The first AI going out of control will be a spelling checker, that will eradicate humans to eradicate spelling mistakes. It will be called the Grammar Nazi.
No; it'll be called the Spelling Nazi. A true Grammar Nazi would check grammar, not spelling, and would try to eradicate (people who make) grammatical mistakes.
Heh. The AC probably didn't look at any of your post history, just the number of posts. That told him/her that you spend far too much time on/., and thus don't have a meaningful life (for some people's definition of "meaningful").
So 'the user buying something' is a better solution than the printer software supporting ad-hoc networks?
Well, you're obviously not a businessman.;-)
If you were, it would be obvious to you that "the user buying something" is always better than "the user just using their equipment and not buying any tie-in products".
Once you understand this, you understand a lot of how marketing works. But a lot of people never understand it. In the business world, they're known as "failures".
Right. The ToS gives a license to Geeknet (and only to Geeknet). It gives no license to the readers of slashdot, who routinely download copyrighted messages by the pageful without asking for permission from the copyright owners - or from slashdot - to do so.
If you think this is a frivolous point, you have a profound misunderstanding of how the American legal system works.
(Not that I actually expect to see any prosecution over this any time soon, of course. I read slashdot regularly, and I'm not actually worried about being prosecuted for doing so. I'm just pointing out that the legal situation is a bit ambiguous and quite weird, by the standards of any reasonable person. And the copyright industry has lately been getting rather weird about prosecuting what they consider violations.)
So the next question is: Does slashdot have the legal right (in the US where they're located) to impose any such Terms of Service that override a poster's automatic copyright? Maybe they do. I don't know. I've looked for comment or legal precedent or court decisions on such subjects, and I don't seem to find them.
In any case, I don't see that the ToS says that we readers have a legal right to download slashdot comments not owned by slashdot. It does have the usual wording that gives geeknet perpetual publication rights, etc. But that doesn't apply to readers not employed by geeknet. Can you point to where slashdot explicitly states that posters give all readers the right to download their copyrighted content? Maybe it's there in the ToS, in terminology that I don't understand (not being an IP lawyer).
This is all typical of online forums, of course. And assorted lawyers have occasionally commented that it's not obvious (at least not in the US) that the normal downloading of copyrighted content without an explicit license is actually legal. Granted, the "reasonable man" approach would say that if someone make something available on their web site, they are implicitly giving everyone on the Internet a license to download it. This is just "common sense", but the (American;-) legal system very rarely considers this relevant to anything. Until we get a clear decision from a high-enough court that posting copyrighted material on the Web provides an automatic license, we should assume that the legal status of such downloads is "unknown".
After all, we had to have a decree from Congress that it was legal to make backup copies of copyrighted material on your own disks. Copyright holders were starting lawsuits over the common custom of making backups, which wasn't explicitly allowed by their licenses. If they consider making backups a copyright violation, I'd expect that they would also consider downloading of copyrighted web pages a violation, especially when they explicitly say that it is. I wouldn't expect most publishers to be "reasonable men (or women)" in this regard. Not in the light of some of their recent behavior on the topic.
Ultimately, copying someone else's IP, to which you have no rights, means someone didn't get paid. Period. And if you copied it, you have assigned some value to it. Period. At best, it means you've inflicted direct financial harm by devaluing of the product in question. If you doubt me, I encourage you to verse yourself in the basics of economics.
If you actually believe this, I wonder why you're posting here. Your post was a clear and obvious invitation to commit exactly the sort of "harm" to you that you're decrying.
Consider: Here in the US, and most other countries, your message is copyrighted by you./. even notifies us all of this fact. I don't have a signed paper from you giving me explicit permission to download your copyrighted message, and I haven't paid you any money for your message, so there's no implicit contract. So under US copyright law, I've "pirated" your message, and according to the message itself, this has harmed you (presumably because I haven't paid your expected but unstated price for the license to read your message).
In fact, I've "pirated" such copyrighted messages here by the hundreds over the last day or two. And I suspect that you've done the same.
This is one of the reasons that, to most of us, the current copyright laws are absurd on their face. Automatic copyright leads immediately to the situation I've just described. And if we were to obey the copyright laws, we'd have to shut down all online discussions, because none of them have a mechanism to ensure proper licensing and payment for downloading of their (automatically) copyrighted material.
