I don't see why companies don't like the idea of getting help from CUSTOMERS.:D
Simple: Maybe they would get help from customers, maybe not. If they got help from customers, then their cars would be a little bit better (though probably not much), and their customers would be a little bit happier.
But by keeping all this stuff secret, they create a monopoly on service and their dealerships can charge $200 for something that Joe Smith at your local garage would charge $120 for.
Re:Music sharing may be legal in US too! 17 USC 10
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Burnt Coffee and Burnt CDs
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· Score: 2, Informative
So your interpretation of the law differs from his..? Why is yours correct and his incorrect?
Because the original poster's is wrong, maybe?
Look at the piece that the original poster even pasted:
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium...
It's clear as day that they are talking about manufacturing/importing/distribution devices or mediums... Ie, Computers/tape recorders/Ipods or CDRs...
This section says nothing whatsoever about the actual infringement of copyrighted materials.
This is maybe why people need to get the advice of lawyers. I have always felt that reading contracts/laws was relatively straightforward... But so did the original poster, and he is completely wrong.
Ironically, I just came from my school's gallery, and was musing on how painfully uncreative and uninspired the works there are.
I'm a programmer, not an artist, but it might be the case that stuff in your school's gallery was assigned work, that allowed little room for being creative or inspired, and is there because it's a good example of a technique.
"Paint a still life involving fruit and a table cloth"... There is not really much room for being creative or original there, how many thousands of paintings with this theme exist?
Do they overflow the current process's virtual address space?
No. On the stack itself, in addition to the local data for a function (and the saved registers), is the return address that you are going to jump back to after the function is complete. Buffer overflow exploits write past the end of the buffer. So you are overflowing the function's local data, not the entire stack segment. As the previous poster mentioned, because the stack grows downward, your overflow can write over the return address, which is where all the nastiness starts.
In addition to this, is the fact that the binaries are always the same for each machine, and the process's memory all logically maps to the same location (windows user code maps to 0x10000000).
So, say someone writes a program and somewhere has a static buffer for input which is 256 bytes, and doesn't check bounds on input data. You can construct an input which is more than 256 bytes, and your data will overwrite stuff which is outside of the input buffer, perhaps the return address. So, with the proper input, you can make the program jump to an arbitrary point.
Usually, whenever a function is called, it will be called at the same depth of recursion. Like, I might make a function, "authenticate", which asks for your username and password (storing them without checking in my 256 byte buffers), then checks credentials and either proceeds or returns an error code.
This function will probably only be called once, and it will always be called at the same time in program execution, relatively early. The stack will always be the same size when it is called. (Like, your call stack at this point might look like: main() -> initialize() -> authenticate()) or whatever).
Sometimes, a function might be called from multiple places... Maybe there is something like "getAddress()", which does pretty much the same thing, it grabs an address input by the user, but it might be called from many places in the executable. Each call will have its own characteristic call stack, and offset within the stack segment. The stack frames of all functions leading down to it will be present. (You can usually examine the current call stack in a debugger).
If you know "where" the function will be called from in this manner, you will know the exact stack layout at this point, including the absolute addresses and everything (which you know because the binaries are always the same and the executable always maps to the same logical place in memory).
So, you can overwrite the return address so that it returns to inside the input buffer. Then, you have 256 bytes (in this example) to work with for constructing your little exploit. Often, the exploit will be just a stub which downloads another malware program and launches it, or whatever.
There is a little bit more to it. Like, you usually need to construct your input so that you don't have any 0 bytes within it, because that will signify the end of a string. The input, even though it's not bounds checked, might still be validated in some fashion. (I think I remember reading about someone who had made a "codec", so that the input data could be composed of valid alphanumeric characters. So, even the unpacker was alphanumeric, which is pretty cool).
The next step is to move all device driver software from the operating system to a dedicated flash ROM embeded on the motherboard.
There are so many problems with this that it's silly.
I think the original poster was saying, that you don't move *your* drivers onto the hardware, but that the hardware starts to "take responsibility" for "driving itself".
This is already relatively standard, it just means you need 1 OS driver to support a common interface, and the hardware should support it as well. Most USB input devices and USB storage devices are pretty much "plug and play", no matter if you're using win2k, mac, or linux.
The hardware conforms to a public interface, and your software does, and everything works out (in theory).
The types of performance problems you're talking about are orders of magnitude away from the performance problems that users percieve when using Java applications though.
I disagree here.
