But if you really want to reduce C02, just stop cutting down trees in south america and asia. Stop buying solid wood furniture and tables.
Actually, that's one of the common examples that doesn't really work very well. Wood that's turned into furniture is carbon that isn't returned to the atmosphere; it's kept out of circulation for the long term. Granted, there are scraps to dispose of, but woodworkers (and furniture factories) try hard to minimize the scrap, because good wood is expensive (and getting more so).
We do live in a house with a fireplace, but right now it's blocked by a sofa and a coffee table, so we're not burning much wood in it.;-)
What we really should do is persuade people to buy good quality furniture that won't be discarded after a decade or two. World-wide, people need a lot of furniture, and all of it that's made of wood represents CO2 that's taken out of the atmosphere for as long as the furniture lasts.
(OTOH, studies have shown that a good portion of the atmosphere's CO2 - and about 1/3 of the methane - comes from termites. So try to keep the little critters out of your local wooden artifacts, OK?;-)
The conventional explanation was that this was a bit of "marketing", to persuade people to 1) sell their land to local investors, and 2) pay shippers for transport to this wonderful new frontier where land was free. The same marketing was used in the 18th and 19th centuries to persuade Scandinavians that the US's upper midwest was a wonderful Golden Land. People who emigrated and moved to Minnesota or Upper Michigan were shocked at how much worse the winters are there than back in Scandinavia.
But I haven't read any of the primary documents that supposedly show this for 1000 years ago. It could well be a just-so story made up by more modern historians. Anyone know how well this story is documented? (And how many of us can read Old Norse?;-)
I have seen first-hand a modern version of such propaganda. I grew up in the Seattle area, which is notorious for its cool, rainy weather. One of the local running jokes is explaining that we should keep telling people about the cold rain at every opportunity, so that people won't want to move to the area and turn it into another overpopulated California or Japan.
... this is the year where Winter skipped the east coast. The past few years have been off, but it's crazy now. Everyone seems to see the weather doing something bonkers.
Yeah, but here in New England, we're hearing even more comments from the natives, to the effect that they think global warming sounds like a fine thing.;-)
And on a very tiny scale, we have at least one good bit of "anecdotal" evidence of the growing problem, in our yard. We have a lot of herbs planted (some invading the neighbors' yards). One our our real successes was a infestation of a rather nice variety of thyme. But last spring, it was almost all dead. Last winter was one of the mildest on record, though colder than this winter has been. The only clump of thyme that survived was growing on a small ledge with a northern exposure, next to a sidewalk that didn't get much sun. Its root system was frozen solid for the entire winter, which is just what it likes. Everywhere else, conditions were milder, with repeated thaws every few weeks. The thyme couldn't take those conditions, and nearly died out. It's likely that this spring, that one remaining clump will also be dead.
Of course, our side-yard thyme crop isn't what you'd call a serious problem to the world. Our Greek and Italian oregano are still strong and healthy, and we can probably get a more heat-tolerant thyme variety. (We still bring the pot of rosemary in, because it isn't frost tolerant, and we have had several mild frosts.)
OTOH, an important commercial crop in New England is its apples, which require a good frost to develop their fruit. If an apple tree dies, you can't just plant a few sprigs of another variety and have a crop next year. Migrating apple groves will be a much slower process. The farmers in both the old and new apple-growing areas will have go through the long process of learning to make a new crop profitable.
Also, humans have imposed national borders in the paths of most crops' migration paths. This will further slow down the adaptation to the new climate regime.
But around here, we're looking forward to the plant nurseries supplying palm trees, to replace all the old cold-climate trees that are on the way out.
... Half our national budget goes to the military.
False. Half our national budget goes to health care and pensions (47%), defense only gets about a quarter (23%).
Those aren't necessarily inconsistent. How much of the US government's health care and pension costs are due to obligations to (former) military personnel?
Actually, there's also a good amount of medical research funded by the military, partly to study and develop treatments for combat injuries. Much of that money could be classified in summaries as military or academic research (or both), since it's paid for by the military but done by academic researchers.
It can be fun to look at the different ways such things can be classified, to get bottom lines that agree with various political viewpoints.
Yeah, you're right. But that doesn't make it any less fraudulent to claim someone else's work as your own. And I suspect they knew what they were doing. At least their lawyers did, if they were the least bit competent. They just thought they could get away with it.
'For an industry that's pursuing copyright reform, the portrayal of a copyright regime that works against young artists can't be a good thing.
The copyright reform being persued is clearly aimed at further control of new artistic works by the old corporations that have been such a heavy weight on artists for the past century.
If we want true "reform", we'll use this as a tool to push for legislation that supports the rights of artists to control of their own works.
If there were any justice in the copyright issue, Universal Music would be hit hard with a fraud charge (and serious fines) for their part in this atrocity. We all know that this won't happen, though, and they'll continue to commit such acts in the future.
It might be interesting to start a collection of the Big Labels' claims of copyright for things that they don't in fact own.
500 miles (800 km)? I think it's higher. From the image file's metadata:
Projection: Near-sided perspective from 2124 kilometers above 20 North by 100 West
I think you're right. I was just using the estimates from other posters in this discussion. But I'd guess that the NASA folks just might be more accurate than random/. posters.;-)
In any case, when I saw the image, I was immediately struck by the fact that it was obviously the view from a point rather close to the Earth. It has only about half of North America plus all of Central America, but no South America. It's not even close to a hemisphere.
The funny part, of course, was the people who took this as an "image of the Earth" on a par with the classical "blue marble" image from the Apollo crew. It's a strange image of the planet if it includes only one medium-size continent. And it might not be a coincidence that it shows prominently the US portion of the planet.
Still, it's a nice image. I'll bet it gets a bit of use, if not quite as much as the Apollo image, which mostly shows Africa. (But Africa is where our species evolved, so that photo seems appropriate as The Iconic Image of the planet.;-)
Well, yeah, but the traditional name for your reasoning is "the Etymological Fallacy". It's based on the assumption that people are using the language's word-construction methods normally and honestly, to convey information. But we're talking politics here, so people's normal use of words is to persuade and convert, not to honestly inform. So the meanings of words are often unrelated to (or the opposite of) what you'd expect from an honest parsing according to the language's rules.
The major example of this in the past century, of course, was the use of "commun-" words to mean an authoritarian oligarchy, with everything owned and controlled by a small, powerful clique; pretty much the opposite of the general meaning of that root.
Similarly, American self-described "conservatives" are nowadays mostly radical reformers, intent on abolishing the 2+ centuries of slow expansion of personal liberty (which is what literal "conservatives" would support), and replacing it with an authoritarian oligarchy controlled by a small, powerful clique. They aren't trying to conserve anything; they're trying to overturn the liberal social order and replace it with a religious and financial system with strong central control.
