Again, it comes down to 'freedom to' and 'freedom from'.
All of the 5-rated comments that I see at this point are of the "How dare they" mindset. Of course, this remote will probably be abused by the immature 13-20 year old camp, and probably be more of an nuisance than the red laser pointer was. Many people are saying things like "Don't like TV while you eat? Don't go to that restaurant!"
Consider this analogy: replace "TV" with "secondhand smoke". It's pretty widely known that secondhand smoke is bad for you, and that has been codified by laws and ordinances in various jurisdictions. It's also widely believed (but I don't know about sociological research) that TV is also bad for you, and if you don't want to be subjected to it, you shouldn't have to be.
It used to be that secondhand smoke was just something that people accepted as being a consequence of living in modern society. Fortunately, many areas have wised up and enacted laws that restrict smoking. This has worked to such a point that in many communities (such as my own, in Boulder, Colorado) you can go for weeks without being accosted by secondhand smoke. This makes for a much healthier life.
If it turns out that ubiquitous TVs are unhealthy (reducing your attention span, increasing lonliness, decreasing your ability to think critically about things such as who to vote for president) it makes sense that their presence should be curbed. I don't believe this remote control is really the most mature way of addressing the problem, but it does certainly indicate that the problem is very real and that many people would like to do something about it.
Is it possible that when I go to a restaurant in a few years, rather than asking "smoking or non" they will ask "TV or non"?
AppleCorp as a megacorp?
on
Beatles vs Apple
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Maybe I'm cynical, but, uh, AppleCorp as a megacorp? What's the threshold of calling a company a megacorp?
I completely agree: if a non-geek were to buy a Linux laptop, thinking they'd got a great deal, they'd soon be telling everybody they know about their awful experience.
And now for a not-completely-off-topic-anecdote: My freshman year of college I worked at a retail software store. There was a punk kid in our store who was telling me what a l337 haX3r he was, how he, like, TOTALLY 0WNED this one IRC channel this one time. His mom came in to pick him up just as we started discussing Linux. Mom was in a bitchy, hurry-up-son we-have-to-pick-up-your-sister-from-ballet sort of mood, so when junior pressed his mom to buy one of those Sams books with a Linux CD (Slackware, with the 1.2.13 kernel, I believe) she bought it just to placate him. I have to admit, I was sort of being sadistic, because the kid was such an arrogant juvenile.
The next day, Mom storms into the shop, guns a-blazin'. I distinctly remember that her face reminded me of jiggly red jello. She wanted to know why I did that to her, and how I was going to fix her computer, which junior evidentally trashed. Honestly, I was so fixated on how truly HUGE her eyeballs were that I didn't pay a whole of attention to the rest of the conversation.
Anyway, that was like 1996. And today, we're still saying "Gosh, I hope ma and pa don't accidentally get Linux" because of the backlash. We've come a long, long way. But there's a long, long way to go.
Something I expected is still missing, and an opportunity wasted on this initial version. When I get a notification from other systems (MSN Messenger mainly), I can click on the popped up window and be taken directly to the email, this I can't.
You're absolutely right about that, and I'm a little concerned that they didn't get that the first time through. They've got more Ph.D's than Harvard, and they don't get something like that the first time?
I think Google has such an incredibly large number of people looking at them that they really can't afford to have a 1.0 release of *anything* be cruddy, or people will become jaded. This is, however, a beta release of the notifier, and (I could be blind!) I couldn't find any reference to it either from the main Google homepage or the GMail homepage. So it's not something that is going to be generally visible quite yet. So I think I am jumping the gun on getting down on them this soon.
Now, a Google IM client that uses open transport protocols that don't change every week. That would be awesome, and I will be surprised if they don't have a beta out within the next three months.
The Yahoo notifier I was talking about is just the Yahoo IM client. You don't need to use it for instant messaging, you can use it for notification only if you want.
This is great! I know people who have been holding back on using GMail because of the notification thing. I sometimes still get email at my Yahoo account, and I am notified when I receive them. Every time the Yahoo notification thing pops up I am reminded of how almost-but-not-quite perfect GMail is. This little icon in the tray will end up being a bigger deal than it looks.
