A civilian using deadly force against someone to prevent a crime involving nonlethal force (like stealing an iPod, car, wallet, etc) is illegal under almost all circumstances. Worse, if you managed to kill the guy, you could be looking at manslaughter or murder charges.
Now, if the guy pulls a *knife* or a *gun*, you're free to let loose. However, if someone is three feet away from me, I'm not sure I'd want to try gambling on having a quicker draw (and being able to avoid being injured or killed by the return stab/shot).
And shooting someone in the *back* as they run away with your iPod makes damning evidence against you WRT possibly managing to slip out on a self-defense exenoration ("I swear, it looked like he was going for a gun in his pocket"), because if he's running away, he just plain isn't a threat.
I hate to say it, but if I were you, I'd want to think about going over some basic criminal law (like, law student 101 stuff...there's probably something distilled on the Internet for gun owners in your state). You could seriously screw yourself over with a felony conviction for doing something that you thought was perfectly kosher.
I just don't understand why people always complain about this. You *know* that the eds have different opinions about stories and that complaining doesn't help you out. It's in the FAQ. This happens to people all the time. Something comes out on NYT or news.com and the eight zillion people that read it daily all submit it to Slashdot. I certainly don't think any less of anyone because they had a story rejected -- nor would I think any more highly of them because they had a story accepted.
Heck, maybe they didn't like your presentation or something. It's not like any submissions are likely to get more than a couple of seconds' glance.
Seriously, whether this was urban legend or not, it won't be any more.
The iPod is a very expensive device. It is probably easy to fence -- it's selling like hotcakes, is in demand, and does not have permanent customizability features. If it follows the trend of audio devices rather than PDAs, it will depreciate slowly. It's a damn *good* idea to mug people with iPods.
You have to be extremely careful where you use this technique, as it's vulnerable to replay attacks (remember what cookie you had at time A, let Amazon change it at time B, and then set it back to the cookie you had at time A). If you use a scheme like this, you have to deal with people being able to revert all the state in the cookie back.
Also note that you want to be doubly-careful when dealing with a complex set of data (as Amazon does) and triply-careful when dealing with a system that deals with money.
Nothing to say that Amazon doesn't use this properly (or, really, that they even use this at all), but man oh man, even if they have some serious security and distributed developers, and don't make any mistakes, I could sure see some schmuck Amazon web developer a year down the road assuming that he has transaction semantics for all of his customer records (when in fact the remote client can cause partial arbitrary rollbacks) and do something that relies on the data in the customer's computer, or something that relies only on local data.
I dunno. One-Click generally seemed like a bad idea in practice too. Amazon is racking up an awful lot of dubiously useful and really-shouldn't-be-valid-anyway patents.
Surely checksumming and encryption cannot be patented, even by a patent office corrupted by allowing too little money to do a good job.
Oh, such fresh, fresh innocence.
Off the cuff, I can think of three patents in this realm alone. RSA patented RSA encryption, the (extremely obvious, done by everyone) table lookup optimization in CRC32 is patented, and IBM has certain tables of bit encodings (simple checksums that are particularly resistant to common hard-drive errors) patented.
I'm wondering how it is faster to pull a cookie from the browser, compute its checksum, compair, if they match, decrypt, then decode. Surely that can't be faster than a properly cached local database query.
You have to be extremely careful where you use this technique, as it's vulnerable to replay attacks (remember what cookie you had at time A, let Amazon change it at time B, and then set it back to the cookie you had at time A). If you use a scheme like this, you have to deal with people being able to revert all the state in the cookie back.
That has already been tried with One-Click. It doesn't work. Slashdot is used to dealing with technology companies that have technology buyers that have an opinion that's sometimes influenced by Slashdot (especially via secondhand word-of-mouth). Joe Blow is the target Amazon customer. Amazon just doesn't care about bad press surrounding their patents (or at least they feel that their losses due to the bad PR are less significant than the benefit derived from being able to club BarnesAndNoble.com down when BandN tries to let people purchase books with a single click.
Current Japanese dating games that I can think of are all non-real-time adventure-class games. This genre has not fared very well in the United States for something like a decade now.
