I'm just guessing here, but I would think that unless you could prove that the freeware codecs were true clean-room reimplementations that didn't involve any of AT&T's IP (which it doesn't seem like anyone except AT&T has actually seen), then those codecs might have to get moved off of US servers and onto ones on friendlier shores.
Man, I remember when that thing came out. Actually I bet I have the MacWorld with it on the cover, if I dug around some (sad, I know).
I hadn't looked at it in a while, but it's interesting to note how similar it is to the iMacs of today. Sure, the iMacs don't have those big Bose speakers running up and down the side, but they have a lot of the same general design features.
Also, I think the 20th Anniversary Mac was built with a lot of laptop parts, which at the time was a fairly odd thing to do in a desktop machine; now we're seeing a lot of that in their products.
I find it most interesting because Apple, over the years, has acquired a reputation as a company that gets into a market way ahead of its time (Set-Top boxes with Pippin, handhelds with Newton, etc.), gets burned, and then retreats out of that market for what seems like forever. It's interesting to look back and see a one-off product like the 20th A.M. coming back (in small amounts) in main-line products, years later.
I disagree. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption to make -- the Bible is full of parables and allegories, and I don't think anyone except a small minority of Christians demand a literally textual interpretation, and those that do are usually labeled (by themselves or others) as "fundamentalists," or "literalists." Literalism is a different doctrine from infallibility, which is something shared by almost all Christians -- that they believe that the Bible is inspired by God. You can belive in infallibility and still understand allegory and parable, which have seemingly been used by everyone in the Christian tradition from Jesus on down, without succumbing to literalism.
Actually, I would argue that such literalists are hypocritical, because (in Galatians 4:22-24) Paul -- that's the Apostle Paul -- writes:
"For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he [who was] of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman [was] by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar."
So there you have an example of part of the Old Testament being clarified as being allegorical, by someone who supposedly is on the direct line to God. It's pretty hard to get around that. Not that I'm sure some people don't do the mental gymnastics, but a literal textual interpretation of the Bible just isn't practical.
In fact I would argue that the literal interpretations -- ignoring, as they do, glaringly obvious use of allegory in many cases -- are the more heretical ones, since it's obvious that Christians have been comfortable with the idea of allegory and non-literal teaching since the very beginning (e.g., how they interpret the Old Testament).
Although I confess never to have read the Koran (I've never read the Bible cover-to-cover either), my understanding is that it is written in a much different way than the Christian Bible. Its use of allegory is much more limited, and the acceptedness of allegorical interpretations are significantly less widespread. That's not to say that it isn't done (especially by some modern, moderate Muslims), but it doesn't have the wide-ranging acceptance that the Christian allegorical teaching style does. Furthermore, the practice of accepting only the last-written verse on a particular subject, as is done by some, makes issues much more cut-and-dried. (An easy progression to follow is the prohibitions on alcohol.) Whether this textual strictness is the "right" or "intended" interpretation is obviously up for debate, although it might not be a good idea to voice such a concern in some places right now. However, the texts currently accepted leave a lot less room for interpretation than Christian ones.
In the end, what matters is less what's actually written in any religion's holy documents, but how people interpret them. The current interpretation of most Christian ones is very allegorical and non-literal. This does not seem to be the case in the Arab Muslim world (although it may be more popular in other parts of the Muslim world), where it seems as though a literalist interpretation is dominant, and in fact there seems in some places to be a popular demand for government based on it.
I agree -- IBM was another company that went up a few notches in my book as a result of not caving to an obvious courtroom stickup. I was surprised initially that they didn't just buy SCO wholesale; I'm sure if somehow they had lost, we'd all be calling them fools for not doing so.
The SCO case, in my opinion, is made slightly more morally complicated by the fact that SCO actually did make a product at one point, but was basically taken over and was dismantled and sunk by a pack of theives. NTP, on the other hand, was purpose-built for attacking legitimate businesses, and never served any other function.
It's unfortunate that RIM and IBM seem to be the exception to the rule, though. (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft are the recent examples, but there are a lot more things going on every day that you never hear about -- abusive lawsuits that companies simply submit to because the cost of defending themselves is higher than the demand. Perhaps I was wrong to call the tech sector on it, because it's nearly universal -- I've been told it's endemic to the insurance industry as well. Regardless, in my book it's all extortion, and those who submit to it carry a certain amount of responsibility for why it continues, although the bulk is obviously with the perpetrators and the system which allows it.
I don't think WoW works as a "golf like" game because (at least the part I've played with other people) involve the long stretches of doing nothing that you need in order to prompt conversation. When you're playing golf, especially if it's with a couple of people, you spend most of your time either walking or standing around, meaning you have lots of opportunities to talk. Plus you might have drinks at the club afterwards, etc etc. I just don't see WoW as being conducive to that.
The only game/sport I've done that I think fills the role of golf (for some) is trap shooting. It has most of the same elements -- potentially very slow paced, provides ample opportunities to throw your own game if you're doing better than the boss, lots of standing-around when done in a group, etc. It also has a certain stratifying/filtering effect -- although a basic one doesn't cost much, high-end trap guns can get terribly expensive, so it provides people a way to show off a little if they've got dough, and some trap clubs are not dissimilar to country clubs in terms of having a social atmosphere and elitism (by virtue of being very expensive and/or having a limited number of membership slots that are handed down from one member to another). That's not to say that you can't be involved in the sport without those aspects, but they definitely are there for people that want them.
