with handwriting recognition (using former newton-technology so it's a lot better than current palm os recognition)
LOL! First of all, the Newton sucked when it came to handwriting recognition. Second of all, the guy doesn't even seem to realize that Palm OS doesn't do handwriting recognition, it does gesture recognition with Graffiti, which is why it was successful. Palm was smart enough to know that handwriting recognition sucks and will always suck like voice recognition until we get better AI-based pattern recognition and language context theories (no, it won't be solved solely by processor speed).
Re:Interesting comment in related news...
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2
You're right, they are not the same morally, nor functionally. However, they are both asymetrical and ambiguous and stem from root causes that are difficult to identify and eliminate.
I understand what you're saying, but I think the key difference is that the drug problem is primarily an economic supply-and-demand problem. Drugs exist because a) there is a big demand for them, and b) you can make a huge amount of money from them.
This is totally different from the motivations for terrorism. For a terrorist leader like Osama bin Laden, the motivation is a desire for power over others. He wants to remake the world into his vision of radical Islam, similar to how Hitler wanted to remake the world into his vision. The rank-and-file terrorist feels powerless in his world, and wants to "strike back" at the people whom he has blamed for his powerlessness. This is actually pretty similar to how Hitler's rise came about -- Hitler took advantage of the power-WW/I Germany's powerlessness due to the punishments that were installed by the rest of Europe. The roots of that powerlessness are very different, but there is no doubt that it exists.
So I agree superficially you can find similarities, but the motivations and structure are very different. Of course, the biggest difference are the stakes -- I don't particularly like the social decay that comes from drugs, but that's quite a different scale from the destruction of freedom and liberty that the terrorist organizations threaten us with.
Re:Interesting comment in related news...
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2
About as winnable as the War on Terror, or War on Drugs
I am astounded when I see people compare "war on drugs" to "war on terror" as if they are the same thing. First of all, they are TOTALLY different, except for the semantic similarities which is what you seem to find so appealing. One is a cultural "war", and the other is a military war. I assure you, the war on terror is winnable and will be won.
Of course, people like you will never acknowledge it when it is won, because you will be a literalist who will claim, "well, if there are ANY terrorist events in the world, therefore, the War on Terrorism hasn't been won."
This will be like saying that since we have Nazi groups around the world, therefore we never defeated the Nazis.
The point is not to defeat every lunatic who wants to pin the word "Terrorist" (or Nazi) to his shirt, the point is to wipe out the world wide organization that allows them to carefully plan large-scale attacks. The point is to wipe out the leadership. The point is to eliminate governments who sponsor terrorism, and use terrorist groups as part of their military.
A good example of winning a war on Terrorism was defeating the Ku Klux Klan in the US in the early part of the century. They would fit just about any definition of a terrorist group, and in fact, the southern states turned a blind eye to their activities. It took the Federal Government coming in to finally defeat the organization. Do we still have Klan members around? Of course. But they have so little power that no one takes them seriously.
I wonder what it must be like to go through life being so pessimistic, and believing that liberty and freedom are not worth fighting for.
However, WWII could have been avoided altogether without bloodshed if the US and European nations had been less selfish and vindictive decades earlier.
Well, you can "coulda shoulda woulda" any war in hindsite and see how to prevent it. It's worth pointing out that Germany brought it on itself by starting WW/I.
Something analogous is true now: WTC and the bombing of Afghanistan are the long-term consequences of massive failures of US foreign policy,
I agree with you that there are parallels between Germany back then and now. You can definitely make an argument that Germany got screwed in the years after WW/I which led to Hitler's rise.
However, there are also difference. You have to give the Middle East some responsibility for their own problems. I thought this series of Newsweek articles was an excellent discussion of the issues. The US has some responsibility for the current problems, but it's not true that it's solely our fault.
the US is already laying the groundwork for future wars and terrorism in their alliances with Pakistan and other undemocratic forces.
