C is not a sophisticated language. No objects, no runtime bounds checking, no exceptions. No cruft.
Likewise, a sword is not a sophisticated tool. It's a grip, a hilt, and a blade. If you want to get fancy with a ricasso or pommel, go right ahead, but that's about as complicated as it gets.
But few would say that experienced, trained sword fighters cannot perform sophisticated, elegant tricks. And few would say that you cannot write a sophisticated, elegant program in C.
It's just really freaking hard, because if you do it wrong, you'll chop your own arm off.
My intent was not to increase conviction rates. It was to increase conviction accuracy. Currently, an officer can just say "I saw it", and unless there's evidence otherwise, there's not much you can do. With recording, you can protect against both intentional and unintentional "misrememberings".
Wouldn't the "slips in the shower" case be handled by EMTs, or perhaps the fire/rescue department, rather than the police? I'm not saying there won't be cases of "non-criminal does something embarrassing on police footage, gets harassed", but that's probably not the best example.
And besides, I think culture is changing enough that that will shortly not be a huge issue. We're recorded in our "private moments" so often that we don't even think about it, and people really don't find them that interesting. The pervs looking for nude pics? There's this little thing called the "Inter-net", perhaps you've heard of it.
But, perhaps you do have a point. Easily remedied - add a button that, when pressed, cuts the live video feed (but keeps the audio), and flags the video for review (blur out victims' faces, etc.), while still requiring that it eventually be broadcast.
Yes - which is why I included the "broadcast" element. Anyone who wants to could record the entire stream. And it is much harder to create "technical difficulties" when you have four hours until it goes out, not four months before it enters a courtroom.
If it were up to me, police would *always* be recorded while on-duty. Cameras, or at least microphones, in the car and on the person, both recording to a tamper-resistant medium and broadcasting online (with a time delay).
Why? Because the police are supposed to work for the government, and the government is supposed to work for the people. The people have a *right* to know what they are doing, to ensure that they are actually working properly.
And if the police are doing their jobs properly, it will actually help them. They'll have video evidence of any crime they witness. That would be more than a little helpful.
Of course, if it were up to me, we'd have nuked North Korea flat decades ago, so maybe it's good that I'm not actually running the country. But I still think my "record the police" idea is a good one.
Just an FYI, a "citizen's arrest" is limited to essentially yelling "hey, stop!". No use of force, not even grabbing by the arm. No handcuffs, no restraints, nothing. So no, it is not at all the same thing.
The problem with such predictions is that they rely on the smartphone being a full replacement for a PC. And that's just not the case.
There's the obvious problems - typing large amounts of text, or doing things that require more processing power than a smartphone will have in the foreseeable future. These have been covered to death already; I won't bother reiterating them.
But then there's the lesser obstacles. Let me bring in some anecdotal evidence. I was feeling nostalgic, and wanted to play some of my old Game Boy Color games. I figured I should do so on my phone, rather than try to drag yet another bulky piece of electronics around. Finding an emulator was easy enough (finding one that didn't display ads was tougher, but doable). And I easily found a ROM file (just in case you're spying on me, MAFIAA, yes, I still have those games on cartridge, so bugger off).
But, every time I tried to download it, it prompted me for what program to open it in. And it only listed the ones that had registered themselves as being able to open.ZIP filesl the emulator was not among them. There was no option for "save the file locally, I'll handle opening it". None at all.
So in order to actually get it to work, I had to hook it up to my computer and copy the file over. Such a simple task, but it couldn't do it.
There are many other times I've tried to do something on my phone, but been unable to without using a PC. Here's a big one - development. You can code for Linux, on Linux. You can code for Windows, on Windows. I've even coded for freaking TI calculators, *on* the calculator. But you can't code for Android on an Android device, nor can you code for iPhone on an iPhone.
The running theme of it seems to be that smartphones and tablets are designed as consumers of data, not producers. But, given how essential producing data is to modern society, that means they will never replace the PC until that fundamental design concept is thrown out. Sure, for some, even many, uses, they're adequate, or at least capable of doing the task (if slower and more awkwardly). But so many common things remain impossible.
The more paranoid among you are probably preparing a rant about how this is $BIG_EVIL_CONGLOMERATE's wet dream, and something something 1984 something something DRM something from my cold dead hands. But that's not the case. Even *if* you posit a dystopian future where the $BEC controls everything, there will *still* be PCs, because *someone* will still have to produce data. They may become much less common, but a PC, or a PC-functional device, *will* be necessary.
