That seems to mainly be due to the insistence of mobile phone vendors who wanted to do things their own way. In fact, if you read through to the end of the IT World article linked in the summary, there's a salient comment at the end by someone using the handle Contrarian which touches on this very issue:
It's "why should we care" attitudes like Google's that will make your job harder by ensuring every "cloud" has a different subset of Java living in it.
It's the same "we're too big to be told what to do" attitude that made mobile Java the disaster it is - every phone company demanded the freedom to make their own APIs and Sun failed to keep them all under control, with the consequence that mobile Java is a nightmare of incompatible fragments.
This is the copyright system as set up by the big cartels, and if a writer can manage to turn it around and screw them back with their own weapon, I say why the fuck not?
I've said it elsewhere, but I'll say it again: Ideas are not covered by copyright. The whole Terminator fiasco with Harlan Ellison should never have happened, but Cameron's production company didn't want to deal with a possibly protracted plagiarism lawsuit, so they settled. But in order for plagiarism to take place, there has to be copying of the actual work in question. Copying of ideas doesn't count because that's not what copyright protects.
So the previous poster was right -- inspired by and written by are not the same thing.
In the end, you get to the right conclusion -- the issue at hand is a matter of contract law, not copyright law -- but I couldn't stand to see the waters any more muddied than they already are. Don't take the whole Terminator settlement as an endorsement of the idea that copyright covers ideas.
Faced with an admissable statement that showed Cameron did in fact borrow ideas from Ellison's work, the distributor decided not to wait for the almost inevitable verdict a jury would render, and they settled for a lump sum of cash and a credit.
So, James Cameron admitted he got some ideas from Harlan Ellison's writing (for a couple Outer Limits episodes). But then you jump to the (unfounded, and unsupported) conclusion that the verdict was "inevitable" once this happened. Not so; I'll get to my reasoning why in a moment.
Then you wrote:
Maybe you think our copyright laws shouldn't work that way, but don't be mad at Ellison. He didn't write 'em. It was the big copyright cartels, including the motion picture industry, so if it bites 'em in the ass, tough shit.
Except for one glaring problem with your entire line of reasoning: Copyright laws actually don't work that way! You can copyright the expression of an idea. You can not copyright an idea. James Cameron merely admitting that he got a couple ideas from a particular source in no way means that he owes money to Harlan Ellison. There are no new ideas for plots or plot devices under the sun, and the stories you cite by Ellison themselves can be shown to be derivative in some way of even older literature, some of it very ancient.
The settlement was nothing more or less than a means to get rid of a nuisance lawsuit.
I am not a lawyer, but I would encourage you to actually read up on U.S. Copyright law -- the U.S. Copyright Office has a great web site which has FAQs, legal resources, and more. In particular, I'd like to turn your attention to section 102 of Chapter 1 of the law, which states in part:
In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
You later wrote:
It's not quite "The Terminator," but it's close, and a hell of a lot closer than for example, "I, Robot" was to the novel it was named after.
Erm, just to point out, I, Robot was a collection of loosely-related stories featuring Dr. Susan Calvin. The movie was written using the character of Dr. Calvin, and was intended to be a story complementary to and similar to the ones that appear in the book, dealing with the same kinds of issues without being derivative of the ideas presented in those other stories. Whether you consider the movie a true heir to that intellectual pedigree or not, the fact remains that calling I, Robot a novel is a stretch.
But while Harlan Ellison is a well known name in science fiction and fantasy, there is apparently some disagreement with his distinction between SF and SciFi.
Besides, much of what Ellison wrote that he billed as science fiction I would only (charitably) call fantasy... which only further serves to illustrate the point that all these descriptive terms for genres are pretty much arbitrary, and there's plenty of bleed-over from one to another. Just ask Margaret Atwood whether The Handmaid's Tale is science fiction or speculative fiction. Her thoughts on the distinction between the two genres are pretty entertaining, albeit infuriating to anyone who actually likes good science fiction.
Funny, I see the "jail" spelling on the BBC far more commonly than the "gaol" spelling. I take that as an indication that "jail" is now the preferred spelling in the UK as well. I've also noticed that "connexion" is dying out in favor of "connection." That said, I have a perverse romantic attachment to "connexion" and "gaol" as cool archaic spellings; they're excellent to use in some contexts, mainly for effect.
yes, a db that is under a quarter of a MB. It is vastly superior (with regards to interoperability, speed, flexibility, and scaling) to the poorly documented, brain-damaged Mork history format they where using, and it much more powerful and useful than flat html file that was used for bookmarks.
In fairness, the real utility of the database will be enabling client-side storage for web apps that utilize HTML 5 features (since the client-side storage stuff is mandated by HTML 5 -- this is the same API that Palm's new phone is going to use). In addition to basic key-value pair storage, there will be fully realized structured/relational data storage.
That's a pretty good disemboweling of Nemesis (thanks for the link!), although I think I disagree with the author of that pictorial guide in only one spot. Basically, that author was complaining about Picard "ignoring the Prime Directive" to ride a dune buggy on a planet. I agree that the dune buggy bit was silly and pointless, but how did that scene constitute a Prime Directive violation? Didn't seem to me that either Picard or Data were doing anything that interfered in the development of the... er, locals... whoever they were...
...on your definition of "piece of junk." What Jobs considers to be junk is probably acceptable to most users, which is why manufacturers other than Apple seem to sell plenty of these cheap PCs.
