You're right, that's what you'd expect, and at least some of the research indicates that's what happens. I'm not going to reiterate them here, but I've discussed this very issue in a couple of other posts in this topic, one of which has a couple of good links to articles and papers on this exact topic.
In short, TDMA and GSM do exhibit an effect that is more "harmful" than does CDMA. That's the reason I wil only carry and use a CDMA phone (and why I rant elsewhere about Handspring's bone-headed decision to support only GSM in their upcoming VisorPhone, which is probably the coolest and most useful piece of tech to come along since the original Pilot 1000.
Radiation does not have to be ionizing to be dangerous!
I don't think anyone this side of Ted Kaczynski is arguing that all "radiation" is bad. But the people who maintain that RF "can't possibly be harmful because at these levels it doesn't have the energy to break molecular bonds" are taking a position even more ridiuculous than Ted's.
The only safe thing to say is that there is a lot we don't know, and that there is at least some evidence that even low-power RF can cause health problems. (That high-power RF can cause health problems is easily validated by defeating the safety interlock on your microwave oven. I don't recommend that you try that, as you'll probably need new corneas afterwards, if you're lucky..)
A couple of sites not mentioned yet that have a good set of reasonable links about possible risks:
I had another really good one or two bookmarked, but apparently they've moved. If I find out where they went, I'll post the info.
There are links in the above to the many studies that show a linkage between wireless phone usage (especially the GSM and other TDMA CancerPhones (my term, not his)) and non-trivial biological effects. We clearly don't understand this complex issue yet, but to say there's nothing there is simply to be ignorant of the facts, or take a blind position based on a wish.
I'd agree that the ratings as written are silly, but the report missed some key facts that affect the biological impacts that each phone can have.
In particular, they ignored the extremely important factor of modulation method. Comparing raw "power output" figures for CDMA and TDMA is more like comparing apples and rocks than even apples and oranges. TDMA (and TDMA-based systems like GSM and its ilk) use a wideband, high-power transmission rigidly slotted in time. This by necessity produces a train of extremely sharp rise-time/fall-time RF power spikes that appear, at least in some studies, to have potential harmful effects on nearby biological systems. Every study that has shown a correlation between RF and potential health problems has been with either analog (which has higher radiated power in general) or TDMA/GSM digital systems. Even analog systems seem to be safer than TDMA because thier continuous modulation lacks the sharp spikiness that seems to be part of the health problem.
CDMA is fundamentally different in its physics because the RF signal is both much lower power and *continuously* spread across the entire frequency band, thus, no spikes. (CDMA is a direct sequence, not frequency-hopping, spread spectrum system.) This is just what Claude Shannon said would happen: if you spread the information out over the frequency domain, the power required to propagate the signal falls dramatically. In fact, CDMA signals are very much like background noise, which is why they were first used for secure and stealthy military communcations syustems. (The direct sequence "spreading sequence" in CDMA is evan called a PN, for "pseudo noise" code. There are a set of these codes called "gold codes" that are all orthogonal to one another, and obviously, the ones you want to use to maximize cell capacity.)
Finally, not all systems are power agile, as Bruce suggests - CDMA is, and developing the ability for the handset to be able to adjust and coordinate its power output in real time with the base station was probably the most difficult part of the engineering that went into making CDMA a commercial reality. (It was certainly responsible for CDMA's rocky and slower start in the market than the brute-force TDMA approach. Power agility is a nice-to-have for battery life in a TDMA system, but it's a gotta-have in a CDMA system of any significant density.)
It's obvious there's quite a lot we don't know about the effects of RF exposure on living things, but there's more than a little evidence to suggest that high power analog and sharp, very fast high-power spikes *may* be hazardous, so why not opt for an alternative that is likely much safer?
This is my frustration with Handspring over their (finally) perfect implementation of a phone for integration with a PDA - it's only available in GSM CancerPhone form. I'd buy one in heartbeat if I could get it with a CDMA radio.
And no, for the record, I do not work for Qualcomm or any other CDMA company - it's just better technology, and a couple of years ago, I bothered to do the research to find out the facts, as best we know them today. I also have decided, unlike some notables like Richard Branson, that carrying and using a wireless phone is worth the risks - but I made sure I understood the nature of the risk I was taking on before I accepted it.
(As an aside, I personally think all the people, even here on slashdot, decrying the "danger" of phone use while driving are luddites - there was a similar argument about the "obvious" dangers of car radios back inthe 1920's. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed...)
This is TI's "Digital Light Processing" system. It is indeed very cool: It's a direct digital output device, there's no DAC or pixel drivers required. That's because it's really just a video RAM with a set of MEMS mirrors which rock back and forth on a duty cycle proportional to the "on-ness" of a particular pixel. They ysed to have a site explaining in detail at www.ti.com/dlp (Warning - I haven't checked this link to see if it still works, since Netscape is acting flaky and I want to get through this post.)
I looked at this technology a few years ago, and all the better portable "LCD" projectors out now are actually DLP units. There is *no* visible separation between pixels, unlike LCD or other systems, and the brightness is incredible - easily viewable in a daylit room.
