frankly, WiFi won't take off the way most people thing it will simply because most American's aren't wired to "fair share" resources in such a manner. Municipal WiFi may work out, but only in large public areas... downtown areas, libraries, public buildings. Even in my little Midwest city, that's only a few square miles in size, regular Wi-Fi range isn't nearly enough for more than 10-20 houses per spot under the best conditions. We're far to spread out for that to work. On a telco level it could work. Replace the telco box at every 4th house (perhaps for a discount on DSL) and have it wired to the phone company's account structure.. then you could have roaming WiFi all over town.. it would solve the problem of people "stealing" WiFi from neighbors but it would still be expensive to get working.. after all commercial wireless boxes are 10x the cost of the little blue Linksys boxes we all hack.
I think Dvorak is old school... the type that still believe computers will fix the problems in society and every body will "get along" because it's the smart thing to do. The W3C is also filled with those people... that's why web standards languish because they miss the fact that they're being used for their "peacability" to let the money makers keep making their cash.
but the MONEY is going to extra art, music, sound and level design staff, not to programmers. In this particular case the shop was founded on the idea they would make GAMES out of existing engines, not spend much time rewriting their own. The cost of engines like Unreal or Quake4 is entirely realistic and cheap when you're talking employing programmers at 75k+ a year. Perhaps it's a waste of valuable resources to keep reinventing game engines or even trying to hack an engine to do what you need. In that case even, the publisher knows techinical issues take more time and pushed hard to start making the game useable and playable sooner than later... that way you can find more bugs and not introduce more as the game grows.
That's why I'd say it's offically moved to the "real business" side rather than the "arts" side of the game. It's a BUSINESS that lays out a plan, then says STOP when the plan is not being achived or is suffering too much feature creep. I've worked in several factories that have the exact same issues... everybody wants the machines to do "one more thing" and it's going to be great. The same with business software. In the factory setting, there's a guy paying the bills and he expects widgets to start pumping ASAP. I know gaming, movies, music, etc are "art", but on the other hand there is so much waste in the system that needs to be brutally culled. Feature creep seems to be the bane of most games out there today. There are several ways to handle that... rent game engines that have the features you want, if not pay the ENGINE writers to add the feature, they know it better than you. Also, story, gameplay and scope seem to be HUGE issues, these publisher have hundreds of games under their belts, they should have scheduling and work resources under control by now...leading to. Lastly, perhaps games should be more modular, more story driven, it would seem game design takes so long that it's "out of fashion" before it's done. If that's the case they need to change the business model, shorter games, more sequals that truely extend the original, and lower prices to get higher turns on their money. Perhaps they should look at how many players finish these massive games without cheats and dial it down a little. Those are all BUSINESS decisions, not related to engineering or art...
that's a valid question because of the special type of paper it is. Many old school copiers use several hundred watts putting great thermal and light damage to the document. I remember it wasn't that long ago you couldn't copy things like transperancies because the copier would damage them. It's not a big concern, but due the fact it's designed to be rewritten, what's the catalyst for that process?
the studios film much stuff in Australia and New Zeland in order to get around union obligations in the USA. Yet they want to use the same laws to prevent their finished material being sold on the "open market". Just because somebody sells iPods only in the USA is not going to prevent somebody from buying boxes of them here and selling them in a market Apple chooses to ignore. That's the falacy of globalization. It's the new mercantillism, where a small number of players move their pices at will without boundaries, but the local govts are demanded to prevent the customers (serfs) from getting the better deal thru the same channels.
look at copyright laws... they are reletively syncronized between the USA and Austrailia, something copyrighted here is automatically copyrighted there.. so what seriously prevents the media being sold there? Natural laws would say that a "thing" should be sold anywhere to anyone once it leaves your doors. Why are movies and media different? What natural right do they have to prevent global trade of their product that a maker of rubber bouncy balls wouldn't have?
she wants something more user friendly than laptops. First, I think the poster is planning to use the PCs in more than 1 classroom... they like the cart idea but it's impractical to pass them all out, boot them up, get the students started... Remember these are kids so even a 5 lb laptop is bulky and cumbersome. The macbook guy says just "open the lid" if that's the case then you have to have 8 hour batteries! remember they plan to share these so you can't just run them down... also SOMEBODY has to plug them all in and charge them or they don't work the next day!!! The teacher doesn't want them built in because it would waste time. they want to keep regular desks.. and the ability to quickly collect the computers, for example, to switch to art class with finger paints... is also important as is sharing between students.
