At any reasonbly big science fiction convention, you can get either passive sparkly plastic blades or "light kits" that use single-ended neon bulbs inside a plastic sleeve for the blade. These look fantasic. Of course, they're fragile.
I lived in Florida, and therefore do not have much love for Scientology. (Repo Man put it best: "Dioretix. Science of matter over mind.") I even went to one public protest of their strong-arm tactics. However, by the same token...
Hewlett-Packard and Coca Cola must be fronts for Mormonism
The Free Software Foundation must be a front for polyamorous Paganism
The Red Cross must be a front for Atheism
Hollywood must be a front for East European Zionism
The Screenwriters' Guild must have been a front for Communism
At some point, this starts to become silly. I'm not sure if this point has been reached with respect to Scientology. For example, I'll grant that the terrible version of Battlefield Earth was certainly a Scientology schtick, but does every movie or teevee show become Scientology Propaganda whenever John Travolta, Tom Cruise, or Kirstie Alley signs up for a role? I found Eyes Wide Shut incredibly dull and dead-horse-beating as well as dumb (I've been to orgies in the Bible Belt with less security than the one in the movie), but I don't think I got too many subliminal messages from it.
According to an issue of "Ask Marilyn" that I really wish I had kept, violence is acceptable because "everyone knows it
was faked," while sex is not because it's real.
This is nonsense, of course, because the violence on the popular show "Cops" is not faked, and I have seen no evidence that people object to this show. (I object to it, because it presents violations of civil liberties as just fine, but most people don't see that.) Nor, for that matter, is the violence in boxing matches faked, and the violence in "tough guy" competitions isn't even stylized or controlled. Some people object to boxing, but not many.
But then again, this is the same woman who said that the reason you can't see the wind is that you couldn't see air because air molecules were too small to see, so what do you expect?
(FTR, the reason you can't see wind most of the time is that most of the time the air is visually homogeneous. When it isn't, such as with layers of heat over Florida blacktop during summer, let alone when there's actual condensation, you can see wind just fine.)
I've wrapped plenum-rated cable around a soldering iron that was hot enough to fry the copper off a board if I wasn't careful (normally ran it through a diode for PC board work). No effect. PVC-insulated cable, on the other hand, roasts and stinks rather quickly.
Incidentally, "plenum" is not the name of the cable; it's the name of the air space. Literally, it is an air space at higher pressure than the surrounding air space (e.g. for ventilation). However, it has come to mean just about any air space, especially the air space above the ceiling and in walls.
is that Microsoft would have to sell, by auction, a minimum of three licenses to enable third parties to produce versions for other operating systems "such as Linux."
It does not mean that Microsoft has to produce a Linux version. Nor does it mean that the third parties have to produce a Linux version. What it means is that at least three companies will have the right to produce a version of Office for whatever other environment they want to.
The crap that Apple pulled with 8.0 was to freeze out the clone manufacturers. Their contracts only gave them the right to use System 7. Steve Jobs wanted to get rid of the clones, and this is how he did it.
Some people think this was a good move. I'm not so sure. I think clones would have strengthened Apple's position, but maybe only if they had started much earlier.
I am a big fan of Connie Willis. She is excellent and writes with good emotion, usually humorous, but sometimes quite grim (The Doomsday Book).
However, there is a not-so-subtle difference. LeGuin is definitely a woman writer, except perhaps for The Lathe of Heaven. Willis is a writer who is a woman.
In the same sense, Woody Allen is a Jewish comedian. Groucho Marx was a comedian who was Jewish. Richard Pryor started off as a Black comedian but later became a comedian who was black. Bill Cosby did it the other way around. Octavia Butler is a Black Woman Writer. Samuel Delaney started off as a writer who was gay and black, became a Gay Writer who was black and then, unfortunately, stopped writing SF right after that cliffhanger in Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand.
About half of John Varley's stories contain the idea of safe, reversible sex-change operations. At least three or four contain the idea that this kind of sexual exploration is for the young. I can't narrow it down any more than that, I'm afraid.
His work is very interesting because, while it contains many elements that reflect what feminism should be about, he shows some pretty strong impatience about what feminism is.
The interesting thing is that the levels of carbon dioxide, while increasing, are nowhere near the highest levels during human history. That credit goes to the time of the Roman empire.
How do we know? Well, for thousands of years, people have been making crimped brass buttons. When you make one of these, a little bit of air gets trapped inside. All you have to do is get one of these buttons from an archealogical dig, make sure it's really sealed, put it in a vacuum, drill a tiny hole in it, and subject the gas to spectrographic analysis.
It probably did lead to global warming. The Middle Ages, by all accounts, were astonishingly temperate. This explains a lot of things, such as the explorations of the Vikings, who come from places that nowadays seem a bit on the cold side. Back then, it wasn't so bad.
I wouldn't dismiss the concerns about global warming entirely. However, it is also worth remembering that small increases in temperature are associate with fairly large increases in plant growth. What with the depletion of the rain forests and the need to grow more food, a period of lushness may be exactly what the world needs.
I also wouldn't trust environmentalism entirely. Concern for the environment is good, but some of the efforts have been rather shortsighted and destructive. Pressure from Greenpeace caused the State of Florida (possibly others as well, but I have personal knowledge of Florida) to get rid of all the hospital incinerators. Now, infectious medical waste is buried in landfills in Alabama, unless it winds up washing on shore, due either to deliberate dumping, accidental spillage, or jettisoning of cargo required during hurricanes and the like. I don't see this as an improvement. Medical incineration was hardly a massive source of air pollution in the first place.
Actually, I believe Solaris has kernel extensions which can be used to garuntee a process a minimum amount of runtime.
But I could be wrong.
I don't know that I'm not wrong either, so I asked the local Solaris guru. He said that later versions of Solaris provide prioctl, which is somewhat better than nice, but that he hadn't heard of any kernel extensions that provided guarantees or any way to make such guarantees to the process. I looked at the description of prioctl in his book, and while it contains some hand-waving about "real-time" processes, it falls short of making any guarantees.
Although "real-time" has a very good definition (A real-time problem is any
problem in which the time taken to arrive at the answer is part of its correctness) people abuse the definition horribly.
That's a good definition, provided that it is clear we are talking about wall clock time. Unfortunately, it's a bit like the definition of "gender" (a grammatical marker in the sense that person and number are markers); nobody really pays much attention to it.
You are thinking that anyone wanting
security and safety is a bleeting sheep.
Nope. I want security and safety, too. But that's OK. I didn't expect you to understand what I was saying at all. I have communicated with many people who write as you do, and I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that they are unable to understand that other people value safety just as much as they do, but simply differ in their opinions as to what exactly makes a secure and safe America.
That's OK. I know that you cannot conceive as anyone who does not believe exactly like you as other than an insidious enemy of your safety, just as bin Laden is incapable of viewing America as anything other than the great Satan.
