Great idea, although the first thing that comes to mind is that Matsushita (IBM's co-conspirator in the CPRM deal) is by far the largest maker of decent cheap CD-Rs and depite a pathetic --perhaps fatal would be a better term-- time to market, they'll eventually be the largest producers of DVD-R.
So, for optical media you're kinda trapped by the fact that a small group of Japanese companies own the market. I'd be interested to hear from someone who knows better, but I am under the impression that all, and I mean ALL, CD recorders are manufactured by large Japanese firms. I've lived in Taiwan for many years and although Taiwan makes some of its own CD readers, I'm fairly sure that there are no Taiwanese companies who make writers.
So, what's the point here Steve? Well, a local company might be willing to feature the logo on their boxes to boost overseas sales (locally, it wouldn't be worth much) but I don't think there are any CD-R companies in Taiwan that do direct imports to the States without strict OEM agreements with their Japanese --uhmm bosses. And since those guys are the ones pushing for the CPRM, I don't see them featuring this logo real big on the boxes.
So, that's just optical media. And, as I posted below, I think the Japanese have screwed themselves there by their own arrogance in that particular market. PC firewire cards and accompanying external hard drive cases are all the rage at the local shops in recent months along with the 4X IDE motherboards, so the DVD standard can go to hell with it's proprietary copy control crap and Matshushita will get what it deserves for holding its cards so long.
But as Schwab pointed out, optical is hardly the only place this logo would be used. Flash memory is something much more native to Taiwan and I think Taiwan is a country that is open for business with the Open Source community as long as their hands aren't tied by deals like they probably have in the optical market. The government partially operates the big chip fabs, but it's usually in conjunction with lots of smallish companies. The smallish indepent hardware conpanies in Taiwan might be a good place to pitch this. Open Source is quite popular among Taiwanese computer geeks.
Then there's hard drives and those are mostly coming out of the good ol' USA. Now, I'm not talking manufactuing obviously because those are probably in Malaysia/Singapore, but coorporate headquarters who might be doing the logo side of the box design and all that. Hey, business is business with them there fellers. If it can move product, then so be it.
On the other hand, a lot of these companies seem highly sensitive to their product package designs. You may have noticed the cheapo IDE Seagate drives come in a package that says "Seashells Patent Pending" Gag! I'll take a trademark on the stupid pun, but patented? With that kind of overzealous IP crap going on, you have to wonder if they're going to be open to this sort of idea.
Got to start somewhere though. If you put the log on the web, it might not be that hard to send a little form letter around the island. I could translate it. Well, if it ever gets to that point, it will be a new/. story I suppose. It could take off. Who knows. These optical storage suckas might be irrelevant anyway.
After all, Phoenix is a BIOS software and the one post quoting the "ATA guru" said that this new Pheonix plan allows you to use certain undisclosed OS's, or tools thereof, to simply re-organize your boot sector more to your liking. That being the case, it doesn't look like it's really about hard drives.
DVD, on the other hand-- I think that's more where this is at with Toshiba and Matsushita. And this is where it has been for so long. The Japanese have totally blown that market. Price competitive DVD-R is so overdo it's gonna end up a stillborn product and this continuing game is just drawing it out further and further. There are alternatives to DVD for home content --stacks of cheap hard drives-- and the main forms of IP this ridiculous debate is targeting are movies and audio both of which are mostly used by people in their homes.
Let's look at the fact that while CSS says it has never actually even been to court in the US or any other country, they conveniently turn to the issue of global legal issues to introduce their shady Russia deal.
Isn't it a bit premature to introduce such questionable overseas practices as evidence of their strong legal position when they've never even demponstrated that they can convince a jury that their evidence is substantial and compelling in a single case? It would seem more to indicate my earlier conclusion that CSS is running a highly questionable venture and flaunting this fact in the press. I would hardly be surprised if CSS eventually finds itself liable for great damages in the form of counter-suits. Convincing a jury that they had malicious intent and should pay punitive damages would be fairly easy using their own press releases.
By not actually going to court, they've sidestepped this issue which I think could be fatal for them of they actually took it to that level.
I personally tried to hunt down people "breaking into" our network at my office when we first started using DSL and firewalls and I've found no university or ISP would respond to my request to identify users. At first I was really surprised, but then I thought about it and I realized that it's such a headache to prove anything. So, we just encrypted everything we didn't want to wander away and stopped worrying about it.
Now this lawyer feller is in the same situation, but he sends subpeonas and gets a response from the ISPs. But I don't see how his log files, or whatever it is he's got, are really solid evidence in court. Sure, the ISP rolls over, but that's hardly the same as evidence in court? He's got a bunch of data that he's personally compiled and he's saying that's evidence. Why couldn't a defendant simply deny the whole thing or, even better, suggest it was all nothing more than a mistake by CSS? The burden of proof lies with the accuser, not the innocent. If a defendant is accused and they claim the accusation is a mistake. It's not the defendants responsibility to prove that the accuser has made an error, it's the other way around. What would constitute proof on CSS's part? A sheet of printed IP addresses that came out of the HP printer in CSS's office? What does that prove?
It would be different if they got warrants and siezed the users computer and found corroborating logs on the user's machine. That would be evidence useful in court. But that doesn't seem to be the likely modus operandi --that's lawyer talk ya know-- if they're serving subpeonas without actually collecting any evidence from the user first.
If they don't have a valid court strategy, then they are in the business of blackmail regardless of whether they are licensed to practice law or not. They may be milking suckers with this blackmail tactic --notice how well it went over in Russia-- but I'd like to hear about their actual court victories in the US or elsewhere before we have to sit through all this pissin' contest stuff.
