The devil wants to own certain works, such as the mouse, the Beatles, etc. We want to release forgotten works and future works into the public domain.
Let us offer to the corporations perpetual copyright on anything they now own. We'll give them a year to make up a grand list of it all. In exchange, we'll demand a reset of the copyright period for new works to something much shorter (like the 1976 version of 33 years + renewal for 33 years). For old works not on the grand list, we'll reset their period according to whatever copyright law existed when they were first published (causing most of them to flow into the public domain immediately).
How's that for a deal? We give up the mouse forever and they give us back a functional public domain. I'm betting that it won't take long for "the locked works" to be forgotten by all of us.
Second, most videogame companies are still around, or have been bought out by other companies,
You've _got_ to be kidding, right? C'mon. Having no evidence, I'd guess that these companies sprout and die pretty quickly, often going out with a disorganized little wimper. But I'll bite -- do you have some backup for your assertion? I know I have none for mine.
Here's this, though. Whenever a business is "wound up", some one receives "all remaining assets". Though none of the people involved might have realized it, this includes the copyrights. And that's part of the problem. Not only isn't anyone publishing the stuff anymore, not only is the content getting lost and/or degrading, but no one knows who the copyright holder is. Which means that if some one else wants to distribute, improve, or preserve the content, they can't do so in any safety -- not even if they're willing to buy the rights.
Lessig and co.'s problem with copyright extension is that _nothing_ is flowing into the public domain -- not the valuable works, nor even the near-forgotten works. The utility of these forgotten works, whether historic or commercial, is being lost and may disappear permanently. And, it's not being lost for any reason -- just as a side effect of companies wanting perpetual rights to a very narrow group of properties.
Not to be insensitive, but your grandmother is going to die. Meanwhile the children being born today... will have no trouble... Your grandmother is not the market for these devices. My son is.
Eventually, we found it: the stash where she'd hidden them. Under a bed in the back room was every electronic device we'd given my grandmother since 1985. She hadn't played one CD in the decade since we'd bought her a simplistic player. That's when I realized that she had stopped learning new devices for good. So maybe it _is_ too late to get her $$.
But it's not to late to sell to some one like my recently-retired father. He's skilled enough, barely, to hook up a home theatre and he's going to live another 30 years. If you can design something he can understand well enough to think his grandchildren need one, he'll buy it in a heartbeat. Getting him into the market will net $$ in the years between now and when your son has discretionary income.
The geek in the family (me) is too busy spending her limited funds feeding and educating the new generation of tech-savvy grandchildren to buy gadgets.
When your toaster tells you that you've got 2 potential e-harmony dates, and your fridge won't shut up about your lousy tv dinner diet, it will be time...
What scares me is the prospect of my fridge telling my potential e-harmony dates that all I have in the house is beer and lousy tv dinners.
If Google took the position that "if we can't get in as a normal user, we won't index it", this "registration" thing would stop.
Google news is the solution, not the problem here. If one source requires registration, so what? Google aggregates all other sources of the same info, letting you find one that doesn't require registration. What more perfect market could anyone design to test just how willing readers are to switch sources to avoid registration?
Forget about how damn clever you think you are, just remember that all anybody has ever really been doing is trying to give you a boost when they tell you you're clever. You're not that clever. No-one is.
Oh, don't be silly. They are, too. I've met them. They're a darned sight cleverer than I am. I'm lucky to stay with them for 3 moves before I'm bested. And for me, there are some people that couldn't stay with me for 3 moves. There are some absolute scales and some of the evaluations you've had from people can be pegged to those scales.
The point is: so what? The game of life isn't all about cleverness.
Kind is what we're supposed to be to those who need us more than we need them. We don't get paid for kind; we pay kind forward. If you must think of a balance between the kind you get and the kind you give, then sum up all the good things you've ever received that you didn't pay for and start making up for them.
What are we to do with all the excess in our lives? Consume it? Hoard it? Ridiculous. That's what kind is for: redistributing the excess.
However if you read the more mature, legible, sensible, well-thought-out, adult posts - which are probably from those of us who have "been there, done that" as it were, you'll realise that most of us...feel alienated, differently clever... or whatever at some point in our lives.
