Hmmm... This seems to be anothe case of something I've been seeing lately: My message got attached to the parent of the one that I actually replied to. So it reads like a non sequitur.
I guess I should have quoted the original message, short as it was. It may not get modded up, and won't be seen by many people who read my reply.
I was replying to a comment that the current Beijing rulers don't have a mandate of heaven.
I do wonder how important that ever was. After all, a large part of their population was Buddhist, and what does heaven mean to them? You might try "mandate of nirvana", but that somehow doesn't seem to work too well...
There is also a question of whether they really did lose such a mandate. Remember when pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell informed us that the Sep 11 terrorists were doing the "work of God"? Maybe we should ask them about the state of the relationship between the Beijing rulers and the heavenly plane. They can probably give us first-hand information on the topic, since they apparently have a direct connection to God.
It is true that dissent in China will get you jailed, whereas in America it is actually hard to get jailed for dissent.
If you're white, and have an "American" name.
Google for "Jose Padilla" and "Yaser Hamdi". Both native-born American citizens. Both jailed for years without charges. Padilla was a bit of a two-bit thug (from Brooklyn;-). Hamdi seems to be your basic nerdy nice guy (with an interest in Eastern religions). But this was all irrelevant when they were arrested. It's well understood in the US by the minority that ever heard of them that their real crime was being "in the wrong place at the wrong time" and not being white. The authorities didn't have enough evidence for a court case, so they just held these guys in jail without charges.
When George Bush told us "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists", most Americans weren't really all that worried. We understood the unstated "unless you're white" that would make it difficult for most of us to be jailed for disloyalty. But we're under no illusion that this applies to all Americans.
(I do wonder sometimes what might happen if the authorities discover my French-Canadian grandmother.;-)
The London guardian at one point ran a piece on how the Chinese embassy had been quite likely rebroadcasting radio signals from Serb forces in violation of the laws governing embassies (neutrality) and how the bombing run that hit the embassy was the only one which didn't go through the NATO chain of command, but came directly from the CIA.
And how much did we in the states hear about this second, more likely explanation?
Oooh! Me, me, me! I heard that...
Actually, I'm pretty sure I came across it on the Internet. By then, I'd long since stopped watching network news. Some info came from print sources. But even 10 years ago, the most reliable news was the Internet. This was, of course, almost entirely due to the variety of sources. In this case, there were Yugoslav news sources on the Net, as there are now Iraqi news sources on the Net. You can learn all sorts of interesting things that the official news sources won't tell you. And some of it's even true.
Anyone really interested in learning what's going on in the world can now easily find such sources and compare them with the commercial and government news. There's getting to be fewer excuses for ignorance.
Of course, the Chinese government is one that's still fairly successful at keeping their own population ignorant. But give them another 10 years, and the Internet will be too important to their own business world. Then they won't be able to restrict their people's access without also seriously restricting their economy.
But wouldn't you agree that the Chinese government lacks some of the democratic customs practiced in most of the world and that they excessively opress their people for acts that we take for granted?
Sure; that's pretty well documented. But calling it "Communism" is merely a rhetorical device whose main function is to prevent coherent discussion. It has little to do with Communism or any other ideology. It's mainly the effect of a top-down power structure, which is dependent on keeping lower levels docile. This happens with any ideology.
It is curious that China seems to be one of the few parts of the world with little history of democracy, which may be defined loosely as a system of choosing governors by some sort of voting process. This sort of bottom-up power structure has been developed independently in many cultures. Thus, contrary to current US government propaganda, even a casual reading of Mideast history will turn up many references to village-level democracy, typically in the form of town meetings of some sort.
But China seems to have been mostly governed historically by a sort of civil service (bureaucracy), which you are hired into, and your career is determined by decisions of your superiors. This is another common scheme in many societies. It seems to have survived China's brief experiment with Communism quite well.
it's important that we limit, as much as is possible, our children's exposure to information, education,...
Of course. And, as here in the US, attempts to block children's exposure to the Internet will have a valuable effect: It tells the children where the forbidden knowledge is to be found. Those who want to learn will know where to look. And the next generation will be fluent users of the Internet.
That's what we want, of course. So we should applaud all such attempts to block children's access to the Internet. This is the best path to a fully-interconnected world in which our rulers won't be able to keep us ignorant any more.
Indeed; Communism is thoroughly dead in China. The current ruling gang apparently doesn't even give it lip service any more. Many writers with a bit of historical knowledge have commented that China is again ruled by mandarins, though they may not use that term.
It is impressive how long rhetorical terms can last. Thus, Communism died in the old USSR when Stalin took power and became in all but name a new tsar. But Western propagandists still used that country as an example of Communism 50 years later, despite all the objections that the term no longer applied in any meaningful fashion.
It's likely that 50 years from now, Western politicos will still be using China as an example of Communism, in their attempts to extend the old Communist/Capitalist false dichotomy.
It's really just a way of blindly using code words to avoid at reality. A reasonable approach would be to simply treat terms like "Communist", "Capitalist", etc. as symptoms of writing without much thought or understanding. It's hardly worth debating when such terms appear, since (as a form of Godwin's observation) such terms usually mean that no reasonable discussion will be possible. In American politics, the terms "Liberal" and "Conservative" have come to have the same import.
