I'd rather see a shop for outfitting an evil criminal's lair:
- Shark tank, with trap door to dump disloyal henchmen into said tank.
- Electric wheelchair complete with controls for remote control helicopter (helicopter sold separately)
- Brushed stainless steel paneling
- High backed leather swivel chair (comes with fluffy white cat)
Never. They will not show you exactly what you want, but will make (hopefully increasingly better) guesses at what stuff you don't know about but might want. You "want"ed an iPhone? It won't show you more iPhones, but might show you accessories for it, or perhaps an ad for an Android phone trying to convince you that this is the better choice.
What matters is how you frame the law (or how the jurisprudence works out). In Europe, the law is explicit about importing for resale without the rights holder's permission. In this US case it seems they want to achieve the same, but they go about it differently, by more or less stating that IP rights on physical objects imported from abroad cannot be transferred by the first owner. No more parallel imports, sure, but an unintended side effect is that it does make private second hand sales of imported goods illegal. Unintended by the courts perhaps, but very, very much intended by the rights holders, who will most certainly break out the champagne if this is upheld.
The real question is how the ruling, if upheld, would affect subsequent cases. At a glance there's still a lot of reasons to be afraid, very afraid.
Some time ago in NL we had laws against "parallel imports" that specifically targeted this practice (they probably have been superseded by Euro laws since). If I remember correctly, this law granted the manufacturer or their designated representatives the right of first sale (and first sale only) in our country, which was achieved by forbidding anyone else to import their stuff in bulk. Kirtsaeng wouldn't have been able to import the books under this law, but there would have been absolutely no question about the legality of second hand sales in general.
Another thing that I wouldn't mind to be set firmly into law. If you buy a physical product, it should come with a perpetual license for all associated IP: patents, trademarks and copyrights. That license is an inseparable part of the product. The idea that the license remains with the first buyer and is non-transferrable is ludicrous, yet that is exactly what IP holders would love. Creators of intangible products like computer games and e-books have already gotten in on this action, and made transferring access certificates or keys to create game accounts more or less impossible. I do understand the difficulties there, but I'd me much more inclined to firmly anchor the first sale doctrine into explicit law and extend it to non-tangible products, than I'd be to extend the notion of personal licenses to physical products, as is seemingly on the table in this case.
Would that be the idea behind it? Publish through the MS app store or have your application consigned to some invisible app purgatory. Or is it possible to distribute Metro apps outside of the MS app store?
Brainstorm session are a great way to get buy-in from others if you need it... But not all sessions are like that. If you are genuinely interested in the outcome of such a session, be selective about who you invite. Leave the dumb people out of it, and get a diverse group of smart people.
Most mindmaps boil down to a visual representation of a hierarchical list, with some comments and maybe a few extra relationships added. As a visual representation they are great for individual ideation, brainstorming, or even scoping functional designs. In those cases you're working with concepts that fit a taxonomy but are otherwise only loosely interrelated (as far as matters for the mapping exercise). A lot of what you're doing there is fitting items into the taxonomy, checking whether every (sub)category is complete, and tweaking the taxonomy itself. Mind maps are a very useful visualisation for such tasks, and even for people new to the concept they are simple enough to understand and work with.
But design work? Things like ordering and complex flows are not naturally captured very well in a mindmap. The mindmaps in the Dr. Dobbs article appear to me as rather awkward flow diagrams. There are better representations; even a simple indented list might work better for the examples given. I have used mindmaps when designing software, but in those cases I used them to map out functional areas of the software, break down each area in distinct tasks and perhaps subtasks, but I stopped at the level where timing, order and interdependencies become important.
Depends. Perhaps it is possible to create a "fire once" arm that will sort of fire a.22 round, and fail, but not in a way that'll harm the shooter. Probably takes some wacky design choices... like adding a 10cm printed plastic shield behind the hammer to deflect debris.
Huh, how does that work? "If you ditch the need for parachutes, more people would start flying, which will make the Luftwaffe more aware of them." Maybe I am missing the similarity here...
