Policeman (typing in public chatroom): im a big girl now and my teecher says im the best speller in my class.
(Clippy pops up on policeman's computer)
Clippy: Hi! I see you're trying to pass yourself off as a young girl for the purposes of ensaring pedophiles. Would you like some help? Policeman: I, uh, I guess so. Clippy: GREAT! Let's get started. Would you like to try the "wide eyed wonderment" personality, or the "my parents suck" mode? Policeman: (clicks on 'Wide Eyed Wonderment') Clippy: Excellent choice. Please fill in the following dialog with how many goldfish you have, number of loose teeth, and favorite flavor of lollipop...
I suppose it's encouraging that SBC thinks there's enough of a correlation between pulic support and a bill passing that they're campaigning with ads and a website...?
The state Senate will vote today (April 5th) on Colorado Senate Bill 152, which would allow cities to provide wireless internet access.
So what, we should be down on our knees thanking them for allowing it? It's already allowed, unless there was prior legislation prohibiting it, in which case I'm not exactly going to pretend to be grateful. Last week at the Freedom to Connect meeting, Susan Crawford began her posted comments with the following:
A right to connect, or freedom to connect, signals that we need permission -- rights only operate against someone who has the ability to say no. Freedom of speech, all of that -- all operates against the government. A digital bill of rights assumes that someone has the power to cut those rights off.
We're here to affirm that we don't need permission. We are more threatened by ourselves and our willingness to look to government for permission than by anything else.
It didn't seem to me like any single company had the stomach to keep after the scum that are ruining the Net for the rest of us. Unless that company is Microsoft.
The Hurd project has NOTHING to do with Linux.... Just as Macromedia Dreamweaver has NOTHING to do with Frontpage. It's not splintering...they're completely different things.
I don't know Frontpage or Dreamweaver well enough to know if they couldn't be used on the same website, but using Hurd necessarily precludes using Linux on the same machine (and vise versa)... such mutual exclusivity would by itself indicate an overlap of functionality, and it stands to reason anyway since they're both operating systems. To assert that Hurd and Linux are differently implemented and have different semantics in terms of threads, permissions, etc, doesn't IMO justify saying they're entirely different things.
Within the last five years I worked for a company that made 3D rendering chips. The operation that was encoded in hardware was that of testing a ray against a triangle; on the chip produced by my former employer, this operation could be done in parallel something like 16 times, using only one or two clock cycles.
Once this functionality was achieved, there were some contextual architectural decisions to be made about what asic would include these gates. The company decided to implement these gates on a chip that had about 16MB of ram on it and its own execution unit (vaguely like one of the subchips in IBM's upcoming cell architecture, IIUC) and then to put arrays of these independent exec chips on daughter cards.
Many of these decisions were trying to solve the specific problems of raytracing, e.g. how do we get geometry info into the chips efficiently, how can we parallelize the running of shaders so they don't bottleneck things, etc. These problems manifested themselves quite differently than they did for zbuffering hardware, and there were lots of clever-yet-brittle constructs used which could be shown to work in specific cases but which had pot-holes that were hard to predict when scaling or changing the problem/scene at hand.
Rather than selling these chips themselves, the company decided that programming them was hard enough that the company itself would package up the chips into a "rendering appliance", which was essentially a computer running linux with a few of these daughtercards in them. For a software interface to rendering packages, the company chose Renderman. The task then became to translate rendering output from disparate sources (Maya, etc) into renderman expressions, and this was devilishly hard to get right. Each rendering package had to be individually tweaked in emulation, and some companies didn't help out much with info, and even those that did weren't able to supply all the info needed in many cases... my former employer ended up chasing un-spec'd features down ratholes.
The end result was really a disaster. Nothing worked quite right, which was problematic because these chips were marketed not just as fast but as faster drop-in replacements for existing software renderers.
I find it interesting how this entire tsunami of problems snowballed from the initial foundation of how raytracing algorithms (and therefore hardware) are different from zbuffering.
So the prices of real estate can go up and down, but because there is little speculation involved (unless you're buying undeveloped land in the hope that it will eventually be developed), there is little risk of a sharp downturn. That's as true now as it ever was.
In some real estate markets right now, there is rampant speculation. This can be quantified by observing the number of people who buy houses and then sell them within a short period of time. There is a lot of this going on right now, much more than there was ten years ago.
