The problem with HTML and Flash is that each of them is badly integrated with the other in all browsers. Flash is too much of a "black box" to HTML and to content digesters (like search engine indexers). HTML in the same browser is too hard to access from a Flash object. That bad interface between the two is the main problem.
And that's mostly Flash's fault. The HTML has a DOM and an extensive API to it that the Flash plugin can access. But the presentation of that API inside Flash is not easily programmable. Flash's language is ActionScript, which should be just another interoperable dialect of JavaScript (they're both variants of the ECMAScript standard), but you can't just include JavaScript in Flash apps or vice versa. The browser's inability to speak (even a binary compiled version) of ActionScript is a limit of the browser, but that's Flash's fault from differing from JavaScript with no valuable reason. The JavaScript API is not entirely standardized across all browsers (or even the major ones, Firefox/Safari/IE), which is a flaw of JavaScript, but that just means both sides of the incompatibilities have changes to make.
Maintaining the bad interface is a point of leverage for each of HTML/JavaScript and Flash to work to protect its status quo, to force the other side to change. But the fragmentation of the platform is costing both sides more than they'd gain by "being the boss".
Both Adobe and the browser developer projects should bury the hatchet, and make a single, unified, bidirectional API that can be programmed in the same language from either side of the interface. Most of the moves to get there have to come from Adobe. With HTML5 arriving, and the contest between HTML and Flash becoming truly epic - and epically wasteful - now is the time to get it together. We don't need another decade fighting over this only to get hard to program hybrids that are hard for people to use.
US Federal funds were cut off from embryonic stem cell research by Bush in 2001. That was a big change, since US Federal funding is a giant part of global medical research. The US and its Federal funding that's no risk to the private corps that benefit from its results is indeed the center of the medical research universe. In 2001, embryonic stem cells were the most likely kind to produce results. That was slowed a very great deal until the funding was allowed again last year. And now just a year later is this breakthru. Showing just how valuable throwing money at this problem is, compared to denying it money.
In the real world, cutting off stem cell funding in 2001 was an epic setback to the medical research. And in the real world, real people who could benefit suffered without it.
I'd love to have 3x9" phone with a long edge that could pull out a scrolled up display to a full 8.5x11".
Even cooler would be if the scroll could "telescope" out like a radio antenna before scolling, so a few 3" segments could snap out to 8.5", and scroll out to 11". That extensible scroll could contain an 8.5x11" screen in a 3x3 package. Perhaps even a 0.5" thick package, if the scroll can roll really tight.
A real pocket sized phone with a real fullsized display on demand. Cool!
Obama lifted Bush's 2001 ban in 2009. If embryonic stem cell research hadn't been banned by Republicans pandering to theocrats and drug corps for so long, this technique that finally unleashes stem cells for therapies might have been developed 8 years earlier.
Maybe my paraplegic college buddy who starved himself a year ago instead of continuing life in a wheelchair with chronic pain and steadily failing organs might have at least had real evidence for hope. Bush killed him, and who knows how many other people.
Microsoft is quietly getting rid of its old mobile business because it's replacing it with Silverlight. Windows 7 has a mobile edition that will evolve into whatever supports Silverlight. Which means that Microsoft's mobile business will use the same developer base as its desktop and server.Net business. And with things like MonoTouch, its mobile business will include the iPhone, just as Microsoft has always been one of the biggest developers for Mac desktops.
Silverlight puts.Net everywhere. The rest of Microsoft's mobile and desktop business is defined by that overall strategy.
It's fascinating to watch NASA begin to really explore a place like Mars that has a dynamic environment. The Moon is mostly changeless (except for Earth's shadow periodically swinging by, and the occasional tiny meteorite). Planetary orbits are dynamic at only the subatomic (eg. solar wind) scale, except for the rare encounter with space junk. But Mars is a real planet, with weather and lots of energetic events lots of the time.
It's not just far away that makes it hard. It's being so close to the Earth in having a dynamic atmosphere and possibly even surface conditions that makes it hard.
And that is why we do it: not because it's easy, but because it's hard. Doing it makes us better, and shows how good we are. Go NASA!
Typical Anonymous Republican Coward: A Republican abuses power, and the only thing you care about is making sure you say "Democrats, too!", though there's no Democrat in this story.
No, the governor does not control the attorney general. The attorney general is independent, though there is some influence. It's why attorneys general are independently elected, not appointed by the governor, nor can they be fired by the governor (at least not without quite a high political cost).
It's also how this attorney general is a Republican, though Rendell is a Democrat, and the AG is running to replace the governor when he retires - against Rendell's favored Democrat.
Nice try trying to blame a Republican's abuses on a Democrat, though. The Republican Party thanks you.
