Like Zeinfeld, I find the anti-American spin of the article more than a bit suspect. In particular, the statements about Super 301 trade laws blocking the introduction of TRON into Japanese school computers. This just doesn't make any sense?
If such a switch were made to TRON, what would prevent US companies from licensing TRON to compete in the school Japanese market. Nothing - particularly since the OS is open source. In 1989 the Japanese government could have chosen at least half a dozen non-Microsoft operating systems for their school computers and the US government couldn't say boo about it. What makes TRON any different than if the Japanese had chosen to use the Amiga OS or even a variant of Unix?
The article then goes on to state that Japanese government and several computer firms severed ties to TRON because it might anger the American government and companies. However, the evidence is overwhelmingly against this statement as these same companies continued to use TRON making it the most ubiquitous operating system in the world. I don't see how this constitutes severed relationships.
To believe the basic premise of this article you have to suspend disbelief on too many levels. It may make for a nice story on the imagined evils of American capitalism trouncing the poor Japanese programmer, but I suspect the truth as to the failure of TRON as a desktop operating system is far different and more complicated.
Then one little city rebelled and MS instantly rewrote the licensing deal.
It seems a way for Linux advocates to hurt Microsoft where it hurts most would be to make sure every decision maker caught in negotiations with Microsoft gets a copy of this article.
At the very minimum it presents a 5-step recipe for getting a 30% to 40% discount on your Microsoft license fees.
Yeah, casual gamers are going to plop down $400 on a console that requires a $10 a month service fee to play games that you have to purchase separately.
Even worse, the consumer purchasing the unit is making a $400 bet the service won't go out of business three months later leaving them with a DRM enabled paper weight.
I enjoy laymen-level particle physics and cosmology and would love to learn more about it sometime in a context where nobody was forcing me to turn in homework;-)
You may be interested in The Teaching Company. They offer the lecture component of college level courses on audio tape, video tape and/or DVD. I've bought a couple of physics and astronomy courses on DVD and enjoyed them very much. They do a good job of selecting professors from top universities to lecture and a lot more material is covered in a 20 to 40 hour course than can ever be seen in a 1 hour PBS or Discovery Channel documentary.
You can get the courses as very reasonable prices (around $60-$80 on DVD) if you wait for their inventory clearance sales that seem happen twice a year or so.
I'm not affiliated with The Teaching Company in any way, just a happy customer.
Genius indeed. However, to fight fire with fire, the anti-RFID crowd should come up with their own scarry nickname for these potentially pesky little devices. Perhaps "black beacon of death", "cancer tab", or something else capable of playing off the public's irrational health fears when it becomes more widely known that these devices are powered by absorbing and emitting electromagnetic "RADIATION".
What about OSS?
on
Science Faction
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Has the impact of open source software been anticipated in science fiction literature or movies? It seems to me that 10 to 20 years from now the impact of OSS on the technology industry and our culture can potentially be 10 times or more greater than it is today. Particularly as the grip of the media companies is tightened on an unsuspecting public with draconian DRM laws that leak into all facets of our lives through media controlled technology. The chaos of OSS may ultimately become the last refuge of innovation in a tech sector that is otherwise corralled and beaten into submission.
Re:Stuff from SF we should have.
on
Science Faction
·
· Score: 1
Where's the flying cars? I want my flying car!
Well, the flying car may not be as far off as you think.
What ever happened to exercising some civility and making the assumption that people and corporations do make honest mistakes and will typically try to fix the situation when such a mistake is pointed out.
I fully believe that Corbis should be able to defend it's copyrights in courts if necessary. However, from the article it seems that Amazon and it's affiliated partners would have fully cooperated with removing the infringing material if they were simply informed of the issue. Furthermore, I would like to think that some reasonable settlement could have been reached short of filing a lawsuit had the infringing companies actually made any money off the images in question.
However, this seems like the case of another company thinking it won the judicial lottery because they found a clear cut instance copyright infringement. From the way lawsuits are flying out of Corbis you would think the Earth came to a crashing halt because some dumb picture of Renee Holhoegger found it's way onto Amazon.
Am I being naive that such a mistake can be made and remedied with people acting like adults, or do the people running Corbis need to go back to nursery school to learn to play nice with other kids? Sheesh.
