That shows a supreme lack of imagination. Look at Palm, with it's thousands of apps (big and small) that enable it to be so much more than Palm ever envisioned. The same goes for Symbian... so much of the power of those devices is in the truly clever and innovative ideas that the third parties bring to those platforms. Even the most basic functions have benefited from third party development. You can find improvements in security, contact management, and a host of other functions on those other platforms. The OEM's provide a platform, the development community makes it better.
The tragedy here is that the iPhone provides even more opportunities for real innovation. With thousands of developers (the world over) building on top of the work Apple has already done we would have seen truly stunning advances in both the functionality and the form of the iPhone.
The iPhone may not be a computer replacement, but that doesn't mean it's not a computing device with immense potential.
That's exactly the issue here, however. In your hypothetical, a 34 year old male should certainly be punished for having sexual relations with a 14 year old girl. Very few people would question that. However, should that singular offense lead to life on a list that will keep you from holding a job, living in a growing number of municipalities, and otherwise making your life simply unliveable?
I don't think that crime warrants what is effectively a life sentence, and certainly not on your first strike. Justice, after all, is not about revenge..
There are lots of other issues like this. For example, in Texas a stripper who is convicted of giving an overly suggestive lap dance can be charged with public lewdness... a 'crime' that can land you on the sex offender registry. So can selling 'obscene' materials at a porn store. That's the problem with these lists, they are meant to protect society from the most dangerous of offenders, but the hysterical of society expand them to include virtually any crime with any kind of sexual connotation.
The issue isn't Google, it's the Mozilla foundation. Just as you posit that Google *has* to be secretive, the Mozilla people *have* to be transparent and open. They represent the collective work of thousands of developers, each of home should enjoy 'ownership' in what they ultimately produce. With upwards of $50 million in play, they definitely deserve to know where that money came from and how it's being used.
They see the latest "Left vs. Right: Smackdown!" show on CNN, watch it for awhile, take one side or the other, and call it a day.
While a popular viewpoint, I think it's completely wrong. In reality most voters are really issue voters. They have one or two issues that are extremely important to them (ask a farmer about subsidies/tariffs or a factory worker about immigration/outsourcing). They tend to seek out candidates that support they're particular issues of interest. They then select a particular candidate from that group using some combination of charisma, identifiability, and gut instinct.
Once where past the primaries we get further polarized because the voting public really only cares about one or two issues, and with only two candidates to choose from it gets pretty clear cut for most voters.
This is one of the reasons democrats have really struggled in recent elections. The democratic platform tends to be a hodge-podge of vague positions and fractured loyalties. Since a democrat candidate has to appeal to a varied base that care about a LOT of different issues they end up having to take weak stands on a awful lot of them. So called 'blue dog' democrats are a perfect example of this. This 'moderate' group of democrats that can be quite conservative. Many are opposed to gay marriage for instance, so a democrat candidate has to toe a very delicate line of placating both sides of the issue. What you end up with is John Kerry.
The republicans show a tremendous amount of savvy by then attacking these candidates. If gay marriage is your hot button issue then republicans paint a very clear choice which reduces your vote to no choice at all. This can work in reverse as well.. in the 2006 elections it was clear that the Iraq war was the issue of choice for a LOT of voters, which led to a landslide for the Democratic party. However, as soon as the winds of change cause people to find new issues to care about then the Democrats will find themselves back to their same old struggles.
The point being... most voters in this country are much more intelligent than most people think they are. They simply cast their vote for the candidate that most closely aligns with the issues that truly matter to them. It's not that their uninformed sheep, it's that they don't bother to care about the things that aren't important to them. Which seems perfectly rational to me.
As a last note: Political Science junkies will point out that this phenemenon is the best defense of the two party system. In countries with multiple (sometimes dozens) of parties you end up with a highly fractured body of representatives responsible only to a handful of voters whom aligned with them only one or two important issues.
I certainly don't care, and I suspect that 99% of the voting population is right there with me. I think the desire to have control of ones own representation on MySpace is perfectly legitimate. The rest of it is just a business squabble. It does very little to shape my opinion of Obama either positively or negatively. I somehow doubt I'm in the minority on this.
A atom is not patentable, a new type of medicine is nothing more than a particular arrangement of atoms, therefore that medicine should not be patentable.
You can apply this logic to lierally everything. If the conclusion you reach is that NOTHING should be patentable, that's one thing. To exclude software (at least in this case) as being unique is another altogether.
More correctly it should say 'Open WAP is not protection from search warrant.' That's essentially what the legal question was here. Does the fact that one has a Open WAP prevent the police from having probable cause to search your residence for electronic crimes? This guy was making an argument that he was essentially an ISP for whoever happened to drive by his house. There are established protections for ISP's that prevent search and siezure of their equipment when someone downstream transmits across their network. This guy was arguing that he should enjoy those same protections. The court ruled that when you run a unsecured wireless network that the police have probable cause to assume that you might be directly involved in whatever illegal traffic crosses your network (it's not clear how this applies to wireless points that themselves have downstream nodes). That's all..
