We're building the infrastructure required to support a sufficiently powerful computing system (most probably in the form of large numbers of massively interconnected discrete systems) that will carry itself over the tipping point with the aid of some initial kickstarting on our part. After that, such a system simply won't need any intervention from us to improve itself.
We barely have the infrastructure required to support a sufficiently powerful computing system to drive to the store and pick up some milk. Intelligence isn't some magical free-energy machine that can just churn itself out ad infinitum. For one, you have pragmatic microscopic limitations of electron based computing systems, or any system that you choose to ultimately use. Two, you have limitations on parallelization in real-world computing scenarios. Three, any system would be limited in growth speed and potential by the amount of financial resources devoted to it... things like necessary raw research, new land for fabrication plants, etc. Four, and this is a biggie, evolution has been at our brains for a really long time. As far as developed computing systems go, neither us nor our computers have any real idea how our brains are working. And Five, this being the other biggie, fifty years of artificial intelligence research has shown that each and every step of AI development is slow, painful, and very task specific. The idea of an independent entity that can live on its own is so far removed from the results of AI research that it's laughable.
Now, doing some of the drudgework of designing chipsets, brute-forcing possibilities, those are things that AI is good at. But the idea of a robotic factory and robotic research facility all attached to a giant self-updating robotic brain all making independent orders and upgrading itself... it's ridiculous for the time being, and there isn't a lot of evidence yet that it will happen in the future.
The tipping point of my free energy machine will take place when it exceeds 100% efficiency. But so far, free energy and AI research of the type you're talking about have been near neck-and-neck in actual execution.
I love how the thresholds for Artificial Intelligence are: Step 1: Be smarter than a third grader. Step 2: Achieve superhuman intelligence that surmises all that is possible in the universe.
"Don't worry as soon as my new bicycle design can go as fast as car within weeks we should have it beating jet planes." We don't yet have artificial intelligence that is smart enough to improvise a good spot to put a beer back into a fridge, or understand why people shake hands, or not crash all the F*(king time. It can't even pretend to chat like a person OVER THE INTERNET for crying out loud. You want it to make all human beings obsolete? We haven't even gotten to the physical repairey bits of humans and low energy consumption.
Don't worry, though. Once one of my predictions comes true, obviously the others will follow.
Sexual harassment suits require more than what grandparent posted, and most people prefer to let unwanted advances go away on their own. Charges don't come out until long after you lost any chance anyway.
I'm not surprised. Wikipedia is great for niche articles like finding out what happened to Star Trek, The Experience. Such niche information wouldn't be viable for Britannica to cover, but anyone with an interest can put up an article about it. If you want real articles on things like science, DON'T GO TO AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. They're about as good at teaching you usable science as they are teaching you how to play the flute.
YMMV, but I find myself jotting down source code into Evernote, then being able to easily and directly refer or search for it. Finding that I can search my lecture notes quickly and easily makes me far more likely to do so. I find the written notes are the ones that I never come back to, since it is so much harder to find what you're looking for and cannibalize for future projects.
As for diagrams, I'll usually either make a quick flow-chart conversion of them, sketch them out in ascii, or just take a picture. You don't lose any of the fidelity of the original if you just take a picture, though encoding into ascii does help it to stick.
Big 3 console development on disk require basically millions in development dollars. If you're on there, you're clearly pro. There is no such thing as an amateur studio on disk.
Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, and Steam all require platform approval and lots in the bank. If you make it to one of these, you're basically pro. There are indies that do it, but they're professional indies.
Xbox Indies and iPhone are the third tier platforms that will basically approve anything that doesn't crash.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of them said "learn to code for the iphone in a week, have something we can ship in 8".
My college has decided to focus its game development program on the iPhone, because they think it's the hot salable property. Just wait for the flood in 3, 2, 1...
Yes, but what you are talking about is a psychopath, not a bully. Psychopaths are, I suppose, a kind of bully, but they really ought to be treated as a special case. Thinking of all bullies as psychopaths is a bad idea, because it makes it harder to recognize and deal with garden variety bullying. Oh, my little Johnny can't be a bully, because he's not a monster. Well, the unfortunate and scary thing about human nature is that you don't have to be a monster to sometimes act like one.