OTOH, if someone refers to events in China as "Chinese", reasonable discussion of events there might be possible. The current rulers of China aren't beholden to any outside ideology; they are their own people, with their own ideas and goals. Understanding will come from talking about them as they are, not by describing them with foreign words that don't apply very well.
this is the beginning of the government controlled communications infrastructure and the final elimination of individual value from the internet
We seem to have yet another person who thinks that the Internet was invented by private industry. Fact is, it was developed nearly 100% with U.S. government funding. Mostly military funding, actually. Private business got involved only when they realized that there was money to be made. This was long after the Internet was designed and built.
Of course, there was lots of business involvement during the DOD-funded years. As usual, much of the work of building the hardware was subcontracted. And the design was subcontracted, but that was mostly to academia (and a few companies like BB&N). But neither the funding nor the design came from private business.
Also, the history so far shows that, at least in the US, the commercial Internet has been much more restrictive of "individual value" than the government. Thus, many ISPs routinely block ports 80 and 25. This is done primarily so that your email and web pages have to be stored on the ISPs computers rather than just on your own. This way, they can easily access all of your email and web pages. Unlike the government, they don't need a warrant to do this. Some of them (e.g., msn.com) have even had an item in their contract stating that they own any files on their machine. So, for example, if you put your own music on a web site hosted on the ISP, you have assigned the copyright to the ISP.
In the US, at least, the laws (attempt to) prevent a government agency from doing this sort of thing to you. Granted, they might do it anyway. But it's illegal, and they can't use such information against you in court, unless they first got a warrant to access your data. The First Ammendment will almost certainly be interpreted by the courts to mean that you have a right to use any port, including ports 80 and 25. It's simply not legal for a government agency to block private communications. A private ISP can block your communication as they wish. They can also intercept your communication and do as they wish with anything they capture. Unless you're a multi-millionaire, there's not a lot you can do to stop them.
Of course, the Bush administration had been doing their best to give the government the unrestricted power that corporations have...
Listening to music is free, just like looking at this sculpture is free.
True. What will probably happen is that listening to the music will be ok, but remembering it will be a form of copying, so it will be infringement.
Thus, as other people have suggested, we will soon reach the point where whistling a copyrighted tune while walking down the street will lead to arrest and an infringement charge. When you whistled the tune, you were doing a public performance of a copy of the tune, right?
It's easy to think of other similar absurdities. For example, street layouts are designed, and presumably copyrighted. So, while you can look at the streets, if you drive along the them, you are copying the layout, and are thus infringing the designer's copyright.
Hmmm... I seem to recall seeing lots and lots of cityscapes in the background of pictures in newspapers, magazines, etc. I rather doubt that for every picture, the publisher has searched out the owner of the copyright to the image of every building (and vehicle) in the picture. Doing that for some of the pictures would cost more than most publishers' annual profit.
It sounds like something that is enforced for people like you and me, but not enforced for corporate publishers.
It might be fun to search out public events that are likely to result in news photos, get your own image into a photo, and then sue the publisher when it's published. Presumably I own the copyright to my own image, after all.
The traditional name for such a gift is "white elephant".
The usual story explaining this is that occasionally very pale elephants are born, and in SE Asia, these have been traditionally considered a sacred beast. If you offended a king or prince or other powerful person, one way of getting back was to give you a "gift" of a white elephant. This obligated you to care for the elephant for the rest of your/its life. This could be somewhat of a financial burden, of course.
Sounds like the people of Chicago have themselves such a gift. Especially if you can be sued and fined (or imprisoned?) for merely taking a picture of the gift at its very public location.
This is probably also a good exhibit in any discussion of changing the copyright laws.
Well within our lifetimes, the network will become smart enough that it will find your party for you. A lot of problems have to be solved before this "just works", but it will happen.
Uh, it happened at least 20 years ago.
In the mid 80's, one of the fun toys that I worked with for a while was an AT&T desktop computer. Not surprisingly, it came with lots of phone-related software. It had a couple of jacks for a handset and a wall connection, so it acted like a phone with keyboard and display.
One of the apps was a lot like the address/phone books that a lot of the current "smartphones" provide. But if it didn't have a name, you could type it, and it would call the electronic version of Directory Assistance. If there were several matches on the name, it would show them to you, and you could select one.
You could do the usual typing of the name and number into your contact list, of course. But the technology to look up a name remotely was also provided. You could also include a city, and it would figure out how to contact the phone-company database there.
The machine didn't do well commercially, though. Probably because by then, outside the Microsoft market, nobody was buying computers that didn't come with builtin Internet capability, and this machine didn't have it. It only spoke proprietary phone-company protocols.
This is probably also why people now might think that automated number (phone or IP) is some sort of new idea. Proprietary code like AT&T's doesn't stand much chance of being used by anyone else. And, of course, AT&T didn't know how to market computers with builtin comm capabilities. (They couldn't even figure out how to market unix.;-)
Funny thing: I did a bit of googling for this snafu, and found a comment that Microsoft had noticed the problem and fixed it in Feb 2005. It seems that their fix didn't last.