In Plato's Academy which became the model for later Greek and Roman educational institutions, there was a core set of courses called the Trivium. The Trivium consisted of three subjects: Math, Music and Rhetoric. These were the only subjects considered worthy of imperial citizens. The other arts were decidedly for slaves including both the painting and sculpture for which these ancient cultures are so famous.
Originally then --if we take these ancient academic values to be the origins of those common in modern american culture-- painting and sculpture were not condsidered arts at all. On the other hand, debate was considered the highest form of art.
I think that there is a very profound sense in which this ancient notion of art continues to prevail in postmodern American culture despite the fact that we now accept various other forms of craftswork as art besides just music. Why is Picasso considered art? It is precisely because Picasso's work was so revolutionary, controversial and often disconcerting to his peers that he is considered a great artist rather than some magic power of his amazing brush strokes. It is not the artists paintings themselves which are instilled with the essence of art whatever the hell that is, rather it is the role of the work in society. It is the rhetorical function of the work which makes it art. All great art must play a rhetorical role in postmodern America just as it had to in ancient Greece. This is simply the Western tradition being kept alive.
Now, are video games art in the postmodern American sense? Damn right they are! In fact, video games are clearly one of the only valid artforms in existence today. What do I mean by valid? Video games are perhaps the one genre that most often clashes with accepted social conventions. That is to say, video games engage us in debate and this is the height of art in the western sense.
The will to art is apparent in the work of ID software more than any other source I can think of. Of course Wolf3D was controversial at a time when skinhead gangs were making the papers at regular intervals. Here was a game stretching consumer technology to the limit, more immersive than any other and freely distributed --by default if not by intention-- featuring rooms mapped with Nazi memorabilia, swastikas, and torture scenes. A stunning piece! Who could help but be shocked by this bizarre and striking combination? Wolf 3D was art and ID knew it.
Why do I say that ID knew it? Easy, remember the maps for the original Quake? Although the swastikas were gone from the walls in Quake, the level maps still had them. At least one of the room layouts retained a swastika pattern. I feel that ID realized they were making art and they realized that all real art is polemic. Hence, they needed some magic lucky charms to keep their edge.
Since that time, the technology has developed sufficiently to allow ID and other developers to tap into other emotive rhetorical symbols such as fire and all whole pallete of OpenGL effects.
My point should be obvious by now, but I'll sum up just to keep things tidy. In western civilization high art has always been a subject of debate. The preceding statement is a definition, not an observation. Under this definition, certain craftsmen within the video game genre clearly stand out as true artists. Their merits are not based on the beauty of their work, but on the beauty of their work's affect on society.
I was reading the last chapter of an engineering textbook the other day --sorry, forgot the reference info-- that mentioned HV long distance DC transmission as an often overlooked bit of technology. The author claimed that the real problems with electrical power sharing across continents was not the any technological limitation, but a lack of political will to share electrical generator capacity between nations along with the fact that power plants are built to such a scale that most of the power is consumed within a fairly local region. According to the author, this had little to do with line losses or the inability of conventional metals to carry large currents over long thousands of miles.
I mentioned this to my father who is quite excited about superconductor technology and he said that was nonsense, echoing a lot of the posts I've seen here today. But I wonder if this textbook might not have had it right.
This same book said that there was no reason to think that conventional coal and oil fired powerplants couldn't be made much more efficient if they were scaled up many times larger than the current standards. According to this book, the reason we've settled upon powerplants of the size and efficiency that we have is that the individual components are as large as the transportation infrastructure can support for manufacture and maintenance. I thought this was a fascinating observation although I don't know if it's accurate or not. Sure does have a ring of truth to it.
Of course this is an important issue from the standpoint of individual liberty, but that's not where this plan will fail if it goes through.
These cops are fools or totally bored if they want to become the complaint department for the Internet. Every home user who adopts a firewall for the first time and then starts going through the log files and gets all freaked out is going to start calling them and demanding to know why so and so is "hacking" me and it's your responsibility to arrest this sonofabitch.
On the other side, they'll have somebody running some little app they downloaded off a security site six months ago and totally forgot about who's gonna swear up and down they don't know what this guy is talking about becuase they really don't.
Multiply above times --oh, say ten thousand.
If these silly cops think they've got the man hours to sort that stuff out then maybe they've got too many heads on the payroll. Fact is, cops are like counselors in most situations and they always have to respond to the loudest complainer. If this goes through, they're gonna get a major earful and it's undoubtedly going to result in otherswise needless and potentially violent diputes that they are going to be essentially powerless to resolve. While not being of much assistance, the cops will be highly capable of aggravating the circumstances by bringing the image of armed officers into the fray, thus heightening the paranoia of the conflicting parties who are already feeling defensive because they don't really know the strength of their own arguments.
That's why this isn't going to be implemented for long even if it does pass through the legislature.
A classic example would be the ever topical goatse.cx
This is a very important point that people are much too quick to brush under the rug because it is closely tied to sexual conventions. The assumption is always that those who give up their privacy are victims. This dynamic of exposed victim and sadistic voyeur is an icon of the pornographic market.
Those officials who prefer to take the knight in shining armor identity are merely palying out their fetish for conventional sexual identities.
I agree with the author of the article that the argument that "not even the government" can sort out privacy issues is hardly a valid reason to have officials play out their twisted sexual perversions in protective legislation.