Now, it could be possible that smartphones will change to have this type of functionality, and would be able, in theory, to replace PCs. But *that* seems unlikely, because the form factor itself, as well as limitations of technology, makes them very poor PC replacements.
[1] Note that, throughout, I use the term "PC" for "workstation, desktop or notebook". OS does not matter - your Mac is a PC; your Linux desktop is a PC; even that one guy still running CP/M is using a PC.
with a trip to radio shack a child could whip up a fart chair to signal keyboard input to any OS they choose for under 40 bucks.
I take it you haven't been to Radio Shack lately. The big shelf of resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors and such? Gone, along with any employees that even remember it existed.
I don't think they even have radios anymore. Just overpriced cables and cell phones.
Let's start with the biggest reason: now they can't completely ruin it with a redesign. On an "active" project, you eventually run out of stuff to do. No new features to add, no glaring design problems, just boring bugs and maintenance. So you're eventually going to do some big overhaul, some big redesign, if only to justify being an active, major project. See: almost every major desktop environment. Sometimes a big redesign is necessary, but quite often, the change is just for the sake of change. Downshifting development means you don't need to "justify" your project's existence - you're just maintaining it, fixing bugs and minor issues, keeping up with the times. Because let's face it, there's only so many features you can add to an email client.
Second reason: how many people don't even use a dedicated email program anymore? I haven't used one in years (discounting the GMail app on my phone, that doesn't count). I just use a website, either GMail or whatever that online Outlook is. It's faster, and I *always* have a browser open anyways, so why not? Sure, some people will actually need features they don't have, or maybe just want a dedicated email program anyways. That's fine - Thunderbird still exists for those people. But I do not doubt that the potential userbase is shrinking.
Third and final reason: it's open source. If you really think they are no longer doing a good job with it, do it yourself. Fork it. Fix it. If you need help, you'll find people, as long as the work is worth doing.
Yet another company trying to legislate itself a profit.
As far as the law *should* be concerned, unless the university had in its contract terms restricting how quickly you can graduate or something to that effect, there's no case here. If they didn't think of that, it's their own damn fault for writing a contract with a "loophole" (although I'd say that graduating that quickly by actually doing all the work quickly isn't a loophole, it's just the right way to do it).
We really need to toughen the laws on frivolous or groundless cases.
It took four years because for the first 3.9 years, the tinkerers were satisfied with the official Linux-on-PS3. Sure, it was more locked-down than any Linux ought to be , but it was good enough for the tinkerers to tinker with.
Once Sony stole* Linux back from the tinkerers, it took what, a month or two, before it was cracked? And cracked it open wider than the old Sony Linux port had?
So depending on how you define when the tinkerers started trying to crack it, it took either years, or weeks.
* Yes, stole. If "piracy != stealing because the original guy still has his copy", then taking away a working copy from someone *is* stealing, and should be labeled as such.
So the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Dominican Republic wars, the Arab-Israeli and Yom Kippur wars, the Soviet and American invasions of Afghanistan, two Persian Gulf wars, the Falklands War, the Invasion of Grenada, the Serbia-Bosnia war, and too many more to list... those are just what, "police actions"? Some of them you can discard as "non-major countries", but too many of them had major, nuclear-armed powers on at least one side.
In fact, you could argue that nukes have produced *more* wars. Just look at Wikipedia. They obviously don't have a single page listing every war that ever was, but they've got it broken up by dates: List of wars before 1000 List of wars 1000–1499 List of wars 1500–1799 List of wars 1800–1899 List of wars 1900–1944 List of wars 1945–1989 List of wars 1990–2002 List of wars 2003–2010 List of wars 2011–present
Weird how roughly 40% of all wars happen *after* 1945, when he says war basically ended. That assumes that all sub-lists have approximately the same length, which isn't precisely true, but it's close enough for our purposes (in fact, the longest seem to be the 1900-1944 and 1945-1989 lists). So you could easily argue that, while nukes may prevent major wars, they do so by converting them into numerous small wars.
And even his premise of "no major wars" is not proven. Sure, we haven't had a World War since '45. That's 65 years or so. They've had wars that *lasted* longer than that. Having a peace that lasts that long in "Western and Northern Europe and North America" isn't exactly uncommon. I can imagine people made the same argument about the rifle in pre-Napoleonic Europe, and I know people said such things about machine guns after WWI.
