There seem to be a lot of negative comments about this device; I see where these comments are coming from, but I -- and maybe this is just the/. propaganda getting to me -- thing this is generally well-designed device. Here are my thoughts on most of the criticisms put forth.
1. Why not just buy a Dell? It'd be more powerful and cost only a little more. By making a miniature computer of very low cost, the users can keep personal data on smart-cards and share one Simputer amongst many users. Thus the cost can be spread around. This could also be done with a laptop, but the power consumption and cost of a laptop much higher than this Simputer would be.
2. Why not just spend the money on picture books for literacy, or better farming tools, or condoms, or hand-soap? Because the root causes of illiteracy, starvation, overpopulation, and unsanitary living are often educational. This one device, unlike picture books, could be used to teach literacy at many levels, as well as other languages and subjects (such as effective farming.) Throwing condoms at a population is useless without some sexual education / health propaganda. Unsanitary living is the same way -- many of the diseases caught by not doing a post-shit soap handwashing can be eliminated by washing one's hands in ash, which is free. Again, this problem is educational and/or propagandistic.
3. Why does it run on AAA batteries? Yecch! The batteries can be rechargable. For usability and transportability, the Simputer should be small.
4. Why not just get a cell phone? This thing has fairly high specs for a hand-held, and its cost will likely be defrayed by non-profit and governmental organizations. The design needs of cell phones go in a different direction -- they're targeted towards hip Japanese schoolgirls and soulless American yuppies. The Simputer is meant for communal use by the very poor (and remember, the design is pretty much open, so the problem-domain-targeted features can be upgraded). Also, where's the flash card slot on these cell phones? These machines need to be usable as a machine shared by a large group of people.
5. Why is it so expensive? Again, shared computer amongst a poor group. They all chip in for the machine and their own smart card. This design -- and few others, I posit -- meet the needs of this problem domain.
Did I cover everything? What other reasons do folks have?
gcc is built for portability, not speed. VC++'s code is faster, but has zero portability and its own magical, lsd-inspired "innovations." [" for(int i=0;in;i++); for(int i=0;in;i++); ? Why would anybody ever want to compile code like that?"] That intel compiler mentioned on/. a while back sounded fast; but the gcc-for-everything approach may not be best, if they find compiled java too slow.
> Do they really expect any self-respecting Unix > user will by this???
By which I assume you mean, "Do they really expect any self-respecting Unix user to pass this up?"
From Dictionary.com: ---------- bye1 also by Pronunciation Key (b) n.
1. A secondary matter; a side issue.
2. Sports. The position of one who draws no opponent for a round in a tournament and so advances to the next round. ----------
Oh, ho ho ho! I do so love myself. Anyway, I remap every keyboard I touch, much to my officemates' chagrin. CapsLock makes a fine control.
> For example, why did it take me almost 3 days to > hack my way to using my qwest dsl connection > without having to boot into windows? DSL is a > standard technology now, you should be able to use > it easily.
Cry me a river. My home machines are all Win2K (my workplace has standardized on this), and my dsl is every bit as fucked up as yours was. The tech support of the SBC reseller I foolishly subscribed to has stopped replying to my emails about getting a replacement modem. They, and the manufacturer, and of course the imbeciles at SBC, have all been zero help these past several weeks.
Those three days must have been rough. When will linux ever hit primetime?
> What prevents B from running a nonsecure client/OS > and reponding "yeah sure, palladium enabled" and > receiving the content and storing it unencumbered?
Client B is required to register with Server C, a machine at passport.com. Server A checks with Server C to verify this.
At least, that's one way to implement it; the Microsoft method is bound to be more fucked-up. This will probably look a lot like COM or.NET -- a big, half-designed mess.
> You want to know when Linux is going to be truly > ready for the home desktop? It will be ready when > Microsoft starts really pushing Palladium.