That was true for me until Nokia released their new browser for S60. It's an amazing experience and the full-page rendering with some really novel navigation actually makes the mobile web extremely useable. There are still some sites that do funky things with Javascript/Flash that give it trouble, but for my needs it's nearly perfect.
As a better example: Gay marriage. States have basically exempted themselves (with judicial approval) from the full faith and credit clause when dealing with homosexual couples who marry in a state where it is legal.
I am the lead technical architect for Quickoffice (http://www.quickoffice.com). You might say we have developed a few Symbian applications in our day;)
Symbian certainly has its quirks, but this article is based on a lot of information that is no longer correct or even relevant.
1) The article states that no objects are deallocated on a 'leave'. This was true prior to 9.1. You had to manually push objects on a cleanup stack which would deallocate objects during a leave. However, with 9.1 the underlying leave mechanism is a standard C++ throw, meaning that the stack is unwound and all objects are properly deallocated (just like any other platform). The only limitation is that Symbian (for compatibility reasons I'm sure) chose to keep the throw hidden behind the User::Leave interface meaning that only integer exception codes can be thrown. You CAN actually throw an exception object with a normal 'throw SomeObj()' statement, but if it is uncaught the application panics.
Functionally this means that Symbian supports 'real' exception semantics, although it is limited in its support for full blown exception objects. It's 3/4 of what we want, and with some careful planning (managing the list of error codes) it provides fairly robust exception handling system.
2) String handling: Descriptors are a horrible convention. However, there is nothing stopping anyone from implementing their own more standard dynamic string class. That's what we did. A conversion operator allows us to automatically convert to/from descriptors with very little trouble (TPtrC is a wonderful thing). From our applications perspective strings are very much the dynamic strings we know and love on other platforms, with the Symbian descriptor bits abstracted away.
3) Threads: The EKA2 Kernel has great threading support. Their use may be 'discouraged', but that is far different from not having them available. We utilize threads when they make sense and have had no issues. Writing a multi-threaded application on Symbian is really no different than any other platform I've worked on.
4) The development environment is most definitely a problem. I've never had any issues getting the SDK's installed and running (although I have managed to corrupt SDK's on a few occasions;->). The command line build system is functional. The IDE's on the other hand, have been quite bad. Carbide 1.1 is an absolute mess, Codewarrior (the default development environment for years) is quirky, and working within Visual Studio is a largely manual process. From what I've heard about the new version of Carbide (1.2), this situation is going to be getting MUCH better in the near future (ahead of the iPhone release).
Symbian has really come a long ways in the last couple of years. We've done a lot of work to make it a more standard environment for our development efforts. Outside of direct UI work, a engineer at Quickoffice has to have very little direct Symbian knowledge. All of the standard C++ mechanisms are available (with the exception of exception objects). About 70% of our code is directly compilable on other platforms with no modification (the rest deals directly with Symbian API's).
There is even STL support available (I beleive Penrellian has a port up and running, we utilize stlport), which makes Symbian a fairly standard platform. It definitely has it warts. Many of the API's are undertested and rather poorly thought out. The documentation is often non-existent and the differences in emulation and device can be infuriating (sometimes it even breaks between two different devices). It is a evolving and ever improving situation, however. I hardly think that Apple has a 5 year lead over anyone.
I also do a lot of websurfing on my Nokia N80. It has a great browser, capable of faithfully rendering a great many pages on the web. In this case memory consumption/speed is a huge deal. My GPRS data connection is flaky and the phone doesn't have gigs of memory to play with.
I expect the number of websurfers relying on mobile devices to only increase. This attitude that both bandwidth and memory are unlimited is simply incorrect.
I'll happily confuse 'market value' for.. err.. 'market value' thank you very much.
Your confusing 'price' with 'market value', and the two are very much different. One is reflective of what the seller BELEIVES the optimal value of the product (in the intersection of supply/demand), the other is what something is actually worth in an open market.
So yes, the theater may do quite a bit to raise (or lower) the market value of the home (dependent on the buyers and makeup of the market itself).
The 20% number is the total number of workers with any kind of disability. That doesn't mean that 20% is unemployed, that they are listed with some kind of disability. This is NOT the number of people removed from the labor force for disability reasons. Those people must be 'detached from the labor force' in that they are not actively looking for work. A disabled person who is actively looking for work will be counted as unemployed. I can't find reliable figures for just how widespread that is.
Here is how the unemployment numbers are arrived at:
It is not like extremism is purely the domain of the religious. You have the whole of human existence to choose from in this case as well. There have been stateist extremeists, environmental extremists, technological extremists, and extremists of just about every ilk. Even Mac users can be every bit as fervent in their extremism as the craziest religious radical.
I find it very hard to condemn religion simply because a few of its indoctrinates take it way to far. After all, I would have to condemn other noble pursuits (like environmentalism) for the same reasons. I still find plenty of value in environmentalism, just as I find a lot to love in what religious people have DONE for this planet. They are a bastion of charity and goodwill. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship have been at the center of community development since the dawn of human history. Religion has often been the glue that binds strong societies together (as well as the force that drives them apart). I don't think the world would be better off without religion, it would be better off if we could convince everyone in the world to do what their religions actually TEACH them.
