There are a couple of things that make TI calculators different from your average hackable smartphone or Raspberry Pi device.
First, they have terrible specs. The TI-NSpire, which is the creme-de-la-creme of these calculators has 20 MB of RAM. Compare to a recent Galaxy S3 smartphone - 2 GB, or even a $35 Raspberry Pi - 512 MB. The CPU is also woeful in spec, as is the flash, etc. They're also locked down to their dumbed down operating system which is extraordinarily limited, even when you consider the lack of the device's hardware prowess.
Second is the fact that these TI calculators are allowed on the SAT, ACT, and other standardized tests. This in my opinion is the reason for the awful specs. That they are allowed is precisely because the calculators are limited. It would be much easier to put a whole bunch of cheating software on a Galaxy S3. Heck, I could see apps like that in the Android marketplace for sale for $9.95! Or imagine - you could "ask an expert" during the test and have the answer transmitted to you over the smartphone's 4G coverage. Doesn't it make sense that the TI calculators have no built-in-networking, not even Bluetooth?
TI has to balance the fact that people want to cheat their way through these tests or math class and yet give them a nice calculator, one that can aid students in relieving the drudgery of basic arithmetic and maybe even have features that make people's lives easier. But again, this cannot come at the expense of having a platform that's ready for cheaters.
So in my opinion, this concept of putting Linux on the TI N-Spire is probably not a good idea, for a number of reasons. First, TI will likely try their darndest to prevent the calculators from being loaded up with a custom OS that could then be loaded up with cheatware. Moreover, if cheatware became easy to load, the people that run the SAT and ACT test would look to disqualify the TI from being used on these tests. This would then hurt the people that are honestly looking to use the calculator as intended on those exams.
If you're looking to hack on a piece of hardware, buy a Raspberry Pi, load a custom ROM on your smartphone. You're not doing anyone any favors by hacking Linux to run on the TI calculators except cheaters, and even that would only last a short while.
Suppose you go ahead and copy your brain state, and transfer the state to a functionally identical set of hardware. Now, the hardware is turned on, and identifies itself as you. But you are still here, running the original wetware. Now you have an issue. Who here is really you?
Here it gets even more interesting. Suppose you are then killed. Would that be murder? Technically you (the new you) are still alive. Who are you killing?
If this is not murder, than what is it? If it is murder, then as a final mental exercise, let's move the time back a couple of minutes to before the "new you" was created. Now our chain of events is identical to what happens in Star Trek. You are scanned, deconstructed (or killed) and finally reconstructed (perhaps in a new location). Is this still murder?
Can't Microsoft claim that what they paid for it was their developer's time and effort and housing and salaries, etc? In that case, we would be back to the original (retail) valuations.
I think those design people missed out something in their college careers. They missed out learning the principle of diminishing returns.
Being small only gets you so far, and just because you can make it smaller doesn't mean that you should. For example, take your average ball-point pen. Most pens you can buy in a store are about the same size - a good fit for an average hand. Yet, I've seen a few "toy" pens here and there - I remember there was a teeny pen on a swiss army knife I owned. That thing was completely useless. You could attempt to write with it, but your hands cramped up almost instantly. That's probably the reason you don't see a lot of swiss army knives with pens as attachments nowdays. I'm sure there are ways of making a new "interface" for a miniature ball-point pen - for example, if you had nothing to do, you could probably attach it to a thimble and have a half-decent pen. The point is, that people don't do it. There is a thing as TOO small.
I think handheld computers too are getting to their natural sizes with the Palm (and PocketPC) form factors. If you get too much smaller, you start squinting at the screen and there's the whole issue of diminishing utility again. Input into the thing becomes just one of your (many) issues. I had a teensy cell phone for example, and I was in constant fear of losing it in the cushions of my couch. I actually upgraded to a larger phone with more features and a longer battery life - because the size of the previous phone was a nuisance rather than a benefit.
No, copyright law is to protect covered works from being looted by someone other than the copyright holder. Why should someone spend time and effort writing a song/book/play/etc... and not expect payment for the work that went into said work.
I wouldn't want you to be making money off of something that I worked hard. You don't have the right to take my money that I could earn, unless we were to come to some sort of financial agreement that would be fair to both you and me.
Of course, if you could point out a place where I could find information to the contrary, please post it.
One man's definition of "looting" is another man's definition of "fair use". The previous post was right, the monopoly of record labels is codified in law - therefore "forced" upon us.
Regarding your idea that you don't want to be making money off something you worked hard for: there are other ways of compensating creators of copyright work that don't involve the kind of monopoly that we've seen in the record labels.
