While not admitting to the violations, MOSR did say on Saturday that Apple had cited suspected NDA violations. Amusingly, they printed this, along with a "We must remove this by Monday", in a "We're onto something, or they wouldn't claim NDA" manner... Also implying "If you don't read us regularly, you might miss the dirt we're forced to remove.
Apple's overenthusiastic lawyers are good for mac rumor mongers' business...
MOSR is one of the less reliable sites... which is unsurprising, given their name... but I have always found their mock ups worth a chuckle. And they (and their competitor AppleInsider) did manage to give us advance warning about those candy boxes before they first showed up... by about six hours.
I dunno, seems like it's all just a joke at the mac fanatics' expense... or somesuch.
Sort of like that sci fi news network that's an optional on the right bar of/., really. Rumor sites... tabloids for the geek masses...
Ever buy a book from Amazon? (Yeah, I know, patents, but when it can't be found locally...) You know that "People who bought this book also liked..." section? And that little agent that recommeds books when you log on...
Now pair that with a good feedback modifier (I bought it, but it really stank!!!), and you've got a winner. My SO is a singer. I've been working on setting up independant distribution for her latest album in my spare time... web site with 30 second track samples, contacts with genre (very specific... Jewish album) stores and chains, that sort of thing. We're setting up an MP3.com listing, but...
I went through all the Jewish music on MP3.com. Yes, the #1 track's band is sort of good, and catchy, but... there's no real user rating system. It was jumbled and there was no profiled association. Rather discouraging.
I'm starting to get pissed at the socialist attitude on/., though... I know how much they spent on the album... on the recording alone, and the own the studio, which is a luxury not available to most artists. In the case of music, for most of the kids out there, damnit, free (as in speech) does mean free (as in beer). If they can get it without compensating the person who poured sweat and blood into into it, regardless of how much benifit they gain from it, they will!
I know I've written for-sale software - hey, I have to eat, damnit, and I'm not a uni grad student anymore, and I don't live in a world where the government (you know, the government we all love to hate) pays me for my services to society with money from taxes (which, honestly, I'd aprove of, if I could somehow be assured of a honestly benevolent government, which I can't), so I have to extract payment from society in sales. Which is why, damnit, when I sell you a commodity, I'm selling you everything that went into it. My 3D rendered MMPOG with advanced simulation and presentation capacities is damned well worth more than the price of the CD-R I sent it to you on, and I damned well deserve more for it that just your payment. Just because you payed for the media does not mean you payed for the distribution rights. Sure, I'll grant you that you payed for the right to use it on any platform that supports it, and the right to keep using it, but if you get upset because I don't want you burning copies and giving them to your friends in exchange for a few of those herbal brownies they baked, and take steps to nuke any rogue copies that try to access the server, well, fuck you. You're a thief, and I'm not signing over the rights to resell my blood, sweat, and code.
...whew...
And the same goes for musicians. Which is why, ethically, I won't keep any MP3s I haven't paid for the album of (though buying it used, just as buying a book used, is a different story. That's still a copy that the artist was compensated for, on a per copy basis), and I won't tolerate those who do.
I'm a physicist and an algorithm designer. I know the upside of patents... if I dedicate my energy and efforts to something, I eventually reap some small percentage of the gains from my work.
I also know the downside. When I was in the University, they got 50% on profits from any patents I might have gotten in the line of sponsered research. (Of course, if it was sponsered, with the people I was working under, it wouldn't have been mine at all. Hence, no patent work there. Maybe if I get back into academia somewhere else...) Now, working in industry, I'm vulnerable to corporate lawyers' interpretations of "related research"... let me tell you, that sucks. Worse, if it was something I wanted to, say, GPL, and not part of paid work effort... I'd be fighting a legal battle over something I should rightfully have full rights to.
What I propose, for the good of the high-tech industries, the engineers, and the scientists, is this: Patents are owned by the person who takes them out. They can be licenced and distributed by a company that contracts them for a period significantly less than the duration of the patent, but ownership reverts to the individual(s) responsible for the patent. The licencing rights are not salable except with consent of their owner(s). Patent licensing rights can be negotiated for before the research takes place, but all rights are not licensable by a blanket clause on employment, save in the case of official thinktank hires (with the current rules for thinktank employment, IE free direction clauses, partial royalty rights, etc still in effect), and exempt employment does not mean own-time work is still in the employ of the signer of paychecks.
Add to this a reform of patent office hiring and training, patent fees, and generality of patents (no vague patents should be binding, I'm sorry... likewise, patents should not be granted for general systems. I'm all for algorithm patents, engineering patents, or process patents. I'm also for unordered process patents (Do A then B, and follow C D and F, in any order), but I'm seriously discusted by system patents. They practically insure vagueness.
