How long does it take for a patented architecture to be reimplemented by lots of competitors in order for it to be seen as a properly patented architecture? Some really good ideas languish for years before their full potential is realized, and so patenting those ideas often seems futile-- the patent will expire before it becomes worth anything. On the other hand, many really good ideas get copied immediately, in which case, patenting them must have been correct in hindsight.
There are almost as many spidering search engines out there as there, now, as there are web portals. Didn't altavista do it first? And if they did, then why are we complaining that they got it patented? There are many ways to go about indexing websites without resorting to spiders, so there are other ways of supporting other search engines -- no one's going to be forced out of business by this one.
Patents make companies look good on paper and feel good at heart. If you don't want altavista to own these patents, then the honest thing to do is to get enough capital together and buyout altavista (as well as google and others) and make one big search engine that you can run yourself and decide to manage exactly as you wish. To do otherwise is to cast an umbra on the very ideals of property that bind our society together.
Just give them some time. They spent two years researching and designing one of the more innovative products out there, and so they've run into a few snags. Nothing big, really. They'll bounce back, sooner than you can say ":Cuecat". Why have they failed so far? Not enough punctuation.
My advice to:cue:cat is to increase the number of colons (":"). One thing you learn in business school is that when you're going for an angle with a marketing campaign, you can't hammer home your main point enough. You have to try harder. Most people don't even notice the colons when they first look at ":CueCat", and far fewer remember to include them when discussing the product among friends. It's a losing proposition, I'm afraid.
That's why they need to have more colons. They shouldn't stop until their name at least looks like ":::c:u:e:c:a:t::". They should also get a trademark on "cuecat" without the colons and start harassing people who misuse it instead of ":CueCat". They also have to dump cuecat.com as their homepage, because it unfortunately reinforces the "no colon" mistake. Problems like these aren't often solved so easily.:CRQ should consider themselves lucky.
Yes, I read the article before I posted (hence citing some of the companies involved as examples), and Clinton's approval makes it all the more disturbing. Let me share something with you.
In our nation's (US's) history, there have been four presidents assasinated. Two were saints. Two were mediocre. But four out of soon to be forty-three is a miniscule percentage. It's barely over 9%. No wonder our government and our leaders have gotten out of touch with the American people. They're not beholden to us anymore, because they no longer have the fear of the masses beaten into them. That must change.
There are four more days before Clinton leaves office. He must be shot today. And then we have to shoot Bush when we're done with Clinton. There must be blood on the floor tonight, if our government will ever learn to tread lightly on the liberties of man.
This information-cartel outrage is only the latest volley in an ongoing war we have been fighting since we decapitated Louis XVI and drank from his blood at the guillotine (ingesting his divine sovereign mandate and becoming a true sovereign democracy). Our leaders are out of touch and out of their minds. The mail isn't being delivered anymore. The snake problem is at a fevered pitch. A grown man can't even walk to the corner store without getting passing stares from gawking subversives. Is that the kind of world we want to leave for our children?
The information cartel must be killed tonight. Tonight. Tomorrow, we'll go after the guys who planned it. They must be brought to a pointy reckoning. Shudder them.
This is exactly the sort of thing antitrust laws are intended to prevent: collusion among market dominators, patting each others' backs and shunning the upcoming little guy. If you're not a major conglomerate like Oracle or Microsoft (much less AT&T and others), you can't possibly break into this information cartel. Don't people understand that information is the currency of the new age?
Having a cartel like this is not only unnecessary; it's plain wrong. It simulatneously flies in the face of libertarian notions of self-help and of liberal notions of the omnipotent government who can protect citizens corporations on its own. Like so many areas of our economy, things were just fine until the corporations decided to start merging into one giant monopolistic hairball. I urge you all to write your congressmen and senators. This must be put to a stop.
Hitachi's link looks like it's down. Here's the story at ZDNet and Hitachi's own press release.
Some quick points:
It came out in Japan back in August.
It has a 1.1-million-pixel 1/4-inch CCD with an effective area of 720,000 pixels is used for video recording. In still mode, the effective area is one million pixels.
It's compatible with Windows 9x and Windows 2000/NT. No plans for Linux as yet.