At one point a year or two ago, the TI web site said that Nokia was planning a (40-ish inch) DLP-based TV, which while not a flat panel, was still planned to come in at only about a foot deep. I don't know what happened to this product, but it looks like Samsung beat tehm to that form factor with their new FLCD TV.
(I do know that TI had real problems in getting the DLP chips to scale up in resolution - they were stuck at 6x4 and 8x6 for a long time... (Yes, that's 640x480 and 800x600, really - it's a common abbrev. in the laptop business...)
But, lawyers have been messing with the meaning of expert in the field, so that now, a software developer isn't an expert, only a patent lawyer is an expert. [unnecessary expletive deleted]
To put it bluntly, you're wrong: such an expert is clearly defined as one reasonably skilled in the art, and there is a great body of writings and case law defining exactly what that means. In no way does it make the patent lawyers the experts. In general, the test is that the solution being patented should not be obvious to someone trained and experienced in the area in question, but require some special insight. Sometimes, the simple fact that no one has done something before when the "pieces" to do so have existed for a while can buttress an applicant's claim for non-obviousness. (Would Amazon's one-click survive a challenge on those grounds? Good question.)
If you wnat to cease to be patent challenged, I suggest Nolo Press' excellent book "Patent it Yourself". Even if you have no intent of patenting anything yourself, the book is a wealth of information about the patent system.
Remember: Killing or weakening patents helps the Microsofts of the world more than it helps anyone else. The US patent system is the best in the world - don't let a few bad patents destroy the most powerful engine of innovation and creativity the world has ever seen.
We absolutely should prohibit anything like this suugestion that patent examiners should be able to confer with outsiders.
There is a reason innovation happens in America far more than it happens in other countries (even those that are quite capable technologically) - the strength of the US patent system. Our strong patent system provides vital protections for small, innovative inventors and gives them a fighting chance against deep-pocketed competitors. The US Patent system succeeds in levelling the playing field like no other system in human history. This is one of the chief reasons for the exploding pace of patents and innovation in the US as opposed to other countries - the US is one of the few countries that protects the contents of the patent application until the patent is issued.
It should be obvious that requiring disclosure of patent applications in any way (or even "allowing" the PTO to leak such information) will put the US in the same boat as other nations, where individual inventors (who have both the technological and economic motivation to innovate) will have their inventions stolen or their patents worked around before they ever issue.
WARNING, FOLKS: Supporting this bill is literally supporting the likes of Microsoft, and their ability to be far more predatory than they are today. If you kill patents, all you do is ensure the domination of the huge corporations, which have little motivation to innovate, and everything to gain by stealing every invention they can. US PATENTS ARE A VERY GOOD THING!
Actually, GPG/PGP support would be one of the worst things that could happen to Mozilla and the Net at large.
The reason: we already have a real, actual Internet standard for secure e-mail: S/MIME
Internet standards matter, folks! If you don't believe it, just ask Microsoft - they had to learn the lesson the hard way a few years ago, and barely moved fast enough to avoid oblivion. The Mozilla team show no such agility, sadly.
It was this about-face even more than their abuse of power that established them as the standard Internet platform in so much of the corporate world. Like it or not, Microsoft currently sticks to the important Internet standards better than the Netscape folks.
So what happens if they end up not only with an STD but married to the person who gave it them? The advice you are giving is half baked (literally) it only makes sense to tell them "Marry another virgin". (Let alone all potential damage your advice could do if your children are not definitly hetero mono in the first place.)
Actually, my advice very much *will* be to marry a virgin. There is nothing wrong or even weird about being a virgin at marriage, nor is there a shortage of available (and desirable) virgins - maybe you should check out the phenomenal growth and success of new pledge campaigns like "True Love Waits" before assuming everyone will jump into the sack at the first opportunity.
Finally, there is no potential damage my advice could cause, for the very simple reason that it is that very advice that will ensure that they are sexually well-balanced or "definitly hetero mono" as you put it. (If one believes in marriage, then both "hetero" and "mono" are presuppositions, since it is flat impossible to have a marriage without *both*: marriage is by its very *definition* a pledged monogamous relationship between a man and a woman! Yes, that means that "gay marriage" is indeed an oxymoron. Reality's tough sometimes.)
I don't think Cisco is trying to patent NAT here, but there's little doubt in my mind that they could.
A few years ago, Cisco bought a company called Network Translation, which had one product: the now-famous PIX. This was a very interesting box, with a custom OS-9-like operating system, and was legitimately, so far as I know, the first implementation of any kind of network address translation. I know Network Translation had some patents pending back years ago, we may just be seing these now. If so, they have a legitimate claim, since I was following NAT pretty closely back then (this was the time leading up to the "we're running out of IP addresses!" paranoia), and there was *no one* else doing NAT at that time. Cisco watched, and then, wisely, bought them.
I doubt they could enforce the patent, due to the later IETF work (we were in the RFC 1200-1300 range when I was looking at this stuff), but having the patent issue may be entirely appropriate, even if it is for the basic concept of NAT.
I'm sure the/. thought police will moderate me down into negative numbers for this, but here goes...
