In case you didn't know, it's because people like us are changing things faster than our leaders can keep up with them. One of the hardest things about being smart is realizing that not everyone thinks as fast as you do.
In any case, they're not wrong to be exploring these options. Do you have a proven business model that allows freely distributing copies of intellectual work (not just software, but books, music, movies, etc.) without payment to the authors?
When you do, your rant will make more sense. Right now it's just another rant.
...With or without Compaq. That business is so large and it moves so fast that there's no way a combined HP/COMPAQ merger could keep up with it and still make a reasonable profit.
The real money is in support contracts for server software, and PC clients. IBM has already figured this out. It will be interesting to see if these folks can make a niche for themselves as IBM has.
In the 1960s and 1970s most cars WERE the size of an SUV --maybe even bigger in some ways.
And back then you could pack all the kids you wanted in the back seat and you didn't even need a safety belt much less a full child safety seat. By the way, in case you haven't installed one recently, most child safety seats take up more room than a seriously obese adult.
In most states the use of such seats is mandated by some very stiff laws. And it's not unusual to need two such seats in a car. There goes your whole back seat. You can't even fit a child between the two safety seats in most sedans I've seen. Even if you did, I have serious doubts about the safety of that child in the event of a side collision.
Maybe you've seen something I haven't. I have two young children ages 22 months and 3 years old. We have a large station wagon. It's a squeeze getting a third person of any size in our back seat. And I still worry about the crashworthiness.
Now you know the reason why people drive these behemouth road monsters. Once you install two child carrier seats, there really isn't much choice. When my family can fit in to something smaller, believe me, I won't hesitate.
I don't disagree that a public transit system is a good thing for cities. What I'm saying is that they usually have to be designed for peak loads and that they're usually much less efficient when you have to scale them down to off-hour use.
The problem is that public transportation systems must be designed for peak load operation and because of that, it has a high overhead. The train cars have to run even if they're nearly empty, if the system is going to be regarded as useful by city residents.
People ranted earlier about how expensive it is for the environement to drive an SUV. --Has anyone put a cost on a nearly empty subway train? Don't forget to include all those lights in the stations, the ventilation, and so forth.
I grew up in Washington DC, not the suburbs, the city itself. Once rush hour is over, I rarely saw a busy station. After eight or nine PM, the system got so empty it's eerie. It continues running like that until around 1 AM, when they usually shut down for the night. Despite the lack of riders, there are still those who would rather see the system run all night.
Most calculations people make assume a certain average traffic in the system. The DC metro system doesn't always get that traffic. It suffers not only from the crushing peaks that it can barely handle, but from the empty runs where almost nobody rides.
Some cities are indeed built around pedestrians. I've lived in such cities too. If you're fortunate enough to not have a crime problem, if you're fortunate enough to have the artery roads to get supplies and shipments in to the local stores, if you're blessed with enough serendipity that the transit system is useful, ENJOY!
Urban Planning is a contradiction in terms. Most public transit systems almost never turn out the way they were envisioned. Definitely celebrate when they do work well, but recognize the fact that such utility is often a matter of luck as much as anything else.
Either you need to go on a diet, or go to the store more.
Some people always use the elevator, and drive two blocks away. Then they go to the gym and use the stair machine and treadmill
...And some people post moronic, self-centered bullshit on Slashdot.
Try shopping for a family of four using your methods. Oh, and by the way, not everyone lives within walking distance of a grocery store --even those who live in cities. Let's see you negotiate riding a crowded bus with eight bags of groceries.
While I won't deny that some people will drive to a grocery store three blocks away to buy a pack of gum, they're by far the exception to the rule. One look at the checkout lines in a local grocery store ought to dispel that myth.
That is an incorrect assumption! The benefits of a well designed and implemented mass transit system are much more far reaching than solely to the individuals actually using the system.
And just where might this system be?
The only and best known cases of mass transit that work are the ones where there is absolutely no other choice that can be made. For example, access to downtown New York City is impractical in most motor vehicles. The transportation models for motor vehicles don't scale to that density. Everyone uses public transportation not because they want to but because nothing else works. But I live on a farm, not New York City. Their solutions don't scale to me either.
And also, before you continue on your anti-SUV line of rant, consider what vehicle options a family of five should use: No, I don't have enough room in an econo-box for my wife, an aging mother in law, and two small children in child safety seats. Our alternatives are 1) two cars, 2) a minivan, 3) a large sedan or station wagon, or 4) an SUV.