If you really believe what you wrote, I hope you wake up and start working to prevent any such harm to yourself in the future. The first step is to stop posting (automatically) copyrighted material on online forums. Nobody will ever pay you for the right to download your messages. They won't even bother trying to contact you to see if you'll give them a free license. They'll just download entire pages of messages, like this page, and ignore the massive "pirating" that's involved. So every message you post will result in hundreds or thousands of harms to you. The sensible thing is to stop this harm by doing no more posting here or on any other online forum.
IE6 is a huge security hole, why are you even catering to the lusers that use it?
In my experience, this is usually necessary because it's what the boss (and/or most of top management) use on their desk. Of course, they have no idea what IE6 is; they just want it to look good "on the Internet", which of course is that window that pops up when they hit the "e" icon.
Given that level of understanding in the people who can fire you at any time, most people will at least try to make it not look too bad in IE6. The security holes are Someone Else's Problem, since you can't fix IE security holes yourself.
I've been saying this for awhile now. Why would you possibly want to build a professional application on top of what is basically a mudslide?
That's a very good characterization of the Web from the start. Well, maybe it was internally consistent when there was only the Mosaic browser and a few academics using it. But as soon as the commercial folks got involved, it turned into a mudslide pretty much overnight. They took their usual approach, of learning just a little bit about the Web, then creating their products for their misunderstanding of it. Then they declared their misinterpretation "standard". The programmers either found ways to live with this unpleasant reality, or they found another job.
It'll be the same with HTML5. 10 or 15 years from now, we'll still be fighting all the incompatibilities in the (many more) Microsoft browsers. We'll still be learning all the niggling little incompatibilities in the "certified standard" browsers. We'll still be fighting bosses who insist that things work on their desktop system and nowhere else. And we'll have more obsolete browsers that we still have to develop before because there will be more millions of people out there who are still using them. And IE6 will still be a major browser.
(If you want to have some real fun with this, try developing a site that works well on the new "smart phones" that are coming out. And start thinking that 10 years from now, your boss will probably have one of them.;-)
This is also the Senate where a comedian by trade is the smartest guy in the room.
In my experience, the smartest people in the room are usually the comedians. To be good at comedy, you have to understand what's happening around you, smart enough to not take it seriously and see the problems with most of the participants, and with enough empathy to express your thoughts in a way that others will consider funny. All that requires a serious level of intelligence.
Here in the US, surveys around the past several elections have turned up the result that the voters with the best understanding of the issues and of the candidates' policies tend to be those who watch The Daily Show and/or The Colbert Report, and/or listen to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. For those not familiar with these, they are comedy shows (two TV and one radio) with political content. Look them up.
Why don't we start with just raising the basics first?
Uh, people have been trying that for a few thousand years, and look how far it got us? In much of the world where the OLPC is being delivered, working on "just the basics first" means knowingly condemning them to the same economic backwater status that they've always had.
Maybe the OLPC won't fix all the world's educational problems. This is almost certain, if fact, because it's going against the local power structure that has kept the population uneducated all along. But at least they're trying something that has a chance of making a change. It's interesting to watch how it's working out. Or not, in some areas.
(For those without nytimes accounts, the article describes the recent impounding at the port of entry of a shipment of "laptop computers" to a school district in Iraq. After sitting in the warehouse a while, the shipment was declared non-deliverable and auctioned off for a few dollars per computer to an unnamed "businessman" who since seems to have disappeared. Typical for some parts of the world.)
Was there something prior to 2007 that was already doing this?
I'd think that lots of the GPS gadgets back in the 1990s would qualify as prior art. Pretty much all of them communicated their position to another computer via some sort of "network" link, RS-232 or bluetooth or USB or whatever. There was software on the other computer that accepted the GPS info and did something mappy with it.
How could what facebook's doing not be a trivial variant of what GPS gadgets have done from the beginning? The only difference is different network hardware. Yeah, maybe there's different software on the other end now, but that GPS software doesn't know what's at the other end of the comm link.
I have a hard time believing that anything RMS is even partially responsible for is anywhere near as important as GCC, from its humble beginnings as a replacement for CC on UNIX to its present juggernaut Compiler Collection.
There is an important symbiotic relationship between the GPL and the GCC. (And also with other "free" software tools, but the GCC is a good poster child.) One explanation came up in a number of projects that I worked on at Digital back in the 1980s and early 1990s. The question kept coming up there of why DEC supplied a number of BSD-based unix OSs, but not Sys/V. They had Sys/V ported internally, and provided it for a few customers that asked, but they didn't much market it. The explanation that kept coming up was that DEC's lawyers had looked into Sys/V software (with some engineers' help, of course), and had noted that the binaries all contained AT&T copyright notices, usually many copies that were inside various library routines. They suggested that, although the courts hadn't ever decided the status of such copyright claims, it was possible that AT&T could use these embedded strings to claim legal ownership of any software that they wanted. Thus, building your products on AT&T software was risking a court case that might give everything to AT&T.