Similarly, "progressive" has been appropriated by people whose intents are pretty much the opposite of the literal meaning of the term. And so on.
Probably the best example of this inversion of words' literal meaning is the way that in the US, the term "liberal" has been redefined so radically that most American voters don't even realize that it's related to "liberty". It's not too clear exactly what US politicians actually mean by "liberal" these days, and the definition is probably different for every politician. But it clearly has nothing to do with "liberty", despite the obvious etymological relation between the two words.
Anyway, you really can't understand politics anywhere if you think that words mean what they're "supposed to mean" according to dictionaries and grammars of the language in use.
...is for every politician and corporate bigwig to have an image like this permanently tattooed onto their retina.
Nah; that image would mostly impress American politicians with the "fact" that the only continent visible from space is North America. South America, Africa and Eurasia simply don't exist, or are too insignificant to include on a picture of the Earth. For that matter, Canada doesn't seem to exist, either.
Yeah, yeah, I know; it's what was visible from one point 500 miles (800 km) up from just one point on the satellite's orbit. But we have a lot of replies already that seem to be pushing the idea that that's what's visible from space;-)
I wonder if we can find the full series of similar images from other spots on the orbit.
Yeah, it's common to peeve about words like "irregardless", mostly on the grounds that they're partly redundant, so the shorter form is better. But all human languages have a good amount of redundancy, for very good reasons. Spoken languages are often used in noisy environments, or at distances where a speaker can't be heard perfectly. Redundancy is useful because it improves understandability under less-than-optimal hearing conditions.
"Irregardless" is an example of one of the most common redundancies: It repeats the negative part. Negation morphemes are often a very important part of a message. They're typically single syllables (because they're used so often), so they can easily get lost in noisy situations. So most languages tend to repeat negatives, typically with different negative morphemes. Thus you know any French, you're familiar with the "ne... pas" negation syntax, that puts different negative morphemes on both sides of the verb. Either alone is a negative, of course, but using both of them improves the chance that the hearer won't miss the "not" part of the message.
In English, we've had a lot of attempts to suppress repeated negation, typically using the pseudo-mathematical argument that a repeated negative is a positive. That's nonsense, of course; spoken English isn't mathematics, and it has long used repeated negation for emphasis. In this case, there is often a serious loss of the negation in noisy situations. We usually negate verbs with the "-n't" suffix, and that is easily lost if there's even a small noise at the same time. So someone says "I can't do that" and someone hears "I can do that", because the/t/ only lasts a few milliseconds and is easily masked by incidental noise. They rarely use a second negative particle, because they've been taught that it's wrong. This suppression of multiple negation in "standard English" means that this problem is difficult to fix "correctly" without using stilted language, which people aren't likely to do if they're in a hurry.
Of course, "irregardless" is mostly a silly example. In the rare cases I've used it, I don't bother with the "ir-", and I've probably saved a whole second during my life by doing this. But attempts to suppress this sort of redundancy in general are wrong, because they're pushing English in a direction of poorer communication in all but perfect listening conditions. People who want to be understood should just disregard such bad advice, and use redundant negation when there's a chance you might be misunderstood.
It's likely that "ain't" arose for this reason. The original "amn't", which is still used in Ireland and Scotland, has the same problem as "can't", in that it can be misheard as "am" in poor hearing conditions. The change to "ain't", with a very different vowel, probably arose as a solution, since "ain't" can't easily be confused with other likely verbs. This may be part of why it turned into a general negative form of "be" (and sometimes "have"). Suppressing it results in a serious loss of the negation in a lot of English utterances, since people use weaker negative particles that are more easily masked by noise.
Actually, "peevers" pretty much has to be a real English word. The reason is that it is merely a combination of three English morphemes, the verb "peeve" + the two bound morphemes "-er" (actor) and "-s" (plural). Since "peeve" is a verb that described an activity or state, the "-er" suffix can be added to it. The result is a noun that can be pluralized.
You probably wouldn't find it in any dictionary other than a huge "unabridged" dictionary, of course, since they usually omit most words that are constructed like this, out of routine combinations of English morphemes. In particular, few dictionaries list regular plurals, and they typically have few of the many "-er" (or "-or") words that we use all the time. There's no point in wasting page space on such words that any competent speaker will construct and understand automatically.
Granted, the verb "peeve" isn't all that common in ordinary English speech. But linguists do use the term routinely, when they're dealing with the ways that a language community talks about its own language.
Peevery (another routinely-constructed English word) is common in most languages. But it's especially common in the languages with a large, widespread population. Those languages do have a problem with tendencies to split into separate dialect communities that go their own way, and this interferes with communication. So you'd expect people to try various methods of encouraging standardization. Unfortunately, some of those methods usually turn out to be based on poor understanding of how the language actually works. When they involve put-downs of others who are actually using the language in a standard way, it's especially amusing to those who do understand how the language works.
It's an especially fun example of the futility of this sort of "peevery", since the peevers' campaign against "ain't" has had the effect of increasing its use.
The original use of "ain't" many centuries ago was as the contraction for "am not". Now, you might wonder how "am"+"not" gives "ain't", and one answer is that it's the same process that turned "will"+"not" into "won't", which is every bit as silly. Human languages do silly things like that all the time. But the peevers don't seem to rant about "won't"; they only declared a pogrom against "ain't". And the result has been that the common speech in many dialects now also use "ain't" as the contraction for "is"+"not" and "are"+"not". It has become the general negative for all present tense forms of "be".
But really, we should probably let the language peevers have their fun. At least they're not rounding up the ain't-sayers and burning them at the stake. They're just posting peeves in discussions like this, because to them the war against their favorite banned contraction is more important than, say, massive increases in availability and decreases in price for educational textboooks.
Some people just have different value scales than the rest of us.
I wonder if any of the newly-available electronic textbooks include linguistically valid histories or grammars of the English language?
If it's really true that this question has been settled, we might start asking about the legal situation with the next-most-interesting GPS-related question: If you're running software like google maps in your car (perhaps in your cell phone like I often do), what legal access to the authorities have to the tracking information that this produces?
This is especially interesting if you enable Google's traffic reports, as I often do because our two in-car GPS gadgets don't have live Net access and can't do this. It can be useful to know that the route your car's GPS gadget is recommending has a major traffic congestion event happening on one stretch of highway. For this to work, it's fairly obvious that the map+traffic software is sending its location and speed back to the mother ship, and google has talked about this openly. Those traffic reports do mostly come from the packets being sent in by the millions of GPS-enabled smart phones that are running google maps, so their computers know where you are and how fast you're moving. They can keep the info around if they want to. They've said that they quickly add your info into the database's summary, and then discard your personal info. But it's obvious that they could collect this information, perhaps because they've been ordered to do so by a judge somewhere.
