I guess it's time for me to write my "How to build an Abacus Replica" Book
You may think you're being funny, but your idea may actually be a sale-able concept. I can see it being one of those Klutz book items you see at many educational toy stores.
People buy used CDs all the time, even though that's not ethical.
While I agree with your intended point that legality and morality being orthogonal to each other, your viewpoint that the sale of used goods, like CDs, strikes me as out of left field. Pawn shops, garage sales, secondhand book stores, eBay, and libraries aren't subject to major criticism for being "stains on society," even when people complain about the occasional huckster that exploits such institutions. If nothing else, resale rights are an important part of a healthy economy as well as being an ecologically prudent, yet popular, form of recycling.
What's your basis for considering used goods exchange unethical?
Ideally, for a statistical "normal" distribution of population, all three values should be the same. However, if a population is skewed in some way (which is possible if you compare, say, the US with other countries), all bets are off. It's quite possible for the median IQ to be less than 100 if the US population has a higher ratio of slightly "dumb" people verses greatly "smart" people, yet still have a mean IQ of 100.
Err, what did Britain do in 1945 that made it a bad citizen in the world community?
Maybe the grandparent poster was refering to the tail end of the British Imperial era, when the UK still controlled India? British control was the issue that led Gandhi to invent "passive resistance," which indirectly inspired the protest movements against other political issues in the 60's.
My local library has carried video games since my C64 days.
No kidding. When I was a teenager, my library had Atari 2600 games and just started to shelf NES games as well.
Sadly, the library had to stop there due to excessive "shrinkage." The local school system repartitioned the grades and started to send younger students to "higher" schools, eventually crowding 9th Grade into a high school only set-up for 10th-12th. This had an unfortunate side effect of slowing the emotional and social development of the teens in the school system. In the following years, gang behavior and shoplifting increased in town. It got so bad that the library also had to shut down it's computer room to underage patrons and remove most of the PC software from the shelves as well.
This is actually a common problem for libraries and a contributing issue to why many people regard the institution as "quaint" or "behind the times." Anytime a library tries to adopt a popular or trendy form of media, theft and abuse follows. Most libraries I've been to of late with A/V departments now have to install doors sensors like retail stores and have changed library cards to look like state IDs or driver's licenses.
Librarians want libraries to be more popular, but popularity has a price...
Now, iTunes doesn't have a way that I can tell natively to randomize the order that a playlist actually appears and will be copied to the device, but I'm pretty sure some Applescript can take care of that.
It's can be done, but it's slightly buried in the UI. First, make sure your current playlist is unsorted. (The left most column, without the label, is highlighted.) Then, click the Shuffle button. After that, control-click the playlist in the Sources list and choose "Copy To Play Order" from the contextual menu. Finally, turn off "Shuffle" to confirm that the randomizing sticks. (The list will still have the random order and won't revert to the previously sorted state.)
Shame on Apple for hiding functionality in a contextual menu... Apple's UI guidelines require that functionality exists in the main menubar or an button as well, not just in a contextual menu.
No, they are not the same thing. Reality is not subject to a democratic vote.
Okay, here's the kicker...
How can you tell the difference between consensus and truth?
Especially when dealing with topics like history and politics, which have little to no means of objective or experimental confirmation? "History being written by the victors" doesn't apply just to war... There are many people out there who call our world "consensual reality."
The only architectural solution here is to take 'least privillege' seriously. [snip] Every binary (and some data files) needs to be signed and the privilleges required to run it specified as attributes.
A valid concern, but to be honest, I don't think there is a magic bullet for this issue. Your own parenthetical statement shows part of the problem... data and code have a very blurry boundary separating them. Data tends to have lower security to streamline communication and work flows, while code has to be given tighter security to insure only "valid" applications are used by organizational computers.
For good and ill, technologies continually get developed to work around the loss of flexability such a regime acquires, ususally by providing code-like ability to data files that can still "bypass" the tight security. E-mail and web pages used to be data-only mediums, until client software was made to allow executable data to be embedded in it, via attachments and links at first, then interpreted scripting within data, leading to a new vector for security issues. Remember when e-mail viruses were considered a hoax? Word documents and other early productivity apps fell in a similar hole with "macros."
