I know it's about pedestrian, rather than vehicular, traffic. But for an instant I thought some genius had thought of an exploit for high-tech shoes that had QR code scanners in their soles that linked to their smartphones.
Now that would be a plot for a near future sci-fi novel. A sort of Apple maps-like fiasco that would send hapless pedestrians falling off bridges or onto the freeway.
'I wonder what it would be like to live in a world that simply relies and trusts in the goodness of your neighbors.'
I don't think that existed 100 years ago. I don't think that exists anywhere. Not in our society, nor in the animal world. Anything that trusts too much gets wiped out sooner or later."
Any group where the members fear each other too much would soon disintegrate or worst descend into internecine conflict. Yes, some form of "trust" is necessary in any animal society, even in species where the dominant social unit is the lone wolf or tiger.
Fearing too much is as worst as trusting too much. I'd rather trust my neighbor, whom I've observed for a few weeks, than an amorphous entity called the government, even if that government has been existence for decades or even centuries. There are exceptions. My neighbor could well be a government agent!
If you live in an out-of-way or dangerous place then you make provisions for it. You bring along water and food to last more than a day, you bring weapons and other protective gear, and you don't rely on just one mapping application.
But note how Obama's support fell because he was unable or unwilling to do the Change he promised. So maybe other countries are simply indifferent to having a "free" worldwide Internet. As far as I can tell the Russian/Red Chinese/Islamist proposals would at worst balkanize the Internet, and each country would be free to spy and censor its own version of the Internet as it sees fit.
And that isn't entirely a bad idea, if you already live in a country where electronic communication is as much a fundamental right as the right to hold protest demonstrations on the street.
"In short, this is a non-issue and RMS is (as expected) over-reacting to something that doesn't fit into his perfect Socialist software society."
Every society has parts that are owned by the community. For example, most roads are communally owned. This is done because the cost to maintain a road is minimal when compared to the number of users. Most operating system-level belong in this category.
So asking that the operating system and other "boring" userspace software be "owned" by the community is no more socialist than insistinig that our police force be a citizen's police force and not the mayor's private army. There are still other ways to make money off software even in a supposedly "socialist" software society.
The moral standpoint of the US and other liberal democratic countries to resist such proposals is compromised by these countries' eagerness to "censor" the Internet for something as trivial as copyright infringement. However "evil" you might think it is, copyright infringement doesn't lead to ANY civil disturbance. On the other hand, the Arabs can argue that the propagation of anti-religious media like Innocence of Muslims can trigger riots and hence pose a security threat. Similar arguments may be made by the Chinese and the Russians.
We might see such justifications as flawed. But so is the argument that sites that promote copyright infringement or the sale of fake designer goods should be taken off the Internet.
Nice try at sarcasm. Unfortunately there's a big difference between a sheet of paper and a backlit LCD screen.
Note also that the resolution of what you term "professional offset printing" is often lower than the raw DPI because of the use of halftones or a patterns of dots to simulate the appearance of gray. A magazine picture printed at 1200 DPI may well have a resolution merely equivalent to a 300 DPI photograph printed using traditional analog film processing techniques.
I can't blame the Washington Post. This isn't an isolated move. News publishers throughout the West are fighting to have some pay mechanism in place, either through legilsation, such as in France and Germany, or through paywalls, in English-speaking speaking countries like the US and UK.
A single paper restricting access to its free news service isn't bad. It may impove its bottom line. But imagine what would happen if the majority of the online publications in the West decide to go the pay-before-you-read route? Then more and more people who want to read the news online would go to the remaining free news sources. And guess what? There are organization than would be more than eager to fill the vacuum.
Russia, China, and the news or propoganda organizations of other authoritarian/totalitarian countires can well afford to subsidize online sites that can broadcast or publish their outlook on world events. They just need a little more time to polish off their English, make it sound less like party propaganda and apparat-speak. Perhaps a brand name change would is also in order, if names like Russia Today and China Central TV sound pretty ominous to citizens of Western liberal democracies.
Let's just hope that relatively unbiased news sites like the BBC remain "free" for the rest of the world to read.