So the obvious questions arise. What legal rights do various government agencies have to this data? Can they get at it without a court warrant? Can they get at it in fact even if it's illegal? Is google legally obligated to collect this data if asked (or if so ordered by a court), or is the Constitution's ban on involuntary servitude mean that they can legally refuse unless paid for the extra disk space, employee time, etc.? Do they have to inform us if they are doing this, or can it all be done in secret and they can legally lie to us about it? And, of course, are they actually doing it now (and perhaps telling us they're not)?
It's obvious that the databases at maps.google.com and other mapping services don't qualify as our homes or property or whatever is protected from unwarranted search this month. The obvious suspicion is that such location information is 1) of interest to the authorities at least sometimes, and 2) a bit of an expense for the companies to keep long term (or forward to N agencies). It might be interesting to know how much is actually being accumulated now, and what if any legal protections might exist in this area.
There is no shortage of legal history about government agencies using and abusing such information, but people used to have to collect it themselves. In the past few years, it has gotten a lot easier, since our pocket phones can collect the data and send it in. We do benefit markedly from some of the capabilities of this GPS mapping information. But it's clear that the data could be misused by the authorites nearly anywhere, if they decided to use it against some of us.
Seriously, InfoWorld, SIX pages? That's a WTF in itself.
Nah; "WTF" generally refers to things that make no sense. In this case, what InfoWorld and zillions of other sites are doing makes perfect sense. You just need to understand that they want money, and their main way of getting it is by running ads past their viewers. This gives them a strong incentive to break articles up into small chunks, so you have to click from one to the next to read an article. That way, they can show that you clicked on N copies of an ad, rather than just one, and get N times the $0.002 that they're paid by the ad agency for each click.
It's just a variant of the long-running practice of newspapers, of putting pieces of a story on several different pages, each piece surrounded by ads that you try not to glance at. It's how news distribution has always worked, and moving to the internet didn't change much of anything.
The econ theory guys sometimes refer to a situation like this as a "perverse incentive".
I can assure you that 99% of Americans agree that these laws are total shit...
Nah, more like 9.9%;-) The rest mostly have no clue what copyright or patent or the various acronyms like DMCA or SOPA are all about. This is part of the problem. We can't vote the bastards out who passed these laws, because the few of us who understand the issue at all are swamped by a huge majority whose votes are based on other issues that they can understand.
It's probably true that a majority of voting Americans would like to stick it to the "1%" and the big corporations. That's why all the propaganda talks about things like the poor, starving artists whose income is being stolen. Americans like those artists, and think they should be paid what they're worth. But most Americans aren't aware that most of those artists get nothing from their works, and the corporations claim all the income (and the copyrights in most cases).
Ignorance of a topic doesn't mean that people agree or disagree with you. It just means that they're ignorant. If they have an opinion at all, it's mostly formed by the confusing blur of propaganda aimed their way, which they hardly listen to.
Of course you own your own phone. You can make calls on it. You can run apps on it. You can smash it if you want. What else do you want?
Well, I'm a programmer, of the "system programmer" and "network programmer" variety. Apple (and/or my cell-phone company) doesn't permit me to write and test my own software on their phones, unless I pay a special price to get a temporary "developer" account. So no, with the standard contract, I don't "own" my phone in the way any programmer would mean by that word. Someone else has the legal right to deny me the ability to write the kinds of software that I make a living writing.
So to me, it's as if I were, say, a taxi driver, and I bought a new car, and found out that it didn't permit me to enter any taxi stands. To do that, I'd have to pay the auto maker an extra "professional driver" fee every year. Any taxi driver would say "WTF?!!", and ask some mechanics how to break that idiotic lock. Car makers have no right to restrict where we can drive their vehicles.
As a professional software geek, I respond the same way to the usual smart-phone "jail". An iPhone or iPad isn't a "computer" as I define the term. That is, it isn't programmable; it's a datacomm appliance, but not a computer. To get access to the (fairly powerful) computer hidden inside them, I have to pay an extra annual rental for a temporary permit to use them as my jobs require. "Buying" the gadget didn't give me the right to develop and test my software on them.
And yes, I have been bitten by this problem on several projects, where we bought "smart phones" for the explicit purpose of developing and testing software. With several of them, we proved eventually that our problems were due to the blocks that the vendors (well-known cell-phone companies) had installed, and didn't remove even when our employer paid their "developer" fees. Funny thing; when we proved to their support people that there were still blocks installed that explained why our stuff failed, they weren't the least bit apologetic. It's more like they were annoyed that we'd found out how they did it.
However, consider what would happen if someone disconnected the front end web farm from the storage system during a federal seizure. Also, what about catastrophic failure at the datacenter?
Or suppose during that seizure, the feds plugged in a USB drive and "moved" my files to their drive. Since the files are now gone from dropbox's copy of my directory, would their mv command delete the files from my directory on my machine, too? Seems to me it likely would.
Anyone know for sure?
(I don't actually have a dropbox account. I've considered it, but I haven't convinced myself that I understand their marketing jargon. I've seen disasters caused by "backup" software that responds to a file deletion on the main machine by deleting the backup copy the next time a "sync" is done, and I want nothing to do with a system that does this to me.;-)
The whole business model was derived from monkeys on crack. The ONLY point of these storage sites is to distribute illegal content. This will be entertaining watching these bozos and all their copy cats going to jail with ginormous fines.
Actually, I've been reading a number of forums and mailing lists for small software-development organizations (much of it open source, but not all), where they're having a serious discussion summarizable as "How do we recover from the MegaUpload disaster?" They had all been using megaupload.com as a central repository of their code, to make it easily and quickly accessible to all their participants. They're talking about files that they created and own the copyright to, so there's no way they could be software "pirates". But their distribution center is now gone, and their files (including the proprietary files) are in the hands of unknown people that aren't part of their organizations.
I've also run across a number of not-too-geeky people using MegaUpload or a few other similar sites for things like sharing their personal photos among families and friends. They just learned a rude lesson: Such repositories can be closed down at any time for no reason at all. I just tell them that this is their lesson for the week, and they should try to teach it to others.
Maybe eventually we'll have a system in which only verifiably copyrighted and unlicensed files can be subject to takedowns online. But that's not our situation right now. Our situation is that if your files are on a site that has even one unlicensed file, the entire site can be taken offline indefinitely; your files can be nabbed by people you've never met or talked to; and they can do as they wish with your files. This is what the SOPA/PIPA furor is about, and the MegaUpload case shows that we don't even need such draconian laws. The damage is already done, and they can get away with it right now.
We have no rights online, even to control of and access to our own documents. If you don't like this, what are you gonna do about it?
I must be a leet haxor with this NoScript plugin...
Probably. It has become clear that to the media and political system, anyone with any understanding at all of computers is a "hacker", and therefore an evil criminal who must be stopped at all costs. And no trial for you on any charges; the very fact that you've shown minimal understanding of something inside a computer is sufficient to condemn you.