For example at school I felt "superior" to most people around me. As an undergrad I realised... When researching my masters I could look back and see... Then it came to my PhD - I was 25,... I could look back on even my masters and see how conceited I was at 22!... Now I'm over 30...
Friend, I just about wrote that post, or something kind of like it. What a strange tribe this is that one can be the grandfather of wisdom at just over 30! For my next feat, I'm going to try to raise a child. I can't image what I'll think of my former self after a few years at that task.
tha_mink wrote: The real thing you need to do is get over yourself. You're not special. There's lots of people in this world that are just as smart as you.
ldspartan wrote: don't think you're a fucking genius because you're the smartest kid in your highschool. . . . College is a totally different story, particularly if you're going to a good one. You'll meet people there who are intelligent, motivated, and personable.
(OK, the odds that anyone is still reading this tread are slim and none, but...)
Guys! Give the kid a break. He didn't claim to be "the smartest kid in his school". In fact, he didn't compare himself to anyone. His description, if anything, was pretty modest compared to how a lot of people here would describe themselves. And it was honest. Did you hear him say that he'd had such problems with his dichotomy between extreme-focus and lack-of-focus that he'd consulted a medical professional? Or weren't you listening?
He came here with a cri de coeur, seeking advise on how to be him. He asked slashdot because he hoped that many of us were just like him. He expects that many of us are as smart as him, some less so, and some a damned sight smarter. Y'all were so busy being defensive that you forgot to be flattered by being asked the question in the first place.
This is the parable of the ugly duckling. Here's the submitter, trying to be a duck and not having such a great time of it. Then he sees some other ducklings on slashdot that look a lot like him. He asks them, "How can I be a successful duck?" We owe him a good answer to that. We need to tell him that maybe he can learn to be a successful duck, but maybe he's actually a swan. Heck, he could even be a goose like me, which is also not so bad a thing to be.
Kid, I applaud you for the question. Please don't take any of this negative stuff in some of these answers to heart. There are lots of streams to swim in around here. Also, flying kicks ass whenever you get a chance to do it. Start with what everyone here agrees on: get your ass to college. Find a way to make yourself rack up some GPA and test score numbers that will get you in. Every (geek) path that starts with college is infinitely more interesting that those that don't.
Next up, at college, find a group of people to hang out with that you respect. Choose people that you want to become like in one way or another. Why? Because you will become like those people. There's almost no avoiding it. It's like entropy -- it just sort of creeps up on you. Maybe they're smarter than you, maybe they're funnier, maybe they're more upright, maybe they're better softball players. Doesn't matter.
Finally, keep asking questions. An awful lot of people on here are just like you and some of them, some, like it.
If you think research/invention doesn't require money, explain to your professors that they really don't need their research grants.
Some of the above is circular logic, for example, one of the primary reasons why universities require so much RnD is becuase the patent system makes it impossible for public usable RnD to happen anyplace else.
One of the primary reasons why RnD costs so much at a university or anywhere else is that researchers need money to buy beer just like the rest of us. Cheers!
If I were going to give professional advice, I'd say: It's good that you've identified your weaknesses (e.g. lack of tenacity when bored). Now, work on fixing them. Like the born stutterer who forces herself to become a public speaker, we all gain a lot by working to reduce the severity of our particular limitations.
However, I'm going to give practical advice instead. Go to college and get laid. Get your heart broken. A couple of times. You'll have a whole new perspective on whether you're "bright" or not and whether that matters a damn. Oh, and the guy who said "get a mentor" gave you the best advice of the day.
Quothe my psych prof: We all do what we're least unhappy doing while we wait to die.
People want a phone first; an email or computer or music player second; and a camera last.
Whether the name of the rose is "phone that does PDA tasks" or "PDA that does phone tasks", the rose will smell as sweet.
(The real difference being that if the device must have phone service, then a PDA maker becomes nothing more than one more phone manufacturer for the cellular service companies.)
Some open source software is created by reusing software whose development costs were already paid for by the specific job that required its development. Some open source software is created to drive business for services -- much like creating a razor so that we can sell shaving services (e.g. much of the improvement work now going into linux). Which category does open source biotech fit into?
