Evolution is defined as unguided. The above is a description of Intelligent Design, not evolution. The player is essentially the god of a universe built via Theistic Evolution...
Why are you using the term "theistic evolution" after having redefined evolution to be exclusive of theistic influence? Your argument has just been made to fall flat on its face by your own use of the adjective "theistic" to describe a form of "evolution" in what would be an oxymoron under your terms.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with describing Spore as a game about evolution once you accept that evolution guided by an intelligent force is still a form of evolution, as you just have by the use of that term.
(Also, most supporters of the theory called "Intelligent Design" and packaged to schools as an alternative to the teaching of evolution reject the possibility of theistic evolution as well as that of nontheistic evolution, even though theistic evolution would be a perfectly valid form of intelligent design as the term would seem to be defined at face value.)
Yeah, I can see myself signing up to give Paypal access to my credit cards or bank accounts just for the privilege of keeping my credit card number away from untrustworthy, unscrupulous merchants who are out to steal my mon....
Wait a minute. Oh-ho-ho! Nice try, Paypal! You almost got me there. Whew!
In other words, although you might not agree with Stallman on the rest of his ideas, you *do* agree with him that DRM is a bad thing. Thus, he has a foot in the door with regards to potentially (at some point later) getting you to agree with the rest of his philosophy as well.
That doesn't logically follow at all, nor does its partisan implication that one must reject ALL of somebody's ideas to retain purity against the ones that you don't like. I hate to go straight to Gowdin, but there's no better way to cast a light on the ridiculousness of your position. Hitler was kind to animals, a vegetarian, and frequently tweaked dining mates over how the meat they ate was made. Does that mean that going vegan means a door is open for coming to agree with him about the extermination of the Jewish people?
That's essentially what you're saying with Stallman. If you agree with his stance on DRM, then you're only steps away from saluting the idea that all proprietary software is a robbing of freedom and furthermore that he's " truly miraculous programmer [...], (altruistic *and* a genius...he's looking more like God by the second)." That's indefensible nonsense.
Your alternative is the close-minded bigotry of the partisan. You have decided that Stallman is "not on your side," and are categorically rejecting any ideas of his without consideration of them independent from the rest of the man. Worse, you seem to be actively rejecting a good cause for no other reason than that he supports it. I've seen nothing in your arguments about why DRM is a good thing -- only that Stallman is fearmongering against it.
In the late 70s/early 80s, I might have agreed that such was a possibility...however, first ASCII and now Unicode are fairly powerful deterrents to such a future scenario, methinks. To me PDF is a large potential threat there...I consider it unlikely however that anything that's likely to be of importance centuries from now will use Microsoft Word as its' sole format
PDF is an open, documented standard. I have no fear that it will be readable in the future -- as long as it's not DRM protected like some Adobe eBooks. MS Word, I do worry about. A lot of corporate and legal documents are done in Word. Who knows how much of a future President's early career may be lost to us?
I've said before that it isn't a coincidence that DRM only really became a serious pet topic of the FSF after the start of the War on Terror...Guess where Stallman got the idea from?
Strange. Stallman must've used his GNU powered time machine to go back to 1997 after the DMCA was passed to right "The Right to Read." Not that I'm a fan of Stallman and his stringent philosophy, but you do deserve to be modded down for peddling outright nonsense. The FSF was fighting against DRM long before the "GWoT," and Slashdot was worked up about the DMCA years before we had more scary things to worry about.
Personally, I've been worried for years that our time will be the dawning of a new historical Dark Age based on the following factors:
The overabundance of data making it hard to find the truly significant data in the wash.
The impermanence of modern data storage vs. printed or written works from the past.
The inability to read propietary formats centuries or even decades in the future.
Mass use of encryption to secure documents, making data mining of historical records impractical.
The voluntary extinction of historically significant works by chagrined rights owners. (See Disney's "Song of the South.")
DRM is a major part of this, and while I don't support the FSF on everything, this is the good fight.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I love NPR and am a Marketplace / All Things Considered addict but...
Hello, National. Public. Radio???
[Your State]. Public. Television. Just because it services a wide geographic area doesn't mean that it's mainstream. People have to actually listen to / watch it for something to be mainstream. I'd be overjoyed if nearly as many people listened to NPR as did to partisan radio or watched cable news, but, sadly, good journalism still isn't exactly mainstream.
My reply: Didn't we already have the blind sue over something similar to this?
My reply: Do we get to choose which jerks are first up against the wall when the revolution comes? And can we pick web application developers? 'Cause if so, I'm totally in. (Stupid defect tracking system popping up windows left and right...)