I somewhat agree with this, although not completely. Someone could have made the same statement about WW/II: "We shouldn't kill Nazis; that will just create more of them". It might or might not be true, but that's irrelevent: The aggresors set the rules. They have attacked our freedom and liberty, and I for one believe that freedom and liberty must be defended at all costs.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that we are not exactly aligning with believers of freedom. But let's face it. The middle east is at least 50-100 years away from being democracies. We can either align with "lesser evils", or we can withdraw completely. If we withdraw completely, we risk a Hitler type taking over the entire middle east, and then we really do have WW/III on our hands -- for real. The only thing that keeps that from happening is the good ol' USA.
It's a complicated situation, and there is no end of simple solutions that are dead wrong. There is no doubt the US has made some mistakes, but not as many as the US-haters would like everyone to believe.
Uh, 150,000 died at Dresden alone. How did that win the war?
The point is not rehashing particular decisions of the war, but to point out that sometimes to preserve the freedom of the world, it's necessary that innocents die along with the evil doers. Should we have not fought the Nazis just because some innocent Germans would be caught up in the conflict as well? The answer is no. Sometimes freedom has to be fought for, whatever the cost.
This marked as a troll, but I have to agree with sentiment. People who are ready to be architects have generally worked on a variety of projects under some good architects and have some idea of the issues involved, such as coding standards, style standards documentation, organization, and other issues.
There is much more to a successful project than telling people what code to bang out, and unfortunately this is usually learned in the trenches. The dot-bombs are the ultimate example of what happens when you put people who aren't ready in charge of software projects.
When I saw the words "chemistry movie", the phrase "THIS IS A CHEM-STUDY FILM!!!" immediately ran through my head from high school. That was the first line of the world's most boring science videos, which I'm pretty sure were old when I was in high school (78-82).
That one that sticks out in my mind that was the most unintentionally hilarious teaching movie I've ever seen was this one that had this incredibly old guy. He seemed to move in slow motion, and as he slooowly spoke, he would insert these looooong pauses with a big "uh" in the middle. Like, "here we have our,,,,,,,,,, uh,,,,,,,,,, apparatus to perform the experiment". Then he would use these bad measuring devices that he would (I'm not making this up) tap on to make the needle move, until the right result came up. The class was rolling on the floor during this movie. It was so bad.
Thinking back on them now, I'm wondering if they were really as boring as I remember (although that one above was clearly baaaaad), or if I just remember them through the lens of a punk teenager.:)
Are chem-study films still around? I would imagine they must have been remade by now. I'm pretty sure the ones I watched were made in the 60s.
Because any hinderance to the free exchange of copyrighted materials hurts us all and strikes another blow to the First Amendment.
Stealing music will NEVER be legal, so you might as well get over this ludicrous concept that this somehow has something to do with the First Amendment.
I'll tell you what's going to happen, eventually: Eventually, music will be released as unencrypted files similiar to how software is released. We went through this with software, and we will go through it with music. The music industry will eventually clue in that they need to just allow people to buy the digital copies, and hope that people are honest about it. And you know what? Most people will be, assuming that it's priced reasonably.
Software is pirated, but most software companies still make money.
But you might as well give up on this notion that copyright is ever going to go away. You will be able to continue being a thief and not get caught (similar to software), but it will still be unethical.
I'm a teacher. I use recorded materials to teach my students. I'm allowed to do so under fair use.
Errrr.... I don't think so. "Fair use" is designed for your personal use. Put it this way... it's definitely not legal for you to make copies of a text book that you happened to own and distribute that to your students.
Otherwise, everyone could just get around copyright law by claiming to be a "teacher". "Mr. Lucas, I'm not showing this Star Wars movie to all these people for profit, it's for educational purposes!"
No, that's totally different. It's not illegal to control physical access to property. It is illegal to tamper with postal mail, including commercial mail.
No, they don't. The Postal service owns the mailboxes.
That's true in some cases, but not all cases. For example, if you had a large apartment building with its own mail sorting room, that would probably be owned by the building. Or we could just look at a large business building with its own mail sorting.