Furnishing the child with information in the three example cases you use would more than likely fall under the category of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, which (I believe) is a crime in all states. (Yes, I AM saying they should not have access to that information anonymously - they are not adults.)
Filtering/censorship is NOT a bad thing. Parents have a responsibility to (dare I say it?) *shield* their children about some things until they are old enough to deal with them maturely. I for one plan on withholding information about all of the topics you mention above for as long as I can. And no, I'm not in any way hurting my children by doing this. In fact, not only am I not taking anything away, but I am *giving* them their childhood back - an invaluable gift which today's society is all too ready to take away by forcing an adult knowledge of sex, etc. on even the youngest.
It is my solemn responsibility to care for those children and instill good morals and Truth into them in the short time I can. ("Truth", not "truth", because absolute Truth must exist in order for any logic or reason to exist.) And yes, that means it's my responsibilty as a father to teach (not just tell) my children NOT to have premarital sex of any kind. (Gasp!) Not only because it's morally wrong, but also because it's really, really dangerous - there are ~2 dozen STDs today, up from 2 thirty years ago. Half are incurable. Take just one of the incurables, HPV: The NIH and CDC have both testified before Congress that condoms are absolutely ineffective in preventing its spread, and it is provably the direct cause of 90% of cervical cancer in the US, which killed 5000 women last year. The disease's long-term effects on men are less understood, but it is highly correlated with penile cancer.
Turning kids loose into an environment that encourages them to play in the snake pit that is today's sexual playground is worse than irresponsible - it is and should be criminal.
Apprpriate censorship is a valid, measured, and necessary response to the dangers that an unfiltered Internet poses to children. If you don't agree this is necessary, then you either have no children yourself, or have given insufficient thought to your responsibilities as a parent.
(And no, I don't have a filter on my computers at home now, primarily because there is no good, affordable, non-OS-dependent, single point filter that can work with a cable modem - so the computers are and will remain, sadly, completely off-limits to the children. They're really not missing much, though...)
But remember, Becker doesn't "own" his code anymore - he GPL'ed it. It appears waht he really wants is a new restriction in the GPL that prevents anyone from using his GPL'ed code without his permission, even if they're not breaking the GPL. Somehow I missed that part in the license, mostly because it's not there (yet.)
Guys, lighten up or you'll wind up living down to that Gnazi epithet...
So the question that needs to be addressed is: are binary files created from GPL code subject to the same restrictions as the source code? So it's not the source code, and it's not even the binary created from the source code - it's the binary created from the binary, and the violation is not releasing the source to the operating system that uses it.
Difficult question.
No, it's not difficult at all. Despite what Stallman wants, there must be some limit to the "viral conatmination" of a piece of GPL'ed code. To argue otherwise quite simply reduces to the absurd position that "Free" software and commercial software are forever separated by a chasm which can never be crossed in either direction, possibly to the extent that GPL'ed software can only be run on a GPL'ed OS.
It's funny how the "Free" licenses are in reality more restrictive than the "non-Free" licenses, isn't it?
The scary thing, as I wrote to Bruce above, is that the proposed "fix", GPL3, would have to also prevent the legal distribution of binaries for any operating system (including BSD) distributed under a non-GPL-compatible license. It might even prevent the distribution of binaries without source in all cases.
That, to me, is far scarier than anything Sun *could* do. I'm afraid we are apporaching a point where the GPL may well be the biggest single threat to the contined success of open source software...
There is on harm, and no foul here! Any efforts to make the GPL viral to yet another layer of abstraction will surely result in the whole silly thing being judged unenforceable in court - is that what the FSF really wants?
it's overpriced for what you get, especially considering alot of their hardware is just rebranded (esp media drives).
Well, that pretty much lets out everyone but IBM, since they are the only computer company I know of that also makes disk mechanisms! (I think even HP has finally given up, and DEC/Compaq stopped some time ago.)
Some people here find it fasionable to bash Sun - I've been both a buyer and a seller of their gear, and generally (with a few exceptions) you get what you pay for.
This is ridiculous, though - if I'm reading you right, Bruce, GPL3 would prevent the distribution of binaries of GPL'ed programs for non-GPL'ed operating systems. Not only that, but by the logic being argued in this thread, it would become illegal to distribute any driver binaries even for Linux without distributing the source along with it.
I hope I'm misinterpreting your position here, but this is where the "GPL uber alles" thinking leads us.
Niether WAP nor WML is either required or desirable in wireless interfaces either today or in the future. There is quite simply no compelling reason to support WAP and a whole host of reasons not to.
See post #38 in this topic for a pretty good set of links to pages critical of WAP. Read them all (and then go read phone.com's site for balance) before making up your mind. I think you'll agree that all WAP "standards" should die ASAP.
Great response! I'm amazed by all the whiny hand-wringing here that "someone out there may have gotten a better deal than I did, and it's not faaaaair!" - just like a three year old.
We each strike our own bargains and have no right to complain later just because someone may have gotten a slightly better deal.
That last verse (15) should really be taken to heart by the crowd here.