Options 2, and 3 have similar efficiencies. Option 4 is only slightly worse, Option 1 is simply impractical. Just so you know, my wife and I chose option 3.
Believe me, I'd drive a smaller vehicle in an instant if I thought it were feasible. But it ain't gonna happen for many years. Neither is it likely that I'll see any form of public transportation out where I live.
You talk about squandering natural resources. Ever study what it takes to run a city? Ever really wonder whether there truly is an economy of scale there? Well, I suspect you won't like the answer.
Before you go green with stupidity, think. Think about how mass transit works when you're carting around three or more dependents. Think about what a mass transit system is supposed to do during off-peak hours. Yes, cities may have economies of scale, but they also have the overhead of distribution systems. And if that's not enough, think about failure modes.
Clearly the guys who wrote the article believe in autopilots. That's nice. Do you trust your neighbor to maintain this autopilot so that it won't fail catastrophically? How about the instrumentation that feeds it? Clearly when even one such control system goes wrong the consequences are far greater than if just one idiot runs a red light.
Don't think you can coerce your neighbors to use what you use. Successful systems work because they appeal to everyone. SUVs appeal to many families because there really isn't anything with the safety and capacity that these things have. Yes, I'd like economy too. But which features do you think are more popular?
Enjoy your nice haven in the city. Just remember what supports it, and remember that yours isn't the one and only way of life.
.So instead of polluting Europa, we pollute Jupiter. Sure there is no possibility of life as we know it, but who is to say if there is some different form of life on Jupiter?
Reality check: Io doesn't have nearly the atmospheric drag that Jupiter has. The probe would burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere, though maybe not in Io's atmosphere, such as it is.
So I leave you with this not-so-academic question: What happens when you heat up earthly critters to temperatures that melt metals? Could you achieve that in orbit over Io?
Well then the sites just block the proxie [sic]. If you know an IP address is a proxie [sic] then you jsut [sic] don't allow any thing from those adresses [sic]...
And just how do they figure this out? There will be millions of proxy servers overnight all over the world. I don't see how keeping track of such things will stay ahead of the demand.
Of course, it would be interesting to watch a megalomaniac busybody try to make this work. I expect they wouldn't be doing much else for a while.:-)
In the negative time days (before 1970), if you wanted to copy something, it took serious effort. Copier machines could be used to copy books, but it was too expensive to bother with in most cases. Tapes could be used to copy vinyl records, but the results were usually quite inferior.
Enter the computer, an all in one printing press, photo shop, music production studio that even an idiot can use. Now that we've scaled this technology to a level where anyone can copy intellectual works of various sorts at minimal expense, how shall we price and sell intellectual work?
This is a dangerous question. This paradigm has been a fact of life ever since our industrial society began.
For all practical purposes, IP law is becoming a moot point. Practical concerns are overshadowing the original reasons for having such laws in the first place. This is not a question of morality, rich vs. poor, intellectual honesty, business policy or anything of the sort. It's a question of how we are to build workable concepts of intellectual property distribution and nourishment that are designed to meet the needs of technology.
Teaching not to pirate software is not good or bad --it's irrelevant.
We all like to spit out the rhetoric about how "people listen to Microsoft, but not us", but the fact is, this is no longer true.
This statement is too broad to make sense in either case. People are watching the Linux world, but few understand it well enough to read and comprehend the arguments for and against the case that M$ tried to make.
The bottom line is this: Decision makers don't understand when an argument like this is FUD or not. And if they can't understand it, who do you think they'll listen to? An amorphous world-wide community of software geeks and no money, or a company with so many Billions of Dollars that they could squash your business overnight and not even get noticed.
This little piezo fan may be efficient, but anyone who says it doesn't radiate electromagnetic energy is clearly showing his own ignorance.
There has got to be something less than perfect efficiency and whatever little inefficiency it might be, it almost certainly has to contain some electromagnetic radiation. It may well be much less, perhaps even orders of magnitude less, EM radiation. But you can be certain that it exists.
Oh, and by the way, peizo effect movements are not new. I seem to remember ads for them in Digi-Key catalogs years ago. I seem to remember that they were quite pricey too.
You want a flutter in your lap -top? Get a feather.:-)
With the end of atmospheric broadcast of the BBC in North America I'd like the chance to listen to the BBC again, or Radio Deutschewelle, etc.
You still can. I do. The only thing the BBC really cut was the Sackville, NB transmitter. Antigua is still very much on the air. 6195 kHz in the mornings, 5975 kHz in the evenings. And Radio DW is still on the air too.