Then like I said... if an apartment complex decided that "the cost of accepting mail from J.C. Penney catalogs is too high for me to accept", should they have the right to just dump the catalogs into the trash and not give them to the recipients? Without even their knowledge? Just find another place to live, right?
Right now federal law says no -- you do not have the right to interfere with the delivery of postal mail. I see no reason why e-mail shouldn't be afforded the same protections.
Its their right... I'd have a problem with it, sure. But the fact I have a problem with it doesn't mean they don't have the right to do it. I'd go get another ISP. Problem solved.
So if the apartment complex decided to start rooting through your mail and deciding what you can and can't receive (without your knowledge), that's no problem, right? You'll just find another apartment?
It's illegal to tamper with postal mail. I see no reason why e-mail shouldn't have the same protections.
So if your apartment complex, who are the owners, decided to sort through your postal mail and decide what you would or wouldn't receive, and did it without your knowledge, you wouldn't have a problem with that? After all, they own the mail boxes, right?
The problem is that they are NOT typically voluntary by the people to whom it matters -- the email recipients. If an ISP wants to offer a service to block spammers, then then it should up to the individual to opt-in to the blocking.
Right now it's a federal crime to interfere with the delivery of regular postal mail. Why should e-mail be any different? How would you like it if your apartment complex decided to root through your mail and arbitrarily decided what you could or couldn't receive?
Should it be illegal for an ISP to use MAPS without an individual user's consent? It occurs to me that it should be illegal. Right now, it is a federal crime to interfere with regular mail delivery. Why should e-mail be any different?
If an ISP wants to offer me a service -- that I opt-in to -- to limit the amount of junk mail I receive, then that's fine. But it seems highly arrogant of an ISP to decide what should or should not go in my mailbox.
The more I think about this issue, the more I think it should be a federal crime to interfere with the delivery of e-mail.
At this time, it's a question of ethics. It is unethical to block mail for an individual user without that user's consent.
Quite frankly, however, I think it should probably be illegal to block someone's e-mail without their consent. It's a lot like interfering with postal mail, which is a federal offense.
They're saying that all the filtering should happen at the end user end, when the spam has already cost money.
I'm not arguing that spam isn't a problem in many cases, but I know that I DO NOT want a bunch of nannies telling me what mail I can or cannot recieve. If an ISP wants to offer blocking based on MAPS or any other system, then they should set up an opt-in for individual users, and the default should be opt-out.
A government anti-terrorism commission will recommend that Congress create a shadowy court to oversee investigations of suspected computer intruders.
"Shadowy"? Nice bias, Wired. I pretty much discounted everything in the article after that. It's clear that the writer of the article has an agenda that they are pushing.
But back to the topic: Where, exactly, does it say that this is going to be a "secret, accountable" court? It just sounds like a court that specializes in technology matters. Many Slashdotters complain that the courts are clueless when it comes to technology; why not have a court that specializes in these matters so they can make informed judgements?
Personally, I think hacking should be cracked down on HARD. Not life imprisonment, but at least, say, six months in jail.
I could even get behind something like that. The point is that priority should be that it should be self-sustaining, which probably means some sort of manufacturing (I doubt tourism would be enough in the early days to keep it going). Absolutely zero thought is given to make a space mission self-sustaining. I mean, has NASA ever even considered for one microsecond adding a manufacturing module to the space station to bring in some money? Nah, because they would have to give up control of some of the project.
I thought the Dennis Tito thing was pretty cheesy, but it's unbelievably ironic that the Russians are turning toward private funding and we are still stuck in some socialistic failure hell.
Slashdot Mirror
with handwriting recognition (using former newton-technology so it's a lot better than current palm os recognition)
LOL! First of all, the Newton sucked when it came to handwriting recognition. Second of all, the guy doesn't even seem to realize that Palm OS doesn't do handwriting recognition, it does gesture recognition with Graffiti, which is why it was successful. Palm was smart enough to know that handwriting recognition sucks and will always suck like voice recognition until we get better AI-based pattern recognition and language context theories (no, it won't be solved solely by processor speed).