And then we have such auctions as "Ghost in a Jar". They're obviously just there to lure suckers, and if you fall for it, you pretty much deserve what you get.
So, like, what are you trying to say? There isn't a ghost in the jar I bought off e-bay?
I stand corrected. Thanks for providing the link to the court decision to clarify what was ambiguous in the original article.
It seems that although the court does affirm the right to reverse engineer products under the Copyright Act, this right can be waived within the context of a freely entered private contract such as the EULA.
The contractual aspect of the case did seem to play a major role in the overall decision and in awarding damages.
Even though Bower's won the case in part on the premise that Baystate broke the EULA and reverse engineered his CAD template system, it seems the more important issue is that Baystate was found guilty of infringing on Bower's 1990 patent. It only served to bolster the patent infringement case and gain the sympathy of the court that Baystate apparently ignored the EULA and set out to purposely reverse engineer the "trade secrets" in Bower's product.
However, if the patent didn't exist would Bower's have ultimately won this case based purely on the reverse engineering clauses in the EULA? I suspect not.
It seems that this case doesn't seem to offer a good precedent for preventing the common practice of reverse engineering through a EULA because so much of it is tied up in the patent infringement aspects of the case. Also, the article makes it seem that Baystate so closely copied the UI that they could have infringed copyrights as well which only serves to make the case even more ambiguous with regards to reverse engineering.
It would be more interesting if these other aspects of the case didn't exist and Bower's had simply tried to sue Baystate on the fact they violated the EULA by having two weeks of reverse engineering his product in their development schedule -- even if he couldn't point to specific trade secrets of his being used by Baystate in their product.
Therefore, I doubt this case will even put a dent in the common practice of reverse engineering competitors products.
Hmmm, maybe it's just too hot of a summer day to think much, but am I the only one who found the article long and boring? Then again I'm not one that often gets British humor either.
Is it just me or is this starting to look like the nerd version of the O.J. trial?
We still have a way to go before any actual trial, but the coverage of the SCO debacle by the nerd press sadly puts the FOX News coverage of the Laci Peterson murder case to shame when it comes to sheer quantity of rumor, innuendo and pure speculation.
I would have a hard time flying an airlines that would be so stupid to install such devices in the belief that security is being enhanced. If people think this technology produces false positives then monitoring the twitching of someone's ass will be a nightmare. What? One twitch of the ass too many and a jet on a cross country flight is diverted to the nearest airport under F16 escort. Yeah, right. There are so many holes in the logic behind this story as it relates to airline security that I don't even know where to begin.
Once an armed hijacker is on board a plane the game is essentially over. I would much rather have the money that would be wasted on this type of crap and have it be spent on better screening equipment and personnel at the gate before the flight takes off.
As someone commented earlier, this is one of the worst examples of a solution looking for a problem that I have ever seen. Anyone know what company is pushing this junk to cash in on post 9/11 hysteria? I want to short their stock.
I basically have had the same experience. I stopped writing cursive after the second or third grade and have printed ever since. My signature is pretty much just a wild scrawl after the first letter of each name and varies quite a bit from signature to signature.
However, the main problem I have with handwriting is that my spelling is atrocious. Without the ability to run what I'm writing through a spell checker my spelling would seriously detract from what I'm attempting to communicate. If I must handwrite a letter I'll typically type it into a word processor, spell check it and then transpose it onto paper.
It's hard to tell whether the word processor is a savior for someone like me, or if it just allowed me to be lazy so I could get through life without spelling well.
BTW, I only had two spelling errors in this posting -- which is pretty good for me:-).
It sure looks like the quality is there, but the thing looks, well, like Frankenmonitor. I would bet the odds are 10 to 1 he doesn't live with a female to complain about ugly green things laying around the house.
An alternative to 8-way joysticks might just be two optical mice. Software can easily determine the 8 different directions of movement for each independent mouse and combine the different combinations into a single key-click equivalent. With mice you would have the added benefit that they can be placed anywhere in front you rather than the fixed distance between the pads on this device. Even better an escape sequence could be added so one or both mice toggle between character entry and mouse pointing.
