I do agree that it could be a good thing to have advanced surveillance cameras that can assist police in finding bad guys.
Unfortuantely though we have laws designed to "protect" us from terrorists that mean that people can be put away for being suspected of intending to commit a terrorist offense. People can be held indefinitely without access to lawyers, and these laws have already been used to hold innocent people.
With this technology all you need is to add in a few paranoid law enforcement agents and all of a sudden many more "terrorists" get put away.
I've thought about surveillance cameras a lot - I originally come from London where there's a very high conccentration of them. I have no great problem with them, since right now it's very difficult for law enforcement to abuse them, and they do have great potential in helping track down potential criminals. I even have no great problem with law enforcement agencies using cameras to spot people behaving suspiciously and monitoring them - this is after all what police officers on the street do.
I do however have a massive problem with laws that pervert the basic justice system tenet of "innocent until proven guilty". Laws should ensure that people cannot be arrested without probable cause. That has been the case for many, many years, up until 11th September 2001 when paranoia took over and every person who uttered a dissenting opinion or had the wrong skin colour became a suspected criminal.
I'd pay $10 a month for an unlimited music download service offering lossless compressed titles.
I'd drag down gigabytes of music every day for the first few months, slowing to gigabytes a week. I'd probably end up averaging over one album downloaded a day over the first year.
And the company offering this service to me, and the thousands of others doing the same, would go bust. The server costs would be pretty hefty to cope with such download demands, and the bandwidth required to make this work would be hefty too.
Yes, peer to peer technology can help, but you still need a central source, and you need your peers to continually participate in the network. I know that when I've used Bittorrent in the past eventually I end up disconnecting when I want to start downloading something new because it sucks up my bandwidth.
Music artists already make very little from their work. Downloading 30 albums a month means paying 33c per album if you're only being charged $10 for the month. The artists cut of that 33c would either be tiny or non-existant, since there's costs involved.
The first paragraph says that Indians can probably produce software every bit as good as Americans and that outsourcing is only about money.
Then we have a paragraph that contends that an average American would be upset if they understood about laws such as the DMCA, although it's mistyped as DCMA... This seems to be completely unrelated to the previous paragraph and the following one.
Finally we have an assertion that "outsourcing is an evil plain and simple", but there's no argument put forward that backs this up.
It's not plain and simple that "outsourcing is an evil". It has the potential to be a very good thing. It has the potential to deliver good quality merchandise to consumers, and deliver good paying jobs to people who need them.
Outsourcing doesn't mean that jobs will go out of the country - often work is outsourced to companies within the same country.
Some outsourced work does go abroad, and there are many reasons for that, cost being just one. However the costs involved are not simple - it can actually be more expensive to manage a remote team of programmers than doing things locally.
Where there is potential for "evil" in outsourcing is where foreign companies are used that do not treat their workers well. This is very common in the garment industry where manufacturing is often outsourced to sweat shops in the far east. Nike have a particularly bad record in this regard. Software outsourcing on the other hand has a very good record where foreign workers generally make a good living.
IMHO the way to solve the "evil" of outsourcing is to ensure that products sold are produced ethically, and restrict the sale of goods that are produced through exploitation. If Nike were hit with fines and forced to withdraw their products because they were produced by exploiting foreign workers then they would change their policy. It's highly unlikely they would give up the US market just to continue producing goods on the cheap.
Unfortunately whilst governments often pass laws to protect their own citizens they rarely give a damn about foreigners. Indeed exploiting foreign countries seems to be national policy for most governments.
Now Apple's AAC page does indeed reveal that AAC is a consortium design effort and they don't own it.
It doesn't, however, say anything about the FairPlay DRM. Indeed FairPlay is listed as an Apple trademark, and Apple claims it as their own technology. There is no mention of this being licensed, so that would imply that they do own it. See: http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/aut horization. html
Now there is much speculation that FairPlay was licensed from Veridisc, since that company was developing a DRM system called "Fairplay". However the only evidence of this is speculation from web pundits who have done a search on "Fairplay" and come up with Veridisc's web site. There is no press release from either company on a license agreement - one would have thought Veridisc would want to shout about this. There's also, apparently, no record of any payments being made to Veridisc by Apple for a license fee, or purchasing the company, in their accounts.
That is indeed mostly the way of the Star Wars movies, as has been pointed out by other people here, and was always the intention of them.
However given that in Revenge of the Sith we'll see the Republic (who were after all the good guys) transform into the Empire it's not all that straight forward. Sure, we have the Jedi as the good guys, and Sith as the evil, but the wider universe is not as simple. We also have the transformation of a Jedi (Anakin) into a Sith (Vader) going on in this film too.
Whilst the polarity thing is still there in the series this episode has to be, by its very nature, an exploration of the grey area between the two.
Also don't forget that Return of the Jedi also contained some grey, since there was the transformation of Vader back into Anakin.
Germany never attacked us- should we have waited to go to war with them? Oh, and Iraq did attack us almost every day between 1991 and 2002.
Bringing up Germany (i.e. WWII) to try to help justify the war in Iraq... Now that's funny. Yes, Germany never attacked the US, but it did attack the US' closest allies, and indeed had completely occupied some allied countries before the US got involved. Yes, during WWII the US did support the war effort of its allies in Europe through supplies, but it ignored the cries of its allies for military assistance (in the form of troops) for years.
The US had justification for joining in WWII long before they did. In times of war you are supposed to support your allies, after all.
The situation with Iraq was clearly not the same.
But don't forget that he also tried to assasinate a former US president, attack the US run Radio Free Europe in Prague, and according to Russia, he was plotting a direct attack on our homeland.