Biotech has enormous hard costs associated with learning something new. Unlike software that can be built from nearly nothing, biotech needs expensive tools to investigate the physical world and pry forth its secrets. It cannot be done "in your spare time".
For closed biotech: In the current patent-driven model, companies recoup their research costs via temporary premiums charged on drugs they produce. What is the new model for recouping these initial costs? Why would anyone invent instead of merely waiting to duplicate?
For open biotech: Once science has learned a truth about nature/medicine, there is lots of utility to be squeezed out of that truth. Likewise, additional investment to duplicate that finding is largely wasted. If the finding were freely available, society would harvest more utility from it and waste less on duplicative effort.
If millions of people use my car it deprives me use of it in a serious way, but if millions of people use the same invention - then just the opposite happens. The inventor is not only able to keep and use his original invention however he wants, but also now has huge forces contributing to it's improvement.
The analogy is flawed. Your cost to obtain your car was the marginal cost to purcase 1 copy of the car from a manufacturer producing them by the thousands. The cost to invent that car was far higher; higher even than the cost for a duplicator to produce the first duplicate of that car. Those who favor patents seek to reward the fellow who paid the cost to invent.
If the government gave someone a monopoly on growing oranges, on the premise that they wouldn't have an incentive to grow oranges if other people could too - most people would see that as crap too.
Patents are not meant as a production incentive. They're an incentive for the design/research that must take place beforehand. If you think research/invention doesn't require money, explain to your professors that they really don't need their research grants. Explain to every corporation in the country that they can fire all their R&D depts -- because inventing doesn't require money.
Sure, bad patents are bad and perpetual copyrights are silly, but the economic theory is sound: research/invention/creation/authorship are expensive. Production revenues are insufficient where duplicators earn the exact same revenues without the investment. What we should be talking about is how to make the research incentive match the research investment.
I do not dispute the point that people do things that are deterimental to them. However, I suggest that writing more laws for the purpose of protecting them from themselves is often a bad idea. The freedom to make mistakes is valuable. It is valuable both in its own right and because it generates experience which may lead to wisdom. So long as the mistake in question is one the person will recover from making, let them make it.
Since this is a discussion about whether the obscene should be permitted in the media, let me say specifically that I don't believe that the things that were penalized by the FCC recently were either particularly obscene or harmful. Thus, they are a good place for personal liberty rather than more regulation.
One side note: There are another 999+ pages to the Bible that could be used to guide you in your life, not just the 30 words that make up the 10 commandments.
When I said "Deuteronomy", I meant Deuteronomy. The whole book. I was suggesting that people who make too many rules wind up making some silly rules. For example, consider the wisdom of each verse of chapters 22-23.
There were other some things in the parent post that weren't quite equal, namely the political connections, etc. I was unable to evaluate the quality and relevance of that information. Thus, the caveat.
Three guys are standing around, bragging about how good their cellphones are. "I can play poker and blackjack on my cellphone," said the first. "Oh, yeah? Well, mine has a color display and can play games like Splinter Cell on it," said the second. The third guy places his phone next to his head and starts speaking into the air. "What are you doing?!" shout the other two. "Calling home," the third guy says. Whereupon, the other two flee in terror, screaming, "It makes calls! He's in league with the great devil! Tinfoil -- must find tinfoil."
cheating on our spouses (legal, but grounds for divorce)
killing people because they stole our tv (illegal)
killing people because they looked at us the wrong way (illegal)
having sex (legal, except minors)
getting pregnant at age 13 (pregnancy legal, but not the sex)
If you believe that these things are all bad for us and we need help avoiding those choices, what do you propose? Should the government outlaw them all?
Looking at the 4-5 of these that are now illegal, would you do any of them if the laws were dropped? Looking at the 7 or so of these that are legal, are you doing them now? If not, doesn't that suggest that there are things better than laws (such as personal morals) for deciding whether or not to do these things?
Me, I'm not planning on showing my breasts on TV anytime soon, but what if I want to breastfeed my baby in public? Less (of rules) is more (freedom for us). Let's not make any more than we have to. As I recall, Christ's list of commandments was considerably shorter than Deuteronomy.