I think the teacher is right on in what they're asking for... it's just crazy that as long as we've had PCs we're still stuck to boxes and wires... and mearly shrink and repeat for "laptops". I think OLPC is exactly what they're asking for, but it's not quite ready yet and they're not interested in US schools. Once multi-touch gets big we might get something that's 1 piece like Piccard's data pad from Star Trek.... to think of the computers on that show...and they designed those in 1985 and we STILL haven't caught up to the point you can whip out a computer and just use it like a wrench or a flashlight!
What they're doing is basicly 3d model UV mapping!!! When they mentioned how hard it was to map a 3d ink to a 2d surface the first thing I thought was looking at those streached and twisted quake3 character model textures... It would be like making little shrinky-dink models... sounds like fun!!
This really shows how tough the game industry is... it's a lot of work and discipline to get stuff done on time and on budget. Worse is that the best programmers and artists are usually very undisciplined outside their art... very good ones can have no shred of business sense. Unlike the usual industry stories this one sounds pretty positive... Activision seem to have worked really hard to make the business work.. they got the first product out almost on time!! Unfortunately, it looks like Activision took too much of a hit and didn't want to continue the relationship... it happens.
Most game companies are based on "labor of love" in that the core "owners" usually have the tools and projects lined up on their own dime and want to sell it. That makes the hard stuff like code and content management, bug tracking and all the "busywork" of making a game at least partly taken care of. Spark was selling only their work... their ability to get projects done... and they didn't deliver. After millions of extra dollars from activision to settle lawsuits and cost overruns they still didn't have their act together. They sold themselves as a content house.. with minimal programming then tried to reinvent the programming wheel and lost focus.
As far as Activision requiring playable games why not? 80% of the work in a modern game is content, not coding. Any house worth it's salt should be able to have a playable test bed in a reasonable time frame. That's a business choice Activision wanted...deal with it. EA might allow "pie in the sky" development of the content, but if you get to the end and have to cut features it's a disappointment. Activision has a much more solid plan to get the basics working and build on it... you can always trim cost on textures, models, levels, etc... That's what the customer wanted... it's a hard lesson to learn to do your work how somebody else wants it... as opposed to being owned by the guys paying for the game... but that's business.
Sounds like they need some boring business analysts in there to straighten them out! When you have to comply with SOX, ISO, HIPAA, IRS, big 3 auto, TS, banking, EDI, etc. you spend most 75% of your time following other people's rules and about 25% doing actual work! Sounds like gaming is finally ready for grown ups to run the place!!! That sounds like FUN!!!
the newspaper idea is kind of cool.... you only need a newspaper for 1 day anyway 90% end up in the recycle bin. If it didn't require ink to print (or minimal ink) then you could really beef up recycling by having newspaper "vending" machines. Put your old newspaper in + a quarter or fifty cents and get the latest copy. You could of course sell the paper for several dollars on a "new" page. The thing to do as well to change culture is to make the pages more resistant to wear than regular paper.. maybe have 45 degree corners or something (BSG reference!) also develop folios and tubes to store the paper in when not in use so it stays neat and fresh... back to a little old school engineering tubes and such. Actually scrolls would work really well. They would allow long prints of dozens of pages and have a built in storage device to keep the paper fresh.. that could be why we have 3000 year old scrolls but stacked paper books don't last nearly as long.