Exactly. Linux has seen too big waves so far -- around '99, after the release of the halloween documents; and this year, after the new licensing. Linux will reach critical mass inevitably, but the timing of Linux's big gains will be through MS screwups. Palladium will be the next of these -- like DivX and BetaMax, customers have a keener eye towards freedom than we tech elitists give them credit for.
(I offered to get my mom, a lawyer, a copy of XP, and she said "No way in hell do I want those criminals at microsoft spying on me.")
> I start wondering if its not too late to go analog
> and give up on computers
Here's an mit lecture on the subject, converted from pdf by the mighty google.
Hey...here's "Modern Analog Field Computing", a virtual book. That might be too specialized.
And here's a good usenet post on this, posted by David F. Skoll of doe.carleton.ca back in '92:
In <1992Jan21.204757.17081@jsp.umontreal.ca> u1795@JSP.UMontreal.CA
(Zimmer Eric) writes:
> I'm curious...
>
> I'm trying to figure out how an analogic computer
> might work. Nothing technical, just the "basics".
>
> -How do they treat informations?
An analog computer treats information as voltage or current levels
(usually - I suppose it could use water or air levels, too.:-)) It
uses op-amps to perform arithmetic operations. (That's how the
"operational amplifier" got its name.) With op-amps, you can easily
do addition, subtraction, integration and differentiation, as well as
multiplication by a constant. You can also do more exotic things like
taking the log of a signal or the exponential by using diodes in the
feedback loops. Still more exotic circuits can multiply two signals.
> -What are they good for?
They have a couple of advantages over digital computers:
o They have the potential to be quite a bit faster, since analog signals
are involved. More efficient use is made of bandwidth.
o If the inputs and outputs are in analog form anyway, they eliminate
the need to do A/D and D/A conversion.
They suffer from many disadvantages:
o They're not as flexible. They're very hard to "program" - to
change the gain of an amplifier, for example, you need to change
a resistor value.
o They're not as accurate as digital computers can potentially be.
In a digital world, if you need more precision, you just use more
bits in your data representation. Analog computers are limited by
the precision of the electrical components, which can get very
expensive.
o They suffer from noise problems, device mismatches, etc. more than
digital computers.
o Memory is a problem - it's very difficult to maintain an accurate
analog signal in a storage cell.
> -Could they be the solution to some problems that
> seem uncomputable on a digital computer?
I don't know - my theory here is too weak. I know that A. K. Dewdney
wrote an interesting article about mechanical "gadgets" that can solve
certain problems much faster than digital computers. Anyone?
I saw one amazing computer in a Time-Life book about water.
Scientists constructed a model of a water table by representing each
square mile of table with four resistors and a capacitor. The values
were selected to match the porosity of the underlying rock. Water was
"pumped" from the model by applying a voltage step at the pump site,
and "water levels" could be monitored throughout the model with an
oscilloscope. The computer used thousands of components, but could
probably still outrun a Cray - it took only a few milliseconds to do
the entire computation! It calculated the "water level" at each node
in parallel - how's that for massive parallelism? I'd imagine that a
digital computer would be hard-pressed to match that over such a large
simulation. (Imagine passing a 10 000 node circuit to Spice...)
(If the following post seems like an overreaction, keep in mind that messages to anti-abortion web sites began with statements like this and elevated to hit lists that murderers actually followed.)
Sweet fucking Jesus! This is incredibly stupid, counter-productive, and dangerous. Things wrong with your post:
1) Terrorism inevitably results in strong conservatism on the part of the terrorized. Killing members of the media cartel (without the backing of a full-out revolution) would horrify the public and lend gravitas to whatever the media execs say. ("We should outlaw piracy -- it's a gateway for murder.")
2) If anyone who (rightfully) hated the media execs actually killed anyone, they'd become a greater tyranny than the media execs themselves.
Your rights are being trampled on. Affect political change by lobbying your elected officials. If that doesn't work, elect new representatives. If that doesn't work, start a revolution to get a true democracy in power. Media execs should be prevented from stomping on free speech by law; the problem is with the laws, not that Jack Valenti draws breath.