There is one interesting thing about adventure games -- generally, they're easy to put down at any time and do not require a powerful platform. This makes adventure games an appealing possibility for the console. The sole exception is storage space -- many adventure games require a fair bit of storage. It may be necessary to have a device with a 1" hard drive to store enough data for a modern adventure game.
However, on slashdot, we're only allowed to point out when Republicans say stupid things, not when Democrats do. Didn't you read the F.A.Q.?
I'm pretty certain that the most commonly reviled politician on Slashdot is Sen. Fritz Hollings ("The Senator from Disneyland"). He is a Democrat.
IMHO, the flak that Bush and Ashcroft get on Slashdot is very much well-deserved. It's often misdirected, as when Bush does something *stupid* or *wrong* ("Let's attack Iraq to fight terrorism!") and then gets complained at for the number of soldiers dying, when we are doing very well. Invading Iraq was the real problem, but deaths of soldiers is a current and ongoing issue that can be complained about. People didn't just randomly decide "hey, let's hate Bush!", though.
It's kind of like Microsoft. Microsoft frequently catches a huge amount of complaining on Slashdot for doing something incredibly minor. However, Microsoft *earned* a steady and widespread hatred from many Slashdotters from years of screwing customers and competitors alike over. They're simply paying for their original actions in installments.
Actually, banning gay marriage really has little foundation in divine command, even in Christian belief.
Leviticus 18 deals with homosexuality, and prohibits it. However, there is a huge quantity of other old Judaic law in these sections, containing other commands that are ignored by modern-day Christians, mostly because they are inconvenient (don't eat pork, treat your deceased brother's wife as your own wife, etc).
The idea that Christians have is that Christ established a new covenant, and that the commands they have to obey are listed in the New Testament (which contains nothing banning homosexuality). However, there was an arbitrary mishmash of Old Testament stuff that just happened to be kept and shoved into Church doctrine. It's a serious inconsistency in Christianity -- essentially, there are no Biblical grounds for both eating pork and condemning homosexuality. It's really nothing more than a cultural thing that happens to live on with the church.
Actually, I think it's too bad that Powell got involved with the whole Super Bowl thing. In most respects, he's one of the most pro-Slashdot interest administrators out there, trying to avoid federal Internet regulation.
Also, I even agree with Powell. Nothing wrong, IMHO, with having bare breasts on the television. There is something wrong when many of the consumers of the television feel strongly about *not* seeing bare breasts and are watching a show in which they feel that they will not see particularly risque content, and get an unpleasant surprise.
First, they're trying to write a game that will be acceptable to the current gaming world. The current gaming world plays and prefers games with lots of explosions and guns and violence and whatnot.
Second, what are you comparing this to? A romance movie? A book? Games just don't *work* the same as either medium. It's much harder to involve a gamer in a romance game than a romance movie because the gamer may stop at any time, and play in any-sized chunks. With a movie, viewers allocate two hours, and the movie director has a given undivided two hours in which he controls much of the viewers' environment to manipulate emotions. Compare this to, say, a computer, where viewers are probably not in a totally dark room with huge speakers and a vast screen. With a book or a movie, it is possible to write a carefully-crafted story that depends upon timing (Joe just misses the train with Mary) or precise actions, or whatnot. A game generally requires more flexibility, unless you're going to make it incredibly flat and consisting mostly of cutscenes. In most types of game, a player might spend an arbitrary amount of time stopped or trying to figure something out. It has to allow a player to make decisions.
Third, many of the elements in a romance are *very* difficult to reproduce in an interactive environment. Most romances place a good deal of emphasis on (often subtle) emotions and human relationships. Unless you entirely represent these elements with cutscenes, you need to provide some form of interactive "human". We do not have the technology to currently do this effectively or convincingly.
Ultimately, I could see romance games doing well. Middle-aged women are currently the most common demographic online. It turns out that the Internet beats the snot out of daytime soaps. I'm sure there will be a lot of false starts and failures, though. It won't be an easy problem -- but then again, if you took a programmer from 1980 and told him to produce Doom III, he'd probably be at a bit of a loss for words too. There's money in the romance market, and that means that someone will find out a way to take advantage of it.
That TrollTech's trying to make it a standard library.
It's a wonderful toolkit with a great API.
