A big problem is that those involved do notbtake time to read and understandcwhat politicians are saying, or what the public thinks. Your reality has little to do withnthe perceived reality, which as clearly stated in TFA is that the congressman wants the fed to regulate poker as a skills based game and for those games to register and taxes to states. just because this does not match your reality does not mean that it is not reality to other people, and if they have the power it will become reality. I hear what you are saying, but it does not seem to match what the Feds have in mind.
What he wants to do is create a new taxing agency and have everyone in the world who wishes to cater to follow the arbitrary rules of that new agency. SInce there does not appear to be any direct income to the federal government, I assume he expect the tax payers to fund this new and innovative level of government.
Furthermore he expects all these firms who may ot conduct any business int he US, US citizens have to call them, are going to have to pay protection money to the organized crime syndicates that control the varied states in which gambling is legal. This would be like a US company having to pay the Russian mob before a Russian citizen can order a widget from the US company. What would happen is if a Russian party did receive goods form the US, they would pay a tarrif on when it entered the country. This is what should happen, use the rules we have. I can tell you that many cities in texas have a number of thinly veiled gambling houses and the laws are not being enforced.
I think that US citizens should be able to link foreign sites an gamble as they please. If the money or good are drawn from foreign sources and brought into the US, that is legal. If the good are US domestic that may be a problem. If the web sites are registered local then that might also be a problem as the US government can and will take it. The taking does not necessarily limit the ability to gamble.
Also, in case you don't know, the skill thing is a nod to the many irrational christians in texas. They are experts in situational ethics so that, for instance, preventing a the termination of fetus at 4 weeks requires huge amounts of taxpayer funding, but not taxpayer funding is required to prevent the baby from dying at 1 year. Gambling is bad, but if he can fool enough people into thinking that poker is skills it won't hurt their brains, even though most gambling houses will kick you out if you really use skill.
This is what many people are saying. The problem is that firms keep designing things that act like IPads, instead of thing that act like something different. What this different thing would be I don't know, but it has to be more different than simply a open App Store.
One thing that is different is the chrome book. The idea of a minimal machine with data storage off site is interesting. That this machine would cost as much as a laptop with storage, and would require at least an equal amount in yearly fees to guarantee connectivity makes it less of an attractive option, but at least it was a good attempt. If Verizon would give the machine away from free with a good data plan in the $1000/2yr range, they might have a winner.
Some of these computers are not what we now consider personal computers, or of 1980+ vintage, The TRS-80. The TRS 80 and Apple ][ are example of mid-to-late-70 computers that are identifiable as what most would call personal computers, that is general purpose assembled machines. My memory of the Commodore Pet annd the early atari machines were that they did not do all that much.
The early IBM machines were more mini computers rather than personal computers. Tandy also had a number of computer in this class. In school a hobby was going through computer catalogs, and these machines were not marketed as a computer for a individual users, rather it was a shared resource
IBM entered the market in 1980 along with many other players. Like Apple who established the GUI as a viable technology, IBM established the computer as a viable tool for the individual worker. I think It took IBM to do this because they controlled the typewriter market, and it would have been hard for a third party to displace this market. However, as IBM apparently saw the writing on the wall, rather than do what some do and continue to make buggy whips, they innovated.
I wonder how many exploits are based on video memory. I am not saying this is not aq security hole, just that that does not seem like the most effecient manner to get hundreds of credit card numbers.
This tends to support a basic belief about MS. When MS talks about security they are not talking about protecting end user data or making sure that personal information is not used in ways unknown to the user, what they are talking about is digital rights management. When talking about insecure video memory, one is talking about streaming movies that can be copied. Netflix has stated that Silverlight is used instead of HTML5 because HTML 5 does not deliver the protection of Silverlight. Flash is also not secure because it will leave cache images.
Something like this may be the best option for someone that does not want to use Dropbox. More than likely, when and if Apple end iDisk, I will move to a Webdav server at a shared hosting site. Although Rackspace would be the ultimate, it would be rather more expensive than the $99 mobileme. Many shared hosting services has Webdav included, and ample space. Since it is your virtual server, and you are paying for it, there are no ads or third party data mining. There is, of course, risk of random attacks by third parties, but if you set up some random domain that is not on the search engine listting it should less a target than dropbox.
It is not the recession. 15 years ago, when every skilled person had a job, the script kiddies were hard at work
What I think it is is that the tools have advanced so much, that one does not even have to rise to the level of script kiddie to call oneself a 'hacker'. Look at the iphone, all one needs to know how to do is run autoinstall and maybe hexedit.
There has always been ample opportunities for real hacker. Just think of the first time that some hacked a stone into a knife. That must have been really cool. This is different from someone who simply applied the technology to make knifes. For instance when I first build my radio from a kit, I was not a hacker, or a maker, but a kit builder. I did not understand what was going on. OTOH, when I hacked my print buffer to connect my printer to my computer, back in the 80's that was not always so easy, I felt like that was a pretty good thing. I was using my skills to void the warranty and make the product do something that it was not intended.
I am not saying that the new hackers are not as smart or capable as the old ones. Certainly the people who make the tools and crack the systems are as cleaver as any other hacker. What I mean is that I see kids hacking together solutions everyday, and the solutions are really quite good, yet what people are proud of are not the original and innovative solutions, which is what hacking is all about, but the breaking of trivial passwords or the running of scripts so they can download and install stuff on their iPhone.
Patent infringement lawsuits can be dramatic, but almost always are not. Case in point is that we still see MS selling MS Office.
There has been much written about Nokia failures to respond to the disruptive market conditions caused by RIM and Apple. Remember 5 years ago RIM was the object of lawsuits because it was the company that was going to make all the legecy mobile phone manufacturers go bankrupt. Now that Apple is the big new kid on the block, the legacy mobile firms refused to let it into the club, so Apple had to fight for entry. There is no danger, consumers are not going to let the iPhone go away any more than they are going to let MS Office go away. It is just a question of how the law can be applied so that the victim can be compensated enough not to lose face, and the product can remain available.