This book makes a fascinating case that genius is a function of time and not giftedness, validating both Edison's famous saw about 98% perspiration and Feynman's claim that there is no such thing as intelligence, only interest.
First off, the Edison quote is "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." This is not to say that inspiration (presumed here to be a product of giftedness) is somehow dispensible. Both are required, so you can't really say that the 1% component is somehow irrelevant.
The difference is shown to result from an astonishing lack of charisma and a sense of what others are thinking in Langen, and an extreme personability in Oppenheimer, which is said to show that success is not a function of hard work or even genius but more of likability and the ability to empathize.
Sounds like Langen may have had Asperger's Syndrome, or another similar disorder. It also sounds like Gladwell is cherry-picking his anecdotes to amplify his point.
The fact that Asian languages in many cases use shorter and more logical words for numbers confers a strong early advantage[...]
Shorter, I can buy. More logical is a subjective assessment based on criteria we're not privy to. As this is being debated in other threads, I can only conclude that I'm not the only person who finds this claim suspect. While some are attempting to play the role of apologist for this viewpoint, it's not clear to me which of their arguments is the one that Gladwell is using to justify this statement. Furthermore, the comparison with metric units vs. English units isn't very illuminating -- lots of people I know would prefer doing engineering calculations in English units rather than metric, and in truth, the ease of unit conversion in the metric system isn't such a huge advantage in the real world when doing such calculations. The problems always seem to come in when conversions are happening between systems of units (e.g., going from English to metric).
It is bound to bear out in the minds of many Prof. Richard Feynman's assertion, which we may modify to say that giftedness and IQ are not inherent but conferred by accidents or benefits of culture, or at least via mechanisms that are not obvious.
Which also completely ignores many studies that show that there is a genetic component to IQ. While IQ is variable, with environment playing a substantial role, it's well established that environment is not the sole factor in intellectual development. According to some studies, the contribution of genetics to IQ is as much as 75% (i.e., 75% of all IQ variances can be attributed to genetic differences). I think the reviewer here may be conflating "success" (what the book is about) with "intelligence" (i.e., giftedness and IQ, which seem to be prerequisites for success but which the book argues are not the dominant factors).
It has also been said many times, here on Slashdot and elsewhere, that IQ is the best single predictor of future success -- this seems to be derived from The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray. This claim has been attacked numerous times, so I'll leave it to the statistics folks to argue that one. But you can't just ignore the study altogether.
On a closing note, the review could stand a few extra commas in strategic locations, and maybe some thoughtful reordering of a few sentences to make them clearer.
Yeah, I read that interesting statement for which you provided a link. I noticed that they are a little cagey with respect to what product, if any, they're currently offering that uses the Netbook trademark. (Other bloggers have noted that right now, Psion mostly seems to be offering accessories and replacement parts.)
One passage caught my eye:
Few computer manufacturers use the term 'netbook' descriptively to describe computers in this class, and even today, many on-line and bricks-and-mortar retailers do not use the 'netbook' term descriptively, preferring instead 'ultra-portable', or 'subnotebook' or some other term.
Well, considering that Dell and Intel both are using the term "netbook" descriptively for computers in this particular class of subnotebook computers, and considering I've seen promotional material for Asus Eee devices and derivatives calling them netbooks, I wouldn't say "few computer manufacturers" use the term.
As for brick-and-mortar retailers, did Psion bother to check out the U.S. retail landscape? Best Buy regularly calls these kinds of devices "netbooks," and their web site even lets you filter by "netbook" as one category of portable computer.
I have to say, I personally am happy with using two fingers on the touch pad and clicking with the button to do the two-finger-click gesture (which is equivalent to right-clicking). I'm just dubious of the new design where the pad itself is the button. I had thought maybe the pad sent the same event to the OS no matter where you clicked on the surface, but now that you've described it, I guess this is a superior solution... except when some crud gets into the mechanism and prevents one side or the other from registering click events.
I think having gestures + clicking a single physical button that is separate from the pad is the best arrangement, but it seems that Apple ranks cool design higher than ruggedness and reliability in many cases. And I'm saying this as a long-time Apple fan. I'm just glad I bought my MacBook Pro when I did: before they did away with matte finish screens and the separate trackpad button, yet after they came out with LED backlighting.
Summary is wrong; it states a "Radeon 4570" as one of the options. According to the Mac Pro page (under the Comparison tab), the 24" iMac has the ATI Radeon 4850 as an option, while the Mac Pros have an ATI Radeon 4870 as an option.
Well, the National Federation of the Blind did just that, accusing the Authors Guild of discriminating against the blind and creating a legal argument about what is permissible under copyright that never existed until now. Naturally, the Authors Guild subsequently published a rant in the NYT (see today's Slashdot article) which attacks both the NFB and the EFF.
Well, the National Federation of the Blind did just that. The Authors Guild subsequently published a rant in the NYT (see recent Slashdot story) in which they attack the NFB and the EFF.
That is why you hide the recorder - just make sure you are in a one party consent state first.
In some states, it is a felony to record audio without the explicit permission of all parties. A felony.
Yes, that's why he said "just make sure you are in a one party consent state first" -- that's what that means, only one party needs to be aware of the recording, and that party could be the guy with the recording device. It's that way in Arizona, for example, and is commonly used to record local phone calls. The recording is considered a legal document for civil purposes (e.g., a lawsuit).
