I believe that you can easily recognize the irony of encouraging your students to matriculate in the creative arts
At Harvard?
while engaging in behavior which, if unchecked, will make it impossible for those students to earn an income from their future creative efforts.
...unless they come up with some kind of new, creative business model that was not only compatible with the new realities presented by the Internet, but made loads of money from them. And that certainly would not be in keeping with the ethos of the Ivy League. Status quo or death!
"They ought to seriously address this issue of intellectual property. They certainly aren't allowing students to copy books in the university library."
What the hell university did this guy go to? Half of my professors made me pick up my course book -- a collection of articles from other books and journals -- at Kinko's.
Does the above article actually say anything? If it does, I couldn't find it.
In 1948 a guy named Garry Davis decided that the nation-state system had to be abolished if the horrors of World War II were to be avoided in the future. He felt that the logical conclusion to the train of thought that produced the UN Convention on Human Rights was that everyone was sovereign and nation-states had no rights over people.
In Paris, he renounced his citizenship and walked out of the US Embassy stateless. He issued himself a passport and has been going around the world ever since by convincing bureaucrats that his passport is just as good as one issued by a recognized government.
His organization, the World Service Authority, still sell the passports and they claim people have been able to get into almost everywhere using them.
It's kind of a crackpot outfit (I see they're taking banner ads now -- very principled), but it is an interesting demonstration that the nation-state is only as powerful as people believe it is.
Late 1990s: OMG! People are posting stock market tips which are causing market fluctuations. People will be unable to tell the difference between real and fake stock market news!
You're right -- people are way too smart to get taken in by that kind of thing. I mean, it's not like some 23 year-old could release fake stock market news that would cause the stock of some electronics company to plummet, knocking 2.5 billion from its market cap.
As for people being unable to tell fact from fiction on the Internet in general, Slashdot is more than enough to reassure us in that regard.
The barcode scanner is called a CueCat (with some lame marketroid colons that I'm not using because it irritates me when people name things like that).
Dear Sir:
It has come to our attention that you have reverse-engineered the clever encryption scheme used in the branding of our latest technological advance, properly called:CueCat, and posted the brand name in plaintext on your website.
We order you to cease and desist in your devilishly clever reverse-engineering and to post the product's name only in it's encrypted form.
"I got about two-thirds of the way through the book without giving the reader any hope at all", he writes "It was about then that I realized I didn't have the hope to give."
Salon takes this quote out of context. Schneier goes on to say:
I had my epiphany in April 1999: that security was about risk management, that detection and response were just as important as prevention, and that reducing the "window of exposure" for an enterprise is security's real purpose. I was finally able to finish the book: offer solutions to the problems I posed, a way out of the darkness, hope for the future of computer security.
I haven't read the book yet, but my understanding from what Schneier says regularly on his very interesting mailing list is that he and others had been looking at security the wrong way. The analogy he uses frequently is to safes. Safes don't claim to be uncrackable; instead they come with ratings specifying how many minutes it would take a skilled safecracker to open them. Schneier's argument is that this is the same approach we should be taking to information security. Not "this security is crackable and that security isn't," but "this security can be cracked by a skilled intruder after X minutes/hours, giving you that much lead time to respond. Plan accordingly."
Email is much more informal than paper mail, and people treat it accordingly. I can't imagine people in my office send or get chain letters, jokes, and photos of varying levels of propriety through the postal service. But the volume of the same kind of stuff they send and get over email is enormous.
People are much more likely to send or receive "inappropriate" material via email than by post. The two mechanisms require different sets of rules.
The New York Times is running what I think is a more substantive article on the Kursk sinking that also supports the cavitation-torpedo-gone-bad theory.
Of course, free registration is required so they know where to find you and take your guns away.
This, to me, is one of the most interesting questions about the direction of the Internet right now.
If we continue to see progress with tools like Babelfish and Babylon, the question may be moot, which would be a very interesting outcome indeed. (I wonder: if these tools become good enough that large numbers of people start using them for everyday media consumption, will major media portals dumb down their writing so the automatic translators can parse it better?)
Mandarin will not be a contender until the Chinese government gets less jittery about free expression. Who wants to create content you can get arrested for?
Hindi could be significant if Internet penetration in India makes real strides. There are several efforts being made in this area. But for the time being the Indians with enough money for access almost all speak English anyway.
Spanish could make a real challenge to English hegemony on the Internet and we're seeing more of this already.
Someone else made the astute comment that ASCII kind of screws non-Western languages in this department. The support for non-Western character sets in a lot of software in non-existent to poor. We're seeing more and more Middle East-based Internet portals now, but most at least default to English and some don't even offer Arabic. The software solutions for Arabic are varied and don't all play well together. A few months ago PC World/Egypt shipped with a CD from a vendor trying to get their Arabic browsing solution better exposure. Until that battle is settled 180 times around the world, Western languages will have an unfair advantage.