I'm sure you meant this as a joke, but good god! This is how these things get out of hand.
One of the big problems with bands today is their dull performance -- no creativity, no humor, no novelty. So give the audience a reason to keep looking at you on stage, and give the casual page-viewing-person a reason to download your music.
I looked on your site, and it was flash-ridden scene from "Quake." It had pop-ups, too -- wow, *extreme*. If your web page isn't interesting, odds are your lyrics and songs are pretty dull too. (Alt-metal, I presume?)
(If this just seems like a knee-jerk reaction, get used to it. It's how web browsing works. I'm sure to get modded down for this.) Getting your page slashdotted is a good idea, though, and some banner ads might work (as the text ads work on k5.) But put out something interesting and novel, or you'll be correctly ignored.
It's the inverse of km^2. 1 sq/km is a square with side length of one kilometer. This unit of measurement is odd in that it increases as the area described decreases, but it's popular in Bizarro World and on Slashdot Island (where hamburgers eat you, and people throw ducks at balloons, and caching is impossible, and trying to moderate fairly gets you banned. Huzzah!) Therefore 3 sq/km is 1/3 km^2. What the article describes is 3 km^2, which translates to 1/3 sq/km -- that's the real typo in this article's title, not the units. No...no, not the units. What? Fifty dollars? Getoutaheeee...
> To extend your idea a little further, Slashdot > could generate a unique token for each cached site > and email it to the site admin.
To do this right, there should be
- A way for the webmaster to turn caching on via the internet (web form, email), - A way for the webmaster to turn on caching by calling a phone number (if the slashdotting takes down their internet connection), AND - A way for the webmaster to automatically indicate that caching should be turned on by default.
Slashdot needs to make caching off by default, because of (probably hallucinatory) legal issues. IRCache (as you describe it) thus wouldn't qualify.
Of course, this is all totally easy coding, which is what is so tragic and painful about watching these sites die with barely a chance to protest. Who was Malda's mentor at Hope College? Can we recruit him to guilt-trip his former student?
Malda could have the slashcode automatically create a cache of the victim's site, but by default point the link to the actual site (not the cache.) Allow the webmaster several easy ways to turn caching on. Allow permission to be granted in robots.txt files! Allow permission to be granted in some slashdot form! Allow permission to be granted by email! Allow permission to be granted by phone!
Of course, none of this will be done. Slashdot's coders once tried to innovate; then they became part of a corporation. Nothing kills real progress like hopes of profit.
Re:Any Text Editor That Needs A Book...
on
Vi IMproved -- Vim
·
· Score: 2
> Can you script the MSVC editor?
Uh, select "Macro" from the tools menu.
> Can you set up any key binding you want?
Select "Customize" from the tools menu and click the "Keyboard" tab.
> Can you execute commands arbtitrary numbers of > times?
I sure wish it could. My boss ribs me for using vim whenever I need to do real work, but the MSVC editor is not as brain-dead as that.
> In the end, you're either a troll or a moron.
No kidding.
Re:Any Text Editor That Needs A Book...
on
Vi IMproved -- Vim
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I use both at work, so if anyone knows how to do these vim things in MSVC, let me know.
1) Repeat the last command 2) Execute a command an arbitrary number of times 3) Folding 4) Non-overlapping windows of different files
That's all I can think of right now. I've really tried getting aquainted with MSVC, since it has our project management integrated. But when I need to do non-trivial code changes, using vim always, always is easier.
> Any Text Editor That Needs A Book is hopelessly > broken.
I truly hate this philosophy of interface design. It's what gives us useless, dumbed-down GUIs and languages like COBOL. Requiring the slightest goddamned effort by the user can make everybody's life easier.
Okay, I can agree with that. I would contend that you can map these higher constructs onto more primitive ones with loss of information (e.g., flatten the nested footnotes), and that this loss would be understood by users as the price of heterogeneity. But if loss is unacceptable, then true, XML wouldn't magically solve that.