I'm curious if this new paper can be copied or scanned without damage. The next remaining question is if we can get notebooks made of this stuff and a special pen for writing on it... there's already 2 types of tech for reading handwriting either the logitech/penfly "dot" paper and magic pen, or the magic notebook that follows your writing. The failure of both of those models is that you spend all your time writing on ACTUAL paper, put the data into digital, then have to buy more special paper... you gain nothing over a regular notebook... unless you had magic erasing paper... now it's a really cool idea!!!!
think about it for a minute.. a typical RAID 5 is set up on one system in one shot from 3-4 identical drives with the same lot numbers. Sounds good on paper but... if one fails then due to the fact it's siblings are almost identical, they will have the same useage/wear on them as well potential failure defects! So they have just as much chance of failing as the one that died...and the same variables. Now you put extra stress to rebuild the missing drive and accellerate another failure that should be "about" to occur. I like the other poster's idea about mixing drives up, but that can lead to unnessary compatibility problems not necessary either. You'd think drive monitoring would let you pick out the potential failure sooner, but as Google found out the built in reporting isn't reliable enough yet to make decisons from... you may repace the wrong drive and still cause the failure you're trying to prevent!
This is about optimising your data center spending on disk. What they're saying is that accross 100,000 drives of a bunch of types installed in data centers, whether it was an expensive FC drive or a desktop SATA didn't seem to affect the over all live as much as other things... spending big money on expensive FC + RAID solutions doesn't gain you anything over the same solution with cheaper drives. It's all about the management of the failures. You can't believe people willing to take a lot of money and then ignore the reliability.
That makes the most interesting solution Serial attached Scsi.. the ability to mix fast or big drives as your application demands. And optimise for cost... make up any preceved "reliability" loss with engineering and planning and consistancy. That's what IT lacks.. we (IT) have to get away from "magic bullets" and to real engineering/accountability methods.
I think the myth of infant mortality is that if the drive works in the first week/month it will work perfectly until the warranty/magic dust wears off and you don't have to worry about reliability until then. What they saw in the real world was that some drives had consistantly reduced performance and lifespan right from the start. You can't operate on the assumption that I replaced 5 drives so I'm good for 3 years and not keep spares or backups ready... the Google report takes this another step because they were interested in what the drives were reporting for health.. is the drive's internal software giving good reliability numbers... In Google's case the drives weren't and work needs to be done.
the whole idea is away from the main myth that drive never fail unless they're junk... to the idea that drive DO and WILL fail because they are mechanical parts. Engineers aren't interested in blaming the manufacurer for imperfect parts, but in doing THEIR job of keeping the data and the network going.
Everybody keeps beating on her for contradicting the "scientific numbers" used for advertising, but that's not what her study was about! Like the Google study, this is about Actual length of drives in real installs. Sure, you could get better performance, longer life... but that's not what it's about. It's about putting meaningful numbers so that network engineers can plan their installs of disks according to when the drives will fail. We all know drives fail...it's not about pointing fingers, but rather giving engineers numbers to plan PREVENTIVE maintenance rather than REACTIVE maintenance. In the ideal world, you'd replace the drive in rotation a few days before it failed.. because you know it WILL fail. Uptime is related more to how well you maintenance the computers, not how much the manufacturer says it will last. As installs get bigger and the numbers better, the people with little systems can benifit from these reports as many longstanding ideas are challanged.
that's why Palm bought them... there's a Palm 6 out there but never marketed that's a direct descendant of BeOS techonolgy... just like you said.. but it's TOO different to push on Palm developers without them all jumping to WinCE. What a shame.
side note that it runs on at least 4 different CPUs.. Hobbit, PPC, X86, and Xscale...
BE used Haikus in each of the system error messages... it was an inside joke that was all over the system... when they had to pick a non-trademarked name for the OSS project to copy it they picked "Haiku" as a throwback to the joke.
