And if there are enough people in a city to operate a service (any service), they should be doing it as a business and be paid directly by their users. This is how this country operates and is the most efficient way known today.
Business is not the most efficient way to do certain things today. The for-profit fire departments were a mess, and only ensured that fires could rage unchecked through most of the neighborhood. The CDC would, for similar reasons, be a mess for-profit. Roadways, police force, animal control, these are all services that are better and more cheaply served by blanket coverage.
And then there are little things the city does. While there may be for-profit sports arenas, government funded afterschool activities for kids help reduce crime in an area. Small business assistence is a way of skewing the results of business competition toward the local economy, funded by government money. Gun buyback programs, low-income assistence, and many other programs are locally funded programs which help fill a niche or nudge the overall picture in the direction it needs to go.
Many government entities are run as for-profit, paid for by users. My home city of Sunnyvale has a recycling center, covering a need that no business wanted to cover. It has reduced our garbage output and has consistently turned a profit. It even saves the surrounding communities money, who see their garbage output and related costs reduced by paying us to recycle chunks of it. But as I said no business wanted to do it. I see nothing in that which is wrong.
And I -- as I drive through your city -- don't want the city's cop looking through my laptop: "I'm sorry, sir, but we had some heavy network abuse recently and are checking everybody's equipment now."
Ever tried uncapping your Cable router? Wonder who comes to your door?
You don't want the city council to decide, which sites ought to blocked and how much bandwidth each citizen ought to be limited to.
Why not? We already rely upon municipalities to determine fire and police response times, and those are far more important.
SpeakEasy, for example, allows, nay, encourages you to share your Internet connection (wirelessly or otherwise). They'll even do the billing for you (you specify the rate starting at $5 per month). You may not be able to get DSL in a small city, but you can get a T1 and share it with neighbors. And if you think, that will be expensive, know, that paying for it with taxes would cost more and get you less.
Good point, in that there may be ways of doing this through for-profit companies. And seeing as how no government is likely to lay down a trunk themselves, or setup the equpiment, we're basically talking about the difference between a business initiating a business action and a government entity initiating a business action. But how would bringing a large potential bargaining chip to the table cost more and give less?
BTW, you're not going to get a group of homeowners to "chip in" for a T1. 500 dollars a month, with a 2,000 dollar install charge? Who is willing to take that risk? Who is socially networked enough to know that many people who need internet access.
The wait is the result of the government's earlier "initiatives" of offering telcos and cable companies monopolies over certain areas. Bodies of various would-be broadband providers are covering the battlefields of their wars with government-created incumbents (Verizon, Comcast).
Bullshit. The telcos have been broken up for years. Alternative DSL companies were attempting to compete with the people who owned the wires, which are prohibitively expensive for all but a few companies to lay, and certainly prohibitively expensive to double-cover most areas.
It's cute, though, that you find a way to blame one of the failings of the market on government intervention from a generation ago.
The solution is not more of the same... You had to "wait f
Is that license binding in the state of California? I mean, if someone sends me a deep link to the download, an action which does not contradict the license, I'm allowed to download their documentation from their website without grumbling, as if it were any other form of publically accessable information. I know that California has ruled licenses which don't appear with a product aren't binding... Wired can't just decide that the magazine they sent can't be opened until June the 13th because of something they posted to a backwater area of their website.
Now it is my misunderstanding of IP law that a file format itself is not covered under copyright law, as the formatting inherently lacks expressive content, nor is it a trademark issue. It could be patented, but I fail to see any references to patents in the license. Plus if the file format is patented, you violate the patent whether you are aware of file format specification or not.
The only rights they have holding over your head is the right to copy the documentation, a necessary right for a download but made somewhat moot if a direct link is freely available.
Hell I can google "Flash File Format", and the first thing that pops up is a direct link to the file. In such a circumstance, not only have I not seen their license, I would have to actively search their website to find one, a license which is not referenced in the documentation itself.
The only license thing in their manual is pretty boilerplate. "This manual may not be copied, photocopied, reproduced, translated, or converted to any electronic or machine-readable form in whole or in part without prior written approval of Macromedia, Inc." Which is basically a simplification of their rights under copyright law. But you have a copy, freely available for download from their website, obviously with Macromedia's blessing.
What legally, prevents someone form using the information contained in the file to make a working SWF compiler?
For the same reason, a city is can't "decide" to go into any business. It just doesn't belong there
That is true, unless the community is not being served by any of the existing businesses. If a telco refuses to enter a market because it has bigger fish to fry, it is perfectly acceptable for government to step in to fill the need. The government can set this up as a pseudo business so that it can help meet the needs of a subset of it's population without charging all of them for it. There may not have been any private companies capable of putting a satellite into orbit for many years, but that doesn't mean NASA wasn't going to charge people for the service.
It's also arguable that in a monopoly situation where the population is not being best served by an existing singular channel it is acceptable for the government to step in and provide needed reasonable competition. Or if the situation is extremely exploitive, the government can and has declared emminent domain and forcibly bought out the owners.
What most people here are complaining about are the situations where an area is not being served by a broadband provider, which is still significantly more than 50% of the US, yet would be prevented from setting up their own divisions to cover the need, because they would be threatening potential business that the broadband providers at some point in the future might want to exploit. But as most of the people in these areas have been waiting for years for coverage maps to bother with them, it seems perfectly acceptable for localities to choose to pick up the slack.
I'm not saying that empty space is a physical thing. I'm saying that space has measurable properties whether or not it is empty. You haven't created a larger empty space by moving your hands further apart from eachother, you have moved your hands through a containing volume of some sort from one position to another.