You're right, they are not the same morally, nor functionally. However, they are both asymetrical and ambiguous and stem from root causes that are difficult to identify and eliminate.
I understand what you're saying, but I think the key difference is that the drug problem is primarily an economic supply-and-demand problem. Drugs exist because a) there is a big demand for them, and b) you can make a huge amount of money from them.
This is totally different from the motivations for terrorism. For a terrorist leader like Osama bin Laden, the motivation is a desire for power over others. He wants to remake the world into his vision of radical Islam, similar to how Hitler wanted to remake the world into his vision. The rank-and-file terrorist feels powerless in his world, and wants to "strike back" at the people whom he has blamed for his powerlessness. This is actually pretty similar to how Hitler's rise came about -- Hitler took advantage of the power-WW/I Germany's powerlessness due to the punishments that were installed by the rest of Europe. The roots of that powerlessness are very different, but there is no doubt that it exists.
So I agree superficially you can find similarities, but the motivations and structure are very different. Of course, the biggest difference are the stakes -- I don't particularly like the social decay that comes from drugs, but that's quite a different scale from the destruction of freedom and liberty that the terrorist organizations threaten us with.
About as winnable as the War on Terror, or War on Drugs
I am astounded when I see people compare "war on drugs" to "war on terror" as if they are the same thing. First of all, they are TOTALLY different, except for the semantic similarities which is what you seem to find so appealing. One is a cultural "war", and the other is a military war. I assure you, the war on terror is winnable and will be won.
Of course, people like you will never acknowledge it when it is won, because you will be a literalist who will claim, "well, if there are ANY terrorist events in the world, therefore, the War on Terrorism hasn't been won."
This will be like saying that since we have Nazi groups around the world, therefore we never defeated the Nazis.
The point is not to defeat every lunatic who wants to pin the word "Terrorist" (or Nazi) to his shirt, the point is to wipe out the world wide organization that allows them to carefully plan large-scale attacks. The point is to wipe out the leadership. The point is to eliminate governments who sponsor terrorism, and use terrorist groups as part of their military.
A good example of winning a war on Terrorism was defeating the Ku Klux Klan in the US in the early part of the century. They would fit just about any definition of a terrorist group, and in fact, the southern states turned a blind eye to their activities. It took the Federal Government coming in to finally defeat the organization. Do we still have Klan members around? Of course. But they have so little power that no one takes them seriously.
I wonder what it must be like to go through life being so pessimistic, and believing that liberty and freedom are not worth fighting for.
However, WWII could have been avoided altogether without bloodshed if the US and European nations had been less selfish and vindictive decades earlier.
Well, you can "coulda shoulda woulda" any war in hindsite and see how to prevent it. It's worth pointing out that Germany brought it on itself by starting WW/I.
Something analogous is true now: WTC and the bombing of Afghanistan are the long-term consequences of massive failures of US foreign policy,
I agree with you that there are parallels between Germany back then and now. You can definitely make an argument that Germany got screwed in the years after WW/I which led to Hitler's rise.
However, there are also difference. You have to give the Middle East some responsibility for their own problems. I thought this series of Newsweek articles was an excellent discussion of the issues. The US has some responsibility for the current problems, but it's not true that it's solely our fault.
the US is already laying the groundwork for future wars and terrorism in their alliances with Pakistan and other undemocratic forces.
I somewhat agree with this, although not completely. Someone could have made the same statement about WW/II: "We shouldn't kill Nazis; that will just create more of them". It might or might not be true, but that's irrelevent: The aggresors set the rules. They have attacked our freedom and liberty, and I for one believe that freedom and liberty must be defended at all costs.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that we are not exactly aligning with believers of freedom. But let's face it. The middle east is at least 50-100 years away from being democracies. We can either align with "lesser evils", or we can withdraw completely. If we withdraw completely, we risk a Hitler type taking over the entire middle east, and then we really do have WW/III on our hands -- for real. The only thing that keeps that from happening is the good ol' USA.