The drive in the iPod is so thin that it's incredible that they could even fit a motor in there. It's a rectangle that just fits in the case but not much thicker than a stack of a few credit cards.
I know it wouldn't be a terribly good engineering decision to have more than one drive in the device, because of the extra electronics and the need for the software to handle multiple volumes, but physically, they could do it and only need to make it about 5mm thicker.
The battery is about the same shape as the disk drive, but a bit thinner. The high surface area probably explains the excellent recharge performance.
I lived through military
checkpoints and police blockades for 2 weeks to get into my apartment.
I got there a couple of days after they moved
the checkpoints from 14th St. to Canal St. This was lucky, as the only place I had to stay was on Christopher St. When I was there, in the bars between stints of volunteering, I got a very good impression of the people. I already admired New Yorkers, not least because I grew up there. It seemed to me that at that time, most were not in favor of war and would have been opposed to restrictions on civil liberties. Perhaps that has changed.
The group of "well meaning, good
intentioned" Americans that only believe that effective policing can occur when the "Cops" are handcuffed and
blindfolded.
You don't need to mince words. As one of those people concerned with civil liberties, I am well aware that people think of us as horrible, vicious, anti-American scum.
The trouble is this. When people speak of security, it can mean two things:
Feeling secure
Actually being secure
When you write "His actions have actually made me feel more comfortable about my situation," you are clearly referring to number 1. I view 2 as being more important than 1. I also think that, in many instances, the sweeping measures taken support 1 at the expense of 2.
This is a fundamental philosophical difference, and I'm well aware that people who are concerned with 2 are a reviled minority. Consider the case of the ACLU pushing so that Nazis could march in Skokie. Most people think that's horrible, because people who are hated by Nazis have a right to feel comfortable. Personally, as someone who is Jewish enough for Hitler and Israel, I want Nazis marching. That's because I want to see and count them. Forcing them to stay in their homes doesn't make them or their hatred vanish, it just allows people to keep their head in the sand. I am well aware that most people consider my perception monstrous.
What concerns me about the recent legistlation is not the ostensible use to track down foreign nationals. Rather, it is the big bunch of riders that have been attached to these bills that grant more surveilance power over civilians. The FBI once got into a little bit of trouble for wiretapping Martin Luther King and about 10,000 other Americans. At the time, that was illegal. Now it would be perfectly legal. All the FBI would have to do is note that there were riots of black people, and that there were some inciting violence (therefore terrorists), and that even though MLK taught nonviolence, he was potentially associated with suspects. You may not care, but I don't think I like that.
Right now, I think that the FBI is too busy to bother too many private citizens much. However, in the past there have been actions on suspected Communists, people who wanted civil rights for black people, pornography, and supposed ritual satanic abuse in day care centers. I'm not sure what the next fad will be, but I'm pretty sure there will be one, and when there is, there will be less oversight. In the words of Spider Robinson, "we may even be making the problem worse, but hey, that's the price we pay for drama."
In addition, I think that, Serpico notwithstanding, the NYC police are pretty good, probably second only to the Austin, TX police. Not everywhere is it like that. There are, for example, the Washington DC police, who were responsible for more than 300 accidental shootings in the first 18 months after the introduction of the Glock 9mm, some in the words of one perpetrator because the cops didn't know not to put their fingers on the trigger unless they wanted to shoot the weapon. There's New Orleans, where one of my friends was hit by a beer bottle thrown from a Police car. I think my trust that they will always do the right thing is far from total.
Whatever one may think of Jon Katz, however obvious one may think this article is, however irrelevant Wired has always been, it's still nice to see him admit it.
Consider the previous unrealistic Utopian dream: the 1960's. The people most responsible for that still refuse to admit to this day that there were any flaws and continue mindlessly to blame others, even as they pump up the War on Drugs to support a kind of racism no less vile but considerably less honest than what they criticized in their parents.
As for Thomas Paine, while he was unquestionably a powerful writer, describing the King as a "sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man" or writing "The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries 'Tis time to part.'" do not seem to me more rational discourse than typical USENET, though better written.
I can COMPLETELY believe the idea that dark matter
is just regular matter that isn't being illuminated or is not emitting enough radiation for us to detect! But it seems that
this, the most obvious explanation, is the last one that physicists want to believe.
I used to work in a research institute that had a lot of physicists in it, and I think most of them would prefer the mundane explanation. However, they would not rule out wild possibilities, and the minority that preferred the wild possibilities would not rule out mundane explanations.
I think that your problem may be with the reporting of science, which I agree sucks. One thing I have learned (rather painfully) upon my transition from research science to industry is that scientists operate and think very differently from the way journalists think. The journalist tries to translate what the scientists are saying into what he and/or she thinks is the language of most people. This causes distortion, for two reasons:
There is a distortion of information when it is translated into the worldview of the journalist
The journalist may not be particularly good at understanding the worldview of most people, either
I dealt with a lot of journalists during my 13 years as a research scientist, and I cannot think of a single instance where the journalist got the story even approximately right. The worldview of the journalist is simply too different from the worldview of the scientist. Very, very few scientists are gifted enough with words to provide alternate explanations, and even when they do, they are usually ignored by people who have read a lot of journalistic reviews of science and love to tell the scientists that they're wrong.
Scientists love to toss around wild guesses and argue fiercely about them. The reason they do this is that this process stimulates imagination and the generation of hypotheses, which give hints on what to look for. The sky is just too big simply to passively look around and gather evidence that you will synthesize later. That approach might be ideal if we had an infinite number of scientists, but we don't. The next best thing is to have a diverse community of scientists, each looking for a different thing. Most may be looking for mundane explanations, but a few will be following wild hairs. This is not a bad thing, because whether the wild hairs turn out to be supported or unsupported, knowing this information reduces the number of ideas that have to be considered. Eventually, if we're lucky, a consensus eventually emerges. But, remember, this is the first observation of a class of objects, not the last.
So, some people will be looking for A, and some will be looking for B, etc. Some of them will get evidence that confirms their guesses; some will not, but all will contribute to the sum of knowledge.
It's a bit like doing detective work. You can't just put cameras everywhere and feed the output into a massive algorithm that solves all possible crimes. Instead, you have to follow leads, guesses, hunches, etc. The only difference in science is that a lot of scientists are doing it, and they tend to keep each other honest.
Now, the journalist wants to make a good story, above all. The mundane does not make a good story. Neither does the concept of a working hypothesis, a guess, or a hunch. So, the journalist (or ESA public relations department or whatever) writes a dramatic story focusing on the exciting bits.
Then, finally, when it gets to the readers, they conclude that something is an Explanation from On High, when it is really nothing of the kind. That's just what happened to it in the process of translation through the journalist.
One thing about science that usually doesn't get around is that the scientist is always in doubt. No scientist is really, deep down, 100% sure of anything. He and/or she may be close to 100% sure, but that isn't a trivial difference; it's a vast chasm in a philosophical sense. This is a very difficult thing to learn, and some scientists forget it. The best scientists, however, do remember it, and some are articulate in describing it, such as Richard Feynman. It isn't a need that most people have to deal with at all, and so explanations tend to be ignored.