It sounds like there's an excellent market for a backup app that just sucks all data off a mobile PC, stores it on someone's home PC, then wipes the mobile PC and installs an empty, quickly searchable OS and storage. Then later, the mobile PC hits a website that redirects to the home PC, from which the mobile PC is restored intact. Network transfers all encrypted.
Business and other travelers would backup before leaving, then restore when arriving. No way for customs to mess with that. And it would give backups for restoring anyway. Like if you want to leave your mobile PC at home entirely, and just get a temporary one in the place you're going. Or if your mobile PC is damaged, or lost in luggage transfer, or stolen...
This kind of stupid privacy invasion, that anyone who's really a threat to a country can easily evade with cruder tools doing what I described, ought not to be a worry. SW is stronger than the government here.
UC Berkeley's campus isn't liberal. It's got the most stereotypical frat/sorority ghetto I've ever seen. Its budget is stuffed with defense contractor and other giant corporation contracts, especially oil and telecom corps. Its law school hired John Yoo, the Bush lawyer who wrote the US torture regime rationalizations.
The list goes on. But these "Conservative" (corporatist, or worse) activities are defined by being exclusive, even covert, even secret. While Berkeley's actually "liberal" (or whatever's not "Conservative") activities are usually defined by being public, even extroverted. Then take the mass media's interest in hiding the "Conservative" activities behind a distracting "liberal" show, and you get Berkeley a reputation for being "liberal".
If they want to protect inventions from patent monopolization, they'll just publish the invention with a declaration that it's in the public domain. Which prevents anyone from patenting it.
People have the right to destroy our own property. That right can be infringed by a legitimate order not to destroy evidence of a crime, when due process uses prior evidence of that crime and the existence of further evidence.
But until a person is so ordered, it is their right to destroy their own property. The condition of our property that we cause is also our property. So deleting electronic records from our own devices is within our rights.
If sex offenders are mentally ill, which caused their behavior, and are still ill that way when their sentence is up, then they shouldn't be released. They probably shouldn't be in jail, either. They should be in a psychiatric jail.
The law in the US regarding sickness vs criminality is so screwed up that there's little chance people's rights will be protected when their illness creates either harm or risk to other people.
Patents are granted only on the basis that the inventor's investment must be protected from competition by competitors who have money to compete without the burden of paying to invent. There's no way the inventor spent over $200M to invent their invention. Now they have recouped all their investment, and a lot of profit.
So they don't need a patent to protect them from unfair competition anymore. Their patent should expire, and they should compete solely based on their product's superiority in the market.
There are some good doctors, but they're very few among the many who suck.
These days doctors mostly just see as many patients as they possibly can per hour, look for symptoms identified by drug corps, order standard tests run by labs and returned with diagnosis attached, then prescribe drugs. They're just gateways to testing and drug corps.
Of course they don't want to talk about what you googled. That just slows them down. And they often don't have any deeper understanding of the diagnosis and treatment they're charging for than google gave you.
We need more doctors, with rigorous periodic testing for them to keep their licenses. And published track records of their accuracy in diagnosis and treatment. Increase the supply to meet the demand, force them to compete with each other, watch quality increase as price decreases. And watch us all get healthier from it.
High capacity drives should come in one enclosure that can be seen over its PC interface connection as multiple smaller drives the OS can handle. A "drive RAID".
And OSes should stop representing each drive as a separate object, except to lower level administration.
All longterm storage should be pooled as a RAID, even if there's only a single device. Presenting individual volumes to the user (and programmer) is more trouble than it's worth. It's the OS' job to present a simple, effective interface to complex underlying hardware.
We've made big changes to the world we evolved into. The number of species going extinct during the last few generations of humans is now among the biggest dieoffs the planet has ever seen.
There will be variations in how photosynthesis is encoded in different species, and some species will be better models for mimicking with artificial devices. When we make those species extinct, we're losing the benefit they would bring if we had them to study.
Drugs are a good example, but they're just the most obvious ones. Humans have been using plants and animals as sources for medicine since time immemorial, probably since before we were even human, so more advanced techniques for exploiting them are second nature to us. Indeed, many medicinal species were co-evolved with humans, who survived more when cultivating them (whether or not by planning, or just eating them and excreting seeds). Humans' more abstract needs for biochemical processes are much more recent, and often too subtle for us to even notice they're available. Entanglement in photosynthesis is a good example. But photosynthesis is one of the best known plant behaviors, and one of the closest to basic modern human needs. There will surely be many others.
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The problem with HTML and Flash is that each of them is badly integrated with the other in all browsers. Flash is too much of a "black box" to HTML and to content digesters (like search engine indexers). HTML in the same browser is too hard to access from a Flash object. That bad interface between the two is the main problem.