Not all local governments are corrupt in the manner you describe. On the San Francisco Penninsula there is the San Mateo County Telecom Authority (SAMCAT) that encourages multiple telecom and cable companies to offer service throughout San Mateo County. The major hurdle here is not getting local governments to grant multiple franchises in the same geographic area (this has already been done on multiple occasions), but getting the competing telecom and cable companies granted a franchise license to actually spend the money on infrastructure to offer competing services in the current down economy. In most communities there still is only a single choice because the established provider is the local 800lb gorilla, but at least there is some hope for real competition once the industry starts growing again.
Re:Uphill water flow at Disneyworld since 1971..
on
Water Flows Uphill
·
· Score: 1
I remember seeing a much larger version of such a floating faucet at the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum in San Francisco during the 1970's. I'm not sure if it is still there or not.
Obviously you haven't had the pleasure of watching a 12 month old child for an extended period of time. At that age my son would often get himself into predicaments that he could not extract himself from. I remember one time when he managed to squeeze himself under a leather ottoman and wound up with his arms and legs flailing out from each of the its four sides. Needless to say, the magic hand of dad had to come to his rescue.
What's so amazing with kids is their relentless passion of exploring and learning about the world around them. The first three years of life are an endless cycle of observation, mimicry and experimentation. I think that truly autonomous robots will have to develop some facsimile of emotions so as to have an inner drive to explore and modify their programming to better cope with the world around them. What we need is a robot that can feel pain when tumbling down stairs, hunger when power is low, frustration when trapped and a sense of joy and accomplishment at finally figuring out how to extricate itself. At that point we can then simply sit back and let the robot figure out for itself how to avoid the "keep from smacking the wall and staying there" routine.
I wonder if these relatively rapid changes to U.S. paper currency are a reaction to the fact there is now another paper currency vying for dominance -- namely the Euro. I believe that the vast majority of counterfeiting of U.S. currency occurs outside the U.S. and if the Euro is considered more secure in this regards it could be a serious threat to the dominance of the U.S. currency throughout the world. If this is indeed the case, it is in our (the U.S.) best interest to react to real and perceived vulnerabilities as quickly as possible and the American public had better get used to these kinds of changes to the revered greenback on a regular basis. As always, competition is a potent catalyst for change.
Sorry, I just don't see this system of authentication working. This system seems like it would filter out far too many useful emails that are automatically generated such as on-line sales receipts, shipping status information, newsletters and such. As bad as SPAM is, this alone would make it a no-go for me.
I always wondered why legitimate email servers can't obtain a signed certificate similar to the ones for SSL. There is a fairly lengthy, well-established process for getting a properly signed certificate with a definite lifetime that firmly identifies who is at the other end of a TCP/IP pipe. These certificates would be exchanged at the start of a TCP/IP session between email servers similar to SSL certificates. If they so choose, an organization can then configure their email server to only accept email from other email servers that have properly signed certificates. Mail could also be accepted from servers with unsigned certificates, but these would have to be manually installed at the receiving end similar to how you would install an unsigned SSL certificate in your browser. Also, email from originating servers without certificates or with unsigned certificates could be so marked in the headers for disposal by the end user if they so desire.
Such a system would seem to have many advantages. The vast majority of legitimate email servers could easily obtain and renew certificates for sending email using a well-established process they are already use for obtaining SSL certificates. These servers would form a trusted network of identified servers where SPAM could be detected and offending servers cut out from the trusted network in a variety of ways. Ultimately, organizations that flaunt the system would be unable to renew their certificates and they would be permanently tossed out of the trusted network.
As an end user sending email, to be sure that you are able to send email within the trusted network, your organization (school, business, charity, whatever...) needs to have an email server with a signed certificate or you need to belong to an ISP with a signed certificate that you use for sending email. If you didn't have this, you would still be able to use the existing email infrastructure, but you would probably find that an increasing number of servers would reject your email as coming from a non-trusted source.
I'm certainly not an email protocol expert so I wouldn't be surprised if someone could poke 100 holes in the system I described above, but I am pretty sure that the ultimate solution will require a combination of technology (signed certificates) and bureaucracy (Verisign, et al.) to form a trusted network for email that SPAMmers can be quickly and efficiently ejected from.
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Like Zeinfeld, I find the anti-American spin of the article more than a bit suspect. In particular, the statements about Super 301 trade laws blocking the introduction of TRON into Japanese school computers. This just doesn't make any sense?