Lord of the Rings Being Rendered With Linux. Well, that it: the ultimate geek story. No point in hanging around trying to come up with something else. Let's all pack up and go home.
If people are this upset about Google taking banner ads, how will they feel a year or two from now when all the IPO money for highly speculative Internet ventures dries up, and all the good "free" stuff on the web either disappears or gets absurdly commercialized, portalized, and Time-Warnerized? Look around you; it's happening already.
We've gotten used to good stuff free, but it can't go on forever.
Next thing i'll be able to say that I created a car that gets 150 miles/gallon. But only when using this special gas.
A better analogy would be that your 150 mpg engine is getting dissed by manufacturers because it only gets 75 mpg when they slap it into a Humvee.
Crusoe may or may not live up to the hype, but when Toshiba says the backlight on their laptops takes 25% of the laptops' power and then goes on to complain that Crusoe only improves battery life by 40%-50%... Well, that would indeed seem to indicate an engineering problem; I just don't think it's Transmeta's.
"[Crusoe] does give a reasonable increase in battery life, but nothing like Transmeta's publicity is claiming. The back light consumes a lot of power - one quarter of the power is used pushing light out. Realistically, in
sub-notebooks it gives a 30 to 40 per cent increase in battery life," [Steve Crawley, Toshiba UK's product marketing manager] said.
So Toshiba's backlight is a power hog and that's Transmeta's fault?
It takes a long time to put something like this together. When it was conceived, it was a revolutionary idea. When it was implemented, there was already much cheaper mobile capability on the ground in most inhabited places.
It's a shame, though. These things were a boon for aid workers and others who work in really remote areas and couldn't afford a conventional satellite phone.
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Re:The True Best Personal Transportation
on
Personal Helicopter
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· Score: 2
But what could be better is a small little electricmotor scooter. It may not be as cool, but just a tad safer and you can get one today!
I really like the idea of this, even though the claimed range/charge time ratio (I'm looking at the "Electricycle") borders on the impractical.
It always irritates me, though, to see sellers of electric vehicles make the claim of "zero air pollution." Where do they think the electricity is coming from?
MP3 is a proprietary format. They buy the rights to the MP3 format, and charge any site that distributes MP3's a "license fee" similar to the one that Unisys tried to levy against websites that use GIF's.
I can't imagine they would have any better luck collecting the license fees than they would enforcing their copyright. It might obviate fair-use issues, but it doesn't seem like the case is going to turn on those anyway.
And we'd all just switch to non-proprietary formats anyway, which for them would be worse (just like it will be worse when they force everyone on Napster to switch to Gnutella, et al).
If you kill a porcupine, a thousand more will come. - Asante proverb
You show me a way to enter C code with a voice system and _then_ I'll throw out my keyboard. I could just see it: "up, up, up, left brace..." Screw that.
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but of course C is a language designed for the current, keyboard-based, paradigm. A programming language designed for computers with voice-based input would presumably have an entirely different kind of structure.
I have no idea what that structure might be, but it's interesting to think about, yes?
Slashdot Mirror
At Harvard?
...unless they come up with some kind of new, creative business model that was not only compatible with the new realities presented by the Internet, but made loads of money from them. And that certainly would not be in keeping with the ethos of the Ivy League. Status quo or death!
What the hell university did this guy go to? Half of my professors made me pick up my course book -- a collection of articles from other books and journals -- at Kinko's.
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If there isn't anything out there, we need to know that, too.
Finding something isn't the only measure of success for SETI.
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We were talking about the corporation-state yesterday. Try to keep up, OK?
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Does the above article actually say anything? If it does, I couldn't find it.
In 1948 a guy named Garry Davis decided that the nation-state system had to be abolished if the horrors of World War II were to be avoided in the future. He felt that the logical conclusion to the train of thought that produced the UN Convention on Human Rights was that everyone was sovereign and nation-states had no rights over people.
In Paris, he renounced his citizenship and walked out of the US Embassy stateless. He issued himself a passport and has been going around the world ever since by convincing bureaucrats that his passport is just as good as one issued by a recognized government.
His organization, the World Service Authority, still sell the passports and they claim people have been able to get into almost everywhere using them.
It's kind of a crackpot outfit (I see they're taking banner ads now -- very principled), but it is an interesting demonstration that the nation-state is only as powerful as people believe it is.
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Hey! That naming scheme took them five years to come up with!
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You're right -- people are way too smart to get taken in by that kind of thing. I mean, it's not like some 23 year-old could release fake stock market news that would cause the stock of some electronics company to plummet, knocking 2.5 billion from its market cap.
As for people being unable to tell fact from fiction on the Internet in general, Slashdot is more than enough to reassure us in that regard.
So yeah, give people some credit!
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Dear Sir:
It has come to our attention that you have reverse-engineered the clever encryption scheme used in the branding of our latest technological advance, properly called :CueCat, and posted the brand name in plaintext on your website.
We order you to cease and desist in your devilishly clever reverse-engineering and to post the product's name only in it's encrypted form.
