The court system is a great resource for purely legal related stuff. The court system is an infinitely worthless resource for software IP related stuff because almost nobody who works in it exhibits even the slightest understanding of how software is developed.
Case in point, people at Slashdot seem to firmly believe that the USPTO gets to decide what is novel or obvious, or more broadly, gets to interpret law. This notion could not be more false. The USPTO acts according to case law, and anything the USPTO does can ultimately be appealed to a Federal court - meaning that a failure to act according to existing case law would land the USPTO in the hot seat inside a courtroom.
Evidence or citation for this claim? From what we've seen, when a bad patent is issued, the lawsuit is between the person it is issued to and and the person infringing on it. Has there been any example of someone suing USPTO for a bad patent? If what you are saying is true, then the continued existence of some of the more ludicrous patents we've seen is the most damning possible thing any thing could be of our legal system.
In otherwords, whether your right or wrong, you're still wrong. I don't know what your job is, but you've demonstrated far more ignorance of both law and technology than the average slashdotter exhibits--so I pray to God you're talking out of your ass, and not actually in a position of power within the system--indeed, in that case, your very existence would be the ultimate proof that your defense of the legal system is flawed.
Regarding the issue of "prior art means 'already patented'", this is, of course, slanderously false. There are, however, incredible advantages to using existing patents as prior art over non-patent literature, the least of which are unquestionably documented dates and constructive reduction to practice in compliance with 35 USC 112.
Nice one. Call someone slanderously false, but then admit that he or she is absolutely correct in your next sentence. Did it occur to you that they were probably speaking De Facto rather than De Jure?
Until every Joe Nobody's website meets those criteria, searching the wide internet for that mythical piece of prior art that sufficiently teaches a claimed invention is often the definition of time wasted on the government's dime.
In other words, prior art means 'already patented'. That may not be what the law says, but that's what happens in the real world. Perhaps you need to spend more time thinking about what you've read, rather than reading more.
Here's the problem. If every time I write a line of code, I have to call a lawyer, then software is going to be many, many, many orders of magnitude more expensive. Governments that refuse to accept the American software patent regime will accomplish way more than we will. American corporations that are wising up to how broken the current system will just have to outsource as much of their business as they can--they won't be able to sell in America, but if we don't wise up how insane our legal system has become we won't have much of an economy worth selling to anyway.
What is slowly dawning on everyone is that a truly fair and uniform software patent regime would cost us many, many times more man hours of legal labor per year than the number of lawyers on our entire planet times the number of hours in an entire century.
A lawyer for every line of code. Every web page must have "unquestionably documented dates and constructive reduction to practice in compliance with 35 USC 112. "
This can't happen. So we are left with a completely arbitrary and kind of random system that offers some benefits and risks to major corporations, immense benefits to lawyers, and immense detriment to software developers and lawyers. There is no fair solution but to eliminate the anomaly of patentable software. Turing's Machine is prior art on all bit manipulations, period, end of story, life can finally go on.
You attack the ignorance of slashdotters, but your post is truly the most ignorant posted yet--for its refutation is contained within itself.
I hope for your sake that you're just a lawyer telling lies so you can make more work for yourself.
I'm not sure if Beyond Good and Evil should be counted with those other ones--gameplay wise, it probably has more similarities with Zelda: Wind Waker.
I don't think it's that adventure games have died, it's that the audience for them has shifted to story-centric RPGs or action/adventure games. Given the growth of networked games (massively multiplayer or otherwise), we may eventually consider them all to be the same genre--single-player story-based games.
I do recall that at some point a prominent national debt clock (perhaps sitting at Times Square?) turned itself off because the big number was going down. So, something might be wrong with your numbers. Or my mathdamaged brain. Nope, I found it What was the debt in 2001? That would be under a Clinton budget, no?
In any event, from 99 to 2000, it decreases less than a percentage point, so in terms of real value the debt was still decreasing.
Yes, interest payments are included in the budget deficit, despite misinformation to the contrary in replies.
Yeah, chances are when the PS3 is released, there will be PC cards that have equal or greater power. But how many PC games will be made with those high end cards in mind? Sure, when the XBox was released, there were PCs with vertex and pixel shaders--but were they actually used in games at the time?
