Right now it only compares Gnome, KDE, and xfe, and then it really only lists somewhat superficial differences. If it were fleshed out, I think it could be quite handy.
I would expect an expert to respect another experts view and add his own view after the original
Obviously, the "experts" you know are a lot more polite than the ones I'm familiar with. I think that if anything, someone who thinks of themselves as an expert is more likely to wipe out information which they perceive to be 'incorrect;' intellectual debates can get pretty heated, after all.
I think the only way that an expert system could work is if edit rights are restricted to certain individuals, allowing each person to basically have their own article about a particular controversial topic. For instance, if you looked up string theory or evolution, there would be several different articles to choose from on string theory, written by several distinct "experts," each with different backgrounds and expressing a different perspective on the issue. It's a big mistake to let one expert have edit rights on content written by someone else whom they disagree with, and expect them to just play nice.
Maybe the string theorists would get along and let each others' work be; perhaps the evolutionarians would as well. But how do you think the article on Islam is going to work? I could think of people who might both be well-described as "experts," who nonetheless might have little tolerance for the opinions or work of the other. People kill each other over philosophical disagreements, where religion and politics are involved -- do you really think that they wouldn't revert each other's stuff online?
I think it's a mistake to try to cram too many different viewpoints into one article. This is the trademark of an encyclopedia, to be sure -- one article per entry -- but it's one of the reasons why encyclopedias traditionally aren't used for real research. It's just not possible to have one monolithic article for each topic and still preserve the context and flavor of each argument; to have an honest discussion of a contentious issue requires that you give each of the different viewpoints a separate space in which to express their argument, and then read them each in context.
Any 'expert system' which lets one 'expert' overwrite another is probably going to have just as many revert wars as the layman's Wikipedia; the only difference might be the grammar level used in the ad hominem attacks in the discussion pages. Being an 'expert' doesn't instantly make people respectful of dissenting views; if anything, my experience has taught me the contrary. The more developed someone's opinions on something are, the less likely they are to accept the dissenting point of view as valid. There are exceptions to this, but they're somewhat rare.
My ideal system would be one where I could go to a topic and see a consensus-based general introduction, which would be publicly editable and have a tracked history. This would allow me to get an idea of the "man on the street" perspective -- it might not be correct, and it might be totally at odds with what scientists or experts think at the same time, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of value. (E.g., it would be helpful to know of the wide gap today between the scientific consensus on global warming and the hoi polloi; the latter is important even if it's wrong, just because it's widely held.) Separate from this would be the 'expert articles.' The expert pages would each have a single author (which might be a real person, a psudeonymous entity, or a group of people acting as author -- for example a committee), and express a particular viewpoint. I would be free to agree or disagree with these, and they might contradict one another. That's the nature of knowledge.
It seems like both the Wiki-approach and the "scholar"-based approach have their merits. However it's tough or impossible to combine the two approaches in one project. As you point out, it would be frustrating to spend your time writing an article you know to be true, and have some 'idiot' revert it; however it would also be frustrating to have an article which represents a wide body of consensus opinion thrown away because one self-described "expert" disagreed.
These things need to be done separately. What I think would be optimal is a open-to-the-public Wikipedia, and a more selective Expertpedia; the latter would require articles to be written with real names or at least authenticated psuedonyms attached, and would check credentials, etc.
Then I think I would leave it for the market to develop resources which combine the two things. Although I don't like the site because of its hideous number of advertisements, a frontend like Answers.com is an example of how a site could take content from both places and combine it. If you searched for "nuclear power," you'd see both articles; the one from Wikipedia representing a sort of hive-mind concensus on the issue, and then various articles written by experts, each of which might have a distinct flavor and opinion.
Trying to incorporate experts into Wikipedia is a mistake -- having that sort of hierarchy destroys its purpose and community spirit; alternately, allowing public editing of articles written by true subject-matter experts would be obnoxious. Both types of information have their place, and assuming they're shared freely, others can provide the front-ends which allow an end user to pick which approach they'd like to use in a particular situation.
Sometimes you want the Wiki viewpoint, other times you might want more opinionated, authoritative sources; it all depends. The user should be presented with options and allowed to choose.
I don't know where you live, but in the United States, the vast majority of DVD players are region locked, and most people don't know or care.
The only people who have region-free players are people who've hacked them (some models had override codes you could put in) or who bought them overseas.
Most people go down to Wal-Mart, plunk down their $30, and buy whatever's on the end of the aisle, on sale. They barely stop to look at the name of the brand, much less anything so esoteric as region coding.
This will have a greater affect on people in Europe than in the U.S.; people here just don't care enough about imported content (with the exception of people who are into stuff from Japan) to notice region coding. Most Americans don't travel (and thus wouldn't come into possession of a foreign-region disc), don't speak any other languages (and so most foreign content is useless to them), and have enough domestic content available that they're not dying to get their hands on stuff from abroad.
The very small percentage of people who care about having a region-free DVD player or game console will pay the price premium necessary to acquire one on the grey market. With DVD players this usually means getting one originally destined for Europe or Asia, and with game consoles this means installing a mod chip. I don't think the Nintendo Rev--excuse me, Wii--will be any different in this regard. The very small number of gamers who want to play Japanese import games will get a mod chip.
The biggest effect that the region coding will have in the United States is that it creates a semi-legitimate excuse for mod chips to exist. If there wasn't region coding, and thus the excuse of wanting to be able to override the console's programming and play foreign games, then mod chips would be viewed more as a purely piracy-oriented tool; as it is, it's pretty easy to market them (with a hefty wink-wink-nudge-nude, know what I mean).