The debate is actually about access to the content contained on a piece of media that you purchased and legally own.
That's our side to it. Theirs, however, is tied to the (unfortunately legitimate) worry that DeCSS gives us a very easy start to circumventing country codes...
...which hits their bottom line. And you know that can't be had...
Realistic evaluation, of course, leads to the conclusion that, if they're so worried about that, they should just not put English as a language choice on foreign distributions. Talk about short sighted stuborn litigative attitude blinding the beast...
They do, however, have categories for indies (Independant Films), foreigns, and shorts. Many of the films of this type (and Documentaries) that have won at the acadamies in the past are more likely to show up on the web before they make the theaters, at least in the US. So, no, it is so bad. It's short sighted, and rather out of character for at least some of the people who are voting members of the Acadamy... I'm still befuddled.
I can't really understand this. It's so unsubtle in its monopolistic distribution maintainance that I'm a little shocked to see it from somewhere other than Redmond or the RIAA...
All/. preconceptions aside... I'm still trying to understand this. I know acadamy members. The ones I know are artists. This reads more like something being pushed by SAG, except that it's really targetting indie producers. Thing is, the film industry, on the inside, loves indies... So what gives? Reactionary fear because of the DVD DeCSS revenue losses? (You don't want to know how much video revenue makes the studios... I don't know how much, but I have an Order of Magnitude comparison to box office... there's a reason they're fighting so hard against anything that would enable import of $5 DVDs from less developed countries where they mark them for local market values... ) Strangely, the difference between movies and music is, the artists get a fair cut in the movie industry... and a fair say. The acadamy is not run by the studios, the way things are in the recording industry.
I'm really confused here, and am looking forward to broaching the topic with one of the people I know who might be able to actually answer this...
Seems a good idea... he's savvy enough... but some points:
Pratchett no longer responds to email (his address is no longer public) or reads alt.fan.pratchett, mainly due to overload, partly due to freaky fans... just a warning.
He may have answered many of the potential questions already. Interviews can be found on www.lspace.org, the official pratchett fan site.
Pratchett most certainly has answered the question of how he feels about being compared to Adams. It's in the alt.fan.pratchett FAQ.
He might be cajoled into answering questions about the current state of his carnivorous plants...
I reviewed this book pre-print, some years ago...
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Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 2
I was teaching a small group C++ class in the mid 90s... around '95, I think... and Steve sent me a copy of the book to review for use. I found it rather simple, and I hope he's updated the details since then (Lot of strstreams, for example, in the original), but it was very good for the youngest students in the group (early high school), and cute enough to actually be readable for some of the less naturally geekish students. The little note that he and his student wound up getting married caused one girl to do a sort of Titanic-fan "awwww"... but it did keep her interested, which meant it was the only book of the dozen or so I had available for take-home study that was actually read. I recommended it second highest of the basic books, after the 28 days book (Jesse Liberty, I think), but the "advanced" part was weak.
Somehow, this reeks of Sega playing catch-up with Sony with no particular plan in mind. I've long wondered if there was really room for three in the console market. It's always really been two, with an occasional third ousting one of the two, until the entrance of Sony and the failure of Sega to, quite, leave. I see it working for Sony. They're good at this sort of thing... and PS equipped hotel TV boxes with pay-per-view (this was done with the SNES, IIRC) might be one payoff... but Sega has never shown that kind of market savvy.
Way back when, there was this project to go to mars with a craft that used nukes detonated in an elliptic shield. It was planned, engineers and computer scientists were hired to figure out the details (I know this because the genius of a Dino I learned from was actually one of the comp sci types on the project), and it was actually found to be feasible with a reasonable budget and surplus nukes. Then the public got wind of it and didn't like the 'n' word...
Now we're talking about a plasma that doesn't look much less radiative for the crew, given the relative strengths of the ships, and certainly costs more, and goes slower... decades later... and it's a great thing? What's in a name? Nuclear == bad, plasma != bad? Mind you, the Orion project, like all space travel back then, would have used the technological equivalent of duct tape and bailing wire. Sometimes I wish I were a geek of yore...
More a question of voting for your senator, if you have one. The Senate has considerable unofficial influence on the Supreme Court. So does the prez, in some cases, but not so significantly...
Not later than four months after entry of this Final Judgment, Microsoft shall submit to the Court and the Plaintiffs a proposed plan of divestiture. The Plaintiffs shall submit any objections to the proposed plan of divestiture to the Court within 60 days of receipt of the plan, and Microsoft shall submit its response within 30 days of receipt of the plaintiffs' objections.
