Actually, most Macs that come with the min-VGA plug also come with a mini-VGA/VGA adaptor. I've bought 2 iBooks, and they both came with them. Before that, Powerbooks used to come with a MacVGA/VGA adaptors.
Move along, no extra 'screwing the user' rhetoric to see here...
I never fail to be impressed by this kind of ingenuity. Despite not being a particularly hack-savvy computer user, I am a web designer, so have enormous respect and empathy with people who can do more with less (or something with almost nothing). I mean, to adapt a computer designed 20 years ago to perform modern tasks at all is something of a minor miracle.
I reckon that the kind of thinking that goes in to producing these kind of projects is ultimately more valuable than the project itself.
I'm left-handed, currently use a 3-button USB mouse (Contour UniMouse), and have used Macs comfortably with single buttons for over 10 years. It's really not difficult.
I don't feel even slightly alienated, since I know from long habit (much like PC users with their right-click) that the control key serves as a right-click modifier on a Mac (if you only have a single button mouse, or haven't configured the buttons on your mouse), and they have them on both sides of the keyboard. So what's the problem?
Frankly, this just seems like a ill-researched gripe from someone who doesn't really like Macs, and wanted an excuse to whine about them.
Perhaps I jumped the gun here, however, this does seem to intimate an actual new evolutionary trait not just a physical acclimation to a new environment.
Perhaps the use of the word 'mutation' could be read ambiguously, given its frequent use as a descriptive term within genetics and evolutionary theory.
However, mutation simply means "The act or process of being altered or changed", meaning it applies perfectly well in the context of the article without implying evolutionary change.
how could bending your knees completely rework your skeletal structure?
With regard's elephant's knees, I gather that the front 'knees' are actually modified wristjoints; they function as knees, but are structurally analagous to the human wrist. There is no drastic reworking of the skeletal structure in elephants compared to other mammals.
If these "new" humans with their "new thumbs" had children who were raised in an environment without cell phones, game controllers, etc. they would not manifest this behavior.
Nowhere did the article suggest that an acquired trait such as more dextrous thumbs would be passed to offspring. It seemed merely to be stating that young people's thumbs seem to be becoming more dextrous due to different patterns of usage, in the same way that someone who plays the guitar while still growing will likely develop more dextrous hands than others, simply because the usage patterns will inform bone and muscle growth. Arguments about Darwin and Lamarck don't enter into it.
How, under Lamarckian evolution, could the giraffe add vertibrae to its neck?
This is a little off-topic, but it's worth correcting.
A giraffe has exactly the same number of verterbrae in its neck as a mouse (and every other mammal) does - 7. They are, of course, a lot bigger.
As someone said in the OS/2 story, Microsoft gained its dominance through restrictive OEM licensing. Any penalty must forbid them from using this anticompetitive practice to be worthwhile.
Well quite, but technically, the original consent decree already forbade this.
Bill Gates ackowledged at the time that this 'penalty' would mean precisely nothing, since the policy had already done its work from his point of view.
The problem is not simply preventing M$ from continuing to do all of the shitty things it's done until now, but to put in place some punitive measures to compensate everyone else for the undeserved monopoly position they gained through cheating.
What would really give MUSIC a shot in the arm is if Canada divided that money up among MUSICIANS first, and then allowed the musicians to decide (for once) how much the record companies should get.
I don't know how it works in Canada, but in Australia the way artists get paid is described below.
I work as a volunteer at a community radio station, and every 12 weeks we have what is called APRA (Australian Performing Rights Association) Week, where we fill out forms of what songs were played that week, and the royalties paid to APRA are based on these lists.
Is there a similar organisation in Canada to whom this money could be paid, so it isn't just record companies getting paid?
It doesn't solve the basic inequity of the levy, but it at least (hopefully) would go some way to making sure artists actually see some money, rather than record company hacks.
It's right there in the first sentence. What the lawyers for Morpheus are saying is IF what they do is to be considered illegal, then the activities of ISPs must be considered illegal too.
It is, however, pretty clear that the lawyers in question do not consider that what they do is illegal, and are merely suggesting that if stupid laws are going to be enacted, that they be consistent across the board. This is a strategy to highlight how foolish and unworkable the laws are in the first place, and to place whatever blame exists on the users who misuse the software.
As with manufacturers of photocopiers, video recorder and CD burners, they simply provide a facility that can be taken by users and used for good or ill.