As someone who's never bought an un-modded console, I'd like to take a moment to thank Nintendo for this development. The modchip manufacturers and blank-DVD producers of the world salute you.
In some places it was even more restrictive than that. I was reading a book recently about the history of New York State (The Wedding of the Waters, which I stronly recommend to anyone interested in both the history of the U.S. and of technology), and there were fairly onerous restrictions on eligibility to vote, well into the 19th century. These restrictions could include not only race, age, and gender, but also that a person own property debt free. As an example, I think I remember reading that between 1820 and 1840, for a black person to be eligible to vote in NY State (remember also that at this time, the Electoral College electors were chosen by the state Legislature, not by direct election), they had to own a debt-free freehold worth at least 100 pounds sterling; unfortunately the texts of the NY State Constitutional Conventions from those periods (when the rule would have been enacted, in the 1820s and removed in the 1840s) doesn't seem to be online.
At any rate, what struck me in reading this, was how little we today appreciate the outright corruption and occasionally even violence that was pervasive in our political system in the past. To say that people "hate Bush" today may be true, but it shows a lack of perspective to suggest that these feelings are somehow historically unique. Similarly, the feeling that an executive body has overstepped its authority and encroached on civil liberties is hardly new; these crises have happened to our Republic before, and in my opinion in far more severe ways.
I don't think that history is going to be overly kind to our current President, but neither I think will it regard him with quite the same amount of cataclysmic rhetoric that's frequently spouted today.
If there is one single truth that seems to be the common thread through American politics, it is that the political system can ignore the will of the public for a time, but in the long run it always follows it eventually, if with much reluctance, once that public will is demonstrated. In hindsight, I think people will look back on the current period as one of confusion, when there wasn't a clear consensus among Americans as to what we wanted our government to do and what powers we wanted it to have, regarding domestic surveillance and threats. In this confusion, the goverment is essentially drifting off in its own (probably undesirable) direction; this is only possible because most people really don't understand what's going on or care.
Democracy is if nothing else, very slow. It has in the past taken multiple generations to resolve what in retrospect seem like very obvious problems; I'm not sure it's realistic to assume, even given the accelerated pace of life today, compared to the 19th century, that such basic questions about domestic survelliance and the role of the police and military in what now seems to be the common mode of warfare ("unconventional warfare," aka terrorism), will be settled in our lifetimes.
That sort of "one generation only" DRM is just as broken as all other types of it; it suffers from the same terminal flaws, namely that you can't well restrict the copying of data once it's been moved into the digital realm, where copying is inherent to even the most basic manipulations of the data (i.e., moving it from one place to another).
Just because it doesn't prevent all copies doesn't make it any less flawed from an inherent information-theory and cryptological standpoint, and in the long run I think it's doomed to failure. The only question is whether, in failing, it manages to take down a few otherwise-good formats with it.
You have a point, but it's akin to saying "hey, if you don't like people reading your email, why not just write a letter, stick it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and put it in the Mail!"
Sure, you could use the telephone to keep people appraised about your plans for the evening, just like folks have been doing for the last 50-odd years (I think individual telephones in dorm rooms were uncommon prior to that), but that negates the value of the new technology.
What people want is something that lets them push information out to people effortlessly and quickly, with a modicum of privacy, and with less effort involved than using a telephone. In the same way that people want to be able to use email for business purposes, even though they could probably accomplish the same functions with paper mail and have increased security.
In short, could people use older technology to do the same thing? Sure. Civilization got along just fine with slide rules, typewriters, and comptometers; that doesn't mean that the systems we have now aren't an improvement on any of those things. People will find a balance between the advantages of a new technology (speed of communication, less effort required) and its disadvantages (lack of privacy), just as we've always done with new inventions. The fact that people use them despite the disadvantages speaks to the perceived value that they add.
I was going to suggest this. When I really need to run something that's Windows-only, I run it in a WinXP virtual machine on my Linux box.
I was actually surprised at how spry Windows feels, when it's not bogged down by a lot of anti-virus/spyware/adware, automated backup programs, and the like. Of course, without those things it's not a terribly useful host OS, because it gets owned so easily (click on wrong link in Internet Explorer -> ActiveX control -> rootkit), but as a guest OS, I just disable all patching and auto-updates.
When I'm done with whatever I'm doing with it, I just roll the image back to its saved state and shut it down. Basically I can abuse the living shit out of it, and then just kiss it goodbye the second it starts acting up.
Obviously you need to take steps to make sure that you save your work somewhere not on the VM's drive (duh...), but I could definitely see the possibility for working like this. I still hate working in Windows, but Windows as a VM is orders of magnitude nicer than Windows running on the actual metal.
I always knew that Alge-Blaster was missing something... I wouldn't have guessed that hard-core sex was it, though.
Although, such a product would dovetail well with the excellent Celeste's Guide to Grammar, and Advanced Grammar (NSFW if your boss lacks a sense of humor). Everyone says that education needs to be 'more relevant' today; you can't get more relevant than that.
I think the online-postage people already thought of this; printing it to a PDF and then running multiple copies really isn't any more dangerous/creative than just making photocopies of the printed postage; my understanding is that this is prevented by making each stamp/indicia contain a serial number barcode which is scanned as it is processed, and then noted by the system. If an identical indicia is sent through, it should be rejected as bad postage.