The DVD-RAM used complies with CPRM standards, meaning your own pictures/video is subject to the same copyprotection nonsense we've been bitching about on slashdot for the past couple months. This is insipid, since by definition, you own the copyright on the video you yourself are taking. When will these companies learn?
In the common-law system of trial by jury, the judge is the gatekeeper/refereee and the jury is the factfinder/deliberator. Juries have a strong history of protecting the accused from arbitrary prosecution and of truly showing what the people think should happen. It used to be that juries sat on all criminal proceedings. Sadly, this is no longer the case.
But more importantly, juries by definition aren't biased. Juries are composed of laypeople who have no political motives one way or the other. They're a legitimizing force for the government (hence why the king of England originally instituted grand juries) because they're as close as we can get to the intrinsic truth. Any case that we're not willing to put before a jury of our peers isn't worth pursuing. And any case that we have to resort to getting a paid career judge to decide is tainted with suspicion.
Microsoft probably did break the law. But we'll never know for sure, because they weren't tried by a jury in the proper tradition. You should feel outraged. I know I am.
I remember when I first set eyes on the ENIAC, when they took it out of commission back, well, whever that was. Now there was a computer! That thing gave me the greatest swelling of pride I've probably ever had. We were the greatest, because we had the biggest! It's like with skycrapers that way, you know.
Smaller wearables are fine for mobile applications, but most people just spend their whole lives in one or two rooms (at home or at the office). Why don't we just build the computer into the room? Why not make the computer the room? You're already spending money to aircondition the room to make it inhabitable, so why not work the electronics into the walls and surfaces and have really big cheap components like the ones we used to have before smaller became sexier.
Small is good for a bunch of reasons, but it's also a luxury most people don't need, just as they don't need an SUV or that extra-expensive insurance plan that covers dental. "Small" is just one factor that should be weighed against other factors like cost and aesthetics. Bring back the behemoths! Make me feel young again!
If Apple has been patenting things, it's because they're the latest and greatest and worth patenting (what patents were supposed to be for in the first place -- foremost innovation). If you can't understand this, then you haven't been paying attention. You remind me of this guy:
The only reason that makes PCs better is Cuz of all the Companies Support it.thats it.. if u want to be like that 14 your old handjob saying he could Progam C.. the be like it
i myself am 16 and the only language i ever felt the need to lear is QuakeC But half of u Jackoffs dont even know what the hell your fighting about Makes u wonder how the hell uv lived this long and all these titles . Freak!?!? Loser?? Mac Rules . Shit.. for once can u not be an in Bred Fuck and say what u know . I forn one dont believe that Quake would run so well on a mac not because i dont like macs far from it . i just dont believe in them.. THink.. Quake Was Created with ibm in mind . it would haven been released for Macs if it was intended.. i for one dont know anygame Created for macs besides Some Disney shit . and Asteroids . i dont get it.. Damn teenyboppers always shooting off ther mouths . use what u want . and believe what u like . btw what was the name of that Crap MiniComp made byt mac that Almost cost them there Buisness . Sorry just was trying to remember . ibm AND MICROSOFT have a strong following . Mac . hasnt as much something about the mac interface just doesnt hit my right I mean everyFucking comp i see that is mac has that Shitty Freaking trashcan.. too bad u cant just chukk the entire comp inthere.. i remember my friend was Trying to get me to install Doom on his mac laptop . Stupid Fucking MousePad type shit . i really dont like that windows clone they use . Just looks weird . where was i . oh yeah . Quake is a Great game.intended for reprogramming and that was it . perhaps if they do make it for mac it will still be good but u cant honestly believe it will be the same.. and i dont want to hear anyshit about it being better on the mac Cuz that game if improved which it cant be the way it is.. will just become shit . after all thes4e years the Quake engine still fascinates me . unreal was Crap . and im sure it stayed Crap when it hit macs . If this is was a discussion between Programmers imb and mak . the im sorry for intruding but when that little Retard started mouthing off about his prgramimg skillz . Dont show off about what u know Cuz chances are hell of alot better u dont know it . am i really to believe u were programming at 9 . shit i dont htink u could even make it to the batroom before pissing u pants take a look at your neighbor . yeah the 9 yr old . does he look like he cant program..perhaps Html but not any of what u spoke of .
