"As a parent of an autistic child with escape artist tendencies, I would love to have this kind of watch. That is, assuming that my kid will wear it for more than 5 minutes in a row without trying to cut it off."
But you (and the others posting with similar children) are the special cases. Your child has something wrong with his biology, and the more technology to deal with it, the better. But in order for this thing to make money, it needs to be targeted at a wider audience and made cheap enough for the mass market. It sounds like it would be useful to you, but I wouldn't rely on it's durability, etc.
On the bright side, your story has made me rethink my policy of yelling "Run, kid! Run!" when I see a giggling shild making a break for freedom.
"Seriously to the GP: Do you grow your own food, make your own building materials, build every component of all of your devices and then assemble them?"
No, but it IS my responsibility to acquire the means with which to purchase or trade for such. There are those that believe that an individual has a right for certain things to be provided for them.
"My mother told me she used to think like that too, until the day she lost one of her children (either me or my brother, don't remember) in a busy place. When that happened she realized that maybe the leashes are stupid, but at least you'll never lose your child in one moment of distraction. Thankfully, she never went though with it:-)"
A leash teaches a toddler that someone else will provide a restraint on their impulses. How can they learn impulse control if someone else it literally holding their leash.
"Contemporary society, really anything beyond the barest forms of subsistence scavenging, absolutely depends on division of labor and specialization."
That's a hell of a jump there. Besides which, you are setting up a strawman. The GP didn't say "all the problems of the world are solvable by rugged self-reliance and insolvable by other means". He was bemoaning the fact that people expect others to take care of them and keep them safe. One can be responsible for oneself without roaming across the post apocalyptic wilderness.
Let's take an example. Who is responsible for keeping you safe from criminals? Most would say "the police". But are you aware that, legally, the police are NOT responsible for that? Their job is to deal with crime AFTER it happens. To take it further, "police" as we know them didn't exist until 1829 with the founding of the London police. Prior to that, who was responsible for keeping people safe? The answer is that the individual, or family, was responsible.
There's a big difference between the interactions of specialists in trade and a state of perpetual childhood. It's the difference between knowing some people make and sell shoes and it's my responsibility to acquire them by fair and legal means, and believing that it's the cobbler's responsibility to ensure that you have shoes. Or someone elses responsibility to force the cobbler to give you shoes.
"Besides, if there was any sort of trouble, I always had my cell phone with me so it wasn't like I magically vanished out of sight... having to know where children are was, imho, important only before the age of mobile communication."
Yeah, because cell phone never get lost, or stolen, or forgotten. And the batteries never die.
"Personally I wouldn't use this for teenagers because at that age, they have matured enough that they deserve a little privacy, and they will be going to difference places and such as part of their normal social life. However, for pre-teens, they generally will not be going anywhere but the places you expect them to. If they're not at those places, then they're generally in trouble (whether they've wandered off on accident, been abducted, or are just being mischievous). I don't see how this bracelet really compromises much convenience on their part, so personally I wouldn't hesitate to use it on younger children."
The problem is that it leads to a false sense of security and/or a state of hyper-vigilance. When you say "If they're not at those places, then they're generally in trouble (whether they've wandered off on accident, been abducted, or are just being mischievous)", it implies (by a logical fallacy, I know) that is they are at those places, then they are safe.
So Jane Parent sends her kid off to Tommie Walker's house. She drills the specific route to there, so as to avoid the sex offender she found on the web (public urination) and tracks him on her computer, confident in his safety. Of course, the fact that Billie's uncle Ernie and cousin Kevin are visiting doesn't show up on the bracelet's software. So as she's checking every 5 minutes, confident that the sex offender hasn't snatched him up and taken him to his secret lair, while instead she is "witnessing" he precious be molested in front of her virtual eyes.
As for the other 2 examples, if a child goes wandering off, they shouldn't be allowed to go places alone - they are either too young or have attentional problems and need more supervision. As for being mischievous, that's a discipline problem - if a kid goes where he isn't supposed to KNOWING he's being tracked, the parents have bigger problems.
"The weakest link is usually not the computer engineering but social engineering anyway."
And that's why that exception is there - to protect the companies who have poor policies and weak personnel controls. How many doctors are walking around with their passwords on a sticky on the back of their ID badges? And how many even know policies against that exist, much less care about them?