Four Months plus (probably) one month (as much as) sixty days plus 30 days...
Call it six to seven months.
Which puts it after the new gov't is in power.
Everyone vote liberal this time around... There's a slaying of the behemoth on the line.
Also of interest:
1.d Until Implementation of the Plan, Microsoft shall: iii.take no action that undermines, frustrates, interferes with, or makes more difficult the divestiture required by this Final Judgment without the prior approval of the Court;
Guess that precludes NGW...
Did they buy the techs, or just the network?
on
Iridium Saved?
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· Score: 4
It seems to me that the biggest value in Iridium isn't the network, it's the technical expertice of their engineers, who could be called upon to design the next generation of global orbital communications networking... by a company with sufficient resources.
Still, I'm not convinced that's the way to go. Ground based communication is getting some pretty high penetration, and until the tech gets good enough to compete with ground based, affordably, there's no market. On the other hand, if they managed to make Iridium work as well as it did in the first place, those techs are probably the kind of wiz needed to get broadband wireless up and running for a ground based system. I mean, wireless is close to replacing land line phones in places like college campuses and the like... can you imagine Iridium tech converted to wireless WAN?
Firewire is another IEEE standard, but just as USB was submitted by Intel (and royalties are paid to them), Firewire was submitted by Apple. They actually do deserve the credit for the innovation on that one.
ICANN is a standards body, nothing more. If the geeks of the world came up with an alternate standard, and put enough content up in a manner only accessable by the other standard, ICANN would be powerless to do anything to preserve their power. True, the fact that the standards body is controlled by corporates is a bad sign, but if they abuse their power too much (for example, forcing corporate access to info on users of all anonymity servers, under threat of loss of their domain) they could well discover that, unlike the world at large, the geek world has a rather high revolutionary content. How long do you think it would take us to hijack the net back? Honestly?
In several years of working in physics/programming with satellite tracking data, I found out just how bad the documentation and standards were for the various formats for data on and from satelites. The images were often fine, being compressed versions of standard formats, but what we'll be looking at here, it seems, would require additionally the exact positional data for the satellite body. Here's hoping the open source approach leads to better standards and documentation of data formats for time, position relative to the earth (and orientation), and so forth.
From experience, it will more likely result in filters of resolutions with a tremendous range, both in granularity and depth, being interpolated and patched together. I'm not sure I believe that OS will get around the traditional bailing wire and duct tape aproach of engineers in the field...
This paper extends the quantum search class of algorithms to the multiple solution case. It is shown that, like the basic search algorithm, these too can be represented as a rotation in an appropriately defined two dimensional vector space. This yields new applications - an algorithm is presented that can create an arbitrarily specified quantum superposition on a space of size N in O(sqrt(N)) steps. By making a measurement on this superposition, it is possible to obtain a sample according to an arbitrarily specified classical probability distribution in O(sqrt(N)) steps. A classical algorithm would need O(N) steps.
This is not the instant set-em-up-and-let-em-fall answer of quantum computing mythology. The algorithm is substantially faster than a linear algorithm - it would really show this in a case with a database of such size as to be unsearchable with a classic algorithm, say a very partial retinal scan against a database including every retinal print in the world - but what isn't clear is the cost in setup. I scanned the paper, but couldn't figure out how many qbits this would require. If the number grows with the database size, which is possible, this search might not be doable on a real scale. I'm sure when quantum coprocessors are commonplace, the algorithm will be widely used... I just wonder what it would take to create a situation where the quantum solution to the vague search is faster than a smarter solution on a classical computer... one that restricts enough to dump most of the searchable steps before it starts, then broadens criteria as required.
Compaq says they expect $1 billion in revenue from these boxes over the next four years. They haven't named a price range, but given the market they intend to compete in, I'm guessing these are a very pricey solution for dot com web service machines... better to just get the bandwidth and a bunch of low end boxes in a cluster, I'll bet.
Click on the Objective-C framework reference. I think the three-language API will be just fine... at least Apple's finally lost the Pascal version APIs... hopefully...
As loath as I am to admit it here, I like Apple. I prefer their hardware, and for some situations, I prefer their OS. My home machines are dual boot Mac/Linux PPC boxen. Which means I am looking forward to getting my claws on a BSD based MacOS.