All things being equal, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. Here, there was more money to be made as a "sunny" station than as a "hard" station. Or, the lack of a tinfoil hat could have made me hopelessly naive.
Im having trouble remembering peoples seven digit numbers. What happens when your telephone number is . . . IPv6!!
Prediction: most of us will live to see the death of the phone number in general usage.
The notion that a person should have to remember an almost-random 10-digit string of numbers to speak to the person they wish to speak to is merely a relic of old, limited technology. It is a relic that will go away. Why should the system not handle tracking down and locating our recipient for us?
Cellular networks now locate recipient's cell phones when the recipient is travelling and route the call. Many phones and some cellular company central systems now use limited amounts of voice recognition. DNS now translates names to numbers. This change will come in our lifetimes. Phone numbers will be regarded as a crutch between the era of human operators placing all calls and the era of "Computer, where is Mr. Riker?"
At present, I know of no comprehensive effort to do this, but the necessary technologies are quickly falling into place. Sure, there are problems like disambiguation, but they aren't unsolvable.
I think it's odd that they think it's your God-given right to reverse-engineer your car, but not your XBox.
It's not so odd. It just indicates that Midas, BP Procare, Tuffy, Meineke, Firestone, Sears, Merlin's, Speedy, Monroe, Penske, etc. have a more organized lobbying effort than all those big-time xbox modding companies out there.
They are making the case to congress that a lot of small businesses will be forced out by dealer repair departments if they cannot read the codes. They're movitated because this is a threat to a business they've had for decades, not just a wouldn't-it-be-fun idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Let us sign a bargain with the devil.
The devil wants to own certain works, such as the mouse, the Beatles, etc. We want to release forgotten works and future works into the public domain.
Let us offer to the corporations perpetual copyright on anything they now own. We'll give them a year to make up a grand list of it all. In exchange, we'll demand a reset of the copyright period for new works to something much shorter (like the 1976 version of 33 years + renewal for 33 years). For old works not on the grand list, we'll reset their period according to whatever copyright law existed when they were first published (causing most of them to flow into the public domain immediately).
How's that for a deal? We give up the mouse forever and they give us back a functional public domain. I'm betting that it won't take long for "the locked works" to be forgotten by all of us.
Second, most videogame companies are still around, or have been bought out by other companies,
You've _got_ to be kidding, right? C'mon. Having no evidence, I'd guess that these companies sprout and die pretty quickly, often going out with a disorganized little wimper. But I'll bite -- do you have some backup for your assertion? I know I have none for mine.
Here's this, though. Whenever a business is "wound up", some one receives "all remaining assets". Though none of the people involved might have realized it, this includes the copyrights. And that's part of the problem. Not only isn't anyone publishing the stuff anymore, not only is the content getting lost and/or degrading, but no one knows who the copyright holder is. Which means that if some one else wants to distribute, improve, or preserve the content, they can't do so in any safety -- not even if they're willing to buy the rights.
Lessig and co.'s problem with copyright extension is that _nothing_ is flowing into the public domain -- not the valuable works, nor even the near-forgotten works. The utility of these forgotten works, whether historic or commercial, is being lost and may disappear permanently. And, it's not being lost for any reason -- just as a side effect of companies wanting perpetual rights to a very narrow group of properties.
Not to be insensitive, but your grandmother is going to die. Meanwhile the children being born today ... will have no trouble ... Your grandmother is not the market for these devices. My son is.
Eventually, we found it: the stash where she'd hidden them. Under a bed in the back room was every electronic device we'd given my grandmother since 1985. She hadn't played one CD in the decade since we'd bought her a simplistic player. That's when I realized that she had stopped learning new devices for good. So maybe it _is_ too late to get her $$.
But it's not to late to sell to some one like my recently-retired father. He's skilled enough, barely, to hook up a home theatre and he's going to live another 30 years. If you can design something he can understand well enough to think his grandchildren need one, he'll buy it in a heartbeat. Getting him into the market will net $$ in the years between now and when your son has discretionary income.
The geek in the family (me) is too busy spending her limited funds feeding and educating the new generation of tech-savvy grandchildren to buy gadgets.