[snip]
If that's the best argument wintel users can put up against Apple, then it's little wonder that Apple is fast becoming the number one consumer-computer manufacturer again. What this debate lacks is maturity on the wintel side. You've tried using actual arguments and have lost, so now you resort to name calling and expletives ("If I took a shit into a can and got IBM to sell it, you'd probaly bitch that I stole this idea from Apple"). Apple invented the personal computer as you and I know it. Show some respect.
There was a story on mosr.com a few months ago about how Apple planned to combine certain technologies from its defunct Newton division with its powerbook line, producing a hybrid pda-laptop beast which would behave like a laptop but have a pen and hand-writing recognition. I can't believe IBM would steal such an idea from Apple instead of having its own true innovation, like a touch-controlled built-in laser pointer for lecture presentations or a three-dimensional external talking wordprocessing assistant. The nerve!
In their new powerbooks, I mean. Why'd Apple go with titanium when there are perfectly good alternatives like liquidmetal, an alloy of nickel, zirconium, titanium, copper, and beryllium, which has already been in golf clubs for three years and which is twice as strong as titanium. It can't be just for the sake of marketing, can it? If that were the case, then why would they be running linux?
"Useless" is in the eye of the beholder: every tool has its use, though you might not recognize it. The creditcard-sized camera is perfect for taking pictures in situations where cameras are ordinarily confiscated (like museums and concerts). The directional cellphone antenna sounds like the perfect solution to the problem posed in the last article here a few hours ago. An enormous truck is for lifting enormous loads. What's the problem?
As a community, slashdot demands that everyone use different operating systems for different situations, depending on your needs. It's the proper and most intellectually honest thing to do. So then why ridicule the same people who are on the cutting edge of tool-making? If the frying pan had run linux, then I bet the headline would've been much different. It's hypocritical, I think.
Insurance companies are already finding it more expensive to insure drivers who use cellphones while driving, so companies like Travelers and Geico are already planning to charge them more. Partly, it's just another excuse to boost the bottom line, but at least it's rooted in sound theory.
In all the years that we communicated with ham radio instead of cellphones, not one study showed that anyone was getting cancer from radio spectra. Part of that might have to do with the weaker-energy radio waves (longer wavelengths) and the positioning of antennas relative to the body, but we'll never know, now that cellphones have supplanted ham radios (and at much greater cost).
Ham radio has to adapt now. We have to get rid of all those stupid restrictions like morse-code tests for liscenses. Anyone can buy and operate a cellphone without a liscense. The same should be true for ham radios.
Note that test (c) is very hard to pass. Even nudie magazines like Playboy are not considered obscene because they have at least some (however miniscule) literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Political speech, including speech critical of police or government officials, is protected in the highest degree.
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. The standard is not "lacks any [adjective] value"; it's whether it lacks serious value. There's an enormous difference. Remember, Miller was a decision by the Burger court during the seventies. Do you really think they'd let you get away with anything as long as it had any value whatsoever? Miller was specifically decided so as to avoid the situation where a work of complete filth could be saved by inserting a single page of Shakespeare.
Miller was a compromise that ended a decade of legal wrangling over the subject of obscenity. It affirmed that legal obscenity must be sexual in nature (which this website likely is) and must violate community standards of propriety. Playboy isn't relevant, because playboy is a national magazine which may or may not violate community norms in New Hampshire.
(Incidentally, in R.A.V. v. Saint Paul, White's concurring opinion would have given governments plenary power over what sorts of obscene speech to declare illegal (instead of our present broad bans). Thankfully, that opinion wasn't signed by four other justices. Unfortunately, it won't help you here, since the obscenity ban in question bans far more than just political obscenity.)
Please, stop pretending to be lawyers on slashdot. Slashdot barely has any journalistic credibility in the wake of that hooters link that got on the front page yesterday. Don't undermine it even more by giving people false and misleading legal advice. In many jurisdictions, giving false legal advice is itself a crime. If you must wallow in your own ignorance, then don't drag others into the morass with you. Please.