I dunno if I'd call it "great" -- it doesn't do the STL, for understandable reasons -- but on the whole I don't disagree.
It's also GPL'd, and nobody is forcing you to use it.
Ah. Here we come to the meat of the matter. First, it's GPLed. This is Not Okay For A Standard Linux Library. It's fine if TrollTech was just shooting at making a library that you could use or not. The problem is that folks push for Qt to be a standard widget set, and that means making it a standard library. The idea is that then to make a "standard Linux desktop app", you're faced with licensing restrictions on your application. Much as I like Open Source, I also think that it should be allowed to win out because it *works better*, not forcibly crammed down someone's throat.
There are many GPLed programs out there, and a few GPLed libraries. The differences is that almost all of them are *not* used as standard libraries, where people are expected to use them, rather than just using them if they feel like doing so. (The sole exception that I can think of offhand is libreadline, and there's a BSD equivalent that a number of apps use in even that case...the name escapes me at the moment.)
TrollTech has had a history of trying to leverage Qt to make money off of developers at the cost of developer freedom. With, say, a GTK+-based app, I can do a Windows port with no problem. With Qt, I'm looking at a license or making it freeware. I understand that it is tough for a company to both make money and provide a standard part of Linux (like libX11, glibc, etc), but it *is* possible. I have a strong aversion to letting corporate interests, *however currently benign* into positions where they may in the future have a lot of leverage over Linux. Look at Caldera for an example -- Caldera was once a wonderful company that contributed a good deal to Linux and (though they didn't work out) had legitimate plans to make money in a community-friendly manner. Caldera has become SCO, a company that would happily leverage every bit of IP it could get its paws on. I don't want even the slightest risk of that happening again.
Qt is C++. Nothing wrong with C++ as a language, but it's very nasty to make C bindings for a C++ library. A *lot*, I would say the majority of the software that runs on a typical Linux user's system, is written in C. I'd rather not make the widget set a pain in the ass to use for the majority of developers out there. (Note that it's much easier to make a C-based widget set and provide good C++ bindings than the other way around.)
Qt is big. Really big. It's a worthy design for certain things, but it approaches becoming an application framework more than a widget set. That goes against the UNIX philosophy of small tools, each best at a given job.
Most of my frusterations with Qt would not exist if Qt were LGPL (and not just on X11, but on all platforms, like GTK). TrollTech might have been forced to make money by selling Qt Designer or some sort of similar tools rather than Qt, but that's one of the challenges of working in such an environment.
Re:Armchair physicists are idiots
on
X-43A Hits Mach 7
·
· Score: 4, Funny
4) The toyota corolla attachment won't be out until 2006.
Bullshit. Toyota announced that they will not be selling *any* vehicles with the scramjet until it completes product safety retesting, which will be finished in 2008 at the earliest. Apparently, the flux capacitor doesn't perform as expected above about 88 mph.
This is a really wonderful idea. However, I worry that it has a copule significant problems for researchers. First, for computer analysis work, a paragraph is likely too short to be useful. It can take a *lot* of audio data to make up for one-time variations. Second, cleanliness of the recording. Since anyone can submit a recording, not only will the recording environments and devices differ, but it is unlikely that any recordings will be made in the kind of studio-quality or lab-quality environment that would make these most useful for analysis work.
I'm not a speech synth/recognition researcher, but I do know that generally, for speech research, much stricter constraints are placed on audio being acquired. The extreme variety of the site is nice, but I'm not sure that it outweighs the drawbacks.
If we admit that Apple's patent is reasonable, we should also admit that OneClick is reasonable.
Frankly, I don't think that UI elements should be patentable. It's already extremely difficult to write software without infringing on a patent. I can't even imagine how hard it would be to design user interfaces without infringing on any mechanisms.
I find false marketing to be one of the more upsetting things that companies can do, and I find it a little disturbing that so many Slashdotters seem to feel that it's all right because *it's Apple*. Were it Dell or Compaq or God knows who, people would be up in arms.
It's pretty obvious that Apple's "fastest computer" claims aren't true and were intended to mislead consumers (even the most generous of readings would admit that they were valid for a very, very limited subset of carefully chosen tests for about a month, far less time than the compaign ran for, and only applied to single-processor computers). There may not be all that much damage caused (heck, the net effect may be positive), but there's little doubt in my mind that Apple was trying to implant fairly bogus information in people's heads.