Think of Moore's law, processor speeds, etc... Java is a fast enough language for doing just about anything a user needs to do. Even if java were only 25% as fast as native code, that would be 2 cycles of Moore's law, 36 months, 3 years ago. (And, java is much faster than 25% of C, check here)
3 years ago, users were all doing the same things they are doing today.
A couple of exceptions apply, of course: scientific computing, games, etc, tax the hardware pretty heavily.
But, the primary reason that Java is perceived as slow by users is the terrible speed of the GUI.
All the widgets are implemented in Java directly. This is almost like the same exception as game software, since all this rendering code involves moving around lots of memory, etc...
The GUI matters more than anything to user perception of slowness.
An old 14mhz 68000 amiga often "felt" faster than a 50mhz 386, because the amiga's os/gui were very responsive, while the 386 was running win3.1
Look at the recent developments with the linux kernel. Compare X responsiveness with a preemptible low-latency kernel, and how the whole machine "feels" better.
By going with preemption and low-latency, the overall throughput of the machine is actually slightly slower. But it feels loads better.
C# and the.NET framework use native code libraries for the GUI. It will never have the same perception of "slowness" that java has.
In (economic) theory, such an implementation should be the Darwinian best; in theory the best product always wins. However, we know from engineering experience this is almost always untrue.
No. The concepts behind natural selection almost alway hold true.
The problem is that it's not the case that "the best product always wins", the way you're thinking of it.
You probably evaluate "best" based on several metrics like performance, price, configurability, etc.
The problem is that your assumptions are wrong. In reality, the fitness metrics consist of things like "how well this works with MS products", "how easy it is to install", "can we get support from MS for this product like all our others", "nobody every got fired for buying MS", etc..
On top of all that, add in the previous metrics that I assumed you probably use.
MS's dominance of the industry, coupled with their actions to maintain their monopoly, have influenced which fitness tests apply.
In some cases, like Apache vs. IIS, the "good" metrics overcame the "bad ones", and Apache is the dominant "species".
In most, the "bad" metrics overcame the "good" ones.
What we need to do is change the environment that the "organisms" compete in. Either that, or continue to improve our "good" metrics so much that they overcome the "bad" ones for all other software packages.
As open-source software continues to grow "better", and receives backing from giants like IBM etc, it will start to dominate more areas.
The company will continue to try to improve their products, but they won't generally stray too far away from their core product, because they often have too many investors who expect that core to provide them with a return for their investment. Plus, they've spent so much time and effort grasping that domain, they can't easily or quickly move the company in another direction.
I think you are wrong here. There are lots of bright people, and lots of bright people running companies, that aren't going to experience this sort of tunnel vision.
I think the problem is that every time you try to come up with something "new and innovative", you are taking large risks. Small companies do it all the time, and the vast majority sink. The ones you here about are the ones that "make it", that actually had a good idea, the right people, and probably a bit of luck.
The ones that fail, the company goes bankrupt and is split up among creditors. In effect, the small companies can take huge risks, because it's not like they're going to really lose millions of dollars anyway. It's all other peoples' money, and lines of credit.
Big companies can't afford to take those huge risks. When there project fails, they can't just say "oops, guess I'm bankrupt". They have eat the costs of the failure.
A friend of mine is notorious for sleeping through alarm clocks.
One day, as a gift, he received an alarm clock that was super loud. It looked like it was made in the 70's, it was huge and had that same "plastic that looks like wood" sort of decoration that my 83 Monte Carlo has... Nowadays, electronics are all smaller, more streamlined, more "japanese" feeling.
Anyway, when I first heard it, I said it sounded like a foghorn, and that name, "The Foghorn", stuck, although it was a bit of a misnomer. On the spot, I couldn't remember the sound that it made, although I remembered relatively quickly. It didn't sound like a foghorn, but it sound exactly like a shop vac. It even ramped up just like one, and it moved a ton of air through this big blower.
It sounded just like a shop vac, it didn't beep or turn the noise off and on, it was just one continuous "vrooom" that was certainly way too loud to talk over... (You know how shop vacs are louder than normal vacuum cleaners)
Well, maybe because the sound was monotonous, my friend started sleeping through this noise anyway... He said that he would just incorporate the noise in his dreams. Literally, the thing would be like 3 feet from his head, and like I said, way too loud to talk over or anything, and he'd be sleeping through it. If you were outside of his house, even with all the doors and windows shut, you could hear it, but he'd be sleeping.
This was in high school, and we eventually left for college. He had 2 roommates for awhile, and then one of his roommates swapped rooms with somebody else.