If such a switch were made to TRON, what would prevent US companies from licensing TRON to compete in the school Japanese market. Nothing - particularly since the OS is open source. In 1989 the Japanese government could have chosen at least half a dozen non-Microsoft operating systems for their school computers and the US government couldn't say boo about it. What makes TRON any different than if the Japanese had chosen to use the Amiga OS or even a variant of Unix?
The article then goes on to state that Japanese government and several computer firms severed ties to TRON because it might anger the American government and companies. However, the evidence is overwhelmingly against this statement as these same companies continued to use TRON making it the most ubiquitous operating system in the world. I don't see how this constitutes severed relationships.
To believe the basic premise of this article you have to suspend disbelief on too many levels. It may make for a nice story on the imagined evils of American capitalism trouncing the poor Japanese programmer, but I suspect the truth as to the failure of TRON as a desktop operating system is far different and more complicated.
Then one little city rebelled and MS instantly rewrote the licensing deal.
It seems a way for Linux advocates to hurt Microsoft where it hurts most would be to make sure every decision maker caught in negotiations with Microsoft gets a copy of this article.
At the very minimum it presents a 5-step recipe for getting a 30% to 40% discount on your Microsoft license fees.
I always wondered why my friends who married became dull and unentertaining almost overnight.
From the other side of the fence -- the lives of my single friends who hadn't married eventually seem shallow and empty.
It's all a matter of perspective.
Yeah, casual gamers are going to plop down $400 on a console that requires a $10 a month service fee to play games that you have to purchase separately.
Even worse, the consumer purchasing the unit is making a $400 bet the service won't go out of business three months later leaving them with a DRM enabled paper weight.
I enjoy laymen-level particle physics and cosmology and would love to learn more about it sometime in a context where nobody was forcing me to turn in homework ;-)
You may be interested in The Teaching Company. They offer the lecture component of college level courses on audio tape, video tape and/or DVD. I've bought a couple of physics and astronomy courses on DVD and enjoyed them very much. They do a good job of selecting professors from top universities to lecture and a lot more material is covered in a 20 to 40 hour course than can ever be seen in a 1 hour PBS or Discovery Channel documentary.
You can get the courses as very reasonable prices (around $60-$80 on DVD) if you wait for their inventory clearance sales that seem happen twice a year or so.
I'm not affiliated with The Teaching Company in any way, just a happy customer.
The "green tag" idea sounds like genius.
Genius indeed. However, to fight fire with fire, the anti-RFID crowd should come up with their own scarry nickname for these potentially pesky little devices. Perhaps "black beacon of death", "cancer tab", or something else capable of playing off the public's irrational health fears when it becomes more widely known that these devices are powered by absorbing and emitting electromagnetic "RADIATION".
Has the impact of open source software been anticipated in science fiction literature or movies? It seems to me that 10 to 20 years from now the impact of OSS on the technology industry and our culture can potentially be 10 times or more greater than it is today. Particularly as the grip of the media companies is tightened on an unsuspecting public with draconian DRM laws that leak into all facets of our lives through media controlled technology. The chaos of OSS may ultimately become the last refuge of innovation in a tech sector that is otherwise corralled and beaten into submission.
Where's the flying cars? I want my flying car!
Well, the flying car may not be as far off as you think.
Of course, I'll believe it when I see it.
Because the artist is crappy? No.
Because the sounds is crappy? Sadly, no.
What ever happened to exercising some civility and making the assumption that people and corporations do make honest mistakes and will typically try to fix the situation when such a mistake is pointed out.
I fully believe that Corbis should be able to defend it's copyrights in courts if necessary. However, from the article it seems that Amazon and it's affiliated partners would have fully cooperated with removing the infringing material if they were simply informed of the issue. Furthermore, I would like to think that some reasonable settlement could have been reached short of filing a lawsuit had the infringing companies actually made any money off the images in question.
However, this seems like the case of another company thinking it won the judicial lottery because they found a clear cut instance copyright infringement. From the way lawsuits are flying out of Corbis you would think the Earth came to a crashing halt because some dumb picture of Renee Holhoegger found it's way onto Amazon.
Am I being naive that such a mistake can be made and remedied with people acting like adults, or do the people running Corbis need to go back to nursery school to learn to play nice with other kids? Sheesh.