Since then, I've worked on a number of projects at other companies whose lawyers use a similar argument for why they should use GCC rather than any proprietary compilers and libraries. Again, the legal status isn't clear. This means that you're taking a chance that any binaries produced by proprietary tools or using proprietary libraries could become legally the property of the companies that own the compilers or libraries. The GCC license makes it clear that, if you use GCC, you don't have to worry about this. It's about the only C compiler that provides such safety. We've read versions of this argument in the explanation of why google pushed for the Android platform, as a way of keeping their own software free from takeover by Microsoft or Apple (or AT&T or Comcast or...).
This isn't a trivial concern. There are growing attempts to use "intellectual property" to take control of the work done by others. Look into how Apple now controls the software that runs on many of their devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Look at how Amazon controls what can be on the kindle, to the point of reaching out and deleting content that customers have bought. We even read here some time back that Microsoft is getting patents on some XML encodings, something we thought was beyond such takeovers because XML is a "public" standard.
The GPL in its various forms is one of the few tools we have to fight such control by the industry giants. Figuring out how to use the copyright laws to fight the slow privatization of what used to be public "intellectual" space was an important legal development. It's about the only thing we have left (at least in the US) that protects the efforts of individuals against the legal power of big corporations. So we should be encouraging the people who work on legal tools like this, at least if we want a society in which it remains legal for private individuals to work on anything that involves software.
OTOH, if a traffic app were to do both, that would give more data than either alone. I can't be the first programmer to have had that thought.;-)
In any case, there have been many reports that google maps is collecting some of the traffic data from phones running their software. Here's one of the earlier stories that a quick google search turned up, from about a year ago. It's not hard to find other stories about this topic. This story has the additional comment that, at the time, the iPhone was unusual in that it didn't feed data back to the google traffic database. This has supposedly been fixed in the past year.
I'd think that a sensible design would be to try to consolidate the data from mobile "smart phones" with the data from various highway agencies that monitor traffic. Of course, this would depend on which countries, states, provinces, cities, whatever that you could get data from. There's also the problem that no two of them would be expected to use the same data formats. But we have a lot of smart programmers, right? And the task is easily modularized, since you basically need one package per input source that translates that source's data format to whatever format your database wants.
Gawd, not this/i unimaginative debate again.... why can't a "Universal Awareness" (I dislike the word "God," to me it sounds so ass-backward and presumptuous) have used "evolution" to influence "design?"
Actually, in this case that's what people were talking about. Except the "design" wasn't done by a [Gg]od. It was done by a million local animal breeders over thousands of years, who started with a number of wild animals, and through selective breeding, produced the modern milk/egg/meat machines that give us most of our protein.
Similar selective breeding was done by other millions of growers to produce our modern grains, some of which are so different from their wild ancestors that we're not sure just which wild species were the ancestors.
However our domesticated animal and plant species came to be, we know a fair amount about how they turned into the current species. There was a good deal of "intelligent design" in this process. Urban stereotypes of dumb rural hicks aside, many of those millions of growers and breeders did know what they were doing and how they wanted their animals and crops to change.
Well, obviously you should do the responsible thing, and build your own lab that can test for all known (and future) chemical additives to your food, clothing, etc. If you can't be bothered to learn the equivalent of several PhDs in biochemistry and run your own testing lab, you're clearly not qualified to survive in the world that we're building.
(As I understand the free-market, anti-regulation theories, this is pretty much what is expected of all of us. If we can't be bothered to build our own biochem testing labs, we shouldn't complain when people and corporations use our ignorance against us.;-)
There was a story on/. here a few years ago about squirrels that look booth ways before crossing the road.
Yeah, I've seen them doing that. Of course, since their eyes are on the sides of their heads, it's pretty easy for them. But you can see them looking around for things in the street.
One of my favorite examples of short-term human-triggered evolution is in our lawn: Our neighborhood has mower-adapted dandelions. This has been reported in many cities, but rarely out in rural areas where mowers are much less common. What they do is form flowers on very short stems that are below the mower blades. Then, as the seeds ripen, the stem grows to the usual longer length, so the mover tears up the seed head and sends (some of) the seeds into the air and on their way. The seeds' little "parachutes" are also somewhat tougher than they used to be.