IANAL, but I've been advised of this particular right in my state.
Seems to me the warning from the prior post should have been enough indication that hiding the recorder isn't legal in every jurisdiction.
Yes, but when you work for any kind of government agency, you have additional restrictions placed upon you that you might not have in a corporate job. Public sector has a lot of compliance issues to deal with, more than private sector IMHO. The big difference, though, is that the government has some truly scary means at its disposal to force compliance, and if you manage to piss off the wrong people (i.e., clueless or assholish people in power), you can get swatted pretty hard -- a lot harder than in the private sector, generally speaking. In the private sector, if there's any legal action, it's usually civil. In the public sector... well, we saw what happened in this case, didn't we? This never should have escalated to the point where people were discussing the option of jail/prison time. And if this were a case of criminal wrongdoing in the corporate world, there's no way the authorities would have acted anywhere near this fast or this severely.
Ok, so these guys are going about it the wrong way and screwing up.
And nobody else is going to do any better, because every technique that has been discussed or tried has flaws.
But the basic premise is still sensible, so we just need a more efficient and less crazy way of doing it - the concept is still a noble one, no?
It's hard at this point to tell if you're trolling or not, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
In short, the answer to your last question is still a resouding NO.
There are no more efficient ways to do these things. If anything, some of the techniques that might have fewer problems with false positives also require AI breakthroughs that haven't been invented yet and aren't even on the technology horizon, or deep packet inspection of a kind that will place more overhead and burden on network routing equipment — either way, you'll be slowing the pipes down. In the end, you might turn broadband into a system which is just as slow as dialup; in that case, why bother having broadband at all?
The premise itself isn't sensible either, and it's clear that you don't understand why this might be. Some of the arguments already brought up:
Hiding child porn from average users won't stop the production of child porn, only make it slightly less convenient to obtain.
Hiding child porn from the general public, the unwashed masses who aren't technically savvy, will lull people into a false sense of security. They don't see child exploitation, so it must not be happening.
The definition of what constitutes child porn will continue to expand, lumping more and more sites and material under a prohibited category. Monitoring for this at a network level will expose many people to criminal liability. We already have situations where parents taking photographs of their own children are accused of producing child pornography!
This system will do nothing to prevent transmission of such material over darknets.
This system will be expanded to include other classes of prohibited material, and will be used to monitor and track the trafficking in things which may not (yet) be illegal, but which cause some politicians or other well-connected people to fear for some reason.
This is one of those cases where understanding the fundamental computer science and network theory (math) really helps you in understanding why most of the techniques being used to block "illegal" content simply don't work or don't scale well. And that's not even addressing the issue over what should be considered legal or illegal. In China, many of the things blocked are sites criticizing the government, or which are deemed to "undermine the social order" (whatever that means). The child porn issue is simply a wedge issue, as others have stated, and it will not end there. We know this because we remember history.
As to the "nobility" of the goal of keeping child porn out of the hands of others, I question that very notion. To me, it is nobile to prevent the suffering of children in the first place. Blocking one particular avenue of access over a computer network does nothing to block other potential avenues (e.g., darknets, sneakernets). It also does nothing to prevent children from being hurt in the first place. This is somewhat like DEA agents or local law enforcement agents in the United States going after small-time drug users instead of getting the dealers off the streets — sure, you're arresting a lot of folks, but you're not making the drugs any less easy to obtain, and you're putting a huge portion of the potential tax base behind bars and making them non-productive. (Not that I'm saying the War on Drugs is just, but the way it is conducted is hardly related to its stated goals.)
The movie Red didn't see wide distribution after its release. I saw a trailer for it, but I think it was shown at a single movie theater in the entire Phoenix metropolitan area for a grand total of one week. Brian Cox just doesn't have the star power of Sean Penn and the rest, so he's under-appreciated.
Fact is, you call this film a nominee, but I can't find mention anywhere that it even got considered for Oscar nomination. (By contrast, I had heard early reports that The Dark Knight was considered for Best Picture, though it missed out on that nomination. I suppose that would be an overly ambitious goal for a comic book adaptation, which few people take seriously still to this day.)
OK, first off, it's "your view," not "you're view." Your is a possessive, and you're is a contraction of "you are."
Secondly, it's called civil disobedience, not "civil disorder" as you put it — that means something totally different.
If it's one thing I can't stand, it's petty moralizing and condescension from someone who can't construct a sentence. And the fact remains, just because something is illegal doesn't make the law just; by the same token, something might be perfectly legal, yet morally or ethically reprehensible.
True, smidge207 does appear in that lovely list of professional trolls...
However, you could have at least made sure you replied to the correct comment thread; instead, you replied to a comment that was a sibling of the post by smidge207.
Psych (USA), for example, is listed on the website as 480p... that's normal, non HD TV... yet it looks fine on my HDTV and equal to the "HD" of the cable company's version.
Actually, 480p is not usually billed as Standard Definition (aka "non-HD TV"), but rather as "Enhanced Definition" or ED. It's just progressive, rather than the interlacing you typically see with what we call Standard Def. The "Enhanced" designation was cooked up by vendors of plasma TV sets who wanted to sell wide-screen TVs that wouldn't meet the definition of High Def (which in the U.S. is 720p, 1080i, or 1080p).