Sure Nokia has a lot of basic research patents, and Apple does not. This makes Apple vulnerable. Do you think this is why it took an Apple to get a phone that is for the end user, not the telco, out the door? Because the patent holders wanted to keep the inflated profits flowing even with no real benefit to the end user? Apple pays for any all half-ass patents. Just look at the one-click thing. Nokia tried to avoid original products by misusing it's patent and market share. It got slapped and now is teamed with MS that doesn't have a mass market phone because it also abuses market share rather than coming out with original products. A match made in heaven.
Dreamweaver is the application that seems to have long legs. it is assumed, that if another commercial application were made available and was succesful,. Adobe would do all it could to kill it as they did Golive. I used Golive, I liked Golive, and it was killed off to encourage the use of Flash. Unforgivable.
There seems to be one other HTML Editor in current version, Anacrophila, but I have never used it and it might go away like all the others, but it seems to be the one and only no cost solution. While I sympathise with the smart asses that suggest Emacs and Vum , and feel sorry for the smart asses that suggest notepad, these clearly do not meet the requirement of an HTML editor. Well, maybe Emacs, but then you get an OS that looks like an HTML editor.
Personally, I am moving away from hand coding my HTML pages of using a WYSIWYG editor. There are enough script packages that do generally what I want that I can just use them. I think this is why the HTML editors development is becoming less popular. The availability of high quality scripts.
I think the ideal image of parenting does and really should not exist. When kids are responsible enough to venture on thier own, they have to be allowed to so do to a great extent, otherwise how will they learn to be responsible adults. Many are concerned about the number of kids who live at home, but isn't this cased by overparenting.
What we have now is simply more ways for kids to see, not do, but see things that some think is dangerous. We are not in the age where girls go out to the woods to explore each other and then cause a massacre because they have to lie, we are at a time when people can look at images and read things that are considered inappropriate for certain ages, and we would like to protect them from such things.This is the kid going out to the barn to look at national geographic, or the teen sneaking out of church to read their romance novel, or students sneaking Life of Brian into the dorms. It can cause psychological damage, but is not blowing one's 7th grade home room.
So parents want to give kids appropriate freedoms but want the tools to protect them from content that is inappropriate. WIth TV this was easy. Don't let kids watch tv outside of certain times, and if one wants cable simply block channels. This is why TV is superior to a library. Content can be controlled. The internet is not so easy, and google is not the way to control content. Google is not about the individual user or demographic. It is about packaging content to the masses. Safesearch can help, but is not going protect youtube videos. I would say that until a kid is old enough to handle all the content, youtube access might be denied. Google is not the end all. There are third party services that will provide such filtering.
I respect their right to set the rules, but I suspect this is more the Austin psuedo-chic that makes Austin a place that only those looking to find an identify want to go. Kids looking for an excuse to drink, lesser performers looking for an audience that will react well to the closed culture.
Here is what is playig at the theater. Brides mainds, kung fu panda. x-men, etc. Not a high end theater like landmark or Dundance where the films require a little more attention. Here is the thing. I am distracted by the popcorn, the cokes, the patrons trying to get refills, the people talking on the phone, the cleaning staff that comes in immediately as the credits roll. texting is not a problem.
Here is why I think theaters hate texting. It kills bad films the first weekend, and kills ticket and concessions sales. Everyone tweets how bad the movie is and by the 9 o'clock showing everyone is going to a movie that does not suck. There could be better movies, but instead they continue to make boring movies that do not entertain so everyone texts how much is sucks instead.
There is another thing that some may not know. This theater is running a major promotion trying to establish itself as the pretentious alternative theater. This will work in Austin where they have an overabundance of wanna be pretentious people and a shortage of pretentious movie houses, but in other urban parts of texas we already have high quality pretentious movie theaters with overpriced bad food and drinks either in the theater or near it. The texting thing is being pumped for publicity so that all the pretentious people who are too good to see a popular movie in a normal theater will be attracted to it. Therefore, this has nothing to do with values but is merely a cheap publicity stunt.
As summary states, the problem predates Google. The problem is that we have redefined who should benefit from intellectual property. At one time it was the inventor and the children, so the limit on ownership was essentially two generations. Now it is the legal entity that owns it, which will never be allowed to completely disappear, so the time limit on ownership is essentially forever when compared to a human life span.
The good news is it may not matter for creative work. Artists can choose to more freely distribute work and corporate artists are learning being too strict leads to irrelevancy. Look at the Beatles catalog and the decision to allow it on iTunes. Thought it would never happen, until we realize that not being on iTunes means not existing for large number of people. In academic world, PLoS is pushing journals to be more open. To the current point, students will learn to play what they can afford, and other music will be lost.
Everything is fungible. Marketing creates need for a certain product/brand combination, but real and opportunity costs can quickly kill that perceived need, as we have seen with most of the formerly great US brands. Kids expect to be able to play with products for free. Content that does not allow this is going to fail. Even WSJ has nearly free content for students.
There are two things we know from history. The first is Apple is very good at transitioning customers from one OS and platform to another. The transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS 10 and from 68K, PPC, Intel show this is the case. Therefore if it were in the interest of Apple, and everyones needs could be met, the it would happen. The 'creatives' argument is always used to say it cannot happen. In particular when the move to Intel was announced, it was predicted that all the creatives would leave because Adobe and others were not going to support the switch fully. The reason was that, unlike in the past, the switch to Intel was going to be cold turkey. No emulators, just recompile. This was fine if one worked in xCode, but not many did not.
And you know what. Some people probably did leave. And the relationship between the Mac and Abobe has not bee the same since. But so what? At that point MS Windows machines were sophisticated enough to handle the creative tools, and many were moving off Mac anyway for fiscal reasons. What the Mac got in exchange for the switch was the ability to be a very good cross development platfrom, which caused huge number of machines to be moved, and the ability to run Windows programs either through WIne or using the MS Windows platform. The 'creatives' argument ultimately held no water.