The way I see it, even if someone's taking on Microsoft and we want them very much to do well, holding them to a lower standard of integrity (or anything else) is ultimately a losing strategy. Those people will ultimately take advantage of that leeway, and end up producing a worse product/service. If Red Hat puts out a crummy program or makes a decision that negatively impacts me, I will happily complain vocally and publically. Apple deserves to be held to no lesser of a standard.
I believe this is a bit more comprehensive than just changing the title of a window -- it would modify numerous instances of text throughout the application.
If you read a bit further in the thread I linked to in my parent post, you'll also notice that Elena removed her facial portrait and email address (leaving only the postal address) from her original pages -- the body of her documentary work is still present, without some of the personal information. She originally deliberately took her site down for a short period after it first "hit the Web awareness". As folks have noticed, there has been a lot of online commenting on her sex appeal, etc, and a good guess is that she's been uncomfortable with the email that she's been getting since her original site was put up.
Seriously -- appreciate the work for what it is -- a unique, honest set of images and insights into the most horrific nuclear disaster the world has ever seen. However, please try and avoid creeping the author out. I'd like to continue to see more of this material.
When someone put up a mirror, worried about bandwidth, Elena asked him to take it down because she was concerned that her updates wouldn't get propagated, and that people would only see an old version.
elena
I asked to remove copied site, because need to update and need to make some corrections.
While I realize that folks just want to help out, I think that, given that this is Elena's work (and one that she had to venture into hazardous environments to produce and is giving away freely), her wishes should be respected WRT mirrors. (That doesn't mean that I'm not going to make a personal wget -rk --no-parent'ed copy just in case the site ever goes away permanently, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
A civilian using deadly force against someone to prevent a crime involving nonlethal force (like stealing an iPod, car, wallet, etc) is illegal under almost all circumstances. Worse, if you managed to kill the guy, you could be looking at manslaughter or murder charges.
Now, if the guy pulls a *knife* or a *gun*, you're free to let loose. However, if someone is three feet away from me, I'm not sure I'd want to try gambling on having a quicker draw (and being able to avoid being injured or killed by the return stab/shot).
And shooting someone in the *back* as they run away with your iPod makes damning evidence against you WRT possibly managing to slip out on a self-defense exenoration ("I swear, it looked like he was going for a gun in his pocket"), because if he's running away, he just plain isn't a threat.
I hate to say it, but if I were you, I'd want to think about going over some basic criminal law (like, law student 101 stuff...there's probably something distilled on the Internet for gun owners in your state). You could seriously screw yourself over with a felony conviction for doing something that you thought was perfectly kosher.
I just don't understand why people always complain about this. You *know* that the eds have different opinions about stories and that complaining doesn't help you out. It's in the FAQ. This happens to people all the time. Something comes out on NYT or news.com and the eight zillion people that read it daily all submit it to Slashdot. I certainly don't think any less of anyone because they had a story rejected -- nor would I think any more highly of them because they had a story accepted.
Heck, maybe they didn't like your presentation or something. It's not like any submissions are likely to get more than a couple of seconds' glance.
Seriously, whether this was urban legend or not, it won't be any more.
The iPod is a very expensive device. It is probably easy to fence -- it's selling like hotcakes, is in demand, and does not have permanent customizability features. If it follows the trend of audio devices rather than PDAs, it will depreciate slowly. It's a damn *good* idea to mug people with iPods.
You have to be extremely careful where you use this technique, as it's vulnerable to replay attacks (remember what cookie you had at time A, let Amazon change it at time B, and then set it back to the cookie you had at time A). If you use a scheme like this, you have to deal with people being able to revert all the state in the cookie back.
Also note that you want to be doubly-careful when dealing with a complex set of data (as Amazon does) and triply-careful when dealing with a system that deals with money.
Nothing to say that Amazon doesn't use this properly (or, really, that they even use this at all), but man oh man, even if they have some serious security and distributed developers, and don't make any mistakes, I could sure see some schmuck Amazon web developer a year down the road assuming that he has transaction semantics for all of his customer records (when in fact the remote client can cause partial arbitrary rollbacks) and do something that relies on the data in the customer's computer, or something that relies only on local data.