Anyway, no matter what you call it, 480p isn't really Standard Def, because it is visibly superior. What's sad is that cable and satellite operators compress video so much that HD is hardly any better than ED -- seems to me that truth in advertising laws ought to apply. I haven't been in any hurry to upgrade my cable package to HD for this reason, nor have I transitioned to DirecTV.
People have built many devices to keep count and it's always considered a felony to use them in the state of Nevada. In fact, many devices are a felony to even OWN... Here come the iPhone police, oh joy.
Naturally, this piques my curiosity (and gives me the urge to go out and purchase or build such a device just so I can own something that is illegal in another state). But after reading the statute in question, I am not really clear on what specific items are a felony to own. The only section that stands out in that regard is NRS 465.080, which outlines materials prohibited because they can be used to make counterfeit coins, chips, tokens, etc.
Lead and lead alloys are on that list, so technically you could get arrested if you're found with a lead fishing weight in your pocket. (Yeah, I know, lead is being replaced by tungsten and other metals for sinkers.) If two or more items from the prohibited list are on your person (say, a torch and a pair of tongs), that permits a "rebuttable inference" that you intended to use them for cheating... and not, say, lighting charcoal for your hookah. I'm assuming a "rebuttable inference" means that you're allowed to provide a rebuttal to the claim you're using the items for cheating, presumably by telling the authorities what you were really using them for.
So anyway, I'd really like to know what devices are actually a felony to own.
The rest of the statute is just as scary sounding. Casino employees are permitted to detain and question anyone suspected of cheating. In what other state of the Union would a non-cop or other non-state, non-federal employee be permitted to do such a thing? They don't even have to worry about civil or criminal liability for conducting such questioning or for detaining someone against their will. Any "evidence" seized does not have to be returned if the case goes to trial, and can be disposed of even if it isn't produced in court. Devices seized which don't result in charges, but which are considered prohibited devices, are still retained by the Gaming Board and destroyed by them.
So, probably not a good idea to take your iPhone into any casino just to be safe, because even if you're deemed innocent, you might not get your property back.
Because, you know, the US Government Printing Office is the highest authority in the land... NOT!
But really, none of what you wrote is relevant to what the OP said, and not because your rant smells like fifteen kinds of crazy mixed together. The simple fact is that Homeland Security is an organization that absorbed the functions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, and other agencies, and that all of the old and new functions of Homeland Security are functions of the United States federal government.
The simple fact is that the federal government of the United States does not in any functional or real way recognize the sovereignty of any of the states, and you'd be hard pressed to find the federal government pay even lip service to this notion on paper. (Witness federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in California, despite the governor and various state and county attorneys general begging the federal government to stop.)
So, in summary, this guy was stopped at a checkpoint well inside of the state of Texas and was asked to submit to a search of his vehicle. He hadn't crossed any boundary into or out of the United States, and even if he had crossed a state boundary (say, from New Mexico to Texas), that still doesn't constitute crossing an international boundary. That current law and regulation allows the emplacement of checkpoints up to 100 miles inside the United States from any U.S. border is ridiculous, but that's how the checkpoint got there, not for the interstate reasons you suggest. Besides, putting a customs enforcement checkpoint between two states would be considered an undue burden on interstate commerce, something the current federal system was enacted to avoid.
Now, if he had crossed from Mexico into Texas, then ICE or Border Patrol or whoever else has jurisdiction has every right to search his trunk. You have no right to avoid a search under those circumstances. But what happened to the OP should just not have happened, and he was right to stand up for his rights.
I was shocked to find out just how varied the laws are from state to state regarding whether felons can vote.
In some states, your rights are restored automatically once you're out of prison and off of parole or probation. In other states, you have to get the governor to restore your rights. Where I live (Arizona), it's somewhere between those two extremes, but you definitely have to go through a process to get your civil rights restored.
In predominantly red states, there's a lot of incentive to make it as difficult as possible for felons to resume voting, mainly because felons who vote tend to vote Democrat, not Republican. (That's not universally accepted wisdom, but it is echoed in one of the articles I'll link to in a second.) On the other side of the debate, statistics show that felons who vote are 50% less likely to be re-arrested.
So, here are some articles that deal with the topic of felony voting:
There are some pretty choice quotes in each of those articles, and I recommend reading all three.
As for Iowa, it seems that Governor Tom Vilsack issued an executive order in 2005 which restores voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences; prior to that, Iowa was one of the states that required ex-felons to apply to the governor's office to restore their voting rights. Digging deeper, though, it appears that this was a one-time clemency deal, and people who hadn't completed their sentences prior to July 4, 2005, are required to go through the old system or a new, streamlined (mostly automatic) system to apply to have their rights restored.
The article does mention IBM Research (buried about halfway through), and I think the comparison is instructive.
Like IBM Research once did, Microsoft Research does a lot of pure academic research, stuff that is on a par with or even superior to fundamental research being done at universities. You never know what benefits you'll accrue from pure research, or what inventions you'll create (and possibly sell off, if you don't develop them in-house).
Like IBM Research, Microsoft Research is being pressured into shrinking, and to produce more "relevant" results. That means converting more discoveries into marketable products.