There are lots of other example of wild critters, weeds, and parasites adapting quickly to human activity. The squirrel and dandelion adaptations are mostly funny illustrations. Bacterial adaptations to antibiotics aren't quite as entertaining.
... some Android apps report a user's physical location up to every 30s...
If you're running google maps on your iPhone or Android phone, it does this. This has been mentioned lots of places, when they explain how the maps app gets the traffic data. It gets the data from the phones, of course, which are reporting their position and speed back to a google server every so often,. The green/yellow/red/black color coding of roads is just a summary of how the phones on those roads are moving. It would be surprising if the packets didn't include a phone's ID, since that helps make sense of the strings of packets from different phones on the same stretch of highway that are arriving mingled together.
I've often used google's traffic reports on my G1 to tell me which of my (Garmin) GPS gadgets routes I should avoid. Supposedly Garmin has released a cell-phone version of their GPS software, but I haven't yet read reports of how well it works.
The mobile google-maps app with traffic status is sufficiently useful that people will probably consider it an acceptable excuse for google keeping track of where their phone is at all times.;-)
Doesn't the development antibiotic resistant bacteria involve evolution?
Indeed, and this is occasionally used to illustrate why the evolution/creation "debate" isn't just an intellectual exercise. Here in the US, the creationists have effectively suppressed the teaching of evolution in our school system (below the college level). The result is that most of the population, including the people running all those farms, have been intentionally kept ignorant of the evolutionary process. They don't understand that they're forcing the evolution of antibiotic-resistant micro-organisms. If you were to mention this to them, a lot would react with the standard religious anti-evolution rhetoric, and reject your accusation that they're doing something dangerous. They either "know" that evolution doesn't exist, or they "know" that it takes millions of years and is thus irrelevant to them.
We're living with the consequences of allowing the religious nut cases to block teaching of the evolutionary process. Or rather, we're getting sick and sometimes dying as a consequence of this.
Something that doesn't even exist and is just a Jewish conspiracy.
Heh. I thought Darwin was educated in the Christian ministry.;-)
"... hopeful that the patent office will listen and put an end to the crazy software patent situation that has turned patents into weapons that hinder innovation."
Hindering innovation is exactly what patent is for, and that's what it's always been for. There's been enough written on the topic over the past few centuries; you'd think that people would understand this.
The only thing you can do with a patent is to take it to the courts to prevent someone else from using it in something they're building. If this isn't what "hinder innovation" means, what weird definition of "innovation" are you using?
The earth-moon double planet is a very very exceptional situation. We don't see anything remotely like it anywhere else in the system.
Sure, we do; the Pluto/Charon pair. They're even closer than the Earth/Luna pair, in both mass and distance.
Of course, Pluto and Charon were, uh, designed for life very different from us.
Two double-planet pairs in a system with as few spherical bodies (now that "planet" isn't socially acceptable;-) as ours is a hint that such arrangements might be common. Sorta like how most stars are in groups of two or more, and solitary stars like ours are the minority.
But still, a sample of size two isn't much more significant than a sample of one. We really have no clue how common double planets might be.
Well, it bothers me that your comment (and the one you replied to) both phase the problems as the orbits intersecting in 2098. If the orbits intersect then (and there's no known close pass by another planet to deflect the object's orbit), then their orbits intersect right now.
This is as big a logic error as saying that, since the object is now 20 million miles from Earth, it'll take most of a century to reach us. In reality, depending on its orbit, it should cross the Earth's orbit in roughly a month (to one place accuracy). It's just that we won't be at the crossing then, or on its next pass, or...
What I'd like to see in stories like this is a link to an article that shows the orbits involved. We hardly ever see those, even on/. where a lot of us would understand them.
Actually, in this case the summary contains a link to the Bad Astronomer's article, which is reasonably informative despite being obviously aimed at a "general" audience. And it doesn't seem to make the usual mistakes in phrasing that we have so much fun mocking here.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
... researchers determined that a reliable public WiFi hotspot would be available to their test vehicles only 11% of the time ...
but then a closer look found that in those cases, 99% had the SID "Free Public WiFi".
It will be interesting to see when businesses wont be able to fax, or deal with clients whose names contains those banned words ...
And once again, the good folk of Scunthorpe in the UK will find the technology won't work in their town, and won't let people write to or about them.
innumeracy of the summary, OTOH, is staggering... Come on, people, at least do a quick back-of-the-envelope sanity check, OK?