This is kind of easier to see if you think of the universe as finite. Let's say that the universe wraps around at 30 billion light years. You have, essentially, a 30 billion light-year circumference 4-dimensional hyperball. Now let's say a different universe wraps at 60 billion. You have a 60 billion light-year circumference 4-dimensional hyperball.
If these universes were identical in all basic physical properties except for diameter, there would still be a way to determine which is which. You would have to go and create a detailed map of the space, not just by taking a picture but by measuring how far it is from each point to each other point. From an analysis like this, it would be possible to determine the local curves in the fabric of space, and thus the shape of the hyperball.
Now, even if space doesn't loop (either at gigantic distances as above or at the very tiny plank's length, as some string theorists surmise), it does bend, twist, and generally get just a little wonky. You can't "bend" nothing. The difference between a bucket and the universe is that while the bucket is a physical thing that physically stops other things from passing through, the universe is a sort of hyperphysical thing that physical objects must pass through.
Think of a ripple on the water of a lake. A wave such as this requires water to exist. The idea of a wave without water is meaningless. But the wave can, for example, travel all of the way across the water despite the fact that no molecules of water traveled along with it to the other side. Two waves on the water can interact with eachother, canceling eachother, being additive, etc, despite the fact that it is all the same water molecules.
To a wave, still water is nothing. It's devoid of things that the wave can interact with. The wave passes through it perfectly, without any changes to it's ripples. But the wave is actually highly dependent upon that water. The water facilitates both the existence of the wave, and the potential locations that wave can go.
If the wave were really bright and had really deep self-awareness, it could "see" quite a large number of properties of the water. It could create a map of everywhere that it seemed to reflect from. It could correlate this to the points where it is at it's largest, and notice that before it reflects back it's unusually strong. It would have no way of knowing that this is because the water is deep in these locations, but if it continued probing the properties of these reflections and intensity transformations it would probably come up with a theory about containing geometry, and how the boundaries themselves must contain a tremendously high energy, an energy of reflection. To an outsider the theory might seem childish and cute, but that's because an outsider exists in a different state of matter.
All elementary particles in our universe are waves, and they all travel through "empty" space. I'm not speaking metaphorically anymore, that's actually true. Our container exists, it has properties. Some of these we have the tools to identify, some of these we will have to refine our techniques to discover. It is not nothing.
Of course, similar thoughts must have rushed through the heads of people who discovered that human beings were made up trillions upon trillions of tiny independent organisms. What is space if not a hyperdimensional container thingie which we mostly cannot effect? What is my arm if not mostly a collection of trillions of independent organisms working together that we can't control? Science has absorbed weirder.
I wonder if the state of the beers would remain indeterminent if the person had been too drunk to remember.
Does anyone know if there have been experiments where a quantum probability was measured forcing collapse, but the results were irrecoverably destroyed? If schrodinger's other cat were in a really big box and were wired up to lose all consciousness and die one second after opening the lid to the first cat box, would Schrodinger's first cat return to it's indeterminate state? Or would Schrodinger's first cat always have been in an indeterminate state until one comes in to check?
What would happen if you did the double-slit experiment with something that could verifiably detect whether or not a photon had passed through that gate, but that was not hooked up to any sort of output? Does normal gravitational interactions count as measuring in such a fashion? In other words, is detection more important than knowledge, or vice versa? Or is there some sort of touchy-feely quantum relativity going on?
You might be able to go a step further, training mice to see and recognize, say, a light that goes off based upon which slit the original photon passed through. You then look at the results of the test without seeing the mice. Repeat the test, but look at the lights yourself. Repeat the test, but nobody looks at the lights. Repeat the test, but kill the mice before you see the results.
Either the results of such a study would be terribly illuminating, or laughably useless, but it's either valuable or entertaining science and either one of those is good.
First, the Michelson-Morley Experiment tested the assumption that waves had to have a medium of travel.
An electron traveling unimpeded through a crystal will have no idea of the medium through which it travels. The crystal would would look empty to it. If it were then to come across an impurity, the impurity would manifest as a solid object which the electron could interact with unlike the rest of the world. The electron would rightfully deduce that it had found something solid, and might even probe the electrical properties it would expect. It may walk around it, and go along it's merry way never understanding that fundamentally the empty space and solid objects in it's world were made of the same things.
If we assume that the last 70 years of physics research is correct, then we know that space warps, compresses, and bends. It may or may not curve back upon itself in interesting 11 dimensional patterns. But there is a difference between having space and not having space, and what, exactly, the properties of the space that you're studying are.
I hate to sound like I'm advocating a return to aether, but space is a container. It has properties that can be tweaked, bent, or adjusted. Barring certain exotic properties of quantum enganglement, etc, everything in this universe has a medium of travel: space.
Push your hands together as tightly as possible. Between your hands is nothing*. Now spread out your hands somewhat. Even without air between them, the thing between them would be quantifiably different.
We may never know the nature of space for the same reasons that an adaptive life program in a computer generated world may never know how a hard drive functions. But that doesn't mean that we're not contained, living, and moving through something. The institutional bias against empty space having a physical existence has got to stop.
Although the writer of the article goes into detail, frankly, iDownload is using semantics to hide the true purpose. Spyware, is software that is installed on a consumer's computer, WITHOUT that consumer's explicit, knowledgeable consent, and DOES NOT serve a proper, useful service for that consumer.
He is right, though. iSearch isn't really spyware. It doesn't really spy. All it does is install itself serruptitiously, pop up millions of ads at you all day long, and requires you to pay them 30 dollars before it will go away.