"It's RAID 5 or 6 on a single disk, although without spindle redundancy."
You are aware that the "R" in RAID stands for "redundant", yes? So restating your assertion would be: "It's like a redundant array of inexpensive disks, although without spindle redundancy."
"Wow, never thought I would see an obscure reference like that. Most of the people I know who read Ender's Game never bothered to read the rest of the series and would have no clue who Jane was."
Maybe that's because we read the novella first, thought it was fantastic, and then read the novel and thought WTF?
I could barely stand the crap he used to bulk up the page count the first time - why would I read an entire SERIES made up of that drivel?
"you are ill-served to believed that word meanings or spellings are stable. Read for example Nicholson Baker's essay on the word "lumber" in "size of Thoughts". You will be amazed at the journey of this single English word."
Who said I believed that spelling, grammar, or meaning is stable? Of course it isn't. But to acknowledge that those things are relative to place, culture, and time isn't to agree that they don't matter. If I, as a speaker and writer of American English, write "centre" in something directed to a reader of American English, it's the wrong spelling, just as if it was a British writer using "center."
The rules may be different tomorrow, yesterday, or over there, but Right Here, Right Now, the rules exist and have meaning. It's like when people use the concept of moral relativism to justify their actions. If Bubba tries to claim that beating his wife is OK because it's OK in Afghanistan, he'd be laughed right into a jail cell.
"If you think proper spelling is important (I am not saying that it isn't) then you should make a case, not a complaint."
Ok, how about this: proper spelling is a sign of a writer's respect for the reader off his work. Misspellings are jarring to the flow of reading comprehension, and are a way of saying "I don't want to put in the labor of proofreading, but I don't mind if you have to work harder to read it." In some literature, that is the intent, but the vast majority of the time it is simply carelessness.
It's not so simple. The software IS "open source" - it's freely available. It's just under a custom license. To say it's not "properly" open source gets into the whole BSD vs GPL license argument - which is "free-er"?.
I still believe it was more a case of chapped ass than a disagreement in philosophy, but I'd have to dig REAL deep into the mailing list archives to prove it.
You might want to point out MegaSquirt, the controller that DIY-EFI was originally based on. More development, bigger community, tons of side projects, etc. The DIY-EFI guy was involved early in the MS project, and decided to re-write the assembler code in C. Which everyone thought was neat, until he got pissed off that the entire project didn't convert to his codebase. So he forked it, and still seems to have a chip on his shoulder about the MS project, with numerous references about how much better his project is.
"Art is not all about cute kittens and puppies and flowers"
Nor is all "free expression" art. If your description of Mapplethorpe's motives are correct, he was acting more as a journalist or historian. But it's considers art because...why? Because his title is "artist?" Because it's hung in a gallery instead of a history book? Or because art collectors pay $$$$ for something that an editor would pay $?
I have no problem with people exercising their First Amendment rights to express themselves, even things that are uncomfortable, distasteful, or downright nasty. But it seems that certain folks have latched onto the idea that "art" is somehow above other forms of expression, and not subject to criticism or excoriation but for that given by a select few, aka "critics". They deny the validity of expressions that disagree with their own. Which is just as narrow minded as those they purport to need defense from.
Mapplethorpe was an excellent photographer in a technical sense. He may have been an artist in the aesthetic sense. But that doesn't mean that everything he produced is a piece of art.
"This can't possibly be true. There are already "medical devices" that are just small x86 computers running WinCE (or even full Windows) and a proprietary app.
No special lockdown, just no obvious way to run another app (if you don't know where to look or what to do).
Since these devices qualify, we can infer that the most that's required is hiding the ability to run other apps, not disabling it."
So I can slap a USB drive in one of those and run Portable Firefox without some special knowledge or security barriers?
Didn't think so. "Lockdown" has other meanings besides the geek definition. Sometimes it means just covering the USB port with a cover with tamper resistant screws. Sure, I can get into the port with my tools, but then when something breaks the Manufacturer can say "Hey - the owner had to go out of his way to break it. Not our problem."
I didn't say that the FDA oversight was smart, good, or effective, only that it is expensive to comply with. It costs money to jump through hoops, no matter how stupid they are.