> There is no magic bullet for the format change > problem.
Sure there is. If both formats are open and processable by any language advanced enough to deal with the "character" data abstraction, scripts can be written in any language to translate from one format to the other. Lordy, you could even distribute these scripts as macros with a common interface, a practice invented by Dr. Paul E. Morphism in 1957. So users could be forwards-compatible with new formats without upgrading their client app, by downloading necessary translation modules.
If this passes, we should actively start hacking innocent folks' machines to build opposition to this bill. It could be done without liability (I purport.)
The proper way to do this is to organize a group of "copyright holders", and find vulnerable machines. Each copyright holder is allowed to do up to $250 worth of damage. So, do a round-robin destruction of data, documenting the incremental damage and assigning it to each copyright holder. People's lives and property can thus be ruined without liability.
This is one way to cultivate opposition to a stupid law.
> Does anyone remember the fight over the clipper > phones?
Yep. Of course, this didn't scratch the itches of many folks, since if the average person thinks to {him|her}self, "I hope no one's listening to this phone conversation," they implicitely mean their government.
What the NSA should have done was convince phone companies to make listening in to phone conversations trivial for the average person. And making each phone "scriptable" in some poorly-designed language would have worked wonders.
> It wasn't a rejection of the clipper ideology > that sank the proposal. It was a proof that it > would be possible to build counterfeit clipper > phones that would interact with the system. The > NSA screwed up, they built a system that wasn't > strong enough.
I'll take your word on it; some links would be cool. (I'm not questioning your integrity, it just sounds like interesting recent history.)
> How do they differentiate between a rogue board > that pretends to be palladium compliant and a > real one?
They can't.
> Especially in a world with flashable BIOS?
Move away from Intel/AMD, and you don't even need to screw with the BIOS. Just boot the OS of your choice and load the Palladium spoofing layer.
> What's to stop people from buying boards that > will be palladium switchable?
Nothing.
> If you want to run Windows, you can set the BIOS > one way, if you want to run Linux, you can set > the BIOS to disregard it?
Yes. Er, no. AAAHHHH! (Magically catapulted to my death. What was the question?)
> Or what's to stop people from making boards that > accept any signature without checking it?
(This is the best of your questions.)
JAIL TIME MANDATED BY THE DMCA.
Creating such a board would be viewed by the courts as a copyright circumvention device, since you could use it to watch "Incoming Freshmen" without paying the requisite fees to the distributors and (infintesimally) creators of that knocker-oriented masterpiece.
Fear will keep the star systems in line. Fear of this battle station.
Ever see those ads on UPN and Fox and such for video introductions to desktop computers? Users pop in a CD and it autoplays an introduction to the mouse, word processing, basic configuration. (Those video introductions cost money and are windows-only, of course.)
Get a cheap camera and make a series of video lectures for as much free software as you can. Start off with the absolute basics (this is a mouse, this is a monitor). This will make Linux an easier-to-start-with platform than windows (unless you pay for a windows class.) Move up to more complex things. GPL (or whatever) the videos and distribute them. If and when this catches on, developers will start habitually including these video lectures as an introductory overview of their software's documentation. Linux will gain desktop share. Users will get nice hand-holding. Manna will rain.
> His style is rather generic(other then the > super cheesy wipes,which I will admit are > sometimes fun)
These are also a Kurosawa rip-off (Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai, Rashomon). I still say ANH is a well-directed film, but I'm hair-splitting at this point.
Not to descend into flame war, but I do think Lucas displayed greatness with "A New Hope" ("American Graffiti" is good but not great; the others vary from mediocre to shit). It's not a perfect film (although the dialogue gets a bad rap -- I think the overly-purple dialogue works in a space opera, and lord knows it's not as bad as many science fiction works), but I think it could be classified as great. ([Tangent] This is using Ebert's rule of thumb for film greatness: three great scenes, no bad scenes.) He couldn't keep it up the way truly great directors could (Ford, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Scorcese), but he did have a bright flash of competence with ANH.