(This is, of course, a well-known sort of event in the history of Microsoft patches, which have often been undone by later patches. They're not the only ones who have had this problem, but they seem to be more afflicted by it than most others.;-)
Y'know, I hadn't looked at mapquest in months, but you're right. They now have yet another New Look, and there aren't any mentions of microsoft.com anywhere. There don't seem to be any AOL references, either, though the graphics do have that certain something.
Also, I notice that the site is still pretty much lacking in various of the old features, such as getting maps of different sizes, adding in your own marker icons, etc. I wonder if they'll add these things back, or if they will be available only to paying subscribers?
Meanwhile, the initial google maps seems to already be the best in the pack. I told my wife she should check out maps.google.com, and she was dubious about bothering with a new map site. But within a few minutes, she was saying how nice it was, and it's in her bookmarks now.
I think it's probably by far the clearest map rendering I've seen anywhere. Extremely good visual quality.... But of course it's still Beta.
True, true.
One of the things I found quickly is the serious shortage of information in the maps. Above zoom level 3, almost all the street names disappear. There's plenty of room for them in the empty spaces, and the maps would be much more useful if you could see the street names.
I hope they fix this quickly.
But it's already better than mapquest, which has really gone downhill since Microsoft bought them out. For example, mapquest no longer gives you maps of different sizes unless you buy a subscription; you get only the smallest map. This is already fixed in a much cooler fashion by google's maps, by matching the map to the window size.
And the panning is quite nice. It's just like the Garmin 3600 that I've had for over a year now, but with a much bigger screen (and fewer street names;-).
Now if I could plug a GPS gadget into my laptop and make it talk to the google map aplet, so it could show a "You are here" icon on the map...
you need to edit your binary search paths ($PATH)...
That sort of thing should already have been handled by the OS.
Yeah; that's fine if you aren't using java for anything else. It's fairly common for java users to have more than one version installed. Often this is because there are apps out there that require a specific jvm. With the ability to have a different $PATH in different windows, it's possible to solve such problems.
Of course, eventually you'll likely find that this is unnecessary, and all this can be set up automagically when you log in. But java developers will still insist on the ability to install more than one jvm, and choose among them when running a java app.
The fact that you want your hand held behind the scenes doesn't mean that the rest of us shouldn't be allowed to use the full power of our system.
(And, of course, the OS should have nothing whatsoever to do with setting the $PATH variable. That should be done by whatever login app you're using. If it's tied into the OS, you're using a system that has a very bad engineering design.;-)
... pointing a finger at someone you can't really hold accountable or make a lawsuit against is worthwhile. Telling your CEO "but the tool didn't see that problem" potentially makes you look just as dumb as the tool you paid for.
Needless to say, this sort of finger pointing after a disaster is the norm in most organizations, corporate or governmental. But there's a strategy that can produce good security while covering your ass when the finger pointing starts.
What you do is bring up the FOSS tools during discussions, but don't make a fool of yourself by pushing too strongly. The suits will, of course, decree a commercial "solution". You take the classses and get fluent with the decreed software. Meanwhile, in your copious free time (;-), you also download the free tools, and learn to use them.
When the disaster happens, and the commercial tool didn't see the problem, you go through the standard finger pointing for a while. Then you casually drop in the fact that one of the free tools actually spotted it and led you to the problem. When they hit you with "Why didn't you report it?", you say "Oh, you must not have seen the memo I sent around." You did carefully make sure you had documentation on the problem, and copies of the memo (which they ignored because it was too technical for them).
This way, you can get the benefits of multiple security tools, without hitting your bosses over the head with the fact that they paid for something that didn't do the job. And you've shown that you can do the job, although the main tools failed you.
In most organizations, this is really about the best you can do. Too bad, but that's what groups of mere humans are like.
(Yes; I have seen this scenario played out at work. Several times. They never learn.;-)
We, humans, are the first species on Earth capable of spreading our biosphere into space.
Maybe, maybe not.
Astronomers have known for some time that, like other objects in the solar system, our planet has a "dust tail" that's blown off by the solar wind. This tail is thin, and mostly gases, but it also includes particles up to the size of bacterial spores. The outer atmosphere does contain small numbers of such spores, and probably has for a few billion years. So the Earth has been spraying the outer parts of the solar system with bacterial spores for a rather long time.
Whether any of them have survived, we don't know. Mars is the most likely place to find them. Surface conditions aren't good now for coming out of the spore stage. But a few meters or kilometers down, conditions are probably a lot better. There have been predictions that we will find bacteria living below the surface of Mars, and they'll be very similar to Earth bacteria, because their ancestors came from here.
I've seen this mentioned somewhere recently in the flurry of Titan stories. But Earth bacteria almost certainly won't be found living there (although there will be a few spores). All known life on Earth uses biochemistry that requires a substrate of water as a solvent. At Titan's temperatures (around 95K), water is permanently a mineral. There is lots of methane available as a solvent, but you can't substitute methane for water in biochemistry. They are very different solvents, starting from the fact that water is a polar molecule, while methane is nonpolar. Earthly bacterial spores would simply never wake up on Titan, because their chemical processes don't work when their water is crystallized.