I'm sure other people can think of similar sports that provide the same things. The only downside to trap as a "business sport" is that (assuming you play safely -- I am willing to bet people in generations past did not) the hearing protection does make it difficult to talk without being rather loud. Although the way I've seen some people play, they don't spend a whole lot of time actually shooting.:-)
I think they were being allegorical and really telling you that if another part of your body was causing you to sin... well, work the rest out for yourself.
At any rate, it wasn't a totally literal command; what it means is that if your body is telling you to do something that you know you shouldn't (all these base desires that we, as humans, have), tell your body to stuff it. It's better to be uncomfortable, than live in sin.
There's no expectation that anyone is going to gouge out their eyes.
First of all, "hate speech" isn't a crime. At least, not yet in the US, that I'm aware of. There are some Universities that have tried to effectively criminalize it through their own disciplinary systems, and there are laws (which I don't support) which makes crimes more severe depending on the political and social leanings of the perpetrator, but nothing that outright prohibts you from saying something 'hateful.' The closest we get are the prohibitions on child pornography, and that's banned not necessarily because of the obscene-ness, but because it's indirectly seen as supporting child abuse. The other main form of prohibited (political) speech is when it directly calls for or incites violence, and before anyone starts, these cartoons weren't even close to any reasonable standard for "inciting violence."
Now, I'm not sure how many people have actually seen the cartoons in question, but I think they're pretty mild -- you can see a lot more offensive things on South Park (who has, incidentally, featured the Prophet, although I've never seen the episode and can't substantiate it).
I think this is one of the most interesting and prescient things I've read in this thread.
Chilling, but I think it's far more likely than any other scenario at this point. I don't think the genocide will be perpetrated by a first-world nation, though; I think it will be either one religious sect against another, or one tribal group against another.
The Middle East Muslim (the predominantly Arab) nations don't seem particularly interested, on the whole, in adopting democracy and living in a free society and generally being part of this big love-fest that we call the world economy. The few nations that are democratic seem, at least to my untrained analysis, to be substantially propped up by the West. The reason for our support is nominally because we love democracy in all its forms, but really has a lot more to do with the flow of oil.
So... what happens when the oil, and thus US interest, in that part of the world runs out? There aren't a whole lot of other natural resources in those areas to sell, and they're not exactly jump-starting their high-tech, service, and tourism sectors. The world only demands so many dates.
There are going to be a whole lot of people who've grown to expect a certain standard of living, who are going to be pretty upset when the lights go out in Tehran and don't go back on, because their government can't afford to maintain the infrastructure anymore, without oil revenues. How long will it take for one government or another to decide to start a war with a neighbor, in order to create a distraction from conditions at home? And I'm not talking about these piddling little battles we've come to call "wars" in the US, post-Vietnam; I'm talking about a real all-out, grinding, total war.
The interest of the world, and the US in particular, in promoting democracy is directly tied to the geopolitical relevance of the land that said nascent democracy is sitting on. Nobody really cared when Africa chewed itself up, and there's not a whole lot of interest now that it's become a cesspool, except insofar as making sure that it doesn't become a breeding ground for a world-ending pandemic, or when the lawlessness gets so bad that pirates start attacking our cruise ships or cargo transports. And Africa has lots more to offer the world in terms of exports and human capital than the Middle East would, devoid of oil.
I can pretty easily seeing that whole region of the world eating itself alive, with unimaginable human suffering, and the world looking on idly because those countries and those people chose to reject the ideals that unite everyone else.
The Mormons had their day. It pretty much came and went back in 1858; you can read the Wikipedia entry if you're really interested (see Nauvoo Legion and Utah War), but suffice it to say that they ended up with the distinction of being the only religious group to have war declared against them by the U.S. Government. (Although recently you could say this is incorrect, if you define Al Qaeda to be a 'religious organization,' which I do not.)
I don't think that they're exactly on a violent collision course with any other major secular or religious organizations at this point.
When you look at major religions who are both growing rapidly -- and growing at the expense of other religions, not just other sects of the same general belief system (e.g. at any given time one Christian group might be growing, but if Christians as a whole are decreasing in population, it's not really relevant) -- and who's beliefs are widely considered to be incompatible with the Western idea of a free, secular state, it's a pretty short list.
Not so. RIM never settled because the claims NTP has against them are bullshit.
I'm actually quite impressed that they didn't roll over and just cut NTP a check to make them go away, as I'm sure a lot of companies (and people) would be wont to do.
RIM has played the game very well. The only criticism I've heard of them at all is that, in the past, they were quite aggressive in using their own patents to keep other people out of the portable-email market, so to a certain extent they're getting bitten in the ass by their own tactics. But at least when they were using their patents, they at least were protecting a market; NTP is just doing the corporate equivalent of a mugging.
However, I have far more respect for them now, given that they've refused to settle and really showed some balls, than I would if they had just let the bunch of shyster lawyers that is NTP (you did know that NTP is just a front set up by an attorney, right?) bleed them for several million bucks.
Given the "marriages of convenience" that we've been seeing recently in the tech sector -- where it seems a whole lot of companies are willing to get in bed with anyone, including the Chinese government and our own (and at the same time, no less), if it makes them a few bucks -- I find it refreshing that RIM didn't just settle.