I've installed it and it works great. It uses the same slide-up text bubble idiom that AIM and Yahoo and Thunderbird use. But the bubble not only tells you that you have mail but also who it is from and if there is room, the first part of the text of the email. If you missed it, you can right click and select 'Tell me again...' and it will scroll through all your unread emails, so you can get a quick overview of what's going on in your Inbox right now without having to use your browser. Much nicer.
Looking through the comments, it seems to be populated by teenagers titillated at the prospect of having geek content in a softcore porn magazine. But the interesting bit here (as the original poster stated) isn't that they're in Playboy but that they're in Playboy during their quiet period.
Given that nobody here on Slashdot (I am assuming that Playboy employees aren't kernel hackers, and Page and Brin have better things to do than blow time on/.) has read the full article, I think it is a bit sensationalist to instantly go jumping to the conclusion that this is somehow a breach of SEC rules. They would be breaking the rules if they made forward-looking statements such as earnings or market share, or if they discussed new products and research. From what it looks like from the blurb on the linked article, they are talking about history, which they're allowed to do. They're allowed to talk about their childhood, they're allowed to talk about technology, they're allowed to talk about their lifestyle. They're just not allowed to pump up all the cool things that we haven't seen yet.
Anyway, try not to jump the gun on this. Wait till it comes out before you decide they're being evil.
(MS guy) "The truth is that consumers aren't going to worry about things like CSS and PNG support," said Robert Iliad, a developer who is participating in the feedback process. "There are still millions of consumers using IE 5.5, so how are you going to get them to use IE 7.0 just because of some obscure thing called CSS?"
(Sebby) Now this is what I call truely clueless. Typical MS thinking that is the cause of IE's sercurity vulnerabilities and lack of established standards.
I think what Iliad is saying here is that consumers really don't care if their browser supports de facto fringe standards. I wish CSS and PNG support (as well as some stable ECMAScript, etc.) were supported, but that's not the name of the game. As long as MSN and Google and ESPN and Craigslist and Slashdot (insert longer list of highly traffiked web sites here) work in IE as-is, there is no reason for IE to change. And there is no reason for those sites to change unless IE changes. (Here I open myself up to charges that increased usage of other browsers like FireFox and Safari could force those sites to change... that's another discussion)
Until recently, security really wasn't an issue for typical web users. I've had people send me credit card information and passwords over standard email. I've pointed out to other people that the web form with which they're submitting their personal or financial information is not secure. I've always tried to get my friends and family to use other browsers because using IE just isn't safe. In all these cases, I generally get a vacant stare, because unless their credit card number is stolen, or somebody assumes their identity, they don't care. Those millions of users Iliad mentions are part of that vacant-stare category. Sure, if Microsoft had a corporate culture more like Google's, they would have internal pressure to fix these problems and be standards-compliant. But MS only feels the pressure when there are financial reasons for doing so.
Web developers would prefer to code web pages in one cross-platform, cross-browser syntax, but thanks to Microsoft's indifference in the matter, web developers have to endlessly tweak things so it looks OK in IE as well as whatever browsers their target audience may be using. Given that the target audience for most web sites are IE users, and given that proprietors of those commercial web sites are more interested in making money than some philosophical desire to be standards compliant, whatever MSIE supports becomes the standard.
Slashdotters know that universal support for CSS would be good. We also know that PNG is a legally pure image format. But in the world of PHB-controlled e-commerce sites and the typical demographic that visit their sites, PNG and universal CSS come second (or third, or forth,...) to a host of other concerns. Those concerns are what Iliad are talking about.
In any event, it seems that the reason Microsoft is going to release 7.0 before Longhorn is because of security concerns. CSS and PNG aren't necessarily related to that.
Agreed. One of the best bits of advice that somebody has given me on the topic of scientific research is about dead-ends. If you know that a line of thinking goes nowhere, and there is literature and good research to support that, it's highly useful to the progress of science because such research provides a big "Dead End - No Outlet" road sign to future generations. There is nothing so useless as proving something wrong twice.
