I wouldn't call him a "new" author, but he seldom seems to be in the traditional top-10 or 20. Even so, Weber writes excellent books in the military-sci-fi vein. They're seldom "high art" or particularly thought provoking, but the characters are generally pretty good and the stories themselves are fun reads largely due to Weber's approchable style.
Of his books, I'd recommend the trilogy that begins with The Armageddon Inheritance is a lot of fun. If you like that then you should check out his Honor Harrington Series, which is also excellent
Also worth pointing out is that there are high tech applications which will never be outsourced: Government ones.
Of course, there's the "National Security" projects which can't be outsourced (that would be about the only way to make Total Information Awareness look worse); and most high-tech research projects at NASA, etc. (even if they work with Universities) are secured. In fact, few IT contracts the Fed authors will allow foreign nationals (H1B or no) to work on them).
Actually, a major factor in derailing Japan's world domination was their economic collapse in the early 90's. (They're still in a bit of a recession from it.)
Of course, that crash was largely due to the overly close and trusting relationships between businessmen (bankers giving huge loans at good rates to friends who promised to repay them, but later couldn't).
That was the Japanese achilles heel, America's might have been unions, or company loyalty; what remains to be seen is where or if India will falter.
Of course, with companies so internationally diversified, they won't hurt too much either way, now their employees...
Seems Prada (because every woman needs a $600 plain black purse) is trying all sorts of new tech in their newest New York store (and failing from the sound of it). The relevent bit comes from their experience with using RFID's in all the items' sales tags (to link up to the DB, to inform consumers of other products, to PROFIT etc) Unfortunately, the computers, monitors, power cables and data cables in the store interfere with the RFID tags so badly that all sorts of location-specific tuning of the receivers needed to be done to get them to work - and they only worked passably when every cable was well shielded.
The upshot I suppose is that RFID simply can't be ubiquotous enough to be worrying for a few years anyway.
Um...while this is certainly an interesting story, and an indication of the ridiculous amount of money going into advertising research, I fail to see what's wrong with it.
It appears to me that all this company is doing using an MRI and a neuroscientist to analyse focus group results rather than a sociologist or a psychologist. Which is fine with me, if ad companies want to scientifically proove that the libido sections of men's brains have a stronger responce to the model with the cell phone, then the logic sections do to the cell phone and it's list of features, then that's their own business. Granted, this will increase the price of the product on which they're doing market neuro-research; but the market will ultimately determine the value of the research.
Either way it's not you're brain being explored. (Believe me if Madison Ave. were using an MRI on you you'd know) And too, this research could add more value to neuroscience in general than it does to marketing so it's a Good Thing in some ways...
Perhaps this is foolish optimism, but maybe if hard core Sims players enjoy using their "Simians" (WTF?) to protest corporate greed it will lead them to do so in real life.
Of course, having only watched others play the game, I look at a story like this and think: "Gee, at least that gives the game some sort of point..."
Maybe this will give people the courage and the motivation to make their ideas heard, at least somewhere... Or maybe having people live their lives through online characters, protesting online issues, and concerned with their online world will lead to the decline of and fall of human civilization... Maybe it's about time for me to go home, and get ready to go out for dinner...
...as long as Sony, AOL/Time Warner, etc will allow it to...
Well this fits with Apple's Switch campaign. After all when Ellen Feiss is inspired (by whatever means) to combine her DVD of The Wizard of Oz with a particular Pink Floyd score she has on CD. She won't be pleased when her Mac beeps at her telling her that Sony won't let her rip the CD, and Time Warner won't let her copy their film...
After all if your whole marketing ploy is that people can use your computer to do what they think they should be able to do and do it easily; then you would want them to be able to exercize their "Fair Use" rights.
On my linux tablet I use the touchscreen normally as you would a mouse. Works just fine for surfing, playing mp3's, etc.
For many things xstroke suits my needs quite well. (I've had a Palm for years so I'm used to grafiti. When I have to have a keyboard I pull up xvkbd
and if I really need to type I plugin in one of those "industructable" keyboards that I keep in my desk or drop into my satchel.