Which I'm pretty sure works for all N. (Maybe there are some that it doesn't, but it's right after lunch and I don't feel like thinking about it right now.) It's just factoring out N from 3N.
Well said. I agree; I have no problem at all with the USG spidering and indexing regular web content -- by putting something on the web you're publishing it, so what they're doing isn't really anything different from what Google is, except that I doubt that they'll obey robots.txt (which I don't think there is any legal requirement to do anyway), and they want to do a lot of fairly sophisticated datamining and visualization on the resultant data.
Good for them. I'm not sure it's a particularly useful thing to spend my tax dollars on in regards to the War on Terror -- I'd much rather they put more police officers in major cities -- but that's a different issue than the one of civil liberties.
If they started indexing email, then it becomes a little more suspect, since that's really communications interception, not just caching information that's already publicly available. It's the difference between recording a speech I gave while standing on a soapbox and yelling to an anonymous crowd, and tapping my phone. The former they (and everyone else) have full right to do, there's no (or shouldn't be) assumption of privacy on a public blog. But the second requires some degree of reasonable suspicion, or selection criteria -- e.g., I want them tapping particular people's phones and emails for particular reasons that can be reviewed later (and probably with a warrant), not just tapping everyone's phones and seeing what they can sift out.
However I think it's getting to the point, and I've made this point from time to time, where there's not really any assumption of privacy by an intelligent person of unencrypted data communications. Emails are like postcards, and whatever you write in them ought not to be anything you're not comfortable having coming back to haunt you. I think you're going to see that argument more and more, as the mystique of computers fades and more people realize how open their email is, as it's passing through the network. Frankly that assumption never should have existed in the first place, and we're going to see it go away eventually. Then it will become an issue of whether they have a warrant not to "intercept" the communication, but to forcibly decrypt it.
My favorite Progress Quest quote, from the Info page:
Gamers who have played modern online role-playing games, or almost any computer role-playing game, or who have at any time installed or upgraded their operating system, will find themselves incredibly comfortable with Progress Quest's very familiar gameplay.
I'm not sure that this would pan out -- the critical problem with WoW economies is that there's a totally unlimited supply of money, and unlike fiat currency in the real world, it's printed without much control at all.
E.g., when you complete a quest or kill a monster in most games, you get some money. (Don't ask me why that boar I just killed had 15 Copper on him, I don't want to know.) It's being created all the time, if there wasn't some way to take it out of the economy (objects getting destroyed, "bound" items being sold for less than market value) the economy would hyperinflate.
So you'd have to also come up, I guess, with a totally different way of making money and keeping everyone employed. In effect, you'd have to have a central bank in the world that would regulate monetary policy just like we do IRL.
I guess it wouldn't be impossible to do, given that we do it in the real life, and the admins of a MPG world have truly godlike control over their universe (if they want to stop adding money to the economy, or change the value of an item, they can just do it without any real effort). It would certainly be an interesting experiment.
Let's take it a little further -- rather than just having one human player per character, why not trade them around a little?
Every time you log on, you get dropped into a character that somebody else has just logged out of. Feel like doing something anti-social? Violent? Cannibalistic? Go for it! And the best part -- once you've gotten the character in jail / being chased by hundreds of angry players, log out and let somebody else take over. It'll be HI-larious.
After all, you can only program a script to be so evil. Allow other people to run your character when you're away? It's virtual Ted Bundy time.
As soon as i get done editing the whole movie, i will then be able to distribute it. I plan on putting voice commentaries in it, speed up any boring parts, i figure i can bring down 115 hours of gameplay down to a 30 hour movie...
Wow. Because I was afraid I wasn't going to have anything to do this weekend.
The sad part is that there are people out there who are going to watch that thing, in its entirety, with rapt attention throughout.
I must be missing something -- I'm looking at the reply page right now, and I'm not seeing any sort of anti-script code. Do you post a lot with out signing on or something?
But I agree with you about the quotes on the bottom of the page. I never used to pay much attention to them, but lately there have been a few that were either eerily related to the subject I was writing about, or such gigantic non sequiturs that they made me laugh.
Does anybody know where they're being pulled from, or who puts them in? Is there some fixed number, or do they get ripped off the net somehow?
Better than that, there was actually a 3D "building blocks" (they weren't really Legos) program called Gryphon Bricks. (Possibly 'Bricks 3D'.)
I just looked it up and it seems as though the company has gone kaput, making me belive the program is probably abandoned. (Release date was Sep 1996.) I have the actual retail box around somewhere.
I was kind of a neat concept, but honestly I found that arranging bricks via the mouse was considerably more difficult and less intuitive than putting them together by hand. One of the program's features, IIRC, was that you could put together a model in VR and then it would print a parts list for you. I suppose on very complex models that might have been useful, but I always felt like it would be easier to build the model by hand, take some Polaroids, and then take it apart to get the parts list.
Anyway, it was a neat little program anyway, usefulness to 'Lego designers' nonwithstanding. It was fun if you were on a plane or something and just wanted to have a game to play that wasn't competitive but wasn't as ass-achingly boring as four hours worth of Minesweeper.
And aside from the obvious weaknesses inherent in trying to move a physical-world building toy into the virtual one, it was a very well thought-out program. It was even AppleScriptable, which allowed for some interesting hacks.
