the government will claim this or that, and people will just accept it. when an honest mistake by the government, nevermind malicious intent, might wind up overtaxing someone. most people will wind up spending say $2,000 more on their taxes, accepting the government's proposal unseen, rather than reviewing it for mistakes
I don't have a problem with that. You can't save everyone. The amount of efficiency in the average case would be so great, though, that overall I suspect it would offer more money to both the government AND the taxpayer.
I'm not sure why you threw daycare centers in there. Often they are much more strictly monitored than a child's home life and probably have prevented more of these cases than caused them.
I mean, there's speculation about it showing up on gaming blogs.
Gosh, the successor to one of the most prolific gaming devices ever released is 7 days away from announcement and someone wants to talk about it on a gaming blog? The horror! Seriously, all the game titles released for all the other current platforms put together equal the amount of titles released for the iPhone OS. Sure, a lot of them are free indie toys of questionable quantity, but it's still a must-have device for any gaming enthusiast. And a tablet strikes me as something that could easily become a critical aspect of much tabletop gaming in the near future.
Criticisms on excessive speculation on specs, form factors, operating systems, and manufacturers of the tablet seem warranted-- the gaming one is one of the few that actually DOES make sense to me, along with publishing and input devices.
On the Mac/Safari I use ClickToFlash, which turns off auto-run on all Flash content and lets you click specific flash panels if you want to run them. (It also adds a menu selection to let you turn on all Flash for a given page or override the settings for a given site.) Further, it can recognize YouTube URLs and redirect you from the Flash to the h.264 if available. That single feature is worth more than any speed increase in any other browser... hopefully it spreads.
I disapprove of ad-blocking software since I believe there's an implied contract between web page consumers and the funding models of the providers, but I don't have a problem with blocking particular proprietary content delivery mechanisms.
there is nothing illegal about a service provider handing over their own data
IMHO, the question isn't about the legality of handing it over, but the legality of the Government asking for it without a court order. The fourth amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure, and there is an argument to be made that there is an expectation of privacy regarding this information.
In any case, I don't care if the FBI gets the information with a post-it note, as long as that note has reasonable cause and a judge's signature on it.
Software patents are inherently wrong. It doesn't matter if you invent an algorithm or not, because algorithms are just mathematical expressions, and you can't (or shouldn't be able to) patent math. And algorithms are usually implemented, not in physical (patentable) devices, but in software programs, for which the appropriate protection is copyright, not patent.
So you're asserting that you should be able to copyright math?
The whole "software is math" argument is old and debunked. Anything which requires creativity and careful analysis, and the investment therein, is a potentially valuable addition to human knowledge. In exchange for investing in such a thing, there should be the potential to protect your investment from copycats without resorting to keeping it a secret.
I don't see any difference between patenting a physical machine and a computer model of a machine if they follow identical rules and required the same amount of thought and work to produce.
China is actually the second biggest market, just barely edging out Japan and Germany. They are each between $5-6B in trade a year. The US is something like $15B. We're roughly as big as the next three put together.
I'm sure that will change. China's economy is growing fast, and they seem to have an interesting economic balance between socialist and market concepts. But if you're really close the US and can't trade with them, that's an awful lot of lost opportunity.
If what you said was remotely true, none of the buttons or links would work. Dur.
Not true. The links and buttons simply take you to other URLs which would also have gotten cached by the caching proxy server. (The friends page on facebook is "http://www.facebook.com/friends", which is just another URL to cache.)
My guess is that it's as simple as this: the http returned by a request to "www.facebook.com" was cached by AT&T and delivered to other users who attempted to fetch that URL in an attempt to save bandwidth. The login credentials are irrelevant... once AT&T cached the page it thought of as "www.facebook.com" it would deliver it to anyone who asked for that URL. It probably only changed for the next person because someone insisted on logging out and back in, and the caching server detected the change then re-cached the NEW user's page.
This used to happen a lot on the internet to unencrypted streams that allowed log-ins. These days most caching servers are properly configured, but it's still an easy mistake to make if you're setting up a caching proxy.
I bought the Star Trek Blu-Ray last month. It comes with a code that lets you download a "low-resolution" (slightly below DVD) version of the movie for viewing on your iPhone/computer/whatever. To the chagrin of anti-DRM activists, that works out pretty well for me.
If you ever willingly not only used AOL, but also used their e-mail, you have quite clearly shown a lack of technical aptitude in the past, and you can't grow it any more than you can grow a sense of rhythm. You can gain knowledge and even develop an interest, but you still lack a desirable quality.