Envelope? I've heard of that, I think, but where might I find one?
(Oh, wait; I found one. It was down in the basement, right there on a shelf next to the typewriter. ;-)
The first AI going out of control will be a spelling checker, that will eradicate humans to eradicate spelling mistakes. It will be called the Grammar Nazi.
No; it'll be called the Spelling Nazi. A true Grammar Nazi would check grammar, not spelling, and would try to eradicate (people who make) grammatical mistakes.
Then there's the Terminology Nazi version ...
Heh. The AC probably didn't look at any of your post history, just the number of posts. That told him/her that you spend far too much time on /., and thus don't have a meaningful life (for some people's definition of "meaningful").
Yeah, I know; me too.
So 'the user buying something' is a better solution than the printer software supporting ad-hoc networks?
Well, you're obviously not a businessman. ;-)
If you were, it would be obvious to you that "the user buying something" is always better than "the user just using their equipment and not buying any tie-in products".
Once you understand this, you understand a lot of how marketing works. But a lot of people never understand it. In the business world, they're known as "failures".
... the submitting user grants Geeknet ...
Right. The ToS gives a license to Geeknet (and only to Geeknet). It gives no license to the readers of slashdot, who routinely download copyrighted messages by the pageful without asking for permission from the copyright owners - or from slashdot - to do so.
If you think this is a frivolous point, you have a profound misunderstanding of how the American legal system works.
(Not that I actually expect to see any prosecution over this any time soon, of course. I read slashdot regularly, and I'm not actually worried about being prosecuted for doing so. I'm just pointing out that the legal situation is a bit ambiguous and quite weird, by the standards of any reasonable person. And the copyright industry has lately been getting rather weird about prosecuting what they consider violations.)
So the next question is: Does slashdot have the legal right (in the US where they're located) to impose any such Terms of Service that override a poster's automatic copyright? Maybe they do. I don't know. I've looked for comment or legal precedent or court decisions on such subjects, and I don't seem to find them.
In any case, I don't see that the ToS says that we readers have a legal right to download slashdot comments not owned by slashdot. It does have the usual wording that gives geeknet perpetual publication rights, etc. But that doesn't apply to readers not employed by geeknet. Can you point to where slashdot explicitly states that posters give all readers the right to download their copyrighted content? Maybe it's there in the ToS, in terminology that I don't understand (not being an IP lawyer).
This is all typical of online forums, of course. And assorted lawyers have occasionally commented that it's not obvious (at least not in the US) that the normal downloading of copyrighted content without an explicit license is actually legal. Granted, the "reasonable man" approach would say that if someone make something available on their web site, they are implicitly giving everyone on the Internet a license to download it. This is just "common sense", but the (American ;-) legal system very rarely considers this relevant to anything. Until we get a clear decision from a high-enough court that posting copyrighted material on the Web provides an automatic license, we should assume that the legal status of such downloads is "unknown".
After all, we had to have a decree from Congress that it was legal to make backup copies of copyrighted material on your own disks. Copyright holders were starting lawsuits over the common custom of making backups, which wasn't explicitly allowed by their licenses. If they consider making backups a copyright violation, I'd expect that they would also consider downloading of copyrighted web pages a violation, especially when they explicitly say that it is. I wouldn't expect most publishers to be "reasonable men (or women)" in this regard. Not in the light of some of their recent behavior on the topic.
Ultimately, copying someone else's IP, to which you have no rights, means someone didn't get paid. Period. And if you copied it, you have assigned some value to it. Period. At best, it means you've inflicted direct financial harm by devaluing of the product in question. If you doubt me, I encourage you to verse yourself in the basics of economics.
If you actually believe this, I wonder why you're posting here. Your post was a clear and obvious invitation to commit exactly the sort of "harm" to you that you're decrying.
Consider: Here in the US, and most other countries, your message is copyrighted by you. /. even notifies us all of this fact. I don't have a signed paper from you giving me explicit permission to download your copyrighted message, and I haven't paid you any money for your message, so there's no implicit contract. So under US copyright law, I've "pirated" your message, and according to the message itself, this has harmed you (presumably because I haven't paid your expected but unstated price for the license to read your message).
In fact, I've "pirated" such copyrighted messages here by the hundreds over the last day or two. And I suspect that you've done the same.
This is one of the reasons that, to most of us, the current copyright laws are absurd on their face. Automatic copyright leads immediately to the situation I've just described. And if we were to obey the copyright laws, we'd have to shut down all online discussions, because none of them have a mechanism to ensure proper licensing and payment for downloading of their (automatically) copyrighted material.