The tools for privacy protection are readily avaliable to those who seek them. In fact, it has been the US government who has sought to control encryption technology with this same knight in shining armor bullshit. When the game is "protecting" the people from sex, drugs and rock and roll the government is all opposed to privacy. Here we have officials taking on the same persona in the name of defending people's privacy. I think the fundamental problem is the rhetorical force of the image of the defender.
The one genre where this rhetoric is exposed and ridiculed more than any other is pornography. Thus taking us back to the original point. How bout these fuckers just back off.
I wouldn't say these four slots on the board IDE configs have been typical for a long time, but they did catch my eye last time I was down in the computer market here in Taipei. I saw a bunch of them on both dual and single processor boards. It makes sense that they're for different buses.
But what impressed me about this was thinking about all the cheap IDE drives you could cram into it. If drive prices keep falling like they have then I think this is going to eat into the supposedly up and coming market for DVD writers. If we were to hazardously assume we could get 80 Gig IDE drives for around a hundred bucks next Christmas --okay, perhaps it's too hopeful, but maybe-- and you put six on one of these boards with the four way IDE slots then you'd have almost 500 gigs of drive space for about the same cost as blank DVD media, not to mention the writer itself and all the burnt discs you'd inevitably end up with.
I just read in the print version of the Wall Street Journal that there is a steel wholesaler in Australia called Email currently in the process of taking over another steel concern. They might be sitting on a goldmine.
I love it.
But I assure you that Taipei is not cheap. The real estate market is insane. My wife, who is a local, and I just got back from a little vacation at a house her family owns. This place isn't huge and it's all brick/concrete, no heating etc and they bought it for US$450K. That's not even in Taipei.
You can get fairly decent deals on rent if you shop around enough, but I think it's comparable to the Bay Area within the core of Taipei which means that it's only decent in relation to the price of buying a place. You can forget all about buying real estate even in the boonies. Although if you're going to rent in the boonies, you can do very well. Check out Xin Dian if you don't mind the very long bus ride. You can get brand new 2 bedroom 30th floor apartments built up on the hills over looking Taipei --albeit from quite a distance-- nestled in virgin rain forest for $500 a month.
As for the pay. Well, that's not a good reason to come to Taiwan as far as I'm aware. There's lots of money here, but getting it is no easy task. I had a cousin who sold ATM protocol diagnostic equipment around Asia in the mid 1990's. He made all kinds of money in various Asian markets, but I don't think Taiwan was one of them. He told me at the time that there is a saying that a Shanghai businessman can sell anything to a Canton businessman and the Shanghai businessman always loses out when dealing with the Taiwanese. After all, how do you think these guys stay politically independent from the mainland without even being in the UN? We're talking about serious hustlers. Their military is outdated and they know it, but god can these people bluff.
You recall the scene in Life of Brian where the bazarre dealer won't sell Brian the gourd if he won't haggle? I get that all the time in Taiwan. If you won't haggle it's offensive, especially in the night markets.
Which leads you to the fact that you're not even going to start haggling in the night markets till you get the language down. I love hearing my cousin brag about his French and then reading about all these folks who say Japanese is so tough. They don't even have tones. What's tones? Come on over, you'll pick them up in no time. Hah. But the verbal part of any language could be taught to a parrot. The fun part here is that Taiwan is the only country left that officially and in everyday life uses the traditional Chinese characters which have changed very little for however many thousands of years during which the vast majority of the population was illiterate because the written language was just too tripped out to make time for. Welcome to hell grasshopper. If you're a real glutton for mnemonic torture it's paradise.
And you will eventually cave in to the need for the characters if you want to get around because half the people you speak your perfect Mandarin to will pretend not to understand a word you say. This is not simply because you are a foreigner, but because they insist on speaking Fukien dialect AKA Taiwanese. Now that's fun. It's got three times as many tones as Mandarin, but it's also got all the dirty words and sounds obnoxious so you will inevitably want to study that as well if you want to have a good time. It is cool. I only know a few phrases, but when people speak Taiwanese they tend to get straight to the point and it's fun in that way. You realize these people standing outside of the restaraunts squwaking at the passers by are saying. "Come on in you cool stud you, I can tell you're hungry. We got room for ya right over here." Once you realize that's what's going on around you, you drop all the insecurity and it starts to seem like you're one of the family.
Okay, okay but what about tech jobs? The biggest and easiest one to get into is help files for hardware. You can find that kind of work pretty easy in one of the science parks like the big one in Xin Zhu. The catch is that when you break it down, they're not really making that much more than English teachers, if they're even making that much. English teaching, even tutoring, commands $20 an hour just about anywhere you go and it can go higher. So, the people who take these entry tech writing positions are generally those who just can't bear the notion of teaching, but as far as I know, it's not a better paying field. I've freelanced a few jobs and you get what you bargained for. Good luck with those negotiating skills. Just like anywhere, you'll probably get more money if you're very pushy although you might get less work overall.
I did web design for a NIC manufacturer at one point and I got consistantly bad pay deals because I just didn't feel like stickin it to the man but it was an interesting glimpse into the inner workings of a local hardware manufacturer. All the device driver guys were locals and they were uber geeks at least from the looks of their coke bottle glasses and distorted limbs. They had them behind glass like some museum piece. I don't think you'd get into that menagere without a killer language ability in addition to whatever tech skills they were using.
I assume most of the monitor and mother board places are not all that different from that place although I'm sure someone else would be happy to disagree.
I've always heard the best way to go is to get a job in the States that brings you over here and gives you expat priveledges. Personally, I think the important thing is to be in a place where you feel welcomed. Taiwan will always be that place to those who take the time to appreciate the language.