The reverse is also true. The CIA tried to assasinate Saddam on several occasions. The US mounted radio propaganda campaigns in Iraq. As for "plotting a direct attack", frankly it's not very credible - it's much the same as "attempting to acquire uranium" and "links to al Quaeda". Besides which, if I was the leader of a country that had been blockaded and attacked by a foreign power for over a decade I'd be mightily pissed off with them too and wanting to attack them. Saddam didn't have the capability of mounting an attack though, so where's the credible threat here?
Then we have the tax cut thing...
The US has been running deficit budgets for many years now, and the deficits are increasing. The economy is basically supported by the dollar - it is the world's currency, however the Euro is starting to gain some ground. Some Opec countries start to recognise the comparative weakness of the dollar compared to the Euro and start pricing oil in Euros, and then what happens next? The US mounts a war to secure the largest oil fields in the Middle East, ensuring they will be priced in dollars...
The division between rich and poor in the USA is getting bigger every year - it's becoming harder to join the ranks of the rich, and more and more people are living in poverty. We see headlines of new jobs being created, whereas the rate of job losses gets ignored and unemployment is actually rising.
Bringing things slightly back OT we have corrupt senators such as Hatch pushing laws that further persecute the poor. The rich don't give a damn about these laws since they aren't affected - indeed these laws often help ensure that the rich stay rich.
The right and just thing to do would be to reduce the lowest levels of taxation, paying for this with a small increase in the higest levels of taxation. The rich won't leave the country if you charge them an extra 5% on everything above $100,000 they earn since they'd have a very hard time earning that much in foreign countries.
Yes, I am suggesting an increase in taxes. It is in the rich's interest to have poor people who will work for relatively little, but in order for them to be productive workers they've got to be fit and healthy. Raising the taxes at the high-end could pay for a national health service and daycare for pre-school children, removing a major burden from poor people and helping ensure a happier, more productive, workforce.
As for the victory in Iraq being a resounding success, that may be what CNN tells you, but the whole American media has been in "patriot" mode since 11/9/01. Anyone that speaks out against Bush on the subject of war or terror is branded as un-American. There's been very little questioning as to the wisdom of the actions of the Bush administration by the mainstream media, when there is plenty to question. In reporting on Iraq you hear whining about how many American soldiers are killed, ignoring the many thousand
It costs money to register trademarks. Then there's the issue of multiple territories and trademark protection only applying where you've registered. The killer though is if you don't use a trademark you loose it.
Damn - sorry - sense of humour bypass kicked in! Probably because some bright spark modded you as "Interesting" rather than "Funny".
You're right of course. Flash is the standard. It's the only standard we've got really for web based vector graphics. I certainly can't think of another.
Sure SVG exists, but since it's not supported by any web browser, and as far as I can tell there's no browser plug-ins either (at least not for my Mac) it's not a standard.
Since Flash has been around for many years, and it well supported by many applications and on many different platforms (as the spec is published) it is the de-facto standard.
SVG may be very nice, but until it's supported out of the box by IE, Safari, and Netscape it's no standard.
Of course most Slashdot readers should already be familiar with this kind of licensing dispute. It's just more of the same, and again, typical Slashdot fodder.
Personally I have no big problem with the GPL, and respect people that release software under it. Having said that, I do have a big problem with some of Richard Stallman's attitudes about software development.
It's highly unlikely that I will ever release software under the GPL. Why? Because I want to be able to earn money from writing software. In Stallman's world you don't make money by writing software, you make it by charging for support, charging for a complimentary service, or charging for a book that describes the software.
I don't want to have to charge my users for support. Indeed my aim is to write high quality software that needs no support. I want to write software that is so easy and intuitive to use it needs no manual. So that's what I do.
COmpanies used to use child labor util we made laws about it. Companies used to work people round the clock until we made laws about it. From their past track record companies WILL DO whatever they can GET AWAY WITH - until we unite and make a law about it.
They still do.
This is, after all, why the likes of Nike, Reebok, and Levis have exported their labour. Labour laws that apply only to domestic workers and not the products for sale, coupled with fairly efficient global transportation and communication networks ensures that companies continue to use exploitative labour. The countries where manufacturing labour gets exported to generally has few legal restrictions on working conditions.
For those that live north of the border Stargate Atlantis airs on Monday (July 19th) on The Movie Network and also Movie Central at 8pm (EST).
Looks like we've got to wait a few extra days.
I don't know aboout Movie Central but The Movie Network is a subscription channel. I'm already a subscriber so I'll be sure to be watching on Monday. TMN is also airing a "making of" documentary at 7:30pm.
The TMN web site has a brief "making of" video online right now.
I hope that TMN puts Atlantis on TMN On Demand too... That would be sweet.
It drives me nuts when people shorten "mathematics" to "math".
I don't understand why the "s" is missing in American English and it irritates me every time I hear the word.
There is a subtle difference between the singular "mathematic" and the plural "mathematics". Yes, it is a plural - look up mathematic on dictionary.com as well as mathematics and you may see the difference.
If in math lesson you only learnt arithmetic then the term would be fine, but I learnt many other mathematical sciences such as geometry and calculus too in my maths lessons.
To me "maths" is logically and rationally the more correct term.
That and it's the term I grew up with in England...
Of course developers don't have to follow the rules, and some don't read them. They were never rigidly enforced, and often people didn't follow them. Since years back the normal method for software distribution was boxes in shops people usually got to know about applications from magazine reviews, and if an application didn't follow the rules it would often get a bad review. It's not the same in these days of digital distribution.
Another problem is that some applications run on Mac OS X which don't follow the rules because the program was not specifically designed for the Mac. Java applications that use Swing, for example, run just fine under Mac OS X, but don't look like proper Mac applications.
