I was quite disappointed by this article -- I don't know if ZDNet is providing the whole thing, but overall it was very short. It also missed one of the main development areas that I think is important, which is a whole lot more ubiquitous computing.
The article doesn't really predict anything except the continuation of the same old stuff that's already happening. "Computer screens will become more convenient." This is hardly a big surprise. Neither is the amazing prediction that speech synthesis will be used more as it gets better. These things are boring -- they're essentially saying that what we already have will get better. Well duh!
On the other hand, there aren't any interesting predictions because they're all already obvious. What about clothes that sense how dirty they are and indicate to a washing device how [much] to wash them? For that matter, what about clothes that adapt to downloaded designs and properties so a user doesn't have to buy new ones to look different? What about intelligent feedback audio systems that aren't speech related? What about intelligently using vibrations and other kinetic methods to indicate information so people's eyes aren't distracted?
These are just off the top of my head, and they're the sorts of things that everyone can't come up with easily. For one thing, they actually require some genuine investigation and research to predict, if they can be predicted at all. A few decades ago, a computer was a building sized juggernaut -- almost nobody predicted that they would be on desktops and in everyday devices. That would have been an interesting prediction.
This is like 900 numbers for email. If the system had a widespread implementation, I can see two negative effects that would probably make it as bad as the current system if they weren't dealt with in some way.
Un-sent important mail: Personally I'd ignore a lot of people who I might otherwise contact for completely legitimate reasons (eg. "Did you know your house was on fire?") because I didn't want to bother risking that they were going to charge me to tell them.
Reverse spamming: Instead of sending as much spam, there would almost certainly be a proliferation of advertising addresses under false pretences to encourage unwitting or naive people to send email to it. For example, advertise your address as the complaints address for the RIAA, watch the mail flow in and collect all the money.
Probably the easiest way to counter both of these would be to have a trust system so that people could rate each other's treatment of unsolicited mail. The reverse spammers would still try to counter this, probably by creating false accounts and rating themselves and so on, so a meta rating system would probably also need to be built in. And it'd likely have to be built around a cryptographic system, making the governments of the world all nervous and being an automatic reason why 90% of people probably won't bother to use it.
In other words, charging for unwanted email isn't an easy fix, it's getting really complicated and is it worth bothering with?
Do you think that where companies are being sued or forced into updating their webpages at great expense to include accessibility for the blind in their webpages when the blind could easily find another similar service offline is reasonable?
Pleeeease don't ask this question. The cited example was plain bad management and poor research by the Sydney Olympics organisers and IBM. They deserved what they got.
The rules were set out from the beginning. If they'd bothered to take notice of them, they wouldn't have been sued and it wouldn't have cost them anything.
This looks really interesting and I'm looking forward to playing around with it. I was wondering how it compares with other similar-sounding astronomical survey projects that combine existing data such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Is it expected to replace the existing ones?
Is it acceptable to glue Lego bricks alongside one another to achieve the desired effect?
Most lego doesn't have to stand up to the destructive forces created by extreme acceleration of a disproportionate and brittle design. Just think of this as the lego version of a conveniently available structural integrity field that redefines previously understood boundaries.
I design for standards compliant browsers, NS4 is not, therefore visitors who insist upon using this take their chances.
I agree with you completely. I'm not a commercial web designer and I have no intention of becoming one specifically for the reason that I don't like sacrificing good design for crappy products.
I have designed a couple of websites for voluntary organisations, though, and they both degrade nicely to Netscape 4. Although NS4 has horrendous CSS support, I found that one of the many NS4 bugs causes it to ignore style sheets if several different media are specified. eg.
...is ignored by Netscape 4 because it doesn't like the comma-separated media. This makes it possible to have a good looking CSS-formatted page that degrades nicely in Netscape 4, albeit without much formatting. It's readable though, that that's all that I can be bothered to keep giving people who insist on still using Netscape 4.
Why do people care so much about what lunar denial folk think?