As for software patch approval, you bet your ass it needs to get approved. How many times have we heard "SP2 broke my app...". There's a big difference between "Freecell doesn't work anymore" and "The temperature monitoring program wrote all zeros into the database, so everything we produced during that period needs to be thrown away" or the Blue Screen of REAL Death. And so what if it doesn't get patched immediately - are you saying that these are connected to the Internet?
What TFS leaves out is that the reason "medical devices" cost so much is FDA regulations and the higher standards to which they are held. There is no possible way an iPhone could be certified as a "medical device". If Apple were to apply for certification, they would need to make a lot of changes, such as...wait for it...eliminating the ability to run 3rd party code.
Yes, insurance companies can be stupid when applying rules against paying for certain devises or "experimental" procedures. But ask the women whose lives were cut short by Congress forcing them to cover bone marrow transplants for breast cancer.
"Ford tried that one, and when found out C became much larger. It is not a good business plan."
Kind of. The Pinto gas tank issue had far more to do with Lee Iacocca when he was at Ford. In order to compete with the imports, he gave the designers and engineers a simple directive: "2000#, $2000". Whenever an issue made it up to his office, that was the answer the engineers got - including the gas tank issue. That way, he could deny having "decided" anything. The cost/benefit analysis was more a matter of cover for decisions that had already been made.
"Class Action" may have borrowed elements from the Pinto, but it was fiction.
The importance of this theorem is one of the reasons for the exclusion of 1 from the set of prime numbers. If 1 were admitted as a prime, the precise statement of the theorem would require additional qualifications, since 3 could then be decomposed in different ways
3 = 1 3 and 3 = 1 1 1 3 = 13 3.
Until the 19th century, most mathematicians considered the number 1 a prime, the definition being just that a prime is divisible only by 1 and itself but not requiring a specific number of distinct divisors. There is still a large body of mathematical work that is valid despite labeling 1 a prime, such as the work of Stern and Zeisel. Derrick Norman Lehmer's list of primes up to 10,006,721, reprinted as late as 1956,[4] started with 1 as its first prime.[5] Henri Lebesgue is said to be the last professional mathematician to call 1 prime.[citation needed] The change in label occurred so that the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, as stated, is valid, i.e., "each number has a unique factorization into primes."[6][7] Furthermore, the prime numbers have several properties that the number 1 lacks, such as the relationship of the number to its corresponding value of Euler's totient function or the sum of divisors function.[8]"
Slashdot Mirror
"We were taught COBOL at college 25 years ago and i'm still a grumpy old git"
Hmmm ... 23 years ago we were taught FORTRAN. I wonder what that says about me? (other than the fact that I went to an engineering school).
"All the real evidence points to abduction."
By a dingo, I suppose?
How about some metallic duct tape wrapped around the kid's wrist? $4.99 at Home Depot.
"As a parent of an autistic child with escape artist tendencies, I would love to have this kind of watch. That is, assuming that my kid will wear it for more than 5 minutes in a row without trying to cut it off."
But you (and the others posting with similar children) are the special cases. Your child has something wrong with his biology, and the more technology to deal with it, the better. But in order for this thing to make money, it needs to be targeted at a wider audience and made cheap enough for the mass market. It sounds like it would be useful to you, but I wouldn't rely on it's durability, etc.
On the bright side, your story has made me rethink my policy of yelling "Run, kid! Run!" when I see a giggling shild making a break for freedom.
"Seriously to the GP: Do you grow your own food, make your own building materials, build every component of all of your devices and then assemble them?"
No, but it IS my responsibility to acquire the means with which to purchase or trade for such. There are those that believe that an individual has a right for certain things to be provided for them.
Big difference
"My mother told me she used to think like that too, until the day she lost one of her children (either me or my brother, don't remember) in a busy place. When that happened she realized that maybe the leashes are stupid, but at least you'll never lose your child in one moment of distraction. Thankfully, she never went though with it :-)"
A leash teaches a toddler that someone else will provide a restraint on their impulses. How can they learn impulse control if someone else it literally holding their leash.
Oh, that's right - they're not learning it.
"What is it with the large proportion of parents who feel it suddenly is necessary, though? "
Because Mommy and Daddy are still taking care of them, in one form or another.