Because there's a difference, and it's very familiar to any old Mac hand as OpenDoc. Read up on OpenDoc and Publish and Subscribe and then go back and read the OLPC design requirements until you see what I'm thinking. Also, look up the UI concept of Lifebooks. Activities are identical to OpenDoc components, and the Journal is a Lifebook.
The OLPC isn't doing anything new, per se, but it's bringing together a lot of old UI design concepts that have been sitting on the shelf untried for years and years.
Personally, I'm psyched. These are great ideas that have been considered impractical because they're somewhat incompatible with the current desktop metaphor and would lead to confusion. Also, previous attempts at some of these concepts had design flaws that are correctable upon reflection. Starting from scratch allows the OLPC to completely revitalize the HCI field. I'm suddenly filled with a lot more hope for the future of UI design than I have been in nearly a decade.
But Mac OS X's GUI IS bad -- at least compared to Mac OS 9. UI design has never been the same at Apple since jobs fired practically the entire HCI research department back in 1997 around when Mac OS X was first being designed.
Initial Alpha builds of Rhapsody kept the Mac OS 9 user experience intact. Soon after the firing came the introduction of the Dock, the changes to erase stability of spatial reference, and the dumping of many of Mac OS 9's nicer UI features. It also allowed the company to release the OS in a state where the Finder was barely unusable in icon view mode. Oh, and the HCI labs would've thrown a fit if they'd still been there and Apple was releasing apps that didn't even use the same sets of widgets as those in the rest of the operating system. (Hence the confusion of Aqua and "brushed metal" apps.)
Back when the HCI labs were going strong at Apple, a lot of innovative research into HCI was being constantly churned out there. Innovation and a consistent user experience were king. Now, though, it's all flash and no substance. It's why I no longer count myself as a Mac fan. I put up with the instability and the poor multitasking in the Classic days because the user experience was still so much better than everything else. Nowdays, I purely run my Mac from the command line because the Finder is such utter and complete crap compared even to Explorer under Windows.
Thank God somebody's still advancing UI research with a focus on consistency and ease of use beyond the first three days of owning the machine.
The main "innovation" of DirectX was business-side -- the forcing of hardware vendors to adopt more interesting hardware features at a radically faster pace than the OpenGL standards body was doing. The actual innovation of technologies in DirectX has always been done by developers, hardware manufacturers, and grad students outside of MS. MS has just been a driving force at getting these ideas into the market -- a useful thing, but not innovation.
There is nothing inherently innovative about Xbox Live. It is an evolution of services provided by companies like Blizzard in the past. Xbox Live just provides a common framework for all companies to share. Evolution not revolution.
ASP is just an evolution of ideas from COM as applied to the web which were already in use in some CORBA environments and in many dynamically generated websites. Once again a maturing and refinement of existing ideas and not an innovation.
PowerPoint was originally written for the Mac by Forethought which was bought by Microsoft the same year the software debuted in 1987. This is an example of MS buying innovation from others. Many of MS's best products are from acquisitions, but that's once again an example of MS's skill at identifying a market and seizing it.
Optical mice -- in the form we use them -- were innovated, like many things, by Xerox. My first encouter with an optical mouse was in the late 90s. It came from Sun and had a special shiny, grided pad that you had to use it with. Optical mice that needed no special pad also came first from other manufacturers.
MS has had a great role in popularizing many technologies that might've never entered the marketplace. Nowhere is that more evident than in Direct3D. However, they have never been much of a leader inventing new and risky things.
Lastly, I'd like to point out a couple of problems with other points your raise in your post:
Few people have problems with MS actually embracing a standard. It's the fact that MS almost never embraces a standard without somehow extending it in some fashion to provide new features that encourage vendor lock-in that irritates people. Witness MS's proprietary changes to Java, Kerberos, etc. -- all intended to produce incompatibilities.
The other thing I take issue with is praising as innovative the way MS broke open the commodity PC market. It's not like no one had though of doing so before. It's just that no one had managed to be put in the unique situation that MS was to supply the essential OS of a prioprietary system to anybody who wanted one because an IBM exec slipped up. (Apple would later be bitten by this too when Laser, a clone maker, was able to license Applesoft BASIC from MS thanks to a lack of exclusivity).
While MS's power play certainly benefitted the computer industry, I fail to see how under any reasonable definition of innovation selling essential components to competitors is "innovative." I'm afraid I'm going to have to call into question your definition of innovation if you think any of the issues in your post count.