Under the US Constitution, Congress has jurisdiction over interstate commerce and commerce with foreign nations. This is exactly what the internet is all about: interstate commerce and commerce with foreign nations. Any state that wants its own internal tld system is able to set up its own system of name servers. States could even band together and share dns databases with each other. But the final national decision is left with the Federal government where the Constitution puts it.
That's what's good about our system: 200 years ago, no one could have known that dns servers could even exist someday. But the same constitutional principles enacted then govern now and govern well. I welcome this latest reaffirmation of the beauty of our government in action.
Pinball. Heh, I remember when we used to play stickball in the streets and duck in and out of traffic. And then when pinball came out, our parents were happy to keep us out of traffic and in the penny arcades, hitting constrained balls instead of each other. Those were the days, I think.
Pinball is dying now, and it's little wonder why. Pinball machines have countless mechanical parts subject to mechanical wear and requiring mechanical replacements. All that banging around can equal a whole lot of wear and tear, and without vigilance, your shiny new quarter-eating machine is a worthless hunk of scrap. Your video machines, instead, don't need repair and can be upgraded with a single new chip. That's the power of the internet, you know.
I miss pinball already. It was much more real than video games. You were hitting a real ball with your real stick just like back in the streets of Brooklyn growing up with Jimmy and Pudge. When you scored a point, you got a reassuring *thunk*, and not another epileptic seizure like those pokemon games give you. One pinball machine used to be all it took to get a room moving and grooving, but now where are we? Typing away at our individual boxes with big screens and complete sensory deprivation. What would the Who's Tommy have done with a modern video machine? He certainly wouldn't have written a musical; that's what.
We need to keep pinball machines alive. We need to keep the knowledge of tuning them alive. Pinball repair is a necessary skill I'd hate to see us lose. Then, where'd we be?
Lawyers who represent Wall Street firms have argued that even jumbo commissions may have been legal in the context of the overall relationship between the investors and the securities firms; they say the securities dealers have wide discretion to allocate IPO stock as they see fit in order to manage the offerings.
These sorts of shenanigans have been going on for years precisely because they're not actually shenanigans: they're just a normal part of the process. When you start a company, it's your business whom you pick to be your partners. It's the same with initial public offerings, except those are even more democratic in nature.
When Redhat went ipo, plenty of people active in the opensource movement got a special offer to join the IPO, and slashdot was abuzz with the excitement of it all. This with VaLinux is just another kind of special offer. Nothing to see here; move along.
That's just what's wrong with the industry
on
Nano-pants
·
· Score: 1
The fear to innovate in women's medicine just because you're grossed out is a socially untenable fear. There is already very little research going into new oral contraceptives and other necessary endeavors. Despite the adverse health effects of putting a bleached piece of cotton into one's body, people continue to do it because they have no viable alternative. We need more accountability in the industry, and we need to do our part to make sure new technologies penetrate these neglected markets.
To whoever moderated my original comment down: you're an ignorant coward.
During the cold war we had "1st world", "2nd world", and "3rd world" countries. First-world ones were western-style democracies like ours that fought on our side. Second-world ones were communist countries like the USSR and the eastern "bloc", who opposed us. And third-world countries were the countries not immediately involved in the conflict, like in South America.
Today, communism is completely gone from the world stage, and the old "$ord world" classification is obsolete. But the information age is upon us and is now defining our new political and social interactions in a global sense. I propose that we update our vocabularies with this new tiered classification which is rooted in the very machines that will drive our new economies. For future generations, it'll be much more important to know whether countries have or had access to the latest and greatest imports from the US technology giants than whether they had a particular stance on a silly thing like communism.
This would make a good tampon
on
Nano-pants
·
· Score: 2
Fibers that selectively control the flow of liquids so that they pass in one direction but not the other would be ideal for a super tampon, one that you never have to remove or throw out until after the whole week is over. You could combine it with an organic reprocessor inside which would convert the liquids into dry pellets or extrude them as gaseous byproducts, making the whole process completely hands-off and foolproof. The mark up would be big, but you'd only need one per month and we already have seen people's willingness to buy disposable contact lenses and other such luxuries. It's time that this same technological revolution come to feminine hygiene products.