So, the first night the new guy wsa sharing the room with him (the third roommate was somewhere else that night), my friend gets woken up in the morning. His new roommate is shaking him and saying "Chris wake up, there's a fire drill!" He says "No dude, that's just my alarm", and rolls over and hits the snooze button. His new roommate just stands there and says "Oh my fucking god"...
The point I am discussing is whether or not games are a form of expression (and so covered under free speech).
Whether or not you are allowed to incite mobs or yell fire in a theatre or threaten the president (did I miss any of the standard examples?) is a different matter.
Whether or not GTA can be banned because it is inciting people to kill haitians, is also a different issue...
Just to be certain, do you agree that the following is free speech?
Speaking (well, duh)... Books Movies
The difference is that you/watch/ Scarface, but you/participate in/ Vice City
I don't think there's much difference.
Is a "Choose your own Adventure" book free speech? You are sort of participating in it.
Is attending a meeting of the KKK or some other white supremacy group, and shouting "kill the haitians" protected under free speech?
Re:Virus are on Border of living and Dead Matter .
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Smallpox From The Past
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· Score: 2, Informative
If the virus is nothing but the DNA and a protein coating around it, why are the people wanting it to be live ?
Am I missing something ? What am I missing ?
I think they just mean viable, not really "live", since "live" has a weird meaning for a virus. If they couldn't find live virus samples, then either the virus wasn't there, or it was, but is now "dead", in the sense that it can't work anymore.
True, viruses are just dna and protein, or something like that... Collections of complicated chemicals, basically. They can still degrade, given enough time. Heat them up enough, they will "die", by having their molecules scrambled, etc...
But, IANAChemist, nor a biologist, so take my words with a grain of salt.
I don't know about your grandparents, but mine aren't mentally retarded.
While it's own thing to say "my grandma doesn't know jack about how computers work", and even joke about it, saying they consider it a "magic box" powered by dragons.
But, if my grandmother is using email, I don't think she says "oh, my magic box is telling me to send my bank info over"... She understands the concept of mail, and letters.
Computers and technology had very little to do with this. Maybe sometimes people don't understand the danger of giving out their bank account and identification information, but that's a little different.
(All this being said, my grandmother might fall for this con. But that's because she's into get-rich-quick schemes (she's owned vending machines, tried "telemarket from home" schemes, raised emus in her back yard(!), etc), not because she's an idiot fooled by the "magic box powered by psychic fairies")
If you read the article, you can see that some guy was tracking down the source of the sound. He "found" it in an old western where a character named Wilhelm gets shot in the leg with an arrow.
Later, he found it in an earlier movie/sound, but I figure the name was already stuck.
Doesn't it more likely that the name comes from when some guy named Wilhelm screams in a movie?
Everyone has an obligation to improve the lot of the rest of society. That comes with being human. If you don't like the idea that you are here to help other people, then renounce your humanity.
Several different points and questions...
A) Who says they have this obligation? B) I personally don't agree that I have an obligation to improve the lot of society. Does that mean you view me as inhuman?
A business should be responsible first and foremost to the people who pay its wages -- its customers.
First and foremost to its customers? Or, first and foremost to improving the lot of society, second and almost-foremost to its customers?
Your argument that "nobody is forced to buy their products" is misleading, as there is no Nationalised computer component supplier {which would have to provide full disclosure}. If every manufacturer chose to exploit their customers by failure to disclose...
Why is it misleading? You are free to buy other products, from manufacturers which provide all of the information about their products. You are free to design and create your own hardware, if you choose.
information that their customers have a right to know
You keep saying things like this, but why do you assume that the customers have a right to know?
Is some implicit right, granted to humanity, that:
A) when you buy a car, it should come with a manual full of complete specifications, from the specific mixtures of metals used in its alloys, to the microcode running on its embedded computer, so that you could build the exact same vehicle?
B) when you buy a piece of software, it should come with all of its source code and tools for building it?
C) when you buy a can of coke, or a big mac, you should get the recipe for coke, or the big mac "secret sauce"?
D) your tax dollars (presuming you are American, if not, pretend) have gone into the space program, your local nuclear power plants, and the armed forces and all of their equipment. Is the government obligated to provide you with full plans and specifications of these?
If I spend millions of dollars in research and development on some technology, why am I obligated to tell you everything I learned?
Patents can "protect" this investment in some cases, but not others.
Manufacturers should not be allowed to keep secrets from their customers at all.
Why not? You are not forced to buy from them. If you don't like the terms of the arrangement, don't purchase their product.
Nobody ever benefits by having things hidden from them.
For some reason, the manufacturers should be forced to benefit you?