For the notion of "dark matter," nobody is even close to 100% sure about anything. The whole need to look for dark matter is because, without it, the equations and predictions relating to the big bang look ugly and unbalanced. That may seem like the flimsiest of reasons, until you remember that radio and relativity were developed as a result of precisely that kind of aesthetic judgement of Maxwell's equations. It could all turn out to be totally wrong, which leads to another poorly understood aspect of science: the most effective evidence is that which is against an idea, not for it. However, the best way we know of to find evidence against an idea is to look for evidence for an idea. This is another psychological trick: if you are emotionally attached to an idea, you will try much harder to show it is correct, and a failure to do so means more than a failure of a casual effort. If you do unintentionally distort evidence to support your hypothesis (this happens all the time, far more than outright fraud), there is always somebody else who will poke holes in your ideas. This is good, not bad, but it's very hard to translate that into the language of most people, where auditors are the enemy, not friends.
Late, frequently, because one can't pull oneself away from the same activity.
True of surgeons.
Broke or deeply in debt, because all one's capital goes into support of the activity.
True of the vast majority of small business owners.
Deceptive, distorting truth or outright lying to cover signs others observe and ask questions about.
True of the vast majority of homosexuals and still true of many.
Denial, all of the above are evident, but failing to accept that it's a problem.
True of said homosexuals and most non-European cultures.
Now, before you say "bad analogy," I freely admit that there are differences. What is interesting is what these differences consist of. All of them consist of doing things that are in violation of what the local society holds is the one correct way to be.
Let's take them one by one again:
Late, frequently, because one can't pull oneself away from the same activity.
Universal punctuality is an obsession of European cultures, particularly English-speaking ones. Native Americans think it's crazy. Hindu priests and people in Latin America mostly don't think much of it either. Of course, we know we're right, even if we punctualize ourselves into stress-related diseases because of it. Robert Sapolsky, who studies this, comments that bringing European ideals to Africa has resulted in an alarming number of early deaths amongst new entrepreneurs.
Broke or deeply in debt, because all one's capital goes into support of the activity.
It's OK to be obsessed with an activity that corresponds to the Puritan work ethic. Small business owners are OK. Starving while going to college is OK. It's even OK to be so obsessed with being against alcohol that it destroys your family (Carrie Nation). But having fun is bad in Puritan culture, so it's bad to be obsessed with it.
Deceptive, distorting truth or outright lying to cover signs others observe and ask questions about.
This is a double-whammy which is society-based by definition. Whatever society stigmatizes or even criminalizes something, then people are going to be highly motivated to lie in order to avoid punishment. Then, society takes the fact that people lie to prove that it is they who have a problem.
Liberace lied about being gay, but then again, he grew up in a U.S. where 11 states has castration on the books for that "problem." I'm sure psychologists of the 50's would have loved our definitions of addiction. It would never have occurred to them simply to get off gay people's case. I wish Alan Turing had lied about his problem; he may have been spared Estrogen injections and an early suicide. Yeah, that was a different world, but we are just as cock-sure of the correctness of our stigmata as they were.
Denial, all of the above are evident, but failing to accept that it's a problem.
An even better double whammy than the previous one. If you admit that you have a problem, you have a problem. If you deny that you have a problem, you have a problem. Brilliant.
Now, I probably need to say at this point that people who become so obsessed with games probably should broaden their horizons some. I live in this culture, and some of the values (but far from all) make sense to me. It's a fact that one's actions have to be constrained to some degree by the rules of society.
However, taking this idea and creating the mythology of an addiction around it is thoroughly bogus. If people are obsessed with something, and someone thinks it's bad, they could at least have the decency to admit they think that and that they are not God. To use a word like "addiction" to avoid acknowledging that they are making substantially moral judgements is dishonest. If repeated deception is a real criterion, then addiction-ranting is the worst addiction of all.
It's real and addiction to games, as much as drugs, alcohol, or any of a
thousand other interests or passtimes has ruined lives.
Are you thinking of a heart patient's addiction to digitalis, or are you perhaps thinking of the model of alcohol addiction based on the Oxford Group's holy plan to expiate sin?
Maybe you're thinking of the fact that a person in heroin withdrawal can die, or that a person in alcohol withdrawal can get irreversable neurological damage. In that case, those are certainly addictions.
However, in the growth industry of addictionism, anything that someone does a lot that you do not approve of can be decided to be an addictive behavior. Thus, "addiction" (which word no decent psychologist has used for the past 15 years) becomes primarily a moralistic tool of Procrustes.
People have been trying to do something like this for 60 years with ideas as clever as yours and some more clever, entirely without success.
What happens is this. There's definitely a correlation. However, the correlation only shows up (i.e. you can detect it) when you take the signals from two or more detectors and, by some more conventional means (like wires) and correlate them. If you only look at one detector, all you ever see is random noise.
This is why people call it spooky. If it were just faster than light, there wouldn't be much of a problem. However, it appears to be correlated, but not at all in the way that our intuitions about causal relationships make much sense of.
I've been looking for a good popular book on QM weirdness for years and haven't found one that's really compelling. The closest I've seen is In Search of Schroedinger's Cat.
One of the definitive experiments that showed that quantum weirdness wasn't due to hidden local variables was Bell's Inequality, which was done in the 1960's. A description of that is in this book.
On the other hand, maybe it's OK that QM is so weird. One of the results is that quantum cryptography is possible. (I believe that the record for distance is about 10 kilometers now.) Using single photons to transmit a message in a certain way, you can ensure that nobody can eavesdrop on the transmission at all without your knowing about it. Of course, it's easier and simpler to bribe the recieving party anyway.
There is a problem with running any variant of UN*X with a real-time system: the fact that it is possible for any process to be interrupted for an arbitrary and unpredictable amount of time. You can play games by using nice with negative values to reduce the probability of this happening, but you can't be 100% sure.
Of course, "real-time" is poorly defined, and "embedded" is even worse. Nevertheless, in practice, these fuzzy blobs seem to go together. Embedded systems tend to need to be real-time, either because they are in an application that absolutely demands it (engine computer, perhaps) or the hardware on which they are running is so wimpy that time irregularities people wouldn't notice on much faster systems would be a big problem.
Probably, big chunks of Linux, suitably hacked, would form a good basis for a variety of embedded devices. The kernel is already small, and it would be smaller. However, just taking the kernel per se and building an embedded application on top of it is a bit like the tail wagging the dog.
Why do people say these things? My Mac works on the same networks, can use the same printers, can read and write the same file formats, etc. I can even cross-compile Win32 code on the Mac, and without a PC emulator. I only have to test it under Windows. Plus I can use all the Free BSD tools I can get my grubby little mitts on. If you are really addicted to MS software, you can get MS Office. It works better on the Mac anyway. OK, so I can't run Visual Basic on it. BFHD.