I'm a big fan of coffee shops. I don't really mind 'corporate chain' shops like Starbucks, Caribou, or (here in Colorado) Peaberry's. In the abstract, of course I prefer the independent shop. In my experience, indy coffee shops are generally staffed by punks, who give the vibe that you should be lucky that they will sell you coffee, and in the process possibly transfer some of their tatooed hipness. Indy shops apparently think that if they cleaned their floor, bathroom, or windows once in a while, that's an indication of selling out. Again, this is all in my experience. I suspect the reason that chain coffee shops do so well has to do with not only economies of scale but also the consistent level of quality and cleanliness. And location. Location is key. There's a Starbucks right outside the main bus station in downtown Denver. When I get to work in the morning I could either get a coffee there or go to the indy shop right next to my building.
This is what happened the last time I went in the indy shop next to my building. I walked in and stood up at the counter. Nobody else was in the place. The dude behind the counter was preparing sandwiches or something, jamming out to Phish. He saw me come in--we had eye contact. I stood there for half a minute (which is a while, if you play it out) and he said, "I'll be with you in a sec". He continued to do the sandwich thing until he was done--took roughly four minutes. He then took the big platter of sandwiches into the back, wrapped it in saran wrap or something, then came out to me. "What?" he said. Really. Not "Sorry for making you wait for like six minutes." Not "What can I get for you". It was just a half-stoned stare and a throaty "What", as if I were annoying him.
Needless to say, I haven't been back to that particular place, even though it's location is much more convenient than the starbucks' location. This is representative of my impression of indy coffee shops.
A good indy shop (unfortunately, a bit far from home at the moment) is Troubador's in Earl's Court.
I haven't seen any posts in any of the Slashdot patent threads to make this particular point, so I think I'll throw it out there (BTW, IANAL):
If prior art for a patent can be found, then the patent is somehow not as legally threatening. I don't know if this means the patent is thrown out or completely invalid, but it does seem to help. Again, IANAL.
So if prior art is a good defense against nutty patent awards such as this, and if the open source community (whatever that is) wants to defend itself against such patents, it follows that finding and recording instances of prior art would be beneficial to the community at large.
The OSS world is a veritable machine when it comes to the production of new ideas. Not all of these ideas are necessarily GOOD, but OSS does nonetheless serve the potential of being the basis for prior art as a defense against HyperGlobalMegaCorp[R] Inc.'s silly patent on something completely obvious.
Maybe this would be a good addition to grokdoc, given their interest in both documenting OSS and in legal issues.
I code Java for a living and couldn't agree more. I've only been doing software development for about eight years now, and I'm really beginning to feel that I made a mistake by concentrating too much on Java, for exactly the reasons this guy lists.
A couple of other comments to the parent post were in the vein of "D00d, U need to stop yer bitching and look at the good things about Java". No offense to those posters, but I think they don't have to use Java in the less-than-good places for a living. Sure, Java on the server is great. It's in a position that you can control, so you can (will be able to) take advantage of the goodness that is 1.5. However, Java on the client... well, there's a whole host of reasons why my company is going to be porting our client applications from Java to a cross-platform natively-compiling version.
The problem with Java on the client is that you depend on the end-user to have things set up 'correctly' on their end. In our case, these are lawyers and accountants and other assorted people who could care less about computers. So if you discover that Java 1.3.1_06 and below has a fatal bug in the networking code, you have to write a workaround for that, since it is untenable to ask your customers to install a new JVM, and you also can't simply replace the buggy code. Our code is littered with places where we have to test things like "if the browser is Netscape 4.7, use this code, or if it's IE 5 use this code, but otherwise use this code, unless it's java 1.4.0 in which case it won't run at all due to bugs in the core java classes...". To me, this is a description of a language/runtime that has failed as a viable option for a client platform.
At this point, somebody is thinking of posting as an AC something in the line of "D00d, U need to stop bitching and use SWT" or some drivel like that. Please don't post that, unless you can suggest something that won't force us to have to - write workarounds for the umpteen-hundred bugs related to browser X on platform Y using language version Z - force the user to download a 14 MB plugin - inflate our code from 400k to 3MB because of statically-linked VM bootstrap code - write code that depends on a platform that keeps changing
That said, the parent post is right on the money, and I wish Sun would see that.
Conversely, the thing about the law is that it's there to screw you over when you least expect it. What exactly, using your example, is to be gained with the donkey law? Who is protected by this law? Maybe your mother, if she doesn't want to part with the donkey, but there's a law against selling something that isn't yours against the wishes of the true owner (theft). No, the only person that stands to benefit from this sort of law is the person who can get rich off it: some lawyer.