Once you've done this modification and voided your warranty, you're SOL when the service gets upgraded and you're left behind. I'm surprised people are willing to do this kind of thing when others are spending all kinds of money to protect their devices.
If I had to choose between spending a thousand dollars on a new device when I broke mine or a thousand dollars on a new windows box I could network to my other computer and run as a gateway, I'd rather choose the latter: at least that way, you get something tangible out of it. Windows may not make a great workstation OS, but it's just fine if you're running some network daemons in the background on it and don't fiddle directly. I've done it just fine.
Ken Thompson wrote an important article about this, back in 1984 (wow, that brings back memories), titled Reflections on Trusting Trust where he discussed his famous compiler-trojan which propagated itself even when the user had full access to the source code. The way it worked is the compiler had some code in it that recognized when it was compiling the compiler's own source. When it did, it inserted a bit of code which compiled the source not as a clean compiler but as another copy of the trojan. The user could read the sourcecode all he wanted, but he couldn't get around having to trust the compiler. The thrust of Thompson's article was that you have to put some trust in someone or something along the line.
The moral of the story is that unless you built your own processor, built your own hardware, built your own compiler from scratch, and read the source code and understood it completely, you're open to attack. Open-source itself is no magic bullet, and it's time the zealots figured that out.
Slashdot Mirror
How long does it take for a patented architecture to be reimplemented by lots of competitors in order for it to be seen as a properly patented architecture? Some really good ideas languish for years before their full potential is realized, and so patenting those ideas often seems futile-- the patent will expire before it becomes worth anything. On the other hand, many really good ideas get copied immediately, in which case, patenting them must have been correct in hindsight.
There are almost as many spidering search engines out there as there, now, as there are web portals. Didn't altavista do it first? And if they did, then why are we complaining that they got it patented? There are many ways to go about indexing websites without resorting to spiders, so there are other ways of supporting other search engines -- no one's going to be forced out of business by this one.
Patents make companies look good on paper and feel good at heart. If you don't want altavista to own these patents, then the honest thing to do is to get enough capital together and buyout altavista (as well as google and others) and make one big search engine that you can run yourself and decide to manage exactly as you wish. To do otherwise is to cast an umbra on the very ideals of property that bind our society together.
Just give them some time. They spent two years researching and designing one of the more innovative products out there, and so they've run into a few snags. Nothing big, really. They'll bounce back, sooner than you can say ":Cuecat". Why have they failed so far? Not enough punctuation.
:cue:cat is to increase the number of colons (":"). One thing you learn in business school is that when you're going for an angle with a marketing campaign, you can't hammer home your main point enough. You have to try harder. Most people don't even notice the colons when they first look at ":CueCat", and far fewer remember to include them when discussing the product among friends. It's a losing proposition, I'm afraid.
:CRQ should consider themselves lucky.
My advice to
That's why they need to have more colons. They shouldn't stop until their name at least looks like ":::c:u:e:c:a:t::". They should also get a trademark on "cuecat" without the colons and start harassing people who misuse it instead of ":CueCat". They also have to dump cuecat.com as their homepage, because it unfortunately reinforces the "no colon" mistake. Problems like these aren't often solved so easily.
Not only did I post it with my name, I meant every word of it. You are a coward and a hypocrite.
Yes, I read the article before I posted (hence citing some of the companies involved as examples), and Clinton's approval makes it all the more disturbing. Let me share something with you.
In our nation's (US's) history, there have been four presidents assasinated. Two were saints. Two were mediocre. But four out of soon to be forty-three is a miniscule percentage. It's barely over 9%. No wonder our government and our leaders have gotten out of touch with the American people. They're not beholden to us anymore, because they no longer have the fear of the masses beaten into them. That must change.
There are four more days before Clinton leaves office. He must be shot today. And then we have to shoot Bush when we're done with Clinton. There must be blood on the floor tonight, if our government will ever learn to tread lightly on the liberties of man.