Actually, Apple WAS using colored pixels to do this back in the day when monitors had only two color phosphors -- green and purple. Sub-pixel rendering requires the existence of sub-pixel elements which are utterly unnecessary in a monochrome display. Read more about it here.
The article even has reference to MS's own Apple BASIC manuals discussing the technique.
Whether the ClearType team was aware of work that had been done 20 years ago or not, they did not innovate the idea. They either knowingly stole credit for the idea or they reinvented the wheel and took credit for it. (Or they honestly though that applying it to text instead of just shapes and lines makes it sincerely a new innovation.)
I love how he cites ClearType as an example of a Microsoft innovation because it really is a perfect example. Unfortunately for him, it's an example of Microsoft dressing up other people's work as their own and selling it as innovation. The technology actually dates back over 20 years to patents held by Apple on sub-pixel rendering and was used back in the Apple ][ days to give old displays artificially better resolution.
In my opinion, the fact that MS holds patents on this idea is yet another example of how broken our patent system's treatment of prior art and obviousness is.
Sorry. I have a friend who practically believes that same thing with no sarcasm, so it didn't register. With someone with more sense, it'd be a mutually agreed banned topic for discussion in each other's presence, but he really hates cash intensely and honestly thinks the world would be a better place without it and never lets a potential argument get in the way of a good opportunity to complain when inconvenienced.
...and I can't let advocacy for the elimination of a form of privacy go unchallenged, so I'm as much to blame, much to the chagrin of our mutual friends.
It's cheaper for manufacturers to buy one set of keypad components for drive-up and walk-up ATMs than to buy two separate supplies and to manage the inventory.
Personally, I've always wondered how a blind person is supposed to read what's on the screen. Are their ATM cards flagged in some way to prompt the system to start reading options aloud to them?
Oh, good. Because nothing helps defend freedom and liberty like government tracking of every single financial transaction you make and thus every location you travel to. That's not a recipe for totalitarianism at all, is it? Oh, and just wait until the government considers your records sellable (or more likely giveable) resources to financial and marketing companies with good lobbyists.
In no way would this data ever be abused. Man, that sounds like such a better idea than tactile marks on paper currency.
Somewhere along the line our nation went from a Republic to an odd politically correct hybrid of socialism where the rights of the few outweigh the rights of the many. 1% of the population can now dictate and control 99% of the population. That simply isn't right. [...] I'll tell you one thing; this kind of stuff sure as hell isn't what the founding fathers had in mind when they founded the nation, that's for sure.
Strange. Where in reading the Constitution and the early works of the founding fathers do you get the impression that majority will was always more sacred that minority liberty? Have you never heard the phrase "tyranny of the majority" as popularized by John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Toqueville? What do you think Madison was talking about in Federalist Paper no 10 when he said the following?
"Complaints are everywhere heard [...] that the public good is too often disregarded in the conflict of rival parties; and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party; but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."
Why do you think that we have amendments specifically protecting freedom of speech, press, and religion from the popular will of the people if minority interests weren't intended to be preserved? Why has the minority party in the Senate always enjoyed the right of filibuster to preserve their interests? Why does the Senate itself even exist except to protect the interest of the smaller states against the larger? Why did we pass the 14th Amendment to protect the rights of all people at a time when people of one skin color and creed were by far the dominant majority?
Plurality and respect for the needs of the few over the wants of the many has been a central principle to the American democracy since its inception. If anything, it's the insistence on majoritarian dominance that is the greatest betrayal of our nations founding principles in our times as with it goes away all the rights and liberties that distinguish us from a totalitarian government.
It doesn't. It is however a ruling taken directly from federal disable rights laws, which were passed by Congress under their Constitutional authority to regulate the workings of the federal government, to regulate the transfer of funds from the federal government to state & local governments, and to regulate interstate commerce.
The flaw is either that you assume that shutting down one porn site and locking up its owner is just as easy as stopping an activity that apparently 1/3 of a large population engages in or that you assume that the arrest of a single pornography site owner (out of Lord knows how many) implies that China is not cracking down hard on prostitution too.
It is quite possible that any of the following apply, which your argument does not account for:
There are many, many more prostitutes than can be effectively shut down, compared to porn site owners, meaning that the arrest rate could be higher for them.
Law enforcement in Hong Kong is more lax/corrupt than the bureau responsible for shutting the porn site operator down.
Shutting down a porn is more high profile and newsworthy to some people than shutting down yet another brothel.
There could be some sympathy for prostitutes that results in a lesser sentence, or they might even get sentences just as bad, but we're not aware.