Now whether or not they check all the mail that's postmarked that way, or just spot-check some of it, I have no idea; but I'm pretty sure that just running off multiple copies of the same stamp-image won't do you a whole lot of good. Those online-postage stamp systems don't (at least I hope not) depend on the security or trustworthiness of the client system (not multi-printing) in order to function. You might be able to get away with it for a short while, though.
This is true, however, Pay-Per-View movies only cost (at most) $4 or so. I don't think they would be nearly as popular as they are -- and I'm not even sure how popular they are -- if they cost any more than that.
I think $10 may be a stretch for what most people will pay for something that's divorced from a physical object (that might otherwise give it some perceived value) and extremely limited in what can be done with it.
At $4.99, I think these things would sell like hotcakes. At $9.99, I think they'll do OK. At $14-20, I don't think they'll move, after the initial novelty is spent.
If you really need a deterrent, make attendance affect their grade slightly. Like 5-10%. Allow 3 or 4 free classes free a semester.
If the professor/school wants attendance, you really need to build it into policy. Not encumber the technical solution with so much baggage as to make it too much hassle to use. That's counterproductive.
Finally -- somebody with a clue. Pity you're (probably) not involved in the administration of higher education.
If truancy was that much of a problem, or if it became that much of a problem after the introduction of lecture podcasts, the solution is fairly simple: start taking attendance and start giving "participation grades" based on whether a student shows up or not. If it's really that important, have a TA sit in the front of class as people come in and check their school-issued photo ID if there are concerns that people are going to sign in for one another.
This is purely a policy issue, and is independent of the podcast question. If students are really that hell-bent on not coming to class, it's a pretty simple matter to send one guy to class with a digital recorder, have him record the lecture, and then email the recording to everyone else who wants it. A "bootleg lecture," if you will. Given that pocket dictation recorders are smaller than a pack of gum (you can record with one pretty well if you put it in your shirt pocket and sit in the front row, and don't move around), there is really no way to stop this -- unless you want to frisk every student for recording devices before you get started. And remember that if you let people use or even bring laptops into the lecture hall, they could easily be recording the whole thing (even videotaping it! the horror!) for those evil "truants" to review later on.
Honestly, if someone can get the same benefit of your class just by listening to a few podcasts or watching some video tapes, then you have no business calling yourself a teacher. You might as well just record the lectures, email them to everyone on the class roster, and save everyone involved a whole lot of time. If you teach well, then your lectures ought to have some value in themselves, aside from what could be gleaned from a simple recording -- otherwise, why bother going to all the work of doing a face-to-face? Just read your script into the camera and save everyone the aggravation of showing up.
In all honesty, I doubt Project Gutenberg will have run out of pre-1923 books by the time that new stuff starts coming out of Copyright under the new rules. They have everything written by humanity before that date to digitize: not just English language books and "classics," but government documents, records, foreign language texts, ancient manuscripts... everything. That's as close to an un-finishable task as you can set yourself, I think.
Just assuming that somehow they did manage to digitize everything that was out of copyright, then I think what they should do is start archiving everything that they can. Even if they can't disseminate the information, they could still scan documents in and store them for later OCR-ing, thus preserving them against deterioration. I think this would be covered by fair use law even if the work was still protected. Perhaps this sort of archival work is not exactly the aim of PG, but it's still critically important.
With that said, I don't mean to in any way excuse the disgusting abuse of our political and legal system that was and is the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act." That thing is a disgusting example of pretty much everything that's wrong with our government today.
You're right, of course... however, the manufacturers of computing equipment (and this can be extended to almost anything) have a vested interest in making their equipment as easy to use and approachable as possible, in order to sell it. Even if this means that the equipment is, in a way, too easy to use, or easy to use badly, they will do it, unless prompted otherwise by law.
Now in the case of WiFi setups, I'm not convinced that stickering is warranted. However, it's the nature of the companies selling the equipment to try and sell it to as wide a market as possible. After they've saturated the technically-literate market, they'll do whatever they have to do -- dumb the technology down, put it in plastic cases made in bright primary colors, etc. -- in order to sell it to a wider audience, even if the net result is that the technology is misused, or used obnoxiously/insecurely.
Thus you see a lot of technology which is very useful and handy when used by people who have a clue, which becomes destructive or even dangerous (or at least annoying) when it's put into wider circulation. The manufacturer will dumb it down, package it up with minimal instructions (so as not to scare off anyone), and cut whatever corners they can, so it can be easily mass-marketed.
Short of requiring some sort of test (a la amateur radio) before a person is allowed to buy some sort of externally-facing technology (modem, Wifi, cellphone), I don't see any easy solution to this problem.
Although I think that this law is an incredibly bad idea, I'm not sure that it's as obviously unconstitutional (using a very literal interpretation of various aspects of the Constitution) as some people are assuming.
The prohibition of Bills of Attainder is specifically against things passed by the legislature against specific persons, at least as I understand it; it's a separation-of-powers issue, to keep the legislature from just saying that a particular person is guilty of a crime and punishing them. They're not allowed to do that; they create the laws, but the actual judgement is left up to the judicial branch.
However, as best I understand the scheme in Ohio, it wouldn't be the legislature putting you on the registry per se, it would be a civil court. Thus, it's still in the hands of the judicial branch, and it passes the test.