When your toaster tells you that you've got 2 potential e-harmony dates, and your fridge won't shut up about your lousy tv dinner diet, it will be time ...
What scares me is the prospect of my fridge telling my potential e-harmony dates that all I have in the house is beer and lousy tv dinners.
If Google took the position that "if we can't get in as a normal user, we won't index it", this "registration" thing would stop.
Google news is the solution, not the problem here. If one source requires registration, so what? Google aggregates all other sources of the same info, letting you find one that doesn't require registration. What more perfect market could anyone design to test just how willing readers are to switch sources to avoid registration?
Forget about how damn clever you think you are, just remember that all anybody has ever really been doing is trying to give you a boost when they tell you you're clever. You're not that clever. No-one is.
Oh, don't be silly. They are, too. I've met them. They're a darned sight cleverer than I am. I'm lucky to stay with them for 3 moves before I'm bested. And for me, there are some people that couldn't stay with me for 3 moves. There are some absolute scales and some of the evaluations you've had from people can be pegged to those scales.
The point is: so what? The game of life isn't all about cleverness.
Being kind's never got me anywhere.
Kind is what we're supposed to be to those who need us more than we need them. We don't get paid for kind; we pay kind forward. If you must think of a balance between the kind you get and the kind you give, then sum up all the good things you've ever received that you didn't pay for and start making up for them.
What are we to do with all the excess in our lives? Consume it? Hoard it? Ridiculous. That's what kind is for: redistributing the excess.
Rent the film Pay It Forward, if you haven't yet.
However if you read the more mature, legible, sensible, well-thought-out, adult posts - which are probably from those of us who have "been there, done that" as it were, you'll realise that most of us ...feel alienated, differently clever ... or whatever at some point in our lives.
... When researching my masters I could look back and see ... Then it came to my PhD - I was 25, ... I could look back on even my masters and see how conceited I was at 22! ... Now I'm over 30 ...
For example at school I felt "superior" to most people around me. As an undergrad I realised
Friend, I just about wrote that post, or something kind of like it. What a strange tribe this is that one can be the grandfather of wisdom at just over 30! For my next feat, I'm going to try to raise a child. I can't image what I'll think of my former self after a few years at that task.
tha_mink wrote: The real thing you need to do is get over yourself. You're not special. There's lots of people in this world that are just as smart as you.
ldspartan wrote: don't think you're a fucking genius because you're the smartest kid in your highschool. . . . College is a totally different story, particularly if you're going to a good one. You'll meet people there who are intelligent, motivated, and personable.
(OK, the odds that anyone is still reading this tread are slim and none, but...)
Guys! Give the kid a break. He didn't claim to be "the smartest kid in his school". In fact, he didn't compare himself to anyone. His description, if anything, was pretty modest compared to how a lot of people here would describe themselves. And it was honest. Did you hear him say that he'd had such problems with his dichotomy between extreme-focus and lack-of-focus that he'd consulted a medical professional? Or weren't you listening?
He came here with a cri de coeur, seeking advise on how to be him. He asked slashdot because he hoped that many of us were just like him. He expects that many of us are as smart as him, some less so, and some a damned sight smarter. Y'all were so busy being defensive that you forgot to be flattered by being asked the question in the first place.
This is the parable of the ugly duckling. Here's the submitter, trying to be a duck and not having such a great time of it. Then he sees some other ducklings on slashdot that look a lot like him. He asks them, "How can I be a successful duck?" We owe him a good answer to that. We need to tell him that maybe he can learn to be a successful duck, but maybe he's actually a swan. Heck, he could even be a goose like me, which is also not so bad a thing to be.
Kid, I applaud you for the question. Please don't take any of this negative stuff in some of these answers to heart. There are lots of streams to swim in around here. Also, flying kicks ass whenever you get a chance to do it. Start with what everyone here agrees on: get your ass to college. Find a way to make yourself rack up some GPA and test score numbers that will get you in. Every (geek) path that starts with college is infinitely more interesting that those that don't.