The problem with Africa is not lack of food, it is lack of transport infrastructure and refrigeration to ensure that
a) food can be transported to where it is needed and b) that food can be preserved until it gets there.
Hygiene and medical care would be far lesser problems if people there actually got to eat properly.
Perhaps if we didn't cripple an entire continent's economy with IMF 'restructuring' loans, Africans might be able to afford transport infrastructure and refrigeration, and the situation there would not be so dire that they need to release sterilised flies just to make sure they can earn a subsistance living and keep their children alive.
We in the West get to make all of these 'mistakes' and benefit from them, but then seem to think we have the right to assert that no-one else is allowed to make the same mistakes (since they interfere with the 'natural way'), effectively taking enough rungs out of the ladder to make sure that developing nations can never enjoy our way of life.
Before making grand assertions about the 'natural way', get off of your overprivileged ass, brush the Pringle crumbs from your beard, and live in their shoes for a week. Then tell me you wouldn't be doing exactly the same thing.
I still dig this game in a big way. It's still the only game I play where I literally and completely lose track of time. It's very hard to put it down and just get some damn sleep.
if the fact that NZ can implement these sorts of projects has anything to do with their relatively simple political system? They have no states, only a single national parliament, and even that only has one house. It certainly must streamline the legislative and funding environment that enables these sorts of forward-thinking projects. I also wonder if their relatively small and geographically localised population has something to do with it too.
Here in Australia, all sorts of good projects get held up, or butchered to the point of uselessness by petty bickering and pointless competition between the states, just so one Premier or another can say "We have brought new jobs to [insert state here]".
And we only have 6 states; I can imagine what these sorts of things must get like in a nation with 50 of them.
I wonder if now AOL Time Warner will try to "modify" the DVD standard in order to make DVDs into "software" so they can go ahead with their scheme anyway.
IANAL, but it's hard to see how they can do this. If the fundamantal purpose of the DVD is a vehicle for movies, then anything short of changing that fundamental purpose will not alter the intent of the ruling.
It comes back down to the ruling; just because the DVD contains software, and requires a processor to be used, does not mean that it is perceived as software, or acts meaningfully as software in its application. As long as (for practical purposes) DVDs are used as vehicles for film, then they are just a higher-tech version of videotapes, and should be treated accordingly.
Are you talking about China, or Asia? As I understand it, China's population is around the 1.2 billion mark. The population of the entire world is only 6 billion!
Adobe needs to first learn about the culture and understand it before they try to dictate how chinese people should behave. Chinese are very proud of the culture, history and tradition. No self respecting chinese is going to roll over just because adobe says so.
And best of luck to them, they are very welcome to have and keep those traditions, and neither should they roll over.
Having said this, they also shouldn't expect a foreign company to roll over and produce native-language versions of that company's software either, just because they way that company does business doesn't mesh with their culture.
The political advantage to doing so early remains low, the cost high. This is particularly so since 60% of the UK media market is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, an Austrailian with no particular concern for the UK or its inhabitants but a considerable and justified fear of the European Union curtailing his ambitions through anti-monopoly (trust) regulation.
Actually, despite being born in Australia, Rupert Murdoch has been an American citizen, both living and working there, for many many years.
Don't try to make us take the blame for that ghastly media despot; he seems quite happy to count himself a legal citizen of whatever nation offers him the greatest financial advantages. He'd happily backstab the Yanks in a second if he thought there was a quid in it.
I must confess that as much as I would like to see live and viable thylacines roaming the Tasmanian countryside once more, it isn't going to happen. This is why I find the efforts of both clone-happy scientists and the 'Thylacines aren't really dead' cranks more than a little bemusing.
The cranks have not managed to produce one shred of irrefutable verifiable evidence that thylacines are not completely extinct in over 60 years. This is despite all of the 'unconfirmed sightings', and alleged samples from 'nest sites' and 'spoor', which have all turned out either to be something else or indeterminate. There are even claims by bushmen that they have actually shot and killed living Thylacines, but naturally (as with all good conspiracies) somehow it has been contrived that the corpse was not produced for scientific examination (through the hunters' fear of prosecution, or failure to recognise the significance until after the fact, etc.)
And as for the scientists, even if they do manage to create the technology to clone a thylacine, there isn't enought preserved thylacine DNA to produce a viable self-sustaining population of the animals.
The reason I am so bemused by these efforts is that they both avoid with almost childlike vigour having to accept that these remarkable beasts are forever dead, gone and never to return, and it is all our fault.