One third referencing some obscure GUI from the past where something almost like this has been done already, another third referencing some future project not released yet doing the same
At this point, Avalon is some future project not yet released doing the same.
Seriously, it looks like interesting stuff, and I can't wait to not only develop with it, but develop with the competing technologies that will also spring up as a result.
Avalon is a competing technology springing up as a result of Quartz. I'm not saying Avalon will be bad. But it's quality will be a matter of implementation, not innovation, of which there is very little.
This is very important to remember, because Microsoft is fond of making fun of Open Source for taking proprietary software and simply duplicating it. Avalon is just an example of Microsoft copying ideas from various proprietary, academic, and free sources. There's nothing wrong with copying ideas--all computer science is built on copying ideas. The only sin is the hypocrisy of Microsoft in refusing to admit that fact.
Oh, and for the record, before people say it--OS X does use the 3D card, but only for fast blitting. It is still 2D. Not actual 3D acceleration using hardware triangles like this, where you're dealing with a camera viewport and using meshes.
I think it blits triangles, but in any event, you're comparing what Apple has been doing for more than a year to something Microsoft might be able to release in 2007.
Or let me put it another way. Rand's failing, when she noted that the goverments wants to pass so many laws that everyone is a criminal, failed to realize that property laws could be the category of law that the government uses to fulfill her prophecy.
This claims differently--not only did she endorse IP, she endorsed it with the rights based logic rather than utilitarian logic. (As one would expect of Rand.) Taken to its absolute extreme (and we're talking about objectivism so that's a must), her argument works to defend most of the abuses of the current system.
The irony here being that Ayn Rand was a big fan of intellectual property. Not only would she support any rollback of digital commons that was proposed, she'd probably try to sue your ass for quoting her book;). Fair use is clearly an offense to the rational glory of Man-qua-Man.
Seriously, there's an INSANE amount of entertainment content produced for free--text, comics, music, cartoons, short videos. Occasionally corporations purchase some small portion of it and bring it to the mainstream. Sure, some it is really crappy, but some open source software is really crappy too. And some commercial software and A WHOLE LOT of commercial entertainment is really crappy as well.
It's silly to expect this to replace what we now come to know and expect from Television broadcasting (except through piracy), but I don't think that's the point. The web hasn't replaced books, and blogs haven't replaced the newspaper. But the web and blogs are still very interesting things that have developed content more suited to their specific strengths.
I don't expect to see nightly news webcasts equivalent to television news, but I expect to see live video broadcasts from protests and other mass events--with blogs rebroadcasting interesting highlights from those.
I don't expect to see the equivalent of Super Law and Order: Super Turbo Extreme broadcast from a bunch of kids on the internet, but I expect to see a lot of short skits and experimental film videos appealing to audiences too limited for broadcast television. The new universal law of content is that stuff that's meant to appeal to everyone will actually appeal to fewer and fewer people as time goes on.
I also expect that reality television will soon be watched only by people too old to understand the internet--expecially since reality shows are missing at least two of the requirements for content you list, if not all three.
Indeed, the reality shows only exist because the TV networks are ALREADY losing viewers, and they can't afford to pay actors and writers anymore. You don't have to duplicate something in order to replace it--TV is already losing viewers to the internet, to video games, and to the vast recorded library of all already existing television and movies (whether by DVD or bittorrent), so streaming video on the internet is just one more thing for people to do that doesn't involve watching broadcast television.
Is everything that two people consent to necessarily ethical?... You are viewing morality through an individualistic lens - you are assuming that, for something to be immoral, it must necessarily hurt some individual.
Remember, there are no true synonyms in our language. Ethics and morality are close, but not the same.
Here's the thing--homosexuality is normal now. That makes people like you insecure, for some reason. And that insecurity makes people like me happy. I'm kind of an asshole that way, but what can I say? I really hate misoneism.