And that's mostly Flash's fault. The HTML has a DOM and an extensive API to it that the Flash plugin can access. But the presentation of that API inside Flash is not easily programmable. Flash's language is ActionScript, which should be just another interoperable dialect of JavaScript (they're both variants of the ECMAScript standard), but you can't just include JavaScript in Flash apps or vice versa. The browser's inability to speak (even a binary compiled version) of ActionScript is a limit of the browser, but that's Flash's fault from differing from JavaScript with no valuable reason. The JavaScript API is not entirely standardized across all browsers (or even the major ones, Firefox/Safari/IE), which is a flaw of JavaScript, but that just means both sides of the incompatibilities have changes to make.
Maintaining the bad interface is a point of leverage for each of HTML/JavaScript and Flash to work to protect its status quo, to force the other side to change. But the fragmentation of the platform is costing both sides more than they'd gain by "being the boss".
Both Adobe and the browser developer projects should bury the hatchet, and make a single, unified, bidirectional API that can be programmed in the same language from either side of the interface. Most of the moves to get there have to come from Adobe. With HTML5 arriving, and the contest between HTML and Flash becoming truly epic - and epically wasteful - now is the time to get it together. We don't need another decade fighting over this only to get hard to program hybrids that are hard for people to use.
I was just reading today about Jim Henson's mid-1960s TV commercial for RC Cola, featuring two birds that evolved later to become Big Bird.
These robots surely cost a lot more than running livestock across minefields to trigger the mines.
The existing embryonic stem cell lines in 2001 were believed to be unusable after contamination by mouse cells.
The reality is that Bush succeeded in crippling stem cell research until his ban was lifted last year.
US Federal funds were cut off from embryonic stem cell research by Bush in 2001. That was a big change, since US Federal funding is a giant part of global medical research. The US and its Federal funding that's no risk to the private corps that benefit from its results is indeed the center of the medical research universe. In 2001, embryonic stem cells were the most likely kind to produce results. That was slowed a very great deal until the funding was allowed again last year. And now just a year later is this breakthru. Showing just how valuable throwing money at this problem is, compared to denying it money.
In the real world, cutting off stem cell funding in 2001 was an epic setback to the medical research. And in the real world, real people who could benefit suffered without it.
I'd love to have 3x9" phone with a long edge that could pull out a scrolled up display to a full 8.5x11".
Even cooler would be if the scroll could "telescope" out like a radio antenna before scolling, so a few 3" segments could snap out to 8.5", and scroll out to 11". That extensible scroll could contain an 8.5x11" screen in a 3x3 package. Perhaps even a 0.5" thick package, if the scroll can roll really tight.
A real pocket sized phone with a real fullsized display on demand. Cool!
Obama lifted Bush's 2001 ban in 2009. If embryonic stem cell research hadn't been banned by Republicans pandering to theocrats and drug corps for so long, this technique that finally unleashes stem cells for therapies might have been developed 8 years earlier.
Maybe my paraplegic college buddy who starved himself a year ago instead of continuing life in a wheelchair with chronic pain and steadily failing organs might have at least had real evidence for hope. Bush killed him, and who knows how many other people.
Microsoft is quietly getting rid of its old mobile business because it's replacing it with Silverlight. Windows 7 has a mobile edition that will evolve into whatever supports Silverlight. Which means that Microsoft's mobile business will use the same developer base as its desktop and server .Net business. And with things like MonoTouch, its mobile business will include the iPhone, just as Microsoft has always been one of the biggest developers for Mac desktops.
Silverlight puts .Net everywhere. The rest of Microsoft's mobile and desktop business is defined by that overall strategy.
It's fascinating to watch NASA begin to really explore a place like Mars that has a dynamic environment. The Moon is mostly changeless (except for Earth's shadow periodically swinging by, and the occasional tiny meteorite). Planetary orbits are dynamic at only the subatomic (eg. solar wind) scale, except for the rare encounter with space junk. But Mars is a real planet, with weather and lots of energetic events lots of the time.
It's not just far away that makes it hard. It's being so close to the Earth in having a dynamic atmosphere and possibly even surface conditions that makes it hard.
And that is why we do it: not because it's easy, but because it's hard. Doing it makes us better, and shows how good we are. Go NASA!
Typical Anonymous Republican Coward: A Republican abuses power, and the only thing you care about is making sure you say "Democrats, too!", though there's no Democrat in this story.
Karl Rove, is that you?
No, the governor does not control the attorney general. The attorney general is independent, though there is some influence. It's why attorneys general are independently elected, not appointed by the governor, nor can they be fired by the governor (at least not without quite a high political cost).
It's also how this attorney general is a Republican, though Rendell is a Democrat, and the AG is running to replace the governor when he retires - against Rendell's favored Democrat.
Nice try trying to blame a Republican's abuses on a Democrat, though. The Republican Party thanks you.
Tom Corbett is a Republican.