So Mars (and possibly Europa) are the only feasible places in the outer solar system to find Earth's bacterial colonists actually growing, below the surface. We know enough about Mars to say that it has been even better at some times in the past. But so far, we don't have enough evidence to say for sure whether this has actually happened.
All this is pure speculation, of course.
We are quite probably the first species (in this solar system) with the prospect of knowingly modifying another planet so we can live there.
I don't, either, on my linux boxes. But they are there on my Mac Powerbook. I've dug around in TFM (i.e., the Help stuff) to find a way to turn off silly cpu-eaters like this, to no avail. Anyone know if it's possible to turn off these shadows in OSX?
I have noticed that, after a few upgrades to "current" linux releases, my main linux box is noticably slower than it used to be. The most obvious is that, when I sit down to a blanked-out screen and touch a key or the mouse, it now takes a minute or more to finish painting the screen. In the meantime, nothing works.
I thought we were getting away from the notion that clock speed = performance.
Actually, there's a good use for such comparisons: It tells you that the writer is clueless.
I'd already read enough about the Cell to know that it's more like the PowerPC than it is like an Intel cpu. So, when I read the comparison of its supposed speed and a Pentium's, I immediately knew that the writer hadn't a clue.
Any info around about benchmarks? Those can be misleading, too, in the hands of the wrong marketer. But with enough of them, it's a lot more likely that you can glean some actual speed info.
Not really. It's just a trivial application of basic number theory. Number theory is a branch of mathematics that's centuries old, and this is a really basic application of it. If you've taken Number Theory 101, you won't find this at all interesting or worth studying. If you haven't studied basic number theory, it would be a lot more interesting to study a text on the subject. You'd learn a lot more than you would by studying this patent or any code that implements it.
Using letters to represent digits in a number goes back to the anciend Hebrew and Greek writing systems. It's done billions of times per day in our computers, any time a hex number is generated. Also, see the Base64 encoding used in email MIME attachments. You can't get anything interesting or worth studying from the representation of base-30 digits in this patent. Using an unusual base is simply not interesting.
Treating a floating-point number as a string of bits and reinterpreting the bits as an integer is standard in all low-level programming. See the hex notation again. There's nothing the least bit interesting about this, unless you're mathematiclly illiterate, and it dates to the very earliest computers.
This is merely an attempt to stake a legal claim on centuries (or millenia) of prior art. If the patent is approved, it will mostly show just how low the USPTO's technical expertise has sunk.
It's main use would be as ammunition in the growing "Abolish software patents" argument. Even accepting such an application should be grounds for wiping the USPTO and replacing it with something at least minimally competent.
(OTOH, although this integer representation isn't interesting, there is the old mathematical proof that all the integers are interesting.;-)
I don't think Linux will be crippled by the inability to use an ISNOT operator in their BASIC compilers.
Why did I suddenly imagine a BASIC compiler's author being sued for trademark infringement from Apple, over their new iSnot nose-hair trimmer (combined with USB memory device)?
Yeah, or you could use base 90. That way, you'd use most of the printable ascii char set except for a few chars like '/', '&', '?', and so on. This would produce an even shorter representation.
Base 30 is basically nonsensical from any technical viewpoint. So to understand why they'd try to get legal control of that base, we must consider non-technical explanations.
The explanation is probably, as others have hinted, the legal and "marketing" uses of a patent on such a representation. If MS can get this patent, they can control who can use base-30 representations in URLs. This means that they can either demand a licensing fee for, or block outright, any uses of this base.
MS is ramping up a battle to block "free" software. And there's an important arena for this battle, hinted at by this patent's use of latitude and longitude as an example of their encoding.
Microsoft has been buying all the online map sites such as mapquest, mapblast, mappoint, etc. (Check them out.) With this patent, they can switch these sites to use their encoding, and establish their URLs as the "standard". Anyone who wants to interoperate with them will have to use their encoding scheme. But you will only be able to do this with a license from MS. If you try giving out free software using their encoding scheme, they'll sue you for patent infringement. Or they'll sell you a license for, say, $100 per downloaded copy of your software. Meanwhile, they'll give out their software for free or at a nominal price. This will effectively eliminate any free competition.
It could also effectively eliminate most non-free mapping software. If you have to add the license fee to your price, while MS is selling software without this surcharge, you probably won't sell many copies. Especially if MS's software comes bundled with Windows.
Their lawyers are probably smart enough to figure out that base-60 and base-90 representations wouldn't be patentable. Even if the USPTO approved the patent, any court would throw it out on grounds of both obviousness and prior art. But base-30, since it's so nonsensical and isn't in use by anyone for anything, could be aproved and accepted by the courts. There's no prior art. And judges aren't technically trained in number theory, so they'll easily accept the spurious reasoning for base 30.
If this patent is approved, we can see a shortage of mapping software from anyhone except Microsoft. If you can't represent latitude and longitude in the form that will be required by all the online map sites, how can you produce any map software at all?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm ... This seems to be anothe case of something I've been seeing lately: My message got attached to the parent of the one that I actually replied to. So it reads like a non sequitur.
...
I guess I should have quoted the original message, short as it was. It may not get modded up, and won't be seen by many people who read my reply.
I was replying to a comment that the current Beijing rulers don't have a mandate of heaven.
Now let's see where this gets put
There is that. ;-)
...