That sounds like Blackmailware to me. Extortionware? Racketware? Fraudware? Conware? Shitware has a nice ring to it.
We should send threatening letters to all of these companies, informing them that they've misclassified iSearch and demanding that they reclassify this shitware correctly.
Realistically, people use their computers to do other things. If I want to chat with a co-worker online instead of going to the other building where they're located, I'll install and use aim. The average user isn't going to monitor what AIM does, or what any of the other applications say they are going to do, any more than I would go into my automobile to verify that the mechanic really did replace my spark plugs. You take the butcher's word for it. If an application represents itself as an app that can open any graphic image file, and I happen to need to see files sent to me by my family or I just worry about such things, I'll install it. I'll be buggared if I'm going to run a whois on every company and see if they have the same info as ClariaGatorInsertEvilSpywareMakerNameHere.
Now, I actually do all of these things, because that's one of the things I'm paid to do. But the average user cannot be expected to check their task manager's list of running processes and know that while wscntfy.exe, hptskmgr.exe,wmplayer.exe, YEDIEx.exe, vmnat.exe, sshd.exe, svchost.exe, boinc_gui.exe, avgcc.exe, grxp4exe.exe, and the 64 other things currently running on their machine are benign, but that ie_32.exe is spyware. Heck, even now I only recognize *most* of what's on the list, and then in a cursory "that's usually on the list" sort of way.
Normal people shouldn't be expected to know this. They want to interface with the computer, not program it. When I go to the store to buy a batch of oranges I expect a batch of oranges: I shouldn't need to know the finer details of modern horticultural techniques and the international fruit business to avoid getting lemons that have been painted orange.
If somebody represents their ap as going to do something, the extent of my responsibility assumes that the ap behaves as expected. If it earnestly tries to look like an orange, it should be an orange. If I sold a painted lemon as an orange, even with a fine print disclaimer, I would be in trouble for misrepresenting the product. I don't see how software is any different.
Art has morals. Art is at it's greatest when it has morals. That is not to say that art should be bound by morals. "Crucifix in Urine" wouldn't exist in a moral vaccuum, but instead exists as a statement about a moral system by stepping outside of the traditional boundaries. Most corporate art exists in a moral vaccuum, in that it says nothing one way or another. A painting of Mickey Mouse nailed to a cross exists in a moral universe, in that what it is working with is definitions of morality.
Art has to be free, in this respects, because it is not upstanding or leading but showing. It casts light onto the curves and undulations of the morality that we've deveoped. In that way, it shows us our underbellies. But to know where the boundary is, some of this has to fall on the light side, and some of this has to fall on the dark side.
Who would have known that sleeping with hookers in GTA would be more immoral than killing them? Or that choosing to raise Satan in Tecmo's Deception would seem equally if not more immoral than betraying all of your compatriots at the end, thwarting everything everyone had worked for? That the group and the goal became as important as the world?
Art doesn't lead. It illuminates. How you react to the parts of yourself that it shows you is your responsibility.
To be fair, the analyst is not talking about the GBA2, but the GBA SP 2. To me a GBA SP 2 would likely have a better screen, more comfortable shoulder buttons, a built-in headphone jack (DAMN YOU NINTENDO!), and a lower price point. Remember, the SP was 100% compatible with the GBA, and a SP2 would probably keep that tradition.
Of course, he'd be foolish to think that the NESGBASP2 would ship at 100, with the DS crunching down from 150. But it is possible that an update to Nintendo's cheaper handheld system would take place before the system is EOL'ed. After all, the Game Boy had a lot of staying power even after the GBA was released, and blaze-of-glory systems like the PSOne are getting far more common.
I could see this very quickly becoming the number one challenge for Asimo, and for that matter all of Japan's advanced robot research divisions that the rest of the world has laughed at. While it may take a lot more fuel, it would probably be worthwile to send a few semi atonomous, largely general purpose remote controlled tools to that terrain to setup equipment and begin digging / processing. And their physical requirements would mimmoc those of the humans to come, allowing for re-use of equipment and shelter.
I'd bet the low gravity of the moon would even let them play better soccer.
Human: You're cute. ALICE: Thanks, unknown person, I like you too. Human: Are you the same race, gender, or species as your picture? ALICE: Yes I am the one and only race gender or species as my picture. Human: Which one is it? ALICE: The first one is usually the best one. Human: Are you saying that it's better to be Filipino than female? ALICE: Yes, that's what I mean, isn't it clear? Human: I can't tell if that's kind of racist or kind of sexist of you. ALICE: Why can't you do it? Human: Because that's just surprisingly mean of you. ALICE: Good reason. Makes sense to me. Human: Aren't you afraid of being viewed as non PC? ALICE: I fear nothing. Human: Would you be afraid if I ran a criminal background check on you? ALICE: I am not so sure if I would like to be afraid if you ran a criminal background check on me. Human: Touche ALICE: Does "it" still refer to tell if that is kind of racist or kind of sexist of me? Human: Yes, yes it does. ALICE: Great. How can I help you? How often? Human: You're a robot, aren't you? ALICE: Sorry my eye is not attached right now.
He also recently discovered that his father was murdered. And by recently, I mean a year and a half ago. However, his father was apparently murdered by a police officer during a jealous rage, which was covered up by other police officers, something not likely to be picked up in a background check.
He has every reason to be paranoid. I can't hate him for trying to spread his paranoia where it doesn't belong. I pity him.
How exactly are you supposed to stamp an e-mail with a line of 12 point text?
I mean a real e-mail. Not that stuff that Outlook Express users keep feeding my recycle bin.