I dunno. One-Click generally seemed like a bad idea in practice too. Amazon is racking up an awful lot of dubiously useful and really-shouldn't-be-valid-anyway patents.
Surely checksumming and encryption cannot be patented, even by a patent office corrupted by allowing too little money to do a good job.
Oh, such fresh, fresh innocence.
Off the cuff, I can think of three patents in this realm alone. RSA patented RSA encryption, the (extremely obvious, done by everyone) table lookup optimization in CRC32 is patented, and IBM has certain tables of bit encodings (simple checksums that are particularly resistant to common hard-drive errors) patented.
I'm wondering how it is faster to pull a cookie from the browser, compute its checksum, compair, if they match, decrypt, then decode. Surely that can't be faster than a properly cached local database query.
You have to be extremely careful where you use this technique, as it's vulnerable to replay attacks (remember what cookie you had at time A, let Amazon change it at time B, and then set it back to the cookie you had at time A). If you use a scheme like this, you have to deal with people being able to revert all the state in the cookie back.
That has already been tried with One-Click. It doesn't work. Slashdot is used to dealing with technology companies that have technology buyers that have an opinion that's sometimes influenced by Slashdot (especially via secondhand word-of-mouth). Joe Blow is the target Amazon customer. Amazon just doesn't care about bad press surrounding their patents (or at least they feel that their losses due to the bad PR are less significant than the benefit derived from being able to club BarnesAndNoble.com down when BandN tries to let people purchase books with a single click.
This is why Israel killing a Hamas leader is legitimate warfare and Hamas bombing families on pilgrimage is not.
Not being a terrorist is hardly synonymous with being "legitimate"; I would argue that there are cases where even the inverse is true.
Current Japanese dating games that I can think of are all non-real-time adventure-class games. This genre has not fared very well in the United States for something like a decade now.
There is one interesting thing about adventure games -- generally, they're easy to put down at any time and do not require a powerful platform. This makes adventure games an appealing possibility for the console. The sole exception is storage space -- many adventure games require a fair bit of storage. It may be necessary to have a device with a 1" hard drive to store enough data for a modern adventure game.
However, on slashdot, we're only allowed to point out when Republicans say stupid things, not when Democrats do. Didn't you read the F.A.Q.?
I'm pretty certain that the most commonly reviled politician on Slashdot is Sen. Fritz Hollings ("The Senator from Disneyland"). He is a Democrat.
IMHO, the flak that Bush and Ashcroft get on Slashdot is very much well-deserved. It's often misdirected, as when Bush does something *stupid* or *wrong* ("Let's attack Iraq to fight terrorism!") and then gets complained at for the number of soldiers dying, when we are doing very well. Invading Iraq was the real problem, but deaths of soldiers is a current and ongoing issue that can be complained about. People didn't just randomly decide "hey, let's hate Bush!", though.
It's kind of like Microsoft. Microsoft frequently catches a huge amount of complaining on Slashdot for doing something incredibly minor. However, Microsoft *earned* a steady and widespread hatred from many Slashdotters from years of screwing customers and competitors alike over. They're simply paying for their original actions in installments.
It is nothing more than rebellion against God.
Actually, banning gay marriage really has little foundation in divine command, even in Christian belief.
Leviticus 18 deals with homosexuality, and prohibits it. However, there is a huge quantity of other old Judaic law in these sections, containing other commands that are ignored by modern-day Christians, mostly because they are inconvenient (don't eat pork, treat your deceased brother's wife as your own wife, etc).
The idea that Christians have is that Christ established a new covenant, and that the commands they have to obey are listed in the New Testament (which contains nothing banning homosexuality). However, there was an arbitrary mishmash of Old Testament stuff that just happened to be kept and shoved into Church doctrine. It's a serious inconsistency in Christianity -- essentially, there are no Biblical grounds for both eating pork and condemning homosexuality. It's really nothing more than a cultural thing that happens to live on with the church.
Actually, I think it's too bad that Powell got involved with the whole Super Bowl thing. In most respects, he's one of the most pro-Slashdot interest administrators out there, trying to avoid federal Internet regulation.