But it's not nearly the first time that the media (and the political system) has adopted technical terms and turned them into a put-down (social or legal) of the people who invented the terms. It's all part of the social chasm between us "nerds" and the rest of society that we were learned during our younger school years.,
Actually, my wife has an iPhone, and likes it. But she has utterly failed to get it to input Arabic characters. She's convinced that it can't do that. So she just uses her laptop (Macbook) or iMac when she wants to use Arabic web sites or send email in Arabic. I suspect that iPhones are used in the Middle East, but when I went looking for information, I didn't find anything useful.
Of course, it's possible that we're just both too dumb to figure out what everyone else knows. But her Arabic-speaking friends that she's asked also didn't know, so there's a lot of dummies like us around.
I suspect it's because we live in the US, and the computer industry here does seem quite determined to block attempts to use anything other than English. Presumably they don't do that in non-English-speaking parts of the world, but we don't live there.;-)
(And note that we still can't include Arabic or Chinese or any other non-Latin text in slashdot discussions.)
but PDFs do not scale well and they are not intended to.
While scaling is a useful feature in ebooks, its not something I see as an essential feature.
In other words, you're one of the many people with contempt for the visually impaired, as well as contempt for those that are using portable display gadgets that fit in a pocket or purse.
Your attitude is why PDF is a crappy format for portable electronic devices. And correcting for such contemptuous attitudes was the primary reason that HTML was invented. If the ePub, iBooks, and other related formats truly include HTML, especially HTML5, then they are an approach that can actually make life better for people with poor eyes or small screens.
Actually, my eyes are pretty good, and people are always complaining about the tiny fonts that I use to maximize what I can see on my (large;-) screen. But I have friends who are visually impaired or blind, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. I'd like to give them better access to the world's knowledge. Arguing against PS and PDF, and in favor of all the SGML-derived formats, is part of how we can improve life for those less fortunate than us with good eyes. Anyone else reading this is encouraged to do what you can to push our recalcitrant computer industry in the right direction. We have the technology and we know how to do it right. We just need to fight against people like the above who want to continue making life difficult for those with eyes (or screens) that aren't as good as ours.
Hmm... My wife has an iPad, and she didn't know of any stylus that came with it. A bit of googling turned up a number of comments about them, mostly discouraging due to the low quality of the results (often described as "illegible"), and the short lifetime of the stylus tip. I found a few sites that had examples of the handwritten text they produced, and it all looked like first-grade attempts to write. I'll do a bit more digging, and see if I can find something more encouraging.
After you've seen the results of a few things like this, it's hard to decide to spend any more money testing out products based on glowing ad descriptions. I've spent too much money on things that didn't work at all like they said. The online descriptions I've found of using a stylus on an iPad are less than encouraging.
I've also seen problems like software than can print out music, but when I add Chinese text (or even worse, Arabic;-) text to it, it's readable on the screen, but when I print it, the text comes out as "mojibake" Latin1 gibberish. I can get a PDF of music to print correctly; I can get a PDF page of Chinese text to print correctly; but a page of music with added Chinese text comes out garbled. Dunno why.
(I actually have a couple of PDFs of Chinese music with text that print correctly, but it turns out that the PDFs are just a JPEG or TIFF image with a PDF wrapper. They originated as photos of printed pages. Starting with a printed page of music, writing text on it with a pen, photographing that with a digital camera, and embedding the image inside a PDF isn't exactly what I'd classify as a way to scribble notes on the page via a computer.;-)
While this all sounds good...I dunno if it would have helped me back in school, or even now (although I would try it). I found back in HS and college...that with dead tree books...I often would do like I did on my notes in a separate note book....I'd scribble notes, and make doodles in the margins.
This is a major problem in other areas beside schools. For example, I've seen a few attempts to provide musicians in bands and orchestras with computerized displays on their stands. This also sounds good at first, and it does give them very quick access to all the music in the system's library. But in the first rehearsal with the electronic gadgets, the musicians quickly discover that they have no practical way to scribble notes on the music. There is no second rehearsal with the electronics; the musicians simply state that they've gone back to paper and won't discuss the topic any more.
Similarly, I've had a "smart phone" since the late 1990s (not unusual for a software developer), and I've tried out all their calendar apps. I continue to buy a new paper pocket calendar every year. Using the phones' input methods are just too clumsy, and they never allow a lot of the things that I scribble on the paper. Of course, this is partly because in last year's pocket calendar, I find entries written in Cyrillic, Hebrew and Chinese characters. You'd think the calendar makers would like to sell to Serbian, Israeli, and Chinese customers, so that shouldn't be a problem, right? Try finding a smart-phone in the US with a calendar app that accepts non-English characters. Even people who speak Spanish or French complain about this.
Paper still has one strong advantage: You can scribble anything you like on it, and it holds the image until you (laboriously;-) erase it. The tablet makers will have to match this capability if they're serious about replacing paper in a lot of environments.
Actually, I've seen, and occasionally used, some prototype software that let users scribble random junk on a "document". Such things existed back in the 1990s. But they don't seem to be available on commercial products. Or rather, they are available, but the apps only let you scribble on their own "documents", not on the documents used by other apps. If I can't scribble on, say, a PDF or PNG or SVG music score, but only on the scribble app's blank pages, it isn't of much use to me when I'm working on a piece of music.
How about just selling the machines "blank" like we'e been begging for for years?
Um, the whole point of this discussion is the new tablets that come with a boot loader that explicitly disallows anything but approved Microsoft OSs. If a "blank" machine were included in the specs for this new tablet, we wouldn't be talking about how to overpower the MS-only boot loader (flash? ROM? dunno.) and install what we want.
One of the things that helped development in the computer industry was the appearance of "commodity" desktops back in the 1980s. Granted, most of these were sold with Microsoft OSs, but developers could ignore that, reformat the disks, and install anything they wanted to develop software on. If they screwed things up too badly, they could reformat and reinstall, possibly with a different OS. Development labs everywhere routinely reformatted and reinstalled on their test machines on a near-daily basis, because it was quick and easy.
The story here is that MS is using their market clout to try to eliminate this sort of independent development in the "commodity" tablet market. Saying that the hardware vendors should "just sell" a blank tablet is missing the main point, which is that MS it trying to enforce contracts that forbid this, and require a boot loader that only permits MS software.
And the main question is: What can we developers to about it? Cheap, commodity hardware is really useful if you want to make a successful startup that can sell new products at competitive prices. Allowing the Big Guy in the software business to forbid this puts a serious entry barrier to new software businesses.
Of course, the "hacker" community will probably provide fixes for the problem...
Slashdot Mirror
But if you really want to reduce C02, just stop cutting down trees in south america and asia. Stop buying solid wood furniture and tables.