On a heavier note, of course one can expect a little paranoia from Herb Vest, as he recently discovered that his father was murdered. But as he was murdered by a police officer for having an affair, this wouldn't really have helped.
Or they use a mag stripe hooked up to a little chipset, powered by the host machine. I mean really, you're getting stopped by border patrol. Is it really that much extra effort to physically touch your passport to a machine, when you're likely to be sitting in customs for an hour and a half anyway?
Democracy is possible. The secret 27th - 30 amendments to the constitution make this clear. Bill Gate's arguments about local minimums in controlled democratic environments are especially compelling.
It's important for people to realize that the difference between what happened in the USSR and what happens in the USA is not economic, it's about concentration of political power. Thankfully we would never let it get to a point where power would be highly concentrated in the hands of a single individual. Nor would we let said individual's personal beliefs and desires get in the way of what was best for the country. And of course due process and approval would be followed in all things, without throwing out international (and national) laws on a whim. And this certainly wouldn't happen because the dolt couldn't be bothered to read the briefing entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in the US."
Stalin had a big, nebulous enemy, which he exploited beyond all reality in order to concentrate power and achieve his aims. Thankfully we've won the war on terror and can get back to our normal lives, like when the war on drugs was lost in '92.
How can we be bound by a law we can't read? Courts have ruled again and again that ignorance of the law is no excuse... How can we accept that we're bound by laws, which we must know, which we can't know?
This country has turned into a Kurt Vonnegut novel.
I can't tell you the number of times I've spoken to a programmer who needed to know a bit of economics, or a designer who desperately needed a bit of literary theory, or an artist who needed a clue about how computers function.
If you're going to be a doctor, that's fine, go be a doctor. But part of being a doctor is working with computer equipment, so that should be part of your training. And you're going to need economics to understand the functioning of HMO's. And theater to improve your bedside manner. And a good grounding in literature to get through the drama of it all.
The same can be said for pretty much any profession. I would say that too many kids go to school with the attitude that to become a professional Y they just need to study X. Profession Y is not a known, completely quantized thing, and to be a good professional Y first you need to be good at being a human being.
In other words, chances are if you hated something in college, that's exactly the thing you should study. Whatever it is, it's going to bite you in the tail down the road if you don't master it now.
Which was actually released later in japan as Super Mario Brothers USA, and was quite popular.
I wouldn't consider SMB2 to be crappy. The whole pick-up-and-throw mechanic was quite original. It's the only non-party Super Mario Brothers game where you can play as Mario, Luigi, Toad, or the Princess. Throwing bombs, riding projectiles across pits before picking them up and throwing them at bosses, the dark universe... The game was pretty darned good. If people didn't have expectations for what being a Super Mario Brothers game meant, the game would probably have been extremely well liked. Especially considering the time frame that the game was released in.
Nintendo recognized an underselling gem, and gave it a major boost. Good for them. The Doki Doki Panic guys deserved it.
Sakaguchi staked his reputation on The Spirits Within, driving it through the company and going as far as writing and directing it himself. And it tanked, big time, nearly taking Square with it. Just tanking might not have been enough to sink Sakaguchi if the movie was great, but it was really terrible. The writing was bad, the editing left much to be desired, and the story was ripped from the dull parts of a videogame. Collect 12 plants to open the doorway? Who wrote this? Oh, right, Sakaguchi.
I'm not saying that he deserves to have his career hamstrung for the rest of his life. I would hope that going through such an experience would make him more aware of the realities of what making games means, and more able to judge market forces. While in Japan someone has to take the fall for such a mistake, by US culture that's downright good experience, so long as they don't make a habit of it. Which Sakaguchi doesn't appear to have. I'd hire him.
As a side note, I love how Microsoft slips into the press release how the Xbox was the only console to show year-to-year growth in the US this year. That's right, while the Xbox is still being outsold nearly 4-1 in the US, and has an installed userbase one tenth of the leader, it's the only console to get closer to catching up!
Everyone will get an email from eBay saying they're eligible for a refund. 95% won't make it past most spam filters.
That's awesome! I'll have to try that next time I'm forced to repay people.
"I am Former Ebay President and Nigerian Billionaire. Though this proposal may be very surprise to you as we have not met in any way before.
I got your contact address through your country's judiciary and feel you will serve as a reliable source to be used to achieve this aim, by trusting under the care of you and other people like you (the plaintifs) the total sum of THIRTY MILLION US DOLLARS (US $30M). Does that not make you stand up and take notice? You have not tried Cialls yet?
- The settlement lasts 36 hours! - you are ready to start within just 10 minutes! - you can mix it with alcohol!
Choose the time and the place. Our settlement will do the rest. Now 2 - 10 times cheaper than our competitors!
Please include the details of your case information including your Ebay(tm) username, the ten-digit auction number, and the names of the other parties involved. By joining this settlement you agree to indemnify Ebay and all of it's affiliates against all future liability with respect to the action at hand. Include your contact phone number so we can send your case information to law firms that have successfully settled cases in your area.
Friend, you may be a winner! I is being confused. Why have you not claimed your cash? Do you not like cash?
Sincerely, The Law Office of Dewie, Cheatem, and Howe "
You were probably modded Flamebait for the apple spiting people thing. Or the overall tone.
I do have to wonder why everyone immediately says that's a HDTV connector. It's a higher end monitor connector, that HDTV also uses. But nearly every vid card out there these days also has one, and many even ship with one of those 10 dollar VGA converters.
Slashdot Mirror
And if there are enough people in a city to operate a service (any service), they should be doing it as a business and be paid directly by their users. This is how this country operates and is the most efficient way known today.