The Fallout games had it right - war never changes.
I think he's referring to "trademark", not "copyright", there. He's saying "this code is effectively public domain, but the Prince of Persia trademark is still owned by Ubisoft". So you could modify the game however you want, but you cannot release it as a Prince of Persia game.
Although he is being very vague about releasing your modifications, especially commercially.
I wish Valve would open source the original Goldsource engine used for their Half-Life 1 based games, but that will never happen as long as Counter-Strike is still actively played.
They can't even if they wanted to - GoldSrc is based off the Quake II engine, and apparently their license does not allow them to release it (despite the fact that the Q2 engine itself is now GPL). Although this is second- or third-hand info, here. If you want the full story, just email Gabe.
Not the "it was human error, TEPCO fucked up and could easily have avoided the disaster" part. That was completely expected. I was suspecting as much before they even had it shut down.
Nor am I surprised about the "collusion between industry and regulators". That was also a given.
What I *am* surprised about is that they're admitting to it this quickly. I expected it to be a decade or two before TEPCO or the government would admit that anything but the earthquake/tsunami were to blame. And that they're even blaming their own culture of discipline... wow. That's some harsh self-criticism.
Obviously particles of zero mass are speed-of-light bound - light itself, after all, is zero-mass and, curiously enough, travels at the speed of light.
Man, I can't even trust multinational corporations to do the right things from their own selfish profit-oriented perspective, never mind doing the right thing ethically.
Actually, the article addresses that. Or at the very least, the author says "dammit, Jim, I'm a particle physicist not a computer scientist! I don't know why they picked Linux over BSD!"
Most likely, Linux was just something the admins had more experience with, although technical matters probably played a minor role as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction: it should be "ellipses", not "ellipsis". Ellipsis is singular, ellipses is plural.
C is not a sophisticated language. No objects, no runtime bounds checking, no exceptions. No cruft.
Likewise, a sword is not a sophisticated tool. It's a grip, a hilt, and a blade. If you want to get fancy with a ricasso or pommel, go right ahead, but that's about as complicated as it gets.
But few would say that experienced, trained sword fighters cannot perform sophisticated, elegant tricks. And few would say that you cannot write a sophisticated, elegant program in C.
It's just really freaking hard, because if you do it wrong, you'll chop your own arm off.
Relevant: http://tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=495
My intent was not to increase conviction rates. It was to increase conviction accuracy. Currently, an officer can just say "I saw it", and unless there's evidence otherwise, there's not much you can do. With recording, you can protect against both intentional and unintentional "misrememberings".
Wouldn't the "slips in the shower" case be handled by EMTs, or perhaps the fire/rescue department, rather than the police? I'm not saying there won't be cases of "non-criminal does something embarrassing on police footage, gets harassed", but that's probably not the best example.
And besides, I think culture is changing enough that that will shortly not be a huge issue. We're recorded in our "private moments" so often that we don't even think about it, and people really don't find them that interesting. The pervs looking for nude pics? There's this little thing called the "Inter-net", perhaps you've heard of it.
But, perhaps you do have a point. Easily remedied - add a button that, when pressed, cuts the live video feed (but keeps the audio), and flags the video for review (blur out victims' faces, etc.), while still requiring that it eventually be broadcast.
Yes - which is why I included the "broadcast" element. Anyone who wants to could record the entire stream. And it is much harder to create "technical difficulties" when you have four hours until it goes out, not four months before it enters a courtroom.
If it were up to me, police would *always* be recorded while on-duty. Cameras, or at least microphones, in the car and on the person, both recording to a tamper-resistant medium and broadcasting online (with a time delay).
Why? Because the police are supposed to work for the government, and the government is supposed to work for the people. The people have a *right* to know what they are doing, to ensure that they are actually working properly.
And if the police are doing their jobs properly, it will actually help them. They'll have video evidence of any crime they witness. That would be more than a little helpful.
Of course, if it were up to me, we'd have nuked North Korea flat decades ago, so maybe it's good that I'm not actually running the country. But I still think my "record the police" idea is a good one.
For one, the right to perform an actual arrest.
