I'm not a doctor, but from what I understand about medicine, it's not easy in the least
body systems are very complex, with many interactions. Think of it as debugging code. (even more to the point, medications have weird side-effects sometimes... just like with code, sometimes the patch is worse than the original problem)
a particular problem can have many and varying symptoms
for a given set of symptoms described by a patient, there's potentially a huge list of possible root causes, and sometimes the doctor basically has to pick one based on gut feeling. If you're rich and have enough time, they can run sufficient tests on you to narrow it down, but most people don't have that much money (or time)
*points to the words "hard-drive based" in the parent post
While we're being pedantic (you know full well that Apple had a winner on its hands, and that many companies, as soon as they saw it, immediately wanted to release a copycat product), the first hard-drive based MP3 player was supposedly the Remote Solutions Portable Jukebox PJB-100. Though it doesn't matter, because my essential point still stands... the iPod, via feats of marketing / UI design / whatever, was something cool that everybody wanted to have and/or have one of their own to sell. Apple could have super-hyped it before release, but they didn't.
(then again, apple didn't really need start-up VC funding like a new company does, but still, I assert my point still stands, that most people's gut feeling is that if people are really hyping a product really hard, long before release, it's most likely a bad sign. and that gut feeling is a justified one)
You can't toss Intent outright as unacceptable in the legal world... The Grokster decision was all about intent. It's a valid concept.
Yeah, Intent can be hard to prove in some cases, so it is indeed a weak thing to stand on. But it's absolutely valid in some cases, and sometimes is the only thing that differentiates legal from illegal behavior.
For instance, the Slashdot/DDOS thing... if someone sued Slashdot for DDOSing them, your first reaction would be that the suit was without merit... Slashdot links to random unknown people all the time. It's nothing out of the ordinary. However, it IS possible for Slashdot to knowingly and with malicious intent post a URL to someone's cable modem, for instance, and blow their connection away (assuming static IP, of course). If the defendent could prove that Rob Malda sent them an email that said "I hate you... keep it up, and I'm going to take down your internet connection", then sure, there would then be merit to the lawsuit against Slashdot. And the only difference between these two situations is what the intent of the Slashdot operators was.
There ARE companies who bring new cool products to the market successfully, but when they do that, there's usually very little advanced warning. One day, everybody woke up, and bam! there was the iPod. Sure, other companies realized that a hard-drive based MP3 player could bring a profit, and started making copy-cat products as soon as it was released. But because Apple didn't super-hype the product years before it was released, Apple had a head start on the competition.
Ergo: hyping a product long before release, probably is an indication that there isn't profit to be made, and therefore either the product won't come to the market at all due to insufficient start-up funding, or will come to market, but only at a very high price and for a very short time before the company runs out of money.
Because most of us have seen this story played out over and over... A company announces and hypes a product that's very far from releasing a working product. Hype goes on, and years later, no product is released. Most of us honestly think this product is rather cool and would like to see something actually produced, but our worries probably will only be made worse by waiting for 2 years.
I'm not a hardcore entrepreneur, but I'd guess that if there was a real market opportunity here, they wouldn't be shouting the concept up and down the streets, because then someone else would realize there would be profit to be made, and would start developing an alternative now, and it would hurt Optimus's profits.
Instead, Optimus has probably tried very hard to get funding, and hasn't been able to, because all the investors who have loooked at it think the concept won't be profitable. So Optimus has had to go into super-PR mode to get any chance of attracting start-up money.
So, we can be worried and sad that this kind of keyboard isn't likely to make it to market soon.
See, a large part of the definition of "DOS" involves intent. People can try to sue Slashdot, but it's extremely unlikely the person would win (baring actual malicious intent from Slashdot operators, of course).
How do you define DDOS? If spammers send millions of emails in a day to AOL, does that constitute a DDOS against AOL? If large ISPs automatically send an unsubscribe response for each spam they get, and the total bandwidth is less than what the spammer originally sent, does that constitute a DDOS? Is it a DDOS if the large ISP's intent in doing this is to shut the spammer down?