I don't care about the conspiracy theorists. But as someone who spends a reasonable amount of time educating people about space and astronomy, I've recently been dealing continuously with ordinary people who listen to them. If not directly, then they watched and actually gave some credit to that stupid Fox show.
These people might not want to give the ideas credit (although some do), but they don't know how to argue against them and so they have to give it credit. The main problem is that most regular people in the general populace simply don't know how to counter the arguments. These arguments aren't hard at all for anyone with a modest scientific background, but most people don't have any scientific background. (School doesn't count because most school-level science doesn't teach people to think.) People can't tell their children why it's stupid, and they can't tell each other why it's stupid.
This type of thing is really annoying for anyone who's ever tried to explain or justify science, and it's very counterproductive. From my point of view as someone who has to deal with these people frequently, the more that ordinary people (conspiracy nuts aside) can be educated about how to critically evaluate bad science, the better.
The Leonids shower usually peaks at about that time every year. This year though, there are a couple of storm peaks predicted.
The storms are caused by specific trails of ice and dust left by the comet, and the Earth is expected to go near those trails slightly later than the regular Leonids shower peak. This is why the predictions you're hearing are slightly later than the regular date.
As I have mentioned in a previous post, engaging these people is never useful. People who deny the moon landing, evolution, or the Nazi generated holocaust are asserting an opinion in an effort to save a personal belief, and are not engaging in meaningful dialog.
Although I agree with most of what you've said here, I don't think that these are the people who NASA is targetting.
A couple of months ago I helped take some telescopes around some schools as part of a local astronomy promotion program. The class of eight-year-old children we visited were finishing up a space travel project.
Before we went out with the telescopes, we gave them a talk. All that the were really interested in was saying that the Moon landings were faked. They'd even had a debate about it as part of the project, and the pro-fake side had totally cleaned up.
The reason was that their only source of information was this stupid idiotic documentary that had rescreened locally a few nights earlier. The only "facts" they had to check were the ones presented on TV and, to be honest, the teachers didn't know how to help the other side counter the arguments. One of the saddest parts was the parents, who were there, were also ignorant. They weren't on some personal vandetta and they weren't conspiracy theorists. They just didn't understand how to critically evaluate that trash, and how to convince their children.
Part of NASA's goal is to help educate, if for no other reason than to make sure that it's capable of carrying out it's mission goals, which it can't do with an ignorant public. If these teachers had the information available, they might have actually been able to sway the debate in a meaningful direction instead of letting the children enforce their own ignorance.
What they don't realize however, is that these agreements probably wouldn't stand up under any light.
I find it hard to believe that this is why disclaimers are written in this way. They are lawyers who write these things, after all. Of course they know what is and isn't enforcable.
Personally I think it's far more likely that they hope that other people won't realise that they wouldn't stand up under any light. As long as 99% of people don't realise what parts of disclaimers (and EULA's) are enforcable, 99% of people will arrange their use of a product or service in exactly the way the vendor wants them to.
Even if people suspect that it's over the top, it's not worth most people's time, money or effort to find out in an extended legal battle.
Wasn't that where the rotation came in? That's why most of the big Earth-based ships and stations were constantly spinning. I haven't worked out the physics, so I don't know if it's practical outside of B5.
..unless you're talking about the White Stars, of course.
I did read the whole thing, and to me it still seems just as likely that it could apply to (a) and (b), because they're both stated in the same paragraph and the clause is tagged onto the end of that paragraph. It comes down to which binds tighter out of 'if' or 'or' within whatever grammar's being used.
I'm interested to know if there's a formal lawyerspeak way of interpreting this. It seems unlikely that it would have been left legally ambiguous.
There are more than a billion people in China. On what basis do you consider the Chinese movie industry "fledgeling"? Is it the fact that you never see any?
I guess you probably consider the Indian movie industry as fledgeling too, for the same reasons.
Someone can clarify this but the way I read #3, it had this at the end:
if lawfully directed not to do
so by a governmental agency of competent jurisdiction.