When I did an internship at IBM Research (Yorktown Heights, though I actually did most of my work at the Hawthorne facility), I was told that about 2% of research made it into products. I was on one of the teams that actually had something that was being turned into a product, and we were actively trying to kill off a competing speech recognition project within the company. Yeah, IBM Research was so big that they had teams actively competing, the idea being that the best of several ideas/approaches would win out, and make for stronger products in the end. Sure, it might seem wasteful up front, but in the long run you corner the market because you've tried all or nearly all approaches and found the best.
Today, IBM is more known as a services company, and doesn't produce nearly the volume of pure research that they used to. Even when I was an intern, IBM was busily dismantling some of the facilities they had just constructed at Yorktown Heights, because the company was in the process of shifting direction toward "results oriented" research. Some state of the art material science and chemistry labs were being dismantled.
IBM Research wasn't generating a lot of bottom-line dollars, but IBM's prestige has fallen even as the company has become more profitable. I suppose this is one of the disadvantages of being beholden to shareholders who value short-term profits over innovation. While I'm no fan of Microsoft, I can see nothing but bad if Microsoft Research gets gutted the way IBM Research was. The intangible beneift to Microsoft, prestige, will evaporate. Microsoft will have a harder time attracting and keeping rockstar talent and luminous minds.
The conversion rate of research to profit-generating products is dismal now, perhaps, but increasing the conversion rate isn't just a function of "trimming the fat" in the organization. There are probably some cultural forces at work at Microsoft that prevent things from transitioning, just as there were at IBM — I was told some truly astonishing stories of discoveries and developments that were way ahead of their time and never made it to market. I would hazard a guess, though, that there's also a lot of hang time between when something is discovered and when we figure out how to do something useful with that discovery. This is the part of the equation that the shareholders are probably missing, and that latency isn't going to magically disappear no matter how much fat you trim.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems to mainly be due to the insistence of mobile phone vendors who wanted to do things their own way. In fact, if you read through to the end of the IT World article linked in the summary, there's a salient comment at the end by someone using the handle Contrarian which touches on this very issue:
I've said it elsewhere, but I'll say it again: Ideas are not covered by copyright. The whole Terminator fiasco with Harlan Ellison should never have happened, but Cameron's production company didn't want to deal with a possibly protracted plagiarism lawsuit, so they settled. But in order for plagiarism to take place, there has to be copying of the actual work in question. Copying of ideas doesn't count because that's not what copyright protects.
So the previous poster was right -- inspired by and written by are not the same thing.
In the end, you get to the right conclusion -- the issue at hand is a matter of contract law, not copyright law -- but I couldn't stand to see the waters any more muddied than they already are. Don't take the whole Terminator settlement as an endorsement of the idea that copyright covers ideas.
First, you wrote this:
So, James Cameron admitted he got some ideas from Harlan Ellison's writing (for a couple Outer Limits episodes). But then you jump to the (unfounded, and unsupported) conclusion that the verdict was "inevitable" once this happened. Not so; I'll get to my reasoning why in a moment.
Then you wrote:
Except for one glaring problem with your entire line of reasoning: Copyright laws actually don't work that way! You can copyright the expression of an idea. You can not copyright an idea. James Cameron merely admitting that he got a couple ideas from a particular source in no way means that he owes money to Harlan Ellison. There are no new ideas for plots or plot devices under the sun, and the stories you cite by Ellison themselves can be shown to be derivative in some way of even older literature, some of it very ancient.
The settlement was nothing more or less than a means to get rid of a nuisance lawsuit.
I am not a lawyer, but I would encourage you to actually read up on U.S. Copyright law -- the U.S. Copyright Office has a great web site which has FAQs, legal resources, and more. In particular, I'd like to turn your attention to section 102 of Chapter 1 of the law, which states in part:
You later wrote:
Erm, just to point out, I, Robot was a collection of loosely-related stories featuring Dr. Susan Calvin. The movie was written using the character of Dr. Calvin, and was intended to be a story complementary to and similar to the ones that appear in the book, dealing with the same kinds of issues without being derivative of the ideas presented in those other stories. Whether you consider the movie a true heir to that intellectual pedigree or not, the fact remains that calling I, Robot a novel is a stretch.
But while Harlan Ellison is a well known name in science fiction and fantasy, there is apparently some disagreement with his distinction between SF and SciFi.
Besides, much of what Ellison wrote that he billed as science fiction I would only (charitably) call fantasy... which only further serves to illustrate the point that all these descriptive terms for genres are pretty much arbitrary, and there's plenty of bleed-over from one to another. Just ask Margaret Atwood whether The Handmaid's Tale is science fiction or speculative fiction. Her thoughts on the distinction between the two genres are pretty entertaining, albeit infuriating to anyone who actually likes good science fiction.
Funny, I see the "jail" spelling on the BBC far more commonly than the "gaol" spelling. I take that as an indication that "jail" is now the preferred spelling in the UK as well. I've also noticed that "connexion" is dying out in favor of "connection." That said, I have a perverse romantic attachment to "connexion" and "gaol" as cool archaic spellings; they're excellent to use in some contexts, mainly for effect.
In fairness, the real utility of the database will be enabling client-side storage for web apps that utilize HTML 5 features (since the client-side storage stuff is mandated by HTML 5 -- this is the same API that Palm's new phone is going to use). In addition to basic key-value pair storage, there will be fully realized structured/relational data storage.