> You forgot a great reference to a John Ford > film in "A New Hope" BTW. When Luke comes back > to the villa to find his home and his aunt and > uncle dead and burnt to a crisp it's right out > of "The Serchers"
No kidding! I loved Episode IV, but there were a few things that seemed a little too familiar...
-- The entire plot and most characters (including Leia, R2D2, C3P0, Obi-Wan, and Darth Vader) ripped off from Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress"
-- The "hiding under the floorboards" scene from "Yojimbo"
-- The psychic messianic politician rising out of the desert from "Dune"
-- The epic hero Joseph Cambell hoo-ha
-- Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and company
Part of the reason ANH was so good was that Lucas liberally ripped off from other directors, Kurosawa most of all. (Kurosawa was asked about this and other remakes of his films -- The Magnificent Seven, A Fistfull of Dollars -- and he didn't care, since he considered his films to be ripoffs of John Ford.) Good directors plagiarise.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Why not just buy a Dell? It'd be more powerful and cost only a little more.
By making a miniature computer of very low cost, the users can keep personal data on smart-cards and share one Simputer amongst many users. Thus the cost can be spread around. This could also be done with a laptop, but the power consumption and cost of a laptop much higher than this Simputer would be.
2. Why not just spend the money on picture books for literacy, or better farming tools, or condoms, or hand-soap?
Because the root causes of illiteracy, starvation, overpopulation, and unsanitary living are often educational. This one device, unlike picture books, could be used to teach literacy at many levels, as well as other languages and subjects (such as effective farming.) Throwing condoms at a population is useless without some sexual education / health propaganda. Unsanitary living is the same way -- many of the diseases caught by not doing a post-shit soap handwashing can be eliminated by washing one's hands in ash, which is free. Again, this problem is educational and/or propagandistic.
3. Why does it run on AAA batteries? Yecch!
The batteries can be rechargable. For usability and transportability, the Simputer should be small.
4. Why not just get a cell phone?
This thing has fairly high specs for a hand-held, and its cost will likely be defrayed by non-profit and governmental organizations. The design needs of cell phones go in a different direction -- they're targeted towards hip Japanese schoolgirls and soulless American yuppies. The Simputer is meant for communal use by the very poor (and remember, the design is pretty much open, so the problem-domain-targeted features can be upgraded). Also, where's the flash card slot on these cell phones? These machines need to be usable as a machine shared by a large group of people.
5. Why is it so expensive?
Again, shared computer amongst a poor group. They all chip in for the machine and their own smart card. This design -- and few others, I posit -- meet the needs of this problem domain.
Did I cover everything? What other reasons do folks have?
gcc is built for portability, not speed. VC++'s code is faster, but has zero portability and its own magical, lsd-inspired "innovations." [" for(int i=0;in;i++); for(int i=0;in;i++); ? Why would anybody ever want to compile code like that?"] That intel compiler mentioned on /. a while back sounded fast; but the gcc-for-everything approach may not be best, if they find compiled java too slow.
> Do they really expect any self-respecting Unix
> user will by this???
By which I assume you mean, "Do they really expect any self-respecting Unix user to pass this up?"
From Dictionary.com:
----------
bye1 also by Pronunciation Key (b)
n.
1. A secondary matter; a side issue.
2. Sports. The position of one who draws no opponent for a round in a tournament and so advances to the next round.
----------
Oh, ho ho ho! I do so love myself. Anyway, I remap every keyboard I touch, much to my officemates' chagrin. CapsLock makes a fine control.
> For example, why did it take me almost 3 days to
> hack my way to using my qwest dsl connection
> without having to boot into windows? DSL is a
> standard technology now, you should be able to use
> it easily.