This information-cartel outrage is only the latest volley in an ongoing war we have been fighting since we decapitated Louis XVI and drank from his blood at the guillotine (ingesting his divine sovereign mandate and becoming a true sovereign democracy). Our leaders are out of touch and out of their minds. The mail isn't being delivered anymore. The snake problem is at a fevered pitch. A grown man can't even walk to the corner store without getting passing stares from gawking subversives. Is that the kind of world we want to leave for our children?
The information cartel must be killed tonight. Tonight. Tomorrow, we'll go after the guys who planned it. They must be brought to a pointy reckoning. Shudder them.
This is exactly the sort of thing antitrust laws are intended to prevent: collusion among market dominators, patting each others' backs and shunning the upcoming little guy. If you're not a major conglomerate like Oracle or Microsoft (much less AT&T and others), you can't possibly break into this information cartel. Don't people understand that information is the currency of the new age?
Having a cartel like this is not only unnecessary; it's plain wrong. It simulatneously flies in the face of libertarian notions of self-help and of liberal notions of the omnipotent government who can protect citizens corporations on its own. Like so many areas of our economy, things were just fine until the corporations decided to start merging into one giant monopolistic hairball. I urge you all to write your congressmen and senators. This must be put to a stop.
Some quick points:
It came out in Japan back in August.
It has a 1.1-million-pixel 1/4-inch CCD with an effective area of 720,000 pixels is used for video recording. In still mode, the effective area is one million pixels.
It's compatible with Windows 9x and Windows 2000/NT. No plans for Linux as yet.
The DVD-RAM used complies with CPRM standards, meaning your own pictures/video is subject to the same copyprotection nonsense we've been bitching about on slashdot for the past couple months. This is insipid, since by definition, you own the copyright on the video you yourself are taking. When will these companies learn?
In the common-law system of trial by jury, the judge is the gatekeeper/refereee and the jury is the factfinder/deliberator. Juries have a strong history of protecting the accused from arbitrary prosecution and of truly showing what the people think should happen. It used to be that juries sat on all criminal proceedings. Sadly, this is no longer the case.
But more importantly, juries by definition aren't biased. Juries are composed of laypeople who have no political motives one way or the other. They're a legitimizing force for the government (hence why the king of England originally instituted grand juries) because they're as close as we can get to the intrinsic truth. Any case that we're not willing to put before a jury of our peers isn't worth pursuing. And any case that we have to resort to getting a paid career judge to decide is tainted with suspicion.
Microsoft probably did break the law. But we'll never know for sure, because they weren't tried by a jury in the proper tradition. You should feel outraged. I know I am.
I remember when I first set eyes on the ENIAC, when they took it out of commission back, well, whever that was. Now there was a computer! That thing gave me the greatest swelling of pride I've probably ever had. We were the greatest, because we had the biggest! It's like with skycrapers that way, you know.
Smaller wearables are fine for mobile applications, but most people just spend their whole lives in one or two rooms (at home or at the office). Why don't we just build the computer into the room? Why not make the computer the room? You're already spending money to aircondition the room to make it inhabitable, so why not work the electronics into the walls and surfaces and have really big cheap components like the ones we used to have before smaller became sexier.
Small is good for a bunch of reasons, but it's also a luxury most people don't need, just as they don't need an SUV or that extra-expensive insurance plan that covers dental. "Small" is just one factor that should be weighed against other factors like cost and aesthetics. Bring back the behemoths! Make me feel young again!
Prove it.
If that's the best argument wintel users can put up against Apple, then it's little wonder that Apple is fast becoming the number one consumer-computer manufacturer again. What this debate lacks is maturity on the wintel side. You've tried using actual arguments and have lost, so now you resort to name calling and expletives ("If I took a shit into a can and got IBM to sell it, you'd probaly bitch that I stole this idea from Apple"). Apple invented the personal computer as you and I know it. Show some respect.
There was a story on mosr.com a few months ago about how Apple planned to combine certain technologies from its defunct Newton division with its powerbook line, producing a hybrid pda-laptop beast which would behave like a laptop but have a pen and hand-writing recognition. I can't believe IBM would steal such an idea from Apple instead of having its own true innovation, like a touch-controlled built-in laser pointer for lecture presentations or a three-dimensional external talking wordprocessing assistant. The nerve!