I do wonder how important that ever was. After all, a large part of their population was Buddhist, and what does heaven mean to them? You might try "mandate of nirvana", but that somehow doesn't seem to work too well
There is also a question of whether they really did lose such a mandate. Remember when pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell informed us that the Sep 11 terrorists were doing the "work of God"? Maybe we should ask them about the state of the relationship between the Beijing rulers and the heavenly plane. They can probably give us first-hand information on the topic, since they apparently have a direct connection to God.
It is true that dissent in China will get you jailed, whereas in America it is actually hard to get jailed for dissent.
;-). Hamdi seems to be your basic nerdy nice guy (with an interest in Eastern religions). But this was all irrelevant when they were arrested. It's well understood in the US by the minority that ever heard of them that their real crime was being "in the wrong place at the wrong time" and not being white. The authorities didn't have enough evidence for a court case, so they just held these guys in jail without charges.
;-)
If you're white, and have an "American" name.
Google for "Jose Padilla" and "Yaser Hamdi". Both native-born American citizens. Both jailed for years without charges. Padilla was a bit of a two-bit thug (from Brooklyn
When George Bush told us "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists", most Americans weren't really all that worried. We understood the unstated "unless you're white" that would make it difficult for most of us to be jailed for disloyalty. But we're under no illusion that this applies to all Americans.
(I do wonder sometimes what might happen if the authorities discover my French-Canadian grandmother.
The London guardian at one point ran a piece on how the Chinese embassy had been quite likely rebroadcasting radio signals from Serb forces in violation of the laws governing embassies (neutrality) and how the bombing run that hit the embassy was the only one which didn't go through the NATO chain of command, but came directly from the CIA.
...
And how much did we in the states hear about this second, more likely explanation?
Oooh! Me, me, me! I heard that
Actually, I'm pretty sure I came across it on the Internet. By then, I'd long since stopped watching network news. Some info came from print sources. But even 10 years ago, the most reliable news was the Internet. This was, of course, almost entirely due to the variety of sources. In this case, there were Yugoslav news sources on the Net, as there are now Iraqi news sources on the Net. You can learn all sorts of interesting things that the official news sources won't tell you. And some of it's even true.
Anyone really interested in learning what's going on in the world can now easily find such sources and compare them with the commercial and government news. There's getting to be fewer excuses for ignorance.
Of course, the Chinese government is one that's still fairly successful at keeping their own population ignorant. But give them another 10 years, and the Internet will be too important to their own business world. Then they won't be able to restrict their people's access without also seriously restricting their economy.
[K]eep in mind that people are generally stupid and impulsive when they get into large groups (regardless of beliefs).
;-)
Somewhere I once read a "law" that the intelligence level of a group of humans is inversely proportional to the square root of the group's size.
But I can't remember who wrote that. (Google doesn't seem to know, either.
But wouldn't you agree that the Chinese government lacks some of the democratic customs practiced in most of the world and that they excessively opress their people for acts that we take for granted?
Sure; that's pretty well documented. But calling it "Communism" is merely a rhetorical device whose main function is to prevent coherent discussion. It has little to do with Communism or any other ideology. It's mainly the effect of a top-down power structure, which is dependent on keeping lower levels docile. This happens with any ideology.
It is curious that China seems to be one of the few parts of the world with little history of democracy, which may be defined loosely as a system of choosing governors by some sort of voting process. This sort of bottom-up power structure has been developed independently in many cultures. Thus, contrary to current US government propaganda, even a casual reading of Mideast history will turn up many references to village-level democracy, typically in the form of town meetings of some sort.
But China seems to have been mostly governed historically by a sort of civil service (bureaucracy), which you are hired into, and your career is determined by decisions of your superiors. This is another common scheme in many societies. It seems to have survived China's brief experiment with Communism quite well.
it's important that we limit, as much as is possible, our children's exposure to information, education, ...
;-)
Of course. And, as here in the US, attempts to block children's exposure to the Internet will have a valuable effect: It tells the children where the forbidden knowledge is to be found. Those who want to learn will know where to look. And the next generation will be fluent users of the Internet.
That's what we want, of course. So we should applaud all such attempts to block children's access to the Internet. This is the best path to a fully-interconnected world in which our rulers won't be able to keep us ignorant any more.
(Written with tongue only half in cheek.
Indeed; Communism is thoroughly dead in China. The current ruling gang apparently doesn't even give it lip service any more. Many writers with a bit of historical knowledge have commented that China is again ruled by mandarins, though they may not use that term.
It is impressive how long rhetorical terms can last. Thus, Communism died in the old USSR when Stalin took power and became in all but name a new tsar. But Western propagandists still used that country as an example of Communism 50 years later, despite all the objections that the term no longer applied in any meaningful fashion.
It's likely that 50 years from now, Western politicos will still be using China as an example of Communism, in their attempts to extend the old Communist/Capitalist false dichotomy.
It's really just a way of blindly using code words to avoid at reality. A reasonable approach would be to simply treat terms like "Communist", "Capitalist", etc. as symptoms of writing without much thought or understanding. It's hardly worth debating when such terms appear, since (as a form of Godwin's observation) such terms usually mean that no reasonable discussion will be possible. In American politics, the terms "Liberal" and "Conservative" have come to have the same import.