Actually, every grocery store membership I've seen does indeed change the price at the register. I know here in Texas, for instance, Randall's (now part of the giant Safeway) Remarkable Ripoff-protection-racket card is required to avoid paying *way* too much at the register (fortunately, thier main competitor here, HEB, doesn't play such games, so they get our grocery $$.)
It's not even the profiling I object to (since there's really no way to avoid it anymore anyway, unless you always pay with actual green cash) so much as the attitude that "you must play our game or we'll make you pay through the nose".
This is really the whole point of affinity-group marketing: the price one customer pays for a given product may be different from the price paid by the next customer. The big products companies are using these sorts of systems to target products at particular demographic segments that may be eligible for a discount negotiated though professional organization (say, doctors) or to influence the buying habits of first-time moms with a new baby.
C'mon guys, why is it that you apparently think Amazon isn't entitled to d othe same things any other retailer does - go to Wal-Mart and see how prices fluctuate - all those "roll-back" signs show the ones that dropped (at least temporarily, but there's no notation (surprise, surprise) on the ones that went up a little bit.
This is completely normal practice in the brick and mortar retail business, whay bash Amazon for it? To me, this just shows the juvenile nature of the Slashdot crowd, who apparently just can't stand the fact that Bezos was sharp enough to patent one-click shopping before anyone else. (I'm on the record here as saying I think the patent is (and should be) valid, and the complaints are mostly sour grapes, or the rantings of those that think (wrongly) that patents are a bad thing. See my letters to LWN a few moths back for more info.)
And yes, I have noticed Amazon does this - I bought one the the slick little Linksys broadband routers from them last week, and noticed that delaying my purchase by three days cost me an extra couple of bucks - strange, but hardly anything to worry about, as it's still about the best price out there, and I really *like* one-click shopping - it's one of the reasons I still use and will continue to buy from Amazon. (Also, compare the effort of *cancelling* an order with Amazon to the effort required by other e-tailers for a real eye-opener.) My only complaint with them is that it's too hard to get in touch with a real person if something (usually shipping) goes wrong...
NO! We should NOT keep writing software for this device. There are plenty of reasonably priced bar code readers out there that don't even require drivers at all (their interfaces are typically described as "keyboard wedges" - they lierally make it look like you typed in the info. - all the magic happens in the hardware!)
Why should we even dignify a such a proprietary device with our support, especially after their behaviour and with good, and open alternatives? Simple bar code readers just aren't that expensive, guys... Go grab a cheap one, get a Code 39 (3 of 9) bar code font and go to town. (There are several other formats, but Code 39 is kind of the Lingua Franca of the bar code world, and I've found it the most common and standard format int he past...)
Actually, it's funny you would even bother to be posting here if you really believe that - it flies in the face of the motives behind the open source movement.
There's an old saying: "Good programmers write good code, great programmers steal good code." Now before you go ballistic, realize that "steal" in the context of this saying has never meant actual theft, but simply leveraging the work of others.
Why *should* the guy admiring your site bother to learn how to create the effect from scratch? The problem has already been solved, and he simply wanted to leverage an already existing solution to a problem he had. When Miguel says we should do this, it's a good thing...
He probably went away thinking you were quite a jerk, and I'm not entirely sure he wasn't right. I'd have just told him how to take and use the code himself - where's the harm in that? (Especially since you seem to be referring to plain old HTML code and not even Javascript or anything even remotely programmatic?)
Yup, we do. Does "Git a rope!" mean anything to you?
(For the clueless, this is a reference to a famous Pace Picante Sauce commercial - a group of cowhands on the trail are looking at the salsa provided by their new "cookie" and discover it's not the good stuff from San Antonio, but is made in "New York City??!!". The lead cowpoke turns to another and orders, "Git a rope!", as Cookie gulps and realizes he's about to get stretched. The only reason I bother to explain this is for non-US readers...)
In general, I expect that English forms a much better basis for a computer language for only one reason: Parts of speech in English are positionally determined rather than being determined by form as they would be in Japanese, Latin, or other "inflected" languages.
How would you like to write a parser where you don't know the order of the operators and/or data? My guess is that regardless of the features of the natural language, we'd end up with something like we've got just because it makes writing the laguage parsers so much easier. Whether this will change in the future is an interesting topic for speculation.
I think if Perl were written in Japanese, you'd see verbs on the tail-ends of sentences.
split( ',', @foo );
would become
( ',', @foo ) split;
That would make sense, since Japanese and other oriental languages are strongly verb-final. (I know Korean is for sure.)
Whether it's an advantage to first know what operation you're doing, or what you're doing it on is a topic that should bring about a lively Forth and RPN vs. the world discussion...
English has such a huge vocabulary primarily because English speakers, unlike, say, Francophones, are not at all averse to stealing perfectly good words from other languages when they address a need.
This in combination with other factors, makes English much more subtlely expressive than most other languages in use today. (Interestingly, all languages seem to be becoming simpler - most ancient languages were far more complex than modern ones!)
Given that most computer languages are only designed to communicate a very narrow set of things relative to natural languages, there's an apples and oranges relationship here: Comparing programming and natural languages is an excercise that can produce nothing of value.