No worries... one or two people can't make very much of a difference. Which is sad, really. There's free solutions out there to solve people's problems, but it doesn't really matter unless there's an organization who can throw money into advertising. That just goes to show you how far the internet is from truly enabling a collective human intelligence. We can do it now, communications are essentially free, we just need the right social structures. The bloggers could do it, but I don't think they're doing their job properly. I fault the mainstream bloggers for the spyware mess we're in. Viva revolution!
I think everybody (at least on Slashdot) has read about this long enough to have a decent grasp of the problem. I don't see why people have to keep using hyperbole to argue about the basic technical issues. The possibilities are:
the user only had to type in a cheatcode
like the Excel easter-egg, the user has to do an obscure series of steps to unlock the mini-game, and the first person to discover the obscure steps probably had to go to a significant amount of effort to discover them (or have inside knowledge)
the game or savefiles require an outside tool to change a few binary bytes. The tool required some code development by the person who found the minigame, but relatively few bytes are changed in the actual game itself
the modder had to introduce new textures in the game (eg. to show nudity or whatnot), textures which they had to independently develop using an external graphics tool
the modder had to introduce new textures, 3d shapes, audio, and new behaviors into the game (eg. closer in the direction of a "full conversion" mod, but only for a sub-game)
the modder did a total conversion of GBA to make the game-play completely different
Now, it seems like it should be clear that what happened here was item #3.
I don't know why people keep using hyperbole for the sake of arguing...
You fool! of course the main company shouldn't be liable! people say it was just a cheatcode, but it was waaaay more than that
or, on the other side
you fool! of course the company should be liable! people say the hacker wrote a minigame, but in reality, they barely did anything!
I mean, the technical side of things seem pretty clear. People should stop being so political about the technical side of things. We can speculate about the main company's strategy, but throwing out hyperbole about the technical side of things is just silly at this point.
Scientists think that this asymmetry of lunar features was caused by the synchronization between the Moon's rotation and orbit about the Earth. This synchronization exposes the far side of the Moon to more asteroid and meteor impacts than the near, thereby allowing the maria on the near side to remain relatively undisturbed for many hundreds of millennia.
But, if you still feel strongly about it, then for the sake of science, we must travel many hundreds of millennia back in time, and rotate the moon!
Actually, you may not need to joke about it. I don't know if they tried ASCII specifically (that program requires the Simple DirectMedia Layer library to be installed), but it may very well be feasible.
DRM is usually used to close the analog hole, from the digital side, to make sure that digital content is difficult to be recorded via analog.
Also, the quality decrease from the analog hole is sometimes fairly insignificant... Analog Cable TV companies have already deemed it acceptable, since people with compeletely analog TV's have started seeing MPEG artefacts show up more and more, because of digital hiccups in some upstream (sattelite?) link.
Microsoft wants DRM'd keyboards and mice too... This sounds to some extent like VISA's ATM PIN-entry security measures, but no doubt its powers will be used against the computer owner in some cases (for instance... preventing software keyboard macros from running in multiplayer games, to prevent super-human speed or acuracy).
Palladium is a Microsoft led project to add "trusted" computing to Windows, through a combination of
hardware and software.... processor modifications to... provide trusted path from the keyboard and trusted display.
Secure path to and from the user. Secure channels allow data to move safely from the keyboard/mouse to nexus-aware applications, and for data to move from nexus-aware applications to a region of the screen.
To make NGSCB possible, both the software and the hardware will evolve. On the hardware side, the CPU, chipset, USB I/O and GPU hardware components will be redesigned, and a new component will be added, called the Security Support Component (SSC).
In ALL cities, busses are always just as slow (or slower) than cars. Busses are more of a perhipheral thing. Busses get used as the final leg if the subway doesn't get you close enough to your destination. And if mass-transit becomes popular, and a sufficient percentage of the population decides not to own a car, then busses are a useful fallback for those people.
As I understand it, it's just a change in some data in the saved-game file, so it should work semi-easily on any platform where you can twiddle the memory card.