Now, how exactly is this totally incompatible with anything else?
I can imagine Joe User thinking that Macs are totally incompatible with everything else on the grounds of "where's da Start button?" But, perhaps unreasonably, I expect more from Slashdot.
I don't think I ever put foreign objects into wall sockets as a young child, but I did get a poke off of one of those skinny old-fashioned 2-wire extension cords. One of my earliest memories as a toddler was turning on a hand-operated power sander. I misunderstood the effects of muscle and physics.
Fortunately, my parents still let me play with dangerous toys. My father bought me a Ford coil around age 9, and I got my first neon sign transformer shortly thereafter. I cut apart a coat hanger and banged it into a piece of wood to make a Jacob's Ladder.
I do think that kids who are allowed to play with dangerous toys become more technical adults. I think that adults today are too overprotective. As a result, we have a society of consumers who don't even understand that CD players have parts inside them.
WRT sex, I agree that we've set the bar too high (although I live in a state where the age of consent is 14, and about half of all U.S. states and most of Europe have an AOC of 16, and even those with a high AOC like 18 permit marriages under the AOC with parental permission producing automatic emancipation). However, that analysis completely overlooks the fact that maybe there kinda might be some reasons other than sex not to want your kid to spend the night at a drunken brawl run by someone you don't know and trust. Sex is not the only potentially dangerous thing on the planet. I mean, you don't send your child to a summer camp run by Charles Manson.
Your points are good, but in the current political climate, talking about securing personal information is unlikely to sway too many people.
Instead, talk about the needs of businesses to protect their business data. This is not a weasel move; it is a genuine and important need.
We do not want people to break into bank transfers and steal money. We do not want every virus that comes out of the Phillipines to wreck most businesses in the country for a few hours. We do not want monopolies to be able to swipe trade secrets.
Unfortunately, most "security" measures that I have seen in Congress actually reduce security for businesses. This, ostensibly, is to make it easier for the government to do surveilance on bad people. The fallacious has been the notion that security can be strong enough to prevent corporations from breaking in but not strong enough to prevent the government from breaking in. However, despite what the NSA may say about its superior computers and people, any weakness that is deliberately built into a security system can always be exploited by a clever or lucky individual with far fewer resources.
This is compounded by the fact that there are far more businesses that are doing good and essential work for the economy than there are bad people who need to be put under surveillance.
A few years ago, I did some work on this. The trouble is that there is an alarmingly large variation in color blindness, both in degree and kind. (Some color-blind people can see well into the ultraviolet, and color-blind people were used as spotters during WWII because camouflage didn't fool them.) If you go to an optometrist and look at the real color blindness tests, there are hundreds of plates to diagnose various conditions.
My wife was color-blind in a certain way (she reported that greens looked like dull gray). Her sons were color-blind in a different way (they were insensitive to red, which was lucky because I had a TV that had weak blue and green guns.
So, accurately simulating color-blindness is nontrivial. Probably the best short of that is to look at the colors in HSV and HSL color systems. If colors are distinguishable to you on every individual channel of these color systems, they're probably distinguishable to a color-blind person. Another thing that helps is to try to read the text on a crappy TV with noise on the video signal. The NTSC standard is quite closely matched to human perception; it was a brilliant achievement in 1953. Degrading it in various ways produces artifacts which are usually at the edge of visual perception.
If they throw out the Windows GUI (in the name of common sense), what _else_ do they have when using
Windows?
Well, DOS, which is itself vaguely like an inferior copy of UN*X. At least it's available in older versions of MS OS's. Ever see film of Stephen Hawking using his voice synthesizer? There aren't any close boxes on the screen.
Of course, with a DOS program, all the functionality pretty much has to be built into the program. In UN*X, there's some measure of synchronicity involved. It's too bad that Paul Haeberli's project in the early 1990's to extend the UN*X synchronicity into graphical environments never got into a product. But then again, it was done at SGI, not MS, and therefore must have been kaka or something.
It really alarms me that even on slashdot, a lot of people seem to think that taking a paradigm that is inherently hostile toward people who have a hard time seeing or moving a mouse and throwing some kludges at it to make it somewhat less hostile is not only a viable solution but is so clearly the best possible solution that any other suggestion is ridiculous.
Do you really think the average handicapped person is going to have the same aversion to learning as the average
American sod?
There was a totally blind student who graduated about the same time I did, and I was in one of his classes. Back then, the passwords were 11-digit strings. (This was CDC NOS, not UN*X.) He memorized his instantly. When people expressed amazement, he shrugged his shoulders and said, "I have to."
I spent 13 years as a research scientist working on usable scientific visualization. I presented on user interfaces at ACM SIGGRAPH, the DOE Computer Graphics Forum, Fermilab, the American Meteorological Society, the American Chemical Society, and other places I can't remember. I collaborated with a scientist with a severe neuromuscular disorder giving him the tools he could use to produce visualizations for the Human Genome Project. Even my package for nominally normal people had color-blindness resistance built into the palettes. Before that career, I used to tutor CS students with disabilities.
I'm not in the league of Donald Norman, and I didn't take the position at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, but I ain't chopped liver, either.
As for the other guy (to save posting), I have put my money where my mouth is. As a research scientist, at my highest paid, I made 2/5 what I can easily make in industry now. I did it because I thought it mattered. I gave it up when I realized that people were going to bow down and worship Bill Gates' panty no matter what Microsoft does.
I know that Microsoft employs some great people. I can't remember if Raskin works there these days, but Blinn and Kajiya are great guys. The trouble is, their presentations dropped to zero when they started working there.
Finally, if Microsoft is such calorific fertilizer, then why do they produce products that make even supposedly normal people want to put their fists through the screen? If they have such a sodding clue about usability, why are there still way too many menu options, all of which work in different ways, under menus that are organized according to no functional logic I can detect? Why are there oodles of squinny, indecipherable buttons that I have to hold a mouse over for a half a second before I can see what they do? Why does Visio make me go through a list of a dozen groups of templates when I just want to draw some circles?
The answer, of course, is that people will take just about anything from Microsoft and think it's fabulous innovation. The Stockholm Syndrome was misnamed. It should be called the Redmond Syndrome.
Windows was based on the Macintosh (which had speech synthesis in 1984, a screen magnifier in 1985, and sticky keys by 1986, by the way). The Macintosh was based on the Xerox Star/Alta/Lilith. This was based on a user interface design done 30 years ago by some very young people with fine eyesight and motor coordination. They built the entire user interface on their assumptions about the visual and motor systems of healthy young people.
So, now, on top of all that are some tools to degrade the experience enough to improve the system for specific disabilities. All of a sudden, Microsoft is a Disability Hero.
Yeah, right.
Consider UN*X and its command line interface. With any reasonably well designed command line program, it is possible to pipe standard input from any device and send output to any device. I have seen interactive Braille output devices hooked up to UN*X systems and working with essentially everything. In 1982. That's 19 years ago.