Apple's standards have changed and evolved over the years, but they are still coherant if you care to read them, and do still make for good applications.
Almost no kids in Japanese public schools are driven to school by their parents. It is not against the rules, but is generally discouraged.
Now I grew up in England and I'm now 31 - things have changed a bit since I was a kid. When I was at school quite a few kids would be driven to school by their parents. Most kids caught the bus or train to school, and there was a very limited school bus service for those people that lived in places not served by public transport.
From what I gathered many more parents in England are being driven to school these days. This trend is driven by paranoia about kids being abducted and abused. This paranoia however is not well founded - as far as I can tell the incidence of abduction and abuse is no higher today than it was 20 years ago, or 50 years ago.
Sure, parents send their kids to school, and assume they're going to arrive. If they don't arrive then the school should take note - the child will after all be absent at roll call. Good schools should not allow children to simply take days off, so they'll send a letter to the parents if they believe the child is skipping school or call them. It is usually in response to such feedback from the school that parents nag to incease the likelihood of their child going to school. As for behaving on the way to school, feedback there can come from police officers, but besides that yes, parents do nag, and occasionally do spy too.
Add in RFID tagged kids, and you get an element of spying done automatically. Indeed roll call wouldn't be necessary, since it would be automatic. However kids will still skip school. RFID though would prevent the old trick of turning up for roll call and then leaving school. Schools would still inform parents when kids didn't turn up, and parents would still nag their kids for skipping school. I see very little difference really, besides automatic roll calls.
Of course this ignores abduction, however I don't see RFID tags on book bags as any kind of solution here. A smart kid that wants to skip school will put the tag in a friends bag who is going to school. The solution here is to tag the kids themselves (with an implant), not the bags. Even then the "solution" is flawed, since they need to be scanned for their location to be known.
I doubt very much that schools are going to automatically report children missing if they don't turn up at school. They'll assume, as they do now, that the child is ill and expect it to turn up in a day or two with a note. Police certainly won't have the time to check up on every child that doesn't make it to school - they have more important things to be doing.
Unless the child is a problematic brat parents also aren't going to check that their child made it to school. They'll trust that the kid made it.
Indeed trust is an important factor here. I believe that it's very important to trust your child, and that if you treat them like a criminal they'll be more likely to act like a criminal.
Of course sometimes it's problematic parents where the trouble lies who don't really care if their child makes it to school or not. In such cases RFID would make little difference.
So yeah, I'll stick with nagging and snooping too. I'll also add in a bit of trust in my child too.
I don't know about the Battle Royal Act making no sense... Just very little.
When I was at school a common thing that teachers would do when they did not know who was the guilty party in breaking the rules was to punnish the whole class. It seems to be that the Battle Royal Act is an extension of that kind of logic.
Apple could indeed make a new kick-ass Newton now thanks to modern hardware technology which would be radically superior to just about anything running PalmOS, PocketPC, or Symbian. The only real software work required would probably be to add in support for colour graphics.
Sadly the entire Newton community had been telling Apple to make smaller and lighter devices, although there was also a call for larger devices too. What we ended up with was the MessagePad 2000, which was neither of these things - too large to satisfy those that wanted a Palm sized device, and too small for those that wanted a tablet computer.
However a new Newton from Apple won't happen. Why? Because, rumour has it that Steve Jobs doesn't like the Newton. The Newton was Sculley's baby, and Sculley kicked Steve out.
Newton was killed when it was just becoming profitable. It wasn't logical to kill the Newton when they did. It wasn't logical to pull Newton Inc. back into Apple.
Most people are not creative, and most hate to learn. This is a sad truth. The amount of people who like to learn new things throughout their life, or create things just for the sake of creating, is a thin sliver of the general population.
Now this is indeed the nub of the problem, and whilst I don't know Alan Kay personally I believe he probably already understands this. In fact he's probably a step beyond this. Here's something for you to consider.
All people have the potential within themselves to be creative. Everybody continues to learn throughout the whole of their lives, whether they like to learn or not.
For example there's plenty of people who "hate to learn", but know loads of stats on their favourite football team. They've learnt all that information, but they don't equate that with learning because they acquired that knowledge through fun. People that hate to learn are often full of trivia and indeed it's exceptionally difficult not to learn things as we grow older.
I personally believe that the problem is our education systems. In our education we are generally not encouraged to be creative - we are instead taught to provide our educators with what they want. Often creativity is punished with lower marks, all thanks to an obsession with standardised testing. We are also not usually taught techniques to help us learn things, rather we are just expected to learn what is thrown at us. The general teaching technique is like throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks. People end up with the impression that it's difficult to learn things.
There's also a common misconception with the general population in that it gets more difficult to learn things as you get older. This simply is not true. If you keep an active mind it actually gets easier to learn things as you get older. Learning is a cumulative process, and if you know more things it's easier to learn more things.
Most people don't enjoy their schooling, and so they get the attitude that they hate to learn. Also at school it is far too often the "jocks" that are celebrated, especially by the staff, whereas the "nerds" are often subject to ridicule. The jocks are cool, and people want to be cool.
As for creativity, people can solve simple problems, and that itself is a creative act. Most people don't see it that way though and equate creativity with producing works or art.
Because people didn't have fun learning things at school they think that all learning isn't fun. If people were taught better ways to learn at school then they may have a better attitude. There are some really simple techniques for this, most of which also encourage creativity.
Computers have immense potential to be of assistance in the area of learning and creativity, but they are being under-used. This is a process that should continue throughout our lives and not be restricted to our schooling alone. Business applications generally are not highly creative and do not encourage learning, yet it is mostly business applications that we get taught at school. This is, I believe, where Alan Kay's concerns lie.