Personally, I think this is more geared as a "shot" to drive makers and big enterprise users not so much the general desktop user crowd. After all, how many companies even HAVE 100,000 hard drives to test? Google is unique in their use of LOTS of hardware... in generally better controlled environments than most have. Google has issued other papers and industry "suggestions" about performance of mother boards, power supplies, and other OTS hardware... as big of a CUSTOMER as Google is, they can push the industry to perform better in ways normal people would just "deal with".
What the report really shows is that SMART doesn't accurately indicate the life of the drive... if anything Google drives their hardware harder than normal users, so it should be a good testbed for predictive tools.... Google would be directly interested and probably pay a lot of money to somebody that implemented the changes this engineer said... chasing around 20k+ hard drives is an EXPENSIVE task... I'd bet Google pays a MILLION dollars a year in salary just to have somebody available to run out and replace unscheduled drive failures. That's a big process improvement that they would like to see hard drive manufactures answer.
Are they using OSS to better serve their customers... or merely to squeeze out competitors without the deep pockets to give stuff away for free?
As an example, most of IBM's 'enterprise' boxes cost upwards of $100k... more than half is the cost of licensing the 'software' to turn the box on. Of course they can "give" away free code... as long as it ties you to their system. Even though it's "free" doesn't mean you can actually maintain it...that's the problem. The pundits wonder if OSS is the new "free" like all the internet apps Microsoft put out cough**internet explorer*** merely to stop somebody ELSE from making money.
Parallels new product fixes that bug I believe. Don't they use VT in the C2D chips to run an actual installed version of the software from a dual-boot system? That would be the ticket. I don't think Apple's bootcamp will install an OEM copy though.. but there's nothing stating that wouldn't be legal. Just buy a stick of ram or something. Microsoft can't say that it's not a "valid" PC because it's a Mac.
That said, Microsoft is taking a page from the *nix vendors they've spent so long bashing for expensive licenses. First they took away per user (you could install on two machines if you only used one at a time, like home/work) Then they tied the software to the motherboard with XP SP2 & WGA. Now they are saying you can only INSTALL or RUN ONE copy of the software on a machine. That's a step too far. Traditional VM tech allows you to take ONE install and divide it up into memory how you see fit. Microsoft wants to rewrite the rules to make you pay more to make their software more efficent.
It all goes back to one of the original software copyright rulings that said the computer processor's internal "copying" to memory and hard disk could be considered "infringement" even though that's how it's supposed to work!!! Not to put too fine a point on it but GPL allows UNLIMITED running on a computer without restriction!!! Specifically because of that silly ruling.
the best part is that they can data mine all that recorded data of all the so-called "honest" people to see if you break any other laws any time they want!! I'm sure the IRS and states would like a list of credit card transactions... any time you buy something... or how about any time you search or look at porn... even the legal stuff. I'm sure your boss/wife/parents would like a listing of all the porn you view mailed to them! The states would quickly get on board for tax purposes as well as local "morality" laws. It's a wonderful can of worms with goodies for all levels of govt!
they need to require return addresses on all postal mail as well!! Then the mail man can record the addresses of everybody sending you snail mail. As well as any mail you send out. It's a federal service after all, what do you have to hide?
" That's not a good analogy, nature is both beautiful and ugly. Natural trends are not always the best, for instance, what if I said that "the network tends towards liberal values just as a bull tends to rape any female cow next to him." Doesn't sound so enticing, does it? If you're going to use an analogy, please use one that sheds light or meaning on the situation. Your quote underneath your picture just sounds like you smoked enough dope to spew hippie peace love crap."
Nope, you're BOTH RIGHT!!! Because if we spent all our time building fences to protect cows, we'd trample all the pretty flowers because they'd be "in the way". Freedom has to allow a certain amount of ugliness to exist. It doesn't mean that it doesn't go unpunished.. but it's IMPOSSIBLE to prevent ugliness without diminishing beauty. That's the problem with all the "Wars" lately... for example the "war on terror" has made us so uptight we get scared by blinking boxes without regard for what's inside, what intent was given, so we smash, break and try to lock up people for a silly idea.... the very definition of freedom is that you don't have to ASK PERMISSION to do something harmless.... we've lost that.