Finally, Perl is quite obviously based on something other than English... [ducks behind flame shield]
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, that's what you'd expect, and at least some of the research indicates that's what happens. I'm not going to reiterate them here, but I've discussed this very issue in a couple of other posts in this topic, one of which has a couple of good links to articles and papers on this exact topic.
In short, TDMA and GSM do exhibit an effect that is more "harmful" than does CDMA. That's the reason I wil only carry and use a CDMA phone (and why I rant elsewhere about Handspring's bone-headed decision to support only GSM in their upcoming VisorPhone, which is probably the coolest and most useful piece of tech to come along since the original Pilot 1000.
Radiation does not have to be ionizing to be dangerous!
I don't think anyone this side of Ted Kaczynski is arguing that all "radiation" is bad. But the people who maintain that RF "can't possibly be harmful because at these levels it doesn't have the energy to break molecular bonds" are taking a position even more ridiuculous than Ted's.
The only safe thing to say is that there is a lot we don't know, and that there is at least some evidence that even low-power RF can cause health problems. (That high-power RF can cause health problems is easily validated by defeating the safety interlock on your microwave oven. I don't recommend that you try that, as you'll probably need new corneas afterwards, if you're lucky..)
A couple of sites not mentioned yet that have a good set of reasonable links about possible risks:
Australian Journalist Stewart Fist's collection of General Cellphone Health risk links
Fist's list of links to scientific data and papers on the issue
I had another really good one or two bookmarked, but apparently they've moved. If I find out where they went, I'll post the info.
There are links in the above to the many studies that show a linkage between wireless phone usage (especially the GSM and other TDMA CancerPhones (my term, not his)) and non-trivial biological effects. We clearly don't understand this complex issue yet, but to say there's nothing there is simply to be ignorant of the facts, or take a blind position based on a wish.
I'd agree that the ratings as written are silly, but the report missed some key facts that affect the biological impacts that each phone can have.
In particular, they ignored the extremely important factor of modulation method. Comparing raw "power output" figures for CDMA and TDMA is more like comparing apples and rocks than even apples and oranges. TDMA (and TDMA-based systems like GSM and its ilk) use a wideband, high-power transmission rigidly slotted in time. This by necessity produces a train of extremely sharp rise-time/fall-time RF power spikes that appear, at least in some studies, to have potential harmful effects on nearby biological systems. Every study that has shown a correlation between RF and potential health problems has been with either analog (which has higher radiated power in general) or TDMA/GSM digital systems. Even analog systems seem to be safer than TDMA because thier continuous modulation lacks the sharp spikiness that seems to be part of the health problem.
CDMA is fundamentally different in its physics because the RF signal is both much lower power and *continuously* spread across the entire frequency band, thus, no spikes. (CDMA is a direct sequence, not frequency-hopping, spread spectrum system.) This is just what Claude Shannon said would happen: if you spread the information out over the frequency domain, the power required to propagate the signal falls dramatically. In fact, CDMA signals are very much like background noise, which is why they were first used for secure and stealthy military communcations syustems. (The direct sequence "spreading sequence" in CDMA is evan called a PN, for "pseudo noise" code. There are a set of these codes called "gold codes" that are all orthogonal to one another, and obviously, the ones you want to use to maximize cell capacity.)
Finally, not all systems are power agile, as Bruce suggests - CDMA is, and developing the ability for the handset to be able to adjust and coordinate its power output in real time with the base station was probably the most difficult part of the engineering that went into making CDMA a commercial reality. (It was certainly responsible for CDMA's rocky and slower start in the market than the brute-force TDMA approach. Power agility is a nice-to-have for battery life in a TDMA system, but it's a gotta-have in a CDMA system of any significant density.)
It's obvious there's quite a lot we don't know about the effects of RF exposure on living things, but there's more than a little evidence to suggest that high power analog and sharp, very fast high-power spikes *may* be hazardous, so why not opt for an alternative that is likely much safer?
This is my frustration with Handspring over their (finally) perfect implementation of a phone for integration with a PDA - it's only available in GSM CancerPhone form. I'd buy one in heartbeat if I could get it with a CDMA radio.
And no, for the record, I do not work for Qualcomm or any other CDMA company - it's just better technology, and a couple of years ago, I bothered to do the research to find out the facts, as best we know them today. I also have decided, unlike some notables like Richard Branson, that carrying and using a wireless phone is worth the risks - but I made sure I understood the nature of the risk I was taking on before I accepted it.
(As an aside, I personally think all the people, even here on slashdot, decrying the "danger" of phone use while driving are luddites - there was a similar argument about the "obvious" dangers of car radios back inthe 1920's. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed...)
This is TI's "Digital Light Processing" system. It is indeed very cool: It's a direct digital output device, there's no DAC or pixel drivers required. That's because it's really just a video RAM with a set of MEMS mirrors which rock back and forth on a duty cycle proportional to the "on-ness" of a particular pixel. They ysed to have a site explaining in detail at www.ti.com/dlp (Warning - I haven't checked this link to see if it still works, since Netscape is acting flaky and I want to get through this post.)
I looked at this technology a few years ago, and all the better portable "LCD" projectors out now are actually DLP units. There is *no* visible separation between pixels, unlike LCD or other systems, and the brightness is incredible - easily viewable in a daylit room.