My favorite idea so far, championed by Lawrence Lessig, is called "forced licensing". This idea applies mostly to online downloading, although it has many off-line uses as well. Everyone using any kind of music service would pay a surchage "tax" amount of X. Some metrics company would be brought in to figure out how many people downloaded which songs. Then, the total sum collected from people, Y, would be distributed amongst all the artists in proportion to their listenership.
Is the above idea better then the monopoly the record companies hold? I think it might. The current system doesn't work very well in the first place. For example, there are numerous cases where artists sold their creative work rights for a pittance to the record companies, who turned around, made millions, and gave absolutely ZILCH, NOTHING, NADA back to the artist. Make your own conclusions.
Actually, I don't think that this is how capitalism is supposed to work at all. Ideally, capitalism is about creating a given product (of a certain quality) the most efficiently, passing the savings on to the consumer.
Now, I think that you'll agree that there is nothing wrong about any of that. The problem is the (un)limited monopoly that "WE THE PEOPLE" gave up to content creators. Therefore, they get to dictate to us that we should be happy buying an expiring product.
Capitalism is against monopoly in general, and in true capitalism none of this would be allowed to occur. You would simply be able to buy a non-protected version of the film, probably for less money then you will be paying for these expiring rentals if there was no monopoly and "true" capitalism had its way. The question, of course, is whether the content creators would create 150-million dollar movies if that were the case. But that's a whole different topic of discussion.
[BJH]: Maybe we'll be treated to the sight of SCO becoming the first company to file suit against itself (yeah right...).
Funny thing, this has already happened, with a little company called Sony:
There was an article about this in Wired Mag (click to view entire article)
Quote:
As a member of the Consumer Electronics Association, Sony joined the chorus of support for Napster against the legal onslaught from Sony and the other music giants seeking to shut it down. As a member of the RIAA, Sony railed against companies like Sony that manufacture CD burners. And it isn't just through trade associations that Sony is acting out its schizophrenia. Sony shipped a Celine Dion CD with a copy-protection mechanism that kept it from being played on Sony PCs. Sony even joined the music industry's suit against Launch Media, an Internet radio service that was part-owned by - you guessed it - Sony. Two other labels have since resolved their differences with Launch, but Sony Music continues the fight, even though Sony Electronics has been one of Launch's biggest advertisers and Launch is now part of Yahoo!, with which Sony has formed a major online partnership. It's as if hardware and entertainment have lashed two legs together and set off on a three-legged race, stumbling headlong into the future.
An interesting lesson in PR: How a massive company can excel in technology, make a best-of-breed machine, and still fall flat on its face because of corporate secrecy and mismanagement of information.
Yup, I think IBM bungled that one up pretty good. They win against Kasparov with an incredibly powerful machine, and then take their machine apart. Refused to divulge further information. Refused to play a rematch. I wonder who at IBM thought that corporate secrecy and indifference was going to win them good will of the community? Or maybe they had something to hide?
So, does secrecy make for good PR? Did this give a black eye to IBM?
Hehehe...
The songs they mention are so damn old (How old is The Wizard of OZ, anyway?) that the copyrights should have expired a long time ago if we lived in a sane world. But thanks to the lobbying efforts of Disney, Time Warner and others in the record industry, they get to take their bitter medicine.
I only wish they'd learn from their stupidity. I'm personally hoping that they spend oodles and oodles of money on $400/hr star trial lawyers, and maybe (if we're lucky) to reach an unsatisfactory conclusion for both sides - sort of like that recently passed retroactive webcasting fee is being groaned about from both sides. Only this time it would be a pleasant sound to hear Time Warner and EMI groan.
Sadly, after his death, a mega corporation continues to profit from his works, and with copyrights getting perpetually extended, control will never be relinquished. Would he had wanted the public to have access to his works after he passed away? Personally, I would like everything that I create to eventually find the greatest possible use after I'm gone. After all you can't take it with you. There's no better way than for the work to end up in the public domain. Yet, our laws and a few greedy individuals are going to prevent this from occurring. Something has to get done.
If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will simply jump right out. The trick is to put the frog in cold water, and slowly turn up the heat until the frog dies.
What makes me afraid and sad about the post is the slow erosion of freedom that Microsoft and others are peddling. First, we have the secure audio streams in Windows XP. Fast forward through Windows DRM. What's next? At some point, will MP3 files be deemed "unprotected" and thus not be allowed to run under the future Microsoft OS? Can we allow something like this to come to pass?
For anyone that might think this idea is something far fetched and applies only to esoteric spiders, consider a fairly common disease, rabies. Symptoms in humans include hydrophobia (a fear of water!), and in animals we all know the usual stereotype - aggressive and foaming at the mouth. Talk about mind-altering. Does this add to the ammunition of those that say we don't have a soul, that everything we are is contained between our ears?