"Contemporary society, really anything beyond the barest forms of subsistence scavenging, absolutely depends on division of labor and specialization."
That's a hell of a jump there. Besides which, you are setting up a strawman. The GP didn't say "all the problems of the world are solvable by rugged self-reliance and insolvable by other means". He was bemoaning the fact that people expect others to take care of them and keep them safe. One can be responsible for oneself without roaming across the post apocalyptic wilderness.
Let's take an example. Who is responsible for keeping you safe from criminals? Most would say "the police". But are you aware that, legally, the police are NOT responsible for that? Their job is to deal with crime AFTER it happens. To take it further, "police" as we know them didn't exist until 1829 with the founding of the London police. Prior to that, who was responsible for keeping people safe? The answer is that the individual, or family, was responsible.
There's a big difference between the interactions of specialists in trade and a state of perpetual childhood. It's the difference between knowing some people make and sell shoes and it's my responsibility to acquire them by fair and legal means, and believing that it's the cobbler's responsibility to ensure that you have shoes. Or someone elses responsibility to force the cobbler to give you shoes.
"Besides, if there was any sort of trouble, I always had my cell phone with me so it wasn't like I magically vanished out of sight ... having to know where children are was, imho, important only before the age of mobile communication."
Yeah, because cell phone never get lost, or stolen, or forgotten. And the batteries never die.
The problem is that it leads to a false sense of security and/or a state of hyper-vigilance. When you say "If they're not at those places, then they're generally in trouble (whether they've wandered off on accident, been abducted, or are just being mischievous)", it implies (by a logical fallacy, I know) that is they are at those places, then they are safe.
So Jane Parent sends her kid off to Tommie Walker's house. She drills the specific route to there, so as to avoid the sex offender she found on the web (public urination) and tracks him on her computer, confident in his safety. Of course, the fact that Billie's uncle Ernie and cousin Kevin are visiting doesn't show up on the bracelet's software. So as she's checking every 5 minutes, confident that the sex offender hasn't snatched him up and taken him to his secret lair, while instead she is "witnessing" he precious be molested in front of her virtual eyes.
As for the other 2 examples, if a child goes wandering off, they shouldn't be allowed to go places alone - they are either too young or have attentional problems and need more supervision. As for being mischievous, that's a discipline problem - if a kid goes where he isn't supposed to KNOWING he's being tracked, the parents have bigger problems.
"The weakest link is usually not the computer engineering but social engineering anyway."
And that's why that exception is there - to protect the companies who have poor policies and weak personnel controls. How many doctors are walking around with their passwords on a sticky on the back of their ID badges? And how many even know policies against that exist, much less care about them?
"It's RAID 5 or 6 on a single disk, although without spindle redundancy."
You are aware that the "R" in RAID stands for "redundant", yes? So restating your assertion would be: "It's like a redundant array of inexpensive disks, although without spindle redundancy."
"Wow, never thought I would see an obscure reference like that. Most of the people I know who read Ender's Game never bothered to read the rest of the series and would have no clue who Jane was."
Maybe that's because we read the novella first, thought it was fantastic, and then read the novel and thought WTF?
I could barely stand the crap he used to bulk up the page count the first time - why would I read an entire SERIES made up of that drivel?
"you are ill-served to believed that word meanings or spellings are stable. Read for example Nicholson Baker's essay on the word "lumber" in "size of Thoughts". You will be amazed at the journey of this single English word."
Who said I believed that spelling, grammar, or meaning is stable? Of course it isn't. But to acknowledge that those things are relative to place, culture, and time isn't to agree that they don't matter. If I, as a speaker and writer of American English, write "centre" in something directed to a reader of American English, it's the wrong spelling, just as if it was a British writer using "center."
The rules may be different tomorrow, yesterday, or over there, but Right Here, Right Now, the rules exist and have meaning. It's like when people use the concept of moral relativism to justify their actions. If Bubba tries to claim that beating his wife is OK because it's OK in Afghanistan, he'd be laughed right into a jail cell.
Yep, I fucked up - I was in a hurry and didn't proofread, which I normally do. Sorry about that. My apologies.
Note that I am apologizing for a mistake, not trying to claim that it doesn't matter.