Even ignoring the data/code issue, privilege assignment is as only good as an admin's sense of clairvoyance. You can't always know when a "safe" kind of file or data will turn hostile. The recent resurgence in pop-up ads and browser tracking windows on the web was due to a new capability being found in an interplay between Flash.swf files and JavaScript, fooling the algorithms many web browsers had to block them.
There's also a huge economic liability to requiring every app to be signed in some way or another. Smaller companies will be disproportately expensed or slowed due to lack in the same legal and funding resources needed for compliance that larger firms have. This will kill off the remaining sparks of vitality and innovation in software development, since larger firms, by nature, tend to be more conservative and less prone to experiment and take risks. Those small companies who do go through certification will likely spend resources on that rather than developing quality product, encouraging the development of "certification" mills to expedite the process. When this happens, we just return full circle to security issues, but with the added economic and society burden the extra complexity in the system has added.
Seriously, Apple's always been blamed for being elitist for having a semi-closed architecture and many PC partisans took them to task for it. Now some PC manufacturers are starting to do the same.
This is probably a sign of things to come. As computing becomes more and more dependant on the Internet to even provide basic functionality, security concerns are going to crowd out flexibility and "freedom." It's really a shame; this will only increase the barrier to entry to computing even higher than it is now. Already, classical shareware and freeware have nearly been killed by fears of viruses and spyware. (Interestingly, the Mac market's about the only place where a shareware developer can make a living from it.) There have already been opening salvos of FUD fired at the Open Source movement for not having a "certified" credential system for contributing programmers and writers. (Even non-coding projects like Wikipedia is starting to get brickbats from "established" editors and writers for not being "professional" enough.)
The age of the garage developer is nearly, if not already, over.
You mean you got past all those pits you could fall into and not be able to get out of requiring the machine to be reset?
You know, I never had such problems with E.T.'s levitation function that it required a reset. The trick is simply to stop pushing the joystick upwards the moment the screen changes from inside the pit to the surface. You then change direction and levitate to the side or downwards. The "bug" was that the levitation would end one pixel early if you tried to levitate off the north/topside of a pit.
I'd love to know where they buried all those unsold ET cartridges in the Mojave...
It wouldn't do you any good. They were mixed in with a bunch of other underselling Atari games, crushed under steamrollers, and then had concrete pored over them. (I can't remember for sure, but I think the bulk was being used as some kind of foundation. It wasn't just simple disposal, but a crude recycling attempt.) You wouldn't be able to get anything for eBay from the remains.
And it made absolutely no sense, jumping bears and mushrooms?
Those are badgers, not bears. It only makes sense (if you can call it "sense") with the sound. It's a kind of parody of heavy beat, tightly looped techno, with a little bit of veiled drug humor hidden in it. (And that much explaination may have already ruined the joke...)
It's also a more recent instance of the tendency of the Internet culture to produce "All Your Base" and "Hampster Dance" style micro-fads. The Weebls Stuff website has a bunch of these Flash shorts on it; my personal favorites are "scampi" and "magical trevor."
Using your logic, many things -- such as the Coca-Cola bottle shape, or the distinctive sound of a Harley motorcycle -- would have been public domain a long, long time ago. But they're not.
You overlooked the original poster's "should" and "as intended by the framers" reference. When the United States was founded, IP concepts were only supposed to last for "limited times," originally about 21 years. Having copyright, trademarks, and patents last for indefinite periods of time was introduced roughly at the turn of the 20th Century as a side effect of the legal and economic fallout of the Industrial Revolution and the US Civil War. If the US was still treating IP as it was originally implemented, Disney, Coca-Cola, et al, would already be public domain.
The question at hand now (and is argued here at/. ad nauseum) is that if this indefinitely long "IP monopoly" state is really a good thing for a culture or not... One of the key reasons IP law was changed was to encourge R&D in companies since modern manufacturing and service expenses are dominated by large up-front fixed costs, as opposed to the older "artisan" system where labor and unit costs were a larger proportion of the equation. The debate is if this legal change has given large organizations (and their legal teams) too much power at the expense of smaller organizations and individuals.
Funny, when I do that, I get a weird error message.
Object reference not set to an instance of an object. We are experiencing technical problems. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are still interested in hearing your comments if you have time to provide your feedback. You can do one of two things. You can close this window, refresh your browser, and submit your comments. Or, you can try later.
Thank you.
The editors of At Home and At Work
It doesn't even look like Microsoft can implement a simple "Yes/No" button in a reliable way... Geez.