So yeah, linux tablets work well, and having the power to download OSS apps, and or develop my own tools makes them excellent tools for the "power" user.
..next step get kdepim on it to sync with my desktop and my Palm...infomation everywhere, yeah team!
Better yet, respond by purchacing the crippled CD's, opening them, failing to play them on your Linux system, then returning them (with documentation of the failure) to the manager of the store.
Walmart told the music industry to make edited "clean" versions of their music. If Walmart, BestBuy, etc. tell the music industry that they won't buy copy protected CD's because consumers don't want them, then the RIAA (big as they are) will have to listen...
You have to appreciate post-Dot.Com tech reporting:
discuss how new technology's start-up company is innovative/doomed
discuss how start-up relates to existing industry leaders (provide links to stock prices) - consult staff market analyst
point out economic factors - consult staff economist
discuss how economic factors will doom/promote new start-up - consult magic 8 ball
discuss company's strategy for entering market and establishing foothold - mention start up's expected IPO date
if more inches needed for copy provide breif overview of how new technology actually works - consult glossy side of start-up's brochure/PowerPoint presentation
Thank you c|net for providing us all with that fine peice of tech journalism. Too bad Richard Shim couldn't fill more copy space by staring at Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, and had to resort to describing technology halfway through the article.
Ah...so that's why the Bush admistration stopped a mega-merger for the fisrt time in recent memory! And here I thought it was because he woke up and decided to become a pro-consumer president!
Oh well, I suppose he's got to figure that when he goes to war with Iraq, in addition to the heating oil industry, the media conglomerates will all benefit from new subscribers who want to watch the carnage...
Nope, sorry. I'm afraid heavy trucks are not the reason for the need of road upkeep.
Consider all the roads out there where trucks are forbidden, they still need regular maintenance and repairs with about the same regularity as major highways that carry trucks.
The fact is that road denegration is mostly due to weather and environmental changes. The ground settles differently (usually based on nearby development) and cracks appear. Trees grow and their roots crack streets. The temperature changes, the road expands and contracts, and cracks appear. These cracks fill with water and potholes appear. That's just the way it is, and without breakthroughs in paving technology (like tarmac), maintenance costs will still be high.
As for using rail shipments, that's a fine idea, and I believe that about as much tonnage is shipped by rail these days as by trucks. The trouble is that with rail you can seldom get there from here. And too, you have to maintain rail lines (recall the Amtrak crash in Maryland this summer due to overheated poorly mainained track?).
I hate like driving with trucks as much as the next guy, and there's probably a size of truck that ballances environmental, safety, and shipping concerns which has yet to be found; but in the meantime trucks are often the best (if not only) way to efficiently transmit goods.
Re:I'm sorry to say I agree with the court ruling
on
ADA Doesn't Apply to Web
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· Score: 3, Insightful
what do you think would happen if the feds mandated a HTML-ADA spec???
Actually this sort of thing has been the goal of standards organizations for a while. Pick up a "hype-ography" of XML and you're almost certain to read that XML is supposed to make information accessable to people with disabilities. They'll tell you that data (such as airfares) should be represented in XML and XSL will specify how it should be displayed. There are already web page readers that exist (as plug-ins to browsers) so they would simply download the audible presentation stylesheet. As for the price for the consumer, such products are likely covered (in some part) by health insurance or MediCare. On their end Southwest would simply be implementing the server side of an inernationally (and privately) developed standard which exists now.
If Southwest airlines is going to offer exclusive faires on their website, then they must legally make those faires available the disabled, whether it be through a text-to-speach plugin or (cheaper) through toll free number offering the same fares. Such a scheme would lower the "extremely high" costs: simply add a text to speach tag to your existing site which says "Call 1-800-sml-shop to hear exclusive online offers. If a person is physically capable of using a service (like air-travel) then they should be able to purchace that service just like any other customer.