It's a complicated situation, and there is no end of simple solutions that are dead wrong. There is no doubt the US has made some mistakes, but not as many as the US-haters would like everyone to believe.
Uh, 150,000 died at Dresden alone. How did that win the war?
The point is not rehashing particular decisions of the war, but to point out that sometimes to preserve the freedom of the world, it's necessary that innocents die along with the evil doers. Should we have not fought the Nazis just because some innocent Germans would be caught up in the conflict as well? The answer is no. Sometimes freedom has to be fought for, whatever the cost.
This marked as a troll, but I have to agree with sentiment. People who are ready to be architects have generally worked on a variety of projects under some good architects and have some idea of the issues involved, such as coding standards, style standards documentation, organization, and other issues.
There is much more to a successful project than telling people what code to bang out, and unfortunately this is usually learned in the trenches. The dot-bombs are the ultimate example of what happens when you put people who aren't ready in charge of software projects.
Quarter sized? Whose quarters are they using? Mine are about 0.94". I might believe silver dollar-sized. :)
When I saw the words "chemistry movie", the phrase "THIS IS A CHEM-STUDY FILM!!!" immediately ran through my head from high school. That was the first line of the world's most boring science videos, which I'm pretty sure were old when I was in high school (78-82).
That one that sticks out in my mind that was the most unintentionally hilarious teaching movie I've ever seen was this one that had this incredibly old guy. He seemed to move in slow motion, and as he slooowly spoke, he would insert these looooong pauses with a big "uh" in the middle. Like, "here we have our,,,,,,,,,, uh,,,,,,,,,, apparatus to perform the experiment". Then he would use these bad measuring devices that he would (I'm not making this up) tap on to make the needle move, until the right result came up. The class was rolling on the floor during this movie. It was so bad.
Thinking back on them now, I'm wondering if they were really as boring as I remember (although that one above was clearly baaaaad), or if I just remember them through the lens of a punk teenager. :)
Are chem-study films still around? I would imagine they must have been remade by now. I'm pretty sure the ones I watched were made in the 60s.
Hmm; interesting; I didn't know about the "nonprofit educational purposes" clause. Thank you for the correction.
Where is the line drawn, however? What about for-profit private universities? What about a Catholic High School? What about trade schools?
If any lawyers are reading, it would be interesting to see how this works in practice.
Because any hinderance to the free exchange of copyrighted materials hurts us all and strikes another blow to the First Amendment.
Stealing music will NEVER be legal, so you might as well get over this ludicrous concept that this somehow has something to do with the First Amendment.
I'll tell you what's going to happen, eventually: Eventually, music will be released as unencrypted files similiar to how software is released. We went through this with software, and we will go through it with music. The music industry will eventually clue in that they need to just allow people to buy the digital copies, and hope that people are honest about it. And you know what? Most people will be, assuming that it's priced reasonably.
Software is pirated, but most software companies still make money.
But you might as well give up on this notion that copyright is ever going to go away. You will be able to continue being a thief and not get caught (similar to software), but it will still be unethical.
I'm a teacher. I use recorded materials to teach my students. I'm allowed to do so under fair use.
Errrr.... I don't think so. "Fair use" is designed for your personal use. Put it this way... it's definitely not legal for you to make copies of a text book that you happened to own and distribute that to your students.
Otherwise, everyone could just get around copyright law by claiming to be a "teacher". "Mr. Lucas, I'm not showing this Star Wars movie to all these people for profit, it's for educational purposes!"
This means there is at least a year's moritorium on stupid "Microsoft-is-insecure" jokes. :)
Not true. Many large apartment buildings have their own mail rooms that distribute the mail.
No, that's totally different. It's not illegal to control physical access to property. It is illegal to tamper with postal mail, including commercial mail.
No, they don't. The Postal service owns the mailboxes.