Just because some hijack religious interpretation to further their own need for control (and power), doesn't make religion bad. It makes those people bad.
The media has self-created the right to anonymous and unchallenged sources, and it's something that I find incredibly damaging. There are literally thousands of daily reports that rely on 'unnamed sources'. The incredible power the media wields is often done without the burden of transparency. They can make wild accusations, attribute them to some unnamed source, and pass their reporting as fact. The public is left to either simply trust them, or disregard the news completely.
I beleive that the 'right' to protect sources is a fundamentally flawed one. It's always funny to read a story about the lack of transparency in the Bush administration, with a unnamed administration official happy to corroborate it (the irony!). The media has the luxury of shifting the burden of proof from themselves to the accused. Since the journalist doesn't have to name their source, one must prove their innocence simply because some journalist pointed the finger.
All of this really points to a much larger problem, the press is accountable to no one. They have succeeded in creating a culture in which the media gets to play judge and jury, all while operating under a veil of secrecy. They swarm on stories like locusts, and when they've sucked the life out of people they simply move on. Facts don't seem to matter, and they certainly aren't interested in accepting responsibility for their mistakes.
For example, the University of Colorado football team was embroiled in a scandal a couple of years ago. Accusations of rape, sex for recruits, and general nastiness was levied against the program. Sports Illustrated ran a story which largely relied on highly questionable (although the article convienently left that out) and unnamed sources. The only problem? A series of subsequent investigations by both the state of Colorado, local police, and the University itself found little to no evidence to corroborate any of it. The whole thing turned out to be little more than a bunch of college kids attending college parties. Did the media stick around to report that? Nope, they had already long packed up and moved on to the next media dog-pile in hopes of ruining a few more lives so they could make a few more bucks.
It is this lack of accountability that disturbs me. A free press is great, but we need to find some way to hold journalists accountable for what they report. The problem is, any attempt at accountability is seen as a threat to that freedom surely knocking the U.S. down a few more spots. Yet it's something that is absolutely needed. The Watergate story served as a water-shed moment. Journalists now aspire to BECOME the news (see the celebrity Woodward and Bernstein enjoy now) and in doing so they hold themselves to a lower standard of reporting as long as the gravity of the story is sufficiently high. It seems that anything goes in journalism, as long as you didn't plagarize anything.
So my question is simple: How do we balance freedom of the press with a need for a truly accountable one?
I guess THIS is what they meant when they told me to 'think outside the box'. It's literally like Sony sat down and went 'just how badly can we screw up the PS3'? They are definitely executing that strategy to perfection.
Well you've succesfully described about... 30% of the overall population. Among the rest you'll find some of the brightest thinkers in the world. America continues to be a country on the edge of innovation and that hasn't changed. The rest of the world is rapidly gaining, not because the U.S. has slipped, but because many other countries now embrace innovative freedom just has the U.S. has for more than a century. The world is getting smarter, and that should give all of us some optimism for what we'll be able to achieve.
You raise an interesting question, and I don't think the answer is as clear cut as you think it is.
Should it be legal to drive a tank? After all, it is the pesronal responsibility of the person driving the tank to not..you know.. kill everyone. Yet we restrict access to tanks, because letting an individual own a tank is just not in the publics best interest. We let government regulate someones actions for the greater good. Freedom certainly has limits, and it is up to the government to set those limits.
The problem is determining what is truly in the best interest of a society is REALLY hard. If there was a conclusive link between violent video games and serial killers, then it may very well be in societies best interests to ban video games. On the other hand, what if potential killers who play GTA are often able to satisfy that craving for violence? Should we then PROMOTE violent video games as that would be for the greater good? Those are the types of questions we face, and we (as a world community) will be struggling with them for as long as we exist.
I make fairly frequent trips to London to visit our office there. It's interesting, I talked about these cameras with the guys there (the office is smack in the middle of London) and they all love them. Criminals have circumvented the system by being where the cameras aren't. This has made the highly populated parts London MUCH safer... the privacy issues concern me and the whole thing creeps me out (a lot). However, the system DOES appear to be at least somewhat effective and for anyone living in a highly urban situation that isn't all bad.
I can't give you an example where 'honesty' trumps economic principles, mainly because honesty IS an economic principle. Basic economics teaches that people response to incentives for their own personal self interest. The self-definition of being 'honest' is in many cases so important that it itself becomes an incentive. Some people feel pressured to be moral, and as such act in moral ways out of fear of being perceived as dishonest. Some people take great pride in their honesty, and thus act honestly to maintain that. The reasons are varied, but it doesn't change the fact that honesty itself can be quite a strong factor in making economic decisions.
The book 'Freakonomics' had an interesting example.
It highlights a business in which a person delivered bagels to offices. They would simply take a baset of bagels into the office along with a shoebox. It worked on the honor system, slip a dollar into the box and take the bagel. It was entirely possible to just steal a bagel, there was very little stopping you. It turns out (and I don't remember the exact numbers here) that something like 90% of the bagels where properly paid for. This varied according to time of the year, size of the office, etc... but overall the results where definitely encouraging. Here you had a situation that relied on economic honesty, and the business was quite succesful at it. Given the business model, I'm positive that is quite scalable as well.