As I said in my original post, this is just a theory, just an idea. Of course there are problems with it, just as there are with this abbhoration we call a legal system.
As far as the review system is concerned: this works when there is a fairly even distribution of legal resources, which there is most definitiely not. For example: the RIAA was just given a patent for burning CDs immediately after a concert. This puts DiskLive in a bind because now there's legal backing for ClearChannel to mop the floor with them. It's a complete misuse of a legal tool, and there's no way that a company as small as DiskLive could put up a legal fight with CC. So legal review is out.
Google is going to have to spend hard-earned money to undo the damage these state lawmakers have done. If the lawmakers had something better to do (like, nothing, for example, or maybe repealing other dumb laws) this wouldn't be a problem. The thing is, there's no political reason for an elected official to go around cleaning up.
My suggestion is a response to this observation. When I mention this to people, people almost immediately fall into one of two camps: 1) That'd be great! 2) That's retarded. It's not too often that somebody can give me a convincing argument why it wouldn't work (or why it would), and you haven't either.
I think it's a GOOD thing for lawmakers to revise old statutes every once in a while, rather than just adding more to them. The legal code, like the tax code, is just too complicated for people to understand, and frankly I think it hurts our economy.
This thread is way off topic, but talkin' gubmint' is fun...
This definitely is a tricky concept, and the points that you raise are definitely good ones. My rationalle for making the re-vote harder is to avoid the situation where the lawmakers look at their morning docket and just say "yeah, this all looks good" and just vote with the party line. Furthermore, if a law was passed some time ago and it has turned out to be a good law, then lawmakers would catch flak for trying to overturn it.
In any event, there are two big problems that you bring up, but I don't think this situation would make the problem worse:
1) Corruption and political winds: Politicians are already incredibly corrupt, or at least, they use horrible judgement. And there are always going to be political winds. Sure, if a controversial law came up for a revote this last go-around, people on both sides of the issue certainly would have made a huge noise about it, and it would have sparked national debate--but national debate is something we've long ago exchanged for national voyeurism (think Condit, think Lewinsky, think Schwartzenegger) and i would definitely welcome it back.
2) Riders: You're absolutely correct that riders would be a problem. If I attach, say, a pointless pork project to an otherwise acceptable bill, lawmakers are currently forced to vote for the entirety of the bill. This is the root of the problem and the solution is to keep the scope of bills narrow. That's an entirely different problem, so if that was fixed, it wouldn't be a problem for the recurring vote scenario.
I'm also sort of a conspiracy theorist, at least when it comes to restricting the growth of lawbooks. Consider that lawmakers are by and large lawyers, and even those that aren't are still subject to very powerful lobbies. They have a vested interest in keeping the law complicated, because it not only keeps them employed, it also keeps them rich. No, lawmakers would never go for this idea.
(This also goes for the accounting and finance industries along with the IRS Tax Code: a simplified tax code would put thousands of people out of work!)
Just one of my many ideas on how to make government better: affix a time limit on every law. When the time limit is up, they have to vote on it again, and it has to pass with a larger percentage than it did the first time. Not only would this cull out silly knee-jerk laws like Patriot or this Google nonsense, it would also force lawmakers to deal with their mistakes by repealing laws, rather than spending time fucking things up for everybody else and increasing the number of laws on the books.
Re California: If Cally is so cool, why are you all migrating to Colorado?
Wouldn't it be cool if you could go to the online grocery web page and
* type in your own recipe, or
* pick from an easy-to-use list of recipies
* how many people will be involved w/each meal
...and it gives you not only the list of ingredients and how much of each you will need, but also a map in the store to optimize your time?
You could do this from home, or from a computer kiosk at the grocery store itself. I always forget an ingredient, or spend too much time wandering around the store looking for a hard-to-find item.
Now THIS would be a useful application of technology to a very low-tech thing. (Remember, spray on usability is bad)
Most lowtech/hightech fusions that have gone down in publicly hilarious fireballs are due to the gross MISapplication of technology. Simply using a web page to pick out individual ingredients (separate from what the meal of which they are just a component) is just taking the existing paradigm and putting it on a web page. Won't work.