That's true in some cases, but not all cases. For example, if you had a large apartment building with its own mail sorting room, that would probably be owned by the building. Or we could just look at a large business building with its own mail sorting.
Then like I said... if an apartment complex decided that "the cost of accepting mail from J.C. Penney catalogs is too high for me to accept", should they have the right to just dump the catalogs into the trash and not give them to the recipients? Without even their knowledge? Just find another place to live, right?
Right now federal law says no -- you do not have the right to interfere with the delivery of postal mail. I see no reason why e-mail shouldn't be afforded the same protections.
Its their right... I'd have a problem with it, sure. But the fact I have a problem with it doesn't mean they don't have the right to do it. I'd go get another ISP. Problem solved.
So if the apartment complex decided to start rooting through your mail and deciding what you can and can't receive (without your knowledge), that's no problem, right? You'll just find another apartment?
It's illegal to tamper with postal mail. I see no reason why e-mail shouldn't have the same protections.
So if your apartment complex, who are the owners, decided to sort through your postal mail and decide what you would or wouldn't receive, and did it without your knowledge, you wouldn't have a problem with that? After all, they own the mail boxes, right?
What's wrong with voluntary collective solutions?
The problem is that they are NOT typically voluntary by the people to whom it matters -- the email recipients. If an ISP wants to offer a service to block spammers, then then it should up to the individual to opt-in to the blocking.
Right now it's a federal crime to interfere with the delivery of regular postal mail. Why should e-mail be any different? How would you like it if your apartment complex decided to root through your mail and arbitrarily decided what you could or couldn't receive?
Should it be illegal for an ISP to use MAPS without an individual user's consent? It occurs to me that it should be illegal. Right now, it is a federal crime to interfere with regular mail delivery. Why should e-mail be any different?
If an ISP wants to offer me a service -- that I opt-in to -- to limit the amount of junk mail I receive, then that's fine. But it seems highly arrogant of an ISP to decide what should or should not go in my mailbox.
The more I think about this issue, the more I think it should be a federal crime to interfere with the delivery of e-mail.
An ISP can choose whatever policies it likes.
At this time, it's a question of ethics. It is unethical to block mail for an individual user without that user's consent.
Quite frankly, however, I think it should probably be illegal to block someone's e-mail without their consent. It's a lot like interfering with postal mail, which is a federal offense.
They're saying that all the filtering should happen at the end user end, when the spam has already cost money.
I'm not arguing that spam isn't a problem in many cases, but I know that I DO NOT want a bunch of nannies telling me what mail I can or cannot recieve. If an ISP wants to offer blocking based on MAPS or any other system, then they should set up an opt-in for individual users, and the default should be opt-out.
That's fine, but they are not saying that you are required to read all mail that comes into your server.
The question is, do you want your ISP and/or the government making the decision on what mail you can or can't receive -- without your knowledge?
A government anti-terrorism commission will recommend that Congress create a shadowy court to oversee investigations of suspected computer intruders.
"Shadowy"? Nice bias, Wired. I pretty much discounted everything in the article after that. It's clear that the writer of the article has an agenda that they are pushing.
But back to the topic: Where, exactly, does it say that this is going to be a "secret, accountable" court? It just sounds like a court that specializes in technology matters. Many Slashdotters complain that the courts are clueless when it comes to technology; why not have a court that specializes in these matters so they can make informed judgements?
Personally, I think hacking should be cracked down on HARD. Not life imprisonment, but at least, say, six months in jail.
I could even get behind something like that. The point is that priority should be that it should be self-sustaining, which probably means some sort of manufacturing (I doubt tourism would be enough in the early days to keep it going). Absolutely zero thought is given to make a space mission self-sustaining. I mean, has NASA ever even considered for one microsecond adding a manufacturing module to the space station to bring in some money? Nah, because they would have to give up control of some of the project.
I thought the Dennis Tito thing was pretty cheesy, but it's unbelievably ironic that the Russians are turning toward private funding and we are still stuck in some socialistic failure hell.