The bot would, ideally, be as good as a very observant player, noting those who bluff and those who don't. Obviously noting 1 or 2 bluffs or non-bluffs would not be enough to make a decision, but over the course of a long tournament, or even better a poker playing career, this information would become very useful. The bot would learn its opponents, and this is what makes it an interesting problem.
A large part of what makes Hold'Em a unique challenge is that you really don't have a lot of deterministic information to go off of. A great many hands never reach the stage where you GET to see other players cards. So the data set is inherently incomplete. You can't know that a player likes to bluff, because an effective bluffer never actually shows his cards. After all, the whole idea of bluffing is that you never make it to the end of the hand where you HAVE to show your cards.So its not a simple problem of looking at past history to determine future play, because the past history is quite incomplete. You can know how often a player bluffs and gets called on it, but there may be another player who is actually bluffing much more often that AI can't know about through simple deterministic means.
This is why players have the option of showing their winning hand after they've won a pot, even if it doesn't make it to the final draw. Actually making it to the final card is not that common in practice (I would guess about 1/3 of hands). A good player will intentionally create the PERCEPTION of a certain playstyle by showing (or not) cards at the end of the hand. They can use that in the future to change their playstyle and catch unsuspecting players. A purely historical approach to data (based on a LOT of unknown outcomes) just doesn't work well here.
You are absolutely right, there is no way to 'guarantee' safety from terrorists anymore than you can't 'guarantee' I won't die in a car wreck. However, I certainly won't buy a car without seatbelts, crumple zones, and airbags. Each of those technological innovations gives me a much better chance of surviving. In the same way, technology is an absolutely essential part of fighting the war on terror. One important part of fighting terrorists is ratcheting up the costs and the difficulty of being a terrorist. You certainly won't get rid of the terrorists, but you can definitely make them less effective. You do this by going at them on all possible fronts.
We have to make the costs of terrorism higher. We do that by (i:
1) Police work: Make it more difficult to succesfully PLOT acts of terrorism. This is what the case in the UK did, terrorists now have to think more carefully about who they surround themselves with. This isolates terror groups, and limits the resources they can leverage to kill people. While this makes it harder to find these groups, it also makes them greatly less effective. It limits how well they can share knowledge and evolve their tactics.
2) Technology: Make it more difficult to EXECUTE acts of terrorism. Facial recognition, bomb detection, etc... are all important tools in combatting terrorists (disclaimer: It is definitely important to balance privacy and security, that's not what this post is about). By increasing the costs of subverting the technological barriers to terrorism, we can eliminate a HIGH percentage of potential terrorists. Most terrorists lack the money or the smarts needed to subvert technological solutions. Not all, but the goal here isn't total elmination but simply thinning the herd of potential terrorists.
3) Politics: Make it more difficult to WANT to be a terrorist. Do this by working with other governments to crack down on terrorist cultures within their borders (which the U.S. has done fairly effectively) and create a geo-political climate which removes the incentive to be a terrorist (whith the U.S. has failed miserably at).
Terrorism has been with us since the dawn of man, and its not going anywhere. There is not solution that guarantees our safety, but a variety of solutions that can help to minimize the danger.
Nokia certainly hasn't 'refused' to adopt linux. They are, after all, responsible for a huge initiative in mobile computing with maemo (http://www.maemo.org). They have a linux device (the 770) in the market today. It may not be a phone, but it shows a commitment on Nokia's part to pursuing Linux.
Nokia has also been quite involved with OpenSource, particularly with their KHTML based browser that ships on S60 phones.
The point being, Nokia actually seems like a prime candidate for a Linux device. I would be SHOCKED if they didn't have one in the works right now. I would certainly expect them to have one in the market before the end of 2007. Every indicator points in that direction.
Being first doesn't guarantee success, but it sure gives you a better shot at it. A highly comptent company that is first AND has the technical ability to maintain its lead has a great shot of really capturing a market.
However, being fast isn't always about being first. It makes great business sense because the most expensive part of the development lifecycle is not maintenence (in many cases), its development. Developing software comes with a HUGE up front cost, and generally that cost is being bore by the company developing it. While engineers are crafting highly maintainable code, the company itself is bleeding money. While the TOTAL cost may be higher for maintenence, most companies can't sustain lots of upfront development with no return on that investment. This why a product like Ruby on Rails is so valuable.. It gives businesses something they can monetize, which provides the funding needed to bridge the gap between the initial project and a more maintainable second generation.
We discuss a lot of things... When dealing with American politics it can be very difficult to discern the reality of the American sentiment (which does usually win out) and the rhetoric of ideological political posturing.
The reality is that Americans, by and large, continue to support fairly open immigration policies. The recent political lunacy is really more about 'energizing' a certain political base in an election year. This base is the 30% of Americans that you guys outside of our country perceive to represent 100% of what we do. They are loud.. I can see why you do.