The second thing we know from history is that when the platform changes is dramatic, as it is from Mac OS to iOS, Apple will keep the two around for a number of years. In this case we only have one example, the switch from Apple ][ to Mac. What we see here is a transition period of 5 years. The EOL for Apple ][ coincides with Mac OS 7, which was arguably the point when Mac OS became a reasonable mature product. It also coincided with Apple's attempt to enter the mobile market with Newton, followed a few years late with iPod and the ensuing iOS products.
So what does this tell us. First, iOS is not a mature product. There are some interesting tools, but iOS cannot do everything that one can do on the Mac. At a consumer level, iLife and browsing and mail is well integrated. At a office productivity there are still holes. The creative end is almost useless. However there is no reason to believe that the Mac will not be phased out.
I don't think it will happen nearly as quickly as the article asserts, and certainly not for the reasons. The App store is on the Mac, and from personal experience it is win-win. Yes Apple takes 30%, but prior to the App store I was buying no third pary software. It was expensive and would require a purchase for each machine. Now I make purchases. It sucks for Amazon, but is good for me. Furthermore saying that iOS is not good for the high end is ignoring history. Recall when everyone said the Mac was a toy?
So here is what I see. The iMac will transition into a two piece iOS macine were the mobile bit wirelessly docks into the non-mobile bits. It will have a keyboard. The iOS device can be bought separately and will replace all MacBooks. As the UI and power issues get cleaned up,and touchscreens get cheaper the MacBook Pros will be replaced with large iOS devices, maybe using flexible touchscreens that will offer display space far in excess of the current machines.. Apple will leave the high end creative market to Unix workstations, which will achieve a level of productivity just as MS Windows eventually did. It will focus on consumer and mobile business productivity.
$30 for the OS is the same price as the current OS. The only difference is there is no family pack. This is because device on an Apple account is considered the same device for licensing purposes. If you have 10 macs on you account, then all 10 macs can get the Appstore Software. This is a really attractive feature of Apple software, and I am glad that all Appstore software is going to follow this model. One of my biggest issues with MS is having to buy MS WIndows at $200 a pop for every machine I own.
We also expected the over the network OS upgrades, something I think will really separate Mac Os and iOS hardware form the MS crowd. Lack of installation media is a concern for some, but I put all my OS on HD partitions and install from the harddisk anyway. Haven't install from a DVD in years. Haven't bought a application DVD in years.
The dig about it just working is really apropos. I tried to use Amazon music service thingy. Bought the music, put it on the web, could not download it to my computer afterwards. So I set up Amazon to download to my computer, thinking I would upload back to Amazon. Bought the lady gaga for $1, never got it to download properly, Amazon will not aswer my requests to download it again. I think this is called theft. Really wondering if I am going to do business with them when they won't give me my purchases.
One thing I am concerned about is the transition from Mobileme to iCloud. They are not making it cheaper, 5gb for $20 is not better than the current deal. They are just giving away inexpensive services for free, just like they did with itools. Most people are not going to upload that many pictures in 30 days, and well over a decade of mail is not taking more than a few gb of space.
The versioning on iOS is going be a huge thing, since the iOS 'filesystem' is not versionable with any current tools. OTOH, semms iworks is stil imcompatable between Mac OS and iOS so I would have liked to see some work done on that front.
Apple is competing hard against Google and RIM, which is good, but they seem to have lost their way on some of the applications. This happened in the late 80's when they were trying to cut prices to compete with the PC. The software was spun off the claris and a lot of good applications were lost.
Here is the quote from Palin
warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.
Here is the account from the article
In fact, Revere’s own account of the ride in a 1798 letter seems to back up Palin’s claim. Revere describes how after his capture by British officers, he warned them “there would be five hundred Americans there in a short time for I had alarmed the Country all the way up.
There are two parts of the statement here. The first is that Revere was intercepted by the British and told them what was going on. This is widely acknowledged to be true. The second was here embellishment of the story, which taken as Palin says it makes Revere a traitor to the country as he gave up military intelligence to the enemy. The second quote indicates that Revere was trying to frighten the British troops to release him by telling them the countryside has been warned of their advance and they would be outnumbered. This was justified.
In Palin's version, he also spoke of weapons and well armed what would be Americans..If the British were actually there to take away the right of Americans to possess weapons, then speaking about the weapon stores, of which he likely new of the location, would be supplying vital information to the enemy. In the accepted version, Rever did his job, was captured, told them nothing useful, and then released. In Palin's story he traded intelligence for his release.
The inconsistency is still there. History records he warned the british that they were going to be attacked. Palin strongly implies he gave up the location of the weapon stores bu telling them not that he was simply warning the townspeople. but that there was a weapons store and he was on his way to it.
The US has a competitive culture, yet we know economic development depends on a well educated populous. Therefore the public school system has been set up, for at least the past 40 years, IMHO, to provide both full opportunities for those who want to the educated and compulsory minimums for those who don't.
Because of the free market nature of the US gaining the maximum benefit of public education is also competitive. Parents of means have always had the opportunity to enroll in private school or move to less competitive districts. lately charter schools have provided some of these benefits for well behaved compliant students.
The education the excels in US provides is in skills and problem solving, not filling in bubbles on a test or making high marks for contrived vi al answers. Other less economically diverse countries dan worry about who has the best student sit on a maths or humanities test. What I want to know is who can be given a job and figure out how to do it without supervision. Out of high school. Who can make an accurate measurement. Who can write a complete sentence. Who cares if they can read an essay and write a witty response in an hour. Filling in bubbles and writing witty essays does not pay the bills odor most people.
on exiting public urban I could code, create databases, build stuff in metal and wood, solder circuits, and had very respectable scores on my SAT before they rewrote so that everyone could score well. Even with that I see many public schools providing even superior education to this with much greater access to elective courses that focus on problem solving as well as formal courses in advance math and science. Anyone who asserts that Education today teaches less than before still lives in the Americas of the 80s where we thought of America not as a technological leader, but as a place where minimally educated peasant would be happy to put junk together for high pay, never being educated enough to comprehend the economic or physical realities of which they were living. They were therefore surprised when they got fired be because they were not pulling their fiscally responsible weight.