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yeah, like a Mini-Mac "cube" with a 16x & 1x PCIe slot!!! That would mop the floor with the high end Mac Pro version though.
frankly, WiFi won't take off the way most people thing it will simply because most American's aren't wired to "fair share" resources in such a manner. Municipal WiFi may work out, but only in large public areas... downtown areas, libraries, public buildings. Even in my little Midwest city, that's only a few square miles in size, regular Wi-Fi range isn't nearly enough for more than 10-20 houses per spot under the best conditions. We're far to spread out for that to work. On a telco level it could work. Replace the telco box at every 4th house (perhaps for a discount on DSL) and have it wired to the phone company's account structure.. then you could have roaming WiFi all over town.. it would solve the problem of people "stealing" WiFi from neighbors but it would still be expensive to get working.. after all commercial wireless boxes are 10x the cost of the little blue Linksys boxes we all hack.
I think Dvorak is old school... the type that still believe computers will fix the problems in society and every body will "get along" because it's the smart thing to do. The W3C is also filled with those people... that's why web standards languish because they miss the fact that they're being used for their "peacability" to let the money makers keep making their cash.
That's why I'd say it's offically moved to the "real business" side rather than the "arts" side of the game. It's a BUSINESS that lays out a plan, then says STOP when the plan is not being achived or is suffering too much feature creep. I've worked in several factories that have the exact same issues... everybody wants the machines to do "one more thing" and it's going to be great. The same with business software. In the factory setting, there's a guy paying the bills and he expects widgets to start pumping ASAP. I know gaming, movies, music, etc are "art", but on the other hand there is so much waste in the system that needs to be brutally culled. Feature creep seems to be the bane of most games out there today. There are several ways to handle that... rent game engines that have the features you want, if not pay the ENGINE writers to add the feature, they know it better than you. Also, story, gameplay and scope seem to be HUGE issues, these publisher have hundreds of games under their belts, they should have scheduling and work resources under control by now...leading to. Lastly, perhaps games should be more modular, more story driven, it would seem game design takes so long that it's "out of fashion" before it's done. If that's the case they need to change the business model, shorter games, more sequals that truely extend the original, and lower prices to get higher turns on their money. Perhaps they should look at how many players finish these massive games without cheats and dial it down a little. Those are all BUSINESS decisions, not related to engineering or art...
that's a valid question because of the special type of paper it is. Many old school copiers use several hundred watts putting great thermal and light damage to the document. I remember it wasn't that long ago you couldn't copy things like transperancies because the copier would damage them. It's not a big concern, but due the fact it's designed to be rewritten, what's the catalyst for that process?
you plug it into a PC and click on and .exe file!!!
the studios film much stuff in Australia and New Zeland in order to get around union obligations in the USA. Yet they want to use the same laws to prevent their finished material being sold on the "open market". Just because somebody sells iPods only in the USA is not going to prevent somebody from buying boxes of them here and selling them in a market Apple chooses to ignore. That's the falacy of globalization. It's the new mercantillism, where a small number of players move their pices at will without boundaries, but the local govts are demanded to prevent the customers (serfs) from getting the better deal thru the same channels.
look at copyright laws... they are reletively syncronized between the USA and Austrailia, something copyrighted here is automatically copyrighted there.. so what seriously prevents the media being sold there? Natural laws would say that a "thing" should be sold anywhere to anyone once it leaves your doors. Why are movies and media different? What natural right do they have to prevent global trade of their product that a maker of rubber bouncy balls wouldn't have?
I think the teacher is right on in what they're asking for... it's just crazy that as long as we've had PCs we're still stuck to boxes and wires... and mearly shrink and repeat for "laptops". I think OLPC is exactly what they're asking for, but it's not quite ready yet and they're not interested in US schools. Once multi-touch gets big we might get something that's 1 piece like Piccard's data pad from Star Trek.... to think of the computers on that show...and they designed those in 1985 and we STILL haven't caught up to the point you can whip out a computer and just use it like a wrench or a flashlight!