There already exist systems whereby innovators can profit from other people's use of their work, in return for that work eventually entering the Public Domain. For manufacturers to attempt to circumvent the obligation to enrich the Public Domain by the use of secrecy is tantamount to vigilantism.
This is just ridiculous. The patenting process is optional. And, what obligation to enrich the Public Domain are you talking about?
I am not really that big a fan of Ayn Rand's philosophies, but when people pose arguments like this, I can certainly see where she was coming from.
There is no obligation on the part of manufacturers to give you something for nothing.
I think one of the big issues with VVidia and their IP problems are that basically NVidia was formed by a bunch of people that left SGI.
Apparently, they felt that SGI should be doing something in the consumer graphics card market. SGI disagreed, so all these people left.
But, when they formed NVidia, they were infringing patents, using trade secrets, or whatever, that belonged to SGI. (Kind of crummy, the trade secret thing, since many of these NVidia people developed the concepts in the first place).
Anyway, there was a big settlement with SGI and NVidia, and this is a big part of NVidia's "not being allowed" to open up information about their architectures.
So, when you say "NVidia should never have stood for", it may be the case that they didn't have much choice.
Take the story with a grain of salt though. I have no references to back it up, and it might all be a false rumor in the first place.
Check out this page here for adapters which work, and perhaps the forums for ones which work under linux.
They "should" just be USB HID devices, so they "should" work, but there are some caveats...
Anyway, hands down, the best gamepad is the playstation 2 gamepad. Before that, it was the playstation gamepad. It is amazing how much all gamepads in the console industry suck, except for the playstation ones. Nintendo started out pretty good, the NES and SNES pads were nice, but the n64 on up sucked.
I have an "emulation station", a computer hooked up to my TV, with NES, SNES, sega, etc emulators on it, and it's controlled via ps2 gamepads, and playing on it is absolutely awesome.
I do find it amusing, though, that the author of the article just implicitly assumes that the reverse is not true: ie, that designing the frontend first will never result in arbitrary limitations for the backend.
Well, I think that, in most cases at least, this is true. Especially when you consider a good separation between the backend and the frontend.
Consider your APT example: apt has its command line utilities, and also some gui frontends for these utilities.
Now, I have not used any of the apt guis. (I use linux machines rather often, and debian is my favorite dist, but I use windows machines for gui workstations)...
But, a quick look at the apt-get options: I would not be surprised at all to discover that the gui frontends do not support the -c= (read this config file) or -o= (set aribtrary config option) features. Even if the gui tools do support these, there will be some features in the apt tools that gui tools don't support, I bet.
Now, even if the frontend had been designed first, it would not be a problem to add these features to the backend afterwards.
I would say that it is very rare that the frontend imposes arbitrary limitiations on the backend. The only conceivable thing I could think of is the app being poorly designed, maybe as a result of considering only what the frontend functionality will be. (But, this is not to say that a frontend impedes the backend).
The reverse is true, even from your own example: Changing your mind about the package set, while the download is occuring, might make sense in a frontend gui. (In particular, you never want your gui to be "dead" to user input, etc)... But this is something that you really wouldn't consider when designing a command-line interface.
So in this case, the backend has maybe impeded the frontend.
(I don't think it's that big an issue, because you can cancel the apt-get, and redo a different package selection, and it will pick up the downloads where it left off)
Answer #1: There will *always* be stuff which is scarce. Maybe it will be real estate. Maybe we will continue to impose artificial scarcity (i.e. intellectual property) on certain things. Maybe there will be some completely arbitrary measure of "status" that people value.
Read science fiction stories for examples of what will be scarce. (The "status" thing really was in a rather crummy science fiction story I read once.)
Whatever it is, scarce goods will have value, and some economy based around that value will exist.
Answer #2: Perhaps we can build robots to do the bad work for us.
I believe that artificial intelligence is possible with enough processing power (and if we have nanotech, we will be capable of exceeding the processing power per cm^3 of our brains).
More important than just creating smarter versions of ourselves, though, is the concept of intelligence without personality. Something which is able to reason, but which does not have a "being" behind it.
Artificial intelligence built around this concept would not "turn on us" like the matrix. There would be no moral issues with shutting it off after asking it to solve a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see why companies don't like the idea of getting help from CUSTOMERS. :D
Simple: Maybe they would get help from customers, maybe not. If they got help from customers, then their cars would be a little bit better (though probably not much), and their customers would be a little bit happier.
But by keeping all this stuff secret, they create a monopoly on service and their dealerships can charge $200 for something that Joe Smith at your local garage would charge $120 for.