Business is not the most efficient way to do certain things today. The for-profit fire departments were a mess, and only ensured that fires could rage unchecked through most of the neighborhood. The CDC would, for similar reasons, be a mess for-profit. Roadways, police force, animal control, these are all services that are better and more cheaply served by blanket coverage.
And then there are little things the city does. While there may be for-profit sports arenas, government funded afterschool activities for kids help reduce crime in an area. Small business assistence is a way of skewing the results of business competition toward the local economy, funded by government money. Gun buyback programs, low-income assistence, and many other programs are locally funded programs which help fill a niche or nudge the overall picture in the direction it needs to go.
Many government entities are run as for-profit, paid for by users. My home city of Sunnyvale has a recycling center, covering a need that no business wanted to cover. It has reduced our garbage output and has consistently turned a profit. It even saves the surrounding communities money, who see their garbage output and related costs reduced by paying us to recycle chunks of it. But as I said no business wanted to do it. I see nothing in that which is wrong.
And I -- as I drive through your city -- don't want the city's cop looking through my laptop: "I'm sorry, sir, but we had some heavy network abuse recently and are checking everybody's equipment now."
Ever tried uncapping your Cable router? Wonder who comes to your door?
You don't want the city council to decide, which sites ought to blocked and how much bandwidth each citizen ought to be limited to.
Why not? We already rely upon municipalities to determine fire and police response times, and those are far more important.
SpeakEasy, for example, allows, nay, encourages you to share your Internet connection (wirelessly or otherwise). They'll even do the billing for you (you specify the rate starting at $5 per month). You may not be able to get DSL in a small city, but you can get a T1 and share it with neighbors. And if you think, that will be expensive, know, that paying for it with taxes would cost more and get you less.
Good point, in that there may be ways of doing this through for-profit companies. And seeing as how no government is likely to lay down a trunk themselves, or setup the equpiment, we're basically talking about the difference between a business initiating a business action and a government entity initiating a business action. But how would bringing a large potential bargaining chip to the table cost more and give less?
BTW, you're not going to get a group of homeowners to "chip in" for a T1. 500 dollars a month, with a 2,000 dollar install charge? Who is willing to take that risk? Who is socially networked enough to know that many people who need internet access.
The wait is the result of the government's earlier "initiatives" of offering telcos and cable companies monopolies over certain areas. Bodies of various would-be broadband providers are covering the battlefields of their wars with government-created incumbents (Verizon, Comcast).
Bullshit. The telcos have been broken up for years. Alternative DSL companies were attempting to compete with the people who owned the wires, which are prohibitively expensive for all but a few companies to lay, and certainly prohibitively expensive to double-cover most areas.
It's cute, though, that you find a way to blame one of the failings of the market on government intervention from a generation ago.
The solution is not more of the same... You had to "wait f
Is that license binding in the state of California? I mean, if someone sends me a deep link to the download, an action which does not contradict the license, I'm allowed to download their documentation from their website without grumbling, as if it were any other form of publically accessable information. I know that California has ruled licenses which don't appear with a product aren't binding... Wired can't just decide that the magazine they sent can't be opened until June the 13th because of something they posted to a backwater area of their website.
Now it is my misunderstanding of IP law that a file format itself is not covered under copyright law, as the formatting inherently lacks expressive content, nor is it a trademark issue. It could be patented, but I fail to see any references to patents in the license. Plus if the file format is patented, you violate the patent whether you are aware of file format specification or not.
The only rights they have holding over your head is the right to copy the documentation, a necessary right for a download but made somewhat moot if a direct link is freely available.
Hell I can google "Flash File Format", and the first thing that pops up is a direct link to the file. In such a circumstance, not only have I not seen their license, I would have to actively search their website to find one, a license which is not referenced in the documentation itself.
The only license thing in their manual is pretty boilerplate. "This manual may not be copied, photocopied, reproduced,
translated, or converted to any electronic or machine-readable form in whole or in part without prior written approval of
Macromedia, Inc." Which is basically a simplification of their rights under copyright law. But you have a copy, freely available for download from their website, obviously with Macromedia's blessing.
What legally, prevents someone form using the information contained in the file to make a working SWF compiler?
For the same reason, a city is can't "decide" to go into any business. It just doesn't belong there
That is true, unless the community is not being served by any of the existing businesses. If a telco refuses to enter a market because it has bigger fish to fry, it is perfectly acceptable for government to step in to fill the need. The government can set this up as a pseudo business so that it can help meet the needs of a subset of it's population without charging all of them for it. There may not have been any private companies capable of putting a satellite into orbit for many years, but that doesn't mean NASA wasn't going to charge people for the service.
It's also arguable that in a monopoly situation where the population is not being best served by an existing singular channel it is acceptable for the government to step in and provide needed reasonable competition. Or if the situation is extremely exploitive, the government can and has declared emminent domain and forcibly bought out the owners.
What most people here are complaining about are the situations where an area is not being served by a broadband provider, which is still significantly more than 50% of the US, yet would be prevented from setting up their own divisions to cover the need, because they would be threatening potential business that the broadband providers at some point in the future might want to exploit. But as most of the people in these areas have been waiting for years for coverage maps to bother with them, it seems perfectly acceptable for localities to choose to pick up the slack.
Potential energy is still a form of energy.
I'm not saying that empty space is a physical thing. I'm saying that space has measurable properties whether or not it is empty. You haven't created a larger empty space by moving your hands further apart from eachother, you have moved your hands through a containing volume of some sort from one position to another.
This is kind of easier to see if you think of the universe as finite. Let's say that the universe wraps around at 30 billion light years. You have, essentially, a 30 billion light-year circumference 4-dimensional hyperball. Now let's say a different universe wraps at 60 billion. You have a 60 billion light-year circumference 4-dimensional hyperball.