While I agree with the rest of your statement, I have to call out this one. Many if not most psychopaths pass in our society. Part of their insanity is that they outwardly seem completely normal. And for the most part they are, except that they'd have about the same emotional response from finding a 20 dollar bill on the ground and cutting your brake wire for the insurance. This actually described my admittedly anecdotal experience with a lot of bullies pretty well. Some were obvious, but a lot were "the nice guys" who didn't have an outlet for their aggression and instead took it out on other kids. They just didn't have empathy, or at least their empathy wasn't fully developed. This is the hallmark of psychopathy.
And maybe we need to realize that empathy is something that develops over time, but that children aren't born with. Which means that they inherently go through a little psychopath phase. And no matter what you may think of your little angel, they are capable of doing almost anything when you're not watching.
Good elementary school administrators do not tolerate bullying. Good high-school administrators do not tolerate bullying. Good college administrators do not tolerate bullying. Good bosses at firms do not tolerate bullying.
You can say that all you like, but most bullying happens outside of the scope of administrators. Kids don't generally go to school administrators when bullied. Nor to their parents. They go to eachother, and try to find a solution, or they just suck it up. Administrators aren't monitoring hallways, they aren't watching the playgrounds (not really). And it is just as easy to get into a he-said, she-said situation. The one time I did turn in a bully of mine, I was punished for things I definitely had not done. The kids are on their own.
I remember being chastised for not keeping quiet during a math class in Jr. High school. I wasn't keeping quiet, because I was being punched in the face repeatedly when the teacher wasn't looking. This was a math teacher I was quite fond of and had looked up to. I distinctly remember thinking how bloody useless the administrators were. Having been on both sides of that equation now, I still think the administrators are pretty bloody useless at preventing or policing abuse.
I second this. When I was young, my parents drilled into me the virtues of pacifism and never fighting back. Because of this, I never fought back. Being an easy target, I was constantly abused by my classmates. At one time I counted 7 bullies that mainly beat me up. After years of being battered, I just couldn't take it any more. I finally socked one of my bullies after he punched me. Then I socked another one after he tried to beat me up. Two punches. They weren't even particularly good punches, but they were enough to send the message that I wasn't a trivial target. My mental and physical health became light years better, and those are to date still the only times I've punched another human being.
The clear and beautiful message to never resort to violence is really not helpful. You don't need to win the fight, you don't even need to get close. You just need to show that you're willing to fight back, or people will take advantage of you.
They spend money on artists? I thought the big costs were promotion and producers. Unless, of course, you had meant the marketing artists and the audio producers who keep adding autotune to everything.
I'd argue that there are iPhone developers out there making a ton of money, as well as other phone developers. It's really a question of getting the hardware to a sufficient power level (that would be overkill for most), and creating a smooth gaming interface that doesn't interrupt normal phone usage. The iPhone 3GS was an interesting attempt, but in terms of visual output it is pretty laughable, and the controller is still terrible. If Apple finally ever converts the home button into a non-crappy d-pad, and adds a professional level visual processor, it may be a serious contender.
Phones may suddenly be in a mad rush to one-up eachother, but that's partially due to their fashion accessory item nature and partially due to the recent smartphone revolution. Oh, and due to the fact that the U.S. FINALLY caught up with the rest of the world. GSM is and will probably continue to be compatible everywhere in the world for many years now, 3G has been standard abroad for 10 years, and 4G is just coming online everywhere. If a phone were based off that platform, it would outlast the average console cycle. Plus with a programmable platform and / or software radio, the platform provider would have all the flexibility they would need.
Of course, you'd need to grab a huge subset of users for it to be worth bothering about. And your gaming phone would need extensive network awareness features to make it worth picking over a dedicated separate gaming platform. And, of course, you'll still have to contend with the usual phone and console enemies. But I doubt that platform stability is the major limiting factor on entering the market.
In this particular case IMHO both parties need to change their behavior and work together to solve the problem.
She's being convicted of sharing 2 albums over the internet. That's about $30 worth of goods. If this were a theft case, she might be looking at between 200 to 2,000 dollar fine depending on jurisdiction. She's not. She's looking at paying out 54 thousand dollars for sharing 24 songs. That's an entire student loan! She could have gotten a masters degree with that money, but instead she's being convicted of sharing 24 songs. Even 24,000 is huge, as that's rent for two years, and a punishment that is quite literally a thousand times harsher than the crime. Don't get me started on how silly 1.9 million is: the judge was right to call it "monstrous and shocking."