So your interpretation of the law differs from his..? Why is yours correct and his incorrect?
Because the original poster's is wrong, maybe?
Look at the piece that the original poster even pasted:
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium...
It's clear as day that they are talking about manufacturing/importing/distribution devices or mediums... Ie, Computers/tape recorders/Ipods or CDRs...
This section says nothing whatsoever about the actual infringement of copyrighted materials.
This is maybe why people need to get the advice of lawyers. I have always felt that reading contracts/laws was relatively straightforward... But so did the original poster, and he is completely wrong.
Ironically, I just came from my school's gallery, and was musing on how painfully uncreative and uninspired the works there are.
I'm a programmer, not an artist, but it might be the case that stuff in your school's gallery was assigned work, that allowed little room for being creative or inspired, and is there because it's a good example of a technique.
"Paint a still life involving fruit and a table cloth"... There is not really much room for being creative or original there, how many thousands of paintings with this theme exist?
Do they overflow the current process's virtual address space?
No. On the stack itself, in addition to the local data for a function (and the saved registers), is the return address that you are going to jump back to after the function is complete. Buffer overflow exploits write past the end of the buffer. So you are overflowing the function's local data, not the entire stack segment. As the previous poster mentioned, because the stack grows downward, your overflow can write over the return address, which is where all the nastiness starts.
In addition to this, is the fact that the binaries are always the same for each machine, and the process's memory all logically maps to the same location (windows user code maps to 0x10000000).
So, say someone writes a program and somewhere has a static buffer for input which is 256 bytes, and doesn't check bounds on input data. You can construct an input which is more than 256 bytes, and your data will overwrite stuff which is outside of the input buffer, perhaps the return address. So, with the proper input, you can make the program jump to an arbitrary point.
Usually, whenever a function is called, it will be called at the same depth of recursion. Like, I might make a function, "authenticate", which asks for your username and password (storing them without checking in my 256 byte buffers), then checks credentials and either proceeds or returns an error code.
This function will probably only be called once, and it will always be called at the same time in program execution, relatively early. The stack will always be the same size when it is called. (Like, your call stack at this point might look like: main() -> initialize() -> authenticate()) or whatever).
Sometimes, a function might be called from multiple places... Maybe there is something like "getAddress()", which does pretty much the same thing, it grabs an address input by the user, but it might be called from many places in the executable. Each call will have its own characteristic call stack, and offset within the stack segment. The stack frames of all functions leading down to it will be present. (You can usually examine the current call stack in a debugger).
If you know "where" the function will be called from in this manner, you will know the exact stack layout at this point, including the absolute addresses and everything (which you know because the binaries are always the same and the executable always maps to the same logical place in memory).
So, you can overwrite the return address so that it returns to inside the input buffer. Then, you have 256 bytes (in this example) to work with for constructing your little exploit. Often, the exploit will be just a stub which downloads another malware program and launches it, or whatever.
There is a little bit more to it. Like, you usually need to construct your input so that you don't have any 0 bytes within it, because that will signify the end of a string. The input, even though it's not bounds checked, might still be validated in some fashion. (I think I remember reading about someone who had made a "codec", so that the input data could be composed of valid alphanumeric characters. So, even the unpacker was alphanumeric, which is pretty cool).
Find a bug in Apache that isn't patched within a day. Go ahead. I dare you.
Guarantee me that if I look I won't find an apache server which is months or years out of date. Go ahead. I dare you.
The next step is to move all device driver software from the operating system to a dedicated flash ROM embeded on the motherboard.
There are so many problems with this that it's silly.
I think the original poster was saying, that you don't move *your* drivers onto the hardware, but that the hardware starts to "take responsibility" for "driving itself".
This is already relatively standard, it just means you need 1 OS driver to support a common interface, and the hardware should support it as well. Most USB input devices and USB storage devices are pretty much "plug and play", no matter if you're using win2k, mac, or linux.
The hardware conforms to a public interface, and your software does, and everything works out (in theory).
The riser *is* conductive, by design. It's a ground circuit.
The types of performance problems you're talking about are orders of magnitude away from the performance problems that users percieve when using Java applications though.
.NET framework use native code libraries for the GUI. It will never have the same perception of "slowness" that java has.
I disagree here.
Think of Moore's law, processor speeds, etc... Java is a fast enough language for doing just about anything a user needs to do. Even if java were only 25% as fast as native code, that would be 2 cycles of Moore's law, 36 months, 3 years ago. (And, java is much faster than 25% of C, check here)
3 years ago, users were all doing the same things they are doing today.