That's a pretty good disemboweling of Nemesis (thanks for the link!), although I think I disagree with the author of that pictorial guide in only one spot. Basically, that author was complaining about Picard "ignoring the Prime Directive" to ride a dune buggy on a planet. I agree that the dune buggy bit was silly and pointless, but how did that scene constitute a Prime Directive violation? Didn't seem to me that either Picard or Data were doing anything that interfered in the development of the ... er, locals... whoever they were...
...on your definition of "piece of junk." What Jobs considers to be junk is probably acceptable to most users, which is why manufacturers other than Apple seem to sell plenty of these cheap PCs.
First off, the Edison quote is "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." This is not to say that inspiration (presumed here to be a product of giftedness) is somehow dispensible. Both are required, so you can't really say that the 1% component is somehow irrelevant.
Sounds like Langen may have had Asperger's Syndrome, or another similar disorder. It also sounds like Gladwell is cherry-picking his anecdotes to amplify his point.
Shorter, I can buy. More logical is a subjective assessment based on criteria we're not privy to. As this is being debated in other threads, I can only conclude that I'm not the only person who finds this claim suspect. While some are attempting to play the role of apologist for this viewpoint, it's not clear to me which of their arguments is the one that Gladwell is using to justify this statement. Furthermore, the comparison with metric units vs. English units isn't very illuminating -- lots of people I know would prefer doing engineering calculations in English units rather than metric, and in truth, the ease of unit conversion in the metric system isn't such a huge advantage in the real world when doing such calculations. The problems always seem to come in when conversions are happening between systems of units (e.g., going from English to metric).
Which also completely ignores many studies that show that there is a genetic component to IQ. While IQ is variable, with environment playing a substantial role, it's well established that environment is not the sole factor in intellectual development. According to some studies, the contribution of genetics to IQ is as much as 75% (i.e., 75% of all IQ variances can be attributed to genetic differences). I think the reviewer here may be conflating "success" (what the book is about) with "intelligence" (i.e., giftedness and IQ, which seem to be prerequisites for success but which the book argues are not the dominant factors).
It has also been said many times, here on Slashdot and elsewhere, that IQ is the best single predictor of future success -- this seems to be derived from The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray. This claim has been attacked numerous times, so I'll leave it to the statistics folks to argue that one. But you can't just ignore the study altogether.
On a closing note, the review could stand a few extra commas in strategic locations, and maybe some thoughtful reordering of a few sentences to make them clearer.
Yeah, I read that interesting statement for which you provided a link. I noticed that they are a little cagey with respect to what product, if any, they're currently offering that uses the Netbook trademark. (Other bloggers have noted that right now, Psion mostly seems to be offering accessories and replacement parts.)
One passage caught my eye:
Well, considering that Dell and Intel both are using the term "netbook" descriptively for computers in this particular class of subnotebook computers, and considering I've seen promotional material for Asus Eee devices and derivatives calling them netbooks, I wouldn't say "few computer manufacturers" use the term.
As for brick-and-mortar retailers, did Psion bother to check out the U.S. retail landscape? Best Buy regularly calls these kinds of devices "netbooks," and their web site even lets you filter by "netbook" as one category of portable computer.
I have to say, I personally am happy with using two fingers on the touch pad and clicking with the button to do the two-finger-click gesture (which is equivalent to right-clicking). I'm just dubious of the new design where the pad itself is the button. I had thought maybe the pad sent the same event to the OS no matter where you clicked on the surface, but now that you've described it, I guess this is a superior solution... except when some crud gets into the mechanism and prevents one side or the other from registering click events.
I think having gestures + clicking a single physical button that is separate from the pad is the best arrangement, but it seems that Apple ranks cool design higher than ruggedness and reliability in many cases. And I'm saying this as a long-time Apple fan. I'm just glad I bought my MacBook Pro when I did: before they did away with matte finish screens and the separate trackpad button, yet after they came out with LED backlighting.
Summary is wrong; it states a "Radeon 4570" as one of the options. According to the Mac Pro page (under the Comparison tab), the 24" iMac has the ATI Radeon 4850 as an option, while the Mac Pros have an ATI Radeon 4870 as an option.
Well, the National Federation of the Blind did just that, accusing the Authors Guild of discriminating against the blind and creating a legal argument about what is permissible under copyright that never existed until now. Naturally, the Authors Guild subsequently published a rant in the NYT (see today's Slashdot article) which attacks both the NFB and the EFF.
Well, the National Federation of the Blind did just that. The Authors Guild subsequently published a rant in the NYT (see recent Slashdot story) in which they attack the NFB and the EFF.
Yes, that's why he said "just make sure you are in a one party consent state first" -- that's what that means, only one party needs to be aware of the recording, and that party could be the guy with the recording device. It's that way in Arizona, for example, and is commonly used to record local phone calls. The recording is considered a legal document for civil purposes (e.g., a lawsuit).
IANAL, but I've been advised of this particular right in my state.
Seems to me the warning from the prior post should have been enough indication that hiding the recorder isn't legal in every jurisdiction.
Yes, but when you work for any kind of government agency, you have additional restrictions placed upon you that you might not have in a corporate job. Public sector has a lot of compliance issues to deal with, more than private sector IMHO. The big difference, though, is that the government has some truly scary means at its disposal to force compliance, and if you manage to piss off the wrong people (i.e., clueless or assholish people in power), you can get swatted pretty hard -- a lot harder than in the private sector, generally speaking. In the private sector, if there's any legal action, it's usually civil. In the public sector... well, we saw what happened in this case, didn't we? This never should have escalated to the point where people were discussing the option of jail/prison time. And if this were a case of criminal wrongdoing in the corporate world, there's no way the authorities would have acted anywhere near this fast or this severely.