With the right physical devices and some code that takes a weekend to write, a person who could only operate a single switch and could only recieve information by means of Morse Code with wires on his tongue could use almost all of UN*X, up to and including rewriting the kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
At any reasonbly big science fiction convention, you can get either passive sparkly plastic blades or "light kits" that use single-ended neon bulbs inside a plastic sleeve for the blade. These look fantasic. Of course, they're fragile.
I lived in Florida, and therefore do not have much love for Scientology. (Repo Man put it best: "Dioretix. Science of matter over mind.") I even went to one public protest of their strong-arm tactics. However, by the same token...
At some point, this starts to become silly. I'm not sure if this point has been reached with respect to Scientology. For example, I'll grant that the terrible version of Battlefield Earth was certainly a Scientology schtick, but does every movie or teevee show become Scientology Propaganda whenever John Travolta, Tom Cruise, or Kirstie Alley signs up for a role? I found Eyes Wide Shut incredibly dull and dead-horse-beating as well as dumb (I've been to orgies in the Bible Belt with less security than the one in the movie), but I don't think I got too many subliminal messages from it.
According to an issue of "Ask Marilyn" that I really wish I had kept, violence is acceptable because "everyone knows it was faked," while sex is not because it's real.
This is nonsense, of course, because the violence on the popular show "Cops" is not faked, and I have seen no evidence that people object to this show. (I object to it, because it presents violations of civil liberties as just fine, but most people don't see that.) Nor, for that matter, is the violence in boxing matches faked, and the violence in "tough guy" competitions isn't even stylized or controlled. Some people object to boxing, but not many.
But then again, this is the same woman who said that the reason you can't see the wind is that you couldn't see air because air molecules were too small to see, so what do you expect?
(FTR, the reason you can't see wind most of the time is that most of the time the air is visually homogeneous. When it isn't, such as with layers of heat over Florida blacktop during summer, let alone when there's actual condensation, you can see wind just fine.)
I've wrapped plenum-rated cable around a soldering iron that was hot enough to fry the copper off a board if I wasn't careful (normally ran it through a diode for PC board work). No effect. PVC-insulated cable, on the other hand, roasts and stinks rather quickly.
Incidentally, "plenum" is not the name of the cable; it's the name of the air space. Literally, it is an air space at higher pressure than the surrounding air space (e.g. for ventilation). However, it has come to mean just about any air space, especially the air space above the ceiling and in walls.
is that Microsoft would have to sell, by auction, a minimum of three licenses to enable third parties to produce versions for other operating systems "such as Linux."
It does not mean that Microsoft has to produce a Linux version. Nor does it mean that the third parties have to produce a Linux version. What it means is that at least three companies will have the right to produce a version of Office for whatever other environment they want to.
The crap that Apple pulled with 8.0 was to freeze out the clone manufacturers. Their contracts only gave them the right to use System 7. Steve Jobs wanted to get rid of the clones, and this is how he did it.
Some people think this was a good move. I'm not so sure. I think clones would have strengthened Apple's position, but maybe only if they had started much earlier.
I am a big fan of Connie Willis. She is excellent and writes with good emotion, usually humorous, but sometimes quite grim (The Doomsday Book).
However, there is a not-so-subtle difference. LeGuin is definitely a woman writer, except perhaps for The Lathe of Heaven. Willis is a writer who is a woman.
In the same sense, Woody Allen is a Jewish comedian. Groucho Marx was a comedian who was Jewish. Richard Pryor started off as a Black comedian but later became a comedian who was black. Bill Cosby did it the other way around. Octavia Butler is a Black Woman Writer. Samuel Delaney started off as a writer who was gay and black, became a Gay Writer who was black and then, unfortunately, stopped writing SF right after that cliffhanger in Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand.
About half of John Varley's stories contain the idea of safe, reversible sex-change operations. At least three or four contain the idea that this kind of sexual exploration is for the young. I can't narrow it down any more than that, I'm afraid.
His work is very interesting because, while it contains many elements that reflect what feminism should be about, he shows some pretty strong impatience about what feminism is.
The interesting thing is that the levels of carbon dioxide, while increasing, are nowhere near the highest levels during human history. That credit goes to the time of the Roman empire.
How do we know? Well, for thousands of years, people have been making crimped brass buttons. When you make one of these, a little bit of air gets trapped inside. All you have to do is get one of these buttons from an archealogical dig, make sure it's really sealed, put it in a vacuum, drill a tiny hole in it, and subject the gas to spectrographic analysis.
It probably did lead to global warming. The Middle Ages, by all accounts, were astonishingly temperate. This explains a lot of things, such as the explorations of the Vikings, who come from places that nowadays seem a bit on the cold side. Back then, it wasn't so bad.
I wouldn't dismiss the concerns about global warming entirely. However, it is also worth remembering that small increases in temperature are associate with fairly large increases in plant growth. What with the depletion of the rain forests and the need to grow more food, a period of lushness may be exactly what the world needs.
I also wouldn't trust environmentalism entirely. Concern for the environment is good, but some of the efforts have been rather shortsighted and destructive. Pressure from Greenpeace caused the State of Florida (possibly others as well, but I have personal knowledge of Florida) to get rid of all the hospital incinerators. Now, infectious medical waste is buried in landfills in Alabama, unless it winds up washing on shore, due either to deliberate dumping, accidental spillage, or jettisoning of cargo required during hurricanes and the like. I don't see this as an improvement. Medical incineration was hardly a massive source of air pollution in the first place.
Actually, I believe Solaris has kernel extensions which can be used to garuntee a process a minimum amount of runtime. But I could be wrong.
I don't know that I'm not wrong either, so I asked the local Solaris guru. He said that later versions of Solaris provide prioctl, which is somewhat better than nice, but that he hadn't heard of any kernel extensions that provided guarantees or any way to make such guarantees to the process. I looked at the description of prioctl in his book, and while it contains some hand-waving about "real-time" processes, it falls short of making any guarantees.
Although "real-time" has a very good definition (A real-time problem is any problem in which the time taken to arrive at the answer is part of its correctness) people abuse the definition horribly.
That's a good definition, provided that it is clear we are talking about wall clock time. Unfortunately, it's a bit like the definition of "gender" (a grammatical marker in the sense that person and number are markers); nobody really pays much attention to it.
You are thinking that anyone wanting security and safety is a bleeting sheep.
Nope. I want security and safety, too. But that's OK. I didn't expect you to understand what I was saying at all. I have communicated with many people who write as you do, and I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that they are unable to understand that other people value safety just as much as they do, but simply differ in their opinions as to what exactly makes a secure and safe America.
That's OK. I know that you cannot conceive as anyone who does not believe exactly like you as other than an insidious enemy of your safety, just as bin Laden is incapable of viewing America as anything other than the great Satan.
The drive in the iPod is so thin that it's incredible that they could even fit a motor in there. It's a rectangle that just fits in the case but not much thicker than a stack of a few credit cards.