Also, I even agree with Powell. Nothing wrong, IMHO, with having bare breasts on the television. There is something wrong when many of the consumers of the television feel strongly about *not* seeing bare breasts and are watching a show in which they feel that they will not see particularly risque content, and get an unpleasant surprise.
But by that same token: why on earth should we simply to assume that the government is totally free of corruption?
Oh, I agree. For instance, there's the current administration and Haliburton.
I think you're being to harsh.
First, they're trying to write a game that will be acceptable to the current gaming world. The current gaming world plays and prefers games with lots of explosions and guns and violence and whatnot.
Second, what are you comparing this to? A romance movie? A book? Games just don't *work* the same as either medium. It's much harder to involve a gamer in a romance game than a romance movie because the gamer may stop at any time, and play in any-sized chunks. With a movie, viewers allocate two hours, and the movie director has a given undivided two hours in which he controls much of the viewers' environment to manipulate emotions. Compare this to, say, a computer, where viewers are probably not in a totally dark room with huge speakers and a vast screen. With a book or a movie, it is possible to write a carefully-crafted story that depends upon timing (Joe just misses the train with Mary) or precise actions, or whatnot. A game generally requires more flexibility, unless you're going to make it incredibly flat and consisting mostly of cutscenes. In most types of game, a player might spend an arbitrary amount of time stopped or trying to figure something out. It has to allow a player to make decisions.
Third, many of the elements in a romance are *very* difficult to reproduce in an interactive environment. Most romances place a good deal of emphasis on (often subtle) emotions and human relationships. Unless you entirely represent these elements with cutscenes, you need to provide some form of interactive "human". We do not have the technology to currently do this effectively or convincingly.
Ultimately, I could see romance games doing well. Middle-aged women are currently the most common demographic online. It turns out that the Internet beats the snot out of daytime soaps. I'm sure there will be a lot of false starts and failures, though. It won't be an easy problem -- but then again, if you took a programmer from 1980 and told him to produce Doom III, he'd probably be at a bit of a loss for words too. There's money in the romance market, and that means that someone will find out a way to take advantage of it.
So what's your beef with Qt?
That TrollTech's trying to make it a standard library.
It's a wonderful toolkit with a great API.
I dunno if I'd call it "great" -- it doesn't do the STL, for understandable reasons -- but on the whole I don't disagree.
It's also GPL'd, and nobody is forcing you to use it.
Ah. Here we come to the meat of the matter. First, it's GPLed. This is Not Okay For A Standard Linux Library. It's fine if TrollTech was just shooting at making a library that you could use or not. The problem is that folks push for Qt to be a standard widget set, and that means making it a standard library. The idea is that then to make a "standard Linux desktop app", you're faced with licensing restrictions on your application. Much as I like Open Source, I also think that it should be allowed to win out because it *works better*, not forcibly crammed down someone's throat.
There are many GPLed programs out there, and a few GPLed libraries. The differences is that almost all of them are *not* used as standard libraries, where people are expected to use them, rather than just using them if they feel like doing so. (The sole exception that I can think of offhand is libreadline, and there's a BSD equivalent that a number of apps use in even that case...the name escapes me at the moment.)
TrollTech has had a history of trying to leverage Qt to make money off of developers at the cost of developer freedom. With, say, a GTK+-based app, I can do a Windows port with no problem. With Qt, I'm looking at a license or making it freeware. I understand that it is tough for a company to both make money and provide a standard part of Linux (like libX11, glibc, etc), but it *is* possible. I have a strong aversion to letting corporate interests, *however currently benign* into positions where they may in the future have a lot of leverage over Linux. Look at Caldera for an example -- Caldera was once a wonderful company that contributed a good deal to Linux and (though they didn't work out) had legitimate plans to make money in a community-friendly manner. Caldera has become SCO, a company that would happily leverage every bit of IP it could get its paws on. I don't want even the slightest risk of that happening again.
Qt is C++. Nothing wrong with C++ as a language, but it's very nasty to make C bindings for a C++ library. A *lot*, I would say the majority of the software that runs on a typical Linux user's system, is written in C. I'd rather not make the widget set a pain in the ass to use for the majority of developers out there. (Note that it's much easier to make a C-based widget set and provide good C++ bindings than the other way around.)