Whilst Cutler may have been one of the people that wrote VMS he did so for DEC. It doesn't matter if he wrote it or not, DEC owned the code, and probably also owned many of the ideas that the code contained in the form of patents. Since Cutler did not own the IP here if he did cut and paste in code from an aborted version of VMS then he, and by extension Microsoft, did steal, unless DEC sold had the rights to that code and the patents to Cutler or Microsoft. I don't believe such a sale was made.
As for Intel and Alpha, as has been written elsewhere the parent post was wrong about it being the P4, it was the Pentium that this issue revolved around. Whilst Intel may now own the Alpha they didn't when they made the Pentium, and chronology is important here.
Besides some bad decisions by the management of DEC this stealing of IP by Intel and Microsoft were major contributors to the downfall of DEC.
Whilst ARM was at one stage part of Acorn it's not what Acorn became. In Acorn's dying days the remaining part of the company renamed themselves to "Element 14", which from what I can make out was basically a DSP chip design outfit which was later bought up by Broadcom.
The name "ARM" originally meant "Acorn RISC Machine" (no 's') and was the name of the processor. The original ARM chip was, as far as I know, only ever available as a co-processor module for the BBC Micro. It had a few minor flaws which were remedied in the ARM2, which was used in the first commercial RISC computers, the Acorn Archimedes range. The Archimedes was otherwise known as the A-series, with the first four models being the A305, A310, A410, and A440. The A400 series had an ST506 disc interface built in and could support up to 4MB of memory. The A300 series needed an expansion card for hard discs and was only designed to take 1MB of RAM, although some companies later worked out how to increase that to 4MB and beyond.
The later A540 model came with an ARM3 processor and could support up to 16MB or RAM. It was possible to upgrade earlier machines to ARM3.
As for the R-series, the two models I remember are the R140 and the R260, and they were Unix workstations. They would first boot into RISC OS before starting up RISCiX, Acorn's BSD derived Unix. The R140 was actually an A440, and the R260 an A540, although both carried a high price premium over their A-series equivalents. Whilst they were fairly reasonably priced for Unix workstations they failed to sell in any significant quantity since they were underpowered compared to other Unix boxes. Sparc boxes were much faster and could take more RAM.
ARM, the company, has always been "Advanced RISC Machines". Whilst ARM was a spin-off of Acorn's processor division the company was a joint venture between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI. I believe there was also an investment company in the mix too.
Apple used the (VLSI-manufactured) ARM610 in their Newton MessagePad computers, and Acorn used it in their RiscPC. The MessagePad 2000 and 2100, as well as later versions of the RiscPC used the DEC (later Intel) StrongARM SA110 processor.
Now the interesting thing about StrongARM is that it wasn't designed by ARM. DEC licensed the ARM design and then changed it themselves to produce StrongARM.
Personally my reading habits have varied a great deal.
After school I also didn't read all that much, however I never really gave up. At times though I've got to a point where I've been taking six months to read a book. I'm in one of those phases right now, although for a change its not because the book is lousy.
Back when I commuted a couple of hours to and from work every day I read a great deal on the train. This was fantastic. However when I replaced the train with a motorbike my journey time decreased and with it my reading dropped off to almost nothing.
When I was unemployed a couple of years back I read quite a bit, but on occasion I'd get stuck with a lousy book. Rather than plug on with it I just wouldn't read it and watch TV instead - I rarely don't finish reading any book I start. The way around this problem is to read a couple of books at once.
Last year I read a whole load of books. Why? I had sold my home and was travelling a great deal. No TV for a year, and no significant obligations, gives you more reading time. Most hostels also have small libraries where you can swap your books too, so I got to read some interesting books that I would not normally have considered looking at.
This year though I haven't read much at all - I'm on the same book I was back in February. Why? Well, I've settled down, have a new flat where I live with my pregnant fiancee, worked hard to put out some software, and then there's digital cable TV. I also now have a computer again and high speed Internet access. Some big distractions and I've not been very diciplined about reading. At least though I've become slightly diciplined about buying books.
I am however reading a lot. I read news and many other articles every day (thanks to RSS), and I've also read a great deal of documentation. I do want to be reading books again though, so I'll sort that out soon.
If you're talking about books and know exactly which book you wish to buy then yes, Googling for it seems to make sense.
If, in contrast, you have no idea about what type of book you wish to get then a book store is IMHO a much better way of finding a book. Often I won't even know the genre of book I'm going to buy when I walk into a book store and keep a very open mind about my purchases. Surfing around Amazon (or another online bookseller) really isn't a nice way to find books, and due to their nature you're more likely to limit your choices to areas you're already familiar with.
A truely intelligent person should seek ways to expand their knowledge and be open to completely new ideas. It is harder to do that with on-line book stores.
Of course you can find out new ideas by just doing Google searches rather than reading books, however a decent book has the advantage of depth. A good author will have done a great deal of research in producing their book and should know their subject intimately - the book should be a distilation of most of what you can find using Google with confusion and misinformation removed.
Additionally some material just isn't available in decent forms online. Good biographies for instance are very rare.
Slashdot Mirror
I do agree that it could be a good thing to have advanced surveillance cameras that can assist police in finding bad guys.
Unfortuantely though we have laws designed to "protect" us from terrorists that mean that people can be put away for being suspected of intending to commit a terrorist offense. People can be held indefinitely without access to lawyers, and these laws have already been used to hold innocent people.
With this technology all you need is to add in a few paranoid law enforcement agents and all of a sudden many more "terrorists" get put away.