How do I know you're afraid? Because you seem to have spent a great deal of time researching one side of an issue you claim not to care about. You said they were "representative", so I guess that means I'm supposed to imagine there are a great deal more studies like these. It's interesting to note that these only "refute" the Gay Press (does the musical score in your head change ominously when you say those two words?), if you're assuming a rigid hetero/homo dichotomy--which is silly. If you start out thinking that there is a spectrum of sexualities that people are born with (the received view), then none of these studies refute that. You may have read more science, but it would have helped if you'd occasional taken a break and actually thought about what you'd read. Not really possible, given your level of bitterness. You might want to work on that first. Try some yoga or drinking tea. This is me being condescending, because I like to agitate you ignorant, fearful people. Sorry.
Furthermore, it is evident that "gay marriage" - at least among male homosexuals - is not equivalent to heterosexual marraige in an important respect. Namely, it is rarely, if ever, monogamous.
And might the fact a great deal of people feel the need to put gay marriage in scare quotes, suggesting its not a real marriage, have something to do with that? Or could it be self-fulfilling prophecy--we've painted homosexuality as something deviant, so now deviants are disproportionately more likely to admit their sexuality? Or might you be overestimating the monogamy of heterosexual unions?
Or, might it be none of your damn business whether they're actually monogamous or not--it's certainly not your business when we're talking about heterosexual couples, why do you feel a need to punish all homosexuals for the cheating or rule bending of a few? Do you have evidence that married gays are LESS monogamous that non-married gay couples? Any decrease in promiscuous sex of any subgroup is of public health benefit.
Plenty of heterosexuals get married only to adopt or remain childless. I see no reason why homosexuals ought not to do the same. Would they be ideal parents? No, but no living flesh and blood person is an ideal parent.
There was no sense in which homosexuality was regarded as an alternative to heterosexuality - instead, it was regarded as a fling, something that one did when young and with the young. (And, frankly, if you look up any authoritative source on this you will find this out. I'm not makign this up.
You are trying to tell me that there are no cases of exclusive homosexuality throughout history?
Perhaps you truly aren't homophobic. Or perhaps you are--you aren't helping yourself with the "I have lots of black friends" defense. But your insecurity seems more directed at some perceived academic and/or leftist orthodoxy. You are determined to prove--not only that you are learned, but that you are more learned than the other fellow. Perhaps you're a very gifted individual who missed a key opportunity in academia. To redeem yourself, you found a piece of somewhat uninhabited memetic turf (territory that people like me deemed to be bigoted) and built a fortress of logic and citations to sit upon it. You sit atop it and sing the praises of all that you have read. (And more importantly, that other people have NOT read.)
I dunno, surely all that trade federation political/economic stuff isn't aimed at your four year old, is it? You can say Lucas succeeded in entertaining your four year old, but Episodes I and II were way too pretentious for anyone to claim that was Lucas's only goal.
Hey, I'm sure its a great, fun console, but doesn't something have to turn a profit to be called a success? Unless it's an exercise in predatory pricing...
Playing songs and movies
Chatting with an IM, checking e-mail
Writing documents (letters, resumes)
Playing games
It seems really weird that you left the web off this list--Joe Sixpack almost certainly uses that more often than he plays games.
And in the near future, we could expect people to start streaming home movies to each other or attaching them to their blogs fairly often. Content creation rather than mere playback could become fairly widespread. Editing videos still takes a good bit of CPU horsepower.
I'm not sure what your definition of PC is, but the bulk of people are still going to be using keyboards, screens, and pointing devices in combination for decades to come. How else do you expect people to enter text into a computer? Those itty bitty little PDA keyboards? Handwriting recognition? People who grew up typing can type faster than they write. Speech recognition? Perhaps, but that's a ways off and has its own problems.
You can complain about layout if you want, but whether the keys change positions or not, we'll still be using keyboards. Maybe they'll be on laptops talking to a central hub--but that hardly seems like a revolutionary change. People have used "desktop replacement" laptops for quite a while.
This makes me think far worse of Micheal Powell. At the top of the article, Reason manages to sum up why everyone claims he's simultaneously pro-censorship, pro-government regulation, and pro-big business. You know, not a libertarian, not a conservative, but a Bush-ite. In the the interview, Powell denies each of these, but the only defense he can offer are vague policiy initiatives and newspeak.