I don't know if that is really a good thing. I got burned on Unlimited Saga, which felt like they only spent a month to develop it. I've also seen other Squeenix titles "bargain bin" quickly, like Drakengard. (Though I admit to not playing that one...)
In the days of 10Mhz 286's I used to really enjoy John's columns.
No kidding. I used to read him regularly when he wrote the back page op-ed for MacUser. Yes, he used to write for the Mac press long ago before he started to consider the Mac platform the Source Of All Evil. He used to be a entertaining curmudgeon, but now he's become shrill and hostile towards computing, it seems...
Not that I'm all that innocent myself. When I was about 10, I had a fixation with graphing paper, and frequently made video game and vector graphic inspired artwork and board games using it. My Mom was going through an "art-and-crafts" stage at the time, and suggested I make a computer themed cross-stitch pattern for her. So, I made a desk layout of an old style hobbist computer with about a dozen peripherals attached and she made it for me. I had it framed and it decorated my room until I went to college. I really ought to dig it out of my parent's attic, photograph it and post it online somewhere some time...
...nah. Just use an Infernal Spawn Of Evil. It's competely free of any Christian symbolism whatsoever.
Re:Why only for 'developing' countries?
on
The Sub-$100 Laptop?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How come a laptop computer couldn't be any different?
If you had paid attention to the discussion here, you'd realize that the sub-$100 price is only possible in depressed economies. There's too much financial overhead to sell and manufacture goods in the Western world due to legislation and cultural baggage. Assuming you try to sell that same laptop outside the Third World, you'd likely have to charge $200-$300 for it to cover duties, distribution fees, and legal coverage. At that point, you may as well make a laptop that leverages the local infrastructure, since you are paying for it anyways. One of the points of Negroponte's initiative is to make technology that works with limited infrastructure, technology that can't compete in a market where other products use it.
It sounds stupid, but in some ways, it's easier to help a homeless person in Africa than in the United States, if the homeless people I walk by everyday in Downtown Chicago is any indication. The change I and other others handout can only do so much. I've seen people stay at the same corner for years because the US economy is such that people can get wedged at the bottom, no matter what the various churches and civil groups try to do to unwedge them.
Not rugby, I was refering to the comparison to petanque.... I had to look up that game online to find out what the article meant, and realized it was intended to be a slur.
The games are played at a frenetic pace, making real sports such as football and rugby look like petanque
Egad, did I just read a UKian write that Soccer (the big UK sport) seems like a French game? It looks like the Beeb is getting into the trolling act itself...
Then again, imagine if this was a USian article refering what we call "football." That kind of talk could start a war... (You want freedom fries with that?)
Slashdot Mirror
You may think you're being funny, but your idea may actually be a sale-able concept. I can see it being one of those Klutz book items you see at many educational toy stores.
While I agree with your intended point that legality and morality being orthogonal to each other, your viewpoint that the sale of used goods, like CDs, strikes me as out of left field. Pawn shops, garage sales, secondhand book stores, eBay, and libraries aren't subject to major criticism for being "stains on society," even when people complain about the occasional huckster that exploits such institutions. If nothing else, resale rights are an important part of a healthy economy as well as being an ecologically prudent, yet popular, form of recycling.
What's your basis for considering used goods exchange unethical?
Which kind: mean, median, or mode?
Ideally, for a statistical "normal" distribution of population, all three values should be the same. However, if a population is skewed in some way (which is possible if you compare, say, the US with other countries), all bets are off. It's quite possible for the median IQ to be less than 100 if the US population has a higher ratio of slightly "dumb" people verses greatly "smart" people, yet still have a mean IQ of 100.
Sorry, felt like I had to jump in here...
Maybe the grandparent poster was refering to the tail end of the British Imperial era, when the UK still controlled India? British control was the issue that led Gandhi to invent "passive resistance," which indirectly inspired the protest movements against other political issues in the 60's.
Consider yourself disemvoweled...
No kidding. When I was a teenager, my library had Atari 2600 games and just started to shelf NES games as well.
Sadly, the library had to stop there due to excessive "shrinkage." The local school system repartitioned the grades and started to send younger students to "higher" schools, eventually crowding 9th Grade into a high school only set-up for 10th-12th. This had an unfortunate side effect of slowing the emotional and social development of the teens in the school system. In the following years, gang behavior and shoplifting increased in town. It got so bad that the library also had to shut down it's computer room to underage patrons and remove most of the PC software from the shelves as well.