Actually, that's one of the common examples that doesn't really work very well. Wood that's turned into furniture is carbon that isn't returned to the atmosphere; it's kept out of circulation for the long term. Granted, there are scraps to dispose of, but woodworkers (and furniture factories) try hard to minimize the scrap, because good wood is expensive (and getting more so).
We do live in a house with a fireplace, but right now it's blocked by a sofa and a coffee table, so we're not burning much wood in it. ;-)
What we really should do is persuade people to buy good quality furniture that won't be discarded after a decade or two. World-wide, people need a lot of furniture, and all of it that's made of wood represents CO2 that's taken out of the atmosphere for as long as the furniture lasts.
(OTOH, studies have shown that a good portion of the atmosphere's CO2 - and about 1/3 of the methane - comes from termites. So try to keep the little critters out of your local wooden artifacts, OK? ;-)
No one knows why Greenland was so named.
The conventional explanation was that this was a bit of "marketing", to persuade people to 1) sell their land to local investors, and 2) pay shippers for transport to this wonderful new frontier where land was free. The same marketing was used in the 18th and 19th centuries to persuade Scandinavians that the US's upper midwest was a wonderful Golden Land. People who emigrated and moved to Minnesota or Upper Michigan were shocked at how much worse the winters are there than back in Scandinavia.
But I haven't read any of the primary documents that supposedly show this for 1000 years ago. It could well be a just-so story made up by more modern historians. Anyone know how well this story is documented? (And how many of us can read Old Norse? ;-)
I have seen first-hand a modern version of such propaganda. I grew up in the Seattle area, which is notorious for its cool, rainy weather. One of the local running jokes is explaining that we should keep telling people about the cold rain at every opportunity, so that people won't want to move to the area and turn it into another overpopulated California or Japan.
... this is the year where Winter skipped the east coast. The past few years have been off, but it's crazy now. Everyone seems to see the weather doing something bonkers.
Yeah, but here in New England, we're hearing even more comments from the natives, to the effect that they think global warming sounds like a fine thing. ;-)
And on a very tiny scale, we have at least one good bit of "anecdotal" evidence of the growing problem, in our yard. We have a lot of herbs planted (some invading the neighbors' yards). One our our real successes was a infestation of a rather nice variety of thyme. But last spring, it was almost all dead. Last winter was one of the mildest on record, though colder than this winter has been. The only clump of thyme that survived was growing on a small ledge with a northern exposure, next to a sidewalk that didn't get much sun. Its root system was frozen solid for the entire winter, which is just what it likes. Everywhere else, conditions were milder, with repeated thaws every few weeks. The thyme couldn't take those conditions, and nearly died out. It's likely that this spring, that one remaining clump will also be dead.
Of course, our side-yard thyme crop isn't what you'd call a serious problem to the world. Our Greek and Italian oregano are still strong and healthy, and we can probably get a more heat-tolerant thyme variety. (We still bring the pot of rosemary in, because it isn't frost tolerant, and we have had several mild frosts.)
OTOH, an important commercial crop in New England is its apples, which require a good frost to develop their fruit. If an apple tree dies, you can't just plant a few sprigs of another variety and have a crop next year. Migrating apple groves will be a much slower process. The farmers in both the old and new apple-growing areas will have go through the long process of learning to make a new crop profitable.
Also, humans have imposed national borders in the paths of most crops' migration paths. This will further slow down the adaptation to the new climate regime.
But around here, we're looking forward to the plant nurseries supplying palm trees, to replace all the old cold-climate trees that are on the way out.
... Half our national budget goes to the military.
False. Half our national budget goes to health care and pensions (47%), defense only gets about a quarter (23%).
Those aren't necessarily inconsistent. How much of the US government's health care and pension costs are due to obligations to (former) military personnel?
Actually, there's also a good amount of medical research funded by the military, partly to study and develop treatments for combat injuries. Much of that money could be classified in summaries as military or academic research (or both), since it's paid for by the military but done by academic researchers.
It can be fun to look at the different ways such things can be classified, to get bottom lines that agree with various political viewpoints.
Yeah, you're right. But that doesn't make it any less fraudulent to claim someone else's work as your own. And I suspect they knew what they were doing. At least their lawyers did, if they were the least bit competent. They just thought they could get away with it.
'For an industry that's pursuing copyright reform, the portrayal of a copyright regime that works against young artists can't be a good thing.
The copyright reform being persued is clearly aimed at further control of new artistic works by the old corporations that have been such a heavy weight on artists for the past century.
If we want true "reform", we'll use this as a tool to push for legislation that supports the rights of artists to control of their own works.
If there were any justice in the copyright issue, Universal Music would be hit hard with a fraud charge (and serious fines) for their part in this atrocity. We all know that this won't happen, though, and they'll continue to commit such acts in the future.
It might be interesting to start a collection of the Big Labels' claims of copyright for things that they don't in fact own.
500 miles (800 km)? I think it's higher. From the image file's metadata:
Projection: Near-sided perspective from 2124 kilometers above 20 North by 100 West
I think you're right. I was just using the estimates from other posters in this discussion. But I'd guess that the NASA folks just might be more accurate than random /. posters. ;-)
In any case, when I saw the image, I was immediately struck by the fact that it was obviously the view from a point rather close to the Earth. It has only about half of North America plus all of Central America, but no South America. It's not even close to a hemisphere.
The funny part, of course, was the people who took this as an "image of the Earth" on a par with the classical "blue marble" image from the Apollo crew. It's a strange image of the planet if it includes only one medium-size continent. And it might not be a coincidence that it shows prominently the US portion of the planet.
Still, it's a nice image. I'll bet it gets a bit of use, if not quite as much as the Apollo image, which mostly shows Africa. (But Africa is where our species evolved, so that photo seems appropriate as The Iconic Image of the planet. ;-)
Well, yeah, but the traditional name for your reasoning is "the Etymological Fallacy". It's based on the assumption that people are using the language's word-construction methods normally and honestly, to convey information. But we're talking politics here, so people's normal use of words is to persuade and convert, not to honestly inform. So the meanings of words are often unrelated to (or the opposite of) what you'd expect from an honest parsing according to the language's rules.
The major example of this in the past century, of course, was the use of "commun-" words to mean an authoritarian oligarchy, with everything owned and controlled by a small, powerful clique; pretty much the opposite of the general meaning of that root.
Similarly, American self-described "conservatives" are nowadays mostly radical reformers, intent on abolishing the 2+ centuries of slow expansion of personal liberty (which is what literal "conservatives" would support), and replacing it with an authoritarian oligarchy controlled by a small, powerful clique. They aren't trying to conserve anything; they're trying to overturn the liberal social order and replace it with a religious and financial system with strong central control.
Similarly, "progressive" has been appropriated by people whose intents are pretty much the opposite of the literal meaning of the term. And so on.