No, the reason they've been shutting down SW transmissions is because they're under the mistaken impression that local coverage from various PBS stations and streaming audio coverage via the Internet is an economical substitute. They're wrong, of course, but they're still figuring that out.
Yours is a reasonable application of this technology. Unfortunately, I don't think there can be 4.5 million others like you.
Like most folks, I can count the number of such trips I take each year on my fingers. I am not going to subscribe to a satellite service at a price like that unless I was using it at least a few times every month.
In any case, an alternative to this has existed for many years and everyone has ignored it: It's called short-wave radio. You won't find a single major store that sells short-wave radios for the automotive market. But companies like Sony do make and sell quite a few such radios in various markets overseas.
No, the real problem is that folks are looking for talent and local content. But you won't find much of that in government, and you won't find much of that in the morass of corporate conglomerates that own much of the radio spectrum these days. It takes talent to recognize genius, but mediocrity knows nothing better than itself.
Lack of local content and regimented programming is why most listeners agree that most radio station programming sucks. But in these days where corporate ownership has homogenized the sounds of radio from city to city, when "local content" are bar ads, weather and news, when advertising dollars are sold nationally, when markets are going so "vertical" that variety is gone, where is there room for a Nationwide format?
I'd like to think there is a market for satellite radio, but I really doubt there will be.
Just remember what business you're in. You've got to do more than just one-up Intel. You have to keep at it while consistently beating them to the punch.
And all it takes is just one screwup like the Z8k and you're history. Intel is the M$ of the processor market and they're not going to fall on their faces because of a one trick wonder...
Ugh. Moller has been throwing designs at the wall for decades now. None have flown in to production. A closer look at his ideas reveal that we'd need some new theories in thermodynamics and aerodynamics to make his vehicles fly. When he publishes such a paper, I'll pay more attention.
However, NASA's highway in the sky concept has been around for a while and only now has it become reasonably feasible for instrument rated private pilots to use.
Most people don't realize how much thinking is involved for aircraft pilots to navigate, evaluate weather ahead, keep track of airfields, aircraft performance, air traffic control instructions, and so on. The workload is high enough that unless an airplane has a capable autopilot, many would not fly "single pilot IFR."
So a highway in the sky concept is a big deal. Reducing pilot work-load means safety. Let's face it, it's hard enough to stay at peak performance for four hours straight, let alone four hours after a long day of activities on the ground.
Not having to worry what frequencies to use next is a big reduction in work, not having to dig out the next chart along the way is a reduction in work, seeing weather depicted in 3D along the route, is a big deal. The less you have to think about where the air route, airports, weather, and you are, the more attention you can pay to how well the airplane is flying.
Sandel already makes a nice electronic HSI display which is finding its way in to many higher end General Aviation aircraft. Garmin also makes a nice GPS+navigation radio combination with moving map displays that are extremely popular among pilots.
However, flying an instrument approach to miniumus is still a lot of work and there is often little room for going stupid and making mistakes. NASA's concepts could help a great deal in this regard.
Before you ask "what calc now", why not address the larger problem at hand:
What should a calculator do?
This question isn't just rhetorical. I remember when people would spend hours programming calculators to do what we now use spread-sheets for. Yes, I was one of those people.
Nobody wants to key in boat-loads of data one finger stroke at a time on a keyboard with 49 special buttons, and a four line by 20 character screen.
Nobody uses calculators for circuit simulation or finite element analysis any more. It's too much trouble when computers have become so fast and ubiquitous.
Calculators used to be used to gather data. However, these days the data is often stored by the instrument that collected it because it's so cheap to do so. That data can then be networked (again, because it's dirt cheap to do things that way) to whatever computing platform you desire.
Computing resources used to be expensive, difficult to use, and obscure. That's what drove the scientific calculator market forward. Today, most of those functions have been gobbled up by user friendly and powerful software.
So what's a calculator good for? The occasional equation? Sure. Small programming area? Maybe. But any more than that is pointless. Smarts are too damned easy to add to the instruments themselves, and computers are scaling down toward PDAs. So doing an FFT program in your calculator is mostly a geeky exercise in pointlessness...
Go look for MatLab or Mathematica on a PDA. If they aren't there, they probably have plans to be there "real soon now."
Of course the medium of expression has a functional capacity. A pr0n flick has a functional capacity too! So do sculpture, portraiture, a paperback novel, and a mathematics textbook. If it weren't functional in some form it wouldn't be worth doing.