Oh please. I've had my own domain since the latter part of the 90's that serves as my primary email address, but have had an AOL account (and later email address) since shortly after AOL branched off from AppleLink Personal Edition. To this day I think my grandmother still finds that one easier to send mail to (she's 92 so making her iMac as easy to use as possible is important.)
I agree that having @aol.com these days makes a negative statement about one's technical aptitude, but to imply that no one who ever had one is worthy of your respect is just silly.
If you're going to choose and not do both, then it largely depends on what kind of "programming" you're going to do. Note that "Programming" is a very different profession from Computer Science or Software Engineering. If you're interested in 3D, games, physics, etc., you're going to need a solid foundation in linear algebra and calculus. If you're going to be dealing in large datasets, distributed systems, client-server communications, etc., then discrete math and set theory will probably be very useful. If you're going to go into AI, classifiers, robotics, etc., then you'll probably want both, plus statistics.
If you're just going to bang out code to someone else's careful spec, then you may not need all that much math.
Oh, and it's worth pointing out (as AT&T insists in their commercials against Verizon) that 2G should be good enough for anybody, and the Nexus One will work on AT&T's 2G network that they think is so awesome.
Not good enough for anybody, just good enough for those used to other provider's "3G" speeds, which aren't much better than AT&T's 2G speeds. If you're already used to AT&T's 3G speeds, this will be a noticeable step down.
I sleep 6-8 hours a day and rarely use my iPhone while doing so. Like many clock radio these days, I got mine with an iPod/iPhone dock that charges it and/or plays music from it and it's sitting by my bed. It's really not that hard considering the utility it provides.
Any gamer who's ever sat around a table playing games who can't imagine the use of a reasonably-sided, flat, touch-sensitive inexpensive networked computer with an easy-to-use SDK isn't imaginative enough. Slashdot, if anywhere, should be all over this. I would expect this product to be like the introduction of Magic: The Gathering to the gaming community.
Solar panels and turbines, though, are catalysts in the sun->electricity process. They aren't consumables. It's true that parts wear out and efficiency decreases over time, but the "fuel" is the sun and that has a couple billion years of habitable life left.
It's funny how "lucky" things often happen to those striving to do new and interesting things in various pursuits. In order for luck to cause anything to happen you have to be set up to take advantage of the lucky situation. The more you do the "luckier" you'll get. (As long as you keep your eyes open while you do it.)
The only firm "deliverables" (CDRLs in contract-speak) in most DARPA contracts are status reports and a final writeup. If you get something that actually works it's a major bonus for future contract work, of course, but doesn't affect your DARPA money. That's why it's called "Research" and not "Development". Sometimes trying for something impossible turns up some interesting discoveries. Sometimes not.
When was the last time we had a story about Linus or RMS sneezing?
You've got to be joking. We heard how RMS thinks MySQL's mixed closed/open source is better than a pure GPL license. We got an article about how Linus should win the Nobel Peace Prize. Just do some searches for Stallman or Linus on Slashdot and you'll get the same drivel you do for jobs.
Personally, I think rumors about the latest and greatest tech gadgets are Slashdot's bread and butter, and the Apple haters are just infuriated the iPhone remains so popular.
So the pre-alpha version of Opera is faster than the competition, but how does it compare against the pre-alpha versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome?
The issue here, though, is not what the blogger has a right to say, but what a registered PAC has the right to say. In return for PACs being granted a special status in tax law and election law, they have to follow certain rules. Most PACs have found ways to bend the rules to the point of silliness, but still follow the letter of the law. This site explicitly states that the group was created solely to battle a single politician, so it really shouldn't be a PAC.
Note that I don't know or care about the folks involved in this situation, just trying to point out that this is not simply a freedom of speech issue.
IMHO, the best science fiction depiction of this type of space combat was in the Neutronium Alchemist/Night's Dawn trilogy. All the mechanical (non-living) spacecraft were spherical, and space-to-space combat was accomplished through volleys of pods that contained weapons and countermeasures launched in swarms. The series depicts several space battles, as well as some space-to-ground attacks that are pretty fascinating reads. The series is highly recommended except for the ending-- in paperback it's split into 6 books, and I recommend just reading the first 5 then imagining how it might end. You'll definitely come up with a better plotline than the author's.
Welcome to reality. The amount of electricity to your house is not limited, but if everyone in town pulls down every Watt of power they possibly can at the same time the system will fall to its knees. Ubiquitous networks are just too new for "normal" to be well-defined yet, and are just starting to have enough capacity to be effectively "unlimited".
So it's not really about capacity, it's about billing.