So slashdot readers are really loveless loser who just sit in the basement until they whither away. The reality is that my biggest fear is that the government with megalomaniacal religious wannabes forcing me to live way past my natural life, turning me into a zombie drug addict, but of course most geeks are going to keel over at fourth from a cheetos overdose.
in reality this concerns geeks because most geeks are rational and do not support making people suffer simply so that other people may extend their power and wealth. I suspect that most geeks with children would not support extended a life in which simple pleasures like reading and video games and coding are impossibilities simply because religious figures must force another to live in intolerable pain so they can continue to fleet the masses out of hard earned currency. And i suspect that most would rather have money spent supporting healthy babies rather than drug addicted seniors.
And before people say I hate religion, it is not true. I simply see no justification for the existence of charlatans that use faith of any color to enslave the minds and bodies of willing or unwilling subjects. There is nothing inherently wrong with faith, simply the people who abuse it and to lesser extent the weak looking for simple solutions.
This reminds me of a study I had this morning concerning social networking abuse on the job. Evidently people who have access to public services like facebook and twitter use them for work, and sometimes they misuse them. The solution is, evidently, is to liscense MS solution that will regulate the use.
What I see here is the failure of the OS to protect the user from rougue apps. If Android phones are not going to use Apple's process of vetting Apps to insure they behave, then the OS should do more. For instance, it seems that power consumption could be regulated to insure that no app can overuse the battery or abuse system resources. This is kind of what was done with garbage collection. Random developers could not be trusted to manage memory, so we put that in the compiler.
In the best case scenario, the suit is being filed now because on September 1 companies like Lodsys could be liable for all costs if they lose. While the lose pays legislation is primarily an attack on individuals, a blatant effort to remove the one power a person has against harm by a corporations, the side effect could be to stop these frivolous patent lawsuits. We will see how the Texas courts write the rules. It could be written merely to protect the corporation that accidentally kills an infant due to faulty design of a crib, or it could be written more broadly to protect the lawsuits against individuals that distribute negative information about corporations. As I said, the best case scenario is that it will stop the patent trolls from using East Texas as a easy way to litigate protection money.
This is really get out of hand, and killing the tax payer. In Texas Perry created a multibillion dollar deficit,in violation of the Tx constitution in the previous budget cycle and is going to do so again. One of the many things that creates this deficit is the big government criminalization of trivial matters. One of these things is cheating in fishing competitions. Tax payers are now expected to prosecute cheater in these contests, and may be liable for paying their bills for a year in jail. If the people who run contests are so incompetent that they cannot execute an honest event, it is certainly not up to me to pay for this. Likewise, there are many ways to insure a password is not misused, like logging locations and only allowing one session. Conservatives should not require tax payers to support big government initiatives to help incompetent private enterprise.
There is nowhere in a computer science curriculum where offica applications are an appropriate subject. That would like learning to use your pencil in math class. Presumable one learns to use writing implements elsewhere. Also, one should already know how to add and subtract prior to high school. If the OP has asked for addition, subtraction, and multiplication the answer would be the same. No such animal in a high school curriculum.
A good CS program should allow the student understand, on a fundamental level, how the computer works. Once that happens any program the student uses is no longer a set or random commands, but a systematic means of processing data. The teaching of officer applications is the anithesis of computer science. There has been a whole generation of computer users that have no idea what is going on, and are stuck with sub minimal skills in low wage jobs.
Here is what I would do for a curriculum. I would start with a Python book that introduces concepts. I woulld them move to Java or C++ depending on what the end goal is. I would introduce some theory, such as taught in The Art of Computer Programming. At this point some architecture and skill training is in order, perhaps using Pragramtic Programmer, the practice of programming, or design patterns.
Ultimately what is taught is going to depend on what the student is going to do. If the student going into physical science, for instance, then there are specific books that teach, for instance, Python for physics. If the student is interested in bussiness, there are other books that lean in that direction. For financial modeling and stochastics, that is a lot of theory.
In addition, you can't put a scientist on a project and call it science, at least not ethical science. For instance, a scientist could kidnap a child, put them intending to put that child in the closet for three day will full monitoring and appropriate scientific protocols while not injuring the child in any physical manner. I suppose when the police rescued that child the headline would read "Police disrupt scientific child experiment'.
These GMO 'experiments' are like kidnapping the whole world because they are ransoming our future food supply for short term profits. They are worse than nuclear explosions because the effect of nuclear explosions are localized, say the massive radiation of the Bikini Atoll, because the effects are much more widespread and may not get better in relatively short periods of time unlike nuclear explosions. We have no idea what the new genes in plants will do, but we do know that they genes will be spead because that's the whole purpose of nature, to spread mutations. Bad mutations will be breed out over time, but it could cause ecosystem to collapse.
In a larger context GMO exists to reinforce the non-sustainable agricultural methods developed over the past century. One of these is artificial fertilizer and insecticides. The negative effects of this is real. In the recent debate of blowing the levees so the missispii could flood farm land instead of cities, one argument against it is that the rivier is so full of these chemicals that the farm land would be destroyed. We live in a world where we can't even use annual flooding the reinvigorate our land.
Everyone says GMO is all about increasing food security, but it is really about increasing short term profits. In the Americas and Europe we grow way more food than we need. The issues in Africa is about using unsustainable framing practices and int he process creating desert. In the US where we have way more food than we need, we process it into empty calorie snacks na brainwash out kids into buying it as food. Just look at what happened when FLOTUS said it might be nice for kids to have healthy food. All the lobby dollars of the junk food industry came out and said that if parents though that chips and soft drinks were what parents wanted to feed the kids then they should have that choice. Which I don't disagree with, just let's be honest about what we are doing and why we are doing it.