And then we have such auctions as "Ghost in a Jar". They're obviously just there to lure suckers, and if you fall for it, you pretty much deserve what you get.
So, like, what are you trying to say? There isn't a ghost in the jar I bought off e-bay?
I stand corrected. Thanks for providing the link to the court decision to clarify what was ambiguous in the original article.
It seems that although the court does affirm the right to reverse engineer products under the Copyright Act, this right can be waived within the context of a freely entered private contract such as the EULA.
The contractual aspect of the case did seem to play a major role in the overall decision and in awarding damages.
Even though Bower's won the case in part on the premise that Baystate broke the EULA and reverse engineered his CAD template system, it seems the more important issue is that Baystate was found guilty of infringing on Bower's 1990 patent. It only served to bolster the patent infringement case and gain the sympathy of the court that Baystate apparently ignored the EULA and set out to purposely reverse engineer the "trade secrets" in Bower's product.
However, if the patent didn't exist would Bower's have ultimately won this case based purely on the reverse engineering clauses in the EULA? I suspect not.
It seems that this case doesn't seem to offer a good precedent for preventing the common practice of reverse engineering through a EULA because so much of it is tied up in the patent infringement aspects of the case. Also, the article makes it seem that Baystate so closely copied the UI that they could have infringed copyrights as well which only serves to make the case even more ambiguous with regards to reverse engineering.
It would be more interesting if these other aspects of the case didn't exist and Bower's had simply tried to sue Baystate on the fact they violated the EULA by having two weeks of reverse engineering his product in their development schedule -- even if he couldn't point to specific trade secrets of his being used by Baystate in their product.
Therefore, I doubt this case will even put a dent in the common practice of reverse engineering competitors products.
BTW, IANAL so don't sue me if you get sued.
Hmmm, maybe it's just too hot of a summer day to think much, but am I the only one who found the article long and boring? Then again I'm not one that often gets British humor either.
/. anyway?
BTW, what is this doing on
Is it just me or is this starting to look like the nerd version of the O.J. trial?
We still have a way to go before any actual trial, but the coverage of the SCO debacle by the nerd press sadly puts the FOX News coverage of the Laci Peterson murder case to shame when it comes to sheer quantity of rumor, innuendo and pure speculation.
I would have a hard time flying an airlines that would be so stupid to install such devices in the belief that security is being enhanced. If people think this technology produces false positives then monitoring the twitching of someone's ass will be a nightmare. What? One twitch of the ass too many and a jet on a cross country flight is diverted to the nearest airport under F16 escort. Yeah, right. There are so many holes in the logic behind this story as it relates to airline security that I don't even know where to begin.
Once an armed hijacker is on board a plane the game is essentially over. I would much rather have the money that would be wasted on this type of crap and have it be spent on better screening equipment and personnel at the gate before the flight takes off.
As someone commented earlier, this is one of the worst examples of a solution looking for a problem that I have ever seen. Anyone know what company is pushing this junk to cash in on post 9/11 hysteria? I want to short their stock.
Ahhh, the memories of intense dirt clod fights in hills behind the house I grew up in. I can only hope my 1 year old son will have such memories.
I basically have had the same experience. I stopped writing cursive after the second or third grade and have printed ever since. My signature is pretty much just a wild scrawl after the first letter of each name and varies quite a bit from signature to signature.
:-).
However, the main problem I have with handwriting is that my spelling is atrocious. Without the ability to run what I'm writing through a spell checker my spelling would seriously detract from what I'm attempting to communicate. If I must handwrite a letter I'll typically type it into a word processor, spell check it and then transpose it onto paper.
It's hard to tell whether the word processor is a savior for someone like me, or if it just allowed me to be lazy so I could get through life without spelling well.
BTW, I only had two spelling errors in this posting -- which is pretty good for me
It sure looks like the quality is there, but the thing looks, well, like Frankenmonitor. I would bet the odds are 10 to 1 he doesn't live with a female to complain about ugly green things laying around the house.
An alternative to 8-way joysticks might just be two optical mice. Software can easily determine the 8 different directions of movement for each independent mouse and combine the different combinations into a single key-click equivalent. With mice you would have the added benefit that they can be placed anywhere in front you rather than the fixed distance between the pads on this device. Even better an escape sequence could be added so one or both mice toggle between character entry and mouse pointing.