I am against piracy as well, but with a fair few 'buts'. I agree that artists and media companies should be able to make money, but I do not agree to the notion that they can freely set the terms of the sale. First of all, the question of anti-competitive practice comes into play, with essentially one huge lobby group setting these terms, or lobbying for them. Second, copyright is a right granted (and enforced) by society to allow creators to charge for their work (amongst other things). It is only fair that we as society attach some conditions to that privilege to protect consumers. Fair use rights cone to mind.
As things stand, these laws are slanted firmly against us consumers. Unsurprising, given the lobbying power of the industry. I like the stance of the Pirate Party and some other sensible parties who state: we will not prosecute downloading of pirated material until there is a viable legal alternative. Viable means: priced right, with a good, current selection of material, and respecting consumers rights to make personal copies, format shift, etc. I'd like those rights to be firmly set into law as well at some point, but right now there is little chance of that. Until then: screw you, MPAA. (Not RIAA though, I find the current offering of music to be acceptable, and I haven't pirated any music in years)
I am actually well pleased, so far. Routing is good, the roads between my place and my parents' house are a bit goofy, and unlike my other nav software (Navigon) it gave the two most sensible routes. It also has traffic info even on crappy little roads here in the Netherlands, marked more clearly than it was on Google's map app. The parsing is not as good as Google's, but I found that typing in part of the street name resulted in a list of suggestions sorted on proximity, which allows me to quickly fill in the complete address. I haven't found any errors in the maps thus far.
Innocent until proven guilty. Although... the law seems to state "inciting" (which implies intent) as well as "causing" (which does not exclude accidental SMSs). Still, one would think that intent plays a large part here, which would be rather hard to prove in this case.
If one of the teen girls replies, and he bites, then throw the book at him. Of course, it would have looked much better if he had sent another mass SMS to apologise and ask everyone to disregard the previous one, as soon as he found out what happened.
TV itself isn't destructive, it's just that kids don't really pick up anything of value from it. Letting your kids watch TV all day every day is the mental equivalent of raising them on nothing but crackers and milk. TV is fine as entertainment for kids, just make sure it's not all they are doing. Same as letting them play video games. That is what my parents did: we watched TV (in the living room, we did not have a TV in our own rooms) or messed around on my dad's homebrew computer, but after an hour or so our parents would shoo us out to play. My parents didn't use the TV as a babysitter, and we never learned how to "veg out" in front of the screen; at a later age I never spent any significant time channel surfing or vegging out to watch any old rubbish.
Nothing wrong with a whole meal on a plate. When I grew up, we were served a reasonably sized meal on a plate (and got told to eat up), ensuring we got the nutrition we needed. Still hungry? Go for seconds. But in most cases the first serving was sufficient for us. The important thing is to size the servings right.
br>
Apparently that's a good way to lose some weight too: eat what you eat normally (provided you are already on a more or less proper diet), just cook a bit less of it. Works well enough in my case, and it beats the Chinese way where people tend to keep snacking on what's on the table until they are stuffed.
I agree that we'll need to protect religion from prosecution by the state, though I am not sure that the right to kosher/halal food should be included in that. Especially on religious grounds. There are a few cases in NL where it was proposed to serve only halal food in prisons for cost reasons. The idea of having to eat meat from animals that have been slaughtered according to religious rules rather than ones based on animal welfare might deeply offend me, but sorry: mine is not a religious objective, so it wouldn't fly.
Still, you do have a point and I am ok with keeping freedom of religion in our laws. As long as freedom of speech clearly supersedes it. Nothing in freedom of speech laws would enable persecution of religion.
How about we finally rank freedom of expression firmly above freedom of religion? Freedom of expression already safeguards religious freedom in all the important ways (along with freedom of assembly). But freedom of religion should not include the right to be free from being insulted or offended. We all are offended by something from time to time, but us non-religious types just have to suck it up. And rightly so. In such cases, freedom of expression should trump religious sensitivities
iPhones can be locked down and controlled to some degree. Enough for some corporations to allow confidential email and contact info on personal iPhones. What I'd like to see on the iPhone is a completely separate "work" sandbox. Doesn't BB offer this already?
It is not allowed in quite a few non-idiotic countries as well. Not because of fears of spies or terrorists, but for safety reasons. Here in the Netherlands, you can mount all the cameras you want to your RC plane, but you have to maintain line-of-sight when flying it. Mostly because in msot places here you can't fly 1km without ending up over residential areas or in controlled airspace.