My impression was that the Kindle and Nook both use technology that only uses large amounts of power when the page is turned. This means that hours of continuous use is not really a good metric, as they can just base this on a slow reader, say 15 page flips an hour.
What they should be doing is like the number for the iphone. Give expected battery life for different uses: some number of page turns, some number for web browsing, etc. Of couse, as this is only marketing, transparency and honesty has nothing to do with it.
Patents and copyrights have never stopped innovation, just slowed it down. There was a story about some early industrial engine, maybe Watts steam engine, in which a part was hidden from view and not publicized because the idea was borrowed from some other inventor and he did not want to get in trouble. Did not the industrial revolution.
IBM tried to keep Compaq from introducing the IBM compatible computer, which all but destroyed IBM attempt to transition customer from high prices typewriters to high priced microcomputers. Apple tried to keep MS from introducing Mac OS clones. The copy cats are never going to be stopped when they are producing something customers wants and are selling it at a cheaper price.
What is going on is that Google, Amazon, to some extent Apple is provided a better value than MS in many areas. MS may say that there are hidden costs, but if customers cared about hdden costs they would not be buying MS. MS is, or should be looking, at a future where the PC is not the dominant machine and so cannot demand that every PC comes loaded with Windows under the idea that every naked PC owner is going to steal a copy of windows. Even worse, unlike in the days when MS wanted enterprise to use thin net application, so MS could charge double, even the back office may be remote hosted by Amazon or Google. So where will money come frome. Well, if every Android table has to pay $5, then at least they get that, and do not have to do any real work for it.,
So this says we are to be secure in our houses and effects. Like the second amendement, it is pretty clear what the state can and can't do. Unlike the second amendment, it is not defended by the hysterical populous who is afraid the some minority might one day venture into their neighborhood. So it is basically dead. The police can enter a home on many pretexts. The police may detain you and search you person anytime you are in a public place with no probable cause a rational person would consider valid.
To be fair, the airport has been designated a zone where most of our rights do not exist. We enter it freely knowing that a minimally trained TSA agent can do whatever they want to us.
But there are other violations of the atrocities signed into law by Bush. The fourteenth amendment says that citizens cannot hace rights abridged without due process. I don't think that the legislature is due process to abridge rights of the entire population, so airport checks where we are molested does not pass a rational person interpretation of the constitution.
What is clear is that only the Federal government has the ability to regulate interstate commerce and travel. Therefore, while the state can control what happens inside it boarders, and is free to disallow molesting of passengers, interstate travel is something different.
What is also clear is that the TSA is more about limiting travel of Americans rather than making travel safer. Like the Berlin wall, it is meant to kept the citizens ignorant and facile.
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A big problem is that those involved do notbtake time to read and understandcwhat politicians are saying, or what the public thinks. Your reality has little to do withnthe perceived reality, which as clearly stated in TFA is that the congressman wants the fed to regulate poker as a skills based game and for those games to register and taxes to states. just because this does not match your reality does not mean that it is not reality to other people, and if they have the power it will become reality. I hear what you are saying, but it does not seem to match what the Feds have in mind.
Furthermore he expects all these firms who may ot conduct any business int he US, US citizens have to call them, are going to have to pay protection money to the organized crime syndicates that control the varied states in which gambling is legal. This would be like a US company having to pay the Russian mob before a Russian citizen can order a widget from the US company. What would happen is if a Russian party did receive goods form the US, they would pay a tarrif on when it entered the country. This is what should happen, use the rules we have. I can tell you that many cities in texas have a number of thinly veiled gambling houses and the laws are not being enforced.
I think that US citizens should be able to link foreign sites an gamble as they please. If the money or good are drawn from foreign sources and brought into the US, that is legal. If the good are US domestic that may be a problem. If the web sites are registered local then that might also be a problem as the US government can and will take it. The taking does not necessarily limit the ability to gamble.
Also, in case you don't know, the skill thing is a nod to the many irrational christians in texas. They are experts in situational ethics so that, for instance, preventing a the termination of fetus at 4 weeks requires huge amounts of taxpayer funding, but not taxpayer funding is required to prevent the baby from dying at 1 year. Gambling is bad, but if he can fool enough people into thinking that poker is skills it won't hurt their brains, even though most gambling houses will kick you out if you really use skill.
One thing that is different is the chrome book. The idea of a minimal machine with data storage off site is interesting. That this machine would cost as much as a laptop with storage, and would require at least an equal amount in yearly fees to guarantee connectivity makes it less of an attractive option, but at least it was a good attempt. If Verizon would give the machine away from free with a good data plan in the $1000/2yr range, they might have a winner.
The early IBM machines were more mini computers rather than personal computers. Tandy also had a number of computer in this class. In school a hobby was going through computer catalogs, and these machines were not marketed as a computer for a individual users, rather it was a shared resource
IBM entered the market in 1980 along with many other players. Like Apple who established the GUI as a viable technology, IBM established the computer as a viable tool for the individual worker. I think It took IBM to do this because they controlled the typewriter market, and it would have been hard for a third party to displace this market. However, as IBM apparently saw the writing on the wall, rather than do what some do and continue to make buggy whips, they innovated.
This tends to support a basic belief about MS. When MS talks about security they are not talking about protecting end user data or making sure that personal information is not used in ways unknown to the user, what they are talking about is digital rights management. When talking about insecure video memory, one is talking about streaming movies that can be copied. Netflix has stated that Silverlight is used instead of HTML5 because HTML 5 does not deliver the protection of Silverlight. Flash is also not secure because it will leave cache images.
Something like this may be the best option for someone that does not want to use Dropbox. More than likely, when and if Apple end iDisk, I will move to a Webdav server at a shared hosting site. Although Rackspace would be the ultimate, it would be rather more expensive than the $99 mobileme. Many shared hosting services has Webdav included, and ample space. Since it is your virtual server, and you are paying for it, there are no ads or third party data mining. There is, of course, risk of random attacks by third parties, but if you set up some random domain that is not on the search engine listting it should less a target than dropbox.