As much as I'm drooling, however, from the angle of Apple's future, this delay is probably a very good thing. Rushing out the release before the OS (or the apps for it) are ready gives the press opportunities to slam it into the ground. The longer developers have to polish it, the better it will be when the wrappers come off. The more apps developers support it (with Carbon or Cocoa apps), the better the package feels to the end user. And, probably, the better the reviews come off.
A September release would be premature. As a developer, I know that without question... but I really wish I had the opportunity to hack with it a while before the release...
So what if someone likes to look at kiddie porn, but they have never commited that crime? Does this mean they will commit it in the future?
Just because you like to look at something, does not mean you will do it.
Statistics support the assumption that they will commit it in the future.
Given opportunity, most people will choose to enact fantasies. Unlike most crimes, pedophilia feels unthreatening... the sicko isn't at any risk if he thinks he can't get caught.
People who don't have the potential to commit this crime are generally revolted and nauseated by the images. This is, of course, less than 100% verifiable, but it hasn't been falsified yet, either.
We discovered, through monitoring of traffic, seventeen regular viewers of child pornography in the pre-luser-proliferation era. We monitored them. We've managed to catch eleven of them red handed, to date. Not terribly good statistics.
There are many more of these people online now than there were seven years ago. Perhaps there are more sick fscks who only want to fantasize out there than there are sick fscks who indulge their fantasies. I'd be surprised, but I've been surprised before.
Windows is all about bundling. Outlook comes bundled with windows, as does everything else M$, in one way or another... and it hooks into the OS's global script execution network... like they wanted people to be executing things on your computer from email. And it didn't even start to cross their mind that someone might write a script to execute something malicious? The common windows user is someone who purchases the computer from CompUSA or the like, with everything preinstalled, and uses what's been provided. This means homogeneous software, perfect for the virus writer.
A more useful comparison: About two years ago, a company in the US that produced hybrid grain seeds got a patent on a variety of hostile seed that produced pollen designed to sterilize and cripple other species of the same grain. They intended to use it to kill off competition and force farmers to buy from them every year... in short, to become the M$ of the american (and world) food supply. As far as I know, they are still trying to pull this off. At about the same time, there was a major crisis in the... I think it was Soybeans, but I may be misremembering... some crop that had become relatively homogenized, which was hit by an (organic) virus. Prices soared, growers struggled to get seeds to nonsuceptible varieties, and there was a general backlash against homogenized varieties... for a few months.
Some people never learn. Nature, even our modified version, still responds to evolution, and evolution prefers diversity for good reason. Software emulates nature. Microsoft would have the entire world beholden to their monolithic approach if they could. This would be just asking for a big die off. Personally, I'd rather be one of the oxygen breathers, one of the mammals, one of the scurrying little guys that have a hope of surviving. The next disaster might be a little bigger, and if it is, I'd hate to be dependant on Windows for everything...
Get a *clue* halfwitt! The internet is a *global* medium. Don't try to impose your own local values on it. Hmm. AC and troll, and using the favorite PC crap of every group I've come to hate, US or not, first world or third.
The statutory rape proposals are based on the work of the social work community - mostly educated with graduate degrees and extensive real world experience, and, interestingly, with substantial exposure to various cultures and societies.
They are not cultural imperialism or local values. There are cultures that support sixteen year olds having relationships with twenty year olds. There are also cultures that support dictatorship, genocide, and ritual genital mutilation. Just because it isn't part of the devil american cultural empire (sic), doesn't mean it is exempt from ethical evaluation.
I will conceed some culture-by-culture flexibility on this, but cultures that sell fifteen year old girls off in marriage (and far more do that than fifteen year old boys) are not going to get any sort of blessing from me, on the basis of cultural preservation. Some parts of some (all) cultures do not deserve preservation, or, in some cases, acknowledgement beyond military action.
Gor the record, I am neither christian nor redneck. I should also point out that a huge percentage of the people who have incurred my wrath on this topic in the U.S. are, indeed, "narrow minded bible thumping rednecks".
This is my ethical creedo: By your actions, never harm another for personal gratification alone. By your inactions, never allow another to come to harm for reasons of laziness or petty fear.
Generally, this includes understanding, and, where aplicable, accepting those that are different... which, for me, means just about everyone.
BTW, I didn't offer to throw you into prison for four years, I offered to make it a criminal action for you to sleep with a sixteen year old if you were 21... which seems pretty damned reasonable to me. On a *global* scale. Not that I make the rules worldwide.
think that what he was saying is that for it to be considered statuatory rape, the difference in age would have to be five years for a 17 yr old, 4 for a 16 year old, etc etc... Thanks. That's exactly what I was saying.