It's a bit hard to side with goliath on this one. The previously offered $3,000 dollar penalty is a LOT more in scope, though still a bit silly. But that should be codified into law, rather than a compromise that the other side is "willing" to offer instead of the utterly without reality $80,000 per song currently. And if you listen to her lawyers, that's exactly what Thomas-Rasset's lawyers are trying to get passed: a constitutionality ruling on the truly silly financial numbers being thrown around. And good on them for that. Congress obviously isn't going to do it.
Note that's with a training lap before full speed, but not with any embedded highway magnets that the older systems used to use. Considering BMW's pioneering efforts in anti-lock breaks, semiautomatic shifting, and modern single-wheel breaking traction control, I wouldn't be surprised if they made a roadworthy self-driver first.
Of course, some vehicles of the type OP talks about are already in production.
And some that do the sorts of things the parent talks about from... a US car company?
According to the US DOJ website, the "virtual child porn" provision on our books was intended to stop child-porn trials that were bogging down in forensic evidence about whether or not an image was real or virtual. That actually makes sense to me, in a practical way, even if the net is wide enough to cover clay statues.
The Protect act of 2003 does, however, have a Miller Test requirement to be defined as child pornography, which Australia does not. Under the Miller test, to be obscene something must lack literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Dirty images of The Simpsons might have enough inherent artistic social commentary to not be considered legally obscene (which is not to say that it couldn't be prohibited on other grounds).
You're forgetting what's being outlawed here. It is not against the law to be a gangster. Or to be a card shark. Or to have a predisposition to abusing your spouse. It is only illegal to engage in specific acts of gansterism, or cheating, or spousal abuse.
It is, however, apparently the goal to outlaw being sexually attracted to children. Not specific acts of pedophilia, but rather the general concept of liking it. In no other set of laws do we attempt to outlaw being attracted to something, partially because it isn't really the place of law to set those preferences but mainly because it's bloody impractical. The closest we can do is outlaw anything that might be seen as liking it. So not only do we outlaw sexual abuse of minors, but we also outlaw images of that abuse. We outlaw virtual or faked images of child abuse. We outlaw pornography that pretends to be with underage people even though everyone involved is verifiably of legal age and consent. And we outlaw cartoon depictions and sculptures of child abuse. Congress even called this out specifically in the 1996 CPPA, saying that pedophiles might 'whet their own sexual appetites' with faked images.
Of course, an angry person can calm down and get counseling. A card shark can be taught useful skills and get a real job. We have yet to find a real way to change anyone's sexual attractions. That, of course, leaves everyone in a bind. As a society, we have a vested interest in making sure these people don't abuse children ever again. The pedophile may well hate the sexual attractions that he or she has, but has no effective way of changing them. And personally, I want them away from any children my fiancée and I may have. So the law stays, and we just hope everyone goes to jail before anyone gets hurt.
I think Apple's bet is that the reward of creating a new device class like the iPod or the iPhone is worth the development cost of a few duds like the Apple TV and Newton.
This is a risk. A big risk. If it didn't look like a risk, everyone else would have done it already, and there wouldn't be any potential payoff for risking going into the market.
Have you tried Evernote as a One Note replacement? Oddly enough, it has a native iPhone client which should work fine on the iPad (or the android, palm, winmobile, blackberry, windows, osx... sadly no Linux other than the web client). The iPhone has native exchange support, which works well for corporate e-mail.
Really the only missing link in the chain that you mentioned is annotating PDF files, which is something that I haven't looked into. Maybe an iPhone client exists for that? I don't know.
Too bad the above is just a pipe dream. I can't imagine how bad it is living in dense residential/apartments, where these users still don't know how to configure things, but there are 2 dozen within range instead of 5.
Except for that mess-up in the early days of N that would just obliterate everything in range, it's not as bad as you would think. You're lucky to get 20m range in this apartment complex, but the apartments aren't that big anyway. Similarly, being in America, the signal degredation brings the transmission rates down to... oh... about the paultry upstream we get from the cable provider anyway.
For some of us, there is need for a computing device that you can use while walking from place to place. The Laptop works well when you can sit and setup, but a tablet would be helpful for situations where you're talking to people, running errands, or generally being physically active. There are already iPhone / iPod Touch and other smartphone / PDA custom solutions for these people, but a bigger screen and a task-specific interface would be nice.
Which is not to say that apple isn't going to position this as an ebook, since the above is a pretty small market.
Do you really think the ribbon was anything to do with usability?