I've thought about surveillance cameras a lot - I originally come from London where there's a very high conccentration of them. I have no great problem with them, since right now it's very difficult for law enforcement to abuse them, and they do have great potential in helping track down potential criminals. I even have no great problem with law enforcement agencies using cameras to spot people behaving suspiciously and monitoring them - this is after all what police officers on the street do.
I do however have a massive problem with laws that pervert the basic justice system tenet of "innocent until proven guilty". Laws should ensure that people cannot be arrested without probable cause. That has been the case for many, many years, up until 11th September 2001 when paranoia took over and every person who uttered a dissenting opinion or had the wrong skin colour became a suspected criminal.
I'd pay $10 a month for an unlimited music download service offering lossless compressed titles.
I'd drag down gigabytes of music every day for the first few months, slowing to gigabytes a week. I'd probably end up averaging over one album downloaded a day over the first year.
And the company offering this service to me, and the thousands of others doing the same, would go bust. The server costs would be pretty hefty to cope with such download demands, and the bandwidth required to make this work would be hefty too.
Yes, peer to peer technology can help, but you still need a central source, and you need your peers to continually participate in the network. I know that when I've used Bittorrent in the past eventually I end up disconnecting when I want to start downloading something new because it sucks up my bandwidth.
Music artists already make very little from their work. Downloading 30 albums a month means paying 33c per album if you're only being charged $10 for the month. The artists cut of that 33c would either be tiny or non-existant, since there's costs involved.
I think I missed something in the parent post.
The first paragraph says that Indians can probably produce software every bit as good as Americans and that outsourcing is only about money.
Then we have a paragraph that contends that an average American would be upset if they understood about laws such as the DMCA, although it's mistyped as DCMA... This seems to be completely unrelated to the previous paragraph and the following one.
Finally we have an assertion that "outsourcing is an evil plain and simple", but there's no argument put forward that backs this up.
It's not plain and simple that "outsourcing is an evil". It has the potential to be a very good thing. It has the potential to deliver good quality merchandise to consumers, and deliver good paying jobs to people who need them.
Outsourcing doesn't mean that jobs will go out of the country - often work is outsourced to companies within the same country.
Some outsourced work does go abroad, and there are many reasons for that, cost being just one. However the costs involved are not simple - it can actually be more expensive to manage a remote team of programmers than doing things locally.
Where there is potential for "evil" in outsourcing is where foreign companies are used that do not treat their workers well. This is very common in the garment industry where manufacturing is often outsourced to sweat shops in the far east. Nike have a particularly bad record in this regard. Software outsourcing on the other hand has a very good record where foreign workers generally make a good living.
IMHO the way to solve the "evil" of outsourcing is to ensure that products sold are produced ethically, and restrict the sale of goods that are produced through exploitation. If Nike were hit with fines and forced to withdraw their products because they were produced by exploiting foreign workers then they would change their policy. It's highly unlikely they would give up the US market just to continue producing goods on the cheap.
Unfortunately whilst governments often pass laws to protect their own citizens they rarely give a damn about foreigners. Indeed exploiting foreign countries seems to be national policy for most governments.
Now Apple's AAC page does indeed reveal that AAC is a consortium design effort and they don't own it.
t horization. html
It doesn't, however, say anything about the FairPlay DRM. Indeed FairPlay is listed as an Apple trademark, and Apple claims it as their own technology. There is no mention of this being licensed, so that would imply that they do own it.
See:
http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/au
Now there is much speculation that FairPlay was licensed from Veridisc, since that company was developing a DRM system called "Fairplay". However the only evidence of this is speculation from web pundits who have done a search on "Fairplay" and come up with Veridisc's web site. There is no press release from either company on a license agreement - one would have thought Veridisc would want to shout about this. There's also, apparently, no record of any payments being made to Veridisc by Apple for a license fee, or purchasing the company, in their accounts.
Interesting point re black hat vs. white hat.
That is indeed mostly the way of the Star Wars movies, as has been pointed out by other people here, and was always the intention of them.
However given that in Revenge of the Sith we'll see the Republic (who were after all the good guys) transform into the Empire it's not all that straight forward. Sure, we have the Jedi as the good guys, and Sith as the evil, but the wider universe is not as simple. We also have the transformation of a Jedi (Anakin) into a Sith (Vader) going on in this film too.
Whilst the polarity thing is still there in the series this episode has to be, by its very nature, an exploration of the grey area between the two.
Also don't forget that Return of the Jedi also contained some grey, since there was the transformation of Vader back into Anakin.
Well this is all mildly amusing.
You've stated this:
Germany never attacked us- should we have waited to go to war with them? Oh, and Iraq did attack us almost every day between 1991 and 2002.
Bringing up Germany (i.e. WWII) to try to help justify the war in Iraq... Now that's funny. Yes, Germany never attacked the US, but it did attack the US' closest allies, and indeed had completely occupied some allied countries before the US got involved. Yes, during WWII the US did support the war effort of its allies in Europe through supplies, but it ignored the cries of its allies for military assistance (in the form of troops) for years.
The US had justification for joining in WWII long before they did. In times of war you are supposed to support your allies, after all.
The situation with Iraq was clearly not the same.
But don't forget that he also tried to assasinate a former US president, attack the US run Radio Free Europe in Prague, and according to Russia, he was plotting a direct attack on our homeland.
The reverse is also true. The CIA tried to assasinate Saddam on several occasions. The US mounted radio propaganda campaigns in Iraq. As for "plotting a direct attack", frankly it's not very credible - it's much the same as "attempting to acquire uranium" and "links to al Quaeda". Besides which, if I was the leader of a country that had been blockaded and attacked by a foreign power for over a decade I'd be mightily pissed off with them too and wanting to attack them. Saddam didn't have the capability of mounting an attack though, so where's the credible threat here?