I think it's interesting how that's been assembled. Rather than using the regular Lego plastic shafts (the sort of X-shaped ones, or rather 'round with 4 deep angle grooves cut into them at 90-degree intervals'), he's used regular machine screws and hardware. It kind of reminds me more of an Erector set than Legos, in terms of how it's built.
I have to admit I'm sad that Erector seems to have gone the way of the dodo (although Meccano is still around), although Legos are definitely superior in terms of ease-of-use, I did have a soft spot for them.
I'm very aware of the ROKR, as much as I've tried to expunge it from my memory, however I don't think even Apple would have dared call that abortion of a device an "iPod Phone." (Mostly because they were the ones responsible for ruining it.)
Being an engineer at Motorola must be really hard. There are several times over the past few years when they have gotten so very close to making a great product, only to have marketing weasels from some other company pull the rug out from under them, and cripple the device so much, it becomes useless and widely ridiculed.
The first example I'm thinking of was the Verizon v710 phone -- Motorola even went and advertised it, on their own, in order to generate sales when it was released through Verizon. But the Verizon scumbags crippled it so badly, half the features Motorola advertised never worked. (If I sound bitter it's only because I stuck with Verizon for about a year longer than I otherwise would've, waiting for that phone to come out -- after I found out it was crippled, I beat feet to TMobile and haven't looked back.)
But, man, it must have really sucked to be on the v710 or ROKR design teams.
I think Google came down on BMW a little hard, but I think they also wanted to make an example as a warning to other people who are using SEOs to try and increase their pagerank.
However, if I were them I think maybe it would have been a better move -- rather than zeroing their pagerank -- to changing it to reflect whatever the pagerank would have been from the actual user-accessible site, instead of the gateway page that they were sending robots to.
Although, that doesn't give them a lot of motivation to stop using the redirected, robots-only gateway page, and might set a precident that Google will just clean up after whatever SEO trickery you try and use.
I had not heard anything mentioned about the ISS' cross-band repeater being in operation to retransmit SuitSat. Do you know what its output frequency would be?
I don't really have the equipment to monitor it (just a HT with a 5/8-wave magmount, indoors) but some of the guys in my club regularly get the ISS, although I don't think anybody has had success getting SuitSat itself. It would be nice if they're boosting the signal for us.
True. However, GigE is used a lot on backbone connections within LANs. So even though your client is only seeing a 100Mb port, the switch it's plugged into probably uses 1Gb on its uplink side.
I think the reason you don't see more 1Gb client ports, is because most network architects want to have the backbones be some multiple of the client-link speeds, and 10Gb connections are cost-prohibitive. And if you don't have the bandwidth on the backbone to carry the traffic (and if most of the traffic in your LAN isn't internal, which is a fair assumption to make in a lot of cases), why bother buying Gig switches?
The biggest thing most people would get out of some new, ultra-fast Ethernet, would be that their computer's connection might eventually become an order of magnitude or two lower than it. So if you have 100Gb ethernet available to use for backbones, then putting every client in a LAN on GigE becomes more feasible.
In a home or small-LAN situation, I'd like to see more GigE, because it provides enough bandwidth (theoretically) to do full-resolution screen-sharing in near-realtime. VNC and the like are fine on 10 or 100Mb for remote administration and even regular office tasks, but it's not a way I'd want to play any kind of game, or even use as my main desktop for very long. But at 1000Mb/s, you could (again, theoretically) send a 1024x768x24 bit screen down the wire at 50 refreshes per second, without compression. Now that, to me, spells possibilities. Too bad I'm too poor (and barred by lease from drilling holes in the walls) to put it into my place right now.
Um, the WinXP alt-tab works exactly as you describe,
No, there is a difference: Alt-Tab on Windows rotates between open windows, on MacOS it rotates through applications. Like I said, the differences are minimal, but they're there.
An example of why this difference matters: On Windows, if an application is running but doesn't have any open windows, it won't appear in the Alt-Tab list. This happens for example with my IM client -- I can close the buddy list window and it will reduce itself to an icon in the tray, but continue to run; it will not be available through Alt-Tab in this state. iChat or Adium on Mac OS X, on the other hand, can still be running in the background, without any open windows, and will appear both in the Dock, and in the Command-Tab display of applications.
I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or not.
I think -- if I understand you correctly -- that I agree with you. People pirate movies with camcorders in movie theaters. This shows that even physical, analog content can't be protected, in what ought to be a "secure location."
Now, what DRM attempts to do, is let people take that movie home with them, where they'll have all the time and resources they want to try and throw at the problem of breaking into it. And in order to be useful to people who actually want to pay to use it, the key has to be available somewhere.
So people have the encrypted content (the DRMed file or whatever) and they have access to the key (through whatever way you're supposed to view the file, in the DRM scheme), therefore, a person with enough time on their hands is going to get their hands on the decrypted content.
All you can do is make that obnoxiously difficult, by degrading the analog outputs, etc. However -- as your point about movie theaters substantiates -- people will still find ways to copy the analog output, AND they will do it, even if the quality is substantially impaired by doing so.
It becomes even more of a losing proposition, because as you make the DRM more and more restrictive, you create an incentive for otherwise-legitimate users to get pirated content, instead of legitimate ones. So it creates not only the means for people to "steal" content (giving them the keys and the encrypted content) but in trying to make it difficult for them to copy it, creates an incentive for them to do so. I don't think it takes Sherlock Holmes to put together what happens when you combine means and motive.