Probably the best example of this inversion of words' literal meaning is the way that in the US, the term "liberal" has been redefined so radically that most American voters don't even realize that it's related to "liberty". It's not too clear exactly what US politicians actually mean by "liberal" these days, and the definition is probably different for every politician. But it clearly has nothing to do with "liberty", despite the obvious etymological relation between the two words.
Anyway, you really can't understand politics anywhere if you think that words mean what they're "supposed to mean" according to dictionaries and grammars of the language in use.
...is for every politician and corporate bigwig to have an image like this permanently tattooed onto their retina.
Nah; that image would mostly impress American politicians with the "fact" that the only continent visible from space is North America. South America, Africa and Eurasia simply don't exist, or are too insignificant to include on a picture of the Earth. For that matter, Canada doesn't seem to exist, either.
Yeah, yeah, I know; it's what was visible from one point 500 miles (800 km) up from just one point on the satellite's orbit. But we have a lot of replies already that seem to be pushing the idea that that's what's visible from space ;-)
I wonder if we can find the full series of similar images from other spots on the orbit.
Yeah, it's common to peeve about words like "irregardless", mostly on the grounds that they're partly redundant, so the shorter form is better. But all human languages have a good amount of redundancy, for very good reasons. Spoken languages are often used in noisy environments, or at distances where a speaker can't be heard perfectly. Redundancy is useful because it improves understandability under less-than-optimal hearing conditions.
"Irregardless" is an example of one of the most common redundancies: It repeats the negative part. Negation morphemes are often a very important part of a message. They're typically single syllables (because they're used so often), so they can easily get lost in noisy situations. So most languages tend to repeat negatives, typically with different negative morphemes. Thus you know any French, you're familiar with the "ne ... pas" negation syntax, that puts different negative morphemes on both sides of the verb. Either alone is a negative, of course, but using both of them improves the chance that the hearer won't miss the "not" part of the message.
In English, we've had a lot of attempts to suppress repeated negation, typically using the pseudo-mathematical argument that a repeated negative is a positive. That's nonsense, of course; spoken English isn't mathematics, and it has long used repeated negation for emphasis. In this case, there is often a serious loss of the negation in noisy situations. We usually negate verbs with the "-n't" suffix, and that is easily lost if there's even a small noise at the same time. So someone says "I can't do that" and someone hears "I can do that", because the /t/ only lasts a few milliseconds and is easily masked by incidental noise. They rarely use a second negative particle, because they've been taught that it's wrong. This suppression of multiple negation in "standard English" means that this problem is difficult to fix "correctly" without using stilted language, which people aren't likely to do if they're in a hurry.
Of course, "irregardless" is mostly a silly example. In the rare cases I've used it, I don't bother with the "ir-", and I've probably saved a whole second during my life by doing this. But attempts to suppress this sort of redundancy in general are wrong, because they're pushing English in a direction of poorer communication in all but perfect listening conditions. People who want to be understood should just disregard such bad advice, and use redundant negation when there's a chance you might be misunderstood.
It's likely that "ain't" arose for this reason. The original "amn't", which is still used in Ireland and Scotland, has the same problem as "can't", in that it can be misheard as "am" in poor hearing conditions. The change to "ain't", with a very different vowel, probably arose as a solution, since "ain't" can't easily be confused with other likely verbs. This may be part of why it turned into a general negative form of "be" (and sometimes "have"). Suppressing it results in a serious loss of the negation in a lot of English utterances, since people use weaker negative particles that are more easily masked by noise.
Actually, "peevers" pretty much has to be a real English word. The reason is that it is merely a combination of three English morphemes, the verb "peeve" + the two bound morphemes "-er" (actor) and "-s" (plural). Since "peeve" is a verb that described an activity or state, the "-er" suffix can be added to it. The result is a noun that can be pluralized.
You probably wouldn't find it in any dictionary other than a huge "unabridged" dictionary, of course, since they usually omit most words that are constructed like this, out of routine combinations of English morphemes. In particular, few dictionaries list regular plurals, and they typically have few of the many "-er" (or "-or") words that we use all the time. There's no point in wasting page space on such words that any competent speaker will construct and understand automatically.
Granted, the verb "peeve" isn't all that common in ordinary English speech. But linguists do use the term routinely, when they're dealing with the ways that a language community talks about its own language.
Peevery (another routinely-constructed English word) is common in most languages. But it's especially common in the languages with a large, widespread population. Those languages do have a problem with tendencies to split into separate dialect communities that go their own way, and this interferes with communication. So you'd expect people to try various methods of encouraging standardization. Unfortunately, some of those methods usually turn out to be based on poor understanding of how the language actually works. When they involve put-downs of others who are actually using the language in a standard way, it's especially amusing to those who do understand how the language works.
"antidisirregardlessmentarianism"
What a wonderful word! I'm going to have to find ways to use it ...
That's because [ain't]'s also a word.
It's an especially fun example of the futility of this sort of "peevery", since the peevers' campaign against "ain't" has had the effect of increasing its use.
The original use of "ain't" many centuries ago was as the contraction for "am not". Now, you might wonder how "am"+"not" gives "ain't", and one answer is that it's the same process that turned "will"+"not" into "won't", which is every bit as silly. Human languages do silly things like that all the time. But the peevers don't seem to rant about "won't"; they only declared a pogrom against "ain't". And the result has been that the common speech in many dialects now also use "ain't" as the contraction for "is"+"not" and "are"+"not". It has become the general negative for all present tense forms of "be".
But really, we should probably let the language peevers have their fun. At least they're not rounding up the ain't-sayers and burning them at the stake. They're just posting peeves in discussions like this, because to them the war against their favorite banned contraction is more important than, say, massive increases in availability and decreases in price for educational textboooks.
Some people just have different value scales than the rest of us.
I wonder if any of the newly-available electronic textbooks include linguistically valid histories or grammars of the English language?
If it's really true that this question has been settled, we might start asking about the legal situation with the next-most-interesting GPS-related question: If you're running software like google maps in your car (perhaps in your cell phone like I often do), what legal access to the authorities have to the tracking information that this produces?
This is especially interesting if you enable Google's traffic reports, as I often do because our two in-car GPS gadgets don't have live Net access and can't do this. It can be useful to know that the route your car's GPS gadget is recommending has a major traffic congestion event happening on one stretch of highway. For this to work, it's fairly obvious that the map+traffic software is sending its location and speed back to the mother ship, and google has talked about this openly. Those traffic reports do mostly come from the packets being sent in by the millions of GPS-enabled smart phones that are running google maps, so their computers know where you are and how fast you're moving. They can keep the info around if they want to. They've said that they quickly add your info into the database's summary, and then discard your personal info. But it's obvious that they could collect this information, perhaps because they've been ordered to do so by a judge somewhere.