Cry me a river. My home machines are all Win2K (my workplace has standardized on this), and my dsl is every bit as fucked up as yours was. The tech support of the SBC reseller I foolishly subscribed to has stopped replying to my emails about getting a replacement modem. They, and the manufacturer, and of course the imbeciles at SBC, have all been zero help these past several weeks.
Those three days must have been rough. When will linux ever hit primetime?
> What prevents B from running a nonsecure client/OS
.NET -- a big, half-designed mess.
> and reponding "yeah sure, palladium enabled" and
> receiving the content and storing it unencumbered?
Client B is required to register with Server C, a machine at passport.com. Server A checks with Server C to verify this.
At least, that's one way to implement it; the Microsoft method is bound to be more fucked-up. This will probably look a lot like COM or
> You want to know when Linux is going to be truly
> ready for the home desktop? It will be ready when
> Microsoft starts really pushing Palladium.
Exactly. Linux has seen too big waves so far -- around '99, after the release of the halloween documents; and this year, after the new licensing. Linux will reach critical mass inevitably, but the timing of Linux's big gains will be through MS screwups. Palladium will be the next of these -- like DivX and BetaMax, customers have a keener eye towards freedom than we tech elitists give them credit for.
(I offered to get my mom, a lawyer, a copy of XP, and she said "No way in hell do I want those criminals at microsoft spying on me.")
> and give up on computers
Here's an mit lecture on the subject, converted from pdf by the mighty google.
Hey...here's "Modern Analog Field Computing", a virtual book. That might be too specialized.
And here's a good usenet post on this, posted by David F. Skoll of doe.carleton.ca back in '92:
Oh...you were joking. Never mind.
(If the following post seems like an overreaction, keep in mind that messages to anti-abortion web sites began with statements like this and elevated to hit lists that murderers actually followed.)
Sweet fucking Jesus! This is incredibly stupid, counter-productive, and dangerous. Things wrong with your post:
1) Terrorism inevitably results in strong conservatism on the part of the terrorized. Killing members of the media cartel (without the backing of a full-out revolution) would horrify the public and lend gravitas to whatever the media execs say. ("We should outlaw piracy -- it's a gateway for murder.")
2) If anyone who (rightfully) hated the media execs actually killed anyone, they'd become a greater tyranny than the media execs themselves.
Your rights are being trampled on. Affect political change by lobbying your elected officials. If that doesn't work, elect new representatives. If that doesn't work, start a revolution to get a true democracy in power. Media execs should be prevented from stomping on free speech by law; the problem is with the laws, not that Jack Valenti draws breath.
I'm sure you meant this as a joke, but good god! This is how these things get out of hand.
One of the big problems with bands today is their dull performance -- no creativity, no humor, no novelty. So give the audience a reason to keep looking at you on stage, and give the casual page-viewing-person a reason to download your music.
I looked on your site, and it was flash-ridden scene from "Quake." It had pop-ups, too -- wow, *extreme*. If your web page isn't interesting, odds are your lyrics and songs are pretty dull too. (Alt-metal, I presume?)
(If this just seems like a knee-jerk reaction, get used to it. It's how web browsing works. I'm sure to get modded down for this.) Getting your page slashdotted is a good idea, though, and some banner ads might work (as the text ads work on k5.) But put out something interesting and novel, or you'll be correctly ignored.
> what kind of unit is a sq/km?
It's the inverse of km^2. 1 sq/km is a square with side length of one kilometer. This unit of measurement is odd in that it increases as the area described decreases, but it's popular in Bizarro World and on Slashdot Island (where hamburgers eat you, and people throw ducks at balloons, and caching is impossible, and trying to moderate fairly gets you banned. Huzzah!) Therefore 3 sq/km is 1/3 km^2. What the article describes is 3 km^2, which translates to 1/3 sq/km -- that's the real typo in this article's title, not the units. No...no, not the units. What? Fifty dollars? Getoutaheeee...