Right. It seems that to stay afloat, thesome of the so-called new space companies still require a healthy infusion of government funds, just like the Defense industry. The company closest to achieving "private" space is probably the group assoicated with Virgin Space since they'll mostly be dealing with rich non-governmental passengers, a.ka. space tourists, rather than NASA or the almighty US military.
"An Idealist is just another word for tyrant (benevolent or otherwise)."
You, sir, have just redefined a word to suit the needs of your argument. There's nothing in the word "idealist" to suggest that others are required to submit to the idealist's "ideals". There may well be idealistic tyrants, just as there are greedy, self-serving tyrants who profess their "ideals" merely as a ruse to seduce the gulllible masses.
As for your hypothetical vegan, she or he could act tyranically and impose a meat-eating ban on the other survivors in the island. But it's just as possible that her "idealism" would merely lead to her own death by starvation. She might withdraw from the group and live by herself on her own small part of the island. Now if only she died because of her "idealistic" belief in not harming any sentient life, would that make her a tyrant?
"But once people start making elaborate and complicated legal terms for things, which are designed to try to prevent all sort of things they don't like, and maybe they prevent a few things which coulda been okay but whatever... I don't care whether it's the RIAA or the FSF. It's about control, not liberty, and I don't like it."
You would have wasted less bytes if you simply stated that you hate copyright. Any copyright system is based on the idea of control. Even the non-copyleft licenses would prohibit you from claiming that you wrote something that you didn't. Or from changing the permissive copyright to a copyleft, something which a clueless Linux hacker once attempted to do WRT some BSD code.
Not to take anything away from the efforts of the volunteers, but I think the project's misnamed. According to Wiki a dojo is broadly "a formal training place for any of the Japanese do arts" or specifically " a formal gathering place for students of any Japanese martial arts style such as karate, judo."
The key word is "formal", which while not contradicting appears to contrast with the project's goal of fostering "open and inclusive" participation. The presence of older mentors appears to be the main inspiration for the use of the word "dojo" besides its exotica when compared with more conventional terms like "club", "gym" or everybody's summer favorite "camp".
Damn don't-reply-to-first-post curse. Reposting without typos:
"MS R&D is the largest computer tech R&D in the world. Combine IBM, Intel, and AMD, and you get an idea of their size."
Citation needed. Not disputing the first part. Just the second part about the relative size of Microsoft Research.
If we grant the reasonable assumption that the laws of physics are the same across the galaxy, then we can combine our "ridiculously scant data" on exoplanets with the information and knowledge we already have about life on Earth and the conditions on Mars and other planets visited by space probes. This is the same as in any crime investigation. By itself, a blood stain would be meaningless. You have to compare it to an existing database of DNA samples and corroborate it with other evidence.
I think learning from a "Daily" newspaper is overall a bad idea. Since time is of the essence, a typical news story gets just enough background research that by comparison would make Wikipedia an authoritative source. Just look at the history lessons you would have learned from reading the news at the start of the Iraq War 2 or during a presidential election.
Note that I differentiate between learning and the accumulation of random facts or trivia. If knowing that Kate is going to have a baby is learning, then I guess you can "learn" something even from someone's random celebrity blog.
Mainland China was never colonized by the British Empire. Hong Kong, which was colonized, remains somewhat democratic as a special autonomous region after the UK "returned" the territory to China.
"The thing that makes what we call a "computer" a "computer" is that it's general purpose, and designed to empower creative work. Barring radical developments, tablets and phones are not going to displace the traditional computer any more than game consoles did."
I have a problem with your definition of "computer". The first computers weren't general purpose in any modern sense, simply because they were too low-powered to be anything other than glorified adding machines, or primitive calculators.
Even a smartphone is more general purpose than any computer made before the invention of the so-called "personal" computer. As for "empowering creative work", that's more a legacy of the Macintosh, although printing dot-matrix birthday banners might be considered "creative" by the users of the early keyboard-only Apple computers.