Until we own up to the fact that we wipe out entire species with regular abandon, we will never be able to stop this human-driven extinction process. If we persist with this 'if we wipe them out, we can just clone them again later' attitude, then there's really no incentive to preserve what we have now.
Threats fall into a special category of speech known as performatives, where the speech also constitutes an action beyond the simple speech itself.
When you promise to pay someone for an apple for example, you are not merely making a statement about or description of a promise, you are enacting a promise.
Threats are also performative speech; they are not protected speech, but an unprotected and assaultive action, since it is impossible to separate the 'protected' speech from the unprotected action.
This is an important distinction people often ignore.
You don't boil a frog by dropping it in boiling water; it'll jump straight out. You boil it by putting it in cold water, then slowly raise the temperature. It'll fall asleep, then die.
It strikes me that this is simply the difference between someone who has taken an active position that there is no God, or at the very least no evidence for one, whereas 'none' simply tells you that this person does not practise a religion.
While 'none' would confortably encompass most atheists, but just because someone put 'none', it does not automatically follow that they are an atheist. This, I would suppose, is why many people put 'atheist' on the census.
Yea, you're right. I think the community has been too overzealous about privacy without considering the nature of public action.
Certainly, actions that occur in a public arena have no reasonable expectation of being private; if you observe an event in a public space, you then own that knowledge. BUT, until recently, you could pretty much guarantee that if anyone was observing your actions in such an environment, you would be able to observe them as well. With recent proposals for introducing face-recognition software, for example, you can now be observed and recorded in public by anonymous and unaccountable voyeurs for any purpose.
Society would run a lot smoother if we weren't so secretive about what we do and what we like.
Privacy is not the same as secrecy. Privacy is about having the right to choose which actions or communications are made public.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, most Macs that come with the min-VGA plug also come with a mini-VGA/VGA adaptor. I've bought 2 iBooks, and they both came with them. Before that, Powerbooks used to come with a MacVGA/VGA adaptors.
Move along, no extra 'screwing the user' rhetoric to see here...
I never fail to be impressed by this kind of ingenuity. Despite not being a particularly hack-savvy computer user, I am a web designer, so have enormous respect and empathy with people who can do more with less (or something with almost nothing). I mean, to adapt a computer designed 20 years ago to perform modern tasks at all is something of a minor miracle.
I reckon that the kind of thinking that goes in to producing these kind of projects is ultimately more valuable than the project itself.
Now, the application, the application...
I'm left-handed, currently use a 3-button USB mouse (Contour UniMouse), and have used Macs comfortably with single buttons for over 10 years. It's really not difficult.
I don't feel even slightly alienated, since I know from long habit (much like PC users with their right-click) that the control key serves as a right-click modifier on a Mac (if you only have a single button mouse, or haven't configured the buttons on your mouse), and they have them on both sides of the keyboard. So what's the problem?
Frankly, this just seems like a ill-researched gripe from someone who doesn't really like Macs, and wanted an excuse to whine about them.
Perhaps I jumped the gun here, however, this does seem to intimate an actual new evolutionary trait not just a physical acclimation to a new environment.
Perhaps the use of the word 'mutation' could be read ambiguously, given its frequent use as a descriptive term within genetics and evolutionary theory.
However, mutation simply means "The act or process of being altered or changed", meaning it applies perfectly well in the context of the article without implying evolutionary change.
how could bending your knees completely rework your skeletal structure?
With regard's elephant's knees, I gather that the front 'knees' are actually modified wristjoints; they function as knees, but are structurally analagous to the human wrist. There is no drastic reworking of the skeletal structure in elephants compared to other mammals.
If these "new" humans with their "new thumbs" had children who were raised in an environment without cell phones, game controllers, etc. they would not manifest this behavior.
Nowhere did the article suggest that an acquired trait such as more dextrous thumbs would be passed to offspring. It seemed merely to be stating that young people's thumbs seem to be becoming more dextrous due to different patterns of usage, in the same way that someone who plays the guitar while still growing will likely develop more dextrous hands than others, simply because the usage patterns will inform bone and muscle growth. Arguments about Darwin and Lamarck don't enter into it.
How, under Lamarckian evolution, could the giraffe add vertibrae to its neck?
This is a little off-topic, but it's worth correcting.
A giraffe has exactly the same number of verterbrae in its neck as a mouse (and every other mammal) does - 7. They are, of course, a lot bigger.