It's worse than that from where I'm sitting. A cab is a form of transportation. People don't necessarily take cabs simply because it's raining. If people don't need to be somewhere, they won't take a cab, period. An umbrella is more analogous to a portable form of shelter rather than a form of transportation. I'm sure there's no shortage of shelter in New York when it rains. I think the cab thing is a matter of perception. If you're looking for a cab in the rain and you're getting wet, it pisses you off. but a cab isn't really like an umbrella.
I wrote to one of these companies. I forgot which one at the moment. But I was suggesting a plan that I think makes great sense and is a kind of processing already commonly done in a distributed manner --3D animation rendering.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who loves setting up scenes with a gazillion meshes and complex camera shots and ray traced textures mirroring each other into infinity. The wireframe of a wild animation is within reach of many typical desktops, it's the rendering that you'll never get --especially at high res-- without your own CPU farm.
So, my proposal to whatever company it was, was to allow artists to send in descriptions of their animation along with say a single screen shot and then CPU cycle donators could go to the site and decide which project they wanted to patronize.
The reward? --not money but a free copy of the final project.
In my mind, this is where the net can transcend conventional notions of economy. Heady stuff.
But what about the money? Well, the organizing site would have to get by on ad revenues. But since it would be an entertainment site, that might not be too bad.
Postmodernity is critical of consumerism? I beg to differ.
This is always the difficulty when using such commonly misused terms. I like to think of postmodernity as a reference to a period in history. That is, a time period. According to this way of thinking, both the prefix "post" and the "modern" part of the term seem to make good sense. Using the word in this way, even those who despise the humanities can have a clear referece as to what is being discussed.
The precise demarcations of this boundary call into question the nature of precision and boundaries as useful concepts, but that's part of the fun of it. What is clear though, is that the postmodern era has clearly been an era in which rampant consumerism has surpassed all previously conceived limits and continues to gain momentum.
Indeed, it could be argued that the technology which has defined postmodernity is built on metaphor of consumption without limit. Think of the hard drive ad . . . on a clean disk, you can see forever!
The constant consumption of ever more bandwidth and CPU cycles is further evidence that postmodernity has never stopped to question consumerism. In fact, leading consumption to ever more extreme excess is the defining movement of postmodernity.
To assume that just because some wannabee trendy-journal-scouring artists in New York call their re-cycled sentimental surrealist crap "postmodern art" implies postmodernism qustions consumerism is misguided. This kind of abuse is one of the reasons that many people get turned off as soon as they see such terms being thrown around.
And as far as public key cryptology goes, it will be useless to keep information confidential once we have all been assimilated into the borg collective. Now that is where postmodernity is joyfully leading us and that is why slashdot readers deserve better than to have such important terms abused.
I'm an American expat in Taiwan and we're not on the list, but that doesn't really matter. The fact is that most of the coutries that are not actually signatories to these agreements are more than happy to bow to pressure from any well funded foreign organization that wants to come in and blackmail the locals for selling pirated goods from software and entertainment to hand bags and watches.
You can't conclude that there is no IP enforcement just because a country isn't signed up on one of these lists. That's like assuming that a country has no role international political role because it's not in the UN. Again, Taiwan would be a good example of how that would be an absurd assumption.
The part about the boxes linking the voice to text, text to voice and computer translators was ridiculous.
If all it took was some genius to write down a set of boxes on a piece of paper and it would all work out, then this would be an interesting and thought provoking article.
The fact is that computers aren't replacing translators any time soon. Oh, sure, maybe English to Spanish or German or some other linguistic first cousin. But something tells me the English to Chinese computer translator is a long long way off. I live in China and I've tried what I could find in terms of digital translators and they can do word for word quick as can be, but that's missing the point. The concept of a word isn't even equivalent in these two languages.
Language aquisition is my bread and butter. I can tell you that a Chinese student --we're talking about human minds here which is vast linguistic power compared to computers-- whith a broad GRE prep vocabulary will inevitably stumble over even the simplest English verb phrase which is typically nothing more than a basic combination of a verb and a preposition. Why? There are no verb phrases in Chinese. In fact, for the most part you don't have verb tenses. You can have sentences without verbs at all!
Now, we're talking about a real difference. Translation English to Chinese is not just vocabulary substitution. This literary prop the writer uses in describing her friend drawing boxes on paper to invoke our awe at their linguistic insights is exactly where linguists and psychologists get their reputations as pseudo scientists.
Re:I'd like to believe this, but I don't.
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The company's page says 300 liters at 300 barr, that would be three cubic meters, right? So, your half hour figure for one cubic meter times three is close enough, right?
The part entitled Discourse Analysis and Disadvantages of Using the Net seemed to have some logical problems.
Aside from the logic --she lists a series of disadvantages and then goes on to say that there are disadvantages as well-- it doesn't seem to take into account that people can and do interrupt each other using interactive networking tools.
Many people collaborate interactively on the net for various development projects using, for example IRC which does allow you to interrupt people and even punish them. Hmm.
I guess I'm not too sure what she meant by Discourse Analysis anyway. As a Rhetoric major, such terminology makes me suspicious of a writer's intentions.
These little stumbling blocks seem to underpin a larger instability in the piece which is trying to apply commercial software development concepts to open source models. There doesn't really need to be a convergence between the two. If they don't completely overlap each other there won't be any crisis.
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate" Oh, that's nice. I've never heard that one before. That's a sweetie right there. I'm very impressed. I plan to borrow that one.
I heard they got a contract with NASA though. Sometime early this summer I heard that Starbridge was doing something with NASA but I don't remember the details. Maybe it was just giving a presentation or something sorta lukewarm. But there was some news.