> To extend your idea a little further, Slashdot
> could generate a unique token for each cached site
> and email it to the site admin.
To do this right, there should be
- A way for the webmaster to turn caching on via the internet (web form, email),
- A way for the webmaster to turn on caching by calling a phone number (if the slashdotting takes down their internet connection), AND
- A way for the webmaster to automatically indicate that caching should be turned on by default.
Slashdot needs to make caching off by default, because of (probably hallucinatory) legal issues. IRCache (as you describe it) thus wouldn't qualify.
Of course, this is all totally easy coding, which is what is so tragic and painful about watching these sites die with barely a chance to protest. Who was Malda's mentor at Hope College? Can we recruit him to guilt-trip his former student?
Malda could have the slashcode automatically create a cache of the victim's site, but by default point the link to the actual site (not the cache.) Allow the webmaster several easy ways to turn caching on. Allow permission to be granted in robots.txt files! Allow permission to be granted in some slashdot form! Allow permission to be granted by email! Allow permission to be granted by phone!
Of course, none of this will be done. Slashdot's coders once tried to innovate; then they became part of a corporation. Nothing kills real progress like hopes of profit.
> Can you script the MSVC editor?
Uh, select "Macro" from the tools menu.
> Can you set up any key binding you want?
Select "Customize" from the tools menu and click the "Keyboard" tab.
> Can you execute commands arbtitrary numbers of
> times?
I sure wish it could. My boss ribs me for using vim whenever I need to do real work, but the MSVC editor is not as brain-dead as that.
> In the end, you're either a troll or a moron.
No kidding.
I use both at work, so if anyone knows how to do these vim things in MSVC, let me know.
1) Repeat the last command
2) Execute a command an arbitrary number of times
3) Folding
4) Non-overlapping windows of different files
That's all I can think of right now. I've really tried getting aquainted with MSVC, since it has our project management integrated. But when I need to do non-trivial code changes, using vim always, always is easier.
> Any Text Editor That Needs A Book is hopelessly
> broken.
I truly hate this philosophy of interface design. It's what gives us useless, dumbed-down GUIs and languages like COBOL. Requiring the slightest goddamned effort by the user can make everybody's life easier.
> If this suit passes in the favor of the RIAA, then
> you can kiss The Constitution goodbye.
Uh, The Constitution's *already* gone, "like a turkey through the corn." You can satisfy your kissing urges by kissing the police state hello.
Okay, I can agree with that. I would contend that you can map these higher constructs onto more primitive ones with loss of information (e.g., flatten the nested footnotes), and that this loss would be understood by users as the price of heterogeneity. But if loss is unacceptable, then true, XML wouldn't magically solve that.
> There is no magic bullet for the format change
> problem.
Sure there is. If both formats are open and processable by any language advanced enough to deal with the "character" data abstraction, scripts can be written in any language to translate from one format to the other. Lordy, you could even distribute these scripts as macros with a common interface, a practice invented by Dr. Paul E. Morphism in 1957. So users could be forwards-compatible with new formats without upgrading their client app, by downloading necessary translation modules.
Significant extrie architecture this is not.
If this passes, we should actively start hacking innocent folks' machines to build opposition to this bill. It could be done without liability (I purport.)
The proper way to do this is to organize a group of "copyright holders", and find vulnerable machines. Each copyright holder is allowed to do up to $250 worth of damage. So, do a round-robin destruction of data, documenting the incremental damage and assigning it to each copyright holder. People's lives and property can thus be ruined without liability.
This is one way to cultivate opposition to a stupid law.
> Does anyone remember the fight over the clipper
> phones?
Yep. Of course, this didn't scratch the itches of many folks, since if the average person thinks to {him|her}self, "I hope no one's listening to this phone conversation," they implicitely mean their government.
What the NSA should have done was convince phone companies to make listening in to phone conversations trivial for the average person. And making each phone "scriptable" in some poorly-designed language would have worked wonders.