In terms of due process, the Constitution guarantees the right to hear the charges against you and to confront your accuser and call witnesses on your behalf (and a jury, etc., etc.), but you could meet all of these requirements in a civil court, if it was so desired. A whole lot of the protections that we've come to expect in this country, while they're derived (I'd argue) from the spirit of the Constitution, aren't protected literally. They're just regular laws, or procedural standards, or come from precedent that relies on a more-than-literal reading of the Constitution. In other words, you could create a pretty twisted system -- twisted from our point-of-view, anyway -- and still maintain a facade of Constitutionality, if you wanted to.
At any rate, I haven't read the actual proposed legislation in Ohio, but I just thought it was important to point out that you could probably do something like this and make it Constitutional according to a very literalist interpretation, on paper. I don't think that we can necessarily count on the USSC striking down something like this, if it became law.
Charging for parking comes with an unspoken-yet-obvious assumption, which may not be true: that simply walking into your store and looking around, is worth money.
Personally, I don't go to stores that charge for parking, unless I know exactly what I want, and I know I can only buy it from that store (and I'm under too much of a time crunch to order it online). And even then, I'm almost always left with a sour taste in my throat, like I just got conned somehow.
It is not worth $1 (much less $2!) to simply walk into most stores; they're not doing any favor to me by simply letting me bask in the warm glow of their overhead fluorescent lighting and smell the faint odor of plastic and floor wax. The only stores I would consider paying for parking at, are the ones where simply being in them is some sort of valued experience in itself -- and that's a rarity these days.
If you think you have so many potential customers beating at your door that you can afford to demand payment for something that's generally assumed to be valueless or free, by all means do so. (Heck, why stop at parking? How about 10 cents per minute they spend standing around, cluttering up your floor?) But realize that by doing so, you're putting yourself at risk of having a competitor, whether next door or in the next town over, or even further away (or virtual), who takes a less arrogant attitude, take your customers and your business. At the end of it all, they'll have a store, and you'll have a parking lot. (If it still makes money as a parking lot, then perhaps you were in the wrong business to begin with?)
Not sure about $10, but here's one for under $20 from MonoPrice. (Hopefully that link is stable...) It's not a "gold plated" one or anything, but I've used their cheap grade stuff in the past and it generally does its job. I'm not sure why most people would need a 25' cable, though. For most people, a $4.95 adaptor and their existing DVI cable ought to do the trick.
Summary admittedly doesn't make a lot of sense, and the Flickr page is down, but the InfoWorld article isn't too bad.
Apparently the guy (allegly -- assuming you don't believe it's all some sort of elaborate PR hoax) had some software on his phone that caused photos taken to be automatically posted to his Flickr account. This is pretty reasonable, actually: Flickr lets you post photos via email, so it would just involve programming the phone to automatically send photos to an the address for this. His phone was stolen, and a while later, photos of random people started showing up on his Flickr page, taken by the thief, we assume.
The real interesting part of the story is not all this, though, it's how it turned into an Internet phenomenon and in particular how a lot of people really tore into him for being a PR flack. Personally I think that the story is probably legit, particularly in hindsight, but a lot of people didn't.
Apparently after he took so much crap about it being a stunt, he disabled the software and has written off the phone.
A crappy ending to what could have been a pretty neat story, if you ask me.
In other news, he has also announced that the next version of the Janus project will be powered by the Easter Bunny running on a very small, internally mounted gerbil wheel.
In addition to scanning for wireless traffic, Williams says the computer can break most WEP keys very quickly by focusing all eight wireless cards on the access point. Using a combination of common utilities like airreplay, airdump and aircrack, Willams said, "When I use all 8 radios to focus in on a single access point, [the WEP key] lasts less than five minutes." However, he added that some retail wireless access points will "just die" after being hit with so much traffic.
...
Williams is improving the Janus computer to crack wireless networks even faster. He is optimizing software routines to use the C7 chip to crack WPA and WPA2 protected networks without the use of Rainbow tables. He is also working on breaking SHA1 and RSA encryption in a single processor instruction cycle.
No, it can't decrypt traffic from 300 networks at once, but it can certainly crack one that's encrypted with some of the most common algorithms rather quickly. It's more than just a recording device. Although, if it really can crack networks that quickly, then concievably you could crack all the WEP-enabled networks in range, and then start logging all the traffic on all the networks that you could hear, encrypted and not, for later analysis.
This, in addition to another few patent claims involving Apple lately, have begun to make me a bit concerned.
In the short term, it might seem like it makes sense to "just settle" with a litigant with an absurd or overly broad patent, rather than fighting it. However, I'm not sure this is really a good idea in the long run -- it just invites more people to try the same trick over and over, damning you to a death by a thousand small wounds.
Compare the difference to IBM's staunch opposition of the SCO lawsuit. I realize that the cases are different, but philosophically they represent very different approaches. IBM seemed to realize, at the very beginning, that even if it cost more to fight SCO's claims than to settle with them, it would be a worthy expenditure, because to settle would be to roll out the Welcome mat to every other numbskull with an axe to grind. Apple seems to be only looking for the immediate cost: will it cost more to fight a particular case, or to settle it?
I think this might be because, while IBM realizes that it is a giant corporation with impossibly deep pockets, and thus a massive target, Apple has for so long been a relatively small player that it seems they haven't gotten their minds around the fact that a short term loss might be worthwhile, if it headed off similar future attacks.
I'm not a shareholder in Apple, just someone who's reasonably fond of their products. However, if I was, I'd be very concerned that in making the quick out-of-court settlement their M.O., they're painting a bulls-eye on themselves, which can only get more inviting the bigger and more profitable they get.