Lots of non-high-tech markets have industry groups that regulate quality and standards, above and beyond (sometimes below) governmental standards. Sometimes this is just for marketing reasons (e.g. "Intel Inside" but other instances it has significant meaning to people who know what to look for (e.g. "not animal tested", "OSI approved").
Google could do the world another favor and let software groups put the "We follow Google's lead" seal on their internet software that lets users know, just from seeing the seal, that the software isn't evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, it comes down to 'freedom to' and 'freedom from'.
All of the 5-rated comments that I see at this point are of the "How dare they" mindset. Of course, this remote will probably be abused by the immature 13-20 year old camp, and probably be more of an nuisance than the red laser pointer was. Many people are saying things like "Don't like TV while you eat? Don't go to that restaurant!"
Consider this analogy: replace "TV" with "secondhand smoke". It's pretty widely known that secondhand smoke is bad for you, and that has been codified by laws and ordinances in various jurisdictions. It's also widely believed (but I don't know about sociological research) that TV is also bad for you, and if you don't want to be subjected to it, you shouldn't have to be.
It used to be that secondhand smoke was just something that people accepted as being a consequence of living in modern society. Fortunately, many areas have wised up and enacted laws that restrict smoking. This has worked to such a point that in many communities (such as my own, in Boulder, Colorado) you can go for weeks without being accosted by secondhand smoke. This makes for a much healthier life.
If it turns out that ubiquitous TVs are unhealthy (reducing your attention span, increasing lonliness, decreasing your ability to think critically about things such as who to vote for president) it makes sense that their presence should be curbed. I don't believe this remote control is really the most mature way of addressing the problem, but it does certainly indicate that the problem is very real and that many people would like to do something about it.
Is it possible that when I go to a restaurant in a few years, rather than asking "smoking or non" they will ask "TV or non"?
Maybe I'm cynical, but, uh, AppleCorp as a megacorp? What's the threshold of calling a company a megacorp?
I completely agree: if a non-geek were to buy a Linux laptop, thinking they'd got a great deal, they'd soon be telling everybody they know about their awful experience.
And now for a not-completely-off-topic-anecdote:
My freshman year of college I worked at a retail software store. There was a punk kid in our store who was telling me what a l337 haX3r he was, how he, like, TOTALLY 0WNED this one IRC channel this one time. His mom came in to pick him up just as we started discussing Linux. Mom was in a bitchy, hurry-up-son we-have-to-pick-up-your-sister-from-ballet sort of mood, so when junior pressed his mom to buy one of those Sams books with a Linux CD (Slackware, with the 1.2.13 kernel, I believe) she bought it just to placate him. I have to admit, I was sort of being sadistic, because the kid was such an arrogant juvenile.
The next day, Mom storms into the shop, guns a-blazin'. I distinctly remember that her face reminded me of jiggly red jello. She wanted to know why I did that to her, and how I was going to fix her computer, which junior evidentally trashed. Honestly, I was so fixated on how truly HUGE her eyeballs were that I didn't pay a whole of attention to the rest of the conversation.
Anyway, that was like 1996. And today, we're still saying "Gosh, I hope ma and pa don't accidentally get Linux" because of the backlash. We've come a long, long way. But there's a long, long way to go.
You're absolutely right about that, and I'm a little concerned that they didn't get that the first time through. They've got more Ph.D's than Harvard, and they don't get something like that the first time?
I think Google has such an incredibly large number of people looking at them that they really can't afford to have a 1.0 release of *anything* be cruddy, or people will become jaded. This is, however, a beta release of the notifier, and (I could be blind!) I couldn't find any reference to it either from the main Google homepage or the GMail homepage. So it's not something that is going to be generally visible quite yet. So I think I am jumping the gun on getting down on them this soon.
Now, a Google IM client that uses open transport protocols that don't change every week. That would be awesome, and I will be surprised if they don't have a beta out within the next three months.
The Yahoo notifier I was talking about is just the Yahoo IM client. You don't need to use it for instant messaging, you can use it for notification only if you want.