Tablets will displace the desktop computer and laptops in contexts where users don't need to input large amounts of alphanumeric data. Tablets have the advantage of being more discreet, physically more manageable, and yes more versatile than a traditional laptop. I've seen people use their tablets as a video camera. Even without an e-Ink screen, they work better for reading ebooks, especially when you don't have the luxury of a level surface.
Note how I specifically mentioned "alphanumeric data" above. A hardware keyboard has definite advantages for programmers and users of alphabetic writing systems. But for users of writing systems that require up to thousands of unique symbols, a hardware keyboard with its fixed set of keys isn't that more efficient than having the on-screen ability to summon different sets of virtual keyboards.
"i dont think sony ever killed people for bypassing drm though..."
I don't think China has ever sentenced to death someone for merely bypassing the Firewall. Which isn't to say that dissidents aren't tortured or arrested on bogus charges, or that you can get jailed merely for repeating rumors about the health or wealth of certain Party officials. But you have to be doing some seriously disruptive activities in REAL life to get the capital punishment.
Nmap comes with a GUI called Zenmap. If you want to be visual, the GUI has a tab labeled "Topology". There are also self-explanatory tabs for "Hosts" and "Services". It's also a nice way to teach your child about security.
Anybody in the Third World who can afford this calculator is likely to spend the money first on a low-end Android phone. And yes plenty of these low-end smartphones come with easily replaceable gray market rechargeable batteries that you can buy in those same shops sharing bootleg DVDs and software, including phone apps.
Inexpensive scientific caculcators have a place in the educational system. But if you're going to do hardcore math, a secondhand desktop or laptop loaded with either opensource or bootleg software is a much better investment.
Something worse than fuck will happen. The propaganda, er news agencies of the Chinese, Russian, Iranian governments, or some fringe extremist group will take up the slack. They will be more than happy to supply "freely" indexable censored news.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's about pedestrian, rather than vehicular, traffic. But for an instant I thought some genius had thought of an exploit for high-tech shoes that had QR code scanners in their soles that linked to their smartphones.
Now that would be a plot for a near future sci-fi novel. A sort of Apple maps-like fiasco that would send hapless pedestrians falling off bridges or onto the freeway.
"The original question was
'I wonder what it would be like to live in a world that simply relies and trusts in the goodness of your neighbors.'
I don't think that existed 100 years ago. I don't think that exists anywhere. Not in our society, nor in the animal world. Anything that trusts too much gets wiped out sooner or later."
Any group where the members fear each other too much would soon disintegrate or worst descend into internecine conflict. Yes, some form of "trust" is necessary in any animal society, even in species where the dominant social unit is the lone wolf or tiger.
Fearing too much is as worst as trusting too much. I'd rather trust my neighbor, whom I've observed for a few weeks, than an amorphous entity called the government, even if that government has been existence for decades or even centuries. There are exceptions. My neighbor could well be a government agent!
If you live in an out-of-way or dangerous place then you make provisions for it. You bring along water and food to last more than a day, you bring weapons and other protective gear, and you don't rely on just one mapping application.
Yes, that's not a bad idea.
But note how Obama's support fell because he was unable or unwilling to do the Change he promised. So maybe other countries are simply indifferent to having a "free" worldwide Internet. As far as I can tell the Russian/Red Chinese/Islamist proposals would at worst balkanize the Internet, and each country would be free to spy and censor its own version of the Internet as it sees fit.
And that isn't entirely a bad idea, if you already live in a country where electronic communication is as much a fundamental right as the right to hold protest demonstrations on the street.
"In short, this is a non-issue and RMS is (as expected) over-reacting to something that doesn't fit into his perfect Socialist software society."
Every society has parts that are owned by the community. For example, most roads are communally owned. This is done because the cost to maintain a road is minimal when compared to the number of users. Most operating system-level belong in this category.
So asking that the operating system and other "boring" userspace software be "owned" by the community is no more socialist than insistinig that our police force be a citizen's police force and not the mayor's private army. There are still other ways to make money off software even in a supposedly "socialist" software society.
I assume your statement's laced with sarcasm.