This is actually a common problem for libraries and a contributing issue to why many people regard the institution as "quaint" or "behind the times." Anytime a library tries to adopt a popular or trendy form of media, theft and abuse follows. Most libraries I've been to of late with A/V departments now have to install doors sensors like retail stores and have changed library cards to look like state IDs or driver's licenses.
Librarians want libraries to be more popular, but popularity has a price...
It's can be done, but it's slightly buried in the UI. First, make sure your current playlist is unsorted. (The left most column, without the label, is highlighted.) Then, click the Shuffle button. After that, control-click the playlist in the Sources list and choose "Copy To Play Order" from the contextual menu. Finally, turn off "Shuffle" to confirm that the randomizing sticks. (The list will still have the random order and won't revert to the previously sorted state.)
Shame on Apple for hiding functionality in a contextual menu... Apple's UI guidelines require that functionality exists in the main menubar or an button as well, not just in a contextual menu.
Remember kiddies, don't anthropomorphize companies... they hate that.
Okay, here's the kicker...
How can you tell the difference between consensus and truth?
Especially when dealing with topics like history and politics, which have little to no means of objective or experimental confirmation? "History being written by the victors" doesn't apply just to war... There are many people out there who call our world "consensual reality."
A valid concern, but to be honest, I don't think there is a magic bullet for this issue. Your own parenthetical statement shows part of the problem... data and code have a very blurry boundary separating them. Data tends to have lower security to streamline communication and work flows, while code has to be given tighter security to insure only "valid" applications are used by organizational computers.
For good and ill, technologies continually get developed to work around the loss of flexability such a regime acquires, ususally by providing code-like ability to data files that can still "bypass" the tight security. E-mail and web pages used to be data-only mediums, until client software was made to allow executable data to be embedded in it, via attachments and links at first, then interpreted scripting within data, leading to a new vector for security issues. Remember when e-mail viruses were considered a hoax? Word documents and other early productivity apps fell in a similar hole with "macros."
Even ignoring the data/code issue, privilege assignment is as only good as an admin's sense of clairvoyance. You can't always know when a "safe" kind of file or data will turn hostile. The recent resurgence in pop-up ads and browser tracking windows on the web was due to a new capability being found in an interplay between Flash .swf files and JavaScript, fooling the algorithms many web browsers had to block them.
There's also a huge economic liability to requiring every app to be signed in some way or another. Smaller companies will be disproportately expensed or slowed due to lack in the same legal and funding resources needed for compliance that larger firms have. This will kill off the remaining sparks of vitality and innovation in software development, since larger firms, by nature, tend to be more conservative and less prone to experiment and take risks. Those small companies who do go through certification will likely spend resources on that rather than developing quality product, encouraging the development of "certification" mills to expedite the process. When this happens, we just return full circle to security issues, but with the added economic and society burden the extra complexity in the system has added.
I wonder if you'll get a +5, Troll for that...
Seriously, Apple's always been blamed for being elitist for having a semi-closed architecture and many PC partisans took them to task for it. Now some PC manufacturers are starting to do the same.
This is probably a sign of things to come. As computing becomes more and more dependant on the Internet to even provide basic functionality, security concerns are going to crowd out flexibility and "freedom." It's really a shame; this will only increase the barrier to entry to computing even higher than it is now. Already, classical shareware and freeware have nearly been killed by fears of viruses and spyware. (Interestingly, the Mac market's about the only place where a shareware developer can make a living from it.) There have already been opening salvos of FUD fired at the Open Source movement for not having a "certified" credential system for contributing programmers and writers. (Even non-coding projects like Wikipedia is starting to get brickbats from "established" editors and writers for not being "professional" enough.)
The age of the garage developer is nearly, if not already, over.
You know, I never had such problems with E.T.'s levitation function that it required a reset. The trick is simply to stop pushing the joystick upwards the moment the screen changes from inside the pit to the surface. You then change direction and levitate to the side or downwards. The "bug" was that the levitation would end one pixel early if you tried to levitate off the north/topside of a pit.
I'd love to know where they buried all those unsold ET cartridges in the Mojave...