At one point a year or two ago, the TI web site said that Nokia was planning a (40-ish inch) DLP-based TV, which while not a flat panel, was still planned to come in at only about a foot deep. I don't know what happened to this product, but it looks like Samsung beat tehm to that form factor with their new FLCD TV.
(I do know that TI had real problems in getting the DLP chips to scale up in resolution - they were stuck at 6x4 and 8x6 for a long time... (Yes, that's 640x480 and 800x600, really - it's a common abbrev. in the laptop business...)
But, lawyers have been messing with the meaning of expert in the field, so that now, a software developer isn't an expert, only a patent lawyer is an expert. [unnecessary expletive deleted]
To put it bluntly, you're wrong: such an expert is clearly defined as one reasonably skilled in the art, and there is a great body of writings and case law defining exactly what that means. In no way does it make the patent lawyers the experts. In general, the test is that the solution being patented should not be obvious to someone trained and experienced in the area in question, but require some special insight. Sometimes, the simple fact that no one has done something before when the "pieces" to do so have existed for a while can buttress an applicant's claim for non-obviousness. (Would Amazon's one-click survive a challenge on those grounds? Good question.)
If you wnat to cease to be patent challenged, I suggest Nolo Press' excellent book "Patent it Yourself". Even if you have no intent of patenting anything yourself, the book is a wealth of information about the patent system.
Remember: Killing or weakening patents helps the Microsofts of the world more than it helps anyone else. The US patent system is the best in the world - don't let a few bad patents destroy the most powerful engine of innovation and creativity the world has ever seen.
We absolutely should prohibit anything like this suugestion that patent examiners should be able to confer with outsiders.
There is a reason innovation happens in America far more than it happens in other countries (even those that are quite capable technologically) - the strength of the US patent system. Our strong patent system provides vital protections for small, innovative inventors and gives them a fighting chance against deep-pocketed competitors. The US Patent system succeeds in levelling the playing field like no other system in human history. This is one of the chief reasons for the exploding pace of patents and innovation in the US as opposed to other countries - the US is one of the few countries that protects the contents of the patent application until the patent is issued.
It should be obvious that requiring disclosure of patent applications in any way (or even "allowing" the PTO to leak such information) will put the US in the same boat as other nations, where individual inventors (who have both the technological and economic motivation to innovate) will have their inventions stolen or their patents worked around before they ever issue.
WARNING, FOLKS: Supporting this bill is literally supporting the likes of Microsoft, and their ability to be far more predatory than they are today. If you kill patents, all you do is ensure the domination of the huge corporations, which have little motivation to innovate, and everything to gain by stealing every invention they can. US PATENTS ARE A VERY GOOD THING!
Actually, GPG/PGP support would be one of the worst things that could happen to Mozilla and the Net at large.
The reason: we already have a real, actual Internet standard for secure e-mail: S/MIME
Internet standards matter, folks! If you don't believe it, just ask Microsoft - they had to learn the lesson the hard way a few years ago, and barely moved fast enough to avoid oblivion. The Mozilla team show no such agility, sadly.
It was this about-face even more than their abuse of power that established them as the standard Internet platform in so much of the corporate world. Like it or not, Microsoft currently sticks to the important Internet standards better than the Netscape folks.
So what happens if they end up not only with an STD but married to the person who gave it them? The advice you are giving is half baked (literally) it only makes sense to tell them "Marry another virgin". (Let alone all potential damage your advice could do if your children are not definitly hetero mono in the first place.)
Actually, my advice very much *will* be to marry a virgin. There is nothing wrong or even weird about being a virgin at marriage, nor is there a shortage of available (and desirable) virgins - maybe you should check out the phenomenal growth and success of new pledge campaigns like "True Love Waits" before assuming everyone will jump into the sack at the first opportunity.
Finally, there is no potential damage my advice could cause, for the very simple reason that it is that very advice that will ensure that they are sexually well-balanced or "definitly hetero mono" as you put it. (If one believes in marriage, then both "hetero" and "mono" are presuppositions, since it is flat impossible to have a marriage without *both*: marriage is by its very *definition* a pledged monogamous relationship between a man and a woman! Yes, that means that "gay marriage" is indeed an oxymoron. Reality's tough sometimes.)
I don't think Cisco is trying to patent NAT here, but there's little doubt in my mind that they could.
A few years ago, Cisco bought a company called Network Translation, which had one product: the now-famous PIX. This was a very interesting box, with a custom OS-9-like operating system, and was legitimately, so far as I know, the first implementation of any kind of network address translation. I know Network Translation had some patents pending back years ago, we may just be seing these now. If so, they have a legitimate claim, since I was following NAT pretty closely back then (this was the time leading up to the "we're running out of IP addresses!" paranoia), and there was *no one* else doing NAT at that time. Cisco watched, and then, wisely, bought them.
I doubt they could enforce the patent, due to the later IETF work (we were in the RFC 1200-1300 range when I was looking at this stuff), but having the patent issue may be entirely appropriate, even if it is for the basic concept of NAT.
I'm sure the /. thought police will moderate me down into negative numbers for this, but here goes...