That some people use these methods of expression to do ugly things is nothing new. (Recall the Uhh, "art" called Piss-Christ) The real question is whether the use of DeCSS to get around DVD copy protection is legal. And if it's not, what should we as a society do about it.
Slashdot Mirror
In case you didn't know, it's because people like us are changing things faster than our leaders can keep up with them. One of the hardest things about being smart is realizing that not everyone thinks as fast as you do.
In any case, they're not wrong to be exploring these options. Do you have a proven business model that allows freely distributing copies of intellectual work (not just software, but books, music, movies, etc.) without payment to the authors?
When you do, your rant will make more sense. Right now it's just another rant.
...With or without Compaq. That business is so large and it moves so fast that there's no way a combined HP/COMPAQ merger could keep up with it and still make a reasonable profit.
The real money is in support contracts for server software, and PC clients. IBM has already figured this out. It will be interesting to see if these folks can make a niche for themselves as IBM has.
And back then you could pack all the kids you wanted in the back seat and you didn't even need a safety belt much less a full child safety seat. By the way, in case you haven't installed one recently, most child safety seats take up more room than a seriously obese adult.
In most states the use of such seats is mandated by some very stiff laws. And it's not unusual to need two such seats in a car. There goes your whole back seat. You can't even fit a child between the two safety seats in most sedans I've seen. Even if you did, I have serious doubts about the safety of that child in the event of a side collision.
Maybe you've seen something I haven't. I have two young children ages 22 months and 3 years old. We have a large station wagon. It's a squeeze getting a third person of any size in our back seat. And I still worry about the crashworthiness.
Now you know the reason why people drive these behemouth road monsters. Once you install two child carrier seats, there really isn't much choice. When my family can fit in to something smaller, believe me, I won't hesitate.
The problem is that public transportation systems must be designed for peak load operation and because of that, it has a high overhead. The train cars have to run even if they're nearly empty, if the system is going to be regarded as useful by city residents.
People ranted earlier about how expensive it is for the environement to drive an SUV. --Has anyone put a cost on a nearly empty subway train? Don't forget to include all those lights in the stations, the ventilation, and so forth.
I grew up in Washington DC, not the suburbs, the city itself. Once rush hour is over, I rarely saw a busy station. After eight or nine PM, the system got so empty it's eerie. It continues running like that until around 1 AM, when they usually shut down for the night. Despite the lack of riders, there are still those who would rather see the system run all night.
Most calculations people make assume a certain average traffic in the system. The DC metro system doesn't always get that traffic. It suffers not only from the crushing peaks that it can barely handle, but from the empty runs where almost nobody rides.
Some cities are indeed built around pedestrians. I've lived in such cities too. If you're fortunate enough to not have a crime problem, if you're fortunate enough to have the artery roads to get supplies and shipments in to the local stores, if you're blessed with enough serendipity that the transit system is useful, ENJOY!
Urban Planning is a contradiction in terms. Most public transit systems almost never turn out the way they were envisioned. Definitely celebrate when they do work well, but recognize the fact that such utility is often a matter of luck as much as anything else.
Some people always use the elevator, and drive two blocks away. Then they go to the gym and use the stair machine and treadmill
...And some people post moronic, self-centered bullshit on Slashdot.
Try shopping for a family of four using your methods. Oh, and by the way, not everyone lives within walking distance of a grocery store --even those who live in cities. Let's see you negotiate riding a crowded bus with eight bags of groceries.
While I won't deny that some people will drive to a grocery store three blocks away to buy a pack of gum, they're by far the exception to the rule. One look at the checkout lines in a local grocery store ought to dispel that myth.
Tell you what, take your assumptions and prejudical remarks and, and, and... --Make them in to yet another post worthy of an ignorant Slashdot weenie.
Sheesh. I don't suppose you've ever tried to put a family in your car have you? What? You don't have one? Gee. Why am I not surprised?
That is an incorrect assumption! The benefits of a well designed and implemented mass transit system are much more far reaching than solely to the individuals actually using the system.
And just where might this system be?
The only and best known cases of mass transit that work are the ones where there is absolutely no other choice that can be made. For example, access to downtown New York City is impractical in most motor vehicles. The transportation models for motor vehicles don't scale to that density. Everyone uses public transportation not because they want to but because nothing else works. But I live on a farm, not New York City. Their solutions don't scale to me either.