A couple of exceptions apply, of course: scientific computing, games, etc, tax the hardware pretty heavily.
But, the primary reason that Java is perceived as slow by users is the terrible speed of the GUI.
All the widgets are implemented in Java directly. This is almost like the same exception as game software, since all this rendering code involves moving around lots of memory, etc...
The GUI matters more than anything to user perception of slowness.
An old 14mhz 68000 amiga often "felt" faster than a 50mhz 386, because the amiga's os/gui were very responsive, while the 386 was running win3.1
Look at the recent developments with the linux kernel. Compare X responsiveness with a preemptible low-latency kernel, and how the whole machine "feels" better.
By going with preemption and low-latency, the overall throughput of the machine is actually slightly slower. But it feels loads better.
C# and the
boost.python, one of the boost libraries, makes binding to python very easy.
It uses C++ and lots of template mojo, but you don't really need to understand all that to use it.
In (economic) theory, such an implementation should be the Darwinian best; in theory the best product always wins. However, we know from engineering experience this is almost always untrue.
No. The concepts behind natural selection almost alway hold true.
The problem is that it's not the case that "the best product always wins", the way you're thinking of it.
You probably evaluate "best" based on several metrics like performance, price, configurability, etc.
The problem is that your assumptions are wrong. In reality, the fitness metrics consist of things like "how well this works with MS products", "how easy it is to install", "can we get support from MS for this product like all our others", "nobody every got fired for buying MS", etc..
On top of all that, add in the previous metrics that I assumed you probably use.
MS's dominance of the industry, coupled with their actions to maintain their monopoly, have influenced which fitness tests apply.
In some cases, like Apache vs. IIS, the "good" metrics overcame the "bad ones", and Apache is the dominant "species".
In most, the "bad" metrics overcame the "good" ones.
What we need to do is change the environment that the "organisms" compete in. Either that, or continue to improve our "good" metrics so much that they overcome the "bad" ones for all other software packages.
As open-source software continues to grow "better", and receives backing from giants like IBM etc, it will start to dominate more areas.
The company will continue to try to improve their products, but they won't generally stray too far away from their core product, because they often have too many investors who expect that core to provide them with a return for their investment. Plus, they've spent so much time and effort grasping that domain, they can't easily or quickly move the company in another direction.
I think you are wrong here. There are lots of bright people, and lots of bright people running companies, that aren't going to experience this sort of tunnel vision.
I think the problem is that every time you try to come up with something "new and innovative", you are taking large risks. Small companies do it all the time, and the vast majority sink. The ones you here about are the ones that "make it", that actually had a good idea, the right people, and probably a bit of luck.
The ones that fail, the company goes bankrupt and is split up among creditors. In effect, the small companies can take huge risks, because it's not like they're going to really lose millions of dollars anyway. It's all other peoples' money, and lines of credit.
Big companies can't afford to take those huge risks. When there project fails, they can't just say "oops, guess I'm bankrupt". They have eat the costs of the failure.
A friend of mine is notorious for sleeping through alarm clocks.
One day, as a gift, he received an alarm clock that was super loud. It looked like it was made in the 70's, it was huge and had that same "plastic that looks like wood" sort of decoration that my 83 Monte Carlo has... Nowadays, electronics are all smaller, more streamlined, more "japanese" feeling.
Anyway, when I first heard it, I said it sounded like a foghorn, and that name, "The Foghorn", stuck, although it was a bit of a misnomer. On the spot, I couldn't remember the sound that it made, although I remembered relatively quickly. It didn't sound like a foghorn, but it sound exactly like a shop vac. It even ramped up just like one, and it moved a ton of air through this big blower.
It sounded just like a shop vac, it didn't beep or turn the noise off and on, it was just one continuous "vrooom" that was certainly way too loud to talk over... (You know how shop vacs are louder than normal vacuum cleaners)
Well, maybe because the sound was monotonous, my friend started sleeping through this noise anyway... He said that he would just incorporate the noise in his dreams. Literally, the thing would be like 3 feet from his head, and like I said, way too loud to talk over or anything, and he'd be sleeping through it. If you were outside of his house, even with all the doors and windows shut, you could hear it, but he'd be sleeping.
This was in high school, and we eventually left for college. He had 2 roommates for awhile, and then one of his roommates swapped rooms with somebody else.