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That shows a supreme lack of imagination. Look at Palm, with it's thousands of apps (big and small) that enable it to be so much more than Palm ever envisioned. The same goes for Symbian... so much of the power of those devices is in the truly clever and innovative ideas that the third parties bring to those platforms. Even the most basic functions have benefited from third party development. You can find improvements in security, contact management, and a host of other functions on those other platforms. The OEM's provide a platform, the development community makes it better.
The tragedy here is that the iPhone provides even more opportunities for real innovation. With thousands of developers (the world over) building on top of the work Apple has already done we would have seen truly stunning advances in both the functionality and the form of the iPhone.
The iPhone may not be a computer replacement, but that doesn't mean it's not a computing device with immense potential.
That's exactly the issue here, however. In your hypothetical, a 34 year old male should certainly be punished for having sexual relations with a 14 year old girl. Very few people would question that. However, should that singular offense lead to life on a list that will keep you from holding a job, living in a growing number of municipalities, and otherwise making your life simply unliveable?
I don't think that crime warrants what is effectively a life sentence, and certainly not on your first strike. Justice, after all, is not about revenge..
There are lots of other issues like this. For example, in Texas a stripper who is convicted of giving an overly suggestive lap dance can be charged with public lewdness... a 'crime' that can land you on the sex offender registry. So can selling 'obscene' materials at a porn store. That's the problem with these lists, they are meant to protect society from the most dangerous of offenders, but the hysterical of society expand them to include virtually any crime with any kind of sexual connotation.
The issue isn't Google, it's the Mozilla foundation. Just as you posit that Google *has* to be secretive, the Mozilla people *have* to be transparent and open. They represent the collective work of thousands of developers, each of home should enjoy 'ownership' in what they ultimately produce. With upwards of $50 million in play, they definitely deserve to know where that money came from and how it's being used.
They see the latest "Left vs. Right: Smackdown!" show on CNN, watch it for awhile, take one side or the other, and call it a day.
While a popular viewpoint, I think it's completely wrong. In reality most voters are really issue voters. They have one or two issues that are extremely important to them (ask a farmer about subsidies/tariffs or a factory worker about immigration/outsourcing). They tend to seek out candidates that support they're particular issues of interest. They then select a particular candidate from that group using some combination of charisma, identifiability, and gut instinct.
Once where past the primaries we get further polarized because the voting public really only cares about one or two issues, and with only two candidates to choose from it gets pretty clear cut for most voters.
This is one of the reasons democrats have really struggled in recent elections. The democratic platform tends to be a hodge-podge of vague positions and fractured loyalties. Since a democrat candidate has to appeal to a varied base that care about a LOT of different issues they end up having to take weak stands on a awful lot of them. So called 'blue dog' democrats are a perfect example of this. This 'moderate' group of democrats that can be quite conservative. Many are opposed to gay marriage for instance, so a democrat candidate has to toe a very delicate line of placating both sides of the issue. What you end up with is John Kerry.
The republicans show a tremendous amount of savvy by then attacking these candidates. If gay marriage is your hot button issue then republicans paint a very clear choice which reduces your vote to no choice at all. This can work in reverse as well.. in the 2006 elections it was clear that the Iraq war was the issue of choice for a LOT of voters, which led to a landslide for the Democratic party. However, as soon as the winds of change cause people to find new issues to care about then the Democrats will find themselves back to their same old struggles.
The point being... most voters in this country are much more intelligent than most people think they are. They simply cast their vote for the candidate that most closely aligns with the issues that truly matter to them. It's not that their uninformed sheep, it's that they don't bother to care about the things that aren't important to them. Which seems perfectly rational to me.
As a last note: Political Science junkies will point out that this phenemenon is the best defense of the two party system. In countries with multiple (sometimes dozens) of parties you end up with a highly fractured body of representatives responsible only to a handful of voters whom aligned with them only one or two important issues.
Reality:
I certainly don't care, and I suspect that 99% of the voting population is right there with me. I think the desire to have control of ones own representation on MySpace is perfectly legitimate. The rest of it is just a business squabble. It does very little to shape my opinion of Obama either positively or negatively. I somehow doubt I'm in the minority on this.
A atom is not patentable, a new type of medicine is nothing more than a particular arrangement of atoms, therefore that medicine should not be patentable.
You can apply this logic to lierally everything. If the conclusion you reach is that NOTHING should be patentable, that's one thing. To exclude software (at least in this case) as being unique is another altogether.
More correctly it should say 'Open WAP is not protection from search warrant.' That's essentially what the legal question was here. Does the fact that one has a Open WAP prevent the police from having probable cause to search your residence for electronic crimes? This guy was making an argument that he was essentially an ISP for whoever happened to drive by his house. There are established protections for ISP's that prevent search and siezure of their equipment when someone downstream transmits across their network. This guy was arguing that he should enjoy those same protections. The court ruled that when you run a unsecured wireless network that the police have probable cause to assume that you might be directly involved in whatever illegal traffic crosses your network (it's not clear how this applies to wireless points that themselves have downstream nodes). That's all..
That was true for me until Nokia released their new browser for S60. It's an amazing experience and the full-page rendering with some really novel navigation actually makes the mobile web extremely useable. There are still some sites that do funky things with Javascript/Flash that give it trouble, but for my needs it's nearly perfect.