The best part was when he said "To suggest that we bend the First Amendment for one industry singularly is to do hazard to our most cherished principle." He then tells us why he is doing exactly that--because Congress passes a law saying he can. Apparently, he is completely unaware that the First Amendment overrules Congression law.
The thing is, my belief is contraryto Reason's--and, I thought, in line with Powell's censorship actions. I think the public owns the airwaves, the public can censor them as they see fit. Maybe you agree with me, maybe you agree with Reason. But either way, Powell is flip-flopping worse than Kerry ever did. When he blames MoveOn.org for the firestorm over broadcast limits, he forgets to note that the NRA, Christian Coalition, and Senator Trent Lott were also against loosening the limits.
Remember that the most played game of all time is Windows solitare. Deer hunter, myst, and roller coaster tycoon are among the top selling pc games of all time.
Do you think any of those players want to see an awards ceremony about games? Basically, Spike TV was targetting people who don't care about games but care about games award ceremonies.
From a sample of 175,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries, researchers at the University of Munich announced in November that performance in math and reading had suffered significantly among students who have more than one computer at home.
So, owning more than one computer, when controlled for income level, correllates with decreased academic performance. Unless you want to just use the complete text of study as the headline, "Too Many Computers Hurt Learning" is just fine.
In any event, it's surely less objectionable than the CSM's hed: "Computers are a drag on learning".
Point out fraud isn't journalism? Some number X between 0 and 20,000 paid their money and did not get what was owed to them. Did michael actually say "idiot", or do you just feel like one after reading what he had to say?
Often, Slashdotters want to change the problem entirely, not solve the original problem.
What problem? Software patents solve NO problem at all. Software patents are a relatively new invention implemented in only a few nations--the vast majority of computer science research took place and takes place WITHOUT the "benefits" of patent protection. With software patents, there is LESS incentive to research new ideas and applications in computer science--researching prior art becomes more important than finding new discoveries.
It seems as if geeks have played SimCity far too much and think the world operates by adjusting a couple issues here and there and balance is once again maintained
This is a cute non sequiter that has nothing to do with software patents. Advocates of software patents are the ones who are disconnected from the real world--a real world in which the man-hours spent by lawyers to track and enforce a non-arbitrary software patent regime would vastly exceed the man-hours spent developing the technologies in question. (The only saving grace of the American software patent regime is that it is unenforceable). For someone who is such a huge fan of common sense, you need to familiarize yourself with the concept of rational satisficing. Software patents are just another case of Ayn Rand fans refusing to live in reality.
intelligence, in my mind, requires an equilibrium between book smarts and common sense
Perhaps you might want to do a better job demonstrating one or both of these in the future.
People don't need to be forced to do anything, given a choice they will choose what they think is best. And if they choose an obsolete browser like IE 6, who cares? They are the ones who end up suffering
Slashdot Mirror
The court system is a great resource for purely legal related stuff. The court system is an infinitely worthless resource for software IP related stuff because almost nobody who works in it exhibits even the slightest understanding of how software is developed. Case in point, people at Slashdot seem to firmly believe that the USPTO gets to decide what is novel or obvious, or more broadly, gets to interpret law. This notion could not be more false. The USPTO acts according to case law, and anything the USPTO does can ultimately be appealed to a Federal court - meaning that a failure to act according to existing case law would land the USPTO in the hot seat inside a courtroom. Evidence or citation for this claim? From what we've seen, when a bad patent is issued, the lawsuit is between the person it is issued to and and the person infringing on it. Has there been any example of someone suing USPTO for a bad patent? If what you are saying is true, then the continued existence of some of the more ludicrous patents we've seen is the most damning possible thing any thing could be of our legal system. In otherwords, whether your right or wrong, you're still wrong. I don't know what your job is, but you've demonstrated far more ignorance of both law and technology than the average slashdotter exhibits--so I pray to God you're talking out of your ass, and not actually in a position of power within the system--indeed, in that case, your very existence would be the ultimate proof that your defense of the legal system is flawed. Regarding the issue of "prior art means 'already patented'", this is, of course, slanderously false. There are, however, incredible advantages to using existing patents