If you really believe what you wrote, I hope you wake up and start working to prevent any such harm to yourself in the future. The first step is to stop posting (automatically) copyrighted material on online forums. Nobody will ever pay you for the right to download your messages. They won't even bother trying to contact you to see if you'll give them a free license. They'll just download entire pages of messages, like this page, and ignore the massive "pirating" that's involved. So every message you post will result in hundreds or thousands of harms to you. The sensible thing is to stop this harm by doing no more posting here or on any other online forum.
I have a simpler pc health idea, stop installing the disease that is windows.
Except that if you aren't running Windows, your machine will be declared totally infected and not allowed any access at all.
Remember that it'll be Microsoft software doing the checking.
IE6 is a huge security hole, why are you even catering to the lusers that use it?
In my experience, this is usually necessary because it's what the boss (and/or most of top management) use on their desk. Of course, they have no idea what IE6 is; they just want it to look good "on the Internet", which of course is that window that pops up when they hit the "e" icon.
Given that level of understanding in the people who can fire you at any time, most people will at least try to make it not look too bad in IE6. The security holes are Someone Else's Problem, since you can't fix IE security holes yourself.
I've been saying this for awhile now. Why would you possibly want to build a professional application on top of what is basically a mudslide?
That's a very good characterization of the Web from the start. Well, maybe it was internally consistent when there was only the Mosaic browser and a few academics using it. But as soon as the commercial folks got involved, it turned into a mudslide pretty much overnight. They took their usual approach, of learning just a little bit about the Web, then creating their products for their misunderstanding of it. Then they declared their misinterpretation "standard". The programmers either found ways to live with this unpleasant reality, or they found another job.
It'll be the same with HTML5. 10 or 15 years from now, we'll still be fighting all the incompatibilities in the (many more) Microsoft browsers. We'll still be learning all the niggling little incompatibilities in the "certified standard" browsers. We'll still be fighting bosses who insist that things work on their desktop system and nowhere else. And we'll have more obsolete browsers that we still have to develop before because there will be more millions of people out there who are still using them. And IE6 will still be a major browser.
(If you want to have some real fun with this, try developing a site that works well on the new "smart phones" that are coming out. And start thinking that 10 years from now, your boss will probably have one of them. ;-)
This is also the Senate where a comedian by trade is the smartest guy in the room.
In my experience, the smartest people in the room are usually the comedians. To be good at comedy, you have to understand what's happening around you, smart enough to not take it seriously and see the problems with most of the participants, and with enough empathy to express your thoughts in a way that others will consider funny. All that requires a serious level of intelligence.
Here in the US, surveys around the past several elections have turned up the result that the voters with the best understanding of the issues and of the candidates' policies tend to be those who watch The Daily Show and/or The Colbert Report, and/or listen to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. For those not familiar with these, they are comedy shows (two TV and one radio) with political content. Look them up.
Why don't we start with just raising the basics first?
Uh, people have been trying that for a few thousand years, and look how far it got us? In much of the world where the OLPC is being delivered, working on "just the basics first" means knowingly condemning them to the same economic backwater status that they've always had.
Maybe the OLPC won't fix all the world's educational problems. This is almost certain, if fact, because it's going against the local power structure that has kept the population uneducated all along. But at least they're trying something that has a chance of making a change. It's interesting to watch how it's working out. Or not, in some areas.
(For those without nytimes accounts, the article describes the recent impounding at the port of entry of a shipment of "laptop computers" to a school district in Iraq. After sitting in the warehouse a while, the shipment was declared non-deliverable and auctioned off for a few dollars per computer to an unnamed "businessman" who since seems to have disappeared. Typical for some parts of the world.)
Was there something prior to 2007 that was already doing this?
I'd think that lots of the GPS gadgets back in the 1990s would qualify as prior art. Pretty much all of them communicated their position to another computer via some sort of "network" link, RS-232 or bluetooth or USB or whatever. There was software on the other computer that accepted the GPS info and did something mappy with it.
How could what facebook's doing not be a trivial variant of what GPS gadgets have done from the beginning? The only difference is different network hardware. Yeah, maybe there's different software on the other end now, but that GPS software doesn't know what's at the other end of the comm link.
I have a hard time believing that anything RMS is even partially responsible for is anywhere near as important as GCC, from its humble beginnings as a replacement for CC on UNIX to its present juggernaut Compiler Collection.