I'm pretty amazed that someone so clever as L. Ron Hubbard would allow something like this to happen.
:)
I'm not sure he's got a lot of say in it, since he's been dead since 1986.
Unless, of course, you buy the CoS propaganda.
As someone said in the OS/2 story, Microsoft gained its dominance through restrictive OEM licensing. Any penalty must forbid them from using this anticompetitive practice to be worthwhile.
Well quite, but technically, the original consent decree already forbade this.
Bill Gates ackowledged at the time that this 'penalty' would mean precisely nothing, since the policy had already done its work from his point of view.
The problem is not simply preventing M$ from continuing to do all of the shitty things it's done until now, but to put in place some punitive measures to compensate everyone else for the undeserved monopoly position they gained through cheating.
Not only is the article slashdotted but it is cut into 10 pieces and finding it in the google cache is a real pain.
Just click on the "printer-friendly" link. It all comes up on one page then.
What would really give MUSIC a shot in the arm is if Canada divided that money up among MUSICIANS first, and then allowed the musicians to decide (for once) how much the record companies should get.
I don't know how it works in Canada, but in Australia the way artists get paid is described below.
I work as a volunteer at a community radio station, and every 12 weeks we have what is called APRA (Australian Performing Rights Association) Week, where we fill out forms of what songs were played that week, and the royalties paid to APRA are based on these lists.
Is there a similar organisation in Canada to whom this money could be paid, so it isn't just record companies getting paid?
It doesn't solve the basic inequity of the levy, but it at least (hopefully) would go some way to making sure artists actually see some money, rather than record company hacks.
It's right there in the first sentence. What the lawyers for Morpheus are saying is IF what they do is to be considered illegal, then the activities of ISPs must be considered illegal too.
It is, however, pretty clear that the lawyers in question do not consider that what they do is illegal, and are merely suggesting that if stupid laws are going to be enacted, that they be consistent across the board. This is a strategy to highlight how foolish and unworkable the laws are in the first place, and to place whatever blame exists on the users who misuse the software.
As with manufacturers of photocopiers, video recorder and CD burners, they simply provide a facility that can be taken by users and used for good or ill.
The problem with Africa is not lack of food, it is lack of transport infrastructure and refrigeration to ensure that
a) food can be transported to where it is needed and
b) that food can be preserved until it gets there.
Hygiene and medical care would be far lesser problems if people there actually got to eat properly.
Perhaps if we didn't cripple an entire continent's economy with IMF 'restructuring' loans, Africans might be able to afford transport infrastructure and refrigeration, and the situation there would not be so dire that they need to release sterilised flies just to make sure they can earn a subsistance living and keep their children alive.
We in the West get to make all of these 'mistakes' and benefit from them, but then seem to think we have the right to assert that no-one else is allowed to make the same mistakes (since they interfere with the 'natural way'), effectively taking enough rungs out of the ladder to make sure that developing nations can never enjoy our way of life.
Before making grand assertions about the 'natural way', get off of your overprivileged ass, brush the Pringle crumbs from your beard, and live in their shoes for a week. Then tell me you wouldn't be doing exactly the same thing.
I still dig this game in a big way. It's still the only game I play where I literally and completely lose track of time. It's very hard to put it down and just get some damn sleep.
So Bushes can clone and succeed one another for thousands of years.
George Snr. and Dubya will be pleased.
if the fact that NZ can implement these sorts of projects has anything to do with their relatively simple political system? They have no states, only a single national parliament, and even that only has one house. It certainly must streamline the legislative and funding environment that enables these sorts of forward-thinking projects. I also wonder if their relatively small and geographically localised population has something to do with it too.
Here in Australia, all sorts of good projects get held up, or butchered to the point of uselessness by petty bickering and pointless competition between the states, just so one Premier or another can say "We have brought new jobs to [insert state here]".
And we only have 6 states; I can imagine what these sorts of things must get like in a nation with 50 of them.
I wonder if now AOL Time Warner will try to "modify" the DVD standard in order to make DVDs into "software" so they can go ahead with their scheme anyway.
IANAL, but it's hard to see how they can do this. If the fundamantal purpose of the DVD is a vehicle for movies, then anything short of changing that fundamental purpose will not alter the intent of the ruling.
It comes back down to the ruling; just because the DVD contains software, and requires a processor to be used, does not mean that it is perceived as software, or acts meaningfully as software in its application. As long as (for practical purposes) DVDs are used as vehicles for film, then they are just a higher-tech version of videotapes, and should be treated accordingly.
