Fi, the Tungsten C. They also support Wi-Fi on 3 other models via their Wi-Fi SD card, which is an imperfect solution. (It takes up the card slot.) The Treo 650 price varies with the carrier, but is typically in the $500-$600 rage or up. It's NOT a cheap product.
Meanwhile, most new Dell PPCs and HP PPCs come with Wi-Fi now, and the PPC world is now being inundated with variants on the BlueAngel/Harrier design: Bluetooth, GSM/GPRS, AND Wi-Fi. All three wireless types in one fairly nice handheld. (Still uses Windows Mobile, which bites, and it's not against-the-face-friendly, but it's still a good device.)
Your point about "don't buy cheap and then complain" is valid, but has nothing to do with this issue. The Treo 650 is NOT cheap, it's a top-shelf product. Other products in similar price ranges all have Wi-Fi. You're NOT getting what you paid for here, that's what people are upset about.
(That said, I still want to get a GSM/EDGE Treo 650 when it comes out. The lack of Wi-Fi is just annoyingly stupid.)