What is it with Mitsubishis and Hondas in Japan? In the US, it seems like there's a fairly even mix of Honds, Toyotas, Nissans, and at least some Mitsubishis. In japan, everything is Toyota with some Nissans ("Nissan Cube", worst. name. ever.). A japanese person was surprised that we buy Mitsubishis in the US, she said something about them catching on fire or something.
But yeah, my impression was definitely that there's a lot of brand loyalty/avoidance over there.
Go to Akihabara and compare the number of iPods on display to the number of XBox's (hint: tons of ipods, only one or two xboxes). Go on the Tokyo subway or visit tech worker's mini-cubicles, and count how many iPods you see (hint: lots).
Dave Barry and John Tierney both have wikipedia pages, but John Tierney's doesn't mention anything that might indicate he tends towards sarcasm or whimsy (other than that he's libertarian... you know how those crazy libertarians are).
I've seen variants of Tron that add a Go-like rule... if the other person completely encircles you, you lose. That would encourage the contestants to try to pedal faster than the other guy, which could be pretty entertaining. (this could make teammates and tunnels more interesting as well)
Thank you for the first insightful response in this thread.
I was trying to find a link to justify your statement about 10% biomass, and instead I found a link that says 10-25% of biomass, depending on region. Heh, so apparently you're more than correct.
There are still some good arguments that humans will be able to weather most storms successfully, no?
Other species aren't changing very much, but humans are changing extremely rapidly. Evolutionarily, there isn't much physical difference between Pythagoras and Einstein, except that Einstein had 2400 years more of collected human knowledge at his birth. This human knowledge continues to accumulate, and its pace is probably accelerating. This rapid change will allow humans to more quickly adapt to changes in environment than other species which either rely on pure evolution, or have a more limited intelligence.
Human beings can plan ahead much better than other species (eg. we have a significantly better chance of spotting climate change, or see asteroids coming, etc etc).
Space travel. We're not quite there yet, on a scale that would save us from destruction of a single planet, but we may soon be. Long term, I'd think this gives us a huge advantage in the game of evolution.
Though, as you pointed out, since we have no other enemies, humans are our own worst enemy. And brains may ocassionally be a hindrance to ourselves, since the most likely way we get wiped out is castrostrophic extenction caused by humans (since natural causes are more likely to be spotted ahead of time).
Low power would just be a nice side-effect that would allow the company to remain commercially viable (you got to bring home the bacon. And maybe the lovin'. And the lovin' bacon).
The real benefit Transmeta brings is that after n years of financial viability and R&D research, they'd start selling CPU's and software that would allow you to change your CPU to emulate other popular instruction sets as well... all on the same hardware.
I won't say that any of these creatures will be where some sort of civilization starts within the next hundred thousand years, but they're clearly headed in the right direction. It's stupid and insulting to think that humans have it all wrapped up.
Um, duh. Evolution says we're all headed in the same direction, and that no particular species has any special place in the universe. Any species can best another, the only question is how much time it would take.
I'm saying, as things currently stand, the line between us and everyone else isn't teribbly gray or confusing. It's a big bright line that could someday be overcome, but as you said, it would clearly take a very long time for other species to catch up with us. This isn't Black vs White, East vs West, this is Human vs. Ape, and to me, it's neither ambiguous nor self-centered to say that humans are far ahead of other species.
Slashdot Mirror
*points to the words "hard-drive based" in the parent post
While we're being pedantic (you know full well that Apple had a winner on its hands, and that many companies, as soon as they saw it, immediately wanted to release a copycat product), the first hard-drive based MP3 player was supposedly the Remote Solutions Portable Jukebox PJB-100. Though it doesn't matter, because my essential point still stands... the iPod, via feats of marketing / UI design / whatever, was something cool that everybody wanted to have and/or have one of their own to sell. Apple could have super-hyped it before release, but they didn't.
(then again, apple didn't really need start-up VC funding like a new company does, but still, I assert my point still stands, that most people's gut feeling is that if people are really hyping a product really hard, long before release, it's most likely a bad sign. and that gut feeling is a justified one)
Yeah, Intent can be hard to prove in some cases, so it is indeed a weak thing to stand on. But it's absolutely valid in some cases, and sometimes is the only thing that differentiates legal from illegal behavior.