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I'm just guessing here, but I would think that unless you could prove that the freeware codecs were true clean-room reimplementations that didn't involve any of AT&T's IP (which it doesn't seem like anyone except AT&T has actually seen), then those codecs might have to get moved off of US servers and onto ones on friendlier shores.
I think the Penguin Liberation Front would probably be willing to host it.
Man, I remember when that thing came out. Actually I bet I have the MacWorld with it on the cover, if I dug around some (sad, I know).
I hadn't looked at it in a while, but it's interesting to note how similar it is to the iMacs of today. Sure, the iMacs don't have those big Bose speakers running up and down the side, but they have a lot of the same general design features.
Also, I think the 20th Anniversary Mac was built with a lot of laptop parts, which at the time was a fairly odd thing to do in a desktop machine; now we're seeing a lot of that in their products.
I find it most interesting because Apple, over the years, has acquired a reputation as a company that gets into a market way ahead of its time (Set-Top boxes with Pippin, handhelds with Newton, etc.), gets burned, and then retreats out of that market for what seems like forever. It's interesting to look back and see a one-off product like the 20th A.M. coming back (in small amounts) in main-line products, years later.
I disagree. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption to make -- the Bible is full of parables and allegories, and I don't think anyone except a small minority of Christians demand a literally textual interpretation, and those that do are usually labeled (by themselves or others) as "fundamentalists," or "literalists." Literalism is a different doctrine from infallibility, which is something shared by almost all Christians -- that they believe that the Bible is inspired by God. You can belive in infallibility and still understand allegory and parable, which have seemingly been used by everyone in the Christian tradition from Jesus on down, without succumbing to literalism.
Actually, I would argue that such literalists are hypocritical, because (in Galatians 4:22-24) Paul -- that's the Apostle Paul -- writes:
"For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman.
But he [who was] of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman [was] by promise.
Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar."
So there you have an example of part of the Old Testament being clarified as being allegorical, by someone who supposedly is on the direct line to God. It's pretty hard to get around that. Not that I'm sure some people don't do the mental gymnastics, but a literal textual interpretation of the Bible just isn't practical.
In fact I would argue that the literal interpretations -- ignoring, as they do, glaringly obvious use of allegory in many cases -- are the more heretical ones, since it's obvious that Christians have been comfortable with the idea of allegory and non-literal teaching since the very beginning (e.g., how they interpret the Old Testament).
Although I confess never to have read the Koran (I've never read the Bible cover-to-cover either), my understanding is that it is written in a much different way than the Christian Bible. Its use of allegory is much more limited, and the acceptedness of allegorical interpretations are significantly less widespread. That's not to say that it isn't done (especially by some modern, moderate Muslims), but it doesn't have the wide-ranging acceptance that the Christian allegorical teaching style does. Furthermore, the practice of accepting only the last-written verse on a particular subject, as is done by some, makes issues much more cut-and-dried. (An easy progression to follow is the prohibitions on alcohol.) Whether this textual strictness is the "right" or "intended" interpretation is obviously up for debate, although it might not be a good idea to voice such a concern in some places right now. However, the texts currently accepted leave a lot less room for interpretation than Christian ones.
In the end, what matters is less what's actually written in any religion's holy documents, but how people interpret them. The current interpretation of most Christian ones is very allegorical and non-literal. This does not seem to be the case in the Arab Muslim world (although it may be more popular in other parts of the Muslim world), where it seems as though a literalist interpretation is dominant, and in fact there seems in some places to be a popular demand for government based on it.
I agree -- IBM was another company that went up a few notches in my book as a result of not caving to an obvious courtroom stickup. I was surprised initially that they didn't just buy SCO wholesale; I'm sure if somehow they had lost, we'd all be calling them fools for not doing so.
The SCO case, in my opinion, is made slightly more morally complicated by the fact that SCO actually did make a product at one point, but was basically taken over and was dismantled and sunk by a pack of theives. NTP, on the other hand, was purpose-built for attacking legitimate businesses, and never served any other function.
It's unfortunate that RIM and IBM seem to be the exception to the rule, though. (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft are the recent examples, but there are a lot more things going on every day that you never hear about -- abusive lawsuits that companies simply submit to because the cost of defending themselves is higher than the demand. Perhaps I was wrong to call the tech sector on it, because it's nearly universal -- I've been told it's endemic to the insurance industry as well. Regardless, in my book it's all extortion, and those who submit to it carry a certain amount of responsibility for why it continues, although the bulk is obviously with the perpetrators and the system which allows it.
I don't think WoW works as a "golf like" game because (at least the part I've played with other people) involve the long stretches of doing nothing that you need in order to prompt conversation. When you're playing golf, especially if it's with a couple of people, you spend most of your time either walking or standing around, meaning you have lots of opportunities to talk. Plus you might have drinks at the club afterwards, etc etc. I just don't see WoW as being conducive to that.
:-)
The only game/sport I've done that I think fills the role of golf (for some) is trap shooting. It has most of the same elements -- potentially very slow paced, provides ample opportunities to throw your own game if you're doing better than the boss, lots of standing-around when done in a group, etc. It also has a certain stratifying/filtering effect -- although a basic one doesn't cost much, high-end trap guns can get terribly expensive, so it provides people a way to show off a little if they've got dough, and some trap clubs are not dissimilar to country clubs in terms of having a social atmosphere and elitism (by virtue of being very expensive and/or having a limited number of membership slots that are handed down from one member to another). That's not to say that you can't be involved in the sport without those aspects, but they definitely are there for people that want them.