Maybe patents had something to do with it, but it is classic Microsoft usability. It takes a cohesive, existing system, and layers on top an additional UI element that they hope will make all of the other UI elements make sense. Microsoft rarely removes elements.
It's like Windows 7 filesharing. Not only did they keep the old Samba based filesharing, but they added an additional type of filesharing on top. Now you have the joys of setting all of the permissions twice, only now you don't really know which goes to which.
Or the godawful and inconsistent side panels. Why you'd want a system-level UI element taking up that much room just to offer to print photos for you is anybody's guess. But the side panels simply replicate functionality that can be achieved by right-clicking, double clicking, going to the menus, option clicking, or sometimes multiples of the above.
Or for that matter, Word: where each separate program module has its own interface elements. This is true whether those interface elements would make sense elsewhere, or replicate other functions / settings within the application. Or are just legacy and don't really matter anymore.
Apple, on the other hand, actually streamlines. They removed the disk drive, removed the com and serial ports. When spotlight became the way to search in OSX, they removed the other ways to search. Instead of just trying to add, so as not to upset old users, they actively redesign the whole system to be usable as a whole. While I have low hopes for the tablet as a piece of hardware, I'm excited to see the interface conventions it comes up with.
This. Programming enjoyed a brief stint of ridiculously high salaries in the 90's, due to imbalance between demand and supply. In certain industries, like Legal or Medical work, this imbalance is maintained by very high schooling requirements. To be a good coder, you don't even need to have gone to school, so it's only natural that the salary would eventually come more in line with other professional work.
Also, to be a good programmer you *have* to love it. People don't become good coders because they're trying really hard at it. They become good coders because when they go home at night, they're write more code. When they wake up in the morning, they write more code. When they have a question about how to cut out the noise from the upstairs neighbors, they write more code. You need to think in it. You need to want to learn other programming languages "just because it's fun." Otherwise, your career is going to get stuck and your output will be middley at best. Or, like so many others before, you'll jump ship to something you actually enjoy doing.
If you just want money, become a finance banker or a stock trader.
Slashdot Mirror
We're building the infrastructure required to support a sufficiently powerful computing system (most probably in the form of large numbers of massively interconnected discrete systems) that will carry itself over the tipping point with the aid of some initial kickstarting on our part. After that, such a system simply won't need any intervention from us to improve itself.
We barely have the infrastructure required to support a sufficiently powerful computing system to drive to the store and pick up some milk. Intelligence isn't some magical free-energy machine that can just churn itself out ad infinitum. For one, you have pragmatic microscopic limitations of electron based computing systems, or any system that you choose to ultimately use. Two, you have limitations on parallelization in real-world computing scenarios. Three, any system would be limited in growth speed and potential by the amount of financial resources devoted to it... things like necessary raw research, new land for fabrication plants, etc. Four, and this is a biggie, evolution has been at our brains for a really long time. As far as developed computing systems go, neither us nor our computers have any real idea how our brains are working. And Five, this being the other biggie, fifty years of artificial intelligence research has shown that each and every step of AI development is slow, painful, and very task specific. The idea of an independent entity that can live on its own is so far removed from the results of AI research that it's laughable.
Now, doing some of the drudgework of designing chipsets, brute-forcing possibilities, those are things that AI is good at. But the idea of a robotic factory and robotic research facility all attached to a giant self-updating robotic brain all making independent orders and upgrading itself... it's ridiculous for the time being, and there isn't a lot of evidence yet that it will happen in the future.
The tipping point of my free energy machine will take place when it exceeds 100% efficiency. But so far, free energy and AI research of the type you're talking about have been near neck-and-neck in actual execution.
I love how the thresholds for Artificial Intelligence are:
Step 1: Be smarter than a third grader.
Step 2: Achieve superhuman intelligence that surmises all that is possible in the universe.
"Don't worry as soon as my new bicycle design can go as fast as car within weeks we should have it beating jet planes." We don't yet have artificial intelligence that is smart enough to improvise a good spot to put a beer back into a fridge, or understand why people shake hands, or not crash all the F*(king time. It can't even pretend to chat like a person OVER THE INTERNET for crying out loud. You want it to make all human beings obsolete? We haven't even gotten to the physical repairey bits of humans and low energy consumption.
Don't worry, though. Once one of my predictions comes true, obviously the others will follow.
Sexual harassment suits require more than what grandparent posted, and most people prefer to let unwanted advances go away on their own. Charges don't come out until long after you lost any chance anyway.