Slashdot Mirror
Great idea, although the first thing that comes to mind is that Matsushita (IBM's co-conspirator in the CPRM deal) is by far the largest maker of decent cheap CD-Rs and depite a pathetic --perhaps fatal would be a better term-- time to market, they'll eventually be the largest producers of DVD-R. /. story I suppose. It could take off. Who knows. These optical storage suckas might be irrelevant anyway.
So, for optical media you're kinda trapped by the fact that a small group of Japanese companies own the market. I'd be interested to hear from someone who knows better, but I am under the impression that all, and I mean ALL, CD recorders are manufactured by large Japanese firms. I've lived in Taiwan for many years and although Taiwan makes some of its own CD readers, I'm fairly sure that there are no Taiwanese companies who make writers.
So, what's the point here Steve? Well, a local company might be willing to feature the logo on their boxes to boost overseas sales (locally, it wouldn't be worth much) but I don't think there are any CD-R companies in Taiwan that do direct imports to the States without strict OEM agreements with their Japanese --uhmm bosses. And since those guys are the ones pushing for the CPRM, I don't see them featuring this logo real big on the boxes.
So, that's just optical media. And, as I posted below, I think the Japanese have screwed themselves there by their own arrogance in that particular market. PC firewire cards and accompanying external hard drive cases are all the rage at the local shops in recent months along with the 4X IDE motherboards, so the DVD standard can go to hell with it's proprietary copy control crap and Matshushita will get what it deserves for holding its cards so long.
But as Schwab pointed out, optical is hardly the only place this logo would be used. Flash memory is something much more native to Taiwan and I think Taiwan is a country that is open for business with the Open Source community as long as their hands aren't tied by deals like they probably have in the optical market. The government partially operates the big chip fabs, but it's usually in conjunction with lots of smallish companies. The smallish indepent hardware conpanies in Taiwan might be a good place to pitch this. Open Source is quite popular among Taiwanese computer geeks.
Then there's hard drives and those are mostly coming out of the good ol' USA. Now, I'm not talking manufactuing obviously because those are probably in Malaysia/Singapore, but coorporate headquarters who might be doing the logo side of the box design and all that. Hey, business is business with them there fellers. If it can move product, then so be it.
On the other hand, a lot of these companies seem highly sensitive to their product package designs. You may have noticed the cheapo IDE Seagate drives come in a package that says "Seashells Patent Pending" Gag! I'll take a trademark on the stupid pun, but patented? With that kind of overzealous IP crap going on, you have to wonder if they're going to be open to this sort of idea.
Got to start somewhere though. If you put the log on the web, it might not be that hard to send a little form letter around the island. I could translate it. Well, if it ever gets to that point, it will be a new
After all, Phoenix is a BIOS software and the one post quoting the "ATA guru" said that this new Pheonix plan allows you to use certain undisclosed OS's, or tools thereof, to simply re-organize your boot sector more to your liking. That being the case, it doesn't look like it's really about hard drives.
DVD, on the other hand-- I think that's more where this is at with Toshiba and Matsushita. And this is where it has been for so long. The Japanese have totally blown that market. Price competitive DVD-R is so overdo it's gonna end up a stillborn product and this continuing game is just drawing it out further and further. There are alternatives to DVD for home content --stacks of cheap hard drives-- and the main forms of IP this ridiculous debate is targeting are movies and audio both of which are mostly used by people in their homes.
Let's look at the fact that while CSS says it has never actually even been to court in the US or any other country, they conveniently turn to the issue of global legal issues to introduce their shady Russia deal.
Isn't it a bit premature to introduce such questionable overseas practices as evidence of their strong legal position when they've never even demponstrated that they can convince a jury that their evidence is substantial and compelling in a single case? It would seem more to indicate my earlier conclusion that CSS is running a highly questionable venture and flaunting this fact in the press. I would hardly be surprised if CSS eventually finds itself liable for great damages in the form of counter-suits. Convincing a jury that they had malicious intent and should pay punitive damages would be fairly easy using their own press releases.
By not actually going to court, they've sidestepped this issue which I think could be fatal for them of they actually took it to that level.
I personally tried to hunt down people "breaking into" our network at my office when we first started using DSL and firewalls and I've found no university or ISP would respond to my request to identify users. At first I was really surprised, but then I thought about it and I realized that it's such a headache to prove anything. So, we just encrypted everything we didn't want to wander away and stopped worrying about it.
Now this lawyer feller is in the same situation, but he sends subpeonas and gets a response from the ISPs. But I don't see how his log files, or whatever it is he's got, are really solid evidence in court. Sure, the ISP rolls over, but that's hardly the same as evidence in court? He's got a bunch of data that he's personally compiled and he's saying that's evidence. Why couldn't a defendant simply deny the whole thing or, even better, suggest it was all nothing more than a mistake by CSS? The burden of proof lies with the accuser, not the innocent. If a defendant is accused and they claim the accusation is a mistake. It's not the defendants responsibility to prove that the accuser has made an error, it's the other way around. What would constitute proof on CSS's part? A sheet of printed IP addresses that came out of the HP printer in CSS's office? What does that prove?
It would be different if they got warrants and siezed the users computer and found corroborating logs on the user's machine. That would be evidence useful in court. But that doesn't seem to be the likely modus operandi --that's lawyer talk ya know-- if they're serving subpeonas without actually collecting any evidence from the user first.
If they don't have a valid court strategy, then they are in the business of blackmail regardless of whether they are licensed to practice law or not. They may be milking suckers with this blackmail tactic --notice how well it went over in Russia-- but I'd like to hear about their actual court victories in the US or elsewhere before we have to sit through all this pissin' contest stuff.