And nobody else is going to do any better, because every technique that has been discussed or tried has flaws.
It's hard at this point to tell if you're trolling or not, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
In short, the answer to your last question is still a resouding NO. There are no more efficient ways to do these things. If anything, some of the techniques that might have fewer problems with false positives also require AI breakthroughs that haven't been invented yet and aren't even on the technology horizon, or deep packet inspection of a kind that will place more overhead and burden on network routing equipment — either way, you'll be slowing the pipes down. In the end, you might turn broadband into a system which is just as slow as dialup; in that case, why bother having broadband at all?
The premise itself isn't sensible either, and it's clear that you don't understand why this might be. Some of the arguments already brought up:
This is one of those cases where understanding the fundamental computer science and network theory (math) really helps you in understanding why most of the techniques being used to block "illegal" content simply don't work or don't scale well. And that's not even addressing the issue over what should be considered legal or illegal. In China, many of the things blocked are sites criticizing the government, or which are deemed to "undermine the social order" (whatever that means). The child porn issue is simply a wedge issue, as others have stated, and it will not end there. We know this because we remember history.
As to the "nobility" of the goal of keeping child porn out of the hands of others, I question that very notion. To me, it is nobile to prevent the suffering of children in the first place. Blocking one particular avenue of access over a computer network does nothing to block other potential avenues (e.g., darknets, sneakernets). It also does nothing to prevent children from being hurt in the first place. This is somewhat like DEA agents or local law enforcement agents in the United States going after small-time drug users instead of getting the dealers off the streets — sure, you're arresting a lot of folks, but you're not making the drugs any less easy to obtain, and you're putting a huge portion of the potential tax base behind bars and making them non-productive. (Not that I'm saying the War on Drugs is just, but the way it is conducted is hardly related to its stated goals.)
The movie Red didn't see wide distribution after its release. I saw a trailer for it, but I think it was shown at a single movie theater in the entire Phoenix metropolitan area for a grand total of one week. Brian Cox just doesn't have the star power of Sean Penn and the rest, so he's under-appreciated.
Fact is, you call this film a nominee, but I can't find mention anywhere that it even got considered for Oscar nomination. (By contrast, I had heard early reports that The Dark Knight was considered for Best Picture, though it missed out on that nomination. I suppose that would be an overly ambitious goal for a comic book adaptation, which few people take seriously still to this day.)
OK, first off, it's "your view," not "you're view." Your is a possessive, and you're is a contraction of "you are."
Secondly, it's called civil disobedience, not "civil disorder" as you put it — that means something totally different.
If it's one thing I can't stand, it's petty moralizing and condescension from someone who can't construct a sentence. And the fact remains, just because something is illegal doesn't make the law just; by the same token, something might be perfectly legal, yet morally or ethically reprehensible.
True, smidge207 does appear in that lovely list of professional trolls...
However, you could have at least made sure you replied to the correct comment thread; instead, you replied to a comment that was a sibling of the post by smidge207.
Actually, 480p is not usually billed as Standard Definition (aka "non-HD TV"), but rather as "Enhanced Definition" or ED. It's just progressive, rather than the interlacing you typically see with what we call Standard Def. The "Enhanced" designation was cooked up by vendors of plasma TV sets who wanted to sell wide-screen TVs that wouldn't meet the definition of High Def (which in the U.S. is 720p, 1080i, or 1080p).
Anyway, no matter what you call it, 480p isn't really Standard Def, because it is visibly superior. What's sad is that cable and satellite operators compress video so much that HD is hardly any better than ED -- seems to me that truth in advertising laws ought to apply. I haven't been in any hurry to upgrade my cable package to HD for this reason, nor have I transitioned to DirecTV.
Naturally, this piques my curiosity (and gives me the urge to go out and purchase or build such a device just so I can own something that is illegal in another state). But after reading the statute in question, I am not really clear on what specific items are a felony to own. The only section that stands out in that regard is NRS 465.080, which outlines materials prohibited because they can be used to make counterfeit coins, chips, tokens, etc.
Lead and lead alloys are on that list, so technically you could get arrested if you're found with a lead fishing weight in your pocket. (Yeah, I know, lead is being replaced by tungsten and other metals for sinkers.) If two or more items from the prohibited list are on your person (say, a torch and a pair of tongs), that permits a "rebuttable inference" that you intended to use them for cheating... and not, say, lighting charcoal for your hookah. I'm assuming a "rebuttable inference" means that you're allowed to provide a rebuttal to the claim you're using the items for cheating, presumably by telling the authorities what you were really using them for.
So anyway, I'd really like to know what devices are actually a felony to own.
The rest of the statute is just as scary sounding. Casino employees are permitted to detain and question anyone suspected of cheating. In what other state of the Union would a non-cop or other non-state, non-federal employee be permitted to do such a thing? They don't even have to worry about civil or criminal liability for conducting such questioning or for detaining someone against their will. Any "evidence" seized does not have to be returned if the case goes to trial, and can be disposed of even if it isn't produced in court. Devices seized which don't result in charges, but which are considered prohibited devices, are still retained by the Gaming Board and destroyed by them.