Finally, as far as this precedent extending American law to the Internet; you have to keep in mind that Southwest airlines is an American corporation (at least I assume they haven't "moved" to the Bahamas yet), therefore they have to obey the same laws. sony.jp certainly violates the ADA (if the web-text plugin can't handle Southwest.com then what the hell is it supposed to do with Kangi?), but that's fine because it's outside US jurisdiction - like any company in Australia.
If companies, and governments are going to move into the online realm to enjoy the savings of paperless operation, then they'll simply have to bring the less fortunate among us with them.
I'm never one to avoid kicking Microsoft (when it's down or up), but the ZDnet article seems rather unfair and narrowly focused.
Reading what the Reg has to say on the topic, it sounds more like MS is licensing encryption algorithms for inclusion in other products: programs (and smartcards?) to allow people to carry their encryption keys around in their PocketPC's, and giving better security to it's Passport service.
MS is a big enough company with more products than Windows, and if they offer improved security in these, or even products geared exclusively towards security (like carrying around encryption keys) then I'm sure companies will buy. (After all as far as many CIO's MS made a great solitare program so their other stuff must be just as good!)
The security flaws in Microsoft's programs go much farther than RSA Inc. could hope to deal with, and adding their nifty new algorithm to encrypt X by Y is not going to fix it. The only trouble that appears here, is that people may see this and think that buying the MS Windows add-on to carry keys on their PocketPC will make Windows and Office more secure - cuz it won't.
Re:Great! - like the School of the Americas
on
That Link Is Illegal
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· Score: 3, Informative
Train Latin Americans to follow in alumnus Manuel Noriega's footsteps and establish abusive military dictatorships (we can always "take them out" later wen we need the political capital)
Train Latin Americans to kill impoverished families seeking their basic human rights
Sell Latin American thugs stinger missiles (we know they'll use them to crush communist revolutions [though we call them Unions here in the US]. They would never resell them to "terrorists")
Sell Latin American thugs A-37 dragonfly jets (they won't resell these to terrorists either they'll use them to fire rockets in to "dissident" families' thatched huts)
Since we're already pretty far off the topic of potential legal challenges to the USA PATRIOT Act, I'll carry on the topic of "terrorists." The fact is that the US has an excellent history of backing up truely vile regiems (the afforementioned Noriega) until there's political capital to be gained from going to war with them. We're doing the same thing in Iraq: when the Iraqi's were fighting the Iranians (back when they were terrorists not allies against terrorists) we had no problem with Hussein trying to take over his neighbors (we didn't like Iran then), gassing dissident groups within his country, or buying weapons of mass distruction (from Lockheed-Martin). There's two sides to every story here...
...we now return you to the previous conversation on freedom of speach in the digital age already in progress...
That sort of leads me to an interesting thought: It could likely proove Constitutionally impossible to use DRM technology with broadcast media. By using the public air waves it's likely that your content must be equally public. This could be similar to law dealing with performances, speaches, etc. given in public places and the rights to have personal coppies of them - assuming no personal profit is made from said coppies... So this leads me to think that I have every right to make digial or analog recordings of this weeks "West Wing" coming to me through the frequencies the FCC gave NBC, ditto for any movies that may be showing on broadcast TV - after all Hollywood must have released them for the public air waves, so I should be able to make my personal coppies. Any public liberties lawyers out there?
Of course, this doesn't have much to do with cable. I didn't read my contract but it might be possible (especially with a "legally new" medium like digital cable) to restrict copying of content delivered digitally. You might be entering into an implicit or explicit agreement with the digital content provider that you will sit quietly and watch the television and not record it. Other than it being rather obnoxious and ungenerous of Hollywood and cable companies to do this to consumers, I don't know what you can do about this within existing public speach laws...
This is actually an intreaguing possibility. You could simply have a small add at the top of each page and append content to it by editing the HTTP stream going to each user.
The really interesting bit is that if used properly it could provide useful information to users while generating business for local retailers. For example, if I'm surfing in a town square and I happen to notice an add for a band playing at the bar across the street tomorrow, I really might be likely to click on the add and even go to the show. I'd certainly be a lot more likely to clik on that than I am to click on the SourceForge add I'm looking at right now. (We use a different team development tool.)