As a better example: Gay marriage. States have basically exempted themselves (with judicial approval) from the full faith and credit clause when dealing with homosexual couples who marry in a state where it is legal.
I am the lead technical architect for Quickoffice (http://www.quickoffice.com). You might say we have developed a few Symbian applications in our day;)
Symbian certainly has its quirks, but this article is based on a lot of information that is no longer correct or even relevant.
1) The article states that no objects are deallocated on a 'leave'. This was true prior to 9.1. You had to manually push objects on a cleanup stack which would deallocate objects during a leave. However, with 9.1 the underlying leave mechanism is a standard C++ throw, meaning that the stack is unwound and all objects are properly deallocated (just like any other platform). The only limitation is that Symbian (for compatibility reasons I'm sure) chose to keep the throw hidden behind the User::Leave interface meaning that only integer exception codes can be thrown. You CAN actually throw an exception object with a normal 'throw SomeObj()' statement, but if it is uncaught the application panics.
Functionally this means that Symbian supports 'real' exception semantics, although it is limited in its support for full blown exception objects. It's 3/4 of what we want, and with some careful planning (managing the list of error codes) it provides fairly robust exception handling system.
2) String handling: Descriptors are a horrible convention. However, there is nothing stopping anyone from implementing their own more standard dynamic string class. That's what we did. A conversion operator allows us to automatically convert to/from descriptors with very little trouble (TPtrC is a wonderful thing). From our applications perspective strings are very much the dynamic strings we know and love on other platforms, with the Symbian descriptor bits abstracted away.
3) Threads: The EKA2 Kernel has great threading support. Their use may be 'discouraged', but that is far different from not having them available. We utilize threads when they make sense and have had no issues. Writing a multi-threaded application on Symbian is really no different than any other platform I've worked on.
4) The development environment is most definitely a problem. I've never had any issues getting the SDK's installed and running (although I have managed to corrupt SDK's on a few occasions;->). The command line build system is functional. The IDE's on the other hand, have been quite bad. Carbide 1.1 is an absolute mess, Codewarrior (the default development environment for years) is quirky, and working within Visual Studio is a largely manual process. From what I've heard about the new version of Carbide (1.2), this situation is going to be getting MUCH better in the near future (ahead of the iPhone release).
Symbian has really come a long ways in the last couple of years. We've done a lot of work to make it a more standard environment for our development efforts. Outside of direct UI work, a engineer at Quickoffice has to have very little direct Symbian knowledge. All of the standard C++ mechanisms are available (with the exception of exception objects). About 70% of our code is directly compilable on other platforms with no modification (the rest deals directly with Symbian API's).
There is even STL support available (I beleive Penrellian has a port up and running, we utilize stlport), which makes Symbian a fairly standard platform. It definitely has it warts. Many of the API's are undertested and rather poorly thought out. The documentation is often non-existent and the differences in emulation and device can be infuriating (sometimes it even breaks between two different devices). It is a evolving and ever improving situation, however. I hardly think that Apple has a 5 year lead over anyone.
I also do a lot of websurfing on my Nokia N80. It has a great browser, capable of faithfully rendering a great many pages on the web. In this case memory consumption/speed is a huge deal. My GPRS data connection is flaky and the phone doesn't have gigs of memory to play with.
I expect the number of websurfers relying on mobile devices to only increase. This attitude that both bandwidth and memory are unlimited is simply incorrect.
I'll happily confuse 'market value' for.. err.. 'market value' thank you very much.
Your confusing 'price' with 'market value', and the two are very much different. One is reflective of what the seller BELEIVES the optimal value of the product (in the intersection of supply/demand), the other is what something is actually worth in an open market.
So yes, the theater may do quite a bit to raise (or lower) the market value of the home (dependent on the buyers and makeup of the market itself).
The best I could find is:
1 _1.php coupled with this explanation:
http://www.infouse.com/disabilitydata/disability/
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Feb2004/duboff0204.html
http://www.westgard.com/essay60.htm
The 20% number is the total number of workers with any kind of disability. That doesn't mean that 20% is unemployed, that they are listed with some kind of disability. This is NOT the number of people removed from the labor force for disability reasons. Those people must be 'detached from the labor force' in that they are not actively looking for work. A disabled person who is actively looking for work will be counted as unemployed. I can't find reliable figures for just how widespread that is.
Here is how the unemployment numbers are arrived at:
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
It is not like extremism is purely the domain of the religious. You have the whole of human existence to choose from in this case as well. There have been stateist extremeists, environmental extremists, technological extremists, and extremists of just about every ilk. Even Mac users can be every bit as fervent in their extremism as the craziest religious radical.
I find it very hard to condemn religion simply because a few of its indoctrinates take it way to far. After all, I would have to condemn other noble pursuits (like environmentalism) for the same reasons. I still find plenty of value in environmentalism, just as I find a lot to love in what religious people have DONE for this planet. They are a bastion of charity and goodwill. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship have been at the center of community development since the dawn of human history. Religion has often been the glue that binds strong societies together (as well as the force that drives them apart). I don't think the world would be better off without religion, it would be better off if we could convince everyone in the world to do what their religions actually TEACH them.