Slashdot Mirror
While not admitting to the violations, MOSR did say on Saturday that Apple had cited suspected NDA violations. Amusingly, they printed this, along with a "We must remove this by Monday", in a "We're onto something, or they wouldn't claim NDA" manner... Also implying "If you don't read us regularly, you might miss the dirt we're forced to remove.
/., really. Rumor sites... tabloids for the geek masses...
Apple's overenthusiastic lawyers are good for mac rumor mongers' business...
MOSR is one of the less reliable sites... which is unsurprising, given their name... but I have always found their mock ups worth a chuckle. And they (and their competitor AppleInsider) did manage to give us advance warning about those candy boxes before they first showed up... by about six hours.
I dunno, seems like it's all just a joke at the mac fanatics' expense... or somesuch.
Sort of like that sci fi news network that's an optional on the right bar of
Ever buy a book from Amazon? (Yeah, I know, patents, but when it can't be found locally...) You know that "People who bought this book also liked..." section? And that little agent that recommeds books when you log on...
/., though... I know how much they spent on the album... on the recording alone, and the own the studio, which is a luxury not available to most artists. In the case of music, for most of the kids out there, damnit, free (as in speech) does mean free (as in beer). If they can get it without compensating the person who poured sweat and blood into into it, regardless of how much benifit they gain from it, they will!
Now pair that with a good feedback modifier (I bought it, but it really stank!!!), and you've got a winner. My SO is a singer. I've been working on setting up independant distribution for her latest album in my spare time... web site with 30 second track samples, contacts with genre (very specific... Jewish album) stores and chains, that sort of thing. We're setting up an MP3.com listing, but...
I went through all the Jewish music on MP3.com. Yes, the #1 track's band is sort of good, and catchy, but... there's no real user rating system. It was jumbled and there was no profiled association. Rather discouraging.
I'm starting to get pissed at the socialist attitude on
I know I've written for-sale software - hey, I have to eat, damnit, and I'm not a uni grad student anymore, and I don't live in a world where the government (you know, the government we all love to hate) pays me for my services to society with money from taxes (which, honestly, I'd aprove of, if I could somehow be assured of a honestly benevolent government, which I can't), so I have to extract payment from society in sales. Which is why, damnit, when I sell you a commodity, I'm selling you everything that went into it. My 3D rendered MMPOG with advanced simulation and presentation capacities is damned well worth more than the price of the CD-R I sent it to you on, and I damned well deserve more for it that just your payment. Just because you payed for the media does not mean you payed for the distribution rights. Sure, I'll grant you that you payed for the right to use it on any platform that supports it, and the right to keep using it, but if you get upset because I don't want you burning copies and giving them to your friends in exchange for a few of those herbal brownies they baked, and take steps to nuke any rogue copies that try to access the server, well, fuck you. You're a thief, and I'm not signing over the rights to resell my blood, sweat, and code.
...whew...
And the same goes for musicians. Which is why, ethically, I won't keep any MP3s I haven't paid for the album of (though buying it used, just as buying a book used, is a different story. That's still a copy that the artist was compensated for, on a per copy basis), and I won't tolerate those who do.
I'm a physicist and an algorithm designer. I know the upside of patents... if I dedicate my energy and efforts to something, I eventually reap some small percentage of the gains from my work.
I also know the downside. When I was in the University, they got 50% on profits from any patents I might have gotten in the line of sponsered research. (Of course, if it was sponsered, with the people I was working under, it wouldn't have been mine at all. Hence, no patent work there. Maybe if I get back into academia somewhere else...) Now, working in industry, I'm vulnerable to corporate lawyers' interpretations of "related research"... let me tell you, that sucks. Worse, if it was something I wanted to, say, GPL, and not part of paid work effort... I'd be fighting a legal battle over something I should rightfully have full rights to.
What I propose, for the good of the high-tech industries, the engineers, and the scientists, is this:
Patents are owned by the person who takes them out. They can be licenced and distributed by a company that contracts them for a period significantly less than the duration of the patent, but ownership reverts to the individual(s) responsible for the patent. The licencing rights are not salable except with consent of their owner(s). Patent licensing rights can be negotiated for before the research takes place, but all rights are not licensable by a blanket clause on employment, save in the case of official thinktank hires (with the current rules for thinktank employment, IE free direction clauses, partial royalty rights, etc still in effect), and exempt employment does not mean own-time work is still in the employ of the signer of paychecks.
Add to this a reform of patent office hiring and training, patent fees, and generality of patents (no vague patents should be binding, I'm sorry... likewise, patents should not be granted for general systems. I'm all for algorithm patents, engineering patents, or process patents. I'm also for unordered process patents (Do A then B, and follow C D and F, in any order), but I'm seriously discusted by system patents. They practically insure vagueness.