Then we have the tax cut thing...
The US has been running deficit budgets for many years now, and the deficits are increasing. The economy is basically supported by the dollar - it is the world's currency, however the Euro is starting to gain some ground. Some Opec countries start to recognise the comparative weakness of the dollar compared to the Euro and start pricing oil in Euros, and then what happens next? The US mounts a war to secure the largest oil fields in the Middle East, ensuring they will be priced in dollars...
The division between rich and poor in the USA is getting bigger every year - it's becoming harder to join the ranks of the rich, and more and more people are living in poverty. We see headlines of new jobs being created, whereas the rate of job losses gets ignored and unemployment is actually rising.
Bringing things slightly back OT we have corrupt senators such as Hatch pushing laws that further persecute the poor. The rich don't give a damn about these laws since they aren't affected - indeed these laws often help ensure that the rich stay rich.
The right and just thing to do would be to reduce the lowest levels of taxation, paying for this with a small increase in the higest levels of taxation. The rich won't leave the country if you charge them an extra 5% on everything above $100,000 they earn since they'd have a very hard time earning that much in foreign countries.
Yes, I am suggesting an increase in taxes. It is in the rich's interest to have poor people who will work for relatively little, but in order for them to be productive workers they've got to be fit and healthy. Raising the taxes at the high-end could pay for a national health service and daycare for pre-school children, removing a major burden from poor people and helping ensure a happier, more productive, workforce.
As for the victory in Iraq being a resounding success, that may be what CNN tells you, but the whole American media has been in "patriot" mode since 11/9/01. Anyone that speaks out against Bush on the subject of war or terror is branded as un-American. There's been very little questioning as to the wisdom of the actions of the Bush administration by the mainstream media, when there is plenty to question. In reporting on Iraq you hear whining about how many American soldiers are killed, ignoring the many thousand
Nice idea. Won't work.
It costs money to register trademarks. Then there's the issue of multiple territories and trademark protection only applying where you've registered. The killer though is if you don't use a trademark you loose it.
Damn - sorry - sense of humour bypass kicked in! Probably because some bright spark modded you as "Interesting" rather than "Funny".
You're right of course. Flash is the standard. It's the only standard we've got really for web based vector graphics. I certainly can't think of another.
Sure SVG exists, but since it's not supported by any web browser, and as far as I can tell there's no browser plug-ins either (at least not for my Mac) it's not a standard.
Since Flash has been around for many years, and it well supported by many applications and on many different platforms (as the spec is published) it is the de-facto standard.
SVG may be very nice, but until it's supported out of the box by IE, Safari, and Netscape it's no standard.
All flame and no info is the Slashdot way. :-)
Of course most Slashdot readers should already be familiar with this kind of licensing dispute. It's just more of the same, and again, typical Slashdot fodder.
Personally I have no big problem with the GPL, and respect people that release software under it. Having said that, I do have a big problem with some of Richard Stallman's attitudes about software development.
It's highly unlikely that I will ever release software under the GPL. Why? Because I want to be able to earn money from writing software. In Stallman's world you don't make money by writing software, you make it by charging for support, charging for a complimentary service, or charging for a book that describes the software.
I don't want to have to charge my users for support. Indeed my aim is to write high quality software that needs no support. I want to write software that is so easy and intuitive to use it needs no manual. So that's what I do.
As usual, my favorite books get butchered and dumbed-down for the general masses...it's a shame, really.
Have you seen this movie yet?
If not then how can you make that judgement.
The posted review is far from sufficient to draw the conclusion that this movie is a dumbing down.
COmpanies used to use child labor util we made laws about it. Companies used to work people round the clock until we made laws about it. From their past track record companies WILL DO whatever they can GET AWAY WITH - until we unite and make a law about it.
They still do.
This is, after all, why the likes of Nike, Reebok, and Levis have exported their labour. Labour laws that apply only to domestic workers and not the products for sale, coupled with fairly efficient global transportation and communication networks ensures that companies continue to use exploitative labour. The countries where manufacturing labour gets exported to generally has few legal restrictions on working conditions.
You can probably find something about this on Naomi Klein's nologo.org web site.
By the way Colour has got a "u" in it.
:-)
:-)
It certainly does!
And arse has an "r" in it too.
I do wish these USians would stop calling their language English.
For those that live north of the border Stargate Atlantis airs on Monday (July 19th) on The Movie Network and also Movie Central at 8pm (EST).
Looks like we've got to wait a few extra days.
I don't know aboout Movie Central but The Movie Network is a subscription channel. I'm already a subscriber so I'll be sure to be watching on Monday. TMN is also airing a "making of" documentary at 7:30pm.
The TMN web site has a brief "making of" video online right now.
I hope that TMN puts Atlantis on TMN On Demand too... That would be sweet.
Can't wait til monday!
It drives me nuts when people shorten "mathematics" to "math".
I don't understand why the "s" is missing in American English and it irritates me every time I hear the word.
There is a subtle difference between the singular "mathematic" and the plural "mathematics". Yes, it is a plural - look up mathematic on dictionary.com as well as mathematics and you may see the difference.
If in math lesson you only learnt arithmetic then the term would be fine, but I learnt many other mathematical sciences such as geometry and calculus too in my maths lessons.
To me "maths" is logically and rationally the more correct term.
That and it's the term I grew up with in England...
Apple still has rules for presenting interfaces.