The moral standpoint of the US and other liberal democratic countries to resist such proposals is compromised by these countries' eagerness to "censor" the Internet for something as trivial as copyright infringement. However "evil" you might think it is, copyright infringement doesn't lead to ANY civil disturbance. On the other hand, the Arabs can argue that the propagation of anti-religious media like Innocence of Muslims can trigger riots and hence pose a security threat. Similar arguments may be made by the Chinese and the Russians.
We might see such justifications as flawed. But so is the argument that sites that promote copyright infringement or the sale of fake designer goods should be taken off the Internet.
Nice try at sarcasm. Unfortunately there's a big difference between a sheet of paper and a backlit LCD screen.
Note also that the resolution of what you term "professional offset printing" is often lower than the raw DPI because of the use of halftones or a patterns of dots to simulate the appearance of gray. A magazine picture printed at 1200 DPI may well have a resolution merely equivalent to a 300 DPI photograph printed using traditional analog film processing techniques.
I can't blame the Washington Post. This isn't an isolated move. News publishers throughout the West are fighting to have some pay mechanism in place, either through legilsation, such as in France and Germany, or through paywalls, in English-speaking speaking countries like the US and UK.
A single paper restricting access to its free news service isn't bad. It may impove its bottom line. But imagine what would happen if the majority of the online publications in the West decide to go the pay-before-you-read route? Then more and more people who want to read the news online would go to the remaining free news sources. And guess what? There are organization than would be more than eager to fill the vacuum.
Russia, China, and the news or propoganda organizations of other authoritarian/totalitarian countires can well afford to subsidize online sites that can broadcast or publish their outlook on world events. They just need a little more time to polish off their English, make it sound less like party propaganda and apparat-speak. Perhaps a brand name change would is also in order, if names like Russia Today and China Central TV sound pretty ominous to citizens of Western liberal democracies.
Let's just hope that relatively unbiased news sites like the BBC remain "free" for the rest of the world to read.
Right. It seems that to stay afloat, thesome of the so-called new space companies still require a healthy infusion of government funds, just like the Defense industry. The company closest to achieving "private" space is probably the group assoicated with Virgin Space since they'll mostly be dealing with rich non-governmental passengers, a.ka. space tourists, rather than NASA or the almighty US military.
"An Idealist is just another word for tyrant (benevolent or otherwise)."
You, sir, have just redefined a word to suit the needs of your argument. There's nothing in the word "idealist" to suggest that others are required to submit to the idealist's "ideals". There may well be idealistic tyrants, just as there are greedy, self-serving tyrants who profess their "ideals" merely as a ruse to seduce the gulllible masses.
As for your hypothetical vegan, she or he could act tyranically and impose a meat-eating ban on the other survivors in the island. But it's just as possible that her "idealism" would merely lead to her own death by starvation. She might withdraw from the group and live by herself on her own small part of the island. Now if only she died because of her "idealistic" belief in not harming any sentient life, would that make her a tyrant?
"But once people start making elaborate and complicated legal terms for things, which are designed to try to prevent all sort of things they don't like, and maybe they prevent a few things which coulda been okay but whatever... I don't care whether it's the RIAA or the FSF. It's about control, not liberty, and I don't like it."
You would have wasted less bytes if you simply stated that you hate copyright. Any copyright system is based on the idea of control. Even the non-copyleft licenses would prohibit you from claiming that you wrote something that you didn't. Or from changing the permissive copyright to a copyleft, something which a clueless Linux hacker once attempted to do WRT some BSD code.
Not to take anything away from the efforts of the volunteers, but I think the project's misnamed. According to Wiki a dojo is broadly "a formal training place for any of the Japanese do arts" or specifically " a formal gathering place for students of any Japanese martial arts style such as karate, judo."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dojo
The key word is "formal", which while not contradicting appears to contrast with the project's goal of fostering "open and inclusive" participation. The presence of older mentors appears to be the main inspiration for the use of the word "dojo" besides its exotica when compared with more conventional terms like "club", "gym" or everybody's summer favorite "camp".
Think of it as a sort of geek heaven where the probability of reaching nirvana is > 0.