The debate is actually about access to the content contained on a piece of media that you purchased and legally own.
That's our side to it. Theirs, however, is tied to the (unfortunately legitimate) worry that DeCSS gives us a very easy start to circumventing country codes...
...which hits their bottom line. And you know that can't be had...
Realistic evaluation, of course, leads to the conclusion that, if they're so worried about that, they should just not put English as a language choice on foreign distributions. Talk about short sighted stuborn litigative attitude blinding the beast...
They do, however, have categories for indies (Independant Films), foreigns, and shorts. Many of the films of this type (and Documentaries) that have won at the acadamies in the past are more likely to show up on the web before they make the theaters, at least in the US. So, no, it is so bad. It's short sighted, and rather out of character for at least some of the people who are voting members of the Acadamy... I'm still befuddled.
I can't really understand this. It's so unsubtle in its monopolistic distribution maintainance that I'm a little shocked to see it from somewhere other than Redmond or the RIAA...
/. preconceptions aside... I'm still trying to understand this. I know acadamy members. The ones I know are artists. This reads more like something being pushed by SAG, except that it's really targetting indie producers. Thing is, the film industry, on the inside, loves indies... So what gives? Reactionary fear because of the DVD DeCSS revenue losses? (You don't want to know how much video revenue makes the studios... I don't know how much, but I have an Order of Magnitude comparison to box office... there's a reason they're fighting so hard against anything that would enable import of $5 DVDs from less developed countries where they mark them for local market values... ) Strangely, the difference between movies and music is, the artists get a fair cut in the movie industry... and a fair say. The acadamy is not run by the studios, the way things are in the recording industry.
All
I'm really confused here, and am looking forward to broaching the topic with one of the people I know who might be able to actually answer this...
Seems a good idea... he's savvy enough... but some points:
Pratchett no longer responds to email (his address is no longer public) or reads alt.fan.pratchett, mainly due to overload, partly due to freaky fans... just a warning.
He may have answered many of the potential questions already. Interviews can be found on www.lspace.org, the official pratchett fan site.
Pratchett most certainly has answered the question of how he feels about being compared to Adams. It's in the alt.fan.pratchett FAQ.
He might be cajoled into answering questions about the current state of his carnivorous plants...
I was teaching a small group C++ class in the mid 90s... around '95, I think... and Steve sent me a copy of the book to review for use. I found it rather simple, and I hope he's updated the details since then (Lot of strstreams, for example, in the original), but it was very good for the youngest students in the group (early high school), and cute enough to actually be readable for some of the less naturally geekish students. The little note that he and his student wound up getting married caused one girl to do a sort of Titanic-fan "awwww"... but it did keep her interested, which meant it was the only book of the dozen or so I had available for take-home study that was actually read. I recommended it second highest of the basic books, after the 28 days book (Jesse Liberty, I think), but the "advanced" part was weak.
Somehow, this reeks of Sega playing catch-up with Sony with no particular plan in mind. I've long wondered if there was really room for three in the console market. It's always really been two, with an occasional third ousting one of the two, until the entrance of Sony and the failure of Sega to, quite, leave. I see it working for Sony. They're good at this sort of thing... and PS equipped hotel TV boxes with pay-per-view (this was done with the SNES, IIRC) might be one payoff... but Sega has never shown that kind of market savvy.
Did you take a look at the radio wave excitation scheme? That's something with a lot more potential to scare me than a fissionable...
Way back when, there was this project to go to mars with a craft that used nukes detonated in an elliptic shield. It was planned, engineers and computer scientists were hired to figure out the details (I know this because the genius of a Dino I learned from was actually one of the comp sci types on the project), and it was actually found to be feasible with a reasonable budget and surplus nukes. Then the public got wind of it and didn't like the 'n' word...
Now we're talking about a plasma that doesn't look much less radiative for the crew, given the relative strengths of the ships, and certainly costs more, and goes slower... decades later... and it's a great thing? What's in a name? Nuclear == bad, plasma != bad? Mind you, the Orion project, like all space travel back then, would have used the technological equivalent of duct tape and bailing wire. Sometimes I wish I were a geek of yore...
More a question of voting for your senator, if you have one. The Senate has considerable unofficial influence on the Supreme Court. So does the prez, in some cases, but not so significantly...
Timetable:
Not later than four months after entry of this Final Judgment, Microsoft shall submit to the Court and the Plaintiffs a proposed plan of divestiture. The Plaintiffs shall submit any objections to the proposed plan of divestiture to the Court within 60 days of receipt of the plan, and Microsoft shall submit its response within 30 days of receipt of the plaintiffs' objections.