Not all local governments are corrupt in the manner you describe. On the San Francisco Penninsula there is the San Mateo County Telecom Authority (SAMCAT) that encourages multiple telecom and cable companies to offer service throughout San Mateo County. The major hurdle here is not getting local governments to grant multiple franchises in the same geographic area (this has already been done on multiple occasions), but getting the competing telecom and cable companies granted a franchise license to actually spend the money on infrastructure to offer competing services in the current down economy. In most communities there still is only a single choice because the established provider is the local 800lb gorilla, but at least there is some hope for real competition once the industry starts growing again.
I believe that you mean something like this.
I remember seeing a much larger version of such a floating faucet at the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum in San Francisco during the 1970's. I'm not sure if it is still there or not.
Obviously you haven't had the pleasure of watching a 12 month old child for an extended period of time. At that age my son would often get himself into predicaments that he could not extract himself from. I remember one time when he managed to squeeze himself under a leather ottoman and wound up with his arms and legs flailing out from each of the its four sides. Needless to say, the magic hand of dad had to come to his rescue.
What's so amazing with kids is their relentless passion of exploring and learning about the world around them. The first three years of life are an endless cycle of observation, mimicry and experimentation. I think that truly autonomous robots will have to develop some facsimile of emotions so as to have an inner drive to explore and modify their programming to better cope with the world around them. What we need is a robot that can feel pain when tumbling down stairs, hunger when power is low, frustration when trapped and a sense of joy and accomplishment at finally figuring out how to extricate itself. At that point we can then simply sit back and let the robot figure out for itself how to avoid the "keep from smacking the wall and staying there" routine.
I wonder if these relatively rapid changes to U.S. paper currency are a reaction to the fact there is now another paper currency vying for dominance -- namely the Euro. I believe that the vast majority of counterfeiting of U.S. currency occurs outside the U.S. and if the Euro is considered more secure in this regards it could be a serious threat to the dominance of the U.S. currency throughout the world. If this is indeed the case, it is in our (the U.S.) best interest to react to real and perceived vulnerabilities as quickly as possible and the American public had better get used to these kinds of changes to the revered greenback on a regular basis. As always, competition is a potent catalyst for change.
Sorry, I just don't see this system of authentication working. This system seems like it would filter out far too many useful emails that are automatically generated such as on-line sales receipts, shipping status information, newsletters and such. As bad as SPAM is, this alone would make it a no-go for me.
I always wondered why legitimate email servers can't obtain a signed certificate similar to the ones for SSL. There is a fairly lengthy, well-established process for getting a properly signed certificate with a definite lifetime that firmly identifies who is at the other end of a TCP/IP pipe. These certificates would be exchanged at the start of a TCP/IP session between email servers similar to SSL certificates. If they so choose, an organization can then configure their email server to only accept email from other email servers that have properly signed certificates. Mail could also be accepted from servers with unsigned certificates, but these would have to be manually installed at the receiving end similar to how you would install an unsigned SSL certificate in your browser. Also, email from originating servers without certificates or with unsigned certificates could be so marked in the headers for disposal by the end user if they so desire.
Such a system would seem to have many advantages. The vast majority of legitimate email servers could easily obtain and renew certificates for sending email using a well-established process they are already use for obtaining SSL certificates. These servers would form a trusted network of identified servers where SPAM could be detected and offending servers cut out from the trusted network in a variety of ways. Ultimately, organizations that flaunt the system would be unable to renew their certificates and they would be permanently tossed out of the trusted network.
As an end user sending email, to be sure that you are able to send email within the trusted network, your organization (school, business, charity, whatever...) needs to have an email server with a signed certificate or you need to belong to an ISP with a signed certificate that you use for sending email. If you didn't have this, you would still be able to use the existing email infrastructure, but you would probably find that an increasing number of servers would reject your email as coming from a non-trusted source.
I'm certainly not an email protocol expert so I wouldn't be surprised if someone could poke 100 holes in the system I described above, but I am pretty sure that the ultimate solution will require a combination of technology (signed certificates) and bureaucracy (Verisign, et al.) to form a trusted network for email that SPAMmers can be quickly and efficiently ejected from.