And also, before you continue on your anti-SUV line of rant, consider what vehicle options a family of five should use: No, I don't have enough room in an econo-box for my wife, an aging mother in law, and two small children in child safety seats. Our alternatives are 1) two cars, 2) a minivan, 3) a large sedan or station wagon, or 4) an SUV.
Options 2, and 3 have similar efficiencies. Option 4 is only slightly worse, Option 1 is simply impractical. Just so you know, my wife and I chose option 3.
Believe me, I'd drive a smaller vehicle in an instant if I thought it were feasible. But it ain't gonna happen for many years. Neither is it likely that I'll see any form of public transportation out where I live.
You talk about squandering natural resources. Ever study what it takes to run a city? Ever really wonder whether there truly is an economy of scale there? Well, I suspect you won't like the answer.
Before you go green with stupidity, think. Think about how mass transit works when you're carting around three or more dependents. Think about what a mass transit system is supposed to do during off-peak hours. Yes, cities may have economies of scale, but they also have the overhead of distribution systems. And if that's not enough, think about failure modes.
Clearly the guys who wrote the article believe in autopilots. That's nice. Do you trust your neighbor to maintain this autopilot so that it won't fail catastrophically? How about the instrumentation that feeds it? Clearly when even one such control system goes wrong the consequences are far greater than if just one idiot runs a red light.
Don't think you can coerce your neighbors to use what you use. Successful systems work because they appeal to everyone. SUVs appeal to many families because there really isn't anything with the safety and capacity that these things have. Yes, I'd like economy too. But which features do you think are more popular?
Enjoy your nice haven in the city. Just remember what supports it, and remember that yours isn't the one and only way of life.
Reality check: Io doesn't have nearly the atmospheric drag that Jupiter has. The probe would burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere, though maybe not in Io's atmosphere, such as it is.
So I leave you with this not-so-academic question: What happens when you heat up earthly critters to temperatures that melt metals? Could you achieve that in orbit over Io?
And just how do they figure this out? There will be millions of proxy servers overnight all over the world. I don't see how keeping track of such things will stay ahead of the demand.
Of course, it would be interesting to watch a megalomaniac busybody try to make this work. I expect they wouldn't be doing much else for a while.
In the negative time days (before 1970), if you wanted to copy something, it took serious effort. Copier machines could be used to copy books, but it was too expensive to bother with in most cases. Tapes could be used to copy vinyl records, but the results were usually quite inferior.
Enter the computer, an all in one printing press, photo shop, music production studio that even an idiot can use. Now that we've scaled this technology to a level where anyone can copy intellectual works of various sorts at minimal expense, how shall we price and sell intellectual work?
This is a dangerous question. This paradigm has been a fact of life ever since our industrial society began.
For all practical purposes, IP law is becoming a moot point. Practical concerns are overshadowing the original reasons for having such laws in the first place. This is not a question of morality, rich vs. poor, intellectual honesty, business policy or anything of the sort. It's a question of how we are to build workable concepts of intellectual property distribution and nourishment that are designed to meet the needs of technology.
Teaching not to pirate software is not good or bad --it's irrelevant.
This statement is too broad to make sense in either case. People are watching the Linux world, but few understand it well enough to read and comprehend the arguments for and against the case that M$ tried to make.
The bottom line is this: Decision makers don't understand when an argument like this is FUD or not. And if they can't understand it, who do you think they'll listen to? An amorphous world-wide community of software geeks and no money, or a company with so many Billions of Dollars that they could squash your business overnight and not even get noticed.
This little piezo fan may be efficient, but anyone who says it doesn't radiate electromagnetic energy is clearly showing his own ignorance.
:-)
There has got to be something less than perfect efficiency and whatever little inefficiency it might be, it almost certainly has to contain some electromagnetic radiation. It may well be much less, perhaps even orders of magnitude less, EM radiation. But you can be certain that it exists.
Oh, and by the way, peizo effect movements are not new. I seem to remember ads for them in Digi-Key catalogs years ago. I seem to remember that they were quite pricey too.
You want a flutter in your lap -top? Get a feather.
You still can. I do. The only thing the BBC really cut was the Sackville, NB transmitter. Antigua is still very much on the air. 6195 kHz in the mornings, 5975 kHz in the evenings. And Radio DW is still on the air too.
No, the reason they've been shutting down SW transmissions is because they're under the mistaken impression that local coverage from various PBS stations and streaming audio coverage via the Internet is an economical substitute. They're wrong, of course, but they're still figuring that out.