For instance, the Slashdot/DDOS thing... if someone sued Slashdot for DDOSing them, your first reaction would be that the suit was without merit... Slashdot links to random unknown people all the time. It's nothing out of the ordinary. However, it IS possible for Slashdot to knowingly and with malicious intent post a URL to someone's cable modem, for instance, and blow their connection away (assuming static IP, of course). If the defendent could prove that Rob Malda sent them an email that said "I hate you... keep it up, and I'm going to take down your internet connection", then sure, there would then be merit to the lawsuit against Slashdot. And the only difference between these two situations is what the intent of the Slashdot operators was.
There ARE companies who bring new cool products to the market successfully, but when they do that, there's usually very little advanced warning. One day, everybody woke up, and bam! there was the iPod. Sure, other companies realized that a hard-drive based MP3 player could bring a profit, and started making copy-cat products as soon as it was released. But because Apple didn't super-hype the product years before it was released, Apple had a head start on the competition.
Ergo: hyping a product long before release, probably is an indication that there isn't profit to be made, and therefore either the product won't come to the market at all due to insufficient start-up funding, or will come to market, but only at a very high price and for a very short time before the company runs out of money.
I'm not a hardcore entrepreneur, but I'd guess that if there was a real market opportunity here, they wouldn't be shouting the concept up and down the streets, because then someone else would realize there would be profit to be made, and would start developing an alternative now, and it would hurt Optimus's profits.
Instead, Optimus has probably tried very hard to get funding, and hasn't been able to, because all the investors who have loooked at it think the concept won't be profitable. So Optimus has had to go into super-PR mode to get any chance of attracting start-up money.
So, we can be worried and sad that this kind of keyboard isn't likely to make it to market soon.
See, a large part of the definition of "DOS" involves intent. People can try to sue Slashdot, but it's extremely unlikely the person would win (baring actual malicious intent from Slashdot operators, of course).
How do you define DDOS? If spammers send millions of emails in a day to AOL, does that constitute a DDOS against AOL? If large ISPs automatically send an unsubscribe response for each spam they get, and the total bandwidth is less than what the spammer originally sent, does that constitute a DDOS? Is it a DDOS if the large ISP's intent in doing this is to shut the spammer down?
No worries... one or two people can't make very much of a difference. Which is sad, really. There's free solutions out there to solve people's problems, but it doesn't really matter unless there's an organization who can throw money into advertising. That just goes to show you how far the internet is from truly enabling a collective human intelligence. We can do it now, communications are essentially free, we just need the right social structures. The bloggers could do it, but I don't think they're doing their job properly. I fault the mainstream bloggers for the spyware mess we're in. Viva revolution!
- the user only had to type in a cheatcode
- like the Excel easter-egg, the user has to do an obscure series of steps to unlock the mini-game, and the first person to discover the obscure steps probably had to go to a significant amount of effort to discover them (or have inside knowledge)
- the game or savefiles require an outside tool to change a few binary bytes. The tool required some code development by the person who found the minigame, but relatively few bytes are changed in the actual game itself
- the modder had to introduce new textures in the game (eg. to show nudity or whatnot), textures which they had to independently develop using an external graphics tool
- the modder had to introduce new textures, 3d shapes, audio, and new behaviors into the game (eg. closer in the direction of a "full conversion" mod, but only for a sub-game)
- the modder did a total conversion of GBA to make the game-play completely different
Now, it seems like it should be clear that what happened here was item #3.I don't know why people keep using hyperbole for the sake of arguing...
or, on the other side I mean, the technical side of things seem pretty clear. People should stop being so political about the technical side of things. We can speculate about the main company's strategy, but throwing out hyperbole about the technical side of things is just silly at this point.To quote from Wikipedia:
But, if you still feel strongly about it, then for the sake of science, we must travel many hundreds of millennia back in time, and rotate the moon!