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There are a couple of things that make TI calculators different from your average hackable smartphone or Raspberry Pi device.
First, they have terrible specs. The TI-NSpire, which is the creme-de-la-creme of these calculators has 20 MB of RAM. Compare to a recent Galaxy S3 smartphone - 2 GB, or even a $35 Raspberry Pi - 512 MB. The CPU is also woeful in spec, as is the flash, etc. They're also locked down to their dumbed down operating system which is extraordinarily limited, even when you consider the lack of the device's hardware prowess.
Second is the fact that these TI calculators are allowed on the SAT, ACT, and other standardized tests. This in my opinion is the reason for the awful specs. That they are allowed is precisely because the calculators are limited. It would be much easier to put a whole bunch of cheating software on a Galaxy S3. Heck, I could see apps like that in the Android marketplace for sale for $9.95! Or imagine - you could "ask an expert" during the test and have the answer transmitted to you over the smartphone's 4G coverage. Doesn't it make sense that the TI calculators have no built-in-networking, not even Bluetooth?
TI has to balance the fact that people want to cheat their way through these tests or math class and yet give them a nice calculator, one that can aid students in relieving the drudgery of basic arithmetic and maybe even have features that make people's lives easier. But again, this cannot come at the expense of having a platform that's ready for cheaters.
So in my opinion, this concept of putting Linux on the TI N-Spire is probably not a good idea, for a number of reasons. First, TI will likely try their darndest to prevent the calculators from being loaded up with a custom OS that could then be loaded up with cheatware. Moreover, if cheatware became easy to load, the people that run the SAT and ACT test would look to disqualify the TI from being used on these tests. This would then hurt the people that are honestly looking to use the calculator as intended on those exams.
If you're looking to hack on a piece of hardware, buy a Raspberry Pi, load a custom ROM on your smartphone. You're not doing anyone any favors by hacking Linux to run on the TI calculators except cheaters, and even that would only last a short while.
But here's an interesting conundrum.
Suppose you go ahead and copy your brain state, and transfer the state to a functionally identical set of hardware. Now, the hardware is turned on, and identifies itself as you. But you are still here, running the original wetware. Now you have an issue. Who here is really you?
Here it gets even more interesting. Suppose you are then killed. Would that be murder? Technically you (the new you) are still alive. Who are you killing?
If this is not murder, than what is it? If it is murder, then as a final mental exercise, let's move the time back a couple of minutes to before the "new you" was created. Now our chain of events is identical to what happens in Star Trek. You are scanned, deconstructed (or killed) and finally reconstructed (perhaps in a new location). Is this still murder?
Can't Microsoft claim that what they paid for it was their developer's time and effort and housing and salaries, etc? In that case, we would be back to the original (retail) valuations.
I think those design people missed out something in their college careers. They missed out learning the principle of diminishing returns.
Being small only gets you so far, and just because you can make it smaller doesn't mean that you should. For example, take your average ball-point pen. Most pens you can buy in a store are about the same size - a good fit for an average hand. Yet, I've seen a few "toy" pens here and there - I remember there was a teeny pen on a swiss army knife I owned. That thing was completely useless. You could attempt to write with it, but your hands cramped up almost instantly. That's probably the reason you don't see a lot of swiss army knives with pens as attachments nowdays. I'm sure there are ways of making a new "interface" for a miniature ball-point pen - for example, if you had nothing to do, you could probably attach it to a thimble and have a half-decent pen. The point is, that people don't do it. There is a thing as TOO small.
I think handheld computers too are getting to their natural sizes with the Palm (and PocketPC) form factors. If you get too much smaller, you start squinting at the screen and there's the whole issue of diminishing utility again. Input into the thing becomes just one of your (many) issues. I had a teensy cell phone for example, and I was in constant fear of losing it in the cushions of my couch. I actually upgraded to a larger phone with more features and a longer battery life - because the size of the previous phone was a nuisance rather than a benefit.
No, copyright law is to protect covered works from being looted by someone other than the copyright holder. Why should someone spend time and effort writing a song/book/play/etc... and not expect payment for the work that went into said work.
I wouldn't want you to be making money off of something that I worked hard. You don't have the right to take my money that I could earn, unless we were to come to some sort of financial agreement that would be fair to both you and me.
Of course, if you could point out a place where I could find information to the contrary, please post it.
One man's definition of "looting" is another man's definition of "fair use". The previous post was right, the monopoly of record labels is codified in law - therefore "forced" upon us.
Regarding your idea that you don't want to be making money off something you worked hard for: there are other ways of compensating creators of copyright work that don't involve the kind of monopoly that we've seen in the record labels.