In their new powerbooks, I mean. Why'd Apple go with titanium when there are perfectly good alternatives like liquidmetal, an alloy of nickel, zirconium, titanium, copper, and beryllium, which has already been in golf clubs for three years and which is twice as strong as titanium. It can't be just for the sake of marketing, can it? If that were the case, then why would they be running linux?
"Useless" is in the eye of the beholder: every tool has its use, though you might not recognize it. The creditcard-sized camera is perfect for taking pictures in situations where cameras are ordinarily confiscated (like museums and concerts). The directional cellphone antenna sounds like the perfect solution to the problem posed in the last article here a few hours ago. An enormous truck is for lifting enormous loads. What's the problem?
As a community, slashdot demands that everyone use different operating systems for different situations, depending on your needs. It's the proper and most intellectually honest thing to do. So then why ridicule the same people who are on the cutting edge of tool-making? If the frying pan had run linux, then I bet the headline would've been much different. It's hypocritical, I think.
Insurance companies are already finding it more expensive to insure drivers who use cellphones while driving, so companies like Travelers and Geico are already planning to charge them more. Partly, it's just another excuse to boost the bottom line, but at least it's rooted in sound theory.
I'd say the effects of cellphone radiation reach at least as far as the cellphone tower. Wouldn't you say? :)
In all the years that we communicated with ham radio instead of cellphones, not one study showed that anyone was getting cancer from radio spectra. Part of that might have to do with the weaker-energy radio waves (longer wavelengths) and the positioning of antennas relative to the body, but we'll never know, now that cellphones have supplanted ham radios (and at much greater cost).
Ham radio has to adapt now. We have to get rid of all those stupid restrictions like morse-code tests for liscenses. Anyone can buy and operate a cellphone without a liscense. The same should be true for ham radios.
Note that test (c) is very hard to pass. Even nudie magazines like Playboy are not considered obscene because they have at least some (however miniscule) literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Political speech, including speech critical of police or government officials, is protected in the highest degree.
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. The standard is not "lacks any [adjective] value"; it's whether it lacks serious value. There's an enormous difference. Remember, Miller was a decision by the Burger court during the seventies. Do you really think they'd let you get away with anything as long as it had any value whatsoever? Miller was specifically decided so as to avoid the situation where a work of complete filth could be saved by inserting a single page of Shakespeare.
Miller was a compromise that ended a decade of legal wrangling over the subject of obscenity. It affirmed that legal obscenity must be sexual in nature (which this website likely is) and must violate community standards of propriety. Playboy isn't relevant, because playboy is a national magazine which may or may not violate community norms in New Hampshire.
(Incidentally, in R.A.V. v. Saint Paul, White's concurring opinion would have given governments plenary power over what sorts of obscene speech to declare illegal (instead of our present broad bans). Thankfully, that opinion wasn't signed by four other justices. Unfortunately, it won't help you here, since the obscenity ban in question bans far more than just political obscenity.)
Please, stop pretending to be lawyers on slashdot. Slashdot barely has any journalistic credibility in the wake of that hooters link that got on the front page yesterday. Don't undermine it even more by giving people false and misleading legal advice. In many jurisdictions, giving false legal advice is itself a crime. If you must wallow in your own ignorance, then don't drag others into the morass with you. Please.
Under the US Constitution, Congress has jurisdiction over interstate commerce and commerce with foreign nations. This is exactly what the internet is all about: interstate commerce and commerce with foreign nations. Any state that wants its own internal tld system is able to set up its own system of name servers. States could even band together and share dns databases with each other. But the final national decision is left with the Federal government where the Constitution puts it.
That's what's good about our system: 200 years ago, no one could have known that dns servers could even exist someday. But the same constitutional principles enacted then govern now and govern well. I welcome this latest reaffirmation of the beauty of our government in action.
Pinball. Heh, I remember when we used to play stickball in the streets and duck in and out of traffic. And then when pinball came out, our parents were happy to keep us out of traffic and in the penny arcades, hitting constrained balls instead of each other. Those were the days, I think.