So the obvious questions arise. What legal rights do various government agencies have to this data? Can they get at it without a court warrant? Can they get at it in fact even if it's illegal? Is google legally obligated to collect this data if asked (or if so ordered by a court), or is the Constitution's ban on involuntary servitude mean that they can legally refuse unless paid for the extra disk space, employee time, etc.? Do they have to inform us if they are doing this, or can it all be done in secret and they can legally lie to us about it? And, of course, are they actually doing it now (and perhaps telling us they're not)?
It's obvious that the databases at maps.google.com and other mapping services don't qualify as our homes or property or whatever is protected from unwarranted search this month. The obvious suspicion is that such location information is 1) of interest to the authorities at least sometimes, and 2) a bit of an expense for the companies to keep long term (or forward to N agencies). It might be interesting to know how much is actually being accumulated now, and what if any legal protections might exist in this area.
There is no shortage of legal history about government agencies using and abusing such information, but people used to have to collect it themselves. In the past few years, it has gotten a lot easier, since our pocket phones can collect the data and send it in. We do benefit markedly from some of the capabilities of this GPS mapping information. But it's clear that the data could be misused by the authorites nearly anywhere, if they decided to use it against some of us.
Do we have any clear information on this topic?
Seriously, InfoWorld, SIX pages? That's a WTF in itself.
Nah; "WTF" generally refers to things that make no sense. In this case, what InfoWorld and zillions of other sites are doing makes perfect sense. You just need to understand that they want money, and their main way of getting it is by running ads past their viewers. This gives them a strong incentive to break articles up into small chunks, so you have to click from one to the next to read an article. That way, they can show that you clicked on N copies of an ad, rather than just one, and get N times the $0.002 that they're paid by the ad agency for each click.
It's just a variant of the long-running practice of newspapers, of putting pieces of a story on several different pages, each piece surrounded by ads that you try not to glance at. It's how news distribution has always worked, and moving to the internet didn't change much of anything.
The econ theory guys sometimes refer to a situation like this as a "perverse incentive".
I can assure you that 99% of Americans agree that these laws are total shit ...
Nah, more like 9.9% ;-) The rest mostly have no clue what copyright or patent or the various acronyms like DMCA or SOPA are all about. This is part of the problem. We can't vote the bastards out who passed these laws, because the few of us who understand the issue at all are swamped by a huge majority whose votes are based on other issues that they can understand.
It's probably true that a majority of voting Americans would like to stick it to the "1%" and the big corporations. That's why all the propaganda talks about things like the poor, starving artists whose income is being stolen. Americans like those artists, and think they should be paid what they're worth. But most Americans aren't aware that most of those artists get nothing from their works, and the corporations claim all the income (and the copyrights in most cases).
Ignorance of a topic doesn't mean that people agree or disagree with you. It just means that they're ignorant. If they have an opinion at all, it's mostly formed by the confusing blur of propaganda aimed their way, which they hardly listen to.
Of course you own your own phone. You can make calls on it. You can run apps on it. You can smash it if you want. What else do you want?
Well, I'm a programmer, of the "system programmer" and "network programmer" variety. Apple (and/or my cell-phone company) doesn't permit me to write and test my own software on their phones, unless I pay a special price to get a temporary "developer" account. So no, with the standard contract, I don't "own" my phone in the way any programmer would mean by that word. Someone else has the legal right to deny me the ability to write the kinds of software that I make a living writing.
So to me, it's as if I were, say, a taxi driver, and I bought a new car, and found out that it didn't permit me to enter any taxi stands. To do that, I'd have to pay the auto maker an extra "professional driver" fee every year. Any taxi driver would say "WTF?!!", and ask some mechanics how to break that idiotic lock. Car makers have no right to restrict where we can drive their vehicles.
As a professional software geek, I respond the same way to the usual smart-phone "jail". An iPhone or iPad isn't a "computer" as I define the term. That is, it isn't programmable; it's a datacomm appliance, but not a computer. To get access to the (fairly powerful) computer hidden inside them, I have to pay an extra annual rental for a temporary permit to use them as my jobs require. "Buying" the gadget didn't give me the right to develop and test my software on them.
And yes, I have been bitten by this problem on several projects, where we bought "smart phones" for the explicit purpose of developing and testing software. With several of them, we proved eventually that our problems were due to the blocks that the vendors (well-known cell-phone companies) had installed, and didn't remove even when our employer paid their "developer" fees. Funny thing; when we proved to their support people that there were still blocks installed that explained why our stuff failed, they weren't the least bit apologetic. It's more like they were annoyed that we'd found out how they did it.
However, consider what would happen if someone disconnected the front end web farm from the storage system during a federal seizure. Also, what about catastrophic failure at the datacenter?
Or suppose during that seizure, the feds plugged in a USB drive and "moved" my files to their drive. Since the files are now gone from dropbox's copy of my directory, would their mv command delete the files from my directory on my machine, too? Seems to me it likely would.
Anyone know for sure?
(I don't actually have a dropbox account. I've considered it, but I haven't convinced myself that I understand their marketing jargon. I've seen disasters caused by "backup" software that responds to a file deletion on the main machine by deleting the backup copy the next time a "sync" is done, and I want nothing to do with a system that does this to me. ;-)
The whole business model was derived from monkeys on crack. The ONLY point of these storage sites is to distribute illegal content. This will be entertaining watching these bozos and all their copy cats going to jail with ginormous fines.
Actually, I've been reading a number of forums and mailing lists for small software-development organizations (much of it open source, but not all), where they're having a serious discussion summarizable as "How do we recover from the MegaUpload disaster?" They had all been using megaupload.com as a central repository of their code, to make it easily and quickly accessible to all their participants. They're talking about files that they created and own the copyright to, so there's no way they could be software "pirates". But their distribution center is now gone, and their files (including the proprietary files) are in the hands of unknown people that aren't part of their organizations.
I've also run across a number of not-too-geeky people using MegaUpload or a few other similar sites for things like sharing their personal photos among families and friends. They just learned a rude lesson: Such repositories can be closed down at any time for no reason at all. I just tell them that this is their lesson for the week, and they should try to teach it to others.
Maybe eventually we'll have a system in which only verifiably copyrighted and unlicensed files can be subject to takedowns online. But that's not our situation right now. Our situation is that if your files are on a site that has even one unlicensed file, the entire site can be taken offline indefinitely; your files can be nabbed by people you've never met or talked to; and they can do as they wish with your files. This is what the SOPA/PIPA furor is about, and the MegaUpload case shows that we don't even need such draconian laws. The damage is already done, and they can get away with it right now.
We have no rights online, even to control of and access to our own documents. If you don't like this, what are you gonna do about it?
I must be a leet haxor with this NoScript plugin...