Adds work (and can even be usefull) when they're targeted at people who care. This provides an excellent opportunity to offer extremely local, grass-roots information. Doing something like this might even be useful for small towns...put up a few WAPs and have the adds point to community events...
Since we're on the topic of AI/genetic/emergent algorithms. Could anyone suggest any good practical introductory books on these topics? (With some code to look at rather than abstract predictions on how "x" will save human civilization)
This is a topic I've been interested in for a while, but I've yet to see any good information to start me off...
Yes, but does the book tell you why anyone out there would want to read a blog about your life? Or what to do with your life to make people interested in reading about it? (Short of getting your own personal stalker of course)
That brings up a good point: if you have good documentation that's also open, so developers can see before they pay, than I think coders will be much more likely to adopt your product. After all, one of the great advantages to Java is the excellent documentation that Sun freely provides.
The article doesn't appear to be too clear on the point but it appears that the researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison didn't succeed in actually building anything. Rather they've "created the world's first successful simulation [my emphasis] of a quantum-computer architecture that uses existing silicon fabrication techniques."
Of course, if that's the case, an interesting question comes to light: how acurate and predictive are these simulations, that they would be able to predict quantum effects? Does anyone know anything about this sort of "simulated research?"
If you consider software plus development licenses I'm sure you can easily run up a $22k bill when putting a box together. Consider you have the cost of the + PC + monitor (or two for really cool developers) + Windows 2k pro + Office Pro + Visual Studio Pro + development library licenses (which can get really expensive like +$5k) + Unixish sofware licenses - software to make Windows boxes perform the tasks of Unix boxes, even simple things long GPL'd can get really really expensive think $500 for grep
With all sorts of proprietary per-user licenses (especially dev tools licenses) it's easy to see how a workstation could get up that high. Similarly, considering all the tools and libraries available under the GPL, you can put together a damn impressive dev platform and save yourself a raft of cash...
Actually, I beg to differ. If all you do is Linux development and administration, then you're going to want that, and there really isn't a substitute.
Take my friend who has a large linux development project, but needs to travel fairly often. He has a Vaio and it's essentially useless to him. He can't exactly ssh into his development box while he's on the road (and under windows he can't get good X-Windows forwarding anyway). There really isn't an option for him. He has to have Linux. But because of the wierd propriatary devices Sony uses he can't find a distro that will support Sony's CD-ROM.
Of course the question that was asked here was not "Why don't I want to build a good basic Linux laptop?" but "How do I build it."
With that in mind, an avenue that might be worth pursuing, would be to look into embedded systems designed to be deployed in the field: to truck drivers, and scientists in remote locations.
I haven't looked into these things in a few years, but last time I did. I seem to recall that they had pretty good systems with decent battery life, LCD's, and a fairly impressive degree of "hackability."
There are clearly caveats involved in constructing your own portable - you're certainly not likely to come up with something as compact and elegant as a Titanium or even a Sony Vaio. But I'm sure this fellow is well aware of the difficulties - he wouldn't have gone to/. if he weren't. After all 10-12 years ago people might have said "Build your own desktop computer? Your asking for a lot of trouble and you'll never be satisified with your result. Just go buy a PC Jr.or PS/2 from IBM.
Looking at Eolas, on the one hand, it's kind of funny to see the degree to which Eolas is beating Microsoft in Court, and the ridiculous hoops that Microsoft has jumped though in the process (Microsoft attempt to claim inventorship of Eolas invention-pdf). But on the other hand Eolas patent is sort of the worst kind of patent-squatting - thinking of something, patenting it, and then hoping others will pay you to license it, because you don't plan on developing it.
If you look at Eolas's website you don't get the impression that they're generating too many "algorithms that implement dynamic, bi-directional communications between Web browsers and external applications," to quote Cringely. Granted they developed the first plugin - in 1993! - for Mosaic! but they don't seem to be doing much else these days, in the hey day of the interactive internet. In fact, as near as I can figure they don't generate anything except law suits (right now only against MS, but what's to stop them from going after Netscape, Mozilla, Sun, etc. should they decide to do so.)