On the contrary, the results show that many people actually read the altered questions to their answers correctly, and then still stand by their given answer, even though the meaning of the answer was effectively changed 180 degrees by changing the question.
"Is censorship bad?". You answer "Yes"
They then change the question to read "Is censorship good?" and ask you to read back the altered question and your answer.
The interesting part is not that half the test subjects fail to notice the changes. The interesting part is that, when asked to provide argument, about half the test subjects will argue *against* the position they held when they answered the unaltered question. In my example, thest subject would provide argument in favour of censorship, even though he was against it earlier.
I don't know how hard is was to introduce that time-release element. However easy it is to defeat it, it might just be a bit harder to come up with than "xyz with rounded corners" or "abc, but on teh interwebz", thus worthy of a patent. And if they indeed patented their proprietary time-release coating rather than the idea of applying such a coating to this specific ingredient, it would seem trivial for other pharma companies to circumvent the patent.
Roomba gave me a great reason to try and keep my place more or less tidy. It's the only way Roomba will work.
But yes... cat hair. There are two sensible, easy, and not too expensive upgrades that would vastly improve the Roomba, but are still inexplicably missing even from the latest models:
- Ball bearings for the brush drivers on the gearbox. This is where all the cat hairs get into the gear box and foul up the gears, to the point where they run so hit the egarbox actually melts a little. Apparently there's a model or version of the gearbox that comes with bearings, but I never found one. I ended up modding the thing myself.
- A good Li-ion battery instead of the craptastic NiMH they still stick in there. And even for NiMH the Roomba packs are of rather poor quality; they all failed quickly, and replacing them with good NiMH cells from an old model airplane pack gave much better results.
Other than that, these vacuums to a pretty good job. They clean places that I usually skip when vacuuming (like under the bed / couch), and they do well on carpets; going over it from different directions as it crisscrosses the room they clean it better than I do by hand.
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I'd rather see a shop for outfitting an evil criminal's lair:
- Shark tank, with trap door to dump disloyal henchmen into said tank.
- Electric wheelchair complete with controls for remote control helicopter (helicopter sold separately)
- Brushed stainless steel paneling
- High backed leather swivel chair (comes with fluffy white cat)
No need for hacking, the "zeroth law" will take care of that, and your robot will strangle you as soon as it gets delivered to your home.
Never. They will not show you exactly what you want, but will make (hopefully increasingly better) guesses at what stuff you don't know about but might want. You "want"ed an iPhone? It won't show you more iPhones, but might show you accessories for it, or perhaps an ad for an Android phone trying to convince you that this is the better choice.
What matters is how you frame the law (or how the jurisprudence works out). In Europe, the law is explicit about importing for resale without the rights holder's permission. In this US case it seems they want to achieve the same, but they go about it differently, by more or less stating that IP rights on physical objects imported from abroad cannot be transferred by the first owner. No more parallel imports, sure, but an unintended side effect is that it does make private second hand sales of imported goods illegal. Unintended by the courts perhaps, but very, very much intended by the rights holders, who will most certainly break out the champagne if this is upheld.
I hope you have a license to reproduce this excerpt; Rowling takes her IP very seriously. And it's "foreign made" to boot...
The real question is how the ruling, if upheld, would affect subsequent cases. At a glance there's still a lot of reasons to be afraid, very afraid.
Some time ago in NL we had laws against "parallel imports" that specifically targeted this practice (they probably have been superseded by Euro laws since). If I remember correctly, this law granted the manufacturer or their designated representatives the right of first sale (and first sale only) in our country, which was achieved by forbidding anyone else to import their stuff in bulk. Kirtsaeng wouldn't have been able to import the books under this law, but there would have been absolutely no question about the legality of second hand sales in general.
Another thing that I wouldn't mind to be set firmly into law. If you buy a physical product, it should come with a perpetual license for all associated IP: patents, trademarks and copyrights. That license is an inseparable part of the product. The idea that the license remains with the first buyer and is non-transferrable is ludicrous, yet that is exactly what IP holders would love. Creators of intangible products like computer games and e-books have already gotten in on this action, and made transferring access certificates or keys to create game accounts more or less impossible. I do understand the difficulties there, but I'd me much more inclined to firmly anchor the first sale doctrine into explicit law and extend it to non-tangible products, than I'd be to extend the notion of personal licenses to physical products, as is seemingly on the table in this case.