Four Months plus (probably) one month (as much as) sixty days plus 30 days...
Call it six to seven months.
Which puts it after the new gov't is in power.
Everyone vote liberal this time around... There's a slaying of the behemoth on the line.
Also of interest:
1.d Until Implementation of the Plan, Microsoft shall:
iii.take no action that undermines, frustrates, interferes with, or makes more difficult the divestiture required by this Final Judgment without the prior approval of the Court;
Guess that precludes NGW...
It seems to me that the biggest value in Iridium isn't the network, it's the technical expertice of their engineers, who could be called upon to design the next generation of global orbital communications networking... by a company with sufficient resources.
Still, I'm not convinced that's the way to go. Ground based communication is getting some pretty high penetration, and until the tech gets good enough to compete with ground based, affordably, there's no market. On the other hand, if they managed to make Iridium work as well as it did in the first place, those techs are probably the kind of wiz needed to get broadband wireless up and running for a ground based system. I mean, wireless is close to replacing land line phones in places like college campuses and the like... can you imagine Iridium tech converted to wireless WAN?
Firewire is another IEEE standard, but just as USB was submitted by Intel (and royalties are paid to them), Firewire was submitted by Apple. They actually do deserve the credit for the innovation on that one.
ICANN is a standards body, nothing more. If the geeks of the world came up with an alternate standard, and put enough content up in a manner only accessable by the other standard, ICANN would be powerless to do anything to preserve their power. True, the fact that the standards body is controlled by corporates is a bad sign, but if they abuse their power too much (for example, forcing corporate access to info on users of all anonymity servers, under threat of loss of their domain) they could well discover that, unlike the world at large, the geek world has a rather high revolutionary content. How long do you think it would take us to hijack the net back? Honestly?
In several years of working in physics/programming with satellite tracking data, I found out just how bad the documentation and standards were for the various formats for data on and from satelites. The images were often fine, being compressed versions of standard formats, but what we'll be looking at here, it seems, would require additionally the exact positional data for the satellite body. Here's hoping the open source approach leads to better standards and documentation of data formats for time, position relative to the earth (and orientation), and so forth.
From experience, it will more likely result in filters of resolutions with a tremendous range, both in granularity and depth, being interpolated and patched together. I'm not sure I believe that OS will get around the traditional bailing wire and duct tape aproach of engineers in the field...
From the Paper's Abstract:
This paper extends the quantum search class of algorithms to the multiple solution case. It is shown that, like the basic search algorithm, these too can be represented as a rotation in an appropriately defined two dimensional vector space. This yields new applications - an algorithm is presented that can create an arbitrarily specified quantum superposition on a space of size N in O(sqrt(N)) steps. By making a measurement on this superposition, it is possible to obtain a sample according to an arbitrarily specified classical probability distribution in O(sqrt(N)) steps. A classical algorithm would need O(N) steps.
This is not the instant set-em-up-and-let-em-fall answer of quantum computing mythology. The algorithm is substantially faster than a linear algorithm - it would really show this in a case with a database of such size as to be unsearchable with a classic algorithm, say a very partial retinal scan against a database including every retinal print in the world - but what isn't clear is the cost in setup. I scanned the paper, but couldn't figure out how many qbits this would require. If the number grows with the database size, which is possible, this search might not be doable on a real scale. I'm sure when quantum coprocessors are commonplace, the algorithm will be widely used... I just wonder what it would take to create a situation where the quantum solution to the vague search is faster than a smarter solution on a classical computer... one that restricts enough to dump most of the searchable steps before it starts, then broadens criteria as required.
Compaq says they expect $1 billion in revenue from these boxes over the next four years. They haven't named a price range, but given the market they intend to compete in, I'm guessing these are a very pricey solution for dot com web service machines... better to just get the bandwidth and a bunch of low end boxes in a cluster, I'll bet.
http://devworld.apple.com/tec hpubs/macosx/macosx.html
Click on the Objective-C framework reference. I think the three-language API will be just fine... at least Apple's finally lost the Pascal version APIs... hopefully...
They have a good PDF tutorial on ObjC as well.
As loath as I am to admit it here, I like Apple. I prefer their hardware, and for some situations, I prefer their OS. My home machines are dual boot Mac/Linux PPC boxen. Which means I am looking forward to getting my claws on a BSD based MacOS.