Not that I'm talking from experience, of course.
I'm not surprised. Wikipedia is great for niche articles like finding out what happened to Star Trek, The Experience. Such niche information wouldn't be viable for Britannica to cover, but anyone with an interest can put up an article about it. If you want real articles on things like science, DON'T GO TO AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. They're about as good at teaching you usable science as they are teaching you how to play the flute.
YMMV, but I find myself jotting down source code into Evernote, then being able to easily and directly refer or search for it. Finding that I can search my lecture notes quickly and easily makes me far more likely to do so. I find the written notes are the ones that I never come back to, since it is so much harder to find what you're looking for and cannibalize for future projects.
As for diagrams, I'll usually either make a quick flow-chart conversion of them, sketch them out in ascii, or just take a picture. You don't lose any of the fidelity of the original if you just take a picture, though encoding into ascii does help it to stick.
Big 3 console development on disk require basically millions in development dollars. If you're on there, you're clearly pro. There is no such thing as an amateur studio on disk.
Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, and Steam all require platform approval and lots in the bank. If you make it to one of these, you're basically pro. There are indies that do it, but they're professional indies.
Xbox Indies and iPhone are the third tier platforms that will basically approve anything that doesn't crash.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of them said "learn to code for the iphone in a week, have something we can ship in 8".
My college has decided to focus its game development program on the iPhone, because they think it's the hot salable property. Just wait for the flood in 3, 2, 1...
Yes, but what you are talking about is a psychopath, not a bully. Psychopaths are, I suppose, a kind of bully, but they really ought to be treated as a special case. Thinking of all bullies as psychopaths is a bad idea, because it makes it harder to recognize and deal with garden variety bullying. Oh, my little Johnny can't be a bully, because he's not a monster. Well, the unfortunate and scary thing about human nature is that you don't have to be a monster to sometimes act like one.
While I agree with the rest of your statement, I have to call out this one. Many if not most psychopaths pass in our society. Part of their insanity is that they outwardly seem completely normal. And for the most part they are, except that they'd have about the same emotional response from finding a 20 dollar bill on the ground and cutting your brake wire for the insurance. This actually described my admittedly anecdotal experience with a lot of bullies pretty well. Some were obvious, but a lot were "the nice guys" who didn't have an outlet for their aggression and instead took it out on other kids. They just didn't have empathy, or at least their empathy wasn't fully developed. This is the hallmark of psychopathy.
And maybe we need to realize that empathy is something that develops over time, but that children aren't born with. Which means that they inherently go through a little psychopath phase. And no matter what you may think of your little angel, they are capable of doing almost anything when you're not watching.
Good elementary school administrators do not tolerate bullying.
Good high-school administrators do not tolerate bullying.
Good college administrators do not tolerate bullying.
Good bosses at firms do not tolerate bullying.
You can say that all you like, but most bullying happens outside of the scope of administrators. Kids don't generally go to school administrators when bullied. Nor to their parents. They go to eachother, and try to find a solution, or they just suck it up. Administrators aren't monitoring hallways, they aren't watching the playgrounds (not really). And it is just as easy to get into a he-said, she-said situation. The one time I did turn in a bully of mine, I was punished for things I definitely had not done. The kids are on their own.
I remember being chastised for not keeping quiet during a math class in Jr. High school. I wasn't keeping quiet, because I was being punched in the face repeatedly when the teacher wasn't looking. This was a math teacher I was quite fond of and had looked up to. I distinctly remember thinking how bloody useless the administrators were. Having been on both sides of that equation now, I still think the administrators are pretty bloody useless at preventing or policing abuse.
I second this. When I was young, my parents drilled into me the virtues of pacifism and never fighting back. Because of this, I never fought back. Being an easy target, I was constantly abused by my classmates. At one time I counted 7 bullies that mainly beat me up. After years of being battered, I just couldn't take it any more. I finally socked one of my bullies after he punched me. Then I socked another one after he tried to beat me up. Two punches. They weren't even particularly good punches, but they were enough to send the message that I wasn't a trivial target. My mental and physical health became light years better, and those are to date still the only times I've punched another human being.
The clear and beautiful message to never resort to violence is really not helpful. You don't need to win the fight, you don't even need to get close. You just need to show that you're willing to fight back, or people will take advantage of you.