Furnishing the child with information in the three example cases you use would more than likely fall under the category of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, which (I believe) is a crime in all states. (Yes, I AM saying they should not have access to that information anonymously - they are not adults.)
Filtering/censorship is NOT a bad thing. Parents have a responsibility to (dare I say it?) *shield* their children about some things until they are old enough to deal with them maturely. I for one plan on withholding information about all of the topics you mention above for as long as I can. And no, I'm not in any way hurting my children by doing this. In fact, not only am I not taking anything away, but I am *giving* them their childhood back - an invaluable gift which today's society is all too ready to take away by forcing an adult knowledge of sex, etc. on even the youngest.
It is my solemn responsibility to care for those children and instill good morals and Truth into them in the short time I can. ("Truth", not "truth", because absolute Truth must exist in order for any logic or reason to exist.) And yes, that means it's my responsibilty as a father to teach (not just tell) my children NOT to have premarital sex of any kind. (Gasp!) Not only because it's morally wrong, but also because it's really, really dangerous - there are ~2 dozen STDs today, up from 2 thirty years ago. Half are incurable. Take just one of the incurables, HPV: The NIH and CDC have both testified before Congress that condoms are absolutely ineffective in preventing its spread, and it is provably the direct cause of 90% of cervical cancer in the US, which killed 5000 women last year. The disease's long-term effects on men are less understood, but it is highly correlated with penile cancer.
Turning kids loose into an environment that encourages them to play in the snake pit that is today's sexual playground is worse than irresponsible - it is and should be criminal.
Apprpriate censorship is a valid, measured, and necessary response to the dangers that an unfiltered Internet poses to children. If you don't agree this is necessary, then you either have no children yourself, or have given insufficient thought to your responsibilities as a parent.
(And no, I don't have a filter on my computers at home now, primarily because there is no good, affordable, non-OS-dependent, single point filter that can work with a cable modem - so the computers are and will remain, sadly, completely off-limits to the children. They're really not missing much, though...)
But remember, Becker doesn't "own" his code anymore - he GPL'ed it. It appears waht he really wants is a new restriction in the GPL that prevents anyone from using his GPL'ed code without his permission, even if they're not breaking the GPL. Somehow I missed that part in the license, mostly because it's not there (yet.)
Guys, lighten up or you'll wind up living down to that Gnazi epithet...
So the question that needs to be addressed is: are binary files created from GPL code subject to the same restrictions as the source code? So it's not the source code, and it's not even the binary created from the source code - it's the binary created from the binary, and the violation is not releasing the source to the operating system that uses it.
Difficult question.
No, it's not difficult at all. Despite what Stallman wants, there must be some limit to the "viral conatmination" of a piece of GPL'ed code. To argue otherwise quite simply reduces to the absurd position that "Free" software and commercial software are forever separated by a chasm which can never be crossed in either direction, possibly to the extent that GPL'ed software can only be run on a GPL'ed OS.
It's funny how the "Free" licenses are in reality more restrictive than the "non-Free" licenses, isn't it?
The scary thing, as I wrote to Bruce above, is that the proposed "fix", GPL3, would have to also prevent the legal distribution of binaries for any operating system (including BSD) distributed under a non-GPL-compatible license. It might even prevent the distribution of binaries without source in all cases.
That, to me, is far scarier than anything Sun *could* do. I'm afraid we are apporaching a point where the GPL may well be the biggest single threat to the contined success of open source software...
There is on harm, and no foul here! Any efforts to make the GPL viral to yet another layer of abstraction will surely result in the whole silly thing being judged unenforceable in court - is that what the FSF really wants?
it's overpriced for what you get, especially considering alot of their hardware is just rebranded (esp media drives).
Well, that pretty much lets out everyone but IBM, since they are the only computer company I know of that also makes disk mechanisms! (I think even HP has finally given up, and DEC/Compaq stopped some time ago.)
Some people here find it fasionable to bash Sun - I've been both a buyer and a seller of their gear, and generally (with a few exceptions) you get what you pay for.
This is ridiculous, though - if I'm reading you right, Bruce, GPL3 would prevent the distribution of binaries of GPL'ed programs for non-GPL'ed operating systems. Not only that, but by the logic being argued in this thread, it would become illegal to distribute any driver binaries even for Linux without distributing the source along with it.
I hope I'm misinterpreting your position here, but this is where the "GPL uber alles" thinking leads us.
Niether WAP nor WML is either required or desirable in wireless interfaces either today or in the future. There is quite simply no compelling reason to support WAP and a whole host of reasons not to.
See post #38 in this topic for a pretty good set of links to pages critical of WAP. Read them all (and then go read phone.com's site for balance) before making up your mind. I think you'll agree that all WAP "standards" should die ASAP.
Great response! I'm amazed by all the whiny hand-wringing here that "someone out there may have gotten a better deal than I did, and it's not faaaaair!" - just like a three year old.
We each strike our own bargains and have no right to complain later just because someone may have gotten a slightly better deal.
That last verse (15) should really be taken to heart by the crowd here.