Just an FYI, a "citizen's arrest" is limited to essentially yelling "hey, stop!". No use of force, not even grabbing by the arm. No handcuffs, no restraints, nothing. So no, it is not at all the same thing.
The problem with such predictions is that they rely on the smartphone being a full replacement for a PC. And that's just not the case.
There's the obvious problems - typing large amounts of text, or doing things that require more processing power than a smartphone will have in the foreseeable future. These have been covered to death already; I won't bother reiterating them.
But then there's the lesser obstacles. Let me bring in some anecdotal evidence. I was feeling nostalgic, and wanted to play some of my old Game Boy Color games. I figured I should do so on my phone, rather than try to drag yet another bulky piece of electronics around. Finding an emulator was easy enough (finding one that didn't display ads was tougher, but doable). And I easily found a ROM file (just in case you're spying on me, MAFIAA, yes, I still have those games on cartridge, so bugger off).
But, every time I tried to download it, it prompted me for what program to open it in. And it only listed the ones that had registered themselves as being able to open .ZIP filesl the emulator was not among them. There was no option for "save the file locally, I'll handle opening it". None at all.
So in order to actually get it to work, I had to hook it up to my computer and copy the file over. Such a simple task, but it couldn't do it.
There are many other times I've tried to do something on my phone, but been unable to without using a PC. Here's a big one - development. You can code for Linux, on Linux. You can code for Windows, on Windows. I've even coded for freaking TI calculators, *on* the calculator. But you can't code for Android on an Android device, nor can you code for iPhone on an iPhone.
The running theme of it seems to be that smartphones and tablets are designed as consumers of data, not producers. But, given how essential producing data is to modern society, that means they will never replace the PC until that fundamental design concept is thrown out. Sure, for some, even many, uses, they're adequate, or at least capable of doing the task (if slower and more awkwardly). But so many common things remain impossible.
The more paranoid among you are probably preparing a rant about how this is $BIG_EVIL_CONGLOMERATE's wet dream, and something something 1984 something something DRM something from my cold dead hands. But that's not the case. Even *if* you posit a dystopian future where the $BEC controls everything, there will *still* be PCs, because *someone* will still have to produce data. They may become much less common, but a PC, or a PC-functional device, *will* be necessary.
Now, it could be possible that smartphones will change to have this type of functionality, and would be able, in theory, to replace PCs. But *that* seems unlikely, because the form factor itself, as well as limitations of technology, makes them very poor PC replacements.
[1] Note that, throughout, I use the term "PC" for "workstation, desktop or notebook". OS does not matter - your Mac is a PC; your Linux desktop is a PC; even that one guy still running CP/M is using a PC.
with a trip to radio shack a child could whip up a fart chair to signal keyboard input to any OS they choose for under 40 bucks.
I take it you haven't been to Radio Shack lately. The big shelf of resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors and such? Gone, along with any employees that even remember it existed.
I don't think they even have radios anymore. Just overpriced cables and cell phones.
This isn't a bad thing.
Let's start with the biggest reason: now they can't completely ruin it with a redesign. On an "active" project, you eventually run out of stuff to do. No new features to add, no glaring design problems, just boring bugs and maintenance. So you're eventually going to do some big overhaul, some big redesign, if only to justify being an active, major project. See: almost every major desktop environment. Sometimes a big redesign is necessary, but quite often, the change is just for the sake of change. Downshifting development means you don't need to "justify" your project's existence - you're just maintaining it, fixing bugs and minor issues, keeping up with the times. Because let's face it, there's only so many features you can add to an email client.
Second reason: how many people don't even use a dedicated email program anymore? I haven't used one in years (discounting the GMail app on my phone, that doesn't count). I just use a website, either GMail or whatever that online Outlook is. It's faster, and I *always* have a browser open anyways, so why not? Sure, some people will actually need features they don't have, or maybe just want a dedicated email program anyways. That's fine - Thunderbird still exists for those people. But I do not doubt that the potential userbase is shrinking.
Third and final reason: it's open source. If you really think they are no longer doing a good job with it, do it yourself. Fork it. Fix it. If you need help, you'll find people, as long as the work is worth doing.
Yeah, UN resolutions seem to be more 640x480 than 1920x1200, if you know what I mean.
That's ignoring the wars between Pakistan and India, both of whom are nuclear-armed.
Yet another company trying to legislate itself a profit.