Of course developers don't have to follow the rules, and some don't read them. They were never rigidly enforced, and often people didn't follow them. Since years back the normal method for software distribution was boxes in shops people usually got to know about applications from magazine reviews, and if an application didn't follow the rules it would often get a bad review. It's not the same in these days of digital distribution.
Another problem is that some applications run on Mac OS X which don't follow the rules because the program was not specifically designed for the Mac. Java applications that use Swing, for example, run just fine under Mac OS X, but don't look like proper Mac applications.
Apple's standards have changed and evolved over the years, but they are still coherant if you care to read them, and do still make for good applications.
Almost no kids in Japanese public schools are driven to school by their parents. It is not against the rules, but is generally discouraged.
Now I grew up in England and I'm now 31 - things have changed a bit since I was a kid. When I was at school quite a few kids would be driven to school by their parents. Most kids caught the bus or train to school, and there was a very limited school bus service for those people that lived in places not served by public transport.
From what I gathered many more parents in England are being driven to school these days. This trend is driven by paranoia about kids being abducted and abused. This paranoia however is not well founded - as far as I can tell the incidence of abduction and abuse is no higher today than it was 20 years ago, or 50 years ago.
I'm not sure about this...
Sure, parents send their kids to school, and assume they're going to arrive. If they don't arrive then the school should take note - the child will after all be absent at roll call. Good schools should not allow children to simply take days off, so they'll send a letter to the parents if they believe the child is skipping school or call them. It is usually in response to such feedback from the school that parents nag to incease the likelihood of their child going to school. As for behaving on the way to school, feedback there can come from police officers, but besides that yes, parents do nag, and occasionally do spy too.
Add in RFID tagged kids, and you get an element of spying done automatically. Indeed roll call wouldn't be necessary, since it would be automatic. However kids will still skip school. RFID though would prevent the old trick of turning up for roll call and then leaving school. Schools would still inform parents when kids didn't turn up, and parents would still nag their kids for skipping school. I see very little difference really, besides automatic roll calls.
Of course this ignores abduction, however I don't see RFID tags on book bags as any kind of solution here. A smart kid that wants to skip school will put the tag in a friends bag who is going to school. The solution here is to tag the kids themselves (with an implant), not the bags. Even then the "solution" is flawed, since they need to be scanned for their location to be known.
I doubt very much that schools are going to automatically report children missing if they don't turn up at school. They'll assume, as they do now, that the child is ill and expect it to turn up in a day or two with a note. Police certainly won't have the time to check up on every child that doesn't make it to school - they have more important things to be doing.
Unless the child is a problematic brat parents also aren't going to check that their child made it to school. They'll trust that the kid made it.
Indeed trust is an important factor here. I believe that it's very important to trust your child, and that if you treat them like a criminal they'll be more likely to act like a criminal.
Of course sometimes it's problematic parents where the trouble lies who don't really care if their child makes it to school or not. In such cases RFID would make little difference.
So yeah, I'll stick with nagging and snooping too. I'll also add in a bit of trust in my child too.
I don't know about the Battle Royal Act making no sense... Just very little.
When I was at school a common thing that teachers would do when they did not know who was the guilty party in breaking the rules was to punnish the whole class. It seems to be that the Battle Royal Act is an extension of that kind of logic.
Apple could indeed make a new kick-ass Newton now thanks to modern hardware technology which would be radically superior to just about anything running PalmOS, PocketPC, or Symbian. The only real software work required would probably be to add in support for colour graphics.
Sadly the entire Newton community had been telling Apple to make smaller and lighter devices, although there was also a call for larger devices too. What we ended up with was the MessagePad 2000, which was neither of these things - too large to satisfy those that wanted a Palm sized device, and too small for those that wanted a tablet computer.
However a new Newton from Apple won't happen. Why? Because, rumour has it that Steve Jobs doesn't like the Newton. The Newton was Sculley's baby, and Sculley kicked Steve out.
Newton was killed when it was just becoming profitable. It wasn't logical to kill the Newton when they did. It wasn't logical to pull Newton Inc. back into Apple.
Most people are not creative, and most hate to learn. This is a sad truth. The amount of people who like to learn new things throughout their life, or create things just for the sake of creating, is a thin sliver of the general population.
Now this is indeed the nub of the problem, and whilst I don't know Alan Kay personally I believe he probably already understands this. In fact he's probably a step beyond this. Here's something for you to consider.
All people have the potential within themselves to be creative. Everybody continues to learn throughout the whole of their lives, whether they like to learn or not.
For example there's plenty of people who "hate to learn", but know loads of stats on their favourite football team. They've learnt all that information, but they don't equate that with learning because they acquired that knowledge through fun. People that hate to learn are often full of trivia and indeed it's exceptionally difficult not to learn things as we grow older.
I personally believe that the problem is our education systems. In our education we are generally not encouraged to be creative - we are instead taught to provide our educators with what they want. Often creativity is punished with lower marks, all thanks to an obsession with standardised testing. We are also not usually taught techniques to help us learn things, rather we are just expected to learn what is thrown at us. The general teaching technique is like throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks. People end up with the impression that it's difficult to learn things.
There's also a common misconception with the general population in that it gets more difficult to learn things as you get older. This simply is not true. If you keep an active mind it actually gets easier to learn things as you get older. Learning is a cumulative process, and if you know more things it's easier to learn more things.
Most people don't enjoy their schooling, and so they get the attitude that they hate to learn. Also at school it is far too often the "jocks" that are celebrated, especially by the staff, whereas the "nerds" are often subject to ridicule. The jocks are cool, and people want to be cool.
As for creativity, people can solve simple problems, and that itself is a creative act. Most people don't see it that way though and equate creativity with producing works or art.