I know it wouldn't be a terribly good engineering decision to have more than one drive in the device, because of the extra electronics and the need for the software to handle multiple volumes, but physically, they could do it and only need to make it about 5mm thicker.
The battery is about the same shape as the disk drive, but a bit thinner. The high surface area probably explains the excellent recharge performance.
I lived through military checkpoints and police blockades for 2 weeks to get into my apartment.
I got there a couple of days after they moved the checkpoints from 14th St. to Canal St. This was lucky, as the only place I had to stay was on Christopher St. When I was there, in the bars between stints of volunteering, I got a very good impression of the people. I already admired New Yorkers, not least because I grew up there. It seemed to me that at that time, most were not in favor of war and would have been opposed to restrictions on civil liberties. Perhaps that has changed.
The group of "well meaning, good intentioned" Americans that only believe that effective policing can occur when the "Cops" are handcuffed and blindfolded.
You don't need to mince words. As one of those people concerned with civil liberties, I am well aware that people think of us as horrible, vicious, anti-American scum.
The trouble is this. When people speak of security, it can mean two things:
When you write "His actions have actually made me feel more comfortable about my situation," you are clearly referring to number 1. I view 2 as being more important than 1. I also think that, in many instances, the sweeping measures taken support 1 at the expense of 2.
This is a fundamental philosophical difference, and I'm well aware that people who are concerned with 2 are a reviled minority. Consider the case of the ACLU pushing so that Nazis could march in Skokie. Most people think that's horrible, because people who are hated by Nazis have a right to feel comfortable. Personally, as someone who is Jewish enough for Hitler and Israel, I want Nazis marching. That's because I want to see and count them. Forcing them to stay in their homes doesn't make them or their hatred vanish, it just allows people to keep their head in the sand. I am well aware that most people consider my perception monstrous.
What concerns me about the recent legistlation is not the ostensible use to track down foreign nationals. Rather, it is the big bunch of riders that have been attached to these bills that grant more surveilance power over civilians. The FBI once got into a little bit of trouble for wiretapping Martin Luther King and about 10,000 other Americans. At the time, that was illegal. Now it would be perfectly legal. All the FBI would have to do is note that there were riots of black people, and that there were some inciting violence (therefore terrorists), and that even though MLK taught nonviolence, he was potentially associated with suspects. You may not care, but I don't think I like that.
Right now, I think that the FBI is too busy to bother too many private citizens much. However, in the past there have been actions on suspected Communists, people who wanted civil rights for black people, pornography, and supposed ritual satanic abuse in day care centers. I'm not sure what the next fad will be, but I'm pretty sure there will be one, and when there is, there will be less oversight. In the words of Spider Robinson, "we may even be making the problem worse, but hey, that's the price we pay for drama."
In addition, I think that, Serpico notwithstanding, the NYC police are pretty good, probably second only to the Austin, TX police. Not everywhere is it like that. There are, for example, the Washington DC police, who were responsible for more than 300 accidental shootings in the first 18 months after the introduction of the Glock 9mm, some in the words of one perpetrator because the cops didn't know not to put their fingers on the trigger unless they wanted to shoot the weapon. There's New Orleans, where one of my friends was hit by a beer bottle thrown from a Police car. I think my trust that they will always do the right thing is far from total.
Whatever one may think of Jon Katz, however obvious one may think this article is, however irrelevant Wired has always been, it's still nice to see him admit it.
Consider the previous unrealistic Utopian dream: the 1960's. The people most responsible for that still refuse to admit to this day that there were any flaws and continue mindlessly to blame others, even as they pump up the War on Drugs to support a kind of racism no less vile but considerably less honest than what they criticized in their parents.
As for Thomas Paine, while he was unquestionably a powerful writer, describing the King as a "sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man" or writing "The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries 'Tis time to part.'" do not seem to me more rational discourse than typical USENET, though better written.
I can COMPLETELY believe the idea that dark matter is just regular matter that isn't being illuminated or is not emitting enough radiation for us to detect! But it seems that this, the most obvious explanation, is the last one that physicists want to believe.
I used to work in a research institute that had a lot of physicists in it, and I think most of them would prefer the mundane explanation. However, they would not rule out wild possibilities, and the minority that preferred the wild possibilities would not rule out mundane explanations.
I think that your problem may be with the reporting of science, which I agree sucks. One thing I have learned (rather painfully) upon my transition from research science to industry is that scientists operate and think very differently from the way journalists think. The journalist tries to translate what the scientists are saying into what he and/or she thinks is the language of most people. This causes distortion, for two reasons:
I dealt with a lot of journalists during my 13 years as a research scientist, and I cannot think of a single instance where the journalist got the story even approximately right. The worldview of the journalist is simply too different from the worldview of the scientist. Very, very few scientists are gifted enough with words to provide alternate explanations, and even when they do, they are usually ignored by people who have read a lot of journalistic reviews of science and love to tell the scientists that they're wrong.
Scientists love to toss around wild guesses and argue fiercely about them. The reason they do this is that this process stimulates imagination and the generation of hypotheses, which give hints on what to look for. The sky is just too big simply to passively look around and gather evidence that you will synthesize later. That approach might be ideal if we had an infinite number of scientists, but we don't. The next best thing is to have a diverse community of scientists, each looking for a different thing. Most may be looking for mundane explanations, but a few will be following wild hairs. This is not a bad thing, because whether the wild hairs turn out to be supported or unsupported, knowing this information reduces the number of ideas that have to be considered. Eventually, if we're lucky, a consensus eventually emerges. But, remember, this is the first observation of a class of objects, not the last.
So, some people will be looking for A, and some will be looking for B, etc. Some of them will get evidence that confirms their guesses; some will not, but all will contribute to the sum of knowledge.
It's a bit like doing detective work. You can't just put cameras everywhere and feed the output into a massive algorithm that solves all possible crimes. Instead, you have to follow leads, guesses, hunches, etc. The only difference in science is that a lot of scientists are doing it, and they tend to keep each other honest.
Now, the journalist wants to make a good story, above all. The mundane does not make a good story. Neither does the concept of a working hypothesis, a guess, or a hunch. So, the journalist (or ESA public relations department or whatever) writes a dramatic story focusing on the exciting bits.
Then, finally, when it gets to the readers, they conclude that something is an Explanation from On High, when it is really nothing of the kind. That's just what happened to it in the process of translation through the journalist.
One thing about science that usually doesn't get around is that the scientist is always in doubt. No scientist is really, deep down, 100% sure of anything. He and/or she may be close to 100% sure, but that isn't a trivial difference; it's a vast chasm in a philosophical sense. This is a very difficult thing to learn, and some scientists forget it. The best scientists, however, do remember it, and some are articulate in describing it, such as Richard Feynman. It isn't a need that most people have to deal with at all, and so explanations tend to be ignored.