Just because some hijack religious interpretation to further their own need for control (and power), doesn't make religion bad. It makes those people bad.
The media has self-created the right to anonymous and unchallenged sources, and it's something that I find incredibly damaging. There are literally thousands of daily reports that rely on 'unnamed sources'. The incredible power the media wields is often done without the burden of transparency. They can make wild accusations, attribute them to some unnamed source, and pass their reporting as fact. The public is left to either simply trust them, or disregard the news completely.
I beleive that the 'right' to protect sources is a fundamentally flawed one. It's always funny to read a story about the lack of transparency in the Bush administration, with a unnamed administration official happy to corroborate it (the irony!). The media has the luxury of shifting the burden of proof from themselves to the accused. Since the journalist doesn't have to name their source, one must prove their innocence simply because some journalist pointed the finger.
All of this really points to a much larger problem, the press is accountable to no one. They have succeeded in creating a culture in which the media gets to play judge and jury, all while operating under a veil of secrecy. They swarm on stories like locusts, and when they've sucked the life out of people they simply move on. Facts don't seem to matter, and they certainly aren't interested in accepting responsibility for their mistakes.
For example, the University of Colorado football team was embroiled in a scandal a couple of years ago. Accusations of rape, sex for recruits, and general nastiness was levied against the program. Sports Illustrated ran a story which largely relied on highly questionable (although the article convienently left that out) and unnamed sources. The only problem? A series of subsequent investigations by both the state of Colorado, local police, and the University itself found little to no evidence to corroborate any of it. The whole thing turned out to be little more than a bunch of college kids attending college parties. Did the media stick around to report that? Nope, they had already long packed up and moved on to the next media dog-pile in hopes of ruining a few more lives so they could make a few more bucks.
It is this lack of accountability that disturbs me. A free press is great, but we need to find some way to hold journalists accountable for what they report. The problem is, any attempt at accountability is seen as a threat to that freedom surely knocking the U.S. down a few more spots. Yet it's something that is absolutely needed. The Watergate story served as a water-shed moment. Journalists now aspire to BECOME the news (see the celebrity Woodward and Bernstein enjoy now) and in doing so they hold themselves to a lower standard of reporting as long as the gravity of the story is sufficiently high. It seems that anything goes in journalism, as long as you didn't plagarize anything.
So my question is simple: How do we balance freedom of the press with a need for a truly accountable one?
I guess THIS is what they meant when they told me to 'think outside the box'. It's literally like Sony sat down and went 'just how badly can we screw up the PS3'? They are definitely executing that strategy to perfection.
Well you've succesfully described about... 30% of the overall population. Among the rest you'll find some of the brightest thinkers in the world. America continues to be a country on the edge of innovation and that hasn't changed. The rest of the world is rapidly gaining, not because the U.S. has slipped, but because many other countries now embrace innovative freedom just has the U.S. has for more than a century. The world is getting smarter, and that should give all of us some optimism for what we'll be able to achieve.
You raise an interesting question, and I don't think the answer is as clear cut as you think it is.
Should it be legal to drive a tank? After all, it is the pesronal responsibility of the person driving the tank to not..you know.. kill everyone. Yet we restrict access to tanks, because letting an individual own a tank is just not in the publics best interest. We let government regulate someones actions for the greater good. Freedom certainly has limits, and it is up to the government to set those limits.
The problem is determining what is truly in the best interest of a society is REALLY hard. If there was a conclusive link between violent video games and serial killers, then it may very well be in societies best interests to ban video games. On the other hand, what if potential killers who play GTA are often able to satisfy that craving for violence? Should we then PROMOTE violent video games as that would be for the greater good? Those are the types of questions we face, and we (as a world community) will be struggling with them for as long as we exist.
I make fairly frequent trips to London to visit our office there. It's interesting, I talked about these cameras with the guys there (the office is smack in the middle of London) and they all love them. Criminals have circumvented the system by being where the cameras aren't. This has made the highly populated parts London MUCH safer... the privacy issues concern me and the whole thing creeps me out (a lot). However, the system DOES appear to be at least somewhat effective and for anyone living in a highly urban situation that isn't all bad.
I can't give you an example where 'honesty' trumps economic principles, mainly because honesty IS an economic principle. Basic economics teaches that people response to incentives for their own personal self interest. The self-definition of being 'honest' is in many cases so important that it itself becomes an incentive. Some people feel pressured to be moral, and as such act in moral ways out of fear of being perceived as dishonest. Some people take great pride in their honesty, and thus act honestly to maintain that. The reasons are varied, but it doesn't change the fact that honesty itself can be quite a strong factor in making economic decisions.
The book 'Freakonomics' had an interesting example.
It highlights a business in which a person delivered bagels to offices. They would simply take a baset of bagels into the office along with a shoebox. It worked on the honor system, slip a dollar into the box and take the bagel. It was entirely possible to just steal a bagel, there was very little stopping you. It turns out (and I don't remember the exact numbers here) that something like 90% of the bagels where properly paid for. This varied according to time of the year, size of the office, etc... but overall the results where definitely encouraging. Here you had a situation that relied on economic honesty, and the business was quite succesful at it. Given the business model, I'm positive that is quite scalable as well.