In Plato's Academy which became the model for later Greek and Roman educational institutions, there was a core set of courses called the Trivium. The Trivium consisted of three subjects: Math, Music and Rhetoric. These were the only subjects considered worthy of imperial citizens. The other arts were decidedly for slaves including both the painting and sculpture for which these ancient cultures are so famous.
Originally then --if we take these ancient academic values to be the origins of those common in modern american culture-- painting and sculpture were not condsidered arts at all. On the other hand, debate was considered the highest form of art.
I think that there is a very profound sense in which this ancient notion of art continues to prevail in postmodern American culture despite the fact that we now accept various other forms of craftswork as art besides just music. Why is Picasso considered art? It is precisely because Picasso's work was so revolutionary, controversial and often disconcerting to his peers that he is considered a great artist rather than some magic power of his amazing brush strokes. It is not the artists paintings themselves which are instilled with the essence of art whatever the hell that is, rather it is the role of the work in society. It is the rhetorical function of the work which makes it art. All great art must play a rhetorical role in postmodern America just as it had to in ancient Greece. This is simply the Western tradition being kept alive.
Now, are video games art in the postmodern American sense? Damn right they are! In fact, video games are clearly one of the only valid artforms in existence today. What do I mean by valid? Video games are perhaps the one genre that most often clashes with accepted social conventions. That is to say, video games engage us in debate and this is the height of art in the western sense.
The will to art is apparent in the work of ID software more than any other source I can think of. Of course Wolf3D was controversial at a time when skinhead gangs were making the papers at regular intervals. Here was a game stretching consumer technology to the limit, more immersive than any other and freely distributed --by default if not by intention-- featuring rooms mapped with Nazi memorabilia, swastikas, and torture scenes. A stunning piece! Who could help but be shocked by this bizarre and striking combination? Wolf 3D was art and ID knew it.
Why do I say that ID knew it? Easy, remember the maps for the original Quake? Although the swastikas were gone from the walls in Quake, the level maps still had them. At least one of the room layouts retained a swastika pattern. I feel that ID realized they were making art and they realized that all real art is polemic. Hence, they needed some magic lucky charms to keep their edge.
Since that time, the technology has developed sufficiently to allow ID and other developers to tap into other emotive rhetorical symbols such as fire and all whole pallete of OpenGL effects.
My point should be obvious by now, but I'll sum up just to keep things tidy. In western civilization high art has always been a subject of debate. The preceding statement is a definition, not an observation. Under this definition, certain craftsmen within the video game genre clearly stand out as true artists. Their merits are not based on the beauty of their work, but on the beauty of their work's affect on society.
I was reading the last chapter of an engineering textbook the other day --sorry, forgot the reference info-- that mentioned HV long distance DC transmission as an often overlooked bit of technology. The author claimed that the real problems with electrical power sharing across continents was not the any technological limitation, but a lack of political will to share electrical generator capacity between nations along with the fact that power plants are built to such a scale that most of the power is consumed within a fairly local region. According to the author, this had little to do with line losses or the inability of conventional metals to carry large currents over long thousands of miles.
I mentioned this to my father who is quite excited about superconductor technology and he said that was nonsense, echoing a lot of the posts I've seen here today. But I wonder if this textbook might not have had it right.
This same book said that there was no reason to think that conventional coal and oil fired powerplants couldn't be made much more efficient if they were scaled up many times larger than the current standards. According to this book, the reason we've settled upon powerplants of the size and efficiency that we have is that the individual components are as large as the transportation infrastructure can support for manufacture and maintenance. I thought this was a fascinating observation although I don't know if it's accurate or not. Sure does have a ring of truth to it.
Of course this is an important issue from the standpoint of individual liberty, but that's not where this plan will fail if it goes through.
These cops are fools or totally bored if they want to become the complaint department for the Internet. Every home user who adopts a firewall for the first time and then starts going through the log files and gets all freaked out is going to start calling them and demanding to know why so and so is "hacking" me and it's your responsibility to arrest this sonofabitch.
On the other side, they'll have somebody running some little app they downloaded off a security site six months ago and totally forgot about who's gonna swear up and down they don't know what this guy is talking about becuase they really don't.
Multiply above times --oh, say ten thousand.
If these silly cops think they've got the man hours to sort that stuff out then maybe they've got too many heads on the payroll. Fact is, cops are like counselors in most situations and they always have to respond to the loudest complainer. If this goes through, they're gonna get a major earful and it's undoubtedly going to result in otherswise needless and potentially violent diputes that they are going to be essentially powerless to resolve. While not being of much assistance, the cops will be highly capable of aggravating the circumstances by bringing the image of armed officers into the fray, thus heightening the paranoia of the conflicting parties who are already feeling defensive because they don't really know the strength of their own arguments.
That's why this isn't going to be implemented for long even if it does pass through the legislature.
A classic example would be the ever topical goatse.cx
This is a very important point that people are much too quick to brush under the rug because it is closely tied to sexual conventions. The assumption is always that those who give up their privacy are victims. This dynamic of exposed victim and sadistic voyeur is an icon of the pornographic market.
Those officials who prefer to take the knight in shining armor identity are merely palying out their fetish for conventional sexual identities.
I agree with the author of the article that the argument that "not even the government" can sort out privacy issues is hardly a valid reason to have officials play out their twisted sexual perversions in protective legislation.