The big difference between electricity and bits is that the electricity is not "all you can eat". And I think network usage has to go the same way. The reason that's scary to a lot of people is because most "per-megabyte" rates are way, way too high. Once costs are pennies per gigabyte we won't be worrying so much about metered internet access and you'll just have those dials on the outside of your house that count up gigabytes like we have for Watt-hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to nitpick, MacOS X is a certified UNIX. Linux isn't. Thus, I don't think that statement is saying what you wanted it to say.
I don't have a problem with that. You can't save everyone. The amount of efficiency in the average case would be so great, though, that overall I suspect it would offer more money to both the government AND the taxpayer.
I'm not sure why you threw daycare centers in there. Often they are much more strictly monitored than a child's home life and probably have prevented more of these cases than caused them.
Gosh, the successor to one of the most prolific gaming devices ever released is 7 days away from announcement and someone wants to talk about it on a gaming blog? The horror! Seriously, all the game titles released for all the other current platforms put together equal the amount of titles released for the iPhone OS. Sure, a lot of them are free indie toys of questionable quantity, but it's still a must-have device for any gaming enthusiast. And a tablet strikes me as something that could easily become a critical aspect of much tabletop gaming in the near future.
Criticisms on excessive speculation on specs, form factors, operating systems, and manufacturers of the tablet seem warranted-- the gaming one is one of the few that actually DOES make sense to me, along with publishing and input devices.
On the Mac/Safari I use ClickToFlash, which turns off auto-run on all Flash content and lets you click specific flash panels if you want to run them. (It also adds a menu selection to let you turn on all Flash for a given page or override the settings for a given site.) Further, it can recognize YouTube URLs and redirect you from the Flash to the h.264 if available. That single feature is worth more than any speed increase in any other browser... hopefully it spreads.
I disapprove of ad-blocking software since I believe there's an implied contract between web page consumers and the funding models of the providers, but I don't have a problem with blocking particular proprietary content delivery mechanisms.
IMHO, the question isn't about the legality of handing it over, but the legality of the Government asking for it without a court order. The fourth amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure, and there is an argument to be made that there is an expectation of privacy regarding this information.
In any case, I don't care if the FBI gets the information with a post-it note, as long as that note has reasonable cause and a judge's signature on it.
So you're asserting that you should be able to copyright math?
The whole "software is math" argument is old and debunked. Anything which requires creativity and careful analysis, and the investment therein, is a potentially valuable addition to human knowledge. In exchange for investing in such a thing, there should be the potential to protect your investment from copycats without resorting to keeping it a secret.
I don't see any difference between patenting a physical machine and a computer model of a machine if they follow identical rules and required the same amount of thought and work to produce.
China is actually the second biggest market, just barely edging out Japan and Germany. They are each between $5-6B in trade a year. The US is something like $15B. We're roughly as big as the next three put together.
I'm sure that will change. China's economy is growing fast, and they seem to have an interesting economic balance between socialist and market concepts. But if you're really close the US and can't trade with them, that's an awful lot of lost opportunity.
If what you said was remotely true, none of the buttons or links would work. Dur.
Not true. The links and buttons simply take you to other URLs which would also have gotten cached by the caching proxy server. (The friends page on facebook is "http://www.facebook.com/friends", which is just another URL to cache.)
Dur indeed.
My guess is that it's as simple as this: the http returned by a request to "www.facebook.com" was cached by AT&T and delivered to other users who attempted to fetch that URL in an attempt to save bandwidth. The login credentials are irrelevant... once AT&T cached the page it thought of as "www.facebook.com" it would deliver it to anyone who asked for that URL. It probably only changed for the next person because someone insisted on logging out and back in, and the caching server detected the change then re-cached the NEW user's page.
This used to happen a lot on the internet to unencrypted streams that allowed log-ins. These days most caching servers are properly configured, but it's still an easy mistake to make if you're setting up a caching proxy.
I bought the Star Trek Blu-Ray last month. It comes with a code that lets you download a "low-resolution" (slightly below DVD) version of the movie for viewing on your iPhone/computer/whatever. To the chagrin of anti-DRM activists, that works out pretty well for me.
Oh please. I've had my own domain since the latter part of the 90's that serves as my primary email address, but have had an AOL account (and later email address) since shortly after AOL branched off from AppleLink Personal Edition. To this day I think my grandmother still finds that one easier to send mail to (she's 92 so making her iMac as easy to use as possible is important.)
I agree that having @aol.com these days makes a negative statement about one's technical aptitude, but to imply that no one who ever had one is worthy of your respect is just silly.