They spend money on artists? I thought the big costs were promotion and producers. Unless, of course, you had meant the marketing artists and the audio producers who keep adding autotune to everything.
I'd argue that there are iPhone developers out there making a ton of money, as well as other phone developers. It's really a question of getting the hardware to a sufficient power level (that would be overkill for most), and creating a smooth gaming interface that doesn't interrupt normal phone usage. The iPhone 3GS was an interesting attempt, but in terms of visual output it is pretty laughable, and the controller is still terrible. If Apple finally ever converts the home button into a non-crappy d-pad, and adds a professional level visual processor, it may be a serious contender.
Phones may suddenly be in a mad rush to one-up eachother, but that's partially due to their fashion accessory item nature and partially due to the recent smartphone revolution. Oh, and due to the fact that the U.S. FINALLY caught up with the rest of the world. GSM is and will probably continue to be compatible everywhere in the world for many years now, 3G has been standard abroad for 10 years, and 4G is just coming online everywhere. If a phone were based off that platform, it would outlast the average console cycle. Plus with a programmable platform and / or software radio, the platform provider would have all the flexibility they would need.
Of course, you'd need to grab a huge subset of users for it to be worth bothering about. And your gaming phone would need extensive network awareness features to make it worth picking over a dedicated separate gaming platform. And, of course, you'll still have to contend with the usual phone and console enemies. But I doubt that platform stability is the major limiting factor on entering the market.
In this particular case IMHO both parties need to change their behavior and work together to solve the problem.
She's being convicted of sharing 2 albums over the internet. That's about $30 worth of goods. If this were a theft case, she might be looking at between 200 to 2,000 dollar fine depending on jurisdiction. She's not. She's looking at paying out 54 thousand dollars for sharing 24 songs. That's an entire student loan! She could have gotten a masters degree with that money, but instead she's being convicted of sharing 24 songs. Even 24,000 is huge, as that's rent for two years, and a punishment that is quite literally a thousand times harsher than the crime. Don't get me started on how silly 1.9 million is: the judge was right to call it "monstrous and shocking."
It's a bit hard to side with goliath on this one. The previously offered $3,000 dollar penalty is a LOT more in scope, though still a bit silly. But that should be codified into law, rather than a compromise that the other side is "willing" to offer instead of the utterly without reality $80,000 per song currently. And if you listen to her lawyers, that's exactly what Thomas-Rasset's lawyers are trying to get passed: a constitutionality ruling on the truly silly financial numbers being thrown around. And good on them for that. Congress obviously isn't going to do it.
Some progress is being made on this front. Another video here.
Note that's with a training lap before full speed, but not with any embedded highway magnets that the older systems used to use. Considering BMW's pioneering efforts in anti-lock breaks, semiautomatic shifting, and modern single-wheel breaking traction control, I wouldn't be surprised if they made a roadworthy self-driver first.
Of course, some vehicles of the type OP talks about are already in production.
And some that do the sorts of things the parent talks about from... a US car company?
Australia is putting people in jail? This seems oddly redundant.
According to the US DOJ website, the "virtual child porn" provision on our books was intended to stop child-porn trials that were bogging down in forensic evidence about whether or not an image was real or virtual. That actually makes sense to me, in a practical way, even if the net is wide enough to cover clay statues.
The Protect act of 2003 does, however, have a Miller Test requirement to be defined as child pornography, which Australia does not. Under the Miller test, to be obscene something must lack literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Dirty images of The Simpsons might have enough inherent artistic social commentary to not be considered legally obscene (which is not to say that it couldn't be prohibited on other grounds).
You're forgetting what's being outlawed here. It is not against the law to be a gangster. Or to be a card shark. Or to have a predisposition to abusing your spouse. It is only illegal to engage in specific acts of gansterism, or cheating, or spousal abuse.
It is, however, apparently the goal to outlaw being sexually attracted to children. Not specific acts of pedophilia, but rather the general concept of liking it. In no other set of laws do we attempt to outlaw being attracted to something, partially because it isn't really the place of law to set those preferences but mainly because it's bloody impractical. The closest we can do is outlaw anything that might be seen as liking it. So not only do we outlaw sexual abuse of minors, but we also outlaw images of that abuse. We outlaw virtual or faked images of child abuse. We outlaw pornography that pretends to be with underage people even though everyone involved is verifiably of legal age and consent. And we outlaw cartoon depictions and sculptures of child abuse. Congress even called this out specifically in the 1996 CPPA, saying that pedophiles might 'whet their own sexual appetites' with faked images.