Actually, every grocery store membership I've seen does indeed change the price at the register. I know here in Texas, for instance, Randall's (now part of the giant Safeway) Remarkable Ripoff-protection-racket card is required to avoid paying *way* too much at the register (fortunately, thier main competitor here, HEB, doesn't play such games, so they get our grocery $$.)
It's not even the profiling I object to (since there's really no way to avoid it anymore anyway, unless you always pay with actual green cash) so much as the attitude that "you must play our game or we'll make you pay through the nose".
This is really the whole point of affinity-group marketing: the price one customer pays for a given product may be different from the price paid by the next customer. The big products companies are using these sorts of systems to target products at particular demographic segments that may be eligible for a discount negotiated though professional organization (say, doctors) or to influence the buying habits of first-time moms with a new baby.
C'mon guys, why is it that you apparently think Amazon isn't entitled to d othe same things any other retailer does - go to Wal-Mart and see how prices fluctuate - all those "roll-back" signs show the ones that dropped (at least temporarily, but there's no notation (surprise, surprise) on the ones that went up a little bit.
This is completely normal practice in the brick and mortar retail business, whay bash Amazon for it? To me, this just shows the juvenile nature of the Slashdot crowd, who apparently just can't stand the fact that Bezos was sharp enough to patent one-click shopping before anyone else. (I'm on the record here as saying I think the patent is (and should be) valid, and the complaints are mostly sour grapes, or the rantings of those that think (wrongly) that patents are a bad thing. See my letters to LWN a few moths back for more info.)
And yes, I have noticed Amazon does this - I bought one the the slick little Linksys broadband routers from them last week, and noticed that delaying my purchase by three days cost me an extra couple of bucks - strange, but hardly anything to worry about, as it's still about the best price out there, and I really *like* one-click shopping - it's one of the reasons I still use and will continue to buy from Amazon. (Also, compare the effort of *cancelling* an order with Amazon to the effort required by other e-tailers for a real eye-opener.) My only complaint with them is that it's too hard to get in touch with a real person if something (usually shipping) goes wrong...
NO! We should NOT keep writing software for this device. There are plenty of reasonably priced bar code readers out there that don't even require drivers at all (their interfaces are typically described as "keyboard wedges" - they lierally make it look like you typed in the info. - all the magic happens in the hardware!)
Why should we even dignify a such a proprietary device with our support, especially after their behaviour and with good, and open alternatives? Simple bar code readers just aren't that expensive, guys... Go grab a cheap one, get a Code 39 (3 of 9) bar code font and go to town. (There are several other formats, but Code 39 is kind of the Lingua Franca of the bar code world, and I've found it the most common and standard format int he past...)
Actually, it's funny you would even bother to be posting here if you really believe that - it flies in the face of the motives behind the open source movement.
There's an old saying: "Good programmers write good code, great programmers steal good code." Now before you go ballistic, realize that "steal" in the context of this saying has never meant actual theft, but simply leveraging the work of others.
Why *should* the guy admiring your site bother to learn how to create the effect from scratch? The problem has already been solved, and he simply wanted to leverage an already existing solution to a problem he had. When Miguel says we should do this, it's a good thing...
He probably went away thinking you were quite a jerk, and I'm not entirely sure he wasn't right. I'd have just told him how to take and use the code himself - where's the harm in that? (Especially since you seem to be referring to plain old HTML code and not even Javascript or anything even remotely programmatic?)
Yup, we do. Does "Git a rope!" mean anything to you?
(For the clueless, this is a reference to a famous Pace Picante Sauce commercial - a group of cowhands on the trail are looking at the salsa provided by their new "cookie" and discover it's not the good stuff from San Antonio, but is made in "New York City??!!". The lead cowpoke turns to another and orders, "Git a rope!", as Cookie gulps and realizes he's about to get stretched. The only reason I bother to explain this is for non-US readers...)
Oops, the last half of the post was cut off:
In general, I expect that English forms a much better basis for a computer language for only one reason: Parts of speech in English are positionally determined rather than being determined by form as they would be in Japanese, Latin, or other "inflected" languages.
How would you like to write a parser where you don't know the order of the operators and/or data? My guess is that regardless of the features of the natural language, we'd end up with something like we've got just because it makes writing the laguage parsers so much easier. Whether this will change in the future is an interesting topic for speculation.
split( ',', @foo );
would become
( ',', @foo ) split;
That would make sense, since Japanese and other oriental languages are strongly verb-final. (I know Korean is for sure.)
Whether it's an advantage to first know what operation you're doing, or what you're doing it on is a topic that should bring about a lively Forth and RPN vs. the world discussion...
English has such a huge vocabulary primarily because English speakers, unlike, say, Francophones, are not at all averse to stealing perfectly good words from other languages when they address a need.
This in combination with other factors, makes English much more subtlely expressive than most other languages in use today. (Interestingly, all languages seem to be becoming simpler - most ancient languages were far more complex than modern ones!)
Given that most computer languages are only designed to communicate a very narrow set of things relative to natural languages, there's an apples and oranges relationship here: Comparing programming and natural languages is an excercise that can produce nothing of value.
Finally, Perl is quite obviously based on something other than English... [ducks behind flame shield]