Pinball is dying now, and it's little wonder why. Pinball machines have countless mechanical parts subject to mechanical wear and requiring mechanical replacements. All that banging around can equal a whole lot of wear and tear, and without vigilance, your shiny new quarter-eating machine is a worthless hunk of scrap. Your video machines, instead, don't need repair and can be upgraded with a single new chip. That's the power of the internet, you know.
I miss pinball already. It was much more real than video games. You were hitting a real ball with your real stick just like back in the streets of Brooklyn growing up with Jimmy and Pudge. When you scored a point, you got a reassuring *thunk*, and not another epileptic seizure like those pokemon games give you. One pinball machine used to be all it took to get a room moving and grooving, but now where are we? Typing away at our individual boxes with big screens and complete sensory deprivation. What would the Who's Tommy have done with a modern video machine? He certainly wouldn't have written a musical; that's what.
We need to keep pinball machines alive. We need to keep the knowledge of tuning them alive. Pinball repair is a necessary skill I'd hate to see us lose. Then, where'd we be?
These sorts of shenanigans have been going on for years precisely because they're not actually shenanigans: they're just a normal part of the process. When you start a company, it's your business whom you pick to be your partners. It's the same with initial public offerings, except those are even more democratic in nature.
When Redhat went ipo, plenty of people active in the opensource movement got a special offer to join the IPO, and slashdot was abuzz with the excitement of it all. This with VaLinux is just another kind of special offer. Nothing to see here; move along.
The fear to innovate in women's medicine just because you're grossed out is a socially untenable fear. There is already very little research going into new oral contraceptives and other necessary endeavors. Despite the adverse health effects of putting a bleached piece of cotton into one's body, people continue to do it because they have no viable alternative. We need more accountability in the industry, and we need to do our part to make sure new technologies penetrate these neglected markets.
To whoever moderated my original comment down: you're an ignorant coward.
During the cold war we had "1st world", "2nd world", and "3rd world" countries. First-world ones were western-style democracies like ours that fought on our side. Second-world ones were communist countries like the USSR and the eastern "bloc", who opposed us. And third-world countries were the countries not immediately involved in the conflict, like in South America.
Today, communism is completely gone from the world stage, and the old "$ord world" classification is obsolete. But the information age is upon us and is now defining our new political and social interactions in a global sense. I propose that we update our vocabularies with this new tiered classification which is rooted in the very machines that will drive our new economies. For future generations, it'll be much more important to know whether countries have or had access to the latest and greatest imports from the US technology giants than whether they had a particular stance on a silly thing like communism.
Fibers that selectively control the flow of liquids so that they pass in one direction but not the other would be ideal for a super tampon, one that you never have to remove or throw out until after the whole week is over. You could combine it with an organic reprocessor inside which would convert the liquids into dry pellets or extrude them as gaseous byproducts, making the whole process completely hands-off and foolproof. The mark up would be big, but you'd only need one per month and we already have seen people's willingness to buy disposable contact lenses and other such luxuries. It's time that this same technological revolution come to feminine hygiene products.
Once you've done this modification and voided your warranty, you're SOL when the service gets upgraded and you're left behind. I'm surprised people are willing to do this kind of thing when others are spending all kinds of money to protect their devices.
If I had to choose between spending a thousand dollars on a new device when I broke mine or a thousand dollars on a new windows box I could network to my other computer and run as a gateway, I'd rather choose the latter: at least that way, you get something tangible out of it. Windows may not make a great workstation OS, but it's just fine if you're running some network daemons in the background on it and don't fiddle directly. I've done it just fine.
Ken Thompson wrote an important article about this, back in 1984 (wow, that brings back memories), titled Reflections on Trusting Trust where he discussed his famous compiler-trojan which propagated itself even when the user had full access to the source code. The way it worked is the compiler had some code in it that recognized when it was compiling the compiler's own source. When it did, it inserted a bit of code which compiled the source not as a clean compiler but as another copy of the trojan. The user could read the sourcecode all he wanted, but he couldn't get around having to trust the compiler. The thrust of Thompson's article was that you have to put some trust in someone or something along the line.
The moral of the story is that unless you built your own processor, built your own hardware, built your own compiler from scratch, and read the source code and understood it completely, you're open to attack. Open-source itself is no magic bullet, and it's time the zealots figured that out.