Their judicial system could be screwy with the way it handles minimum (or even maximum) sentences and multiple offenses.
The judge could've been a real hardline extremist in handing down punishment.
Any of the above make the argument you put forth -- that obviously the Chinese consider prostitution less of a crime than pornography -- ridiculous.
Rome and some of the Greek states are one of the few European cultures we know had very loose attitudes about sexuality and marriage along with some of the Celtic-related cultures. They're not exactly representative of all world history. Futhermore, Rome had become very... cosmopolitan in the days before Constantine switched over to Christianity. Early Roman culture had a much more strict and complex view of marriage which was often about status more than love with a bewildering mash of attitudes about whether it was okay to marry people based on status, keep them as concubines, etc. whereas things had gotten a bit looser only later as Rome began to decline a few centuries before the time Constantine. However, even early Rome had some acceptance of "common law" (usus) marriages through cohabitation.
The only real relation that the adoption of Christianity has to the fall of Rome is that the Christianizing emperors that followed had a way of really, really irritating the surrounding pagan tribes by forcibly converting them to a belief system that was unrecognizeable to their previous pagan traditions (whereas just adopting a new pantheon and tying the old gods in as other forms of the new gods seems to have been less agitating).
One last note, Constantine also outlawed gladiatoral combat because of his beliefs. I don't suppose you'd say that that was a backslide from civilization too, would you?
Erotic art was there in many temples and caves in India, Japan and other civilizations. But with the advent of Christianity with its much more constricted views of right and wrong, other civilizations changed. Ironic that what west sees as backwardness in other cultures is actually introduced by west itself.
This is the kind of tripe that a gross ignorance of foreign history and prehistory and of comparitive religions will get you.
First of all, the presence of erotic art does not denote a broad cultural acceptance of erotica. Second, cultures go on swings of greater and lesser acceptance of erotica -- even Western civilization went from the period of the Inquisition to the period of Renaissance to the period of Puritanism. Japanese culture, which you cited in particular, had numerous shifts in culture to accept and reject sexuality in various forms without the influence of Christianity playing a major role (being actively driven underground for centuries by the Shogunate after a brief introduction in the 16th century).
Furthermore, you apparently have no understanding of the greater influence of Confucian mores (originated in the 5th century BC) on Eastern views of sexuality. Confucianists widely viewed the act of sex itself as meant only to be used for procreation and had very similar views to the West on the "dirtiness" of sex, on the necessity of sex being only between a man and a wife, on the subservience of women to men, on the persecution of homosexuality, etc. two millenia before China had contact with the West. While Taoism was far more accepting of sex, it is Confucian mores that have been the dominant. These mores, developed independently of the West, also happen to be a large part of why the Chinese are so willing to accept authoritarian systems -- Confucianism is inherently a hierarchical system -- and have been a driving force behind many of Communist China's morality laws.
Also, if you think that India is a hotbed for free-love just because it was the home of the Kama Sutra, tantric sex traditions, and erotic temple art, you have a LOT to learn about the many forms of Hinduism and how dominant their various influences have been as well as the way that most polythestic cultures respected the idea of "a time and a place" for sex rites while leaving marriage as the dominant institution.
Next, I'd just like to note that while it was Jesus that said that if your eye leads you to sin, you should pluck it out, it was the millenia old tradition of Judaism that Christianity inherited most of its sexual mores from. All monotheistic religions that we have good records of the beliefs of have had strong prohibitions against sexual immorality, and you'd probably be surprised to find out how many still existing polythestic and animistic religions have VERY strong prohibitions against pre-marital and extra-marital sex in spite of existence of fertility rites and primitive porn.
All human cultures have, with time, developed some sort of bias towards sex primarily between husbands and wives. All human cultures have had porn, prostitution, and adultery in spite of their society saying it's wrong in the general case. Very, very few cultures have accepted polyamory outside of ritualized days and events, and yet people have left evidence that they indulged anyway. It's like there's competing biological needs involved or something...
At this stage in the game, who is buying a NEW Xbox? You couldn't find a used one or hit up Ebay? I need to find one of these 4 people. I have a nice 486 with a Turbo button that they might find appealing.
Dude, I've seen brand new, unopened consoles from the 80s in Japan. We're talking Famicom and PC Engine (aka NES and TurboGrafx-16). There are several shops in Akihabara that sell both the systems and plenty of games, not all used.