The tools for privacy protection are readily avaliable to those who seek them. In fact, it has been the US government who has sought to control encryption technology with this same knight in shining armor bullshit. When the game is "protecting" the people from sex, drugs and rock and roll the government is all opposed to privacy. Here we have officials taking on the same persona in the name of defending people's privacy. I think the fundamental problem is the rhetorical force of the image of the defender.
The one genre where this rhetoric is exposed and ridiculed more than any other is pornography. Thus taking us back to the original point. How bout these fuckers just back off.
I wouldn't say these four slots on the board IDE configs have been typical for a long time, but they did catch my eye last time I was down in the computer market here in Taipei. I saw a bunch of them on both dual and single processor boards. It makes sense that they're for different buses.
But what impressed me about this was thinking about all the cheap IDE drives you could cram into it. If drive prices keep falling like they have then I think this is going to eat into the supposedly up and coming market for DVD writers. If we were to hazardously assume we could get 80 Gig IDE drives for around a hundred bucks next Christmas --okay, perhaps it's too hopeful, but maybe-- and you put six on one of these boards with the four way IDE slots then you'd have almost 500 gigs of drive space for about the same cost as blank DVD media, not to mention the writer itself and all the burnt discs you'd inevitably end up with.
I just read in the print version of the Wall Street Journal that there is a steel wholesaler in Australia called Email currently in the process of taking over another steel concern. They might be sitting on a goldmine.
I love it.
But I assure you that Taipei is not cheap. The real estate market is insane. My wife, who is a local, and I just got back from a little vacation at a house her family owns. This place isn't huge and it's all brick/concrete, no heating etc and they bought it for US$450K. That's not even in Taipei.
You can get fairly decent deals on rent if you shop around enough, but I think it's comparable to the Bay Area within the core of Taipei which means that it's only decent in relation to the price of buying a place. You can forget all about buying real estate even in the boonies. Although if you're going to rent in the boonies, you can do very well. Check out Xin Dian if you don't mind the very long bus ride. You can get brand new 2 bedroom 30th floor apartments built up on the hills over looking Taipei --albeit from quite a distance-- nestled in virgin rain forest for $500 a month.
As for the pay. Well, that's not a good reason to come to Taiwan as far as I'm aware. There's lots of money here, but getting it is no easy task. I had a cousin who sold ATM protocol diagnostic equipment around Asia in the mid 1990's. He made all kinds of money in various Asian markets, but I don't think Taiwan was one of them. He told me at the time that there is a saying that a Shanghai businessman can sell anything to a Canton businessman and the Shanghai businessman always loses out when dealing with the Taiwanese. After all, how do you think these guys stay politically independent from the mainland without even being in the UN? We're talking about serious hustlers. Their military is outdated and they know it, but god can these people bluff.
You recall the scene in Life of Brian where the bazarre dealer won't sell Brian the gourd if he won't haggle? I get that all the time in Taiwan. If you won't haggle it's offensive, especially in the night markets.
Which leads you to the fact that you're not even going to start haggling in the night markets till you get the language down. I love hearing my cousin brag about his French and then reading about all these folks who say Japanese is so tough. They don't even have tones. What's tones? Come on over, you'll pick them up in no time. Hah. But the verbal part of any language could be taught to a parrot. The fun part here is that Taiwan is the only country left that officially and in everyday life uses the traditional Chinese characters which have changed very little for however many thousands of years during which the vast majority of the population was illiterate because the written language was just too tripped out to make time for. Welcome to hell grasshopper. If you're a real glutton for mnemonic torture it's paradise.
And you will eventually cave in to the need for the characters if you want to get around because half the people you speak your perfect Mandarin to will pretend not to understand a word you say. This is not simply because you are a foreigner, but because they insist on speaking Fukien dialect AKA Taiwanese. Now that's fun. It's got three times as many tones as Mandarin, but it's also got all the dirty words and sounds obnoxious so you will inevitably want to study that as well if you want to have a good time. It is cool. I only know a few phrases, but when people speak Taiwanese they tend to get straight to the point and it's fun in that way. You realize these people standing outside of the restaraunts squwaking at the passers by are saying. "Come on in you cool stud you, I can tell you're hungry. We got room for ya right over here." Once you realize that's what's going on around you, you drop all the insecurity and it starts to seem like you're one of the family.
Okay, okay but what about tech jobs? The biggest and easiest one to get into is help files for hardware. You can find that kind of work pretty easy in one of the science parks like the big one in Xin Zhu. The catch is that when you break it down, they're not really making that much more than English teachers, if they're even making that much. English teaching, even tutoring, commands $20 an hour just about anywhere you go and it can go higher. So, the people who take these entry tech writing positions are generally those who just can't bear the notion of teaching, but as far as I know, it's not a better paying field. I've freelanced a few jobs and you get what you bargained for. Good luck with those negotiating skills. Just like anywhere, you'll probably get more money if you're very pushy although you might get less work overall.
I did web design for a NIC manufacturer at one point and I got consistantly bad pay deals because I just didn't feel like stickin it to the man but it was an interesting glimpse into the inner workings of a local hardware manufacturer. All the device driver guys were locals and they were uber geeks at least from the looks of their coke bottle glasses and distorted limbs. They had them behind glass like some museum piece. I don't think you'd get into that menagere without a killer language ability in addition to whatever tech skills they were using.
I assume most of the monitor and mother board places are not all that different from that place although I'm sure someone else would be happy to disagree.
I've always heard the best way to go is to get a job in the States that brings you over here and gives you expat priveledges. Personally, I think the important thing is to be in a place where you feel welcomed. Taiwan will always be that place to those who take the time to appreciate the language.