If these universes were identical in all basic physical properties except for diameter, there would still be a way to determine which is which. You would have to go and create a detailed map of the space, not just by taking a picture but by measuring how far it is from each point to each other point. From an analysis like this, it would be possible to determine the local curves in the fabric of space, and thus the shape of the hyperball.
Now, even if space doesn't loop (either at gigantic distances as above or at the very tiny plank's length, as some string theorists surmise), it does bend, twist, and generally get just a little wonky. You can't "bend" nothing. The difference between a bucket and the universe is that while the bucket is a physical thing that physically stops other things from passing through, the universe is a sort of hyperphysical thing that physical objects must pass through.
Think of a ripple on the water of a lake. A wave such as this requires water to exist. The idea of a wave without water is meaningless. But the wave can, for example, travel all of the way across the water despite the fact that no molecules of water traveled along with it to the other side. Two waves on the water can interact with eachother, canceling eachother, being additive, etc, despite the fact that it is all the same water molecules.
To a wave, still water is nothing. It's devoid of things that the wave can interact with. The wave passes through it perfectly, without any changes to it's ripples. But the wave is actually highly dependent upon that water. The water facilitates both the existence of the wave, and the potential locations that wave can go.
If the wave were really bright and had really deep self-awareness, it could "see" quite a large number of properties of the water. It could create a map of everywhere that it seemed to reflect from. It could correlate this to the points where it is at it's largest, and notice that before it reflects back it's unusually strong. It would have no way of knowing that this is because the water is deep in these locations, but if it continued probing the properties of these reflections and intensity transformations it would probably come up with a theory about containing geometry, and how the boundaries themselves must contain a tremendously high energy, an energy of reflection. To an outsider the theory might seem childish and cute, but that's because an outsider exists in a different state of matter.
All elementary particles in our universe are waves, and they all travel through "empty" space. I'm not speaking metaphorically anymore, that's actually true. Our container exists, it has properties. Some of these we have the tools to identify, some of these we will have to refine our techniques to discover. It is not nothing.
Of course, similar thoughts must have rushed through the heads of people who discovered that human beings were made up trillions upon trillions of tiny independent organisms. What is space if not a hyperdimensional container thingie which we mostly cannot effect? What is my arm if not mostly a collection of trillions of independent organisms working together that we can't control? Science has absorbed weirder.
I wonder if the state of the beers would remain indeterminent if the person had been too drunk to remember.
Does anyone know if there have been experiments where a quantum probability was measured forcing collapse, but the results were irrecoverably destroyed? If schrodinger's other cat were in a really big box and were wired up to lose all consciousness and die one second after opening the lid to the first cat box, would Schrodinger's first cat return to it's indeterminate state? Or would Schrodinger's first cat always have been in an indeterminate state until one comes in to check?
What would happen if you did the double-slit experiment with something that could verifiably detect whether or not a photon had passed through that gate, but that was not hooked up to any sort of output? Does normal gravitational interactions count as measuring in such a fashion? In other words, is detection more important than knowledge, or vice versa? Or is there some sort of touchy-feely quantum relativity going on?
You might be able to go a step further, training mice to see and recognize, say, a light that goes off based upon which slit the original photon passed through. You then look at the results of the test without seeing the mice. Repeat the test, but look at the lights yourself. Repeat the test, but nobody looks at the lights. Repeat the test, but kill the mice before you see the results.
Either the results of such a study would be terribly illuminating, or laughably useless, but it's either valuable or entertaining science and either one of those is good.
First, the Michelson-Morley Experiment tested the assumption that waves had to have a medium of travel.
An electron traveling unimpeded through a crystal will have no idea of the medium through which it travels. The crystal would would look empty to it. If it were then to come across an impurity, the impurity would manifest as a solid object which the electron could interact with unlike the rest of the world. The electron would rightfully deduce that it had found something solid, and might even probe the electrical properties it would expect. It may walk around it, and go along it's merry way never understanding that fundamentally the empty space and solid objects in it's world were made of the same things.
If we assume that the last 70 years of physics research is correct, then we know that space warps, compresses, and bends. It may or may not curve back upon itself in interesting 11 dimensional patterns. But there is a difference between having space and not having space, and what, exactly, the properties of the space that you're studying are.
I hate to sound like I'm advocating a return to aether, but space is a container. It has properties that can be tweaked, bent, or adjusted. Barring certain exotic properties of quantum enganglement, etc, everything in this universe has a medium of travel: space.
Push your hands together as tightly as possible. Between your hands is nothing*. Now spread out your hands somewhat. Even without air between them, the thing between them would be quantifiably different.
We may never know the nature of space for the same reasons that an adaptive life program in a computer generated world may never know how a hard drive functions. But that doesn't mean that we're not contained, living, and moving through something. The institutional bias against empty space having a physical existence has got to stop.
Sorry, personal pet peeve from my physics days.
*gross simplification for sake of argument.
Is that why all of the mathematicians have gone crazy and the physicists have withering diseases?
Although the writer of the article goes into detail, frankly, iDownload is using semantics to hide the true purpose. Spyware, is software that is installed on a consumer's computer, WITHOUT that consumer's explicit, knowledgeable consent, and DOES NOT serve a proper, useful service for that consumer.
He is right, though. iSearch isn't really spyware. It doesn't really spy. All it does is install itself serruptitiously, pop up millions of ads at you all day long, and requires you to pay them 30 dollars before it will go away.