as prior art over non-patent literature, the least of which are unquestionably documented dates and constructive reduction to practice in compliance with 35 USC 112. Nice one. Call someone slanderously false, but then admit that he or she is absolutely correct in your next sentence. Did it occur to you that they were probably speaking De Facto rather than De Jure? Until every Joe Nobody's website meets those criteria, searching the wide internet for that mythical piece of prior art that sufficiently teaches a claimed invention is often the definition of time wasted on the government's dime. In other words, prior art means 'already patented'. That may not be what the law says, but that's what happens in the real world. Perhaps you need to spend more time thinking about what you've read, rather than reading more. Here's the problem. If every time I write a line of code, I have to call a lawyer, then software is going to be many, many, many orders of magnitude more expensive. Governments that refuse to accept the American software patent regime will accomplish way more than we will. American corporations that are wising up to how broken the current system will just have to outsource as much of their business as they can--they won't be able to sell in America, but if we don't wise up how insane our legal system has become we won't have much of an economy worth selling to anyway. What is slowly dawning on everyone is that a truly fair and uniform software patent regime would cost us many, many times more man hours of legal labor per year than the number of lawyers on our entire planet times the number of hours in an entire century. A lawyer for every line of code. Every web page must have "unquestionably documented dates and constructive reduction to practice in compliance with 35 USC 112. " This can't happen. So we are left with a completely arbitrary and kind of random system that offers some benefits and risks to major corporations, immense benefits to lawyers, and immense detriment to software developers and lawyers. There is no fair solution but to eliminate the anomaly of patentable software. Turing's Machine is prior art on all bit manipulations, period, end of story, life can finally go on. You attack the ignorance of slashdotters, but your post is truly the most ignorant posted yet--for its refutation is contained within itself. I hope for your sake that you're just a lawyer telling lies so you can make more work for yourself.
I don't think it's that adventure games have died, it's that the audience for them has shifted to story-centric RPGs or action/adventure games. Given the growth of networked games (massively multiplayer or otherwise), we may eventually consider them all to be the same genre--single-player story-based games.
In any event, from 99 to 2000, it decreases less than a percentage point, so in terms of real value the debt was still decreasing.
Yes, interest payments are included in the budget deficit, despite misinformation to the contrary in replies.
Yeah, chances are when the PS3 is released, there will be PC cards that have equal or greater power. But how many PC games will be made with those high end cards in mind? Sure, when the XBox was released, there were PCs with vertex and pixel shaders--but were they actually used in games at the time?
At this point, Avalon is some future project not yet released doing the same.
Seriously, it looks like interesting stuff, and I can't wait to not only develop with it, but develop with the competing technologies that will also spring up as a result.
Avalon is a competing technology springing up as a result of Quartz. I'm not saying Avalon will be bad. But it's quality will be a matter of implementation, not innovation, of which there is very little.
This is very important to remember, because Microsoft is fond of making fun of Open Source for taking proprietary software and simply duplicating it. Avalon is just an example of Microsoft copying ideas from various proprietary, academic, and free sources. There's nothing wrong with copying ideas--all computer science is built on copying ideas. The only sin is the hypocrisy of Microsoft in refusing to admit that fact.
Oh, and for the record, before people say it--OS X does use the 3D card, but only for fast blitting. It is still 2D. Not actual 3D acceleration using hardware triangles like this, where you're dealing with a camera viewport and using meshes.
I think it blits triangles, but in any event, you're comparing what Apple has been doing for more than a year to something Microsoft might be able to release in 2007.
Or let me put it another way. Rand's failing, when she noted that the goverments wants to pass so many laws that everyone is a criminal, failed to realize that property laws could be the category of law that the government uses to fulfill her prophecy.
This claims differently--not only did she endorse IP, she endorsed it with the rights based logic rather than utilitarian logic. (As one would expect of Rand.) Taken to its absolute extreme (and we're talking about objectivism so that's a must), her argument works to defend most of the abuses of the current system.
The irony here being that Ayn Rand was a big fan of intellectual property. Not only would she support any rollback of digital commons that was proposed, she'd probably try to sue your ass for quoting her book ;). Fair use is clearly an offense to the rational glory of Man-qua-Man.