"If you think proper spelling is important (I am not saying that it isn't) then you should make a case, not a complaint."
Ok, how about this: proper spelling is a sign of a writer's respect for the reader off his work. Misspellings are jarring to the flow of reading comprehension, and are a way of saying "I don't want to put in the labor of proofreading, but I don't mind if you have to work harder to read it." In some literature, that is the intent, but the vast majority of the time it is simply carelessness.
http://www.megamanual.com/copy.htm
It's not so simple. The software IS "open source" - it's freely available. It's just under a custom license. To say it's not "properly" open source gets into the whole BSD vs GPL license argument - which is "free-er"?.
I still believe it was more a case of chapped ass than a disagreement in philosophy, but I'd have to dig REAL deep into the mailing list archives to prove it.
You might want to point out MegaSquirt, the controller that DIY-EFI was originally based on. More development, bigger community, tons of side projects, etc. The DIY-EFI guy was involved early in the MS project, and decided to re-write the assembler code in C. Which everyone thought was neat, until he got pissed off that the entire project didn't convert to his codebase. So he forked it, and still seems to have a chip on his shoulder about the MS project, with numerous references about how much better his project is.
Nor is all "free expression" art. If your description of Mapplethorpe's motives are correct, he was acting more as a journalist or historian. But it's considers art because...why? Because his title is "artist?" Because it's hung in a gallery instead of a history book? Or because art collectors pay $$$$ for something that an editor would pay $?
I have no problem with people exercising their First Amendment rights to express themselves, even things that are uncomfortable, distasteful, or downright nasty. But it seems that certain folks have latched onto the idea that "art" is somehow above other forms of expression, and not subject to criticism or excoriation but for that given by a select few, aka "critics". They deny the validity of expressions that disagree with their own. Which is just as narrow minded as those they purport to need defense from.
Mapplethorpe was an excellent photographer in a technical sense. He may have been an artist in the aesthetic sense. But that doesn't mean that everything he produced is a piece of art.
"This can't possibly be true. There are already "medical devices" that are just small x86 computers running WinCE (or even full Windows) and a proprietary app.
No special lockdown, just no obvious way to run another app (if you don't know where to look or what to do).
Since these devices qualify, we can infer that the most that's required is hiding the ability to run other apps, not disabling it."
So I can slap a USB drive in one of those and run Portable Firefox without some special knowledge or security barriers?
Didn't think so. "Lockdown" has other meanings besides the geek definition. Sometimes it means just covering the USB port with a cover with tamper resistant screws. Sure, I can get into the port with my tools, but then when something breaks the Manufacturer can say "Hey - the owner had to go out of his way to break it. Not our problem."
I didn't say that the FDA oversight was smart, good, or effective, only that it is expensive to comply with. It costs money to jump through hoops, no matter how stupid they are.
As for software patch approval, you bet your ass it needs to get approved. How many times have we heard "SP2 broke my app...". There's a big difference between "Freecell doesn't work anymore" and "The temperature monitoring program wrote all zeros into the database, so everything we produced during that period needs to be thrown away" or the Blue Screen of REAL Death. And so what if it doesn't get patched immediately - are you saying that these are connected to the Internet?
What TFS leaves out is that the reason "medical devices" cost so much is FDA regulations and the higher standards to which they are held. There is no possible way an iPhone could be certified as a "medical device". If Apple were to apply for certification, they would need to make a lot of changes, such as...wait for it...eliminating the ability to run 3rd party code.
Yes, insurance companies can be stupid when applying rules against paying for certain devises or "experimental" procedures. But ask the women whose lives were cut short by Congress forcing them to cover bone marrow transplants for breast cancer.
Kind of. The Pinto gas tank issue had far more to do with Lee Iacocca when he was at Ford. In order to compete with the imports, he gave the designers and engineers a simple directive: "2000#, $2000". Whenever an issue made it up to his office, that was the answer the engineers got - including the gas tank issue. That way, he could deny having "decided" anything. The cost/benefit analysis was more a matter of cover for decisions that had already been made.
"Class Action" may have borrowed elements from the Pinto, but it was fiction.
From Wikipedia:
At least I came by it honestly.
Why isn't there a +1 troll mod? I was halfway through typing a response to that last line before I clued in.
Well played, sir!