You really have to wonder about how far this sort of thing will be taken in the future - that is how many people will patent ideas and not act on them until that fundamental idea has made many companies tremendously successful. After all what if Turing had pattened the idea of "stored information, which can be utilized to control an electronic machine in the preformance of actions determined by the information" - the stored program executable. Morris and Eckert would have had to pay him to write the code for the ENIAC and we'd be paying his heirs everytime we wrote an executable (assuming his heirs renewed the patent).
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't call him a "new" author, but he seldom seems to be in the traditional top-10 or 20. Even so, Weber writes excellent books in the military-sci-fi vein. They're seldom "high art" or particularly thought provoking, but the characters are generally pretty good and the stories themselves are fun reads largely due to Weber's approchable style.
Of his books, I'd recommend the trilogy that begins with The Armageddon Inheritance is a lot of fun. If you like that then you should check out his Honor Harrington Series, which is also excellent
Also worth pointing out is that there are high tech applications which will never be outsourced: Government ones.
Of course, there's the "National Security" projects which can't be outsourced (that would be about the only way to make Total Information Awareness look worse); and most high-tech research projects at NASA, etc. (even if they work with Universities) are secured. In fact, few IT contracts the Fed authors will allow foreign nationals (H1B or no) to work on them).
Actually, a major factor in derailing Japan's world domination was their economic collapse in the early 90's. (They're still in a bit of a recession from it.)
Of course, that crash was largely due to the overly close and trusting relationships between businessmen (bankers giving huge loans at good rates to friends who promised to repay them, but later couldn't).
That was the Japanese achilles heel, America's might have been unions, or company loyalty; what remains to be seen is where or if India will falter.
Of course, with companies so internationally diversified, they won't hurt too much either way, now their employees...
Interesting someone should mention RFID, as I've recently an article which mentions it's use on a site we've already seen today.
Seems Prada (because every woman needs a $600 plain black purse) is trying all sorts of new tech in their newest New York store (and failing from the sound of it). The relevent bit comes from their experience with using RFID's in all the items' sales tags (to link up to the DB, to inform consumers of other products, to PROFIT etc) Unfortunately, the computers, monitors, power cables and data cables in the store interfere with the RFID tags so badly that all sorts of location-specific tuning of the receivers needed to be done to get them to work - and they only worked passably when every cable was well shielded.
The upshot I suppose is that RFID simply can't be ubiquotous enough to be worrying for a few years anyway.
Um...while this is certainly an interesting story, and an indication of the ridiculous amount of money going into advertising research, I fail to see what's wrong with it.
It appears to me that all this company is doing using an MRI and a neuroscientist to analyse focus group results rather than a sociologist or a psychologist. Which is fine with me, if ad companies want to scientifically proove that the libido sections of men's brains have a stronger responce to the model with the cell phone, then the logic sections do to the cell phone and it's list of features, then that's their own business. Granted, this will increase the price of the product on which they're doing market neuro-research; but the market will ultimately determine the value of the research.
Either way it's not you're brain being explored. (Believe me if Madison Ave. were using an MRI on you you'd know) And too, this research could add more value to neuroscience in general than it does to marketing so it's a Good Thing in some ways...
Perhaps this is foolish optimism, but maybe if hard core Sims players enjoy using their "Simians" (WTF?) to protest corporate greed it will lead them to do so in real life.
Of course, having only watched others play the game, I look at a story like this and think: "Gee, at least that gives the game some sort of point..."
Maybe this will give people the courage and the motivation to make their ideas heard, at least somewhere... Or maybe having people live their lives through online characters, protesting online issues, and concerned with their online world will lead to the decline of and fall of human civilization... Maybe it's about time for me to go home, and get ready to go out for dinner...
I just don't know...
...as long as Sony, AOL/Time Warner, etc will allow it to...