Doesn't this mean that Microsoft can only withold information that it's otherwise required to disclose if a government agency directs it to withold the information?
Well I live in New Zealand, and we get new releases from anything between a day ahead of the states and six to nine months behind.
Movies are sometimes released a day early because NZ is on the other side of the International Date Line, so we hit the official release date before anyone else. Some movies have been very late though, because the major holiday seasons are at completely different times of year. (Southern Hemisphere means that summer is around December/January, etc.)
It makes complete sense for the movie industry to restrict the sale of US-released DVD's in NZ, because often it's been released on DVD before it's hit the theatres here.
Ironically though, they can't. Region encoding was ruled as anti-competitive in New Zealand some time ago. Although the movie industry can sell as many region-encoded DVD's and DVD players as they like, it's also completely legal to take their player down to the local shop and have it de-regionised. It's also legal for businesses to parallel-import goods (such as DVD's) from other companies, bypassing the NZ movie industry.
One thing I can't help noticing is that the picture looks very similar to Digital Ink, which was developed at the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems at CMU and won the 1997 Gold Industrial Design Excellence Award. I don't know about the functionality.
The main obvious difference seems to be that the logitech one needs the special paper. Does anyone know if there's a relation?
Shouldn't it be paying the studio? The studio is (usually) the one that actually owns the rights to the movie, after all. If the director can automatically have so much control, you may as well have actors and special effects artists also demanding artistic authority over the display of anything and everything that they had a part in producing.
Irrespective of the super-star status often given to directors, they're still contracted to a studio. If the director wants artistic control then it should be one of the conditions specified in his or her contract, and it should be up to the studio to enforce that requirement down the chain.
For example, to protest the policies of the World Bank and the IMF, parties could run copies of Votester on their personal computers around the Internet. They could join a group called "World Bank and IMF demonstration."
I don't agree with this at all. Technical issues aside, it seems more as if the objective is to turn modern democracy into a online media web-poll. It's not that hard to demonstrate that nearly all of the people who pro-actively take part in public debate and make noise in the media are people who want to change something from whatever is already happening, whereas those who agree with the status quo have no reason to protest unless those other protesters really get up their nose.
It also stinks of laziness, which leads back to the same problem of inactivity. One of the biggest parts of democracy is that you're supposed to stand up for it. Claiming that you might get a finger broken is a poor excuse. It's true that active parcicipation in demonstrations doesn't always work, butbut if people can't even be bothered to leave their home to express their opinion, then maybe it's not worth taking notice of.
Making the whole participation process automated and easy is just encouraging people to get lazier and lazier. It encourages politicians to take less and less notice of it, and rightly so.
It's pointless to have a referendum on an issue that results in 95% of people wanting to change something, if 95% of people didn't turn out to vote.. and after a short time, that's what will happen. Naturally that 95% will be trying to claim victory in front of the mathematically challenged majority, but it still means that 95.4% of people either don't want a change or don't care. The whole exercise was meaningless.
This is the main reason that I don't sign petitions that are waved under my nose, and I don't send form letters that are identical to thousands of others. If and when I have an opinion to express, I'll put some effort in and express my opinion properly in my own words. It might not get read in detail, but at least it'll be visible as an opinion that took some effort to express.
The average urban worker in China earns about 4,500 Chinese yuan per month (US$542), not the 1,000 yuan stated.
It's also important to compare that salary to the cost of living. In New Zealand it's normal to earn roughly US$1400 per month before tax as a relatively introductory wage in IT, depending on the exact exchange rate. But everything here except various imported goods costs about half as much, too. It's not exactly living in poverty because even though lots of technology is imported, most of the basic things are produced internally.
It makes it a really cheap place for people from the US and Europe to come on holidays, and in contrast it's expensive for NZ'ers to travel overseas, so lots of young people go on working holidays when they can.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that it would be possible to see your surroundings if you were somehow able to survive a visit to Venus' surface - the light being a dark dull red glow.