If you're going to choose and not do both, then it largely depends on what kind of "programming" you're going to do. Note that "Programming" is a very different profession from Computer Science or Software Engineering. If you're interested in 3D, games, physics, etc., you're going to need a solid foundation in linear algebra and calculus. If you're going to be dealing in large datasets, distributed systems, client-server communications, etc., then discrete math and set theory will probably be very useful. If you're going to go into AI, classifiers, robotics, etc., then you'll probably want both, plus statistics.
If you're just going to bang out code to someone else's careful spec, then you may not need all that much math.
Oh, and it's worth pointing out (as AT&T insists in their commercials against Verizon) that 2G should be good enough for anybody, and the Nexus One will work on AT&T's 2G network that they think is so awesome.
Not good enough for anybody, just good enough for those used to other provider's "3G" speeds, which aren't much better than AT&T's 2G speeds. If you're already used to AT&T's 3G speeds, this will be a noticeable step down.
I sleep 6-8 hours a day and rarely use my iPhone while doing so. Like many clock radio these days, I got mine with an iPod/iPhone dock that charges it and/or plays music from it and it's sitting by my bed. It's really not that hard considering the utility it provides.
Any gamer who's ever sat around a table playing games who can't imagine the use of a reasonably-sided, flat, touch-sensitive inexpensive networked computer with an easy-to-use SDK isn't imaginative enough. Slashdot, if anywhere, should be all over this. I would expect this product to be like the introduction of Magic: The Gathering to the gaming community.
Solar panels and turbines, though, are catalysts in the sun->electricity process. They aren't consumables. It's true that parts wear out and efficiency decreases over time, but the "fuel" is the sun and that has a couple billion years of habitable life left.
It's funny how "lucky" things often happen to those striving to do new and interesting things in various pursuits. In order for luck to cause anything to happen you have to be set up to take advantage of the lucky situation. The more you do the "luckier" you'll get. (As long as you keep your eyes open while you do it.)
The only firm "deliverables" (CDRLs in contract-speak) in most DARPA contracts are status reports and a final writeup. If you get something that actually works it's a major bonus for future contract work, of course, but doesn't affect your DARPA money. That's why it's called "Research" and not "Development". Sometimes trying for something impossible turns up some interesting discoveries. Sometimes not.
When was the last time we had a story about Linus or RMS sneezing?
You've got to be joking. We heard how RMS thinks MySQL's mixed closed/open source is better than a pure GPL license. We got an article about how Linus should win the Nobel Peace Prize. Just do some searches for Stallman or Linus on Slashdot and you'll get the same drivel you do for jobs.
Personally, I think rumors about the latest and greatest tech gadgets are Slashdot's bread and butter, and the Apple haters are just infuriated the iPhone remains so popular.
So the pre-alpha version of Opera is faster than the competition, but how does it compare against the pre-alpha versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome?
The issue here, though, is not what the blogger has a right to say, but what a registered PAC has the right to say. In return for PACs being granted a special status in tax law and election law, they have to follow certain rules. Most PACs have found ways to bend the rules to the point of silliness, but still follow the letter of the law. This site explicitly states that the group was created solely to battle a single politician, so it really shouldn't be a PAC.
Note that I don't know or care about the folks involved in this situation, just trying to point out that this is not simply a freedom of speech issue.
IMHO, the best science fiction depiction of this type of space combat was in the Neutronium Alchemist/Night's Dawn trilogy. All the mechanical (non-living) spacecraft were spherical, and space-to-space combat was accomplished through volleys of pods that contained weapons and countermeasures launched in swarms. The series depicts several space battles, as well as some space-to-ground attacks that are pretty fascinating reads. The series is highly recommended except for the ending-- in paperback it's split into 6 books, and I recommend just reading the first 5 then imagining how it might end. You'll definitely come up with a better plotline than the author's.
Welcome to reality. The amount of electricity to your house is not limited, but if everyone in town pulls down every Watt of power they possibly can at the same time the system will fall to its knees. Ubiquitous networks are just too new for "normal" to be well-defined yet, and are just starting to have enough capacity to be effectively "unlimited".
So it's not really about capacity, it's about billing.
The big difference between electricity and bits is that the electricity is not "all you can eat". And I think network usage has to go the same way. The reason that's scary to a lot of people is because most "per-megabyte" rates are way, way too high. Once costs are pennies per gigabyte we won't be worrying so much about metered internet access and you'll just have those dials on the outside of your house that count up gigabytes like we have for Watt-hours.
Snap Circuits appear to be the modern equivalent of those old Radio Shack spring-and-wire kits you could buy in the 70's.