In comparison, an Xbox isn't that surprising of a purchase. It's still not a bad base for making an HTPC once you mod it, and until the 360 is cracked, there's not many better choices on the market at its price range. I can definitely see 4 in the whole of Japan deciding to get one new instead of used.
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution is defined as unguided. The above is a description of Intelligent Design, not evolution. The player is essentially the god of a universe built via Theistic Evolution...
Why are you using the term "theistic evolution" after having redefined evolution to be exclusive of theistic influence? Your argument has just been made to fall flat on its face by your own use of the adjective "theistic" to describe a form of "evolution" in what would be an oxymoron under your terms.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with describing Spore as a game about evolution once you accept that evolution guided by an intelligent force is still a form of evolution, as you just have by the use of that term.
(Also, most supporters of the theory called "Intelligent Design" and packaged to schools as an alternative to the teaching of evolution reject the possibility of theistic evolution as well as that of nontheistic evolution, even though theistic evolution would be a perfectly valid form of intelligent design as the term would seem to be defined at face value.)
Yeah, I can see myself signing up to give Paypal access to my credit cards or bank accounts just for the privilege of keeping my credit card number away from untrustworthy, unscrupulous merchants who are out to steal my mon....
Wait a minute. Oh-ho-ho! Nice try, Paypal! You almost got me there. Whew!
In other words, although you might not agree with Stallman on the rest of his ideas, you *do* agree with him that DRM is a bad thing. Thus, he has a foot in the door with regards to potentially (at some point later) getting you to agree with the rest of his philosophy as well.
That doesn't logically follow at all, nor does its partisan implication that one must reject ALL of somebody's ideas to retain purity against the ones that you don't like. I hate to go straight to Gowdin, but there's no better way to cast a light on the ridiculousness of your position. Hitler was kind to animals, a vegetarian, and frequently tweaked dining mates over how the meat they ate was made. Does that mean that going vegan means a door is open for coming to agree with him about the extermination of the Jewish people?
That's essentially what you're saying with Stallman. If you agree with his stance on DRM, then you're only steps away from saluting the idea that all proprietary software is a robbing of freedom and furthermore that he's " truly miraculous programmer [...], (altruistic *and* a genius...he's looking more like God by the second)." That's indefensible nonsense.
Your alternative is the close-minded bigotry of the partisan. You have decided that Stallman is "not on your side," and are categorically rejecting any ideas of his without consideration of them independent from the rest of the man. Worse, you seem to be actively rejecting a good cause for no other reason than that he supports it. I've seen nothing in your arguments about why DRM is a good thing -- only that Stallman is fearmongering against it.
In the late 70s/early 80s, I might have agreed that such was a possibility...however, first ASCII and now Unicode are fairly powerful deterrents to such a future scenario, methinks. To me PDF is a large potential threat there...I consider it unlikely however that anything that's likely to be of importance centuries from now will use Microsoft Word as its' sole format
PDF is an open, documented standard. I have no fear that it will be readable in the future -- as long as it's not DRM protected like some Adobe eBooks. MS Word, I do worry about. A lot of corporate and legal documents are done in Word. Who knows how much of a future President's early career may be lost to us?
Strange. Stallman must've used his GNU powered time machine to go back to 1997 after the DMCA was passed to right "The Right to Read." Not that I'm a fan of Stallman and his stringent philosophy, but you do deserve to be modded down for peddling outright nonsense. The FSF was fighting against DRM long before the "GWoT," and Slashdot was worked up about the DMCA years before we had more scary things to worry about.
Personally, I've been worried for years that our time will be the dawning of a new historical Dark Age based on the following factors:
- The overabundance of data making it hard to find the truly significant data in the wash.
- The impermanence of modern data storage vs. printed or written works from the past.
- The inability to read propietary formats centuries or even decades in the future.
- Mass use of encryption to secure documents, making data mining of historical records impractical.
- The voluntary extinction of historically significant works by chagrined rights owners. (See Disney's "Song of the South.")
DRM is a major part of this, and while I don't support the FSF on everything, this is the good fight.Hey, don't get me wrong, I love NPR and am a Marketplace / All Things Considered addict but...
Hello, National. Public. Radio???
[Your State]. Public. Television. Just because it services a wide geographic area doesn't mean that it's mainstream. People have to actually listen to / watch it for something to be mainstream. I'd be overjoyed if nearly as many people listened to NPR as did to partisan radio or watched cable news, but, sadly, good journalism still isn't exactly mainstream.
My reply: Didn't we already have the blind sue over something similar to this?
My reply: Do we get to choose which jerks are first up against the wall when the revolution comes? And can we pick web application developers?