OTOH, if someone refers to events in China as "Chinese", reasonable discussion of events there might be possible. The current rulers of China aren't beholden to any outside ideology; they are their own people, with their own ideas and goals. Understanding will come from talking about them as they are, not by describing them with foreign words that don't apply very well.
this is the beginning of the government controlled communications infrastructure and the final elimination of individual value from the internet
...
We seem to have yet another person who thinks that the Internet was invented by private industry. Fact is, it was developed nearly 100% with U.S. government funding. Mostly military funding, actually. Private business got involved only when they realized that there was money to be made. This was long after the Internet was designed and built.
Of course, there was lots of business involvement during the DOD-funded years. As usual, much of the work of building the hardware was subcontracted. And the design was subcontracted, but that was mostly to academia (and a few companies like BB&N). But neither the funding nor the design came from private business.
Also, the history so far shows that, at least in the US, the commercial Internet has been much more restrictive of "individual value" than the government. Thus, many ISPs routinely block ports 80 and 25. This is done primarily so that your email and web pages have to be stored on the ISPs computers rather than just on your own. This way, they can easily access all of your email and web pages. Unlike the government, they don't need a warrant to do this. Some of them (e.g., msn.com) have even had an item in their contract stating that they own any files on their machine. So, for example, if you put your own music on a web site hosted on the ISP, you have assigned the copyright to the ISP.
In the US, at least, the laws (attempt to) prevent a government agency from doing this sort of thing to you. Granted, they might do it anyway. But it's illegal, and they can't use such information against you in court, unless they first got a warrant to access your data. The First Ammendment will almost certainly be interpreted by the courts to mean that you have a right to use any port, including ports 80 and 25. It's simply not legal for a government agency to block private communications. A private ISP can block your communication as they wish. They can also intercept your communication and do as they wish with anything they capture. Unless you're a multi-millionaire, there's not a lot you can do to stop them.
Of course, the Bush administration had been doing their best to give the government the unrestricted power that corporations have
Listening to music is free, just like looking at this sculpture is free.
...
True. What will probably happen is that listening to the music will be ok, but remembering it will be a form of copying, so it will be infringement.
Thus, as other people have suggested, we will soon reach the point where whistling a copyrighted tune while walking down the street will lead to arrest and an infringement charge. When you whistled the tune, you were doing a public performance of a copy of the tune, right?
It's easy to think of other similar absurdities. For example, street layouts are designed, and presumably copyrighted. So, while you can look at the streets, if you drive along the them, you are copying the layout, and are thus infringing the designer's copyright.
This is going to be fun to watch
Hmmm ... I seem to recall seeing lots and lots of cityscapes in the background of pictures in newspapers, magazines, etc. I rather doubt that for every picture, the publisher has searched out the owner of the copyright to the image of every building (and vehicle) in the picture. Doing that for some of the pictures would cost more than most publishers' annual profit.
It sounds like something that is enforced for people like you and me, but not enforced for corporate publishers.
It might be fun to search out public events that are likely to result in news photos, get your own image into a photo, and then sue the publisher when it's published. Presumably I own the copyright to my own image, after all.
The traditional name for such a gift is "white elephant".
The usual story explaining this is that occasionally very pale elephants are born, and in SE Asia, these have been traditionally considered a sacred beast. If you offended a king or prince or other powerful person, one way of getting back was to give you a "gift" of a white elephant. This obligated you to care for the elephant for the rest of your/its life. This could be somewhat of a financial burden, of course.
Sounds like the people of Chicago have themselves such a gift. Especially if you can be sued and fined (or imprisoned?) for merely taking a picture of the gift at its very public location.
This is probably also a good exhibit in any discussion of changing the copyright laws.
Well within our lifetimes, the network will become smart enough that it will find your party for you. A lot of problems have to be solved before this "just works", but it will happen.
;-)
Uh, it happened at least 20 years ago.
In the mid 80's, one of the fun toys that I worked with for a while was an AT&T desktop computer. Not surprisingly, it came with lots of phone-related software. It had a couple of jacks for a handset and a wall connection, so it acted like a phone with keyboard and display.
One of the apps was a lot like the address/phone books that a lot of the current "smartphones" provide. But if it didn't have a name, you could type it, and it would call the electronic version of Directory Assistance. If there were several matches on the name, it would show them to you, and you could select one.
You could do the usual typing of the name and number into your contact list, of course. But the technology to look up a name remotely was also provided. You could also include a city, and it would figure out how to contact the phone-company database there.
The machine didn't do well commercially, though. Probably because by then, outside the Microsoft market, nobody was buying computers that didn't come with builtin Internet capability, and this machine didn't have it. It only spoke proprietary phone-company protocols.
This is probably also why people now might think that automated number (phone or IP) is some sort of new idea. Proprietary code like AT&T's doesn't stand much chance of being used by anyone else. And, of course, AT&T didn't know how to market computers with builtin comm capabilities. (They couldn't even figure out how to market unix.
Funny thing: I did a bit of googling for this snafu, and found a comment that Microsoft had noticed the problem and fixed it in Feb 2005. It seems that their fix didn't last.