Next up, at college, find a group of people to hang out with that you respect. Choose people that you want to become like in one way or another. Why? Because you will become like those people. There's almost no avoiding it. It's like entropy -- it just sort of creeps up on you. Maybe they're smarter than you, maybe they're funnier, maybe they're more upright, maybe they're better softball players. Doesn't matter.
Finally, keep asking questions. An awful lot of people on here are just like you and some of them, some, like it.
Dude, it's a brain puzzle! Can you think of anything that has more broad appeal to slashdotters?
The death of this server was foreordained from the moment the article was submitted.
They just fade away.
They just pass beyond the rim.
They just go where no man has gone before.
Well put. To clarify one part,
If you think research/invention doesn't require money, explain to your professors that they really don't need their research grants.
Some of the above is circular logic, for example, one of the primary reasons why universities require so much RnD is becuase the patent system makes it impossible for public usable RnD to happen anyplace else.
One of the primary reasons why RnD costs so much at a university or anywhere else is that researchers need money to buy beer just like the rest of us. Cheers!
If I were going to give professional advice, I'd say: It's good that you've identified your weaknesses (e.g. lack of tenacity when bored). Now, work on fixing them. Like the born stutterer who forces herself to become a public speaker, we all gain a lot by working to reduce the severity of our particular limitations.
However, I'm going to give practical advice instead. Go to college and get laid. Get your heart broken. A couple of times. You'll have a whole new perspective on whether you're "bright" or not and whether that matters a damn. Oh, and the guy who said "get a mentor" gave you the best advice of the day.
Quothe my psych prof: We all do what we're least unhappy doing while we wait to die.
People are willing to carry one device.
People want a phone first; an email or computer or music player second; and a camera last.
Whether the name of the rose is "phone that does PDA tasks" or "PDA that does phone tasks", the rose will smell as sweet.
(The real difference being that if the device must have phone service, then a PDA maker becomes nothing more than one more phone manufacturer for the cellular service companies.)
Too bad. I thought the gist of the article was that they had acheived the same gain on the relevant frequency set using a smaller device.
I didn't figure anything good was coming out of this. (Except maybe a device that works in watch-sized phones.)
Some open source software is created by reusing software whose development costs were already paid for by the specific job that required its development. Some open source software is created to drive business for services -- much like creating a razor so that we can sell shaving services (e.g. much of the improvement work now going into linux). Which category does open source biotech fit into?
Biotech has enormous hard costs associated with learning something new. Unlike software that can be built from nearly nothing, biotech needs expensive tools to investigate the physical world and pry forth its secrets. It cannot be done "in your spare time".
For closed biotech: In the current patent-driven model, companies recoup their research costs via temporary premiums charged on drugs they produce. What is the new model for recouping these initial costs? Why would anyone invent instead of merely waiting to duplicate?
For open biotech: Once science has learned a truth about nature/medicine, there is lots of utility to be squeezed out of that truth. Likewise, additional investment to duplicate that finding is largely wasted. If the finding were freely available, society would harvest more utility from it and waste less on duplicative effort.
If millions of people use my car it deprives me use of it in a serious way, but if millions of people use the same invention - then just the opposite happens. The inventor is not only able to keep and use his original invention however he wants, but also now has huge forces contributing to it's improvement.
The analogy is flawed. Your cost to obtain your car was the marginal cost to purcase 1 copy of the car from a manufacturer producing them by the thousands. The cost to invent that car was far higher; higher even than the cost for a duplicator to produce the first duplicate of that car. Those who favor patents seek to reward the fellow who paid the cost to invent.
If the government gave someone a monopoly on growing oranges, on the premise that they wouldn't have an incentive to grow oranges if other people could too - most people would see that as crap too.
Patents are not meant as a production incentive. They're an incentive for the design/research that must take place beforehand. If you think research/invention doesn't require money, explain to your professors that they really don't need their research grants. Explain to every corporation in the country that they can fire all their R&D depts -- because inventing doesn't require money.
Sure, bad patents are bad and perpetual copyrights are silly, but the economic theory is sound: research/invention/creation/authorship are expensive. Production revenues are insufficient where duplicators earn the exact same revenues without the investment. What we should be talking about is how to make the research incentive match the research investment.