This is great! I know people who have been holding back on using GMail because of the notification thing. I sometimes still get email at my Yahoo account, and I am notified when I receive them. Every time the Yahoo notification thing pops up I am reminded of how almost-but-not-quite perfect GMail is. This little icon in the tray will end up being a bigger deal than it looks.
I've installed it and it works great. It uses the same slide-up text bubble idiom that AIM and Yahoo and Thunderbird use. But the bubble not only tells you that you have mail but also who it is from and if there is room, the first part of the text of the email. If you missed it, you can right click and select 'Tell me again...' and it will scroll through all your unread emails, so you can get a quick overview of what's going on in your Inbox right now without having to use your browser. Much nicer.
Looking through the comments, it seems to be populated by teenagers titillated at the prospect of having geek content in a softcore porn magazine. But the interesting bit here (as the original poster stated) isn't that they're in Playboy but that they're in Playboy during their quiet period.
/.) has read the full article, I think it is a bit sensationalist to instantly go jumping to the conclusion that this is somehow a breach of SEC rules. They would be breaking the rules if they made forward-looking statements such as earnings or market share, or if they discussed new products and research. From what it looks like from the blurb on the linked article, they are talking about history, which they're allowed to do. They're allowed to talk about their childhood, they're allowed to talk about technology, they're allowed to talk about their lifestyle. They're just not allowed to pump up all the cool things that we haven't seen yet.
Given that nobody here on Slashdot (I am assuming that Playboy employees aren't kernel hackers, and Page and Brin have better things to do than blow time on
Anyway, try not to jump the gun on this. Wait till it comes out before you decide they're being evil.
I think what Iliad is saying here is that consumers really don't care if their browser supports de facto fringe standards. I wish CSS and PNG support (as well as some stable ECMAScript, etc.) were supported, but that's not the name of the game. As long as MSN and Google and ESPN and Craigslist and Slashdot (insert longer list of highly traffiked web sites here) work in IE as-is, there is no reason for IE to change. And there is no reason for those sites to change unless IE changes. (Here I open myself up to charges that increased usage of other browsers like FireFox and Safari could force those sites to change... that's another discussion)
Until recently, security really wasn't an issue for typical web users. I've had people send me credit card information and passwords over standard email. I've pointed out to other people that the web form with which they're submitting their personal or financial information is not secure. I've always tried to get my friends and family to use other browsers because using IE just isn't safe. In all these cases, I generally get a vacant stare, because unless their credit card number is stolen, or somebody assumes their identity, they don't care. Those millions of users Iliad mentions are part of that vacant-stare category. Sure, if Microsoft had a corporate culture more like Google's, they would have internal pressure to fix these problems and be standards-compliant. But MS only feels the pressure when there are financial reasons for doing so.
Web developers would prefer to code web pages in one cross-platform, cross-browser syntax, but thanks to Microsoft's indifference in the matter, web developers have to endlessly tweak things so it looks OK in IE as well as whatever browsers their target audience may be using. Given that the target audience for most web sites are IE users, and given that proprietors of those commercial web sites are more interested in making money than some philosophical desire to be standards compliant, whatever MSIE supports becomes the standard.
Slashdotters know that universal support for CSS would be good. We also know that PNG is a legally pure image format. But in the world of PHB-controlled e-commerce sites and the typical demographic that visit their sites, PNG and universal CSS come second (or third, or forth,
In any event, it seems that the reason Microsoft is going to release 7.0 before Longhorn is because of security concerns. CSS and PNG aren't necessarily related to that.
Agreed. One of the best bits of advice that somebody has given me on the topic of scientific research is about dead-ends. If you know that a line of thinking goes nowhere, and there is literature and good research to support that, it's highly useful to the progress of science because such research provides a big "Dead End - No Outlet" road sign to future generations. There is nothing so useless as proving something wrong twice.
Just food for thought--I read this years ago and found it pretty interesting. I just skimmed it again but didn't spend the time to read it.