'Cause if so, I'm totally in. (Stupid defect tracking system popping up windows left and right...)
Because there's a difference, and it's very familiar to any old Mac hand as OpenDoc. Read up on OpenDoc and Publish and Subscribe and then go back and read the OLPC design requirements until you see what I'm thinking. Also, look up the UI concept of Lifebooks. Activities are identical to OpenDoc components, and the Journal is a Lifebook.
The OLPC isn't doing anything new, per se, but it's bringing together a lot of old UI design concepts that have been sitting on the shelf untried for years and years.
Personally, I'm psyched. These are great ideas that have been considered impractical because they're somewhat incompatible with the current desktop metaphor and would lead to confusion. Also, previous attempts at some of these concepts had design flaws that are correctable upon reflection. Starting from scratch allows the OLPC to completely revitalize the HCI field. I'm suddenly filled with a lot more hope for the future of UI design than I have been in nearly a decade.
But Mac OS X's GUI IS bad -- at least compared to Mac OS 9. UI design has never been the same at Apple since jobs fired practically the entire HCI research department back in 1997 around when Mac OS X was first being designed.
Initial Alpha builds of Rhapsody kept the Mac OS 9 user experience intact. Soon after the firing came the introduction of the Dock, the changes to erase stability of spatial reference, and the dumping of many of Mac OS 9's nicer UI features. It also allowed the company to release the OS in a state where the Finder was barely unusable in icon view mode. Oh, and the HCI labs would've thrown a fit if they'd still been there and Apple was releasing apps that didn't even use the same sets of widgets as those in the rest of the operating system. (Hence the confusion of Aqua and "brushed metal" apps.)
Back when the HCI labs were going strong at Apple, a lot of innovative research into HCI was being constantly churned out there. Innovation and a consistent user experience were king. Now, though, it's all flash and no substance. It's why I no longer count myself as a Mac fan. I put up with the instability and the poor multitasking in the Classic days because the user experience was still so much better than everything else. Nowdays, I purely run my Mac from the command line because the Finder is such utter and complete crap compared even to Explorer under Windows.
Thank God somebody's still advancing UI research with a focus on consistency and ease of use beyond the first three days of owning the machine.
None of those things are actual innovations.
The main "innovation" of DirectX was business-side -- the forcing of hardware vendors to adopt more interesting hardware features at a radically faster pace than the OpenGL standards body was doing. The actual innovation of technologies in DirectX has always been done by developers, hardware manufacturers, and grad students outside of MS. MS has just been a driving force at getting these ideas into the market -- a useful thing, but not innovation.
There is nothing inherently innovative about Xbox Live. It is an evolution of services provided by companies like Blizzard in the past. Xbox Live just provides a common framework for all companies to share. Evolution not revolution.
ASP is just an evolution of ideas from COM as applied to the web which were already in use in some CORBA environments and in many dynamically generated websites. Once again a maturing and refinement of existing ideas and not an innovation.
PowerPoint was originally written for the Mac by Forethought which was bought by Microsoft the same year the software debuted in 1987. This is an example of MS buying innovation from others. Many of MS's best products are from acquisitions, but that's once again an example of MS's skill at identifying a market and seizing it.
Optical mice -- in the form we use them -- were innovated, like many things, by Xerox. My first encouter with an optical mouse was in the late 90s. It came from Sun and had a special shiny, grided pad that you had to use it with. Optical mice that needed no special pad also came first from other manufacturers.
MS has had a great role in popularizing many technologies that might've never entered the marketplace. Nowhere is that more evident than in Direct3D. However, they have never been much of a leader inventing new and risky things.
Lastly, I'd like to point out a couple of problems with other points your raise in your post:
Few people have problems with MS actually embracing a standard. It's the fact that MS almost never embraces a standard without somehow extending it in some fashion to provide new features that encourage vendor lock-in that irritates people. Witness MS's proprietary changes to Java, Kerberos, etc. -- all intended to produce incompatibilities.
The other thing I take issue with is praising as innovative the way MS broke open the commodity PC market. It's not like no one had though of doing so before. It's just that no one had managed to be put in the unique situation that MS was to supply the essential OS of a prioprietary system to anybody who wanted one because an IBM exec slipped up. (Apple would later be bitten by this too when Laser, a clone maker, was able to license Applesoft BASIC from MS thanks to a lack of exclusivity).
While MS's power play certainly benefitted the computer industry, I fail to see how under any reasonable definition of innovation selling essential components to competitors is "innovative." I'm afraid I'm going to have to call into question your definition of innovation if you think any of the issues in your post count.