Well for what it's worth, Venera 9 and Venera 10 managed to return images with lighting that was reportedly similar to an overcast summer day on Earth. (At least the Venera 10 photo was.) I'm not sure if that means visual light or not.
Too bad the view wouldn't stop human tourists from being crushed to death, combusted into nothing and suffocated, all simultaneously.:)
In the solar system alone, we've got Earth, Mars, Europa, Titan and now Venus. Of course, there's only evidence so far of life on one, but the very fact that scientists are even considering it is a testament to life's tenacity.
Personally I'm not that enthuiastic yet. Scientists were considering life on Mars, the Moon and life on Venus and life outside of Earth generally 100 years ago, too. Respected scientists throughout history were involved in a lot of these theories, which unfortunately were often hyped out of proportionby media and others. It doesn't mean that the basis for the considerations were correct or meaningful or led to anything except for hype.
There's definitely a lot of anecdotal evidence so far supporting the idea that life might exist in other places, and it's interesting. I'm going to wait for life somewhere else to actually be proven before I get too excited, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of interest, how much could prices be cut if you weren't funding continuaal spam bombardment?
I was quite disappointed by this article -- I don't know if ZDNet is providing the whole thing, but overall it was very short. It also missed one of the main development areas that I think is important, which is a whole lot more ubiquitous computing.
The article doesn't really predict anything except the continuation of the same old stuff that's already happening. "Computer screens will become more convenient." This is hardly a big surprise. Neither is the amazing prediction that speech synthesis will be used more as it gets better. These things are boring -- they're essentially saying that what we already have will get better. Well duh!
On the other hand, there aren't any interesting predictions because they're all already obvious. What about clothes that sense how dirty they are and indicate to a washing device how [much] to wash them? For that matter, what about clothes that adapt to downloaded designs and properties so a user doesn't have to buy new ones to look different? What about intelligent feedback audio systems that aren't speech related? What about intelligently using vibrations and other kinetic methods to indicate information so people's eyes aren't distracted?
These are just off the top of my head, and they're the sorts of things that everyone can't come up with easily. For one thing, they actually require some genuine investigation and research to predict, if they can be predicted at all. A few decades ago, a computer was a building sized juggernaut -- almost nobody predicted that they would be on desktops and in everyday devices. That would have been an interesting prediction.
This is like 900 numbers for email. If the system had a widespread implementation, I can see two negative effects that would probably make it as bad as the current system if they weren't dealt with in some way.
Probably the easiest way to counter both of these would be to have a trust system so that people could rate each other's treatment of unsolicited mail. The reverse spammers would still try to counter this, probably by creating false accounts and rating themselves and so on, so a meta rating system would probably also need to be built in. And it'd likely have to be built around a cryptographic system, making the governments of the world all nervous and being an automatic reason why 90% of people probably won't bother to use it.
In other words, charging for unwanted email isn't an easy fix, it's getting really complicated and is it worth bothering with?
Pleeeease don't ask this question. The cited example was plain bad management and poor research by the Sydney Olympics organisers and IBM. They deserved what they got.
The rules were set out from the beginning. If they'd bothered to take notice of them, they wouldn't have been sued and it wouldn't have cost them anything.
This looks really interesting and I'm looking forward to playing around with it. I was wondering how it compares with other similar-sounding astronomical survey projects that combine existing data such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Is it expected to replace the existing ones?
Most lego doesn't have to stand up to the destructive forces created by extreme acceleration of a disproportionate and brittle design. Just think of this as the lego version of a conveniently available structural integrity field that redefines previously understood boundaries.
I agree with you completely. I'm not a commercial web designer and I have no intention of becoming one specifically for the reason that I don't like sacrificing good design for crappy products.
I have designed a couple of websites for voluntary organisations, though, and they both degrade nicely to Netscape 4. Although NS4 has horrendous CSS support, I found that one of the many NS4 bugs causes it to ignore style sheets if several different media are specified. eg.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen,print" href="stylesheet.css"I don't care about the conspiracy theorists. But as someone who spends a reasonable amount of time educating people about space and astronomy, I've recently been dealing continuously with ordinary people who listen to them. If not directly, then they watched and actually gave some credit to that stupid Fox show.