For the notion of "dark matter," nobody is even close to 100% sure about anything. The whole need to look for dark matter is because, without it, the equations and predictions relating to the big bang look ugly and unbalanced. That may seem like the flimsiest of reasons, until you remember that radio and relativity were developed as a result of precisely that kind of aesthetic judgement of Maxwell's equations. It could all turn out to be totally wrong, which leads to another poorly understood aspect of science: the most effective evidence is that which is against an idea, not for it. However, the best way we know of to find evidence against an idea is to look for evidence for an idea. This is another psychological trick: if you are emotionally attached to an idea, you will try much harder to show it is correct, and a failure to do so means more than a failure of a casual effort. If you do unintentionally distort evidence to support your hypothesis (this happens all the time, far more than outright fraud), there is always somebody else who will poke holes in your ideas. This is good, not bad, but it's very hard to translate that into the language of most people, where auditors are the enemy, not friends.
Late, frequently, because one can't pull oneself away from the same activity.
True of surgeons.
Broke or deeply in debt, because all one's capital goes into support of the activity.
True of the vast majority of small business owners.
Deceptive, distorting truth or outright lying to cover signs others observe and ask questions about.
True of the vast majority of homosexuals and still true of many.
Denial, all of the above are evident, but failing to accept that it's a problem.
True of said homosexuals and most non-European cultures.
Now, before you say "bad analogy," I freely admit that there are differences. What is interesting is what these differences consist of. All of them consist of doing things that are in violation of what the local society holds is the one correct way to be.
Let's take them one by one again:
Late, frequently, because one can't pull oneself away from the same activity.
Universal punctuality is an obsession of European cultures, particularly English-speaking ones. Native Americans think it's crazy. Hindu priests and people in Latin America mostly don't think much of it either. Of course, we know we're right, even if we punctualize ourselves into stress-related diseases because of it. Robert Sapolsky, who studies this, comments that bringing European ideals to Africa has resulted in an alarming number of early deaths amongst new entrepreneurs.
Broke or deeply in debt, because all one's capital goes into support of the activity.
It's OK to be obsessed with an activity that corresponds to the Puritan work ethic. Small business owners are OK. Starving while going to college is OK. It's even OK to be so obsessed with being against alcohol that it destroys your family (Carrie Nation). But having fun is bad in Puritan culture, so it's bad to be obsessed with it.
Deceptive, distorting truth or outright lying to cover signs others observe and ask questions about.
This is a double-whammy which is society-based by definition. Whatever society stigmatizes or even criminalizes something, then people are going to be highly motivated to lie in order to avoid punishment. Then, society takes the fact that people lie to prove that it is they who have a problem.
Liberace lied about being gay, but then again, he grew up in a U.S. where 11 states has castration on the books for that "problem." I'm sure psychologists of the 50's would have loved our definitions of addiction. It would never have occurred to them simply to get off gay people's case. I wish Alan Turing had lied about his problem; he may have been spared Estrogen injections and an early suicide. Yeah, that was a different world, but we are just as cock-sure of the correctness of our stigmata as they were.
Denial, all of the above are evident, but failing to accept that it's a problem.
An even better double whammy than the previous one. If you admit that you have a problem, you have a problem. If you deny that you have a problem, you have a problem. Brilliant.
Now, I probably need to say at this point that people who become so obsessed with games probably should broaden their horizons some. I live in this culture, and some of the values (but far from all) make sense to me. It's a fact that one's actions have to be constrained to some degree by the rules of society.
However, taking this idea and creating the mythology of an addiction around it is thoroughly bogus. If people are obsessed with something, and someone thinks it's bad, they could at least have the decency to admit they think that and that they are not God. To use a word like "addiction" to avoid acknowledging that they are making substantially moral judgements is dishonest. If repeated deception is a real criterion, then addiction-ranting is the worst addiction of all.
It's real and addiction to games, as much as drugs, alcohol, or any of a thousand other interests or passtimes has ruined lives.
Are you thinking of a heart patient's addiction to digitalis, or are you perhaps thinking of the model of alcohol addiction based on the Oxford Group's holy plan to expiate sin?
Maybe you're thinking of the fact that a person in heroin withdrawal can die, or that a person in alcohol withdrawal can get irreversable neurological damage. In that case, those are certainly addictions.
However, in the growth industry of addictionism, anything that someone does a lot that you do not approve of can be decided to be an addictive behavior. Thus, "addiction" (which word no decent psychologist has used for the past 15 years) becomes primarily a moralistic tool of Procrustes.
People have been trying to do something like this for 60 years with ideas as clever as yours and some more clever, entirely without success.
What happens is this. There's definitely a correlation. However, the correlation only shows up (i.e. you can detect it) when you take the signals from two or more detectors and, by some more conventional means (like wires) and correlate them. If you only look at one detector, all you ever see is random noise.
This is why people call it spooky. If it were just faster than light, there wouldn't be much of a problem. However, it appears to be correlated, but not at all in the way that our intuitions about causal relationships make much sense of.
I've been looking for a good popular book on QM weirdness for years and haven't found one that's really compelling. The closest I've seen is In Search of Schroedinger's Cat.
One of the definitive experiments that showed that quantum weirdness wasn't due to hidden local variables was Bell's Inequality, which was done in the 1960's. A description of that is in this book.
On the other hand, maybe it's OK that QM is so weird. One of the results is that quantum cryptography is possible. (I believe that the record for distance is about 10 kilometers now.) Using single photons to transmit a message in a certain way, you can ensure that nobody can eavesdrop on the transmission at all without your knowing about it. Of course, it's easier and simpler to bribe the recieving party anyway.
There is a problem with running any variant of UN*X with a real-time system: the fact that it is possible for any process to be interrupted for an arbitrary and unpredictable amount of time. You can play games by using nice with negative values to reduce the probability of this happening, but you can't be 100% sure.
Of course, "real-time" is poorly defined, and "embedded" is even worse. Nevertheless, in practice, these fuzzy blobs seem to go together. Embedded systems tend to need to be real-time, either because they are in an application that absolutely demands it (engine computer, perhaps) or the hardware on which they are running is so wimpy that time irregularities people wouldn't notice on much faster systems would be a big problem.
Probably, big chunks of Linux, suitably hacked, would form a good basis for a variety of embedded devices. The kernel is already small, and it would be smaller. However, just taking the kernel per se and building an embedded application on top of it is a bit like the tail wagging the dog.
Why do people say these things? My Mac works on the same networks, can use the same printers, can read and write the same file formats, etc. I can even cross-compile Win32 code on the Mac, and without a PC emulator. I only have to test it under Windows. Plus I can use all the Free BSD tools I can get my grubby little mitts on. If you are really addicted to MS software, you can get MS Office. It works better on the Mac anyway. OK, so I can't run Visual Basic on it. BFHD.
Now, how exactly is this totally incompatible with anything else?
I can imagine Joe User thinking that Macs are totally incompatible with everything else on the grounds of "where's da Start button?" But, perhaps unreasonably, I expect more from Slashdot.