> It wasn't a rejection of the clipper ideology
> that sank the proposal. It was a proof that it
> would be possible to build counterfeit clipper
> phones that would interact with the system. The
> NSA screwed up, they built a system that wasn't
> strong enough.
I'll take your word on it; some links would be cool. (I'm not questioning your integrity, it just sounds like interesting recent history.)
> How do they differentiate between a rogue board
> that pretends to be palladium compliant and a
> real one?
They can't.
> Especially in a world with flashable BIOS?
Move away from Intel/AMD, and you don't even need to screw with the BIOS. Just boot the OS of your choice and load the Palladium spoofing layer.
> What's to stop people from buying boards that
> will be palladium switchable?
Nothing.
> If you want to run Windows, you can set the BIOS
> one way, if you want to run Linux, you can set
> the BIOS to disregard it?
Yes. Er, no. AAAHHHH! (Magically catapulted to my death. What was the question?)
> Or what's to stop people from making boards that
> accept any signature without checking it?
(This is the best of your questions.)
JAIL TIME MANDATED BY THE DMCA.
Creating such a board would be viewed by the courts as a copyright circumvention device, since you could use it to watch "Incoming Freshmen" without paying the requisite fees to the distributors and (infintesimally) creators of that knocker-oriented masterpiece.
Fear will keep the star systems in line. Fear of this battle station.
Ever see those ads on UPN and Fox and such for video introductions to desktop computers? Users pop in a CD and it autoplays an introduction to the mouse, word processing, basic configuration. (Those video introductions cost money and are windows-only, of course.)
Get a cheap camera and make a series of video lectures for as much free software as you can. Start off with the absolute basics (this is a mouse, this is a monitor). This will make Linux an easier-to-start-with platform than windows (unless you pay for a windows class.) Move up to more complex things. GPL (or whatever) the videos and distribute them. If and when this catches on, developers will start habitually including these video lectures as an introductory overview of their software's documentation. Linux will gain desktop share. Users will get nice hand-holding. Manna will rain.
> No more wandering around bandwidthless, and no
> more struggling with online maps.
Where are these? My preliminary Google search was fruitless.
> His style is rather generic(other then the
> super cheesy wipes,which I will admit are
> sometimes fun)
These are also a Kurosawa rip-off (Hidden Fortress, Seven Samurai, Rashomon). I still say ANH is a well-directed film, but I'm hair-splitting at this point.
Not to descend into flame war, but I do think Lucas displayed greatness with "A New Hope" ("American Graffiti" is good but not great; the others vary from mediocre to shit). It's not a perfect film (although the dialogue gets a bad rap -- I think the overly-purple dialogue works in a space opera, and lord knows it's not as bad as many science fiction works), but I think it could be classified as great. ([Tangent] This is using Ebert's rule of thumb for film greatness: three great scenes, no bad scenes.) He couldn't keep it up the way truly great directors could (Ford, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Scorcese), but he did have a bright flash of competence with ANH.
> You forgot a great reference to a John Ford
> film in "A New Hope" BTW. When Luke comes back
> to the villa to find his home and his aunt and
> uncle dead and burnt to a crisp it's right out
> of "The Serchers"
Nice! I need to watch that again.
No kidding! I loved Episode IV, but there were a few things that seemed a little too familiar...
-- The entire plot and most characters (including Leia, R2D2, C3P0, Obi-Wan, and Darth Vader) ripped off from Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress"
-- The "hiding under the floorboards" scene from "Yojimbo"
-- The psychic messianic politician rising out of the desert from "Dune"
-- The epic hero Joseph Cambell hoo-ha
-- Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and company
Part of the reason ANH was so good was that Lucas liberally ripped off from other directors, Kurosawa most of all. (Kurosawa was asked about this and other remakes of his films -- The Magnificent Seven, A Fistfull of Dollars -- and he didn't care, since he considered his films to be ripoffs of John Ford.) Good directors plagiarise.