I do not dispute the point that people do things that are deterimental to them. However, I suggest that writing more laws for the purpose of protecting them from themselves is often a bad idea. The freedom to make mistakes is valuable. It is valuable both in its own right and because it generates experience which may lead to wisdom. So long as the mistake in question is one the person will recover from making, let them make it.
Since this is a discussion about whether the obscene should be permitted in the media, let me say specifically that I don't believe that the things that were penalized by the FCC recently were either particularly obscene or harmful. Thus, they are a good place for personal liberty rather than more regulation.
One side note:
There are another 999+ pages to the Bible that could be used to guide you in your life, not just the 30 words that make up the 10 commandments.
When I said "Deuteronomy", I meant Deuteronomy. The whole book. I was suggesting that people who make too many rules wind up making some silly rules. For example, consider the wisdom of each verse of chapters 22-23.
Thanks for correcting the axiom.
There were other some things in the parent post that weren't quite equal, namely the political connections, etc. I was unable to evaluate the quality and relevance of that information. Thus, the caveat.
And I thought the punch line would be . . .
Three guys are standing around, bragging about how good their cellphones are. "I can play poker and blackjack on my cellphone," said the first. "Oh, yeah? Well, mine has a color display and can play games like Splinter Cell on it," said the second. The third guy places his phone next to his head and starts speaking into the air. "What are you doing?!" shout the other two. "Calling home," the third guy says. Whereupon, the other two flee in terror, screaming, "It makes calls! He's in league with the great devil! Tinfoil -- must find tinfoil."
Smaller is nice, but if we build a cell phone with a DLM the same size as the antennas in current models, can we get 3 times the reception?
binge drinking (legal)
having sex with strangers (legal)
contracting diseases (legal)
getting drunk (legal, except minors)
hurting our loved ones (assualt is illegal)
cheating on our spouses (legal, but grounds for divorce)
killing people because they stole our tv (illegal)
killing people because they looked at us the wrong way (illegal)
having sex (legal, except minors)
getting pregnant at age 13 (pregnancy legal, but not the sex)
If you believe that these things are all bad for us and we need help avoiding those choices, what do you propose? Should the government outlaw them all?
Looking at the 4-5 of these that are now illegal, would you do any of them if the laws were dropped? Looking at the 7 or so of these that are legal, are you doing them now? If not, doesn't that suggest that there are things better than laws (such as personal morals) for deciding whether or not to do these things?
Me, I'm not planning on showing my breasts on TV anytime soon, but what if I want to breastfeed my baby in public? Less (of rules) is more (freedom for us). Let's not make any more than we have to. As I recall, Christ's list of commandments was considerably shorter than Deuteronomy.
Right on.
All things being equal, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. Here, there was more money to be made as a "sunny" station than as a "hard" station. Or, the lack of a tinfoil hat could have made me hopelessly naive.
Im having trouble remembering peoples seven digit numbers. What happens when your telephone number is . . . IPv6!!
Prediction: most of us will live to see the death of the phone number in general usage.
The notion that a person should have to remember an almost-random 10-digit string of numbers to speak to the person they wish to speak to is merely a relic of old, limited technology. It is a relic that will go away. Why should the system not handle tracking down and locating our recipient for us?
Cellular networks now locate recipient's cell phones when the recipient is travelling and route the call. Many phones and some cellular company central systems now use limited amounts of voice recognition. DNS now translates names to numbers. This change will come in our lifetimes. Phone numbers will be regarded as a crutch between the era of human operators placing all calls and the era of "Computer, where is Mr. Riker?"
At present, I know of no comprehensive effort to do this, but the necessary technologies are quickly falling into place. Sure, there are problems like disambiguation, but they aren't unsolvable.
I think it's odd that they think it's your God-given right to reverse-engineer your car, but not your XBox.
It's not so odd. It just indicates that Midas, BP Procare, Tuffy, Meineke, Firestone, Sears, Merlin's, Speedy, Monroe, Penske, etc. have a more organized lobbying effort than all those big-time xbox modding companies out there.
They are making the case to congress that a lot of small businesses will be forced out by dealer repair departments if they cannot read the codes. They're movitated because this is a threat to a business they've had for decades, not just a wouldn't-it-be-fun idea.