Seriously, there's an INSANE amount of entertainment content produced for free--text, comics, music, cartoons, short videos. Occasionally corporations purchase some small portion of it and bring it to the mainstream. Sure, some it is really crappy, but some open source software is really crappy too. And some commercial software and A WHOLE LOT of commercial entertainment is really crappy as well.
I don't expect to see nightly news webcasts equivalent to television news, but I expect to see live video broadcasts from protests and other mass events--with blogs rebroadcasting interesting highlights from those.
I don't expect to see the equivalent of Super Law and Order: Super Turbo Extreme broadcast from a bunch of kids on the internet, but I expect to see a lot of short skits and experimental film videos appealing to audiences too limited for broadcast television. The new universal law of content is that stuff that's meant to appeal to everyone will actually appeal to fewer and fewer people as time goes on.
I also expect that reality television will soon be watched only by people too old to understand the internet--expecially since reality shows are missing at least two of the requirements for content you list, if not all three.
Indeed, the reality shows only exist because the TV networks are ALREADY losing viewers, and they can't afford to pay actors and writers anymore. You don't have to duplicate something in order to replace it--TV is already losing viewers to the internet, to video games, and to the vast recorded library of all already existing television and movies (whether by DVD or bittorrent), so streaming video on the internet is just one more thing for people to do that doesn't involve watching broadcast television.
Remember, there are no true synonyms in our language. Ethics and morality are close, but not the same.
Here's the thing--homosexuality is normal now. That makes people like you insecure, for some reason. And that insecurity makes people like me happy. I'm kind of an asshole that way, but what can I say? I really hate misoneism.
How do I know you're afraid? Because you seem to have spent a great deal of time researching one side of an issue you claim not to care about. You said they were "representative", so I guess that means I'm supposed to imagine there are a great deal more studies like these. It's interesting to note that these only "refute" the Gay Press (does the musical score in your head change ominously when you say those two words?), if you're assuming a rigid hetero/homo dichotomy--which is silly. If you start out thinking that there is a spectrum of sexualities that people are born with (the received view), then none of these studies refute that. You may have read more science, but it would have helped if you'd occasional taken a break and actually thought about what you'd read. Not really possible, given your level of bitterness. You might want to work on that first. Try some yoga or drinking tea. This is me being condescending, because I like to agitate you ignorant, fearful people. Sorry.
Furthermore, it is evident that "gay marriage" - at least among male homosexuals - is not equivalent to heterosexual marraige in an important respect. Namely, it is rarely, if ever, monogamous.
And might the fact a great deal of people feel the need to put gay marriage in scare quotes, suggesting its not a real marriage, have something to do with that? Or could it be self-fulfilling prophecy--we've painted homosexuality as something deviant, so now deviants are disproportionately more likely to admit their sexuality? Or might you be overestimating the monogamy of heterosexual unions?
Or, might it be none of your damn business whether they're actually monogamous or not--it's certainly not your business when we're talking about heterosexual couples, why do you feel a need to punish all homosexuals for the cheating or rule bending of a few? Do you have evidence that married gays are LESS monogamous that non-married gay couples? Any decrease in promiscuous sex of any subgroup is of public health benefit.
Plenty of heterosexuals get married only to adopt or remain childless. I see no reason why homosexuals ought not to do the same. Would they be ideal parents? No, but no living flesh and blood person is an ideal parent.
There was no sense in which homosexuality was regarded as an alternative to heterosexuality - instead, it was regarded as a fling, something that one did when young and with the young. (And, frankly, if you look up any authoritative source on this you will find this out. I'm not makign this up.
You are trying to tell me that there are no cases of exclusive homosexuality throughout history?
Perhaps you truly aren't homophobic. Or perhaps you are--you aren't helping yourself with the "I have lots of black friends" defense. But your insecurity seems more directed at some perceived academic and/or leftist orthodoxy. You are determined to prove--not only that you are learned, but that you are more learned than the other fellow. Perhaps you're a very gifted individual who missed a key opportunity in academia. To redeem yourself, you found a piece of somewhat uninhabited memetic turf (territory that people like me deemed to be bigoted) and built a fortress of logic and citations to sit upon it. You sit atop it and sing the praises of all that you have read. (And more importantly, that other people have NOT read.)