Damn don't-reply-to-first-post curse. Reposting without typos: "MS R&D is the largest computer tech R&D in the world. Combine IBM, Intel, and AMD, and you get an idea of their size." Citation needed. Not disputing the first part. Just the second part about the relative size of Microsoft Research.
"MS R&D is the largest computer tech R&D in the world. Combine IBM, Intel, and AMD, and you get an idea of their size."
Citation need. Not disputing the first part. Just the second part about the relative size of Miscorsoft Research.
If we grant the reasonable assumption that the laws of physics are the same across the galaxy, then we can combine our "ridiculously scant data" on exoplanets with the information and knowledge we already have about life on Earth and the conditions on Mars and other planets visited by space probes. This is the same as in any crime investigation. By itself, a blood stain would be meaningless. You have to compare it to an existing database of DNA samples and corroborate it with other evidence.
I think learning from a "Daily" newspaper is overall a bad idea. Since time is of the essence, a typical news story gets just enough background research that by comparison would make Wikipedia an authoritative source. Just look at the history lessons you would have learned from reading the news at the start of the Iraq War 2 or during a presidential election.
Note that I differentiate between learning and the accumulation of random facts or trivia. If knowing that Kate is going to have a baby is learning, then I guess you can "learn" something even from someone's random celebrity blog.
Mainland China was never colonized by the British Empire. Hong Kong, which was colonized, remains somewhat democratic as a special autonomous region after the UK "returned" the territory to China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Country_Two_Systems
"The thing that makes what we call a "computer" a "computer" is that it's general purpose, and designed to empower creative work. Barring radical developments, tablets and phones are not going to displace the traditional computer any more than game consoles did."
I have a problem with your definition of "computer". The first computers weren't general purpose in any modern sense, simply because they were too low-powered to be anything other than glorified adding machines, or primitive calculators.
Even a smartphone is more general purpose than any computer made before the invention of the so-called "personal" computer. As for "empowering creative work", that's more a legacy of the Macintosh, although printing dot-matrix birthday banners might be considered "creative" by the users of the early keyboard-only Apple computers.
Tablets will displace the desktop computer and laptops in contexts where users don't need to input large amounts of alphanumeric data. Tablets have the advantage of being more discreet, physically more manageable, and yes more versatile than a traditional laptop. I've seen people use their tablets as a video camera. Even without an e-Ink screen, they work better for reading ebooks, especially when you don't have the luxury of a level surface.
Note how I specifically mentioned "alphanumeric data" above. A hardware keyboard has definite advantages for programmers and users of alphabetic writing systems. But for users of writing systems that require up to thousands of unique symbols, a hardware keyboard with its fixed set of keys isn't that more efficient than having the on-screen ability to summon different sets of virtual keyboards.
"i dont think sony ever killed people for bypassing drm though..."
I don't think China has ever sentenced to death someone for merely bypassing the Firewall. Which isn't to say that dissidents aren't tortured or arrested on bogus charges, or that you can get jailed merely for repeating rumors about the health or wealth of certain Party officials. But you have to be doing some seriously disruptive activities in REAL life to get the capital punishment.
Nmap comes with a GUI called Zenmap. If you want to be visual, the GUI has a tab labeled "Topology". There are also self-explanatory tabs for "Hosts" and "Services". It's also a nice way to teach your child about security.
Yes, an ex-Nintendo developer even had a name for this philosophy of building hardware using non-bleeding edge components:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology
Anybody in the Third World who can afford this calculator is likely to spend the money first on a low-end Android phone. And yes plenty of these low-end smartphones come with easily replaceable gray market rechargeable batteries that you can buy in those same shops sharing bootleg DVDs and software, including phone apps.
Inexpensive scientific caculcators have a place in the educational system. But if you're going to do hardcore math, a secondhand desktop or laptop loaded with either opensource or bootleg software is a much better investment.
Something worse than fuck will happen. The propaganda, er news agencies of the Chinese, Russian, Iranian governments, or some fringe extremist group will take up the slack. They will be more than happy to supply "freely" indexable censored news.
Not if he can throw that chair faster.