Probably. It has become clear that to the media and political system, anyone with any understanding at all of computers is a "hacker", and therefore an evil criminal who must be stopped at all costs. And no trial for you on any charges; the very fact that you've shown minimal understanding of something inside a computer is sufficient to condemn you.
But it's not nearly the first time that the media (and the political system) has adopted technical terms and turned them into a put-down (social or legal) of the people who invented the terms. It's all part of the social chasm between us "nerds" and the rest of society that we were learned during our younger school years.,
Actually, my wife has an iPhone, and likes it. But she has utterly failed to get it to input Arabic characters. She's convinced that it can't do that. So she just uses her laptop (Macbook) or iMac when she wants to use Arabic web sites or send email in Arabic. I suspect that iPhones are used in the Middle East, but when I went looking for information, I didn't find anything useful.
Of course, it's possible that we're just both too dumb to figure out what everyone else knows. But her Arabic-speaking friends that she's asked also didn't know, so there's a lot of dummies like us around.
I suspect it's because we live in the US, and the computer industry here does seem quite determined to block attempts to use anything other than English. Presumably they don't do that in non-English-speaking parts of the world, but we don't live there. ;-)
(And note that we still can't include Arabic or Chinese or any other non-Latin text in slashdot discussions.)
but PDFs do not scale well and they are not intended to.
While scaling is a useful feature in ebooks, its not something I see as an essential feature.
In other words, you're one of the many people with contempt for the visually impaired, as well as contempt for those that are using portable display gadgets that fit in a pocket or purse.
Your attitude is why PDF is a crappy format for portable electronic devices. And correcting for such contemptuous attitudes was the primary reason that HTML was invented. If the ePub, iBooks, and other related formats truly include HTML, especially HTML5, then they are an approach that can actually make life better for people with poor eyes or small screens.
Actually, my eyes are pretty good, and people are always complaining about the tiny fonts that I use to maximize what I can see on my (large ;-) screen. But I have friends who are visually impaired or blind, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. I'd like to give them better access to the world's knowledge. Arguing against PS and PDF, and in favor of all the SGML-derived formats, is part of how we can improve life for those less fortunate than us with good eyes. Anyone else reading this is encouraged to do what you can to push our recalcitrant computer industry in the right direction. We have the technology and we know how to do it right. We just need to fight against people like the above who want to continue making life difficult for those with eyes (or screens) that aren't as good as ours.
Hmm ... My wife has an iPad, and she didn't know of any stylus that came with it. A bit of googling turned up a number of comments about them, mostly discouraging due to the low quality of the results (often described as "illegible"), and the short lifetime of the stylus tip. I found a few sites that had examples of the handwritten text they produced, and it all looked like first-grade attempts to write. I'll do a bit more digging, and see if I can find something more encouraging.
After you've seen the results of a few things like this, it's hard to decide to spend any more money testing out products based on glowing ad descriptions. I've spent too much money on things that didn't work at all like they said. The online descriptions I've found of using a stylus on an iPad are less than encouraging.
I've also seen problems like software than can print out music, but when I add Chinese text (or even worse, Arabic ;-) text to it, it's readable on the screen, but when I print it, the text comes out as "mojibake" Latin1 gibberish. I can get a PDF of music to print correctly; I can get a PDF page of Chinese text to print correctly; but a page of music with added Chinese text comes out garbled. Dunno why.
(I actually have a couple of PDFs of Chinese music with text that print correctly, but it turns out that the PDFs are just a JPEG or TIFF image with a PDF wrapper. They originated as photos of printed pages. Starting with a printed page of music, writing text on it with a pen, photographing that with a digital camera, and embedding the image inside a PDF isn't exactly what I'd classify as a way to scribble notes on the page via a computer. ;-)
While this all sounds good...I dunno if it would have helped me back in school, or even now (although I would try it). I found back in HS and college...that with dead tree books...I often would do like I did on my notes in a separate note book....I'd scribble notes, and make doodles in the margins.
This is a major problem in other areas beside schools. For example, I've seen a few attempts to provide musicians in bands and orchestras with computerized displays on their stands. This also sounds good at first, and it does give them very quick access to all the music in the system's library. But in the first rehearsal with the electronic gadgets, the musicians quickly discover that they have no practical way to scribble notes on the music. There is no second rehearsal with the electronics; the musicians simply state that they've gone back to paper and won't discuss the topic any more.
Similarly, I've had a "smart phone" since the late 1990s (not unusual for a software developer), and I've tried out all their calendar apps. I continue to buy a new paper pocket calendar every year. Using the phones' input methods are just too clumsy, and they never allow a lot of the things that I scribble on the paper. Of course, this is partly because in last year's pocket calendar, I find entries written in Cyrillic, Hebrew and Chinese characters. You'd think the calendar makers would like to sell to Serbian, Israeli, and Chinese customers, so that shouldn't be a problem, right? Try finding a smart-phone in the US with a calendar app that accepts non-English characters. Even people who speak Spanish or French complain about this.
Paper still has one strong advantage: You can scribble anything you like on it, and it holds the image until you (laboriously ;-) erase it. The tablet makers will have to match this capability if they're serious about replacing paper in a lot of environments.
Actually, I've seen, and occasionally used, some prototype software that let users scribble random junk on a "document". Such things existed back in the 1990s. But they don't seem to be available on commercial products. Or rather, they are available, but the apps only let you scribble on their own "documents", not on the documents used by other apps. If I can't scribble on, say, a PDF or PNG or SVG music score, but only on the scribble app's blank pages, it isn't of much use to me when I'm working on a piece of music.
How about just selling the machines "blank" like we'e been begging for for years?
Um, the whole point of this discussion is the new tablets that come with a boot loader that explicitly disallows anything but approved Microsoft OSs. If a "blank" machine were included in the specs for this new tablet, we wouldn't be talking about how to overpower the MS-only boot loader (flash? ROM? dunno.) and install what we want.
One of the things that helped development in the computer industry was the appearance of "commodity" desktops back in the 1980s. Granted, most of these were sold with Microsoft OSs, but developers could ignore that, reformat the disks, and install anything they wanted to develop software on. If they screwed things up too badly, they could reformat and reinstall, possibly with a different OS. Development labs everywhere routinely reformatted and reinstalled on their test machines on a near-daily basis, because it was quick and easy.
The story here is that MS is using their market clout to try to eliminate this sort of independent development in the "commodity" tablet market. Saying that the hardware vendors should "just sell" a blank tablet is missing the main point, which is that MS it trying to enforce contracts that forbid this, and require a boot loader that only permits MS software.
And the main question is: What can we developers to about it? Cheap, commodity hardware is really useful if you want to make a successful startup that can sell new products at competitive prices. Allowing the Big Guy in the software business to forbid this puts a serious entry barrier to new software businesses.
Of course, the "hacker" community will probably provide fixes for the problem ...