What I think it is is that the tools have advanced so much, that one does not even have to rise to the level of script kiddie to call oneself a 'hacker'. Look at the iphone, all one needs to know how to do is run autoinstall and maybe hexedit.
There has always been ample opportunities for real hacker. Just think of the first time that some hacked a stone into a knife. That must have been really cool. This is different from someone who simply applied the technology to make knifes. For instance when I first build my radio from a kit, I was not a hacker, or a maker, but a kit builder. I did not understand what was going on. OTOH, when I hacked my print buffer to connect my printer to my computer, back in the 80's that was not always so easy, I felt like that was a pretty good thing. I was using my skills to void the warranty and make the product do something that it was not intended.
I am not saying that the new hackers are not as smart or capable as the old ones. Certainly the people who make the tools and crack the systems are as cleaver as any other hacker. What I mean is that I see kids hacking together solutions everyday, and the solutions are really quite good, yet what people are proud of are not the original and innovative solutions, which is what hacking is all about, but the breaking of trivial passwords or the running of scripts so they can download and install stuff on their iPhone.
There has been much written about Nokia failures to respond to the disruptive market conditions caused by RIM and Apple. Remember 5 years ago RIM was the object of lawsuits because it was the company that was going to make all the legecy mobile phone manufacturers go bankrupt. Now that Apple is the big new kid on the block, the legacy mobile firms refused to let it into the club, so Apple had to fight for entry. There is no danger, consumers are not going to let the iPhone go away any more than they are going to let MS Office go away. It is just a question of how the law can be applied so that the victim can be compensated enough not to lose face, and the product can remain available.
Sure Nokia has a lot of basic research patents, and Apple does not. This makes Apple vulnerable. Do you think this is why it took an Apple to get a phone that is for the end user, not the telco, out the door? Because the patent holders wanted to keep the inflated profits flowing even with no real benefit to the end user? Apple pays for any all half-ass patents. Just look at the one-click thing. Nokia tried to avoid original products by misusing it's patent and market share. It got slapped and now is teamed with MS that doesn't have a mass market phone because it also abuses market share rather than coming out with original products. A match made in heaven.
There seems to be one other HTML Editor in current version, Anacrophila, but I have never used it and it might go away like all the others, but it seems to be the one and only no cost solution. While I sympathise with the smart asses that suggest Emacs and Vum , and feel sorry for the smart asses that suggest notepad, these clearly do not meet the requirement of an HTML editor. Well, maybe Emacs, but then you get an OS that looks like an HTML editor.
Personally, I am moving away from hand coding my HTML pages of using a WYSIWYG editor. There are enough script packages that do generally what I want that I can just use them. I think this is why the HTML editors development is becoming less popular. The availability of high quality scripts.
What we have now is simply more ways for kids to see, not do, but see things that some think is dangerous. We are not in the age where girls go out to the woods to explore each other and then cause a massacre because they have to lie, we are at a time when people can look at images and read things that are considered inappropriate for certain ages, and we would like to protect them from such things.This is the kid going out to the barn to look at national geographic, or the teen sneaking out of church to read their romance novel, or students sneaking Life of Brian into the dorms. It can cause psychological damage, but is not blowing one's 7th grade home room.
So parents want to give kids appropriate freedoms but want the tools to protect them from content that is inappropriate. WIth TV this was easy. Don't let kids watch tv outside of certain times, and if one wants cable simply block channels. This is why TV is superior to a library. Content can be controlled. The internet is not so easy, and google is not the way to control content. Google is not about the individual user or demographic. It is about packaging content to the masses. Safesearch can help, but is not going protect youtube videos. I would say that until a kid is old enough to handle all the content, youtube access might be denied. Google is not the end all. There are third party services that will provide such filtering.
Here is what is playig at the theater. Brides mainds, kung fu panda. x-men, etc. Not a high end theater like landmark or Dundance where the films require a little more attention. Here is the thing. I am distracted by the popcorn, the cokes, the patrons trying to get refills, the people talking on the phone, the cleaning staff that comes in immediately as the credits roll. texting is not a problem.
Here is why I think theaters hate texting. It kills bad films the first weekend, and kills ticket and concessions sales. Everyone tweets how bad the movie is and by the 9 o'clock showing everyone is going to a movie that does not suck. There could be better movies, but instead they continue to make boring movies that do not entertain so everyone texts how much is sucks instead.
There is another thing that some may not know. This theater is running a major promotion trying to establish itself as the pretentious alternative theater. This will work in Austin where they have an overabundance of wanna be pretentious people and a shortage of pretentious movie houses, but in other urban parts of texas we already have high quality pretentious movie theaters with overpriced bad food and drinks either in the theater or near it. The texting thing is being pumped for publicity so that all the pretentious people who are too good to see a popular movie in a normal theater will be attracted to it. Therefore, this has nothing to do with values but is merely a cheap publicity stunt.
The good news is it may not matter for creative work. Artists can choose to more freely distribute work and corporate artists are learning being too strict leads to irrelevancy. Look at the Beatles catalog and the decision to allow it on iTunes. Thought it would never happen, until we realize that not being on iTunes means not existing for large number of people. In academic world, PLoS is pushing journals to be more open. To the current point, students will learn to play what they can afford, and other music will be lost.
Everything is fungible. Marketing creates need for a certain product/brand combination, but real and opportunity costs can quickly kill that perceived need, as we have seen with most of the formerly great US brands. Kids expect to be able to play with products for free. Content that does not allow this is going to fail. Even WSJ has nearly free content for students.
And you know what. Some people probably did leave. And the relationship between the Mac and Abobe has not bee the same since. But so what? At that point MS Windows machines were sophisticated enough to handle the creative tools, and many were moving off Mac anyway for fiscal reasons. What the Mac got in exchange for the switch was the ability to be a very good cross development platfrom, which caused huge number of machines to be moved, and the ability to run Windows programs either through WIne or using the MS Windows platform. The 'creatives' argument ultimately held no water.