It wouldn't do you any good. They were mixed in with a bunch of other underselling Atari games, crushed under steamrollers, and then had concrete pored over them. (I can't remember for sure, but I think the bulk was being used as some kind of foundation. It wasn't just simple disposal, but a crude recycling attempt.) You wouldn't be able to get anything for eBay from the remains.
Those are badgers, not bears. It only makes sense (if you can call it "sense") with the sound. It's a kind of parody of heavy beat, tightly looped techno, with a little bit of veiled drug humor hidden in it. (And that much explaination may have already ruined the joke...)
It's also a more recent instance of the tendency of the Internet culture to produce "All Your Base" and "Hampster Dance" style micro-fads. The Weebls Stuff website has a bunch of these Flash shorts on it; my personal favorites are "scampi" and "magical trevor."
You overlooked the original poster's "should" and "as intended by the framers" reference. When the United States was founded, IP concepts were only supposed to last for "limited times," originally about 21 years. Having copyright, trademarks, and patents last for indefinite periods of time was introduced roughly at the turn of the 20th Century as a side effect of the legal and economic fallout of the Industrial Revolution and the US Civil War. If the US was still treating IP as it was originally implemented, Disney, Coca-Cola, et al, would already be public domain.
The question at hand now (and is argued here at /. ad nauseum) is that if this indefinitely long "IP monopoly" state is really a good thing for a culture or not... One of the key reasons IP law was changed was to encourge R&D in companies since modern manufacturing and service expenses are dominated by large up-front fixed costs, as opposed to the older "artisan" system where labor and unit costs were a larger proportion of the equation. The debate is if this legal change has given large organizations (and their legal teams) too much power at the expense of smaller organizations and individuals.
Funny, when I do that, I get a weird error message.
It doesn't even look like Microsoft can implement a simple "Yes/No" button in a reliable way... Geez.I don't know if that is really a good thing. I got burned on Unlimited Saga, which felt like they only spent a month to develop it. I've also seen other Squeenix titles "bargain bin" quickly, like Drakengard. (Though I admit to not playing that one...)
Sadly, it appears the Beeb doesn't ship across the pond. I'd like to get this, but I'm USian.
No kidding. I used to read him regularly when he wrote the back page op-ed for MacUser. Yes, he used to write for the Mac press long ago before he started to consider the Mac platform the Source Of All Evil. He used to be a entertaining curmudgeon, but now he's become shrill and hostile towards computing, it seems...
Not that I'm all that innocent myself. When I was about 10, I had a fixation with graphing paper, and frequently made video game and vector graphic inspired artwork and board games using it. My Mom was going through an "art-and-crafts" stage at the time, and suggested I make a computer themed cross-stitch pattern for her. So, I made a desk layout of an old style hobbist computer with about a dozen peripherals attached and she made it for me. I had it framed and it decorated my room until I went to college. I really ought to dig it out of my parent's attic, photograph it and post it online somewhere some time...
I just love saying.... "Tootie"
...nah. Just use an Infernal Spawn Of Evil. It's competely free of any Christian symbolism whatsoever.
If you had paid attention to the discussion here, you'd realize that the sub-$100 price is only possible in depressed economies. There's too much financial overhead to sell and manufacture goods in the Western world due to legislation and cultural baggage. Assuming you try to sell that same laptop outside the Third World, you'd likely have to charge $200-$300 for it to cover duties, distribution fees, and legal coverage. At that point, you may as well make a laptop that leverages the local infrastructure, since you are paying for it anyways. One of the points of Negroponte's initiative is to make technology that works with limited infrastructure, technology that can't compete in a market where other products use it.
It sounds stupid, but in some ways, it's easier to help a homeless person in Africa than in the United States, if the homeless people I walk by everyday in Downtown Chicago is any indication. The change I and other others handout can only do so much. I've seen people stay at the same corner for years because the US economy is such that people can get wedged at the bottom, no matter what the various churches and civil groups try to do to unwedge them.
Not rugby, I was refering to the comparison to petanque.... I had to look up that game online to find out what the article meant, and realized it was intended to be a slur.
The games are played at a frenetic pace, making real sports such as football and rugby look like petanque
Egad, did I just read a UKian write that Soccer (the big UK sport) seems like a French game? It looks like the Beeb is getting into the trolling act itself...
Then again, imagine if this was a USian article refering what we call "football." That kind of talk could start a war... (You want freedom fries with that?)