As much as I'm drooling, however, from the angle of Apple's future, this delay is probably a very good thing. Rushing out the release before the OS (or the apps for it) are ready gives the press opportunities to slam it into the ground. The longer developers have to polish it, the better it will be when the wrappers come off. The more apps developers support it (with Carbon or Cocoa apps), the better the package feels to the end user. And, probably, the better the reviews come off.
A September release would be premature. As a developer, I know that without question... but I really wish I had the opportunity to hack with it a while before the release...
So what if someone likes to look at kiddie porn, but they have never commited that crime? Does this mean they will commit it in the future?
Just because you like to look at something, does not mean you will do it.
Statistics support the assumption that they will commit it in the future.
Given opportunity, most people will choose to enact fantasies. Unlike most crimes, pedophilia feels unthreatening... the sicko isn't at any risk if he thinks he can't get caught.
People who don't have the potential to commit this crime are generally revolted and nauseated by the images. This is, of course, less than 100% verifiable, but it hasn't been falsified yet, either.
We discovered, through monitoring of traffic, seventeen regular viewers of child pornography in the pre-luser-proliferation era. We monitored them. We've managed to catch eleven of them red handed, to date. Not terribly good statistics.
There are many more of these people online now than there were seven years ago. Perhaps there are more sick fscks who only want to fantasize out there than there are sick fscks who indulge their fantasies. I'd be surprised, but I've been surprised before.
Windows is all about bundling. Outlook comes bundled with windows, as does everything else M$, in one way or another... and it hooks into the OS's global script execution network... like they wanted people to be executing things on your computer from email. And it didn't even start to cross their mind that someone might write a script to execute something malicious? The common windows user is someone who purchases the computer from CompUSA or the like, with everything preinstalled, and uses what's been provided. This means homogeneous software, perfect for the virus writer.
... I think it was Soybeans, but I may be misremembering... some crop that had become relatively homogenized, which was hit by an (organic) virus. Prices soared, growers struggled to get seeds to nonsuceptible varieties, and there was a general backlash against homogenized varieties... for a few months.
A more useful comparison:
About two years ago, a company in the US that produced hybrid grain seeds got a patent on a variety of hostile seed that produced pollen designed to sterilize and cripple other species of the same grain. They intended to use it to kill off competition and force farmers to buy from them every year... in short, to become the M$ of the american (and world) food supply. As far as I know, they are still trying to pull this off.
At about the same time, there was a major crisis in the
Some people never learn. Nature, even our modified version, still responds to evolution, and evolution prefers diversity for good reason. Software emulates nature.
Microsoft would have the entire world beholden to their monolithic approach if they could. This would be just asking for a big die off. Personally, I'd rather be one of the oxygen breathers, one of the mammals, one of the scurrying little guys that have a hope of surviving. The next disaster might be a little bigger, and if it is, I'd hate to be dependant on Windows for everything...
Get a *clue* halfwitt! The internet is a *global* medium. Don't try to impose your own local values on it. Hmm. AC and troll, and using the favorite PC crap of every group I've come to hate, US or not, first world or third.
The statutory rape proposals are based on the work of the social work community - mostly educated with graduate degrees and extensive real world experience, and, interestingly, with substantial exposure to various cultures and societies.
They are not cultural imperialism or local values. There are cultures that support sixteen year olds having relationships with twenty year olds. There are also cultures that support dictatorship, genocide, and ritual genital mutilation. Just because it isn't part of the devil american cultural empire (sic), doesn't mean it is exempt from ethical evaluation.
I will conceed some culture-by-culture flexibility on this, but cultures that sell fifteen year old girls off in marriage (and far more do that than fifteen year old boys) are not going to get any sort of blessing from me, on the basis of cultural preservation. Some parts of some (all) cultures do not deserve preservation, or, in some cases, acknowledgement beyond military action.
Gor the record, I am neither christian nor redneck. I should also point out that a huge percentage of the people who have incurred my wrath on this topic in the U.S. are, indeed, "narrow minded bible thumping rednecks".
This is my ethical creedo:
By your actions, never harm another for personal gratification alone.
By your inactions, never allow another to come to harm for reasons of laziness or petty fear.
Generally, this includes understanding, and, where aplicable, accepting those that are different... which, for me, means just about everyone.
BTW, I didn't offer to throw you into prison for four years, I offered to make it a criminal action for you to sleep with a sixteen year old if you were 21... which seems pretty damned reasonable to me. On a *global* scale. Not that I make the rules worldwide.
think that what he was saying is that for it to be considered statuatory rape, the difference in age would have to be five years for a 17 yr old, 4 for a 16 year old, etc etc... Thanks. That's exactly what I was saying.