Yours is a reasonable application of this technology. Unfortunately, I don't think there can be 4.5 million others like you.
Like most folks, I can count the number of such trips I take each year on my fingers. I am not going to subscribe to a satellite service at a price like that unless I was using it at least a few times every month.
In any case, an alternative to this has existed for many years and everyone has ignored it: It's called short-wave radio. You won't find a single major store that sells short-wave radios for the automotive market. But companies like Sony do make and sell quite a few such radios in various markets overseas.
No, the real problem is that folks are looking for talent and local content. But you won't find much of that in government, and you won't find much of that in the morass of corporate conglomerates that own much of the radio spectrum these days. It takes talent to recognize genius, but mediocrity knows nothing better than itself.
Lack of local content and regimented programming is why most listeners agree that most radio station programming sucks. But in these days where corporate ownership has homogenized the sounds of radio from city to city, when "local content" are bar ads, weather and news, when advertising dollars are sold nationally, when markets are going so "vertical" that variety is gone, where is there room for a Nationwide format?
I'd like to think there is a market for satellite radio, but I really doubt there will be.
Just remember what business you're in. You've got to do more than just one-up Intel. You have to keep at it while consistently beating them to the punch.
And all it takes is just one screwup like the Z8k and you're history. Intel is the M$ of the processor market and they're not going to fall on their faces because of a one trick wonder...
Ugh. Moller has been throwing designs at the wall for decades now. None have flown in to production. A closer look at his ideas reveal that we'd need some new theories in thermodynamics and aerodynamics to make his vehicles fly. When he publishes such a paper, I'll pay more attention.
However, NASA's highway in the sky concept has been around for a while and only now has it become reasonably feasible for instrument rated private pilots to use.
Most people don't realize how much thinking is involved for aircraft pilots to navigate, evaluate weather ahead, keep track of airfields, aircraft performance, air traffic control instructions, and so on. The workload is high enough that unless an airplane has a capable autopilot, many would not fly "single pilot IFR."
So a highway in the sky concept is a big deal. Reducing pilot work-load means safety. Let's face it, it's hard enough to stay at peak performance for four hours straight, let alone four hours after a long day of activities on the ground.
Not having to worry what frequencies to use next is a big reduction in work, not having to dig out the next chart along the way is a reduction in work, seeing weather depicted in 3D along the route, is a big deal. The less you have to think about where the air route, airports, weather, and you are, the more attention you can pay to how well the airplane is flying.
Sandel already makes a nice electronic HSI display which is finding its way in to many higher end General Aviation aircraft. Garmin also makes a nice GPS+navigation radio combination with moving map displays that are extremely popular among pilots.
However, flying an instrument approach to miniumus is still a lot of work and there is often little room for going stupid and making mistakes. NASA's concepts could help a great deal in this regard.
I can hardly wait.
Before you ask "what calc now", why not address the larger problem at hand:
What should a calculator do?
This question isn't just rhetorical. I remember when people would spend hours programming calculators to do what we now use spread-sheets for. Yes, I was one of those people.
Nobody wants to key in boat-loads of data one finger stroke at a time on a keyboard with 49 special buttons, and a four line by 20 character screen.
Nobody uses calculators for circuit simulation or finite element analysis any more. It's too much trouble when computers have become so fast and ubiquitous.
Calculators used to be used to gather data. However, these days the data is often stored by the instrument that collected it because it's so cheap to do so. That data can then be networked (again, because it's dirt cheap to do things that way) to whatever computing platform you desire.
Computing resources used to be expensive, difficult to use, and obscure. That's what drove the scientific calculator market forward. Today, most of those functions have been gobbled up by user friendly and powerful software.
So what's a calculator good for? The occasional equation? Sure. Small programming area? Maybe. But any more than that is pointless. Smarts are too damned easy to add to the instruments themselves, and computers are scaling down toward PDAs. So doing an FFT program in your calculator is mostly a geeky exercise in pointlessness...
Go look for MatLab or Mathematica on a PDA. If they aren't there, they probably have plans to be there "real soon now."
Of course the medium of expression has a functional capacity. A pr0n flick has a functional capacity too! So do sculpture, portraiture, a paperback novel, and a mathematics textbook. If it weren't functional in some form it wouldn't be worth doing.
That some people use these methods of expression to do ugly things is nothing new. (Recall the Uhh, "art" called Piss-Christ) The real question is whether the use of DeCSS to get around DVD copy protection is legal. And if it's not, what should we as a society do about it.