So, the first night the new guy wsa sharing the room with him (the third roommate was somewhere else that night), my friend gets woken up in the morning. His new roommate is shaking him and saying "Chris wake up, there's a fire drill!" He says "No dude, that's just my alarm", and rolls over and hits the snooze button. His new roommate just stands there and says "Oh my fucking god"...
That's it.
Duh? Is _all_ speech protected?
This is dodging the issue.
The point I am discussing is whether or not games are a form of expression (and so covered under free speech).
Whether or not you are allowed to incite mobs or yell fire in a theatre or threaten the president (did I miss any of the standard examples?) is a different matter.
Whether or not GTA can be banned because it is inciting people to kill haitians, is also a different issue...
A game is absolutely not freedom of speech.
/watch/ Scarface, but you /participate in/ Vice City
Just to be certain, do you agree that the following is free speech?
Speaking (well, duh)...
Books
Movies
The difference is that you
I don't think there's much difference.
Is a "Choose your own Adventure" book free speech? You are sort of participating in it.
Is attending a meeting of the KKK or some other white supremacy group, and shouting "kill the haitians" protected under free speech?
If the virus is nothing but the DNA and a protein coating around it, why are the people wanting it to be live ?
Am I missing something ? What am I missing ?
I think they just mean viable, not really "live", since "live" has a weird meaning for a virus. If they couldn't find live virus samples, then either the virus wasn't there, or it was, but is now "dead", in the sense that it can't work anymore.
True, viruses are just dna and protein, or something like that... Collections of complicated chemicals, basically. They can still degrade, given enough time. Heat them up enough, they will "die", by having their molecules scrambled, etc...
But, IANAChemist, nor a biologist, so take my words with a grain of salt.
It's unfortunate that spammers have these networks of compromised hosts.
But which is better, a compromised machine sending out hundreds of emails per minute, or one sending out 10 emails per minute?
No, it *is* a solution...
Some of your bandwidth and time is being wasted in the short term, because spam is still being circulated.
But in the long term, spam ceases to be an effective business model.
I don't know about your grandparents, but mine aren't mentally retarded.
While it's own thing to say "my grandma doesn't know jack about how computers work", and even joke about it, saying they consider it a "magic box" powered by dragons.
But, if my grandmother is using email, I don't think she says "oh, my magic box is telling me to send my bank info over"... She understands the concept of mail, and letters.
Computers and technology had very little to do with this. Maybe sometimes people don't understand the danger of giving out their bank account and identification information, but that's a little different.
(All this being said, my grandmother might fall for this con. But that's because she's into get-rich-quick schemes (she's owned vending machines, tried "telemarket from home" schemes, raised emus in her back yard(!), etc), not because she's an idiot fooled by the "magic box powered by psychic fairies")
Are you sure about this?
If you read the article, you can see that some guy was tracking down the source of the sound. He "found" it in an old western where a character named Wilhelm gets shot in the leg with an arrow.
Later, he found it in an earlier movie/sound, but I figure the name was already stuck.
Doesn't it more likely that the name comes from when some guy named Wilhelm screams in a movie?
Everyone has an obligation to improve the lot of the rest of society. That comes with being human. If you don't like the idea that you are here to help other people, then renounce your humanity.
Several different points and questions...
A) Who says they have this obligation?
B) I personally don't agree that I have an obligation to improve the lot of society. Does that mean you view me as inhuman?
A business should be responsible first and foremost to the people who pay its wages -- its customers.
First and foremost to its customers? Or, first and foremost to improving the lot of society, second and almost-foremost to its customers?
Your argument that "nobody is forced to buy their products" is misleading, as there is no Nationalised computer component supplier {which would have to provide full disclosure}. If every manufacturer chose to exploit their customers by failure to disclose...
Why is it misleading? You are free to buy other products, from manufacturers which provide all of the information about their products. You are free to design and create your own hardware, if you choose.
information that their customers have a right to know
You keep saying things like this, but why do you assume that the customers have a right to know?
Is some implicit right, granted to humanity, that:
A) when you buy a car, it should come with a manual full of complete specifications, from the specific mixtures of metals used in its alloys, to the microcode running on its embedded computer, so that you could build the exact same vehicle?
B) when you buy a piece of software, it should come with all of its source code and tools for building it?
C) when you buy a can of coke, or a big mac, you should get the recipe for coke, or the big mac "secret sauce"?
D) your tax dollars (presuming you are American, if not, pretend) have gone into the space program, your local nuclear power plants, and the armed forces and all of their equipment. Is the government obligated to provide you with full plans and specifications of these?
If I spend millions of dollars in research and development on some technology, why am I obligated to tell you everything I learned?