It sounds like there's an excellent market for a backup app that just sucks all data off a mobile PC, stores it on someone's home PC, then wipes the mobile PC and installs an empty, quickly searchable OS and storage. Then later, the mobile PC hits a website that redirects to the home PC, from which the mobile PC is restored intact. Network transfers all encrypted.
Business and other travelers would backup before leaving, then restore when arriving. No way for customs to mess with that. And it would give backups for restoring anyway. Like if you want to leave your mobile PC at home entirely, and just get a temporary one in the place you're going. Or if your mobile PC is damaged, or lost in luggage transfer, or stolen...
This kind of stupid privacy invasion, that anyone who's really a threat to a country can easily evade with cruder tools doing what I described, ought not to be a worry. SW is stronger than the government here.
Your "liberal media" at work.
They say the devil's greatest trick was convincing people he doesn't exist. More like it was convincing people he's the savior.
UC Berkeley's campus isn't liberal. It's got the most stereotypical frat/sorority ghetto I've ever seen. Its budget is stuffed with defense contractor and other giant corporation contracts, especially oil and telecom corps. Its law school hired John Yoo, the Bush lawyer who wrote the US torture regime rationalizations.
The list goes on. But these "Conservative" (corporatist, or worse) activities are defined by being exclusive, even covert, even secret. While Berkeley's actually "liberal" (or whatever's not "Conservative") activities are usually defined by being public, even extroverted. Then take the mass media's interest in hiding the "Conservative" activities behind a distracting "liberal" show, and you get Berkeley a reputation for being "liberal".
There are other laws requiring retaining business records.
Just another example of how a corporation is not a person; corporations don't have rights like privacy.
If they want to protect inventions from patent monopolization, they'll just publish the invention with a declaration that it's in the public domain. Which prevents anyone from patenting it.
The rest of this posturing is nonsense.
People have the right to destroy our own property. That right can be infringed by a legitimate order not to destroy evidence of a crime, when due process uses prior evidence of that crime and the existence of further evidence.
But until a person is so ordered, it is their right to destroy their own property. The condition of our property that we cause is also our property. So deleting electronic records from our own devices is within our rights.
If sex offenders are mentally ill, which caused their behavior, and are still ill that way when their sentence is up, then they shouldn't be released. They probably shouldn't be in jail, either. They should be in a psychiatric jail.
The law in the US regarding sickness vs criminality is so screwed up that there's little chance people's rights will be protected when their illness creates either harm or risk to other people.
Patents are granted only on the basis that the inventor's investment must be protected from competition by competitors who have money to compete without the burden of paying to invent. There's no way the inventor spent over $200M to invent their invention. Now they have recouped all their investment, and a lot of profit.
So they don't need a patent to protect them from unfair competition anymore. Their patent should expire, and they should compete solely based on their product's superiority in the market.
There are some good doctors, but they're very few among the many who suck.
These days doctors mostly just see as many patients as they possibly can per hour, look for symptoms identified by drug corps, order standard tests run by labs and returned with diagnosis attached, then prescribe drugs. They're just gateways to testing and drug corps.
Of course they don't want to talk about what you googled. That just slows them down. And they often don't have any deeper understanding of the diagnosis and treatment they're charging for than google gave you.
We need more doctors, with rigorous periodic testing for them to keep their licenses. And published track records of their accuracy in diagnosis and treatment. Increase the supply to meet the demand, force them to compete with each other, watch quality increase as price decreases. And watch us all get healthier from it.
High capacity drives should come in one enclosure that can be seen over its PC interface connection as multiple smaller drives the OS can handle. A "drive RAID".
And OSes should stop representing each drive as a separate object, except to lower level administration.
All longterm storage should be pooled as a RAID, even if there's only a single device. Presenting individual volumes to the user (and programmer) is more trouble than it's worth. It's the OS' job to present a simple, effective interface to complex underlying hardware.
We like the mess photosynthetic plants made, into which we evolved.
We won't like the mess we're making, because evolution will see us less fit to inhabit the world we've changed.
We've made big changes to the world we evolved into. The number of species going extinct during the last few generations of humans is now among the biggest dieoffs the planet has ever seen.
There will be variations in how photosynthesis is encoded in different species, and some species will be better models for mimicking with artificial devices. When we make those species extinct, we're losing the benefit they would bring if we had them to study.
Drugs are a good example, but they're just the most obvious ones. Humans have been using plants and animals as sources for medicine since time immemorial, probably since before we were even human, so more advanced techniques for exploiting them are second nature to us. Indeed, many medicinal species were co-evolved with humans, who survived more when cultivating them (whether or not by planning, or just eating them and excreting seeds). Humans' more abstract needs for biochemical processes are much more recent, and often too subtle for us to even notice they're available. Entanglement in photosynthesis is a good example. But photosynthesis is one of the best known plant behaviors, and one of the closest to basic modern human needs. There will surely be many others.