The second thing we know from history is that when the platform changes is dramatic, as it is from Mac OS to iOS, Apple will keep the two around for a number of years. In this case we only have one example, the switch from Apple ][ to Mac. What we see here is a transition period of 5 years. The EOL for Apple ][ coincides with Mac OS 7, which was arguably the point when Mac OS became a reasonable mature product. It also coincided with Apple's attempt to enter the mobile market with Newton, followed a few years late with iPod and the ensuing iOS products.
So what does this tell us. First, iOS is not a mature product. There are some interesting tools, but iOS cannot do everything that one can do on the Mac. At a consumer level, iLife and browsing and mail is well integrated. At a office productivity there are still holes. The creative end is almost useless. However there is no reason to believe that the Mac will not be phased out.
I don't think it will happen nearly as quickly as the article asserts, and certainly not for the reasons. The App store is on the Mac, and from personal experience it is win-win. Yes Apple takes 30%, but prior to the App store I was buying no third pary software. It was expensive and would require a purchase for each machine. Now I make purchases. It sucks for Amazon, but is good for me. Furthermore saying that iOS is not good for the high end is ignoring history. Recall when everyone said the Mac was a toy?
So here is what I see. The iMac will transition into a two piece iOS macine were the mobile bit wirelessly docks into the non-mobile bits. It will have a keyboard. The iOS device can be bought separately and will replace all MacBooks. As the UI and power issues get cleaned up,and touchscreens get cheaper the MacBook Pros will be replaced with large iOS devices, maybe using flexible touchscreens that will offer display space far in excess of the current machines.. Apple will leave the high end creative market to Unix workstations, which will achieve a level of productivity just as MS Windows eventually did. It will focus on consumer and mobile business productivity.
We also expected the over the network OS upgrades, something I think will really separate Mac Os and iOS hardware form the MS crowd. Lack of installation media is a concern for some, but I put all my OS on HD partitions and install from the harddisk anyway. Haven't install from a DVD in years. Haven't bought a application DVD in years.
The dig about it just working is really apropos. I tried to use Amazon music service thingy. Bought the music, put it on the web, could not download it to my computer afterwards. So I set up Amazon to download to my computer, thinking I would upload back to Amazon. Bought the lady gaga for $1, never got it to download properly, Amazon will not aswer my requests to download it again. I think this is called theft. Really wondering if I am going to do business with them when they won't give me my purchases.
One thing I am concerned about is the transition from Mobileme to iCloud. They are not making it cheaper, 5gb for $20 is not better than the current deal. They are just giving away inexpensive services for free, just like they did with itools. Most people are not going to upload that many pictures in 30 days, and well over a decade of mail is not taking more than a few gb of space.
The versioning on iOS is going be a huge thing, since the iOS 'filesystem' is not versionable with any current tools. OTOH, semms iworks is stil imcompatable between Mac OS and iOS so I would have liked to see some work done on that front.
Apple is competing hard against Google and RIM, which is good, but they seem to have lost their way on some of the applications. This happened in the late 80's when they were trying to cut prices to compete with the PC. The software was spun off the claris and a lot of good applications were lost.
warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.
Here is the account from the article
In fact, Revere’s own account of the ride in a 1798 letter seems to back up Palin’s claim. Revere describes how after his capture by British officers, he warned them “there would be five hundred Americans there in a short time for I had alarmed the Country all the way up.
There are two parts of the statement here. The first is that Revere was intercepted by the British and told them what was going on. This is widely acknowledged to be true. The second was here embellishment of the story, which taken as Palin says it makes Revere a traitor to the country as he gave up military intelligence to the enemy. The second quote indicates that Revere was trying to frighten the British troops to release him by telling them the countryside has been warned of their advance and they would be outnumbered. This was justified.
In Palin's version, he also spoke of weapons and well armed what would be Americans. .If the British were actually there to take away the right of Americans to possess weapons, then speaking about the weapon stores, of which he likely new of the location, would be supplying vital information to the enemy. In the accepted version, Rever did his job, was captured, told them nothing useful, and then released. In Palin's story he traded intelligence for his release.
The inconsistency is still there. History records he warned the british that they were going to be attacked. Palin strongly implies he gave up the location of the weapon stores bu telling them not that he was simply warning the townspeople. but that there was a weapons store and he was on his way to it.
Because of the free market nature of the US gaining the maximum benefit of public education is also competitive. Parents of means have always had the opportunity to enroll in private school or move to less competitive districts. lately charter schools have provided some of these benefits for well behaved compliant students.
The education the excels in US provides is in skills and problem solving, not filling in bubbles on a test or making high marks for contrived vi al answers. Other less economically diverse countries dan worry about who has the best student sit on a maths or humanities test. What I want to know is who can be given a job and figure out how to do it without supervision. Out of high school. Who can make an accurate measurement. Who can write a complete sentence. Who cares if they can read an essay and write a witty response in an hour. Filling in bubbles and writing witty essays does not pay the bills odor most people.
on exiting public urban I could code, create databases, build stuff in metal and wood, solder circuits, and had very respectable scores on my SAT before they rewrote so that everyone could score well. Even with that I see many public schools providing even superior education to this with much greater access to elective courses that focus on problem solving as well as formal courses in advance math and science. Anyone who asserts that Education today teaches less than before still lives in the Americas of the 80s where we thought of America not as a technological leader, but as a place where minimally educated peasant would be happy to put junk together for high pay, never being educated enough to comprehend the economic or physical realities of which they were living. They were therefore surprised when they got fired be because they were not pulling their fiscally responsible weight.
in reality this concerns geeks because most geeks are rational and do not support making people suffer simply so that other people may extend their power and wealth. I suspect that most geeks with children would not support extended a life in which simple pleasures like reading and video games and coding are impossibilities simply because religious figures must force another to live in intolerable pain so they can continue to fleet the masses out of hard earned currency. And i suspect that most would rather have money spent supporting healthy babies rather than drug addicted seniors.