I mean, people have been saying for 100 years that real estate is overpriced, but how much do you think an average home built in 1900 costs today compared to what it cost at that time?
Prices do go up over time, but when house price increases outstrip wage increases by 3:1 on a sustained basis, there is a problem. Namely, who is going to buy the houses?
A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute. Venture capitalists know better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you'll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth.
There is another interpretation of VC firms balking at NDAs: that they want to be able to think about the proposed idea in terms of other projects they're funding or considering funding, and perhaps even to implement the idea without the involvement of the people who came up with it.
I know the founders of two startups, and some variety of this occurred in both cases. In one case the VC heard the idea and then brought in people from another venture he was funding who had a somewhat similar plan and basically said to my friend "convince me by arguing with these guys that your idea is better and that you can compete with their year-long lead." And then in the case of the second company, the VC ultimately funded my friend after merging them with another group that was seeking funding for a somewhat overlapping idea.
An NDA wouldn't have prohibited the VCs involved from doing the things they did, it simply would have required the permission of my friends. Which of course they would have granted provided they felt it was in their best interests to do so. But they weren't allowed the freedom to make that kind of decision.
Paul Graham says the reason VCs dismiss applicants who want NDAs is that it shows that the ideas involved are overvalued. Paul's explanation makes very little sense to me. What does make sense is that the VCs know they have a cartel, and that they can squeeze more money out of situations by forcing people to drop their drawers to even get an audience.
The same as the line between a creepy old man and a gynecologist.... The line is quite plain.
You're making your point using a technique called "straw man", where you present a contrast so obvious that it leads to an equally 'obvious' conclusion. When BTK was caught after 20 years, people who'd known him in church were shocked. The line between "creepy guy capable of terrible things" and "nice guy who holds the church collection plate" didn't seem quite so obvious for two decades there.
Someone so biased they can't get a job as a reporter has no business calling themselves a journalist.
That's what the party-controlled media tell folks in places like China. But even in this country, there are reasons other than "bias" that keep people out of big-media journalism. Maybe they don't want to be told what they can't report on, by either their bosses or the white house. Maybe they don't want to have to justify each topic in terms of readership and bean counters. Even having a problem with authority doesn't make someone a bad journalist per se.
We call [people who think big media stifles creativity] 'college students'. Then they grow up and become adults
I don't know if that's a widely held view or not, but even so it's a circular argument. People used to have no option but to work for established media. Now they have an option: blogging.
The future is coming, and it's going to include a vastly more decentralized notion of trust and authority than we were used to ten years ago.
When everything that happens to be written becomes journalism, then the word journalism ceases to mean anything.
Then by all means, share: where is the dividing line between journalists and non-journalists?
Is someone who worked as a formally annointed "journalist" for 40 years at a major newspaper still a journalist if they quit working for the newspaper and start a blog reporting on the same topics? What about someone who worked there for five years? For one year? Three months? One day? Someone who wanted to work at a paper but was rejected because of their political views? Someone who would never work for a paper because they believe conglomerate ownership stifles journalistic integrity?
Security is good, and I find nothing wrong with Kevin M's stated approaches to improving it. But if I never again read another article which, in the course of covering a talk by Mitnick, simply has to preface everything with the soap saga of how Mitnick was once a renegade bad boy who paid for his crimes in jail and is now using his reformed powers for good... then it will be too soon.
Being a journalist is not just starting a web site and pronouncing yourself as one -- that's as meaningless as buying a box of bandages and starting a medical practice as Dr. Nick Riviera.
Actually, Nick Riviera is a doctor, and somebody who starts a website is a journalist... they're both just getting started out and the quality of their output will be low for a while (well, maybe in Riviera's case it'll stay low). The point is, "being a journalist" is something that happens by degrees along a continuum of experience and reliability. It's easy to assert that a ten year old with a website isn't a journalist. Now here's where you ante up: if a ten year old's website isn't journalism, then where exactly is the dividing line between journalists and non-journalists? Fact is, there isn't any bright-line distinction, and if you were to claim there was one, I'd question the basis of your authority to make that claim. Journalism happens by gradual increments, and to claim you must be working for one of the huge media-conglomerate-owned fronts for hysteria and misinformation we call "network news" is a dis-service to the genuine legitimacy of new journalists that the internet enables.