I don't think I ever put foreign objects into wall sockets as a young child, but I did get a poke off of one of those skinny old-fashioned 2-wire extension cords. One of my earliest memories as a toddler was turning on a hand-operated power sander. I misunderstood the effects of muscle and physics.
Fortunately, my parents still let me play with dangerous toys. My father bought me a Ford coil around age 9, and I got my first neon sign transformer shortly thereafter. I cut apart a coat hanger and banged it into a piece of wood to make a Jacob's Ladder.
I do think that kids who are allowed to play with dangerous toys become more technical adults. I think that adults today are too overprotective. As a result, we have a society of consumers who don't even understand that CD players have parts inside them.
WRT sex, I agree that we've set the bar too high (although I live in a state where the age of consent is 14, and about half of all U.S. states and most of Europe have an AOC of 16, and even those with a high AOC like 18 permit marriages under the AOC with parental permission producing automatic emancipation). However, that analysis completely overlooks the fact that maybe there kinda might be some reasons other than sex not to want your kid to spend the night at a drunken brawl run by someone you don't know and trust. Sex is not the only potentially dangerous thing on the planet. I mean, you don't send your child to a summer camp run by Charles Manson.
Your points are good, but in the current political climate, talking about securing personal information is unlikely to sway too many people.
Instead, talk about the needs of businesses to protect their business data. This is not a weasel move; it is a genuine and important need.
We do not want people to break into bank transfers and steal money. We do not want every virus that comes out of the Phillipines to wreck most businesses in the country for a few hours. We do not want monopolies to be able to swipe trade secrets.
Unfortunately, most "security" measures that I have seen in Congress actually reduce security for businesses. This, ostensibly, is to make it easier for the government to do surveilance on bad people. The fallacious has been the notion that security can be strong enough to prevent corporations from breaking in but not strong enough to prevent the government from breaking in. However, despite what the NSA may say about its superior computers and people, any weakness that is deliberately built into a security system can always be exploited by a clever or lucky individual with far fewer resources.
This is compounded by the fact that there are far more businesses that are doing good and essential work for the economy than there are bad people who need to be put under surveillance.
A few years ago, I did some work on this. The trouble is that there is an alarmingly large variation in color blindness, both in degree and kind. (Some color-blind people can see well into the ultraviolet, and color-blind people were used as spotters during WWII because camouflage didn't fool them.) If you go to an optometrist and look at the real color blindness tests, there are hundreds of plates to diagnose various conditions.
My wife was color-blind in a certain way (she reported that greens looked like dull gray). Her sons were color-blind in a different way (they were insensitive to red, which was lucky because I had a TV that had weak blue and green guns.
So, accurately simulating color-blindness is nontrivial. Probably the best short of that is to look at the colors in HSV and HSL color systems. If colors are distinguishable to you on every individual channel of these color systems, they're probably distinguishable to a color-blind person. Another thing that helps is to try to read the text on a crappy TV with noise on the video signal. The NTSC standard is quite closely matched to human perception; it was a brilliant achievement in 1953. Degrading it in various ways produces artifacts which are usually at the edge of visual perception.
If they throw out the Windows GUI (in the name of common sense), what _else_ do they have when using Windows?
Well, DOS, which is itself vaguely like an inferior copy of UN*X. At least it's available in older versions of MS OS's. Ever see film of Stephen Hawking using his voice synthesizer? There aren't any close boxes on the screen.
Of course, with a DOS program, all the functionality pretty much has to be built into the program. In UN*X, there's some measure of synchronicity involved. It's too bad that Paul Haeberli's project in the early 1990's to extend the UN*X synchronicity into graphical environments never got into a product. But then again, it was done at SGI, not MS, and therefore must have been kaka or something.
It really alarms me that even on slashdot, a lot of people seem to think that taking a paradigm that is inherently hostile toward people who have a hard time seeing or moving a mouse and throwing some kludges at it to make it somewhat less hostile is not only a viable solution but is so clearly the best possible solution that any other suggestion is ridiculous.
Do you really think the average handicapped person is going to have the same aversion to learning as the average American sod?
There was a totally blind student who graduated about the same time I did, and I was in one of his classes. Back then, the passwords were 11-digit strings. (This was CDC NOS, not UN*X.) He memorized his instantly. When people expressed amazement, he shrugged his shoulders and said, "I have to."
I spent 13 years as a research scientist working on usable scientific visualization. I presented on user interfaces at ACM SIGGRAPH, the DOE Computer Graphics Forum, Fermilab, the American Meteorological Society, the American Chemical Society, and other places I can't remember. I collaborated with a scientist with a severe neuromuscular disorder giving him the tools he could use to produce visualizations for the Human Genome Project. Even my package for nominally normal people had color-blindness resistance built into the palettes. Before that career, I used to tutor CS students with disabilities.
I'm not in the league of Donald Norman, and I didn't take the position at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, but I ain't chopped liver, either.
As for the other guy (to save posting), I have put my money where my mouth is. As a research scientist, at my highest paid, I made 2/5 what I can easily make in industry now. I did it because I thought it mattered. I gave it up when I realized that people were going to bow down and worship Bill Gates' panty no matter what Microsoft does.
I know that Microsoft employs some great people. I can't remember if Raskin works there these days, but Blinn and Kajiya are great guys. The trouble is, their presentations dropped to zero when they started working there.
Finally, if Microsoft is such calorific fertilizer, then why do they produce products that make even supposedly normal people want to put their fists through the screen? If they have such a sodding clue about usability, why are there still way too many menu options, all of which work in different ways, under menus that are organized according to no functional logic I can detect? Why are there oodles of squinny, indecipherable buttons that I have to hold a mouse over for a half a second before I can see what they do? Why does Visio make me go through a list of a dozen groups of templates when I just want to draw some circles?
The answer, of course, is that people will take just about anything from Microsoft and think it's fabulous innovation. The Stockholm Syndrome was misnamed. It should be called the Redmond Syndrome.
Windows was based on the Macintosh (which had speech synthesis in 1984, a screen magnifier in 1985, and sticky keys by 1986, by the way). The Macintosh was based on the Xerox Star/Alta/Lilith. This was based on a user interface design done 30 years ago by some very young people with fine eyesight and motor coordination. They built the entire user interface on their assumptions about the visual and motor systems of healthy young people.
So, now, on top of all that are some tools to degrade the experience enough to improve the system for specific disabilities. All of a sudden, Microsoft is a Disability Hero.
Yeah, right.
Consider UN*X and its command line interface. With any reasonably well designed command line program, it is possible to pipe standard input from any device and send output to any device. I have seen interactive Braille output devices hooked up to UN*X systems and working with essentially everything. In 1982. That's 19 years ago.
With the right physical devices and some code that takes a weekend to write, a person who could only operate a single switch and could only recieve information by means of Morse Code with wires on his tongue could use almost all of UN*X, up to and including rewriting the kernel.