Slashdot Mirror
There seems to be one in-progress on Wikipedia:
p _environments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_deskto
Right now it only compares Gnome, KDE, and xfe, and then it really only lists somewhat superficial differences. If it were fleshed out, I think it could be quite handy.
I would expect an expert to respect another experts view and add his own view after the original
Obviously, the "experts" you know are a lot more polite than the ones I'm familiar with. I think that if anything, someone who thinks of themselves as an expert is more likely to wipe out information which they perceive to be 'incorrect;' intellectual debates can get pretty heated, after all.
I think the only way that an expert system could work is if edit rights are restricted to certain individuals, allowing each person to basically have their own article about a particular controversial topic. For instance, if you looked up string theory or evolution, there would be several different articles to choose from on string theory, written by several distinct "experts," each with different backgrounds and expressing a different perspective on the issue. It's a big mistake to let one expert have edit rights on content written by someone else whom they disagree with, and expect them to just play nice.
Maybe the string theorists would get along and let each others' work be; perhaps the evolutionarians would as well. But how do you think the article on Islam is going to work? I could think of people who might both be well-described as "experts," who nonetheless might have little tolerance for the opinions or work of the other. People kill each other over philosophical disagreements, where religion and politics are involved -- do you really think that they wouldn't revert each other's stuff online?
I think it's a mistake to try to cram too many different viewpoints into one article. This is the trademark of an encyclopedia, to be sure -- one article per entry -- but it's one of the reasons why encyclopedias traditionally aren't used for real research. It's just not possible to have one monolithic article for each topic and still preserve the context and flavor of each argument; to have an honest discussion of a contentious issue requires that you give each of the different viewpoints a separate space in which to express their argument, and then read them each in context.
Any 'expert system' which lets one 'expert' overwrite another is probably going to have just as many revert wars as the layman's Wikipedia; the only difference might be the grammar level used in the ad hominem attacks in the discussion pages. Being an 'expert' doesn't instantly make people respectful of dissenting views; if anything, my experience has taught me the contrary. The more developed someone's opinions on something are, the less likely they are to accept the dissenting point of view as valid. There are exceptions to this, but they're somewhat rare.
My ideal system would be one where I could go to a topic and see a consensus-based general introduction, which would be publicly editable and have a tracked history. This would allow me to get an idea of the "man on the street" perspective -- it might not be correct, and it might be totally at odds with what scientists or experts think at the same time, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of value. (E.g., it would be helpful to know of the wide gap today between the scientific consensus on global warming and the hoi polloi; the latter is important even if it's wrong, just because it's widely held.) Separate from this would be the 'expert articles.' The expert pages would each have a single author (which might be a real person, a psudeonymous entity, or a group of people acting as author -- for example a committee), and express a particular viewpoint. I would be free to agree or disagree with these, and they might contradict one another. That's the nature of knowledge.
It seems like both the Wiki-approach and the "scholar"-based approach have their merits. However it's tough or impossible to combine the two approaches in one project. As you point out, it would be frustrating to spend your time writing an article you know to be true, and have some 'idiot' revert it; however it would also be frustrating to have an article which represents a wide body of consensus opinion thrown away because one self-described "expert" disagreed.
These things need to be done separately. What I think would be optimal is a open-to-the-public Wikipedia, and a more selective Expertpedia; the latter would require articles to be written with real names or at least authenticated psuedonyms attached, and would check credentials, etc.
Then I think I would leave it for the market to develop resources which combine the two things. Although I don't like the site because of its hideous number of advertisements, a frontend like Answers.com is an example of how a site could take content from both places and combine it. If you searched for "nuclear power," you'd see both articles; the one from Wikipedia representing a sort of hive-mind concensus on the issue, and then various articles written by experts, each of which might have a distinct flavor and opinion.
Trying to incorporate experts into Wikipedia is a mistake -- having that sort of hierarchy destroys its purpose and community spirit; alternately, allowing public editing of articles written by true subject-matter experts would be obnoxious. Both types of information have their place, and assuming they're shared freely, others can provide the front-ends which allow an end user to pick which approach they'd like to use in a particular situation.
Sometimes you want the Wiki viewpoint, other times you might want more opinionated, authoritative sources; it all depends. The user should be presented with options and allowed to choose.
I don't know where you live, but in the United States, the vast majority of DVD players are region locked, and most people don't know or care.
The only people who have region-free players are people who've hacked them (some models had override codes you could put in) or who bought them overseas.
Most people go down to Wal-Mart, plunk down their $30, and buy whatever's on the end of the aisle, on sale. They barely stop to look at the name of the brand, much less anything so esoteric as region coding.
This will have a greater affect on people in Europe than in the U.S.; people here just don't care enough about imported content (with the exception of people who are into stuff from Japan) to notice region coding. Most Americans don't travel (and thus wouldn't come into possession of a foreign-region disc), don't speak any other languages (and so most foreign content is useless to them), and have enough domestic content available that they're not dying to get their hands on stuff from abroad.
The very small percentage of people who care about having a region-free DVD player or game console will pay the price premium necessary to acquire one on the grey market. With DVD players this usually means getting one originally destined for Europe or Asia, and with game consoles this means installing a mod chip. I don't think the Nintendo Rev--excuse me, Wii--will be any different in this regard. The very small number of gamers who want to play Japanese import games will get a mod chip.