Well this fits with Apple's Switch campaign. After all when Ellen Feiss is inspired (by whatever means) to combine her DVD of The Wizard of Oz with a particular Pink Floyd score she has on CD. She won't be pleased when her Mac beeps at her telling her that Sony won't let her rip the CD, and Time Warner won't let her copy their film...
After all if your whole marketing ploy is that people can use your computer to do what they think they should be able to do and do it easily; then you would want them to be able to exercize their "Fair Use" rights.
On my linux tablet I use the touchscreen normally as you would a mouse. Works just fine for surfing, playing mp3's, etc.
For many things xstroke suits my needs quite well. (I've had a Palm for years so I'm used to grafiti. When I have to have a keyboard I pull up xvkbd and if I really need to type I plugin in one of those "industructable" keyboards that I keep in my desk or drop into my satchel.
So yeah, linux tablets work well, and having the power to download OSS apps, and or develop my own tools makes them excellent tools for the "power" user.
..next step get kdepim on it to sync with my desktop and my Palm...infomation everywhere, yeah team!
Better yet, respond by purchacing the crippled CD's, opening them, failing to play them on your Linux system, then returning them (with documentation of the failure) to the manager of the store.
Walmart told the music industry to make edited "clean" versions of their music. If Walmart, BestBuy, etc. tell the music industry that they won't buy copy protected CD's because consumers don't want them, then the RIAA (big as they are) will have to listen...
You have to appreciate post-Dot.Com tech reporting:
provide breif overview of how new technology actually works - consult glossy side of start-up's brochure/PowerPoint presentation
Thank you c|net for providing us all with that fine peice of tech journalism. Too bad Richard Shim couldn't fill more copy space by staring at Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, and had to resort to describing technology halfway through the article.
Ah...so that's why the Bush admistration stopped a mega-merger for the fisrt time in recent memory! And here I thought it was because he woke up and decided to become a pro-consumer president!
Oh well, I suppose he's got to figure that when he goes to war with Iraq, in addition to the heating oil industry, the media conglomerates will all benefit from new subscribers who want to watch the carnage...
credo quia absurdum
Nope, sorry. I'm afraid heavy trucks are not the reason for the need of road upkeep.
Consider all the roads out there where trucks are forbidden, they still need regular maintenance and repairs with about the same regularity as major highways that carry trucks.
The fact is that road denegration is mostly due to weather and environmental changes. The ground settles differently (usually based on nearby development) and cracks appear. Trees grow and their roots crack streets. The temperature changes, the road expands and contracts, and cracks appear. These cracks fill with water and potholes appear. That's just the way it is, and without breakthroughs in paving technology (like tarmac), maintenance costs will still be high.
As for using rail shipments, that's a fine idea, and I believe that about as much tonnage is shipped by rail these days as by trucks. The trouble is that with rail you can seldom get there from here. And too, you have to maintain rail lines (recall the Amtrak crash in Maryland this summer due to overheated poorly mainained track?).
I hate like driving with trucks as much as the next guy, and there's probably a size of truck that ballances environmental, safety, and shipping concerns which has yet to be found; but in the meantime trucks are often the best (if not only) way to efficiently transmit goods.
Actually this sort of thing has been the goal of standards organizations for a while. Pick up a "hype-ography" of XML and you're almost certain to read that XML is supposed to make information accessable to people with disabilities. They'll tell you that data (such as airfares) should be represented in XML and XSL will specify how it should be displayed. There are already web page readers that exist (as plug-ins to browsers) so they would simply download the audible presentation stylesheet. As for the price for the consumer, such products are likely covered (in some part) by health insurance or MediCare. On their end Southwest would simply be implementing the server side of an inernationally (and privately) developed standard which exists now.
If Southwest airlines is going to offer exclusive faires on their website, then they must legally make those faires available the disabled, whether it be through a text-to-speach plugin or (cheaper) through toll free number offering the same fares. Such a scheme would lower the "extremely high" costs: simply add a text to speach tag to your existing site which says "Call 1-800-sml-shop to hear exclusive online offers. If a person is physically capable of using a service (like air-travel) then they should be able to purchace that service just like any other customer.