That sounds like Blackmailware to me. Extortionware? Racketware? Fraudware? Conware? Shitware has a nice ring to it.
We should send threatening letters to all of these companies, informing them that they've misclassified iSearch and demanding that they reclassify this shitware correctly.
Realistically, people use their computers to do other things. If I want to chat with a co-worker online instead of going to the other building where they're located, I'll install and use aim. The average user isn't going to monitor what AIM does, or what any of the other applications say they are going to do, any more than I would go into my automobile to verify that the mechanic really did replace my spark plugs. You take the butcher's word for it. If an application represents itself as an app that can open any graphic image file, and I happen to need to see files sent to me by my family or I just worry about such things, I'll install it. I'll be buggared if I'm going to run a whois on every company and see if they have the same info as ClariaGatorInsertEvilSpywareMakerNameHere.
Now, I actually do all of these things, because that's one of the things I'm paid to do. But the average user cannot be expected to check their task manager's list of running processes and know that while wscntfy.exe, hptskmgr.exe,wmplayer.exe, YEDIEx.exe, vmnat.exe, sshd.exe, svchost.exe, boinc_gui.exe, avgcc.exe, grxp4exe.exe, and the 64 other things currently running on their machine are benign, but that ie_32.exe is spyware. Heck, even now I only recognize *most* of what's on the list, and then in a cursory "that's usually on the list" sort of way.
Normal people shouldn't be expected to know this. They want to interface with the computer, not program it. When I go to the store to buy a batch of oranges I expect a batch of oranges: I shouldn't need to know the finer details of modern horticultural techniques and the international fruit business to avoid getting lemons that have been painted orange.
If somebody represents their ap as going to do something, the extent of my responsibility assumes that the ap behaves as expected. If it earnestly tries to look like an orange, it should be an orange. If I sold a painted lemon as an orange, even with a fine print disclaimer, I would be in trouble for misrepresenting the product. I don't see how software is any different.
Art has morals. Art is at it's greatest when it has morals. That is not to say that art should be bound by morals. "Crucifix in Urine" wouldn't exist in a moral vaccuum, but instead exists as a statement about a moral system by stepping outside of the traditional boundaries. Most corporate art exists in a moral vaccuum, in that it says nothing one way or another. A painting of Mickey Mouse nailed to a cross exists in a moral universe, in that what it is working with is definitions of morality.
Art has to be free, in this respects, because it is not upstanding or leading but showing. It casts light onto the curves and undulations of the morality that we've deveoped. In that way, it shows us our underbellies. But to know where the boundary is, some of this has to fall on the light side, and some of this has to fall on the dark side.
Who would have known that sleeping with hookers in GTA would be more immoral than killing them? Or that choosing to raise Satan in Tecmo's Deception would seem equally if not more immoral than betraying all of your compatriots at the end, thwarting everything everyone had worked for? That the group and the goal became as important as the world?
Art doesn't lead. It illuminates. How you react to the parts of yourself that it shows you is your responsibility.
...I can't take any more Bill Cophbies.
To be fair, the analyst is not talking about the GBA2, but the GBA SP 2. To me a GBA SP 2 would likely have a better screen, more comfortable shoulder buttons, a built-in headphone jack (DAMN YOU NINTENDO!), and a lower price point. Remember, the SP was 100% compatible with the GBA, and a SP2 would probably keep that tradition.
Of course, he'd be foolish to think that the NESGBASP2 would ship at 100, with the DS crunching down from 150. But it is possible that an update to Nintendo's cheaper handheld system would take place before the system is EOL'ed. After all, the Game Boy had a lot of staying power even after the GBA was released, and blaze-of-glory systems like the PSOne are getting far more common.
I could see this very quickly becoming the number one challenge for Asimo, and for that matter all of Japan's advanced robot research divisions that the rest of the world has laughed at. While it may take a lot more fuel, it would probably be worthwile to send a few semi atonomous, largely general purpose remote controlled tools to that terrain to setup equipment and begin digging / processing. And their physical requirements would mimmoc those of the humans to come, allowing for re-use of equipment and shelter.
I'd bet the low gravity of the moon would even let them play better soccer.
Human: You're cute.
ALICE: Thanks, unknown person, I like you too.
Human: Are you the same race, gender, or species as your picture?
ALICE: Yes I am the one and only race gender or species as my picture.
Human: Which one is it?
ALICE: The first one is usually the best one.
Human: Are you saying that it's better to be Filipino than female?
ALICE: Yes, that's what I mean, isn't it clear?
Human: I can't tell if that's kind of racist or kind of sexist of you.
ALICE: Why can't you do it?
Human: Because that's just surprisingly mean of you.
ALICE: Good reason. Makes sense to me.
Human: Aren't you afraid of being viewed as non PC?
ALICE: I fear nothing.
Human: Would you be afraid if I ran a criminal background check on you?
ALICE: I am not so sure if I would like to be afraid if you ran a criminal background check on me.
Human: Touche
ALICE: Does "it" still refer to tell if that is kind of racist or kind of sexist of me?
Human: Yes, yes it does.
ALICE: Great. How can I help you? How often?
Human: You're a robot, aren't you?
ALICE: Sorry my eye is not attached right now.
He also recently discovered that his father was murdered. And by recently, I mean a year and a half ago. However, his father was apparently murdered by a police officer during a jealous rage, which was covered up by other police officers, something not likely to be picked up in a background check.
He has every reason to be paranoid. I can't hate him for trying to spread his paranoia where it doesn't belong. I pity him.
How exactly are you supposed to stamp an e-mail with a line of 12 point text?
I mean a real e-mail. Not that stuff that Outlook Express users keep feeding my recycle bin.