Would that be the idea behind it? Publish through the MS app store or have your application consigned to some invisible app purgatory. Or is it possible to distribute Metro apps outside of the MS app store?
Brainstorm session are a great way to get buy-in from others if you need it... But not all sessions are like that. If you are genuinely interested in the outcome of such a session, be selective about who you invite. Leave the dumb people out of it, and get a diverse group of smart people.
Most mindmaps boil down to a visual representation of a hierarchical list, with some comments and maybe a few extra relationships added. As a visual representation they are great for individual ideation, brainstorming, or even scoping functional designs. In those cases you're working with concepts that fit a taxonomy but are otherwise only loosely interrelated (as far as matters for the mapping exercise). A lot of what you're doing there is fitting items into the taxonomy, checking whether every (sub)category is complete, and tweaking the taxonomy itself. Mind maps are a very useful visualisation for such tasks, and even for people new to the concept they are simple enough to understand and work with.
But design work? Things like ordering and complex flows are not naturally captured very well in a mindmap. The mindmaps in the Dr. Dobbs article appear to me as rather awkward flow diagrams. There are better representations; even a simple indented list might work better for the examples given. I have used mindmaps when designing software, but in those cases I used them to map out functional areas of the software, break down each area in distinct tasks and perhaps subtasks, but I stopped at the level where timing, order and interdependencies become important.
Depends. Perhaps it is possible to create a "fire once" arm that will sort of fire a .22 round, and fail, but not in a way that'll harm the shooter. Probably takes some wacky design choices... like adding a 10cm printed plastic shield behind the hammer to deflect debris.
Huh, how does that work? "If you ditch the need for parachutes, more people would start flying, which will make the Luftwaffe more aware of them." Maybe I am missing the similarity here...
I am against piracy as well, but with a fair few 'buts'. I agree that artists and media companies should be able to make money, but I do not agree to the notion that they can freely set the terms of the sale. First of all, the question of anti-competitive practice comes into play, with essentially one huge lobby group setting these terms, or lobbying for them. Second, copyright is a right granted (and enforced) by society to allow creators to charge for their work (amongst other things). It is only fair that we as society attach some conditions to that privilege to protect consumers. Fair use rights cone to mind.
As things stand, these laws are slanted firmly against us consumers. Unsurprising, given the lobbying power of the industry. I like the stance of the Pirate Party and some other sensible parties who state: we will not prosecute downloading of pirated material until there is a viable legal alternative. Viable means: priced right, with a good, current selection of material, and respecting consumers rights to make personal copies, format shift, etc. I'd like those rights to be firmly set into law as well at some point, but right now there is little chance of that. Until then: screw you, MPAA. (Not RIAA though, I find the current offering of music to be acceptable, and I haven't pirated any music in years)
I am actually well pleased, so far. Routing is good, the roads between my place and my parents' house are a bit goofy, and unlike my other nav software (Navigon) it gave the two most sensible routes. It also has traffic info even on crappy little roads here in the Netherlands, marked more clearly than it was on Google's map app. The parsing is not as good as Google's, but I found that typing in part of the street name resulted in a list of suggestions sorted on proximity, which allows me to quickly fill in the complete address. I haven't found any errors in the maps thus far.
Innocent until proven guilty. Although... the law seems to state "inciting" (which implies intent) as well as "causing" (which does not exclude accidental SMSs). Still, one would think that intent plays a large part here, which would be rather hard to prove in this case.
If one of the teen girls replies, and he bites, then throw the book at him. Of course, it would have looked much better if he had sent another mass SMS to apologise and ask everyone to disregard the previous one, as soon as he found out what happened.
TV itself isn't destructive, it's just that kids don't really pick up anything of value from it. Letting your kids watch TV all day every day is the mental equivalent of raising them on nothing but crackers and milk. TV is fine as entertainment for kids, just make sure it's not all they are doing. Same as letting them play video games. That is what my parents did: we watched TV (in the living room, we did not have a TV in our own rooms) or messed around on my dad's homebrew computer, but after an hour or so our parents would shoo us out to play. My parents didn't use the TV as a babysitter, and we never learned how to "veg out" in front of the screen; at a later age I never spent any significant time channel surfing or vegging out to watch any old rubbish.