Finally, as far as this precedent extending American law to the Internet; you have to keep in mind that Southwest airlines is an American corporation (at least I assume they haven't "moved" to the Bahamas yet), therefore they have to obey the same laws. sony.jp certainly violates the ADA (if the web-text plugin can't handle Southwest.com then what the hell is it supposed to do with Kangi?), but that's fine because it's outside US jurisdiction - like any company in Australia.
If companies, and governments are going to move into the online realm to enjoy the savings of paperless operation, then they'll simply have to bring the less fortunate among us with them.
Given current health trends, the current generations of Americans could best be called generation XXL, as a friend of mine likes to point out.
I'm never one to avoid kicking Microsoft (when it's down or up), but the ZDnet article seems rather unfair and narrowly focused.
Reading what the Reg has to say on the topic, it sounds more like MS is licensing encryption algorithms for inclusion in other products: programs (and smartcards?) to allow people to carry their encryption keys around in their PocketPC's, and giving better security to it's Passport service.
MS is a big enough company with more products than Windows, and if they offer improved security in these, or even products geared exclusively towards security (like carrying around encryption keys) then I'm sure companies will buy. (After all as far as many CIO's MS made a great solitare program so their other stuff must be just as good!)
The security flaws in Microsoft's programs go much farther than RSA Inc. could hope to deal with, and adding their nifty new algorithm to encrypt X by Y is not going to fix it. The only trouble that appears here, is that people may see this and think that buying the MS Windows add-on to carry keys on their PocketPC will make Windows and Office more secure - cuz it won't.
American Agenda for FARC: (via the School of the Americas
Since we're already pretty far off the topic of potential legal challenges to the USA PATRIOT Act, I'll carry on the topic of "terrorists." The fact is that the US has an excellent history of backing up truely vile regiems (the afforementioned Noriega) until there's political capital to be gained from going to war with them. We're doing the same thing in Iraq: when the Iraqi's were fighting the Iranians (back when they were terrorists not allies against terrorists) we had no problem with Hussein trying to take over his neighbors (we didn't like Iran then), gassing dissident groups within his country, or buying weapons of mass distruction (from Lockheed-Martin). There's two sides to every story here...
That sort of leads me to an interesting thought: It could likely proove Constitutionally impossible to use DRM technology with broadcast media. By using the public air waves it's likely that your content must be equally public. This could be similar to law dealing with performances, speaches, etc. given in public places and the rights to have personal coppies of them - assuming no personal profit is made from said coppies... So this leads me to think that I have every right to make digial or analog recordings of this weeks "West Wing" coming to me through the frequencies the FCC gave NBC, ditto for any movies that may be showing on broadcast TV - after all Hollywood must have released them for the public air waves, so I should be able to make my personal coppies. Any public liberties lawyers out there?
Of course, this doesn't have much to do with cable. I didn't read my contract but it might be possible (especially with a "legally new" medium like digital cable) to restrict copying of content delivered digitally. You might be entering into an implicit or explicit agreement with the digital content provider that you will sit quietly and watch the television and not record it. Other than it being rather obnoxious and ungenerous of Hollywood and cable companies to do this to consumers, I don't know what you can do about this within existing public speach laws...
Any thoughts?
This is actually an intreaguing possibility. You could simply have a small add at the top of each page and append content to it by editing the HTTP stream going to each user.
The really interesting bit is that if used properly it could provide useful information to users while generating business for local retailers. For example, if I'm surfing in a town square and I happen to notice an add for a band playing at the bar across the street tomorrow, I really might be likely to click on the add and even go to the show. I'd certainly be a lot more likely to clik on that than I am to click on the SourceForge add I'm looking at right now. (We use a different team development tool.)
Adds work (and can even be usefull) when they're targeted at people who care. This provides an excellent opportunity to offer extremely local, grass-roots information. Doing something like this might even be useful for small towns...put up a few WAPs and have the adds point to community events...