I'm sure other people can think of similar sports that provide the same things. The only downside to trap as a "business sport" is that (assuming you play safely -- I am willing to bet people in generations past did not) the hearing protection does make it difficult to talk without being rather loud. Although the way I've seen some people play, they don't spend a whole lot of time actually shooting.
I think they were being allegorical and really telling you that if another part of your body was causing you to sin... well, work the rest out for yourself.
At any rate, it wasn't a totally literal command; what it means is that if your body is telling you to do something that you know you shouldn't (all these base desires that we, as humans, have), tell your body to stuff it. It's better to be uncomfortable, than live in sin.
There's no expectation that anyone is going to gouge out their eyes.
First of all, "hate speech" isn't a crime. At least, not yet in the US, that I'm aware of. There are some Universities that have tried to effectively criminalize it through their own disciplinary systems, and there are laws (which I don't support) which makes crimes more severe depending on the political and social leanings of the perpetrator, but nothing that outright prohibts you from saying something 'hateful.' The closest we get are the prohibitions on child pornography, and that's banned not necessarily because of the obscene-ness, but because it's indirectly seen as supporting child abuse. The other main form of prohibited (political) speech is when it directly calls for or incites violence, and before anyone starts, these cartoons weren't even close to any reasonable standard for "inciting violence."
Now, I'm not sure how many people have actually seen the cartoons in question, but I think they're pretty mild -- you can see a lot more offensive things on South Park (who has, incidentally, featured the Prophet, although I've never seen the episode and can't substantiate it).
You can browse them to your heart's content here.
I think this is one of the most interesting and prescient things I've read in this thread.
... what happens when the oil, and thus US interest, in that part of the world runs out? There aren't a whole lot of other natural resources in those areas to sell, and they're not exactly jump-starting their high-tech, service, and tourism sectors. The world only demands so many dates.
Chilling, but I think it's far more likely than any other scenario at this point. I don't think the genocide will be perpetrated by a first-world nation, though; I think it will be either one religious sect against another, or one tribal group against another.
The Middle East Muslim (the predominantly Arab) nations don't seem particularly interested, on the whole, in adopting democracy and living in a free society and generally being part of this big love-fest that we call the world economy. The few nations that are democratic seem, at least to my untrained analysis, to be substantially propped up by the West. The reason for our support is nominally because we love democracy in all its forms, but really has a lot more to do with the flow of oil.
So
There are going to be a whole lot of people who've grown to expect a certain standard of living, who are going to be pretty upset when the lights go out in Tehran and don't go back on, because their government can't afford to maintain the infrastructure anymore, without oil revenues. How long will it take for one government or another to decide to start a war with a neighbor, in order to create a distraction from conditions at home? And I'm not talking about these piddling little battles we've come to call "wars" in the US, post-Vietnam; I'm talking about a real all-out, grinding, total war.
The interest of the world, and the US in particular, in promoting democracy is directly tied to the geopolitical relevance of the land that said nascent democracy is sitting on. Nobody really cared when Africa chewed itself up, and there's not a whole lot of interest now that it's become a cesspool, except insofar as making sure that it doesn't become a breeding ground for a world-ending pandemic, or when the lawlessness gets so bad that pirates start attacking our cruise ships or cargo transports. And Africa has lots more to offer the world in terms of exports and human capital than the Middle East would, devoid of oil.
I can pretty easily seeing that whole region of the world eating itself alive, with unimaginable human suffering, and the world looking on idly because those countries and those people chose to reject the ideals that unite everyone else.
The Mormons had their day. It pretty much came and went back in 1858; you can read the Wikipedia entry if you're really interested (see Nauvoo Legion and Utah War), but suffice it to say that they ended up with the distinction of being the only religious group to have war declared against them by the U.S. Government. (Although recently you could say this is incorrect, if you define Al Qaeda to be a 'religious organization,' which I do not.)
I don't think that they're exactly on a violent collision course with any other major secular or religious organizations at this point.
When you look at major religions who are both growing rapidly -- and growing at the expense of other religions, not just other sects of the same general belief system (e.g. at any given time one Christian group might be growing, but if Christians as a whole are decreasing in population, it's not really relevant) -- and who's beliefs are widely considered to be incompatible with the Western idea of a free, secular state, it's a pretty short list.
Not so. RIM never settled because the claims NTP has against them are bullshit.
I'm actually quite impressed that they didn't roll over and just cut NTP a check to make them go away, as I'm sure a lot of companies (and people) would be wont to do.
RIM has played the game very well. The only criticism I've heard of them at all is that, in the past, they were quite aggressive in using their own patents to keep other people out of the portable-email market, so to a certain extent they're getting bitten in the ass by their own tactics. But at least when they were using their patents, they at least were protecting a market; NTP is just doing the corporate equivalent of a mugging.
However, I have far more respect for them now, given that they've refused to settle and really showed some balls, than I would if they had just let the bunch of shyster lawyers that is NTP (you did know that NTP is just a front set up by an attorney, right?) bleed them for several million bucks.
Given the "marriages of convenience" that we've been seeing recently in the tech sector -- where it seems a whole lot of companies are willing to get in bed with anyone, including the Chinese government and our own (and at the same time, no less), if it makes them a few bucks -- I find it refreshing that RIM didn't just settle.