;-)
(This is, of course, a well-known sort of event in the history of Microsoft patches, which have often been undone by later patches. They're not the only ones who have had this problem, but they seem to be more afflicted by it than most others.
Y'know, I hadn't looked at mapquest in months, but you're right. They now have yet another New Look, and there aren't any mentions of microsoft.com anywhere. There don't seem to be any AOL references, either, though the graphics do have that certain something.
Also, I notice that the site is still pretty much lacking in various of the old features, such as getting maps of different sizes, adding in your own marker icons, etc. I wonder if they'll add these things back, or if they will be available only to paying subscribers?
Meanwhile, the initial google maps seems to already be the best in the pack. I told my wife she should check out maps.google.com, and she was dubious about bothering with a new map site. But within a few minutes, she was saying how nice it was, and it's in her bookmarks now.
if it infected the computer with viruses as often as IE did, people would eventually stop using it.
If that were true, people would have stopped using IE (since IE obviously infects computers as often as IE does). But they haven't, mostly.
I think it's probably by far the clearest map rendering I've seen anywhere. Extremely good visual quality. ... But of course it's still Beta.
;-).
...
True, true.
One of the things I found quickly is the serious shortage of information in the maps. Above zoom level 3, almost all the street names disappear. There's plenty of room for them in the empty spaces, and the maps would be much more useful if you could see the street names.
I hope they fix this quickly.
But it's already better than mapquest, which has really gone downhill since Microsoft bought them out. For example, mapquest no longer gives you maps of different sizes unless you buy a subscription; you get only the smallest map. This is already fixed in a much cooler fashion by google's maps, by matching the map to the window size.
And the panning is quite nice. It's just like the Garmin 3600 that I've had for over a year now, but with a much bigger screen (and fewer street names
Now if I could plug a GPS gadget into my laptop and make it talk to the google map aplet, so it could show a "You are here" icon on the map
you need to edit your binary search paths ($PATH) ...
;-)
That sort of thing should already have been handled by the OS.
Yeah; that's fine if you aren't using java for anything else. It's fairly common for java users to have more than one version installed. Often this is because there are apps out there that require a specific jvm. With the ability to have a different $PATH in different windows, it's possible to solve such problems.
Of course, eventually you'll likely find that this is unnecessary, and all this can be set up automagically when you log in. But java developers will still insist on the ability to install more than one jvm, and choose among them when running a java app.
The fact that you want your hand held behind the scenes doesn't mean that the rest of us shouldn't be allowed to use the full power of our system.
(And, of course, the OS should have nothing whatsoever to do with setting the $PATH variable. That should be done by whatever login app you're using. If it's tied into the OS, you're using a system that has a very bad engineering design.
... pointing a finger at someone you can't really hold accountable or make a lawsuit against is worthwhile. Telling your CEO "but the tool didn't see that problem" potentially makes you look just as dumb as the tool you paid for.
;-)
Needless to say, this sort of finger pointing after a disaster is the norm in most organizations, corporate or governmental. But there's a strategy that can produce good security while covering your ass when the finger pointing starts.
What you do is bring up the FOSS tools during discussions, but don't make a fool of yourself by pushing too strongly. The suits will, of course, decree a commercial "solution". You take the classses and get fluent with the decreed software. Meanwhile, in your copious free time (;-), you also download the free tools, and learn to use them.
When the disaster happens, and the commercial tool didn't see the problem, you go through the standard finger pointing for a while. Then you casually drop in the fact that one of the free tools actually spotted it and led you to the problem. When they hit you with "Why didn't you report it?", you say "Oh, you must not have seen the memo I sent around." You did carefully make sure you had documentation on the problem, and copies of the memo (which they ignored because it was too technical for them).
This way, you can get the benefits of multiple security tools, without hitting your bosses over the head with the fact that they paid for something that didn't do the job. And you've shown that you can do the job, although the main tools failed you.
In most organizations, this is really about the best you can do. Too bad, but that's what groups of mere humans are like.
(Yes; I have seen this scenario played out at work. Several times. They never learn.
We, humans, are the first species on Earth capable of spreading our biosphere into space.
Maybe, maybe not.
Astronomers have known for some time that, like other objects in the solar system, our planet has a "dust tail" that's blown off by the solar wind. This tail is thin, and mostly gases, but it also includes particles up to the size of bacterial spores. The outer atmosphere does contain small numbers of such spores, and probably has for a few billion years. So the Earth has been spraying the outer parts of the solar system with bacterial spores for a rather long time.
Whether any of them have survived, we don't know. Mars is the most likely place to find them. Surface conditions aren't good now for coming out of the spore stage. But a few meters or kilometers down, conditions are probably a lot better. There have been predictions that we will find bacteria living below the surface of Mars, and they'll be very similar to Earth bacteria, because their ancestors came from here.
I've seen this mentioned somewhere recently in the flurry of Titan stories. But Earth bacteria almost certainly won't be found living there (although there will be a few spores). All known life on Earth uses biochemistry that requires a substrate of water as a solvent. At Titan's temperatures (around 95K), water is permanently a mineral. There is lots of methane available as a solvent, but you can't substitute methane for water in biochemistry. They are very different solvents, starting from the fact that water is a polar molecule, while methane is nonpolar. Earthly bacterial spores would simply never wake up on Titan, because their chemical processes don't work when their water is crystallized.