So, probably not a good idea to take your iPhone into any casino just to be safe, because even if you're deemed innocent, you might not get your property back.
Because, you know, the US Government Printing Office is the highest authority in the land... NOT!
But really, none of what you wrote is relevant to what the OP said, and not because your rant smells like fifteen kinds of crazy mixed together. The simple fact is that Homeland Security is an organization that absorbed the functions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, and other agencies, and that all of the old and new functions of Homeland Security are functions of the United States federal government.
The simple fact is that the federal government of the United States does not in any functional or real way recognize the sovereignty of any of the states, and you'd be hard pressed to find the federal government pay even lip service to this notion on paper. (Witness federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in California, despite the governor and various state and county attorneys general begging the federal government to stop.)
So, in summary, this guy was stopped at a checkpoint well inside of the state of Texas and was asked to submit to a search of his vehicle. He hadn't crossed any boundary into or out of the United States, and even if he had crossed a state boundary (say, from New Mexico to Texas), that still doesn't constitute crossing an international boundary. That current law and regulation allows the emplacement of checkpoints up to 100 miles inside the United States from any U.S. border is ridiculous, but that's how the checkpoint got there, not for the interstate reasons you suggest. Besides, putting a customs enforcement checkpoint between two states would be considered an undue burden on interstate commerce, something the current federal system was enacted to avoid.
Now, if he had crossed from Mexico into Texas, then ICE or Border Patrol or whoever else has jurisdiction has every right to search his trunk. You have no right to avoid a search under those circumstances. But what happened to the OP should just not have happened, and he was right to stand up for his rights.
I was shocked to find out just how varied the laws are from state to state regarding whether felons can vote.
In some states, your rights are restored automatically once you're out of prison and off of parole or probation. In other states, you have to get the governor to restore your rights. Where I live (Arizona), it's somewhere between those two extremes, but you definitely have to go through a process to get your civil rights restored.
In predominantly red states, there's a lot of incentive to make it as difficult as possible for felons to resume voting, mainly because felons who vote tend to vote Democrat, not Republican. (That's not universally accepted wisdom, but it is echoed in one of the articles I'll link to in a second.) On the other side of the debate, statistics show that felons who vote are 50% less likely to be re-arrested.
So, here are some articles that deal with the topic of felony voting:
From Time, Why Can't Felons Vote?
From the Washington Post, Why Can't Ex-Felons Vote?
And finally, Some Felons' Voting Rights Left Behind Bars
There are some pretty choice quotes in each of those articles, and I recommend reading all three.
As for Iowa, it seems that Governor Tom Vilsack issued an executive order in 2005 which restores voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences; prior to that, Iowa was one of the states that required ex-felons to apply to the governor's office to restore their voting rights. Digging deeper, though, it appears that this was a one-time clemency deal, and people who hadn't completed their sentences prior to July 4, 2005, are required to go through the old system or a new, streamlined (mostly automatic) system to apply to have their rights restored.
The article does mention IBM Research (buried about halfway through), and I think the comparison is instructive.
Like IBM Research once did, Microsoft Research does a lot of pure academic research, stuff that is on a par with or even superior to fundamental research being done at universities. You never know what benefits you'll accrue from pure research, or what inventions you'll create (and possibly sell off, if you don't develop them in-house).
Like IBM Research, Microsoft Research is being pressured into shrinking, and to produce more "relevant" results. That means converting more discoveries into marketable products.
When I did an internship at IBM Research (Yorktown Heights, though I actually did most of my work at the Hawthorne facility), I was told that about 2% of research made it into products. I was on one of the teams that actually had something that was being turned into a product, and we were actively trying to kill off a competing speech recognition project within the company. Yeah, IBM Research was so big that they had teams actively competing, the idea being that the best of several ideas/approaches would win out, and make for stronger products in the end. Sure, it might seem wasteful up front, but in the long run you corner the market because you've tried all or nearly all approaches and found the best.
Today, IBM is more known as a services company, and doesn't produce nearly the volume of pure research that they used to. Even when I was an intern, IBM was busily dismantling some of the facilities they had just constructed at Yorktown Heights, because the company was in the process of shifting direction toward "results oriented" research. Some state of the art material science and chemistry labs were being dismantled.
IBM Research wasn't generating a lot of bottom-line dollars, but IBM's prestige has fallen even as the company has become more profitable. I suppose this is one of the disadvantages of being beholden to shareholders who value short-term profits over innovation. While I'm no fan of Microsoft, I can see nothing but bad if Microsoft Research gets gutted the way IBM Research was. The intangible beneift to Microsoft, prestige, will evaporate. Microsoft will have a harder time attracting and keeping rockstar talent and luminous minds.
The conversion rate of research to profit-generating products is dismal now, perhaps, but increasing the conversion rate isn't just a function of "trimming the fat" in the organization. There are probably some cultural forces at work at Microsoft that prevent things from transitioning, just as there were at IBM — I was told some truly astonishing stories of discoveries and developments that were way ahead of their time and never made it to market. I would hazard a guess, though, that there's also a lot of hang time between when something is discovered and when we figure out how to do something useful with that discovery. This is the part of the equation that the shareholders are probably missing, and that latency isn't going to magically disappear no matter how much fat you trim.