The biggest effect that the region coding will have in the United States is that it creates a semi-legitimate excuse for mod chips to exist. If there wasn't region coding, and thus the excuse of wanting to be able to override the console's programming and play foreign games, then mod chips would be viewed more as a purely piracy-oriented tool; as it is, it's pretty easy to market them (with a hefty wink-wink-nudge-nude, know what I mean).
As someone who's never bought an un-modded console, I'd like to take a moment to thank Nintendo for this development. The modchip manufacturers and blank-DVD producers of the world salute you.
In some places it was even more restrictive than that. I was reading a book recently about the history of New York State (The Wedding of the Waters, which I stronly recommend to anyone interested in both the history of the U.S. and of technology), and there were fairly onerous restrictions on eligibility to vote, well into the 19th century. These restrictions could include not only race, age, and gender, but also that a person own property debt free. As an example, I think I remember reading that between 1820 and 1840, for a black person to be eligible to vote in NY State (remember also that at this time, the Electoral College electors were chosen by the state Legislature, not by direct election), they had to own a debt-free freehold worth at least 100 pounds sterling; unfortunately the texts of the NY State Constitutional Conventions from those periods (when the rule would have been enacted, in the 1820s and removed in the 1840s) doesn't seem to be online.
At any rate, what struck me in reading this, was how little we today appreciate the outright corruption and occasionally even violence that was pervasive in our political system in the past. To say that people "hate Bush" today may be true, but it shows a lack of perspective to suggest that these feelings are somehow historically unique. Similarly, the feeling that an executive body has overstepped its authority and encroached on civil liberties is hardly new; these crises have happened to our Republic before, and in my opinion in far more severe ways.
I don't think that history is going to be overly kind to our current President, but neither I think will it regard him with quite the same amount of cataclysmic rhetoric that's frequently spouted today.
If there is one single truth that seems to be the common thread through American politics, it is that the political system can ignore the will of the public for a time, but in the long run it always follows it eventually, if with much reluctance, once that public will is demonstrated. In hindsight, I think people will look back on the current period as one of confusion, when there wasn't a clear consensus among Americans as to what we wanted our government to do and what powers we wanted it to have, regarding domestic surveillance and threats. In this confusion, the goverment is essentially drifting off in its own (probably undesirable) direction; this is only possible because most people really don't understand what's going on or care.
Democracy is if nothing else, very slow. It has in the past taken multiple generations to resolve what in retrospect seem like very obvious problems; I'm not sure it's realistic to assume, even given the accelerated pace of life today, compared to the 19th century, that such basic questions about domestic survelliance and the role of the police and military in what now seems to be the common mode of warfare ("unconventional warfare," aka terrorism), will be settled in our lifetimes.
They are not a joke.
See: http://www.bullsballs.com/suv/accessories.html
That sort of "one generation only" DRM is just as broken as all other types of it; it suffers from the same terminal flaws, namely that you can't well restrict the copying of data once it's been moved into the digital realm, where copying is inherent to even the most basic manipulations of the data (i.e., moving it from one place to another).
Just because it doesn't prevent all copies doesn't make it any less flawed from an inherent information-theory and cryptological standpoint, and in the long run I think it's doomed to failure. The only question is whether, in failing, it manages to take down a few otherwise-good formats with it.
You have a point, but it's akin to saying "hey, if you don't like people reading your email, why not just write a letter, stick it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and put it in the Mail!"
Sure, you could use the telephone to keep people appraised about your plans for the evening, just like folks have been doing for the last 50-odd years (I think individual telephones in dorm rooms were uncommon prior to that), but that negates the value of the new technology.
What people want is something that lets them push information out to people effortlessly and quickly, with a modicum of privacy, and with less effort involved than using a telephone. In the same way that people want to be able to use email for business purposes, even though they could probably accomplish the same functions with paper mail and have increased security.
In short, could people use older technology to do the same thing? Sure. Civilization got along just fine with slide rules, typewriters, and comptometers; that doesn't mean that the systems we have now aren't an improvement on any of those things. People will find a balance between the advantages of a new technology (speed of communication, less effort required) and its disadvantages (lack of privacy), just as we've always done with new inventions. The fact that people use them despite the disadvantages speaks to the perceived value that they add.
I was going to suggest this. When I really need to run something that's Windows-only, I run it in a WinXP virtual machine on my Linux box.
I was actually surprised at how spry Windows feels, when it's not bogged down by a lot of anti-virus/spyware/adware, automated backup programs, and the like. Of course, without those things it's not a terribly useful host OS, because it gets owned so easily (click on wrong link in Internet Explorer -> ActiveX control -> rootkit), but as a guest OS, I just disable all patching and auto-updates.
When I'm done with whatever I'm doing with it, I just roll the image back to its saved state and shut it down. Basically I can abuse the living shit out of it, and then just kiss it goodbye the second it starts acting up.
Obviously you need to take steps to make sure that you save your work somewhere not on the VM's drive (duh...), but I could definitely see the possibility for working like this. I still hate working in Windows, but Windows as a VM is orders of magnitude nicer than Windows running on the actual metal.
I always knew that Alge-Blaster was missing something ... I wouldn't have guessed that hard-core sex was it, though.
Although, such a product would dovetail well with the excellent Celeste's Guide to Grammar, and Advanced Grammar (NSFW if your boss lacks a sense of humor). Everyone says that education needs to be 'more relevant' today; you can't get more relevant than that.
I think the online-postage people already thought of this; printing it to a PDF and then running multiple copies really isn't any more dangerous/creative than just making photocopies of the printed postage; my understanding is that this is prevented by making each stamp/indicia contain a serial number barcode which is scanned as it is processed, and then noted by the system. If an identical indicia is sent through, it should be rejected as bad postage.