What they're doing is basicly 3d model UV mapping!!! When they mentioned how hard it was to map a 3d ink to a 2d surface the first thing I thought was looking at those streached and twisted quake3 character model textures... It would be like making little shrinky-dink models... sounds like fun!!
Most game companies are based on "labor of love" in that the core "owners" usually have the tools and projects lined up on their own dime and want to sell it. That makes the hard stuff like code and content management, bug tracking and all the "busywork" of making a game at least partly taken care of. Spark was selling only their work... their ability to get projects done... and they didn't deliver. After millions of extra dollars from activision to settle lawsuits and cost overruns they still didn't have their act together. They sold themselves as a content house.. with minimal programming then tried to reinvent the programming wheel and lost focus.
As far as Activision requiring playable games why not? 80% of the work in a modern game is content, not coding. Any house worth it's salt should be able to have a playable test bed in a reasonable time frame. That's a business choice Activision wanted...deal with it. EA might allow "pie in the sky" development of the content, but if you get to the end and have to cut features it's a disappointment. Activision has a much more solid plan to get the basics working and build on it... you can always trim cost on textures, models, levels, etc... That's what the customer wanted... it's a hard lesson to learn to do your work how somebody else wants it... as opposed to being owned by the guys paying for the game... but that's business.
Sounds like they need some boring business analysts in there to straighten them out! When you have to comply with SOX, ISO, HIPAA, IRS, big 3 auto, TS, banking, EDI, etc. you spend most 75% of your time following other people's rules and about 25% doing actual work! Sounds like gaming is finally ready for grown ups to run the place!!! That sounds like FUN!!!
I'm curious if this new paper can be copied or scanned without damage. The next remaining question is if we can get notebooks made of this stuff and a special pen for writing on it... there's already 2 types of tech for reading handwriting either the logitech/penfly "dot" paper and magic pen, or the magic notebook that follows your writing. The failure of both of those models is that you spend all your time writing on ACTUAL paper, put the data into digital, then have to buy more special paper... you gain nothing over a regular notebook... unless you had magic erasing paper... now it's a really cool idea!!!!
think about it for a minute.. a typical RAID 5 is set up on one system in one shot from 3-4 identical drives with the same lot numbers. Sounds good on paper but... if one fails then due to the fact it's siblings are almost identical, they will have the same useage/wear on them as well potential failure defects! So they have just as much chance of failing as the one that died...and the same variables. Now you put extra stress to rebuild the missing drive and accellerate another failure that should be "about" to occur. I like the other poster's idea about mixing drives up, but that can lead to unnessary compatibility problems not necessary either. You'd think drive monitoring would let you pick out the potential failure sooner, but as Google found out the built in reporting isn't reliable enough yet to make decisons from... you may repace the wrong drive and still cause the failure you're trying to prevent!
That makes the most interesting solution Serial attached Scsi.. the ability to mix fast or big drives as your application demands. And optimise for cost... make up any preceved "reliability" loss with engineering and planning and consistancy. That's what IT lacks.. we (IT) have to get away from "magic bullets" and to real engineering/accountability methods.
the whole idea is away from the main myth that drive never fail unless they're junk... to the idea that drive DO and WILL fail because they are mechanical parts. Engineers aren't interested in blaming the manufacurer for imperfect parts, but in doing THEIR job of keeping the data and the network going.
Everybody keeps beating on her for contradicting the "scientific numbers" used for advertising, but that's not what her study was about! Like the Google study, this is about Actual length of drives in real installs. Sure, you could get better performance, longer life... but that's not what it's about. It's about putting meaningful numbers so that network engineers can plan their installs of disks according to when the drives will fail. We all know drives fail...it's not about pointing fingers, but rather giving engineers numbers to plan PREVENTIVE maintenance rather than REACTIVE maintenance. In the ideal world, you'd replace the drive in rotation a few days before it failed.. because you know it WILL fail. Uptime is related more to how well you maintenance the computers, not how much the manufacturer says it will last. As installs get bigger and the numbers better, the people with little systems can benifit from these reports as many longstanding ideas are challanged.
side note that it runs on at least 4 different CPUs.. Hobbit, PPC, X86, and Xscale...