[Good ruling, because] if [Apple] didn't win, then all NDAs are pointless
That should be the centerpiece of Apple's argument... not (as Apple argues) that there are "legitimate journalists" vs "non-legitimate journalists", and that legal protections regarding sources apply only to the former artificially distinguished category. Apple should make as convincing a case as possible that the information in question must have come via the violation of an NDA... and the court should decide how convincing that argument is and rule accordingly.
An excellent answer all around, and one with which I relate quite a lot. My question was about 2/3 flippant humor and 1/3 curiosity at what people might sincerely think... I'm delighted to have confirmation that at least some folks think like I do on this issue.:)
It sure is great to be a Bush and friend of the
Republicans these days
Well yeah, there are certainly some benefits to selling your soul to the devil. It's a lot easier to move ahead by lying and stealing than through hard work. But I'd far rather be an honest, humble person than a rich cheater doomed to hell.
(*raises hand in mandatory Sunday school class*) Not trying to be confused, just have to ask... if only the republicans believe in hell, should those of us who don't believe in hell be comforted by the idea that if there WERE a hell then the republicans would go to it?
Remember, they own the music. Quite literaly in most cases.
Even if we differ on whether intellectual property can or should be owned in a legal or moral framework, there is no such thing as "literally" owning music. Simply because there is no such thing as figuratively owning the music. (Same applies to objects.)
Honestly, how do we know we aren't being influenced?
My previous post's thesis is really more along the lines that pointedly irritating ads represent a slide in aesthetic quality of ads (the craftsmanship that goes into them, and - I'd be willing to speculate - their effectiveness) and a precipitating slide of the standards used to scrutinize them by their commissioners. I think there's little doubt that ads influence people, though there's much doubt about the degree to which they influence people.
I'm probably more hostile to ads than most people. If I see an ad with a smiling person in it, I immediately imagine that the smile is to put me at ease while that person (or the entity they front) picks my pocket. And on the rare ocassion I accidentally let an ad onto my tivo and into my kid's line of sight, it's startling how negatively the ads affect my kid's sense of being content with what we have.
How many internet marketers would, if the technology were available, opt to have a physical hand come out of someone's monitor and slap them in the face until they read your ad?
I just wonder where some marketers draw the line.
If it were possible to do the monitor slap thing, then the only reason businesses wouldn't do it would be if they felt they'd lose more money then they'd gain, whether because of any related laws or because of one of their bean-counters deciding that the negatives outweighted the positives in the public's mind. Morality and "the right thing" would never enter into it, except as abstractions in the bean-counter's and lawyer's strategic analysis of consumers'/jurys' reactions.
Indeed, if a corporation could find a legal-enough way to charge you a dollar per breath of air until you were destitute, they would do it. And if being unable to buy more air ultimately killed you, the only regreat the corporation might have would be that a revenue stream was gone.
Obviously irritation as an advertising strategy actually works with enough people to make it profitable.
I'd rephrase that as: enough people think it may work that the people who come up with ads have been allowed the luxury of being lazy in the creativity department.
If you don't like their business model, do not visit the sites. simple.
Not always simple. My bank began these annoying ads recently. So my "simple" choice here is to either cease doing online banking (not a zero-cost proposition), switch banks (not a zero cost proposition), or put up with the ads. IMO this amounts to a unilateral and material change of relationship by my bank, which I have a problem with because I was never consulted. Yes, I have a choice, but it's not so easy that I'm whistling "don't worry be happy" while I'm mulling over my next move.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet posting about this on slashdot can create widerspread discussion and can allow people to advocate action. It's a fine line.
I suppose it's encouraging that SBC thinks there's enough of a correlation between pulic support and a bill passing that they're campaigning with ads and a website...?
So what, we should be down on our knees thanking them for allowing it? It's already allowed, unless there was prior legislation prohibiting it, in which case I'm not exactly going to pretend to be grateful. Last week at the Freedom to Connect meeting, Susan Crawford began her posted comments with the following:
Oh the irony.
Might even have been one of those banditos who runs through parking lots de-activating all of the tags.
I don't know Frontpage or Dreamweaver well enough to know if they couldn't be used on the same website, but using Hurd necessarily precludes using Linux on the same machine (and vise versa)... such mutual exclusivity would by itself indicate an overlap of functionality, and it stands to reason anyway since they're both operating systems. To assert that Hurd and Linux are differently implemented and have different semantics in terms of threads, permissions, etc, doesn't IMO justify saying they're entirely different things.