Out of 3 billion people
Are you talking about China, or Asia? As I understand it, China's population is around the 1.2 billion mark. The population of the entire world is only 6 billion!
Adobe needs to first learn about the culture and understand it before they try to dictate how chinese people should behave. Chinese are very proud of the culture, history and tradition. No self respecting chinese is going to roll over just because adobe says so.
And best of luck to them, they are very welcome to have and keep those traditions, and neither should they roll over.
Having said this, they also shouldn't expect a foreign company to roll over and produce native-language versions of that company's software either, just because they way that company does business doesn't mesh with their culture.
That sword cuts both ways.
The political advantage to doing so early remains low, the cost high. This is particularly so since 60% of the UK media market is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, an Austrailian with no particular concern for the UK or its inhabitants but a considerable and justified fear of the European Union curtailing his ambitions through anti-monopoly (trust) regulation.
Actually, despite being born in Australia, Rupert Murdoch has been an American citizen, both living and working there, for many many years.
Don't try to make us take the blame for that ghastly media despot; he seems quite happy to count himself a legal citizen of whatever nation offers him the greatest financial advantages. He'd happily backstab the Yanks in a second if he thought there was a quid in it.
Considering Australia's size and geography, I'm surprise solar power isn't implemented on a wider scale.
Because the sun goes down.
I must confess that as much as I would like to see live and viable thylacines roaming the Tasmanian countryside once more, it isn't going to happen. This is why I find the efforts of both clone-happy scientists and the 'Thylacines aren't really dead' cranks more than a little bemusing.
The cranks have not managed to produce one shred of irrefutable verifiable evidence that thylacines are not completely extinct in over 60 years. This is despite all of the 'unconfirmed sightings', and alleged samples from 'nest sites' and 'spoor', which have all turned out either to be something else or indeterminate. There are even claims by bushmen that they have actually shot and killed living Thylacines, but naturally (as with all good conspiracies) somehow it has been contrived that the corpse was not produced for scientific examination (through the hunters' fear of prosecution, or failure to recognise the significance until after the fact, etc.)
And as for the scientists, even if they do manage to create the technology to clone a thylacine, there isn't enought preserved thylacine DNA to produce a viable self-sustaining population of the animals.
The reason I am so bemused by these efforts is that they both avoid with almost childlike vigour having to accept that these remarkable beasts are forever dead, gone and never to return, and it is all our fault.
Until we own up to the fact that we wipe out entire species with regular abandon, we will never be able to stop this human-driven extinction process. If we persist with this 'if we wipe them out, we can just clone them again later' attitude, then there's really no incentive to preserve what we have now.
Pardon me if I am being dense, but, why does it seem that artist are feeding the monster that they know is going to devour them?
Artist continue to feed this ravenous beast in the hope that it will eat them last.
Try threatening the president.
Threats fall into a special category of speech known as performatives, where the speech also constitutes an action beyond the simple speech itself.
When you promise to pay someone for an apple for example, you are not merely making a statement about or description of a promise, you are enacting a promise.
Threats are also performative speech; they are not protected speech, but an unprotected and assaultive action, since it is impossible to separate the 'protected' speech from the unprotected action.
This is an important distinction people often ignore.
You don't boil a frog by dropping it in boiling water; it'll jump straight out. You boil it by putting it in cold water, then slowly raise the temperature. It'll fall asleep, then die.
Your government knows this.
It strikes me that this is simply the difference between someone who has taken an active position that there is no God, or at the very least no evidence for one, whereas 'none' simply tells you that this person does not practise a religion.
While 'none' would confortably encompass most atheists, but just because someone put 'none', it does not automatically follow that they are an atheist. This, I would suppose, is why many people put 'atheist' on the census.
Yea, you're right. I think the community has been too overzealous about privacy without considering the nature of public action.
Certainly, actions that occur in a public arena have no reasonable expectation of being private; if you observe an event in a public space, you then own that knowledge. BUT, until recently, you could pretty much guarantee that if anyone was observing your actions in such an environment, you would be able to observe them as well. With recent proposals for introducing face-recognition software, for example, you can now be observed and recorded in public by anonymous and unaccountable voyeurs for any purpose.
Society would run a lot smoother if we weren't so secretive about what we do and what we like.
Privacy is not the same as secrecy. Privacy is about having the right to choose which actions or communications are made public.