Now whether or not they check all the mail that's postmarked that way, or just spot-check some of it, I have no idea; but I'm pretty sure that just running off multiple copies of the same stamp-image won't do you a whole lot of good. Those online-postage stamp systems don't (at least I hope not) depend on the security or trustworthiness of the client system (not multi-printing) in order to function. You might be able to get away with it for a short while, though.
This is true, however, Pay-Per-View movies only cost (at most) $4 or so. I don't think they would be nearly as popular as they are -- and I'm not even sure how popular they are -- if they cost any more than that.
I think $10 may be a stretch for what most people will pay for something that's divorced from a physical object (that might otherwise give it some perceived value) and extremely limited in what can be done with it.
At $4.99, I think these things would sell like hotcakes. At $9.99, I think they'll do OK. At $14-20, I don't think they'll move, after the initial novelty is spent.
If you really need a deterrent, make attendance affect their grade slightly. Like 5-10%. Allow 3 or 4 free classes free a semester.
If the professor/school wants attendance, you really need to build it into policy. Not encumber the technical solution with so much baggage as to make it too much hassle to use. That's counterproductive.
Finally -- somebody with a clue. Pity you're (probably) not involved in the administration of higher education.
If truancy was that much of a problem, or if it became that much of a problem after the introduction of lecture podcasts, the solution is fairly simple: start taking attendance and start giving "participation grades" based on whether a student shows up or not. If it's really that important, have a TA sit in the front of class as people come in and check their school-issued photo ID if there are concerns that people are going to sign in for one another.
This is purely a policy issue, and is independent of the podcast question. If students are really that hell-bent on not coming to class, it's a pretty simple matter to send one guy to class with a digital recorder, have him record the lecture, and then email the recording to everyone else who wants it. A "bootleg lecture," if you will. Given that pocket dictation recorders are smaller than a pack of gum (you can record with one pretty well if you put it in your shirt pocket and sit in the front row, and don't move around), there is really no way to stop this -- unless you want to frisk every student for recording devices before you get started. And remember that if you let people use or even bring laptops into the lecture hall, they could easily be recording the whole thing (even videotaping it! the horror!) for those evil "truants" to review later on.
Honestly, if someone can get the same benefit of your class just by listening to a few podcasts or watching some video tapes, then you have no business calling yourself a teacher. You might as well just record the lectures, email them to everyone on the class roster, and save everyone involved a whole lot of time. If you teach well, then your lectures ought to have some value in themselves, aside from what could be gleaned from a simple recording -- otherwise, why bother going to all the work of doing a face-to-face? Just read your script into the camera and save everyone the aggravation of showing up.
In all honesty, I doubt Project Gutenberg will have run out of pre-1923 books by the time that new stuff starts coming out of Copyright under the new rules. They have everything written by humanity before that date to digitize: not just English language books and "classics," but government documents, records, foreign language texts, ancient manuscripts ... everything. That's as close to an un-finishable task as you can set yourself, I think.
Just assuming that somehow they did manage to digitize everything that was out of copyright, then I think what they should do is start archiving everything that they can. Even if they can't disseminate the information, they could still scan documents in and store them for later OCR-ing, thus preserving them against deterioration. I think this would be covered by fair use law even if the work was still protected. Perhaps this sort of archival work is not exactly the aim of PG, but it's still critically important.
With that said, I don't mean to in any way excuse the disgusting abuse of our political and legal system that was and is the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act." That thing is a disgusting example of pretty much everything that's wrong with our government today.
You're right, of course ... however, the manufacturers of computing equipment (and this can be extended to almost anything) have a vested interest in making their equipment as easy to use and approachable as possible, in order to sell it. Even if this means that the equipment is, in a way, too easy to use, or easy to use badly, they will do it, unless prompted otherwise by law.
Now in the case of WiFi setups, I'm not convinced that stickering is warranted. However, it's the nature of the companies selling the equipment to try and sell it to as wide a market as possible. After they've saturated the technically-literate market, they'll do whatever they have to do -- dumb the technology down, put it in plastic cases made in bright primary colors, etc. -- in order to sell it to a wider audience, even if the net result is that the technology is misused, or used obnoxiously/insecurely.
Thus you see a lot of technology which is very useful and handy when used by people who have a clue, which becomes destructive or even dangerous (or at least annoying) when it's put into wider circulation. The manufacturer will dumb it down, package it up with minimal instructions (so as not to scare off anyone), and cut whatever corners they can, so it can be easily mass-marketed.
Short of requiring some sort of test (a la amateur radio) before a person is allowed to buy some sort of externally-facing technology (modem, Wifi, cellphone), I don't see any easy solution to this problem.
Although I think that this law is an incredibly bad idea, I'm not sure that it's as obviously unconstitutional (using a very literal interpretation of various aspects of the Constitution) as some people are assuming.
The prohibition of Bills of Attainder is specifically against things passed by the legislature against specific persons, at least as I understand it; it's a separation-of-powers issue, to keep the legislature from just saying that a particular person is guilty of a crime and punishing them. They're not allowed to do that; they create the laws, but the actual judgement is left up to the judicial branch.
However, as best I understand the scheme in Ohio, it wouldn't be the legislature putting you on the registry per se, it would be a civil court. Thus, it's still in the hands of the judicial branch, and it passes the test.