These people might not want to give the ideas credit (although some do), but they don't know how to argue against them and so they have to give it credit. The main problem is that most regular people in the general populace simply don't know how to counter the arguments. These arguments aren't hard at all for anyone with a modest scientific background, but most people don't have any scientific background. (School doesn't count because most school-level science doesn't teach people to think.) People can't tell their children why it's stupid, and they can't tell each other why it's stupid.
This type of thing is really annoying for anyone who's ever tried to explain or justify science, and it's very counterproductive. From my point of view as someone who has to deal with these people frequently, the more that ordinary people (conspiracy nuts aside) can be educated about how to critically evaluate bad science, the better.
The Leonids shower usually peaks at about that time every year. This year though, there are a couple of storm peaks predicted.
The storms are caused by specific trails of ice and dust left by the comet, and the Earth is expected to go near those trails slightly later than the regular Leonids shower peak. This is why the predictions you're hearing are slightly later than the regular date.
Although I agree with most of what you've said here, I don't think that these are the people who NASA is targetting.
A couple of months ago I helped take some telescopes around some schools as part of a local astronomy promotion program. The class of eight-year-old children we visited were finishing up a space travel project.
Before we went out with the telescopes, we gave them a talk. All that the were really interested in was saying that the Moon landings were faked. They'd even had a debate about it as part of the project, and the pro-fake side had totally cleaned up.
The reason was that their only source of information was this stupid idiotic documentary that had rescreened locally a few nights earlier. The only "facts" they had to check were the ones presented on TV and, to be honest, the teachers didn't know how to help the other side counter the arguments. One of the saddest parts was the parents, who were there, were also ignorant. They weren't on some personal vandetta and they weren't conspiracy theorists. They just didn't understand how to critically evaluate that trash, and how to convince their children.
Part of NASA's goal is to help educate, if for no other reason than to make sure that it's capable of carrying out it's mission goals, which it can't do with an ignorant public. If these teachers had the information available, they might have actually been able to sway the debate in a meaningful direction instead of letting the children enforce their own ignorance.
I find it hard to believe that this is why disclaimers are written in this way. They are lawyers who write these things, after all. Of course they know what is and isn't enforcable.
Personally I think it's far more likely that they hope that other people won't realise that they wouldn't stand up under any light. As long as 99% of people don't realise what parts of disclaimers (and EULA's) are enforcable, 99% of people will arrange their use of a product or service in exactly the way the vendor wants them to.
Even if people suspect that it's over the top, it's not worth most people's time, money or effort to find out in an extended legal battle.
Wasn't that where the rotation came in? That's why most of the big Earth-based ships and stations were constantly spinning. I haven't worked out the physics, so I don't know if it's practical outside of B5.
I did read the whole thing, and to me it still seems just as likely that it could apply to (a) and (b), because they're both stated in the same paragraph and the clause is tagged onto the end of that paragraph. It comes down to which binds tighter out of 'if' or 'or' within whatever grammar's being used.
I'm interested to know if there's a formal lawyerspeak way of interpreting this. It seems unlikely that it would have been left legally ambiguous.
There are more than a billion people in China. On what basis do you consider the Chinese movie industry "fledgeling"? Is it the fact that you never see any?
I guess you probably consider the Indian movie industry as fledgeling too, for the same reasons.
Someone can clarify this but the way I read #3, it had this at the end:
Doesn't this mean that Microsoft can only withold information that it's otherwise required to disclose if a government agency directs it to withold the information?
Well I live in New Zealand, and we get new releases from anything between a day ahead of the states and six to nine months behind.
Movies are sometimes released a day early because NZ is on the other side of the International Date Line, so we hit the official release date before anyone else. Some movies have been very late though, because the major holiday seasons are at completely different times of year. (Southern Hemisphere means that summer is around December/January, etc.)