This is a topic I've been interested in for a while, but I've yet to see any good information to start me off...
Yes, but does the book tell you why anyone out there would want to read a blog about your life? Or what to do with your life to make people interested in reading about it? (Short of getting your own personal stalker of course)
That brings up a good point: if you have good documentation that's also open, so developers can see before they pay, than I think coders will be much more likely to adopt your product. After all, one of the great advantages to Java is the excellent documentation that Sun freely provides.
Of course, if that's the case, an interesting question comes to light: how acurate and predictive are these simulations, that they would be able to predict quantum effects? Does anyone know anything about this sort of "simulated research?"
If you consider software plus development licenses I'm sure you can easily run up a $22k bill when putting a box together. Consider you have the cost of the
+ PC
+ monitor (or two for really cool developers)
+ Windows 2k pro + Office Pro + Visual Studio Pro + development library licenses (which can get really expensive like +$5k)
+ Unixish sofware licenses - software to make Windows boxes perform the tasks of Unix boxes, even simple things long GPL'd can get really really expensive think $500 for grep
With all sorts of proprietary per-user licenses (especially dev tools licenses) it's easy to see how a workstation could get up that high. Similarly, considering all the tools and libraries available under the GPL, you can put together a damn impressive dev platform and save yourself a raft of cash...
Actually, I beg to differ. If all you do is Linux development and administration, then you're going to want that, and there really isn't a substitute.
Take my friend who has a large linux development project, but needs to travel fairly often. He has a Vaio and it's essentially useless to him. He can't exactly ssh into his development box while he's on the road (and under windows he can't get good X-Windows forwarding anyway). There really isn't an option for him. He has to have Linux. But because of the wierd propriatary devices Sony uses he can't find a distro that will support Sony's CD-ROM.
Of course the question that was asked here was not "Why don't I want to build a good basic Linux laptop?" but "How do I build it."
With that in mind, an avenue that might be worth pursuing, would be to look into embedded systems designed to be deployed in the field: to truck drivers, and scientists in remote locations.
I haven't looked into these things in a few years, but last time I did. I seem to recall that they had pretty good systems with decent battery life, LCD's, and a fairly impressive degree of "hackability."
There are clearly caveats involved in constructing your own portable - you're certainly not likely to come up with something as compact and elegant as a Titanium or even a Sony Vaio. But I'm sure this fellow is well aware of the difficulties - he wouldn't have gone to /. if he weren't. After all 10-12 years ago people might have said "Build your own desktop computer? Your asking for a lot of trouble and you'll never be satisified with your result. Just go buy a PC Jr.or PS/2 from IBM.
Looking at Eolas, on the one hand, it's kind of funny to see the degree to which Eolas is beating Microsoft in Court, and the ridiculous hoops that Microsoft has jumped though in the process (Microsoft attempt to claim inventorship of Eolas invention-pdf). But on the other hand Eolas patent is sort of the worst kind of patent-squatting - thinking of something, patenting it, and then hoping others will pay you to license it, because you don't plan on developing it.
If you look at Eolas's website you don't get the impression that they're generating too many "algorithms that implement dynamic, bi-directional communications between Web browsers and external applications," to quote Cringely. Granted they developed the first plugin - in 1993! - for Mosaic! but they don't seem to be doing much else these days, in the hey day of the interactive internet. In fact, as near as I can figure they don't generate anything except law suits (right now only against MS, but what's to stop them from going after Netscape, Mozilla, Sun, etc. should they decide to do so.)
You really have to wonder about how far this sort of thing will be taken in the future - that is how many people will patent ideas and not act on them until that fundamental idea has made many companies tremendously successful. After all what if Turing had pattened the idea of "stored information, which can be utilized to control an electronic machine in the preformance of actions determined by the information" - the stored program executable. Morris and Eckert would have had to pay him to write the code for the ENIAC and we'd be paying his heirs everytime we wrote an executable (assuming his heirs renewed the patent).