Actually, Apple WAS using colored pixels to do this back in the day when monitors had only two color phosphors -- green and purple. Sub-pixel rendering requires the existence of sub-pixel elements which are utterly unnecessary in a monochrome display. Read more about it here.
The article even has reference to MS's own Apple BASIC manuals discussing the technique.
Whether the ClearType team was aware of work that had been done 20 years ago or not, they did not innovate the idea. They either knowingly stole credit for the idea or they reinvented the wheel and took credit for it. (Or they honestly though that applying it to text instead of just shapes and lines makes it sincerely a new innovation.)
I love how he cites ClearType as an example of a Microsoft innovation because it really is a perfect example. Unfortunately for him, it's an example of Microsoft dressing up other people's work as their own and selling it as innovation. The technology actually dates back over 20 years to patents held by Apple on sub-pixel rendering and was used back in the Apple ][ days to give old displays artificially better resolution.
In my opinion, the fact that MS holds patents on this idea is yet another example of how broken our patent system's treatment of prior art and obviousness is.
Sorry. I have a friend who practically believes that same thing with no sarcasm, so it didn't register. With someone with more sense, it'd be a mutually agreed banned topic for discussion in each other's presence, but he really hates cash intensely and honestly thinks the world would be a better place without it and never lets a potential argument get in the way of a good opportunity to complain when inconvenienced.
...and I can't let advocacy for the elimination of a form of privacy go unchallenged, so I'm as much to blame, much to the chagrin of our mutual friends.
It's cheaper for manufacturers to buy one set of keypad components for drive-up and walk-up ATMs than to buy two separate supplies and to manage the inventory.
Personally, I've always wondered how a blind person is supposed to read what's on the screen. Are their ATM cards flagged in some way to prompt the system to start reading options aloud to them?
Oh, good. Because nothing helps defend freedom and liberty like government tracking of every single financial transaction you make and thus every location you travel to. That's not a recipe for totalitarianism at all, is it? Oh, and just wait until the government considers your records sellable (or more likely giveable) resources to financial and marketing companies with good lobbyists.
In no way would this data ever be abused. Man, that sounds like such a better idea than tactile marks on paper currency.
Somewhere along the line our nation went from a Republic to an odd politically correct hybrid of socialism where the rights of the few outweigh the rights of the many. 1% of the population can now dictate and control 99% of the population. That simply isn't right. [...] I'll tell you one thing; this kind of stuff sure as hell isn't what the founding fathers had in mind when they founded the nation, that's for sure.
Strange. Where in reading the Constitution and the early works of the founding fathers do you get the impression that majority will was always more sacred that minority liberty? Have you never heard the phrase "tyranny of the majority" as popularized by John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Toqueville? What do you think Madison was talking about in Federalist Paper no 10 when he said the following?
Why do you think that we have amendments specifically protecting freedom of speech, press, and religion from the popular will of the people if minority interests weren't intended to be preserved? Why has the minority party in the Senate always enjoyed the right of filibuster to preserve their interests? Why does the Senate itself even exist except to protect the interest of the smaller states against the larger? Why did we pass the 14th Amendment to protect the rights of all people at a time when people of one skin color and creed were by far the dominant majority?
Plurality and respect for the needs of the few over the wants of the many has been a central principle to the American democracy since its inception. If anything, it's the insistence on majoritarian dominance that is the greatest betrayal of our nations founding principles in our times as with it goes away all the rights and liberties that distinguish us from a totalitarian government.
It doesn't. It is however a ruling taken directly from federal disable rights laws, which were passed by Congress under their Constitutional authority to regulate the workings of the federal government, to regulate the transfer of funds from the federal government to state & local governments, and to regulate interstate commerce.
Ask Maria from West Side Story. She feels pretty.
Dangit. Beat me to the joke. I was going to ask, "But can you feel witty or gay?"
C'mon. Exactly how often does someone from the Treasury Department reply to a thread on Slashdot?
Honestly, what company ever actually does ANY training that you're aware of?
Certainly none that I've ever worked for.
The flaw is either that you assume that shutting down one porn site and locking up its owner is just as easy as stopping an activity that apparently 1/3 of a large population engages in or that you assume that the arrest of a single pornography site owner (out of Lord knows how many) implies that China is not cracking down hard on prostitution too.
It is quite possible that any of the following apply, which your argument does not account for:
Any of the above make the argument you put forth -- that obviously the Chinese consider prostitution less of a crime than pornography -- ridiculous.