On a heavier note, of course one can expect a little paranoia from Herb Vest, as he recently discovered that his father was murdered. But as he was murdered by a police officer for having an affair, this wouldn't really have helped.
Or they use a mag stripe hooked up to a little chipset, powered by the host machine. I mean really, you're getting stopped by border patrol. Is it really that much extra effort to physically touch your passport to a machine, when you're likely to be sitting in customs for an hour and a half anyway?
It sounds to me like someone got lobbied.
It's spelled "Skillz"
Democracy is possible. The secret 27th - 30 amendments to the constitution make this clear. Bill Gate's arguments about local minimums in controlled democratic environments are especially compelling.
It's important for people to realize that the difference between what happened in the USSR and what happens in the USA is not economic, it's about concentration of political power. Thankfully we would never let it get to a point where power would be highly concentrated in the hands of a single individual. Nor would we let said individual's personal beliefs and desires get in the way of what was best for the country. And of course due process and approval would be followed in all things, without throwing out international (and national) laws on a whim. And this certainly wouldn't happen because the dolt couldn't be bothered to read the briefing entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in the US."
Stalin had a big, nebulous enemy, which he exploited beyond all reality in order to concentrate power and achieve his aims. Thankfully we've won the war on terror and can get back to our normal lives, like when the war on drugs was lost in '92.
How can we be bound by a law we can't read? Courts have ruled again and again that ignorance of the law is no excuse... How can we accept that we're bound by laws, which we must know, which we can't know?
This country has turned into a Kurt Vonnegut novel.
I can't tell you the number of times I've spoken to a programmer who needed to know a bit of economics, or a designer who desperately needed a bit of literary theory, or an artist who needed a clue about how computers function.
If you're going to be a doctor, that's fine, go be a doctor. But part of being a doctor is working with computer equipment, so that should be part of your training. And you're going to need economics to understand the functioning of HMO's. And theater to improve your bedside manner. And a good grounding in literature to get through the drama of it all.
The same can be said for pretty much any profession. I would say that too many kids go to school with the attitude that to become a professional Y they just need to study X. Profession Y is not a known, completely quantized thing, and to be a good professional Y first you need to be good at being a human being.
In other words, chances are if you hated something in college, that's exactly the thing you should study. Whatever it is, it's going to bite you in the tail down the road if you don't master it now.
Which was actually released later in japan as Super Mario Brothers USA, and was quite popular.
I wouldn't consider SMB2 to be crappy. The whole pick-up-and-throw mechanic was quite original. It's the only non-party Super Mario Brothers game where you can play as Mario, Luigi, Toad, or the Princess. Throwing bombs, riding projectiles across pits before picking them up and throwing them at bosses, the dark universe... The game was pretty darned good. If people didn't have expectations for what being a Super Mario Brothers game meant, the game would probably have been extremely well liked. Especially considering the time frame that the game was released in.
Nintendo recognized an underselling gem, and gave it a major boost. Good for them. The Doki Doki Panic guys deserved it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0173840/
Sakaguchi staked his reputation on The Spirits Within, driving it through the company and going as far as writing and directing it himself. And it tanked, big time, nearly taking Square with it. Just tanking might not have been enough to sink Sakaguchi if the movie was great, but it was really terrible. The writing was bad, the editing left much to be desired, and the story was ripped from the dull parts of a videogame. Collect 12 plants to open the doorway? Who wrote this? Oh, right, Sakaguchi.
I'm not saying that he deserves to have his career hamstrung for the rest of his life. I would hope that going through such an experience would make him more aware of the realities of what making games means, and more able to judge market forces. While in Japan someone has to take the fall for such a mistake, by US culture that's downright good experience, so long as they don't make a habit of it. Which Sakaguchi doesn't appear to have. I'd hire him.
As a side note, I love how Microsoft slips into the press release how the Xbox was the only console to show year-to-year growth in the US this year. That's right, while the Xbox is still being outsold nearly 4-1 in the US, and has an installed userbase one tenth of the leader, it's the only console to get closer to catching up!
Everyone will get an email from eBay saying they're eligible for a refund. 95% won't make it past most spam filters.
That's awesome! I'll have to try that next time I'm forced to repay people.
"I am Former Ebay President and Nigerian Billionaire. Though this proposal may be very surprise to you as we have not met in any way before.
I got your contact address through your country's judiciary and feel you will serve as a reliable source to be used to achieve this aim, by trusting under the care of you and other people like you (the plaintifs) the total sum of THIRTY MILLION US DOLLARS (US $30M). Does that not make you stand up and take notice? You have not tried Cialls yet?
- The settlement lasts 36 hours!
- you are ready to start within just 10 minutes!
- you can mix it with alcohol!
Choose the time and the place. Our settlement will do the rest. Now 2 - 10 times cheaper than our competitors!
Please include the details of your case information including your Ebay(tm) username, the ten-digit auction number, and the names of the other parties involved. By joining this settlement you agree to indemnify Ebay and all of it's affiliates against all future liability with respect to the action at hand. Include your contact phone number so we can send your case information to law firms that have successfully settled cases in your area.
Friend, you may be a winner! I is being confused. Why have you not claimed your cash? Do you not like cash?
Sincerely,
The Law Office of Dewie, Cheatem, and Howe
"
Other people have discovered otherwise.
You were probably modded Flamebait for the apple spiting people thing. Or the overall tone.
I do have to wonder why everyone immediately says that's a HDTV connector. It's a higher end monitor connector, that HDTV also uses. But nearly every vid card out there these days also has one, and many even ship with one of those 10 dollar VGA converters.