Actually, you may not need to joke about it. I don't know if they tried ASCII specifically (that program requires the Simple DirectMedia Layer library to be installed), but it may very well be feasible.
Also note that this clause was added by the DMCA, and only went into effect starting April 26, 2002.
Also, the quality decrease from the analog hole is sometimes fairly insignificant... Analog Cable TV companies have already deemed it acceptable, since people with compeletely analog TV's have started seeing MPEG artefacts show up more and more, because of digital hiccups in some upstream (sattelite?) link.
http://www.research.ibm.com/gsal/tcpa/tcpa_rebutta l.pdf
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/security/ news/ngscb.mspx
http://www.iaik.tu-graz.ac.at/teaching/03_advanced %20computer%20networks/ss2005/vo11/Palladium_LaGra nde.pdf
http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/8/f/18f8c ee2-0b64-41f2-893d-a6f2295b40c8/TW04055_WINHEC2004 .ppt
In ALL cities, busses are always just as slow (or slower) than cars. Busses are more of a perhipheral thing. Busses get used as the final leg if the subway doesn't get you close enough to your destination. And if mass-transit becomes popular, and a sufficient percentage of the population decides not to own a car, then busses are a useful fallback for those people.
As I understand it, it's just a change in some data in the saved-game file, so it should work semi-easily on any platform where you can twiddle the memory card.
Is it difficult to set up better public transportation in the US? No... most other countries do it better.
Can the US increase the incentives for hybrid cars? Of course.
(or, at least fairly different brand loyalty than in the US)
But yeah, my impression was definitely that there's a lot of brand loyalty/avoidance over there.
Japanese aren't really that xenophobic.
Dave Barry and John Tierney both have wikipedia pages, but John Tierney's doesn't mention anything that might indicate he tends towards sarcasm or whimsy (other than that he's libertarian... you know how those crazy libertarians are).
I've seen variants of Tron that add a Go-like rule... if the other person completely encircles you, you lose. That would encourage the contestants to try to pedal faster than the other guy, which could be pretty entertaining. (this could make teammates and tunnels more interesting as well)
I was trying to find a link to justify your statement about 10% biomass, and instead I found a link that says 10-25% of biomass, depending on region. Heh, so apparently you're more than correct.
There are still some good arguments that humans will be able to weather most storms successfully, no?
- Other species aren't changing very much, but humans are changing extremely rapidly. Evolutionarily, there isn't much physical difference between Pythagoras and Einstein, except that Einstein had 2400 years more of collected human knowledge at his birth. This human knowledge continues to accumulate, and its pace is probably accelerating. This rapid change will allow humans to more quickly adapt to changes in environment than other species which either rely on pure evolution, or have a more limited intelligence.
- Human beings can plan ahead much better than other species (eg. we have a significantly better chance of spotting climate change, or see asteroids coming, etc etc).
- Space travel. We're not quite there yet, on a scale that would save us from destruction of a single planet, but we may soon be. Long term, I'd think this gives us a huge advantage in the game of evolution.
Though, as you pointed out, since we have no other enemies, humans are our own worst enemy. And brains may ocassionally be a hindrance to ourselves, since the most likely way we get wiped out is castrostrophic extenction caused by humans (since natural causes are more likely to be spotted ahead of time).Low power would just be a nice side-effect that would allow the company to remain commercially viable (you got to bring home the bacon. And maybe the lovin'. And the lovin' bacon).
The real benefit Transmeta brings is that after n years of financial viability and R&D research, they'd start selling CPU's and software that would allow you to change your CPU to emulate other popular instruction sets as well... all on the same hardware.
Um, duh. Evolution says we're all headed in the same direction, and that no particular species has any special place in the universe. Any species can best another, the only question is how much time it would take.
I'm saying, as things currently stand, the line between us and everyone else isn't teribbly gray or confusing. It's a big bright line that could someday be overcome, but as you said, it would clearly take a very long time for other species to catch up with us. This isn't Black vs White, East vs West, this is Human vs. Ape, and to me, it's neither ambiguous nor self-centered to say that humans are far ahead of other species.