So Mars (and possibly Europa) are the only feasible places in the outer solar system to find Earth's bacterial colonists actually growing, below the surface. We know enough about Mars to say that it has been even better at some times in the past. But so far, we don't have enough evidence to say for sure whether this has actually happened.
All this is pure speculation, of course.
We are quite probably the first species (in this solar system) with the prospect of knowingly modifying another planet so we can live there.
I still have no dropshadows on my desktop
I don't, either, on my linux boxes. But they are there on my Mac Powerbook. I've dug around in TFM (i.e., the Help stuff) to find a way to turn off silly cpu-eaters like this, to no avail. Anyone know if it's possible to turn off these shadows in OSX?
I have noticed that, after a few upgrades to "current" linux releases, my main linux box is noticably slower than it used to be. The most obvious is that, when I sit down to a blanked-out screen and touch a key or the mouse, it now takes a minute or more to finish painting the screen. In the meantime, nothing works.
I thought we were getting away from the notion that clock speed = performance.
Actually, there's a good use for such comparisons: It tells you that the writer is clueless.
I'd already read enough about the Cell to know that it's more like the PowerPC than it is like an Intel cpu. So, when I read the comparison of its supposed speed and a Pentium's, I immediately knew that the writer hadn't a clue.
Any info around about benchmarks? Those can be misleading, too, in the hands of the wrong marketer. But with enough of them, it's a lot more likely that you can glean some actual speed info.
It is at least an interesting algorithm to study.
;-)
Not really. It's just a trivial application of basic number theory. Number theory is a branch of mathematics that's centuries old, and this is a really basic application of it. If you've taken Number Theory 101, you won't find this at all interesting or worth studying. If you haven't studied basic number theory, it would be a lot more interesting to study a text on the subject. You'd learn a lot more than you would by studying this patent or any code that implements it.
Using letters to represent digits in a number goes back to the anciend Hebrew and Greek writing systems. It's done billions of times per day in our computers, any time a hex number is generated. Also, see the Base64 encoding used in email MIME attachments. You can't get anything interesting or worth studying from the representation of base-30 digits in this patent. Using an unusual base is simply not interesting.
Treating a floating-point number as a string of bits and reinterpreting the bits as an integer is standard in all low-level programming. See the hex notation again. There's nothing the least bit interesting about this, unless you're mathematiclly illiterate, and it dates to the very earliest computers.
This is merely an attempt to stake a legal claim on centuries (or millenia) of prior art. If the patent is approved, it will mostly show just how low the USPTO's technical expertise has sunk.
It's main use would be as ammunition in the growing "Abolish software patents" argument. Even accepting such an application should be grounds for wiping the USPTO and replacing it with something at least minimally competent.
(OTOH, although this integer representation isn't interesting, there is the old mathematical proof that all the integers are interesting.
I don't think Linux will be crippled by the inability to use an ISNOT operator in their BASIC compilers.
/. so much ...
Why did I suddenly imagine a BASIC compiler's author being sued for trademark infringement from Apple, over their new iSnot nose-hair trimmer (combined with USB memory device)?
I've gotta stop reading
Yeah, or you could use base 90. That way, you'd use most of the printable ascii char set except for a few chars like '/', '&', '?', and so on. This would produce an even shorter representation.
Base 30 is basically nonsensical from any technical viewpoint. So to understand why they'd try to get legal control of that base, we must consider non-technical explanations.
The explanation is probably, as others have hinted, the legal and "marketing" uses of a patent on such a representation. If MS can get this patent, they can control who can use base-30 representations in URLs. This means that they can either demand a licensing fee for, or block outright, any uses of this base.
MS is ramping up a battle to block "free" software. And there's an important arena for this battle, hinted at by this patent's use of latitude and longitude as an example of their encoding.
Microsoft has been buying all the online map sites such as mapquest, mapblast, mappoint, etc. (Check them out.) With this patent, they can switch these sites to use their encoding, and establish their URLs as the "standard". Anyone who wants to interoperate with them will have to use their encoding scheme. But you will only be able to do this with a license from MS. If you try giving out free software using their encoding scheme, they'll sue you for patent infringement. Or they'll sell you a license for, say, $100 per downloaded copy of your software. Meanwhile, they'll give out their software for free or at a nominal price. This will effectively eliminate any free competition.
It could also effectively eliminate most non-free mapping software. If you have to add the license fee to your price, while MS is selling software without this surcharge, you probably won't sell many copies. Especially if MS's software comes bundled with Windows.
Their lawyers are probably smart enough to figure out that base-60 and base-90 representations wouldn't be patentable. Even if the USPTO approved the patent, any court would throw it out on grounds of both obviousness and prior art. But base-30, since it's so nonsensical and isn't in use by anyone for anything, could be aproved and accepted by the courts. There's no prior art. And judges aren't technically trained in number theory, so they'll easily accept the spurious reasoning for base 30.
If this patent is approved, we can see a shortage of mapping software from anyhone except Microsoft. If you can't represent latitude and longitude in the form that will be required by all the online map sites, how can you produce any map software at all?