Yes... although the incarnation of the product known as "Pure" came after my time there. You a user?
Within the last five years I worked for a company that made 3D rendering chips. The operation that was encoded in hardware was that of testing a ray against a triangle; on the chip produced by my former employer, this operation could be done in parallel something like 16 times, using only one or two clock cycles.
Once this functionality was achieved, there were some contextual architectural decisions to be made about what asic would include these gates. The company decided to implement these gates on a chip that had about 16MB of ram on it and its own execution unit (vaguely like one of the subchips in IBM's upcoming cell architecture, IIUC) and then to put arrays of these independent exec chips on daughter cards.
Many of these decisions were trying to solve the specific problems of raytracing, e.g. how do we get geometry info into the chips efficiently, how can we parallelize the running of shaders so they don't bottleneck things, etc. These problems manifested themselves quite differently than they did for zbuffering hardware, and there were lots of clever-yet-brittle constructs used which could be shown to work in specific cases but which had pot-holes that were hard to predict when scaling or changing the problem/scene at hand.
Rather than selling these chips themselves, the company decided that programming them was hard enough that the company itself would package up the chips into a "rendering appliance", which was essentially a computer running linux with a few of these daughtercards in them. For a software interface to rendering packages, the company chose Renderman. The task then became to translate rendering output from disparate sources (Maya, etc) into renderman expressions, and this was devilishly hard to get right. Each rendering package had to be individually tweaked in emulation, and some companies didn't help out much with info, and even those that did weren't able to supply all the info needed in many cases... my former employer ended up chasing un-spec'd features down ratholes.
The end result was really a disaster. Nothing worked quite right, which was problematic because these chips were marketed not just as fast but as faster drop-in replacements for existing software renderers.
I find it interesting how this entire tsunami of problems snowballed from the initial foundation of how raytracing algorithms (and therefore hardware) are different from zbuffering.
This ruling does to general information what the DMCA did to technical circumvention/enabling information.
In some real estate markets right now, there is rampant speculation. This can be quantified by observing the number of people who buy houses and then sell them within a short period of time. There is a lot of this going on right now, much more than there was ten years ago.
I mean, people have been saying for 100 years that real estate is overpriced, but how much do you think an average home built in 1900 costs today compared to what it cost at that time?
Prices do go up over time, but when house price increases outstrip wage increases by 3:1 on a sustained basis, there is a problem. Namely, who is going to buy the houses?
I know the founders of two startups, and some variety of this occurred in both cases. In one case the VC heard the idea and then brought in people from another venture he was funding who had a somewhat similar plan and basically said to my friend "convince me by arguing with these guys that your idea is better and that you can compete with their year-long lead." And then in the case of the second company, the VC ultimately funded my friend after merging them with another group that was seeking funding for a somewhat overlapping idea.
An NDA wouldn't have prohibited the VCs involved from doing the things they did, it simply would have required the permission of my friends. Which of course they would have granted provided they felt it was in their best interests to do so. But they weren't allowed the freedom to make that kind of decision.
Paul Graham says the reason VCs dismiss applicants who want NDAs is that it shows that the ideas involved are overvalued. Paul's explanation makes very little sense to me. What does make sense is that the VCs know they have a cartel, and that they can squeeze more money out of situations by forcing people to drop their drawers to even get an audience.
You're making your point using a technique called "straw man", where you present a contrast so obvious that it leads to an equally 'obvious' conclusion. When BTK was caught after 20 years, people who'd known him in church were shocked. The line between "creepy guy capable of terrible things" and "nice guy who holds the church collection plate" didn't seem quite so obvious for two decades there.
Someone so biased they can't get a job as a reporter has no business calling themselves a journalist.
That's what the party-controlled media tell folks in places like China. But even in this country, there are reasons other than "bias" that keep people out of big-media journalism. Maybe they don't want to be told what they can't report on, by either their bosses or the white house. Maybe they don't want to have to justify each topic in terms of readership and bean counters. Even having a problem with authority doesn't make someone a bad journalist per se.
We call [people who think big media stifles creativity] 'college students'. Then they grow up and become adults
I don't know if that's a widely held view or not, but even so it's a circular argument. People used to have no option but to work for established media. Now they have an option: blogging.