My favorite idea so far, championed by Lawrence Lessig, is called "forced licensing". This idea applies mostly to online downloading, although it has many off-line uses as well. Everyone using any kind of music service would pay a surchage "tax" amount of X. Some metrics company would be brought in to figure out how many people downloaded which songs. Then, the total sum collected from people, Y, would be distributed amongst all the artists in proportion to their listenership.
Is the above idea better then the monopoly the record companies hold? I think it might. The current system doesn't work very well in the first place. For example, there are numerous cases where artists sold their creative work rights for a pittance to the record companies, who turned around, made millions, and gave absolutely ZILCH, NOTHING, NADA back to the artist. Make your own conclusions.
Actually, I don't think that this is how capitalism is supposed to work at all. Ideally, capitalism is about creating a given product (of a certain quality) the most efficiently, passing the savings on to the consumer.
Now, I think that you'll agree that there is nothing wrong about any of that. The problem is the (un)limited monopoly that "WE THE PEOPLE" gave up to content creators. Therefore, they get to dictate to us that we should be happy buying an expiring product.
Capitalism is against monopoly in general, and in true capitalism none of this would be allowed to occur. You would simply be able to buy a non-protected version of the film, probably for less money then you will be paying for these expiring rentals if there was no monopoly and "true" capitalism had its way. The question, of course, is whether the content creators would create 150-million dollar movies if that were the case. But that's a whole different topic of discussion.
[BJH]: Maybe we'll be treated to the sight of SCO becoming the first company to file suit against itself (yeah right...).
Funny thing, this has already happened, with a little company called Sony:
There was an article about this in Wired Mag (click to view entire article)
Quote: As a member of the Consumer Electronics Association, Sony joined the chorus of support for Napster against the legal onslaught from Sony and the other music giants seeking to shut it down. As a member of the RIAA, Sony railed against companies like Sony that manufacture CD burners. And it isn't just through trade associations that Sony is acting out its schizophrenia. Sony shipped a Celine Dion CD with a copy-protection mechanism that kept it from being played on Sony PCs. Sony even joined the music industry's suit against Launch Media, an Internet radio service that was part-owned by - you guessed it - Sony. Two other labels have since resolved their differences with Launch, but Sony Music continues the fight, even though Sony Electronics has been one of Launch's biggest advertisers and Launch is now part of Yahoo!, with which Sony has formed a major online partnership. It's as if hardware and entertainment have lashed two legs together and set off on a three-legged race, stumbling headlong into the future.
An interesting lesson in PR: How a massive company can excel in technology, make a best-of-breed machine, and still fall flat on its face because of corporate secrecy and mismanagement of information.
Yup, I think IBM bungled that one up pretty good. They win against Kasparov with an incredibly powerful machine, and then take their machine apart. Refused to divulge further information. Refused to play a rematch. I wonder who at IBM thought that corporate secrecy and indifference was going to win them good will of the community? Or maybe they had something to hide?
So, does secrecy make for good PR? Did this give a black eye to IBM?
Hehehe... The songs they mention are so damn old (How old is The Wizard of OZ, anyway?) that the copyrights should have expired a long time ago if we lived in a sane world. But thanks to the lobbying efforts of Disney, Time Warner and others in the record industry, they get to take their bitter medicine. I only wish they'd learn from their stupidity. I'm personally hoping that they spend oodles and oodles of money on $400/hr star trial lawyers, and maybe (if we're lucky) to reach an unsatisfactory conclusion for both sides - sort of like that recently passed retroactive webcasting fee is being groaned about from both sides. Only this time it would be a pleasant sound to hear Time Warner and EMI groan.
Sadly, after his death, a mega corporation continues to profit from his works, and with copyrights getting perpetually extended, control will never be relinquished. Would he had wanted the public to have access to his works after he passed away? Personally, I would like everything that I create to eventually find the greatest possible use after I'm gone. After all you can't take it with you. There's no better way than for the work to end up in the public domain. Yet, our laws and a few greedy individuals are going to prevent this from occurring. Something has to get done.
If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will simply jump right out. The trick is to put the frog in cold water, and slowly turn up the heat until the frog dies.
What makes me afraid and sad about the post is the slow erosion of freedom that Microsoft and others are peddling. First, we have the secure audio streams in Windows XP. Fast forward through Windows DRM. What's next? At some point, will MP3 files be deemed "unprotected" and thus not be allowed to run under the future Microsoft OS? Can we allow something like this to come to pass?
For anyone that might think this idea is something far fetched and applies only to esoteric spiders, consider a fairly common disease, rabies. Symptoms in humans include hydrophobia (a fear of water!), and in animals we all know the usual stereotype - aggressive and foaming at the mouth. Talk about mind-altering. Does this add to the ammunition of those that say we don't have a soul, that everything we are is contained between our ears?