It's worse than that from where I'm sitting. A cab is a form of transportation. People don't necessarily take cabs simply because it's raining. If people don't need to be somewhere, they won't take a cab, period. An umbrella is more analogous to a portable form of shelter rather than a form of transportation. I'm sure there's no shortage of shelter in New York when it rains. I think the cab thing is a matter of perception. If you're looking for a cab in the rain and you're getting wet, it pisses you off. but a cab isn't really like an umbrella.
I wrote to one of these companies. I forgot which one at the moment. But I was suggesting a plan that I think makes great sense and is a kind of processing already commonly done in a distributed manner --3D animation rendering.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who loves setting up scenes with a gazillion meshes and complex camera shots and ray traced textures mirroring each other into infinity. The wireframe of a wild animation is within reach of many typical desktops, it's the rendering that you'll never get --especially at high res-- without your own CPU farm.
So, my proposal to whatever company it was, was to allow artists to send in descriptions of their animation along with say a single screen shot and then CPU cycle donators could go to the site and decide which project they wanted to patronize.
The reward? --not money but a free copy of the final project.
In my mind, this is where the net can transcend conventional notions of economy. Heady stuff.
But what about the money? Well, the organizing site would have to get by on ad revenues. But since it would be an entertainment site, that might not be too bad.
The poster must have been aware of this because they didn't log-in. That makes the message particularly odd.
Postmodernity is critical of consumerism? I beg to differ.
This is always the difficulty when using such commonly misused terms. I like to think of postmodernity as a reference to a period in history. That is, a time period. According to this way of thinking, both the prefix "post" and the "modern" part of the term seem to make good sense. Using the word in this way, even those who despise the humanities can have a clear referece as to what is being discussed.
The precise demarcations of this boundary call into question the nature of precision and boundaries as useful concepts, but that's part of the fun of it. What is clear though, is that the postmodern era has clearly been an era in which rampant consumerism has surpassed all previously conceived limits and continues to gain momentum.
Indeed, it could be argued that the technology which has defined postmodernity is built on metaphor of consumption without limit. Think of the hard drive ad . . . on a clean disk, you can see forever!
The constant consumption of ever more bandwidth and CPU cycles is further evidence that postmodernity has never stopped to question consumerism. In fact, leading consumption to ever more extreme excess is the defining movement of postmodernity.
To assume that just because some wannabee trendy-journal-scouring artists in New York call their re-cycled sentimental surrealist crap "postmodern art" implies postmodernism qustions consumerism is misguided. This kind of abuse is one of the reasons that many people get turned off as soon as they see such terms being thrown around.
And as far as public key cryptology goes, it will be useless to keep information confidential once we have all been assimilated into the borg collective. Now that is where postmodernity is joyfully leading us and that is why slashdot readers deserve better than to have such important terms abused.
I'm an American expat in Taiwan and we're not on the list, but that doesn't really matter. The fact is that most of the coutries that are not actually signatories to these agreements are more than happy to bow to pressure from any well funded foreign organization that wants to come in and blackmail the locals for selling pirated goods from software and entertainment to hand bags and watches.
You can't conclude that there is no IP enforcement just because a country isn't signed up on one of these lists. That's like assuming that a country has no role international political role because it's not in the UN. Again, Taiwan would be a good example of how that would be an absurd assumption.
The part about the boxes linking the voice to text, text to voice and computer translators was ridiculous.
If all it took was some genius to write down a set of boxes on a piece of paper and it would all work out, then this would be an interesting and thought provoking article.
The fact is that computers aren't replacing translators any time soon. Oh, sure, maybe English to Spanish or German or some other linguistic first cousin. But something tells me the English to Chinese computer translator is a long long way off. I live in China and I've tried what I could find in terms of digital translators and they can do word for word quick as can be, but that's missing the point. The concept of a word isn't even equivalent in these two languages.
Language aquisition is my bread and butter. I can tell you that a Chinese student --we're talking about human minds here which is vast linguistic power compared to computers-- whith a broad GRE prep vocabulary will inevitably stumble over even the simplest English verb phrase which is typically nothing more than a basic combination of a verb and a preposition. Why? There are no verb phrases in Chinese. In fact, for the most part you don't have verb tenses. You can have sentences without verbs at all!
Now, we're talking about a real difference. Translation English to Chinese is not just vocabulary substitution. This literary prop the writer uses in describing her friend drawing boxes on paper to invoke our awe at their linguistic insights is exactly where linguists and psychologists get their reputations as pseudo scientists.
The company's page says 300 liters at 300 barr, that would be three cubic meters, right? So, your half hour figure for one cubic meter times three is close enough, right?
The part entitled Discourse Analysis and Disadvantages of Using the Net seemed to have some logical problems. Aside from the logic --she lists a series of disadvantages and then goes on to say that there are disadvantages as well-- it doesn't seem to take into account that people can and do interrupt each other using interactive networking tools. Many people collaborate interactively on the net for various development projects using, for example IRC which does allow you to interrupt people and even punish them. Hmm. I guess I'm not too sure what she meant by Discourse Analysis anyway. As a Rhetoric major, such terminology makes me suspicious of a writer's intentions. These little stumbling blocks seem to underpin a larger instability in the piece which is trying to apply commercial software development concepts to open source models. There doesn't really need to be a convergence between the two. If they don't completely overlap each other there won't be any crisis.
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate" Oh, that's nice. I've never heard that one before. That's a sweetie right there. I'm very impressed. I plan to borrow that one.
I heard they got a contract with NASA though. Sometime early this summer I heard that Starbridge was doing something with NASA but I don't remember the details. Maybe it was just giving a presentation or something sorta lukewarm. But there was some news.