It makes complete sense for the movie industry to restrict the sale of US-released DVD's in NZ, because often it's been released on DVD before it's hit the theatres here.
Ironically though, they can't. Region encoding was ruled as anti-competitive in New Zealand some time ago. Although the movie industry can sell as many region-encoded DVD's and DVD players as they like, it's also completely legal to take their player down to the local shop and have it de-regionised. It's also legal for businesses to parallel-import goods (such as DVD's) from other companies, bypassing the NZ movie industry.
On the other hand, implementing PROLOG as a language within PROLOG is about one line of code. :)
One thing I can't help noticing is that the picture looks very similar to Digital Ink, which was developed at the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems at CMU and won the 1997 Gold Industrial Design Excellence Award. I don't know about the functionality.
The main obvious difference seems to be that the logitech one needs the special paper. Does anyone know if there's a relation?
Shouldn't it be paying the studio? The studio is (usually) the one that actually owns the rights to the movie, after all. If the director can automatically have so much control, you may as well have actors and special effects artists also demanding artistic authority over the display of anything and everything that they had a part in producing.
Irrespective of the super-star status often given to directors, they're still contracted to a studio. If the director wants artistic control then it should be one of the conditions specified in his or her contract, and it should be up to the studio to enforce that requirement down the chain.
I don't agree with this at all. Technical issues aside, it seems more as if the objective is to turn modern democracy into a online media web-poll. It's not that hard to demonstrate that nearly all of the people who pro-actively take part in public debate and make noise in the media are people who want to change something from whatever is already happening, whereas those who agree with the status quo have no reason to protest unless those other protesters really get up their nose.
It also stinks of laziness, which leads back to the same problem of inactivity. One of the biggest parts of democracy is that you're supposed to stand up for it. Claiming that you might get a finger broken is a poor excuse. It's true that active parcicipation in demonstrations doesn't always work, butbut if people can't even be bothered to leave their home to express their opinion, then maybe it's not worth taking notice of.
Making the whole participation process automated and easy is just encouraging people to get lazier and lazier. It encourages politicians to take less and less notice of it, and rightly so.
It's pointless to have a referendum on an issue that results in 95% of people wanting to change something, if 95% of people didn't turn out to vote.. and after a short time, that's what will happen. Naturally that 95% will be trying to claim victory in front of the mathematically challenged majority, but it still means that 95.4% of people either don't want a change or don't care. The whole exercise was meaningless.
This is the main reason that I don't sign petitions that are waved under my nose, and I don't send form letters that are identical to thousands of others. If and when I have an opinion to express, I'll put some effort in and express my opinion properly in my own words. It might not get read in detail, but at least it'll be visible as an opinion that took some effort to express.
It's also important to compare that salary to the cost of living. In New Zealand it's normal to earn roughly US$1400 per month before tax as a relatively introductory wage in IT, depending on the exact exchange rate. But everything here except various imported goods costs about half as much, too. It's not exactly living in poverty because even though lots of technology is imported, most of the basic things are produced internally.
It makes it a really cheap place for people from the US and Europe to come on holidays, and in contrast it's expensive for NZ'ers to travel overseas, so lots of young people go on working holidays when they can.
Well for what it's worth, Venera 9 and Venera 10 managed to return images with lighting that was reportedly similar to an overcast summer day on Earth. (At least the Venera 10 photo was.) I'm not sure if that means visual light or not.
Too bad the view wouldn't stop human tourists from being crushed to death, combusted into nothing and suffocated, all simultaneously. :)
Personally I'm not that enthuiastic yet. Scientists were considering life on Mars, the Moon and life on Venus and life outside of Earth generally 100 years ago, too. Respected scientists throughout history were involved in a lot of these theories, which unfortunately were often hyped out of proportionby media and others. It doesn't mean that the basis for the considerations were correct or meaningful or led to anything except for hype.
There's definitely a lot of anecdotal evidence so far supporting the idea that life might exist in other places, and it's interesting. I'm going to wait for life somewhere else to actually be proven before I get too excited, though.