Huh? All he said was:
(N * 2) = ((N * 3) - N)
Which I'm pretty sure works for all N. (Maybe there are some that it doesn't, but it's right after lunch and I don't feel like thinking about it right now.) It's just factoring out N from 3N.
Well said. I agree; I have no problem at all with the USG spidering and indexing regular web content -- by putting something on the web you're publishing it, so what they're doing isn't really anything different from what Google is, except that I doubt that they'll obey robots.txt (which I don't think there is any legal requirement to do anyway), and they want to do a lot of fairly sophisticated datamining and visualization on the resultant data.
Good for them. I'm not sure it's a particularly useful thing to spend my tax dollars on in regards to the War on Terror -- I'd much rather they put more police officers in major cities -- but that's a different issue than the one of civil liberties.
If they started indexing email, then it becomes a little more suspect, since that's really communications interception, not just caching information that's already publicly available. It's the difference between recording a speech I gave while standing on a soapbox and yelling to an anonymous crowd, and tapping my phone. The former they (and everyone else) have full right to do, there's no (or shouldn't be) assumption of privacy on a public blog. But the second requires some degree of reasonable suspicion, or selection criteria -- e.g., I want them tapping particular people's phones and emails for particular reasons that can be reviewed later (and probably with a warrant), not just tapping everyone's phones and seeing what they can sift out.
However I think it's getting to the point, and I've made this point from time to time, where there's not really any assumption of privacy by an intelligent person of unencrypted data communications. Emails are like postcards, and whatever you write in them ought not to be anything you're not comfortable having coming back to haunt you. I think you're going to see that argument more and more, as the mystique of computers fades and more people realize how open their email is, as it's passing through the network. Frankly that assumption never should have existed in the first place, and we're going to see it go away eventually. Then it will become an issue of whether they have a warrant not to "intercept" the communication, but to forcibly decrypt it.
I'm not sure that this would pan out -- the critical problem with WoW economies is that there's a totally unlimited supply of money, and unlike fiat currency in the real world, it's printed without much control at all.
E.g., when you complete a quest or kill a monster in most games, you get some money. (Don't ask me why that boar I just killed had 15 Copper on him, I don't want to know.) It's being created all the time, if there wasn't some way to take it out of the economy (objects getting destroyed, "bound" items being sold for less than market value) the economy would hyperinflate.
So you'd have to also come up, I guess, with a totally different way of making money and keeping everyone employed. In effect, you'd have to have a central bank in the world that would regulate monetary policy just like we do IRL.
I guess it wouldn't be impossible to do, given that we do it in the real life, and the admins of a MPG world have truly godlike control over their universe (if they want to stop adding money to the economy, or change the value of an item, they can just do it without any real effort). It would certainly be an interesting experiment.
Let's take it a little further -- rather than just having one human player per character, why not trade them around a little?
Every time you log on, you get dropped into a character that somebody else has just logged out of. Feel like doing something anti-social? Violent? Cannibalistic? Go for it! And the best part -- once you've gotten the character in jail / being chased by hundreds of angry players, log out and let somebody else take over. It'll be HI-larious.
After all, you can only program a script to be so evil. Allow other people to run your character when you're away? It's virtual Ted Bundy time.
Wow. Because I was afraid I wasn't going to have anything to do this weekend.
The sad part is that there are people out there who are going to watch that thing, in its entirety, with rapt attention throughout.
Anti-script code of the reply page?
I must be missing something -- I'm looking at the reply page right now, and I'm not seeing any sort of anti-script code. Do you post a lot with out signing on or something?
But I agree with you about the quotes on the bottom of the page. I never used to pay much attention to them, but lately there have been a few that were either eerily related to the subject I was writing about, or such gigantic non sequiturs that they made me laugh.
Does anybody know where they're being pulled from, or who puts them in? Is there some fixed number, or do they get ripped off the net somehow?
Better than that, there was actually a 3D "building blocks" (they weren't really Legos) program called Gryphon Bricks. (Possibly 'Bricks 3D'.)
w s/gryphonbricks.htm
i d=297
I just looked it up and it seems as though the company has gone kaput, making me belive the program is probably abandoned. (Release date was Sep 1996.) I have the actual retail box around somewhere.
I was kind of a neat concept, but honestly I found that arranging bricks via the mouse was considerably more difficult and less intuitive than putting them together by hand. One of the program's features, IIRC, was that you could put together a model in VR and then it would print a parts list for you. I suppose on very complex models that might have been useful, but I always felt like it would be easier to build the model by hand, take some Polaroids, and then take it apart to get the parts list.
Anyway, it was a neat little program anyway, usefulness to 'Lego designers' nonwithstanding. It was fun if you were on a plane or something and just wanted to have a game to play that wasn't competitive but wasn't as ass-achingly boring as four hours worth of Minesweeper.
And aside from the obvious weaknesses inherent in trying to move a physical-world building toy into the virtual one, it was a very well thought-out program. It was even AppleScriptable, which allowed for some interesting hacks.
Information:
http://www.thecomputershow.com/computershow/revie
Demo (MacOS 7.1 or later, OS X under Classic):
http://mac.the-underdogs.org/index.php?show=game&
I think it's interesting how that's been assembled. Rather than using the regular Lego plastic shafts (the sort of X-shaped ones, or rather 'round with 4 deep angle grooves cut into them at 90-degree intervals'), he's used regular machine screws and hardware. It kind of reminds me more of an Erector set than Legos, in terms of how it's built.