Patents can "protect" this investment in some cases, but not others.
Manufacturers should not be allowed to keep secrets from their customers at all.
Why not? You are not forced to buy from them. If you don't like the terms of the arrangement, don't purchase their product.
Nobody ever benefits by having things hidden from them.
For some reason, the manufacturers should be forced to benefit you?
There already exist systems whereby innovators can profit from other people's use of their work, in return for that work eventually entering the Public Domain. For manufacturers to attempt to circumvent the obligation to enrich the Public Domain by the use of secrecy is tantamount to vigilantism.
This is just ridiculous. The patenting process is optional. And, what obligation to enrich the Public Domain are you talking about?
I am not really that big a fan of Ayn Rand's philosophies, but when people pose arguments like this, I can certainly see where she was coming from.
There is no obligation on the part of manufacturers to give you something for nothing.
I think one of the big issues with VVidia and their IP problems are that basically NVidia was formed by a bunch of people that left SGI.
Apparently, they felt that SGI should be doing something in the consumer graphics card market. SGI disagreed, so all these people left.
But, when they formed NVidia, they were infringing patents, using trade secrets, or whatever, that belonged to SGI. (Kind of crummy, the trade secret thing, since many of these NVidia people developed the concepts in the first place).
Anyway, there was a big settlement with SGI and NVidia, and this is a big part of NVidia's "not being allowed" to open up information about their architectures.
So, when you say "NVidia should never have stood for", it may be the case that they didn't have much choice.
Take the story with a grain of salt though. I have no references to back it up, and it might all be a false rumor in the first place.
Check out this page here for adapters which work, and perhaps the forums for ones which work under linux.
They "should" just be USB HID devices, so they "should" work, but there are some caveats...
Anyway, hands down, the best gamepad is the playstation 2 gamepad. Before that, it was the playstation gamepad. It is amazing how much all gamepads in the console industry suck, except for the playstation ones. Nintendo started out pretty good, the NES and SNES pads were nice, but the n64 on up sucked.
I have an "emulation station", a computer hooked up to my TV, with NES, SNES, sega, etc emulators on it, and it's controlled via ps2 gamepads, and playing on it is absolutely awesome.
I do find it amusing, though, that the author of the article just implicitly assumes that the reverse is not true: ie, that designing the frontend first will never result in arbitrary limitations for the backend.
Well, I think that, in most cases at least, this is true. Especially when you consider a good separation between the backend and the frontend.
Consider your APT example: apt has its command line utilities, and also some gui frontends for these utilities.
Now, I have not used any of the apt guis. (I use linux machines rather often, and debian is my favorite dist, but I use windows machines for gui workstations)...
But, a quick look at the apt-get options: I would not be surprised at all to discover that the gui frontends do not support the -c= (read this config file) or -o= (set aribtrary config option) features. Even if the gui tools do support these, there will be some features in the apt tools that gui tools don't support, I bet.
Now, even if the frontend had been designed first, it would not be a problem to add these features to the backend afterwards.
I would say that it is very rare that the frontend imposes arbitrary limitiations on the backend. The only conceivable thing I could think of is the app being poorly designed, maybe as a result of considering only what the frontend functionality will be. (But, this is not to say that a frontend impedes the backend).
The reverse is true, even from your own example: Changing your mind about the package set, while the download is occuring, might make sense in a frontend gui. (In particular, you never want your gui to be "dead" to user input, etc)... But this is something that you really wouldn't consider when designing a command-line interface.
So in this case, the backend has maybe impeded the frontend.
(I don't think it's that big an issue, because you can cancel the apt-get, and redo a different package selection, and it will pick up the downloads where it left off)
Answer #1:
There will *always* be stuff which is scarce. Maybe it will be real estate. Maybe we will continue to impose artificial scarcity (i.e. intellectual property) on certain things. Maybe there will be some completely arbitrary measure of "status" that people value.
Read science fiction stories for examples of what will be scarce. (The "status" thing really was in a rather crummy science fiction story I read once.)
Whatever it is, scarce goods will have value, and some economy based around that value will exist.
Answer #2:
Perhaps we can build robots to do the bad work for us.
I believe that artificial intelligence is possible with enough processing power (and if we have nanotech, we will be capable of exceeding the processing power per cm^3 of our brains).
More important than just creating smarter versions of ourselves, though, is the concept of intelligence without personality. Something which is able to reason, but which does not have a "being" behind it.
Artificial intelligence built around this concept would not "turn on us" like the matrix. There would be no moral issues with shutting it off after asking it to solve a problem.