There is an important symbiotic relationship between the GPL and the GCC. (And also with other "free" software tools, but the GCC is a good poster child.) One explanation came up in a number of projects that I worked on at Digital back in the 1980s and early 1990s. The question kept coming up there of why DEC supplied a number of BSD-based unix OSs, but not Sys/V. They had Sys/V ported internally, and provided it for a few customers that asked, but they didn't much market it. The explanation that kept coming up was that DEC's lawyers had looked into Sys/V software (with some engineers' help, of course), and had noted that the binaries all contained AT&T copyright notices, usually many copies that were inside various library routines. They suggested that, although the courts hadn't ever decided the status of such copyright claims, it was possible that AT&T could use these embedded strings to claim legal ownership of any software that they wanted. Thus, building your products on AT&T software was risking a court case that might give everything to AT&T.
Since then, I've worked on a number of projects at other companies whose lawyers use a similar argument for why they should use GCC rather than any proprietary compilers and libraries. Again, the legal status isn't clear. This means that you're taking a chance that any binaries produced by proprietary tools or using proprietary libraries could become legally the property of the companies that own the compilers or libraries. The GCC license makes it clear that, if you use GCC, you don't have to worry about this. It's about the only C compiler that provides such safety. We've read versions of this argument in the explanation of why google pushed for the Android platform, as a way of keeping their own software free from takeover by Microsoft or Apple (or AT&T or Comcast or ...).
This isn't a trivial concern. There are growing attempts to use "intellectual property" to take control of the work done by others. Look into how Apple now controls the software that runs on many of their devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Look at how Amazon controls what can be on the kindle, to the point of reaching out and deleting content that customers have bought. We even read here some time back that Microsoft is getting patents on some XML encodings, something we thought was beyond such takeovers because XML is a "public" standard.
The GPL in its various forms is one of the few tools we have to fight such control by the industry giants. Figuring out how to use the copyright laws to fight the slow privatization of what used to be public "intellectual" space was an important legal development. It's about the only thing we have left (at least in the US) that protects the efforts of individuals against the legal power of big corporations. So we should be encouraging the people who work on legal tools like this, at least if we want a society in which it remains legal for private individuals to work on anything that involves software.
OTOH, if a traffic app were to do both, that would give more data than either alone. I can't be the first programmer to have had that thought. ;-)
In any case, there have been many reports that google maps is collecting some of the traffic data from phones running their software. Here's one of the earlier stories that a quick google search turned up, from about a year ago. It's not hard to find other stories about this topic. This story has the additional comment that, at the time, the iPhone was unusual in that it didn't feed data back to the google traffic database. This has supposedly been fixed in the past year.
I'd think that a sensible design would be to try to consolidate the data from mobile "smart phones" with the data from various highway agencies that monitor traffic. Of course, this would depend on which countries, states, provinces, cities, whatever that you could get data from. There's also the problem that no two of them would be expected to use the same data formats. But we have a lot of smart programmers, right? And the task is easily modularized, since you basically need one package per input source that translates that source's data format to whatever format your database wants.
Gawd, not this/i unimaginative debate again. ... why can't a "Universal Awareness" (I dislike the word "God," to me it sounds so ass-backward and presumptuous) have used "evolution" to influence "design?"
Actually, in this case that's what people were talking about. Except the "design" wasn't done by a [Gg]od. It was done by a million local animal breeders over thousands of years, who started with a number of wild animals, and through selective breeding, produced the modern milk/egg/meat machines that give us most of our protein.
Similar selective breeding was done by other millions of growers to produce our modern grains, some of which are so different from their wild ancestors that we're not sure just which wild species were the ancestors.
However our domesticated animal and plant species came to be, we know a fair amount about how they turned into the current species. There was a good deal of "intelligent design" in this process. Urban stereotypes of dumb rural hicks aside, many of those millions of growers and breeders did know what they were doing and how they wanted their animals and crops to change.
Well, obviously you should do the responsible thing, and build your own lab that can test for all known (and future) chemical additives to your food, clothing, etc. If you can't be bothered to learn the equivalent of several PhDs in biochemistry and run your own testing lab, you're clearly not qualified to survive in the world that we're building.
(As I understand the free-market, anti-regulation theories, this is pretty much what is expected of all of us. If we can't be bothered to build our own biochem testing labs, we shouldn't complain when people and corporations use our ignorance against us. ;-)
There was a story on /. here a few years ago about squirrels that look booth ways before crossing the road.