Sincerely,
Digital Convergence
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I wonder if US anti-money laundering regulations have to do with this?
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Salon takes this quote out of context. Schneier goes on to say:
I haven't read the book yet, but my understanding from what Schneier says regularly on his very interesting mailing list is that he and others had been looking at security the wrong way. The analogy he uses frequently is to safes. Safes don't claim to be uncrackable; instead they come with ratings specifying how many minutes it would take a skilled safecracker to open them. Schneier's argument is that this is the same approach we should be taking to information security. Not "this security is crackable and that security isn't," but "this security can be cracked by a skilled intruder after X minutes/hours, giving you that much lead time to respond. Plan accordingly."
-
Email is much more informal than paper mail, and people treat it accordingly. I can't imagine people in my office send or get chain letters, jokes, and photos of varying levels of propriety through the postal service. But the volume of the same kind of stuff they send and get over email is enormous.
People are much more likely to send or receive "inappropriate" material via email than by post. The two mechanisms require different sets of rules.
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...but how many of them are virii?
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I'm sure these guys are real happy to be Slashdotted.
I would have thought that a 1986 Chevrolet Celebrity would be a babe magnet. Go figure.
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Perhaps the name is John Smith or something similarly common.
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The New York Times is running what I think is a more substantive article on the Kursk sinking that also supports the cavitation-torpedo-gone-bad theory.
Of course, free registration is required so they know where to find you and take your guns away.
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I'm going to patent bitching about patents. Gonna make a lot of money off you lot.
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This, to me, is one of the most interesting questions about the direction of the Internet right now.
If we continue to see progress with tools like Babelfish and Babylon, the question may be moot, which would be a very interesting outcome indeed. (I wonder: if these tools become good enough that large numbers of people start using them for everyday media consumption, will major media portals dumb down their writing so the automatic translators can parse it better?)
Mandarin will not be a contender until the Chinese government gets less jittery about free expression. Who wants to create content you can get arrested for?
Hindi could be significant if Internet penetration in India makes real strides. There are several efforts being made in this area. But for the time being the Indians with enough money for access almost all speak English anyway.
Spanish could make a real challenge to English hegemony on the Internet and we're seeing more of this already.
Someone else made the astute comment that ASCII kind of screws non-Western languages in this department. The support for non-Western character sets in a lot of software in non-existent to poor. We're seeing more and more Middle East-based Internet portals now, but most at least default to English and some don't even offer Arabic. The software solutions for Arabic are varied and don't all play well together. A few months ago PC World/Egypt shipped with a CD from a vendor trying to get their Arabic browsing solution better exposure. Until that battle is settled 180 times around the world, Western languages will have an unfair advantage.
-
Lord of the Rings Being Rendered With Linux. Well, that it: the ultimate geek story. No point in hanging around trying to come up with something else. Let's all pack up and go home.
-
If only this article came out in 1982 when my parents didn't want me to play Atari...
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If people are this upset about Google taking banner ads, how will they feel a year or two from now when all the IPO money for highly speculative Internet ventures dries up, and all the good "free" stuff on the web either disappears or gets absurdly commercialized, portalized, and Time-Warnerized? Look around you; it's happening already.
We've gotten used to good stuff free, but it can't go on forever.
-
A better analogy would be that your 150 mpg engine is getting dissed by manufacturers because it only gets 75 mpg when they slap it into a Humvee.
Crusoe may or may not live up to the hype, but when Toshiba says the backlight on their laptops takes 25% of the laptops' power and then goes on to complain that Crusoe only improves battery life by 40%-50%... Well, that would indeed seem to indicate an engineering problem; I just don't think it's Transmeta's.
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So Toshiba's backlight is a power hog and that's Transmeta's fault?
-
It takes a long time to put something like this together. When it was conceived, it was a revolutionary idea. When it was implemented, there was already much cheaper mobile capability on the ground in most inhabited places.
It's a shame, though. These things were a boon for aid workers and others who work in really remote areas and couldn't afford a conventional satellite phone.
-
I really like the idea of this, even though the claimed range/charge time ratio (I'm looking at the "Electricycle") borders on the impractical.
It always irritates me, though, to see sellers of electric vehicles make the claim of "zero air pollution." Where do they think the electricity is coming from?
-
I can't imagine they would have any better luck collecting the license fees than they would enforcing their copyright. It might obviate fair-use issues, but it doesn't seem like the case is going to turn on those anyway.
And we'd all just switch to non-proprietary formats anyway, which for them would be worse (just like it will be worse when they force everyone on Napster to switch to Gnutella, et al).
If you kill a porcupine, a thousand more will come.
- Asante proverb
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I don't necessarily disagree with this, but of course C is a language designed for the current, keyboard-based, paradigm. A programming language designed for computers with voice-based input would presumably have an entirely different kind of structure.
I have no idea what that structure might be, but it's interesting to think about, yes?
Most Forbes articles are.
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