Because people didn't have fun learning things at school they think that all learning isn't fun. If people were taught better ways to learn at school then they may have a better attitude. There are some really simple techniques for this, most of which also encourage creativity.
Computers have immense potential to be of assistance in the area of learning and creativity, but they are being under-used. This is a process that should continue throughout our lives and not be restricted to our schooling alone. Business applications generally are not highly creative and do not encourage learning, yet it is mostly business applications that we get taught at school. This is, I believe, where Alan Kay's concerns lie.
Moderators, please mod parent as -1 "Dick".
Whilst Cutler may have been one of the people that wrote VMS he did so for DEC. It doesn't matter if he wrote it or not, DEC owned the code, and probably also owned many of the ideas that the code contained in the form of patents. Since Cutler did not own the IP here if he did cut and paste in code from an aborted version of VMS then he, and by extension Microsoft, did steal, unless DEC sold had the rights to that code and the patents to Cutler or Microsoft. I don't believe such a sale was made.
As for Intel and Alpha, as has been written elsewhere the parent post was wrong about it being the P4, it was the Pentium that this issue revolved around. Whilst Intel may now own the Alpha they didn't when they made the Pentium, and chronology is important here.
Besides some bad decisions by the management of DEC this stealing of IP by Intel and Microsoft were major contributors to the downfall of DEC.
Interesting, but not all that accurate. :-)
Whilst ARM was at one stage part of Acorn it's not what Acorn became. In Acorn's dying days the remaining part of the company renamed themselves to "Element 14", which from what I can make out was basically a DSP chip design outfit which was later bought up by Broadcom.
The name "ARM" originally meant "Acorn RISC Machine" (no 's') and was the name of the processor. The original ARM chip was, as far as I know, only ever available as a co-processor module for the BBC Micro. It had a few minor flaws which were remedied in the ARM2, which was used in the first commercial RISC computers, the Acorn Archimedes range. The Archimedes was otherwise known as the A-series, with the first four models being the A305, A310, A410, and A440. The A400 series had an ST506 disc interface built in and could support up to 4MB of memory. The A300 series needed an expansion card for hard discs and was only designed to take 1MB of RAM, although some companies later worked out how to increase that to 4MB and beyond.
The later A540 model came with an ARM3 processor and could support up to 16MB or RAM. It was possible to upgrade earlier machines to ARM3.
As for the R-series, the two models I remember are the R140 and the R260, and they were Unix workstations. They would first boot into RISC OS before starting up RISCiX, Acorn's BSD derived Unix. The R140 was actually an A440, and the R260 an A540, although both carried a high price premium over their A-series equivalents. Whilst they were fairly reasonably priced for Unix workstations they failed to sell in any significant quantity since they were underpowered compared to other Unix boxes. Sparc boxes were much faster and could take more RAM.
ARM, the company, has always been "Advanced RISC Machines". Whilst ARM was a spin-off of Acorn's processor division the company was a joint venture between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI. I believe there was also an investment company in the mix too.
Apple used the (VLSI-manufactured) ARM610 in their Newton MessagePad computers, and Acorn used it in their RiscPC. The MessagePad 2000 and 2100, as well as later versions of the RiscPC used the DEC (later Intel) StrongARM SA110 processor.
Now the interesting thing about StrongARM is that it wasn't designed by ARM. DEC licensed the ARM design and then changed it themselves to produce StrongARM.
Personally my reading habits have varied a great deal.
After school I also didn't read all that much, however I never really gave up. At times though I've got to a point where I've been taking six months to read a book. I'm in one of those phases right now, although for a change its not because the book is lousy.
Back when I commuted a couple of hours to and from work every day I read a great deal on the train. This was fantastic. However when I replaced the train with a motorbike my journey time decreased and with it my reading dropped off to almost nothing.
When I was unemployed a couple of years back I read quite a bit, but on occasion I'd get stuck with a lousy book. Rather than plug on with it I just wouldn't read it and watch TV instead - I rarely don't finish reading any book I start. The way around this problem is to read a couple of books at once.
Last year I read a whole load of books. Why? I had sold my home and was travelling a great deal. No TV for a year, and no significant obligations, gives you more reading time. Most hostels also have small libraries where you can swap your books too, so I got to read some interesting books that I would not normally have considered looking at.
This year though I haven't read much at all - I'm on the same book I was back in February. Why? Well, I've settled down, have a new flat where I live with my pregnant fiancee, worked hard to put out some software, and then there's digital cable TV. I also now have a computer again and high speed Internet access. Some big distractions and I've not been very diciplined about reading. At least though I've become slightly diciplined about buying books.
I am however reading a lot. I read news and many other articles every day (thanks to RSS), and I've also read a great deal of documentation. I do want to be reading books again though, so I'll sort that out soon.
If you're talking about books and know exactly which book you wish to buy then yes, Googling for it seems to make sense.
If, in contrast, you have no idea about what type of book you wish to get then a book store is IMHO a much better way of finding a book. Often I won't even know the genre of book I'm going to buy when I walk into a book store and keep a very open mind about my purchases. Surfing around Amazon (or another online bookseller) really isn't a nice way to find books, and due to their nature you're more likely to limit your choices to areas you're already familiar with.
A truely intelligent person should seek ways to expand their knowledge and be open to completely new ideas. It is harder to do that with on-line book stores.
Of course you can find out new ideas by just doing Google searches rather than reading books, however a decent book has the advantage of depth. A good author will have done a great deal of research in producing their book and should know their subject intimately - the book should be a distilation of most of what you can find using Google with confusion and misinformation removed.
Additionally some material just isn't available in decent forms online. Good biographies for instance are very rare.
Yeah, tinfoil hat would probably be a bit more accurate. :-)