The future is coming, and it's going to include a vastly more decentralized notion of trust and authority than we were used to ten years ago.
Then by all means, share: where is the dividing line between journalists and non-journalists?
Is someone who worked as a formally annointed "journalist" for 40 years at a major newspaper still a journalist if they quit working for the newspaper and start a blog reporting on the same topics? What about someone who worked there for five years? For one year? Three months? One day? Someone who wanted to work at a paper but was rejected because of their political views? Someone who would never work for a paper because they believe conglomerate ownership stifles journalistic integrity?
Because not everybody wants to live in an apartment for the rest of their lives.
Security is good, and I find nothing wrong with Kevin M's stated approaches to improving it. But if I never again read another article which, in the course of covering a talk by Mitnick, simply has to preface everything with the soap saga of how Mitnick was once a renegade bad boy who paid for his crimes in jail and is now using his reformed powers for good... then it will be too soon.
Actually, Nick Riviera is a doctor, and somebody who starts a website is a journalist... they're both just getting started out and the quality of their output will be low for a while (well, maybe in Riviera's case it'll stay low). The point is, "being a journalist" is something that happens by degrees along a continuum of experience and reliability. It's easy to assert that a ten year old with a website isn't a journalist. Now here's where you ante up: if a ten year old's website isn't journalism, then where exactly is the dividing line between journalists and non-journalists? Fact is, there isn't any bright-line distinction, and if you were to claim there was one, I'd question the basis of your authority to make that claim. Journalism happens by gradual increments, and to claim you must be working for one of the huge media-conglomerate-owned fronts for hysteria and misinformation we call "network news" is a dis-service to the genuine legitimacy of new journalists that the internet enables.
That should be the centerpiece of Apple's argument... not (as Apple argues) that there are "legitimate journalists" vs "non-legitimate journalists", and that legal protections regarding sources apply only to the former artificially distinguished category. Apple should make as convincing a case as possible that the information in question must have come via the violation of an NDA... and the court should decide how convincing that argument is and rule accordingly.
An excellent answer all around, and one with which I relate quite a lot. My question was about 2/3 flippant humor and 1/3 curiosity at what people might sincerely think... I'm delighted to have confirmation that at least some folks think like I do on this issue. :)
Even if we differ on whether intellectual property can or should be owned in a legal or moral framework, there is no such thing as "literally" owning music. Simply because there is no such thing as figuratively owning the music. (Same applies to objects.)
My previous post's thesis is really more along the lines that pointedly irritating ads represent a slide in aesthetic quality of ads (the craftsmanship that goes into them, and - I'd be willing to speculate - their effectiveness) and a precipitating slide of the standards used to scrutinize them by their commissioners. I think there's little doubt that ads influence people, though there's much doubt about the degree to which they influence people.
I'm probably more hostile to ads than most people. If I see an ad with a smiling person in it, I immediately imagine that the smile is to put me at ease while that person (or the entity they front) picks my pocket. And on the rare ocassion I accidentally let an ad onto my tivo and into my kid's line of sight, it's startling how negatively the ads affect my kid's sense of being content with what we have.
If it were possible to do the monitor slap thing, then the only reason businesses wouldn't do it would be if they felt they'd lose more money then they'd gain, whether because of any related laws or because of one of their bean-counters deciding that the negatives outweighted the positives in the public's mind. Morality and "the right thing" would never enter into it, except as abstractions in the bean-counter's and lawyer's strategic analysis of consumers'/jurys' reactions.
Indeed, if a corporation could find a legal-enough way to charge you a dollar per breath of air until you were destitute, they would do it. And if being unable to buy more air ultimately killed you, the only regreat the corporation might have would be that a revenue stream was gone.
I'd rephrase that as: enough people think it may work that the people who come up with ads have been allowed the luxury of being lazy in the creativity department.
Not always simple. My bank began these annoying ads recently. So my "simple" choice here is to either cease doing online banking (not a zero-cost proposition), switch banks (not a zero cost proposition), or put up with the ads. IMO this amounts to a unilateral and material change of relationship by my bank, which I have a problem with because I was never consulted. Yes, I have a choice, but it's not so easy that I'm whistling "don't worry be happy" while I'm mulling over my next move.