Of course, an angry person can calm down and get counseling. A card shark can be taught useful skills and get a real job. We have yet to find a real way to change anyone's sexual attractions. That, of course, leaves everyone in a bind. As a society, we have a vested interest in making sure these people don't abuse children ever again. The pedophile may well hate the sexual attractions that he or she has, but has no effective way of changing them. And personally, I want them away from any children my fiancée and I may have. So the law stays, and we just hope everyone goes to jail before anyone gets hurt.
I think Apple's bet is that the reward of creating a new device class like the iPod or the iPhone is worth the development cost of a few duds like the Apple TV and Newton.
This is a risk. A big risk. If it didn't look like a risk, everyone else would have done it already, and there wouldn't be any potential payoff for risking going into the market.
Have you tried Evernote as a One Note replacement? Oddly enough, it has a native iPhone client which should work fine on the iPad (or the android, palm, winmobile, blackberry, windows, osx... sadly no Linux other than the web client). The iPhone has native exchange support, which works well for corporate e-mail.
Really the only missing link in the chain that you mentioned is annotating PDF files, which is something that I haven't looked into. Maybe an iPhone client exists for that? I don't know.
Have you used an iPhone? I find myself Kindle-ing on the iPhone a lot, and wonder if a real eInk reader is better enough to warrant another device.
I believe he means "future" by "not the present."
Too bad the above is just a pipe dream. I can't imagine how bad it is living in dense residential/apartments, where these users still don't know how to configure things, but there are 2 dozen within range instead of 5.
Except for that mess-up in the early days of N that would just obliterate everything in range, it's not as bad as you would think. You're lucky to get 20m range in this apartment complex, but the apartments aren't that big anyway. Similarly, being in America, the signal degredation brings the transmission rates down to... oh... about the paultry upstream we get from the cable provider anyway.
For some of us, there is need for a computing device that you can use while walking from place to place. The Laptop works well when you can sit and setup, but a tablet would be helpful for situations where you're talking to people, running errands, or generally being physically active. There are already iPhone / iPod Touch and other smartphone / PDA custom solutions for these people, but a bigger screen and a task-specific interface would be nice.
Which is not to say that apple isn't going to position this as an ebook, since the above is a pretty small market.
Do you really think the ribbon was anything to do with usability?
Maybe patents had something to do with it, but it is classic Microsoft usability. It takes a cohesive, existing system, and layers on top an additional UI element that they hope will make all of the other UI elements make sense. Microsoft rarely removes elements.
It's like Windows 7 filesharing. Not only did they keep the old Samba based filesharing, but they added an additional type of filesharing on top. Now you have the joys of setting all of the permissions twice, only now you don't really know which goes to which.
Or the godawful and inconsistent side panels. Why you'd want a system-level UI element taking up that much room just to offer to print photos for you is anybody's guess. But the side panels simply replicate functionality that can be achieved by right-clicking, double clicking, going to the menus, option clicking, or sometimes multiples of the above.
Or for that matter, Word: where each separate program module has its own interface elements. This is true whether those interface elements would make sense elsewhere, or replicate other functions / settings within the application. Or are just legacy and don't really matter anymore.
Apple, on the other hand, actually streamlines. They removed the disk drive, removed the com and serial ports. When spotlight became the way to search in OSX, they removed the other ways to search. Instead of just trying to add, so as not to upset old users, they actively redesign the whole system to be usable as a whole. While I have low hopes for the tablet as a piece of hardware, I'm excited to see the interface conventions it comes up with.
This. Programming enjoyed a brief stint of ridiculously high salaries in the 90's, due to imbalance between demand and supply. In certain industries, like Legal or Medical work, this imbalance is maintained by very high schooling requirements. To be a good coder, you don't even need to have gone to school, so it's only natural that the salary would eventually come more in line with other professional work.
Also, to be a good programmer you *have* to love it. People don't become good coders because they're trying really hard at it. They become good coders because when they go home at night, they're write more code. When they wake up in the morning, they write more code. When they have a question about how to cut out the noise from the upstairs neighbors, they write more code. You need to think in it. You need to want to learn other programming languages "just because it's fun." Otherwise, your career is going to get stuck and your output will be middley at best. Or, like so many others before, you'll jump ship to something you actually enjoy doing.
If you just want money, become a finance banker or a stock trader.