In addition to what ultranova said...
Rome and some of the Greek states are one of the few European cultures we know had very loose attitudes about sexuality and marriage along with some of the Celtic-related cultures. They're not exactly representative of all world history. Futhermore, Rome had become very... cosmopolitan in the days before Constantine switched over to Christianity. Early Roman culture had a much more strict and complex view of marriage which was often about status more than love with a bewildering mash of attitudes about whether it was okay to marry people based on status, keep them as concubines, etc. whereas things had gotten a bit looser only later as Rome began to decline a few centuries before the time Constantine. However, even early Rome had some acceptance of "common law" (usus) marriages through cohabitation.
The only real relation that the adoption of Christianity has to the fall of Rome is that the Christianizing emperors that followed had a way of really, really irritating the surrounding pagan tribes by forcibly converting them to a belief system that was unrecognizeable to their previous pagan traditions (whereas just adopting a new pantheon and tying the old gods in as other forms of the new gods seems to have been less agitating).
One last note, Constantine also outlawed gladiatoral combat because of his beliefs. I don't suppose you'd say that that was a backslide from civilization too, would you?
Erotic art was there in many temples and caves in India, Japan and other civilizations.
But with the advent of Christianity with its much more constricted views of right and wrong, other civilizations changed.
Ironic that what west sees as backwardness in other cultures is actually introduced by west itself.
This is the kind of tripe that a gross ignorance of foreign history and prehistory and of comparitive religions will get you.
First of all, the presence of erotic art does not denote a broad cultural acceptance of erotica. Second, cultures go on swings of greater and lesser acceptance of erotica -- even Western civilization went from the period of the Inquisition to the period of Renaissance to the period of Puritanism. Japanese culture, which you cited in particular, had numerous shifts in culture to accept and reject sexuality in various forms without the influence of Christianity playing a major role (being actively driven underground for centuries by the Shogunate after a brief introduction in the 16th century).
Furthermore, you apparently have no understanding of the greater influence of Confucian mores (originated in the 5th century BC) on Eastern views of sexuality. Confucianists widely viewed the act of sex itself as meant only to be used for procreation and had very similar views to the West on the "dirtiness" of sex, on the necessity of sex being only between a man and a wife, on the subservience of women to men, on the persecution of homosexuality, etc. two millenia before China had contact with the West. While Taoism was far more accepting of sex, it is Confucian mores that have been the dominant. These mores, developed independently of the West, also happen to be a large part of why the Chinese are so willing to accept authoritarian systems -- Confucianism is inherently a hierarchical system -- and have been a driving force behind many of Communist China's morality laws.
Also, if you think that India is a hotbed for free-love just because it was the home of the Kama Sutra, tantric sex traditions, and erotic temple art, you have a LOT to learn about the many forms of Hinduism and how dominant their various influences have been as well as the way that most polythestic cultures respected the idea of "a time and a place" for sex rites while leaving marriage as the dominant institution.
Next, I'd just like to note that while it was Jesus that said that if your eye leads you to sin, you should pluck it out, it was the millenia old tradition of Judaism that Christianity inherited most of its sexual mores from. All monotheistic religions that we have good records of the beliefs of have had strong prohibitions against sexual immorality, and you'd probably be surprised to find out how many still existing polythestic and animistic religions have VERY strong prohibitions against pre-marital and extra-marital sex in spite of existence of fertility rites and primitive porn.
All human cultures have, with time, developed some sort of bias towards sex primarily between husbands and wives. All human cultures have had porn, prostitution, and adultery in spite of their society saying it's wrong in the general case. Very, very few cultures have accepted polyamory outside of ritualized days and events, and yet people have left evidence that they indulged anyway. It's like there's competing biological needs involved or something...
Wow, I wish I had mod points, because you, sir, don't have enough right now.
That just means you're doing it wrong.
At this stage in the game, who is buying a NEW Xbox? You couldn't find a used one or hit up Ebay? I need to find one of these 4 people. I have a nice 486 with a Turbo button that they might find appealing.
Dude, I've seen brand new, unopened consoles from the 80s in Japan. We're talking Famicom and PC Engine (aka NES and TurboGrafx-16). There are several shops in Akihabara that sell both the systems and plenty of games, not all used.
In comparison, an Xbox isn't that surprising of a purchase. It's still not a bad base for making an HTPC once you mod it, and until the 360 is cracked, there's not many better choices on the market at its price range. I can definitely see 4 in the whole of Japan deciding to get one new instead of used.