And before people say I hate religion, it is not true. I simply see no justification for the existence of charlatans that use faith of any color to enslave the minds and bodies of willing or unwilling subjects. There is nothing inherently wrong with faith, simply the people who abuse it and to lesser extent the weak looking for simple solutions.
What I see here is the failure of the OS to protect the user from rougue apps. If Android phones are not going to use Apple's process of vetting Apps to insure they behave, then the OS should do more. For instance, it seems that power consumption could be regulated to insure that no app can overuse the battery or abuse system resources. This is kind of what was done with garbage collection. Random developers could not be trusted to manage memory, so we put that in the compiler.
In the best case scenario, the suit is being filed now because on September 1 companies like Lodsys could be liable for all costs if they lose. While the lose pays legislation is primarily an attack on individuals, a blatant effort to remove the one power a person has against harm by a corporations, the side effect could be to stop these frivolous patent lawsuits. We will see how the Texas courts write the rules. It could be written merely to protect the corporation that accidentally kills an infant due to faulty design of a crib, or it could be written more broadly to protect the lawsuits against individuals that distribute negative information about corporations. As I said, the best case scenario is that it will stop the patent trolls from using East Texas as a easy way to litigate protection money.
This is really get out of hand, and killing the tax payer. In Texas Perry created a multibillion dollar deficit,in violation of the Tx constitution in the previous budget cycle and is going to do so again. One of the many things that creates this deficit is the big government criminalization of trivial matters. One of these things is cheating in fishing competitions. Tax payers are now expected to prosecute cheater in these contests, and may be liable for paying their bills for a year in jail. If the people who run contests are so incompetent that they cannot execute an honest event, it is certainly not up to me to pay for this. Likewise, there are many ways to insure a password is not misused, like logging locations and only allowing one session. Conservatives should not require tax payers to support big government initiatives to help incompetent private enterprise.
A good CS program should allow the student understand, on a fundamental level, how the computer works. Once that happens any program the student uses is no longer a set or random commands, but a systematic means of processing data. The teaching of officer applications is the anithesis of computer science. There has been a whole generation of computer users that have no idea what is going on, and are stuck with sub minimal skills in low wage jobs.
Here is what I would do for a curriculum. I would start with a Python book that introduces concepts. I woulld them move to Java or C++ depending on what the end goal is. I would introduce some theory, such as taught in The Art of Computer Programming. At this point some architecture and skill training is in order, perhaps using Pragramtic Programmer, the practice of programming, or design patterns.
Ultimately what is taught is going to depend on what the student is going to do. If the student going into physical science, for instance, then there are specific books that teach, for instance, Python for physics. If the student is interested in bussiness, there are other books that lean in that direction. For financial modeling and stochastics, that is a lot of theory.
These GMO 'experiments' are like kidnapping the whole world because they are ransoming our future food supply for short term profits. They are worse than nuclear explosions because the effect of nuclear explosions are localized, say the massive radiation of the Bikini Atoll, because the effects are much more widespread and may not get better in relatively short periods of time unlike nuclear explosions. We have no idea what the new genes in plants will do, but we do know that they genes will be spead because that's the whole purpose of nature, to spread mutations. Bad mutations will be breed out over time, but it could cause ecosystem to collapse.
In a larger context GMO exists to reinforce the non-sustainable agricultural methods developed over the past century. One of these is artificial fertilizer and insecticides. The negative effects of this is real. In the recent debate of blowing the levees so the missispii could flood farm land instead of cities, one argument against it is that the rivier is so full of these chemicals that the farm land would be destroyed. We live in a world where we can't even use annual flooding the reinvigorate our land.
Everyone says GMO is all about increasing food security, but it is really about increasing short term profits. In the Americas and Europe we grow way more food than we need. The issues in Africa is about using unsustainable framing practices and int he process creating desert. In the US where we have way more food than we need, we process it into empty calorie snacks na brainwash out kids into buying it as food. Just look at what happened when FLOTUS said it might be nice for kids to have healthy food. All the lobby dollars of the junk food industry came out and said that if parents though that chips and soft drinks were what parents wanted to feed the kids then they should have that choice. Which I don't disagree with, just let's be honest about what we are doing and why we are doing it.
What they should be doing is like the number for the iphone. Give expected battery life for different uses: some number of page turns, some number for web browsing, etc. Of couse, as this is only marketing, transparency and honesty has nothing to do with it.
IBM tried to keep Compaq from introducing the IBM compatible computer, which all but destroyed IBM attempt to transition customer from high prices typewriters to high priced microcomputers. Apple tried to keep MS from introducing Mac OS clones. The copy cats are never going to be stopped when they are producing something customers wants and are selling it at a cheaper price.
What is going on is that Google, Amazon, to some extent Apple is provided a better value than MS in many areas. MS may say that there are hidden costs, but if customers cared about hdden costs they would not be buying MS. MS is, or should be looking, at a future where the PC is not the dominant machine and so cannot demand that every PC comes loaded with Windows under the idea that every naked PC owner is going to steal a copy of windows. Even worse, unlike in the days when MS wanted enterprise to use thin net application, so MS could charge double, even the back office may be remote hosted by Amazon or Google. So where will money come frome. Well, if every Android table has to pay $5, then at least they get that, and do not have to do any real work for it.,
To be fair, the airport has been designated a zone where most of our rights do not exist. We enter it freely knowing that a minimally trained TSA agent can do whatever they want to us.
But there are other violations of the atrocities signed into law by Bush. The fourteenth amendment says that citizens cannot hace rights abridged without due process. I don't think that the legislature is due process to abridge rights of the entire population, so airport checks where we are molested does not pass a rational person interpretation of the constitution.
What is clear is that only the Federal government has the ability to regulate interstate commerce and travel. Therefore, while the state can control what happens inside it boarders, and is free to disallow molesting of passengers, interstate travel is something different.
What is also clear is that the TSA is more about limiting travel of Americans rather than making travel safer. Like the Berlin wall, it is meant to kept the citizens ignorant and facile.