Yeah, I've seen them doing that. Of course, since their eyes are on the sides of their heads, it's pretty easy for them. But you can see them looking around for things in the street.
One of my favorite examples of short-term human-triggered evolution is in our lawn: Our neighborhood has mower-adapted dandelions. This has been reported in many cities, but rarely out in rural areas where mowers are much less common. What they do is form flowers on very short stems that are below the mower blades. Then, as the seeds ripen, the stem grows to the usual longer length, so the mover tears up the seed head and sends (some of) the seeds into the air and on their way. The seeds' little "parachutes" are also somewhat tougher than they used to be.
There are lots of other example of wild critters, weeds, and parasites adapting quickly to human activity. The squirrel and dandelion adaptations are mostly funny illustrations. Bacterial adaptations to antibiotics aren't quite as entertaining.
... some Android apps report a user's physical location up to every 30s ...
If you're running google maps on your iPhone or Android phone, it does this. This has been mentioned lots of places, when they explain how the maps app gets the traffic data. It gets the data from the phones, of course, which are reporting their position and speed back to a google server every so often,. The green/yellow/red/black color coding of roads is just a summary of how the phones on those roads are moving. It would be surprising if the packets didn't include a phone's ID, since that helps make sense of the strings of packets from different phones on the same stretch of highway that are arriving mingled together.
I've often used google's traffic reports on my G1 to tell me which of my (Garmin) GPS gadgets routes I should avoid. Supposedly Garmin has released a cell-phone version of their GPS software, but I haven't yet read reports of how well it works.
The mobile google-maps app with traffic status is sufficiently useful that people will probably consider it an acceptable excuse for google keeping track of where their phone is at all times. ;-)
Doesn't the development antibiotic resistant bacteria involve evolution?
Indeed, and this is occasionally used to illustrate why the evolution/creation "debate" isn't just an intellectual exercise. Here in the US, the creationists have effectively suppressed the teaching of evolution in our school system (below the college level). The result is that most of the population, including the people running all those farms, have been intentionally kept ignorant of the evolutionary process. They don't understand that they're forcing the evolution of antibiotic-resistant micro-organisms. If you were to mention this to them, a lot would react with the standard religious anti-evolution rhetoric, and reject your accusation that they're doing something dangerous. They either "know" that evolution doesn't exist, or they "know" that it takes millions of years and is thus irrelevant to them.
We're living with the consequences of allowing the religious nut cases to block teaching of the evolutionary process. Or rather, we're getting sick and sometimes dying as a consequence of this.
Something that doesn't even exist and is just a Jewish conspiracy.
Heh. I thought Darwin was educated in the Christian ministry. ;-)
"... hopeful that the patent office will listen and put an end to the crazy software patent situation that has turned patents into weapons that hinder innovation."
Hindering innovation is exactly what patent is for, and that's what it's always been for. There's been enough written on the topic over the past few centuries; you'd think that people would understand this.
The only thing you can do with a patent is to take it to the courts to prevent someone else from using it in something they're building. If this isn't what "hinder innovation" means, what weird definition of "innovation" are you using?
The earth-moon double planet is a very very exceptional situation. We don't see anything remotely like it anywhere else in the system.
Sure, we do; the Pluto/Charon pair. They're even closer than the Earth/Luna pair, in both mass and distance.
Of course, Pluto and Charon were, uh, designed for life very different from us.
Two double-planet pairs in a system with as few spherical bodies (now that "planet" isn't socially acceptable ;-) as ours is a hint that such arrangements might be common. Sorta like how most stars are in groups of two or more, and solitary stars like ours are the minority.
But still, a sample of size two isn't much more significant than a sample of one. We really have no clue how common double planets might be.
Well, it bothers me that your comment (and the one you replied to) both phase the problems as the orbits intersecting in 2098. If the orbits intersect then (and there's no known close pass by another planet to deflect the object's orbit), then their orbits intersect right now.
This is as big a logic error as saying that, since the object is now 20 million miles from Earth, it'll take most of a century to reach us. In reality, depending on its orbit, it should cross the Earth's orbit in roughly a month (to one place accuracy). It's just that we won't be at the crossing then, or on its next pass, or ...
What I'd like to see in stories like this is a link to an article that shows the orbits involved. We hardly ever see those, even on /. where a lot of us would understand them.
Actually, in this case the summary contains a link to the Bad Astronomer's article, which is reasonably informative despite being obviously aimed at a "general" audience. And it doesn't seem to make the usual mistakes in phrasing that we have so much fun mocking here. ;-)