I have to admit I'm sad that Erector seems to have gone the way of the dodo (although Meccano is still around), although Legos are definitely superior in terms of ease-of-use, I did have a soft spot for them.
I'm very aware of the ROKR, as much as I've tried to expunge it from my memory, however I don't think even Apple would have dared call that abortion of a device an "iPod Phone." (Mostly because they were the ones responsible for ruining it.)
Being an engineer at Motorola must be really hard. There are several times over the past few years when they have gotten so very close to making a great product, only to have marketing weasels from some other company pull the rug out from under them, and cripple the device so much, it becomes useless and widely ridiculed.
The first example I'm thinking of was the Verizon v710 phone -- Motorola even went and advertised it, on their own, in order to generate sales when it was released through Verizon. But the Verizon scumbags crippled it so badly, half the features Motorola advertised never worked. (If I sound bitter it's only because I stuck with Verizon for about a year longer than I otherwise would've, waiting for that phone to come out -- after I found out it was crippled, I beat feet to TMobile and haven't looked back.)
But, man, it must have really sucked to be on the v710 or ROKR design teams.
I agree.
I think Google came down on BMW a little hard, but I think they also wanted to make an example as a warning to other people who are using SEOs to try and increase their pagerank.
However, if I were them I think maybe it would have been a better move -- rather than zeroing their pagerank -- to changing it to reflect whatever the pagerank would have been from the actual user-accessible site, instead of the gateway page that they were sending robots to.
Although, that doesn't give them a lot of motivation to stop using the redirected, robots-only gateway page, and might set a precident that Google will just clean up after whatever SEO trickery you try and use.
I had not heard anything mentioned about the ISS' cross-band repeater being in operation to retransmit SuitSat. Do you know what its output frequency would be?
I don't really have the equipment to monitor it (just a HT with a 5/8-wave magmount, indoors) but some of the guys in my club regularly get the ISS, although I don't think anybody has had success getting SuitSat itself. It would be nice if they're boosting the signal for us.
True. However, GigE is used a lot on backbone connections within LANs. So even though your client is only seeing a 100Mb port, the switch it's plugged into probably uses 1Gb on its uplink side.
I think the reason you don't see more 1Gb client ports, is because most network architects want to have the backbones be some multiple of the client-link speeds, and 10Gb connections are cost-prohibitive. And if you don't have the bandwidth on the backbone to carry the traffic (and if most of the traffic in your LAN isn't internal, which is a fair assumption to make in a lot of cases), why bother buying Gig switches?
The biggest thing most people would get out of some new, ultra-fast Ethernet, would be that their computer's connection might eventually become an order of magnitude or two lower than it. So if you have 100Gb ethernet available to use for backbones, then putting every client in a LAN on GigE becomes more feasible.
In a home or small-LAN situation, I'd like to see more GigE, because it provides enough bandwidth (theoretically) to do full-resolution screen-sharing in near-realtime. VNC and the like are fine on 10 or 100Mb for remote administration and even regular office tasks, but it's not a way I'd want to play any kind of game, or even use as my main desktop for very long. But at 1000Mb/s, you could (again, theoretically) send a 1024x768x24 bit screen down the wire at 50 refreshes per second, without compression. Now that, to me, spells possibilities. Too bad I'm too poor (and barred by lease from drilling holes in the walls) to put it into my place right now.
Um, the WinXP alt-tab works exactly as you describe,
No, there is a difference: Alt-Tab on Windows rotates between open windows, on MacOS it rotates through applications. Like I said, the differences are minimal, but they're there.
An example of why this difference matters:
On Windows, if an application is running but doesn't have any open windows, it won't appear in the Alt-Tab list. This happens for example with my IM client -- I can close the buddy list window and it will reduce itself to an icon in the tray, but continue to run; it will not be available through Alt-Tab in this state. iChat or Adium on Mac OS X, on the other hand, can still be running in the background, without any open windows, and will appear both in the Dock, and in the Command-Tab display of applications.
I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me or not.
I think -- if I understand you correctly -- that I agree with you. People pirate movies with camcorders in movie theaters. This shows that even physical, analog content can't be protected, in what ought to be a "secure location."
Now, what DRM attempts to do, is let people take that movie home with them, where they'll have all the time and resources they want to try and throw at the problem of breaking into it. And in order to be useful to people who actually want to pay to use it, the key has to be available somewhere.
So people have the encrypted content (the DRMed file or whatever) and they have access to the key (through whatever way you're supposed to view the file, in the DRM scheme), therefore, a person with enough time on their hands is going to get their hands on the decrypted content.
All you can do is make that obnoxiously difficult, by degrading the analog outputs, etc. However -- as your point about movie theaters substantiates -- people will still find ways to copy the analog output, AND they will do it, even if the quality is substantially impaired by doing so.
It becomes even more of a losing proposition, because as you make the DRM more and more restrictive, you create an incentive for otherwise-legitimate users to get pirated content, instead of legitimate ones. So it creates not only the means for people to "steal" content (giving them the keys and the encrypted content) but in trying to make it difficult for them to copy it, creates an incentive for them to do so. I don't think it takes Sherlock Holmes to put together what happens when you combine means and motive.