But a fortress of logic is a foolish thing
8% sounds more realistic to me than 20%, but its worth noting that that article is 2 months old--and precedes the release of Firefox 1.0
I dunno, surely all that trade federation political/economic stuff isn't aimed at your four year old, is it? You can say Lucas succeeded in entertaining your four year old, but Episodes I and II were way too pretentious for anyone to claim that was Lucas's only goal.
Hey, I'm sure its a great, fun console, but doesn't something have to turn a profit to be called a success? Unless it's an exercise in predatory pricing...
It seems really weird that you left the web off this list--Joe Sixpack almost certainly uses that more often than he plays games.
And in the near future, we could expect people to start streaming home movies to each other or attaching them to their blogs fairly often. Content creation rather than mere playback could become fairly widespread. Editing videos still takes a good bit of CPU horsepower.
I'm not sure what your definition of PC is, but the bulk of people are still going to be using keyboards, screens, and pointing devices in combination for decades to come. How else do you expect people to enter text into a computer? Those itty bitty little PDA keyboards? Handwriting recognition? People who grew up typing can type faster than they write. Speech recognition? Perhaps, but that's a ways off and has its own problems.
You can complain about layout if you want, but whether the keys change positions or not, we'll still be using keyboards. Maybe they'll be on laptops talking to a central hub--but that hardly seems like a revolutionary change. People have used "desktop replacement" laptops for quite a while.
You've finally outdone Bill Watterson--Tyrannosaurs in spaceships iare definitely much cooler than same in F-14s.
The best part was when he said "To suggest that we bend the First Amendment for one industry singularly is to do hazard to our most cherished principle." He then tells us why he is doing exactly that--because Congress passes a law saying he can. Apparently, he is completely unaware that the First Amendment overrules Congression law.
The thing is, my belief is contraryto Reason's--and, I thought, in line with Powell's censorship actions. I think the public owns the airwaves, the public can censor them as they see fit. Maybe you agree with me, maybe you agree with Reason. But either way, Powell is flip-flopping worse than Kerry ever did. When he blames MoveOn.org for the firestorm over broadcast limits, he forgets to note that the NRA, Christian Coalition, and Senator Trent Lott were also against loosening the limits.
Do you think any of those players want to see an awards ceremony about games? Basically, Spike TV was targetting people who don't care about games but care about games award ceremonies.
So, owning more than one computer, when controlled for income level, correllates with decreased academic performance. Unless you want to just use the complete text of study as the headline, "Too Many Computers Hurt Learning" is just fine.
In any event, it's surely less objectionable than the CSM's hed: "Computers are a drag on learning".
On the other hand, a lack of correlation usually implies a lack of causation.
When you take something, it disappears. Illegal copying is neither taking nor theft.
Point out fraud isn't journalism? Some number X between 0 and 20,000 paid their money and did not get what was owed to them. Did michael actually say "idiot", or do you just feel like one after reading what he had to say?
Wasn't that scene ripped off from Mad Max?
What problem? Software patents solve NO problem at all. Software patents are a relatively new invention implemented in only a few nations--the vast majority of computer science research took place and takes place WITHOUT the "benefits" of patent protection. With software patents, there is LESS incentive to research new ideas and applications in computer science--researching prior art becomes more important than finding new discoveries.
It seems as if geeks have played SimCity far too much and think the world operates by adjusting a couple issues here and there and balance is once again maintained
This is a cute non sequiter that has nothing to do with software patents. Advocates of software patents are the ones who are disconnected from the real world--a real world in which the man-hours spent by lawyers to track and enforce a non-arbitrary software patent regime would vastly exceed the man-hours spent developing the technologies in question. (The only saving grace of the American software patent regime is that it is unenforceable). For someone who is such a huge fan of common sense, you need to familiarize yourself with the concept of rational satisficing. Software patents are just another case of Ayn Rand fans refusing to live in reality.
intelligence, in my mind, requires an equilibrium between book smarts and common sense
Perhaps you might want to do a better job demonstrating one or both of these in the future.Network Effects.