Nothing wrong with a whole meal on a plate. When I grew up, we were served a reasonably sized meal on a plate (and got told to eat up), ensuring we got the nutrition we needed. Still hungry? Go for seconds. But in most cases the first serving was sufficient for us. The important thing is to size the servings right. br>
Apparently that's a good way to lose some weight too: eat what you eat normally (provided you are already on a more or less proper diet), just cook a bit less of it. Works well enough in my case, and it beats the Chinese way where people tend to keep snacking on what's on the table until they are stuffed.
I agree that we'll need to protect religion from prosecution by the state, though I am not sure that the right to kosher/halal food should be included in that. Especially on religious grounds. There are a few cases in NL where it was proposed to serve only halal food in prisons for cost reasons. The idea of having to eat meat from animals that have been slaughtered according to religious rules rather than ones based on animal welfare might deeply offend me, but sorry: mine is not a religious objective, so it wouldn't fly.
Still, you do have a point and I am ok with keeping freedom of religion in our laws. As long as freedom of speech clearly supersedes it. Nothing in freedom of speech laws would enable persecution of religion.
How about we finally rank freedom of expression firmly above freedom of religion? Freedom of expression already safeguards religious freedom in all the important ways (along with freedom of assembly). But freedom of religion should not include the right to be free from being insulted or offended. We all are offended by something from time to time, but us non-religious types just have to suck it up. And rightly so. In such cases, freedom of expression should trump religious sensitivities
iPhones can be locked down and controlled to some degree. Enough for some corporations to allow confidential email and contact info on personal iPhones. What I'd like to see on the iPhone is a completely separate "work" sandbox. Doesn't BB offer this already?
It is not allowed in quite a few non-idiotic countries as well. Not because of fears of spies or terrorists, but for safety reasons. Here in the Netherlands, you can mount all the cameras you want to your RC plane, but you have to maintain line-of-sight when flying it. Mostly because in msot places here you can't fly 1km without ending up over residential areas or in controlled airspace.
If you build a free OS and support it for years, I think you're entitled to a little profit. Besides, a single command will get rid of the ads.
On the contrary, the results show that many people actually read the altered questions to their answers correctly, and then still stand by their given answer, even though the meaning of the answer was effectively changed 180 degrees by changing the question.
"Is censorship bad?". You answer "Yes"
They then change the question to read "Is censorship good?" and ask you to read back the altered question and your answer.
The interesting part is not that half the test subjects fail to notice the changes. The interesting part is that, when asked to provide argument, about half the test subjects will argue *against* the position they held when they answered the unaltered question. In my example, thest subject would provide argument in favour of censorship, even though he was against it earlier.
Cutlery provided on flights these days is plastic... try again.
I don't know how hard is was to introduce that time-release element. However easy it is to defeat it, it might just be a bit harder to come up with than "xyz with rounded corners" or "abc, but on teh interwebz", thus worthy of a patent. And if they indeed patented their proprietary time-release coating rather than the idea of applying such a coating to this specific ingredient, it would seem trivial for other pharma companies to circumvent the patent.
Roomba gave me a great reason to try and keep my place more or less tidy. It's the only way Roomba will work.
But yes... cat hair. There are two sensible, easy, and not too expensive upgrades that would vastly improve the Roomba, but are still inexplicably missing even from the latest models:
- Ball bearings for the brush drivers on the gearbox. This is where all the cat hairs get into the gear box and foul up the gears, to the point where they run so hit the egarbox actually melts a little. Apparently there's a model or version of the gearbox that comes with bearings, but I never found one. I ended up modding the thing myself.
- A good Li-ion battery instead of the craptastic NiMH they still stick in there. And even for NiMH the Roomba packs are of rather poor quality; they all failed quickly, and replacing them with good NiMH cells from an old model airplane pack gave much better results.
Other than that, these vacuums to a pretty good job. They clean places that I usually skip when vacuuming (like under the bed / couch), and they do well on carpets; going over it from different directions as it crisscrosses the room they clean it better than I do by hand.