BE used Haikus in each of the system error messages... it was an inside joke that was all over the system... when they had to pick a non-trademarked name for the OSS project to copy it they picked "Haiku" as a throwback to the joke.
What the report really shows is that SMART doesn't accurately indicate the life of the drive... if anything Google drives their hardware harder than normal users, so it should be a good testbed for predictive tools.... Google would be directly interested and probably pay a lot of money to somebody that implemented the changes this engineer said... chasing around 20k+ hard drives is an EXPENSIVE task... I'd bet Google pays a MILLION dollars a year in salary just to have somebody available to run out and replace unscheduled drive failures. That's a big process improvement that they would like to see hard drive manufactures answer.
that would be the touch of his/her/its noodely appendage! This article is proof that FSM moves in mysterious ways.
Great first FSM post!!!
As an example, most of IBM's 'enterprise' boxes cost upwards of $100k... more than half is the cost of licensing the 'software' to turn the box on. Of course they can "give" away free code... as long as it ties you to their system. Even though it's "free" doesn't mean you can actually maintain it...that's the problem. The pundits wonder if OSS is the new "free" like all the internet apps Microsoft put out cough**internet explorer*** merely to stop somebody ELSE from making money.
That said, Microsoft is taking a page from the *nix vendors they've spent so long bashing for expensive licenses. First they took away per user (you could install on two machines if you only used one at a time, like home/work) Then they tied the software to the motherboard with XP SP2 & WGA. Now they are saying you can only INSTALL or RUN ONE copy of the software on a machine. That's a step too far. Traditional VM tech allows you to take ONE install and divide it up into memory how you see fit. Microsoft wants to rewrite the rules to make you pay more to make their software more efficent.
It all goes back to one of the original software copyright rulings that said the computer processor's internal "copying" to memory and hard disk could be considered "infringement" even though that's how it's supposed to work!!! Not to put too fine a point on it but GPL allows UNLIMITED running on a computer without restriction!!! Specifically because of that silly ruling.
the best part is that they can data mine all that recorded data of all the so-called "honest" people to see if you break any other laws any time they want!! I'm sure the IRS and states would like a list of credit card transactions... any time you buy something... or how about any time you search or look at porn... even the legal stuff. I'm sure your boss/wife/parents would like a listing of all the porn you view mailed to them! The states would quickly get on board for tax purposes as well as local "morality" laws. It's a wonderful can of worms with goodies for all levels of govt!
they need to require return addresses on all postal mail as well!! Then the mail man can record the addresses of everybody sending you snail mail. As well as any mail you send out. It's a federal service after all, what do you have to hide?
sure... the IT guys are the problem.
" That's not a good analogy, nature is both beautiful and ugly. Natural trends are not always the best, for instance, what if I said that "the network tends towards liberal values just as a bull tends to rape any female cow next to him." Doesn't sound so enticing, does it? If you're going to use an analogy, please use one that sheds light or meaning on the situation. Your quote underneath your picture just sounds like you smoked enough dope to spew hippie peace love crap." Nope, you're BOTH RIGHT!!! Because if we spent all our time building fences to protect cows, we'd trample all the pretty flowers because they'd be "in the way". Freedom has to allow a certain amount of ugliness to exist. It doesn't mean that it doesn't go unpunished.. but it's IMPOSSIBLE to prevent ugliness without diminishing beauty. That's the problem with all the "Wars" lately... for example the "war on terror" has made us so uptight we get scared by blinking boxes without regard for what's inside, what intent was given, so we smash, break and try to lock up people for a silly idea.... the very definition of freedom is that you don't have to ASK PERMISSION to do something harmless.... we've lost that.