In terms of due process, the Constitution guarantees the right to hear the charges against you and to confront your accuser and call witnesses on your behalf (and a jury, etc., etc.), but you could meet all of these requirements in a civil court, if it was so desired. A whole lot of the protections that we've come to expect in this country, while they're derived (I'd argue) from the spirit of the Constitution, aren't protected literally. They're just regular laws, or procedural standards, or come from precedent that relies on a more-than-literal reading of the Constitution. In other words, you could create a pretty twisted system -- twisted from our point-of-view, anyway -- and still maintain a facade of Constitutionality, if you wanted to.
At any rate, I haven't read the actual proposed legislation in Ohio, but I just thought it was important to point out that you could probably do something like this and make it Constitutional according to a very literalist interpretation, on paper. I don't think that we can necessarily count on the USSC striking down something like this, if it became law.
Charging for parking comes with an unspoken-yet-obvious assumption, which may not be true: that simply walking into your store and looking around, is worth money.
Personally, I don't go to stores that charge for parking, unless I know exactly what I want, and I know I can only buy it from that store (and I'm under too much of a time crunch to order it online). And even then, I'm almost always left with a sour taste in my throat, like I just got conned somehow.
It is not worth $1 (much less $2!) to simply walk into most stores; they're not doing any favor to me by simply letting me bask in the warm glow of their overhead fluorescent lighting and smell the faint odor of plastic and floor wax. The only stores I would consider paying for parking at, are the ones where simply being in them is some sort of valued experience in itself -- and that's a rarity these days.
If you think you have so many potential customers beating at your door that you can afford to demand payment for something that's generally assumed to be valueless or free, by all means do so. (Heck, why stop at parking? How about 10 cents per minute they spend standing around, cluttering up your floor?) But realize that by doing so, you're putting yourself at risk of having a competitor, whether next door or in the next town over, or even further away (or virtual), who takes a less arrogant attitude, take your customers and your business. At the end of it all, they'll have a store, and you'll have a parking lot. (If it still makes money as a parking lot, then perhaps you were in the wrong business to begin with?)
Not sure about $10, but here's one for under $20 from MonoPrice. (Hopefully that link is stable...) It's not a "gold plated" one or anything, but I've used their cheap grade stuff in the past and it generally does its job. I'm not sure why most people would need a 25' cable, though. For most people, a $4.95 adaptor and their existing DVI cable ought to do the trick.
this paper is essentially saying "Ghosts etc. can't exist because they violate the laws of physics."
Well, um, being that it was written by a bunch of physicists and all, for a bunch of physicists (since it's on arXive), isn't this to be expected?
Now, I'm sure if the professors from the Womens Studies department write a followup paper, that'll be some really good reading.
Summary admittedly doesn't make a lot of sense, and the Flickr page is down, but the InfoWorld article isn't too bad.
Apparently the guy (allegly -- assuming you don't believe it's all some sort of elaborate PR hoax) had some software on his phone that caused photos taken to be automatically posted to his Flickr account. This is pretty reasonable, actually: Flickr lets you post photos via email, so it would just involve programming the phone to automatically send photos to an the address for this. His phone was stolen, and a while later, photos of random people started showing up on his Flickr page, taken by the thief, we assume.
The real interesting part of the story is not all this, though, it's how it turned into an Internet phenomenon and in particular how a lot of people really tore into him for being a PR flack. Personally I think that the story is probably legit, particularly in hindsight, but a lot of people didn't.
Apparently after he took so much crap about it being a stunt, he disabled the software and has written off the phone.
A crappy ending to what could have been a pretty neat story, if you ask me.
No I think Flickr does its regular maintainance very late on weekend nights (EST). I've run into this before and it's a bit frustrating.
Just some rather bad timing in posting the story here, I guess.
In other news, he has also announced that the next version of the Janus project will be powered by the Easter Bunny running on a very small, internally mounted gerbil wheel.
No, it can't decrypt traffic from 300 networks at once, but it can certainly crack one that's encrypted with some of the most common algorithms rather quickly. It's more than just a recording device. Although, if it really can crack networks that quickly, then concievably you could crack all the WEP-enabled networks in range, and then start logging all the traffic on all the networks that you could hear, encrypted and not, for later analysis.
This, in addition to another few patent claims involving Apple lately, have begun to make me a bit concerned.
In the short term, it might seem like it makes sense to "just settle" with a litigant with an absurd or overly broad patent, rather than fighting it. However, I'm not sure this is really a good idea in the long run -- it just invites more people to try the same trick over and over, damning you to a death by a thousand small wounds.
Compare the difference to IBM's staunch opposition of the SCO lawsuit. I realize that the cases are different, but philosophically they represent very different approaches. IBM seemed to realize, at the very beginning, that even if it cost more to fight SCO's claims than to settle with them, it would be a worthy expenditure, because to settle would be to roll out the Welcome mat to every other numbskull with an axe to grind. Apple seems to be only looking for the immediate cost: will it cost more to fight a particular case, or to settle it?
I think this might be because, while IBM realizes that it is a giant corporation with impossibly deep pockets, and thus a massive target, Apple has for so long been a relatively small player that it seems they haven't gotten their minds around the fact that a short term loss might be worthwhile, if it headed off similar future attacks.
I'm not a shareholder in Apple, just someone who's reasonably fond of their products. However, if I was, I'd be very concerned that in making the quick out-of-court settlement their M.O., they're painting a bulls-eye on themselves, which can only get more inviting the bigger and more profitable they get.