Qt is big. Really big. It's a worthy design for certain things, but it approaches becoming an application framework more than a widget set. That goes against the UNIX philosophy of small tools, each best at a given job.
Most of my frusterations with Qt would not exist if Qt were LGPL (and not just on X11, but on all platforms, like GTK). TrollTech might have been forced to make money by selling Qt Designer or some sort of similar tools rather than Qt, but that's one of the challenges of working in such an environment.
4) The toyota corolla attachment won't be out until 2006.
Bullshit. Toyota announced that they will not be selling *any* vehicles with the scramjet until it completes product safety retesting, which will be finished in 2008 at the earliest. Apparently, the flux capacitor doesn't perform as expected above about 88 mph.
This is a really wonderful idea. However, I worry that it has a copule significant problems for researchers. First, for computer analysis work, a paragraph is likely too short to be useful. It can take a *lot* of audio data to make up for one-time variations. Second, cleanliness of the recording. Since anyone can submit a recording, not only will the recording environments and devices differ, but it is unlikely that any recordings will be made in the kind of studio-quality or lab-quality environment that would make these most useful for analysis work.
I'm not a speech synth/recognition researcher, but I do know that generally, for speech research, much stricter constraints are placed on audio being acquired. The extreme variety of the site is nice, but I'm not sure that it outweighs the drawbacks.
If we admit that Apple's patent is reasonable, we should also admit that OneClick is reasonable.
Frankly, I don't think that UI elements should be patentable. It's already extremely difficult to write software without infringing on a patent. I can't even imagine how hard it would be to design user interfaces without infringing on any mechanisms.
I find false marketing to be one of the more upsetting things that companies can do, and I find it a little disturbing that so many Slashdotters seem to feel that it's all right because *it's Apple*. Were it Dell or Compaq or God knows who, people would be up in arms.
It's pretty obvious that Apple's "fastest computer" claims aren't true and were intended to mislead consumers (even the most generous of readings would admit that they were valid for a very, very limited subset of carefully chosen tests for about a month, far less time than the compaign ran for, and only applied to single-processor computers). There may not be all that much damage caused (heck, the net effect may be positive), but there's little doubt in my mind that Apple was trying to implant fairly bogus information in people's heads.
The way I see it, even if someone's taking on Microsoft and we want them very much to do well, holding them to a lower standard of integrity (or anything else) is ultimately a losing strategy. Those people will ultimately take advantage of that leeway, and end up producing a worse product/service. If Red Hat puts out a crummy program or makes a decision that negatively impacts me, I will happily complain vocally and publically. Apple deserves to be held to no lesser of a standard.
I believe this is a bit more comprehensive than just changing the title of a window -- it would modify numerous instances of text throughout the application.
"FireBrush"...I dunno, what about "FirePage"?
If you read a bit further in the thread I linked to in my parent post, you'll also notice that Elena removed her facial portrait and email address (leaving only the postal address) from her original pages -- the body of her documentary work is still present, without some of the personal information. She originally deliberately took her site down for a short period after it first "hit the Web awareness". As folks have noticed, there has been a lot of online commenting on her sex appeal, etc, and a good guess is that she's been uncomfortable with the email that she's been getting since her original site was put up.
Seriously -- appreciate the work for what it is -- a unique, honest set of images and insights into the most horrific nuclear disaster the world has ever seen. However, please try and avoid creeping the author out. I'd like to continue to see more of this material.
Thanks.
Elena has started posting on sport-touring.net.
When someone put up a mirror, worried about bandwidth, Elena asked him to take it down because she was concerned that her updates wouldn't get propagated, and that people would only see an old version.
elena
I asked to remove copied site, because need to update and need to make some corrections.
Original Elena post here.
While I realize that folks just want to help out, I think that, given that this is Elena's work (and one that she had to venture into hazardous environments to produce and is giving away freely), her wishes should be respected WRT mirrors. (That doesn't mean that I'm not going to make a personal wget -rk --no-parent'ed copy just in case the site ever goes away permanently, though.)
I suspect Groklaw would like to hear about this.
Just out of curiosity, have you been happy with Server Matrix?