As far as the law *should* be concerned, unless the university had in its contract terms restricting how quickly you can graduate or something to that effect, there's no case here. If they didn't think of that, it's their own damn fault for writing a contract with a "loophole" (although I'd say that graduating that quickly by actually doing all the work quickly isn't a loophole, it's just the right way to do it).
We really need to toughen the laws on frivolous or groundless cases.
It took four years because for the first 3.9 years, the tinkerers were satisfied with the official Linux-on-PS3. Sure, it was more locked-down than any Linux ought to be , but it was good enough for the tinkerers to tinker with.
Once Sony stole* Linux back from the tinkerers, it took what, a month or two, before it was cracked? And cracked it open wider than the old Sony Linux port had?
So depending on how you define when the tinkerers started trying to crack it, it took either years, or weeks.
* Yes, stole. If "piracy != stealing because the original guy still has his copy", then taking away a working copy from someone *is* stealing, and should be labeled as such.
So the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Dominican Republic wars, the Arab-Israeli and Yom Kippur wars, the Soviet and American invasions of Afghanistan, two Persian Gulf wars, the Falklands War, the Invasion of Grenada, the Serbia-Bosnia war, and too many more to list... those are just what, "police actions"? Some of them you can discard as "non-major countries", but too many of them had major, nuclear-armed powers on at least one side.
In fact, you could argue that nukes have produced *more* wars. Just look at Wikipedia. They obviously don't have a single page listing every war that ever was, but they've got it broken up by dates:
List of wars before 1000
List of wars 1000–1499
List of wars 1500–1799
List of wars 1800–1899
List of wars 1900–1944
List of wars 1945–1989
List of wars 1990–2002
List of wars 2003–2010
List of wars 2011–present
Weird how roughly 40% of all wars happen *after* 1945, when he says war basically ended. That assumes that all sub-lists have approximately the same length, which isn't precisely true, but it's close enough for our purposes (in fact, the longest seem to be the 1900-1944 and 1945-1989 lists). So you could easily argue that, while nukes may prevent major wars, they do so by converting them into numerous small wars.
And even his premise of "no major wars" is not proven. Sure, we haven't had a World War since '45. That's 65 years or so. They've had wars that *lasted* longer than that. Having a peace that lasts that long in "Western and Northern Europe and North America" isn't exactly uncommon. I can imagine people made the same argument about the rifle in pre-Napoleonic Europe, and I know people said such things about machine guns after WWI.
The Fallout games had it right - war never changes.
Yes, but is that 0x00000000, or 0xFFFFFF00, or even 0xFFAA9900?
I think he's referring to "trademark", not "copyright", there. He's saying "this code is effectively public domain, but the Prince of Persia trademark is still owned by Ubisoft". So you could modify the game however you want, but you cannot release it as a Prince of Persia game.
Although he is being very vague about releasing your modifications, especially commercially.
I wish Valve would open source the original Goldsource engine used for their Half-Life 1 based games, but that will never happen as long as Counter-Strike is still actively played.
They can't even if they wanted to - GoldSrc is based off the Quake II engine, and apparently their license does not allow them to release it (despite the fact that the Q2 engine itself is now GPL). Although this is second- or third-hand info, here. If you want the full story, just email Gabe.
They're criticizing the damn system!
I'm honestly surprised by this.
Not the "it was human error, TEPCO fucked up and could easily have avoided the disaster" part. That was completely expected. I was suspecting as much before they even had it shut down.
Nor am I surprised about the "collusion between industry and regulators". That was also a given.
What I *am* surprised about is that they're admitting to it this quickly. I expected it to be a decade or two before TEPCO or the government would admit that anything but the earthquake/tsunami were to blame. And that they're even blaming their own culture of discipline... wow. That's some harsh self-criticism.
Not just zero mass - negative mass.
Obviously particles of zero mass are speed-of-light bound - light itself, after all, is zero-mass and, curiously enough, travels at the speed of light.
Man, I can't even trust multinational corporations to do the right things from their own selfish profit-oriented perspective, never mind doing the right thing ethically.
Actually, the article addresses that. Or at the very least, the author says "dammit, Jim, I'm a particle physicist not a computer scientist! I don't know why they picked Linux over BSD!"
Most likely, Linux was just something the admins had more experience with, although technical matters probably played a minor role as well.
Ah, they amended it to SlashCloud.
Nope. Still not clicking any of those links.