The bot would, ideally, be as good as a very observant player, noting those who bluff and those who don't. Obviously noting 1 or 2 bluffs or non-bluffs would not be enough to make a decision, but over the course of a long tournament, or even better a poker playing career, this information would become very useful. The bot would learn its opponents, and this is what makes it an interesting problem.
A large part of what makes Hold'Em a unique challenge is that you really don't have a lot of deterministic information to go off of. A great many hands never reach the stage where you GET to see other players cards. So the data set is inherently incomplete. You can't know that a player likes to bluff, because an effective bluffer never actually shows his cards. After all, the whole idea of bluffing is that you never make it to the end of the hand where you HAVE to show your cards.So its not a simple problem of looking at past history to determine future play, because the past history is quite incomplete. You can know how often a player bluffs and gets called on it, but there may be another player who is actually bluffing much more often that AI can't know about through simple deterministic means.
This is why players have the option of showing their winning hand after they've won a pot, even if it doesn't make it to the final draw. Actually making it to the final card is not that common in practice (I would guess about 1/3 of hands). A good player will intentionally create the PERCEPTION of a certain playstyle by showing (or not) cards at the end of the hand. They can use that in the future to change their playstyle and catch unsuspecting players. A purely historical approach to data (based on a LOT of unknown outcomes) just doesn't work well here.
I couldn't disagree more.
You are absolutely right, there is no way to 'guarantee' safety from terrorists anymore than you can't 'guarantee' I won't die in a car wreck. However, I certainly won't buy a car without seatbelts, crumple zones, and airbags. Each of those technological innovations gives me a much better chance of surviving. In the same way, technology is an absolutely essential part of fighting the war on terror. One important part of fighting terrorists is ratcheting up the costs and the difficulty of being a terrorist. You certainly won't get rid of the terrorists, but you can definitely make them less effective. You do this by going at them on all possible fronts.
We have to make the costs of terrorism higher. We do that by (i:
1) Police work: Make it more difficult to succesfully PLOT acts of terrorism. This is what the case in the UK did, terrorists now have to think more carefully about who they surround themselves with. This isolates terror groups, and limits the resources they can leverage to kill people. While this makes it harder to find these groups, it also makes them greatly less effective. It limits how well they can share knowledge and evolve their tactics.
2) Technology: Make it more difficult to EXECUTE acts of terrorism. Facial recognition, bomb detection, etc... are all important tools in combatting terrorists (disclaimer: It is definitely important to balance privacy and security, that's not what this post is about). By increasing the costs of subverting the technological barriers to terrorism, we can eliminate a HIGH percentage of potential terrorists. Most terrorists lack the money or the smarts needed to subvert technological solutions. Not all, but the goal here isn't total elmination but simply thinning the herd of potential terrorists.
3) Politics: Make it more difficult to WANT to be a terrorist. Do this by working with other governments to crack down on terrorist cultures within their borders (which the U.S. has done fairly effectively) and create a geo-political climate which removes the incentive to be a terrorist (whith the U.S. has failed miserably at).
Terrorism has been with us since the dawn of man, and its not going anywhere. There is not solution that guarantees our safety, but a variety of solutions that can help to minimize the danger.
Nokia certainly hasn't 'refused' to adopt linux. They are, after all, responsible for a huge initiative in mobile computing with maemo (http://www.maemo.org). They have a linux device (the 770) in the market today. It may not be a phone, but it shows a commitment on Nokia's part to pursuing Linux.
Nokia has also been quite involved with OpenSource, particularly with their KHTML based browser that ships on S60 phones.
The point being, Nokia actually seems like a prime candidate for a Linux device. I would be SHOCKED if they didn't have one in the works right now. I would certainly expect them to have one in the market before the end of 2007. Every indicator points in that direction.
Being first doesn't guarantee success, but it sure gives you a better shot at it. A highly comptent company that is first AND has the technical ability to maintain its lead has a great shot of really capturing a market.
However, being fast isn't always about being first. It makes great business sense because the most expensive part of the development lifecycle is not maintenence (in many cases), its development. Developing software comes with a HUGE up front cost, and generally that cost is being bore by the company developing it. While engineers are crafting highly maintainable code, the company itself is bleeding money. While the TOTAL cost may be higher for maintenence, most companies can't sustain lots of upfront development with no return on that investment. This why a product like Ruby on Rails is so valuable.. It gives businesses something they can monetize, which provides the funding needed to bridge the gap between the initial project and a more maintainable second generation.
Its not greed that drives this..its economics.
We discuss a lot of things... When dealing with American politics it can be very difficult to discern the reality of the American sentiment (which does usually win out) and the rhetoric of ideological political posturing.
The reality is that Americans, by and large, continue to support fairly open immigration policies. The recent political lunacy is really more about 'energizing' a certain political base in an election year. This base is the 30% of Americans that you guys outside of our country perceive to represent 100% of what we do. They are loud.. I can see why you do.