The Libertarian Case Against IP
My post here is -5 Offtopic, read accordingly:
I'm a big fan of coffee shops. I don't really mind 'corporate chain' shops like Starbucks, Caribou, or (here in Colorado) Peaberry's. In the abstract, of course I prefer the independent shop. In my experience, indy coffee shops are generally staffed by punks, who give the vibe that you should be lucky that they will sell you coffee, and in the process possibly transfer some of their tatooed hipness. Indy shops apparently think that if they cleaned their floor, bathroom, or windows once in a while, that's an indication of selling out. Again, this is all in my experience. I suspect the reason that chain coffee shops do so well has to do with not only economies of scale but also the consistent level of quality and cleanliness. And location. Location is key. There's a Starbucks right outside the main bus station in downtown Denver. When I get to work in the morning I could either get a coffee there or go to the indy shop right next to my building.
This is what happened the last time I went in the indy shop next to my building. I walked in and stood up at the counter. Nobody else was in the place. The dude behind the counter was preparing sandwiches or something, jamming out to Phish. He saw me come in--we had eye contact. I stood there for half a minute (which is a while, if you play it out) and he said, "I'll be with you in a sec". He continued to do the sandwich thing until he was done--took roughly four minutes. He then took the big platter of sandwiches into the back, wrapped it in saran wrap or something, then came out to me. "What?" he said. Really. Not "Sorry for making you wait for like six minutes." Not "What can I get for you". It was just a half-stoned stare and a throaty "What", as if I were annoying him.
Needless to say, I haven't been back to that particular place, even though it's location is much more convenient than the starbucks' location. This is representative of my impression of indy coffee shops.
A good indy shop (unfortunately, a bit far from home at the moment) is Troubador's in Earl's Court.
gabe
I haven't seen any posts in any of the Slashdot patent threads to make this particular point, so I think I'll throw it out there (BTW, IANAL):
If prior art for a patent can be found, then the patent is somehow not as legally threatening. I don't know if this means the patent is thrown out or completely invalid, but it does seem to help. Again, IANAL.
So if prior art is a good defense against nutty patent awards such as this, and if the open source community (whatever that is) wants to defend itself against such patents, it follows that finding and recording instances of prior art would be beneficial to the community at large.
The OSS world is a veritable machine when it comes to the production of new ideas. Not all of these ideas are necessarily GOOD, but OSS does nonetheless serve the potential of being the basis for prior art as a defense against HyperGlobalMegaCorp[R] Inc.'s silly patent on something completely obvious.
Maybe this would be a good addition to grokdoc, given their interest in both documenting OSS and in legal issues.
Are we a police state yet? No, but we have become a lawyer state, which is much more sophisticated and much harder to stand up to.
I code Java for a living and couldn't agree more. I've only been doing software development for about eight years now, and I'm really beginning to feel that I made a mistake by concentrating too much on Java, for exactly the reasons this guy lists.
A couple of other comments to the parent post were in the vein of "D00d, U need to stop yer bitching and look at the good things about Java". No offense to those posters, but I think they don't have to use Java in the less-than-good places for a living. Sure, Java on the server is great. It's in a position that you can control, so you can (will be able to) take advantage of the goodness that is 1.5. However, Java on the client... well, there's a whole host of reasons why my company is going to be porting our client applications from Java to a cross-platform natively-compiling version.
The problem with Java on the client is that you depend on the end-user to have things set up 'correctly' on their end. In our case, these are lawyers and accountants and other assorted people who could care less about computers. So if you discover that Java 1.3.1_06 and below has a fatal bug in the networking code, you have to write a workaround for that, since it is untenable to ask your customers to install a new JVM, and you also can't simply replace the buggy code. Our code is littered with places where we have to test things like "if the browser is Netscape 4.7, use this code, or if it's IE 5 use this code, but otherwise use this code, unless it's java 1.4.0 in which case it won't run at all due to bugs in the core java classes...". To me, this is a description of a language/runtime that has failed as a viable option for a client platform.
At this point, somebody is thinking of posting as an AC something in the line of "D00d, U need to stop bitching and use SWT" or some drivel like that. Please don't post that, unless you can suggest something that won't force us to have to
- write workarounds for the umpteen-hundred bugs related to browser X on platform Y using language version Z
- force the user to download a 14 MB plugin
- inflate our code from 400k to 3MB because of statically-linked VM bootstrap code
- write code that depends on a platform that keeps changing
That said, the parent post is right on the money, and I wish Sun would see that.
Only on slashdot. In the real world, saying this to a person would likely get you clocked in the face.
Conversely, the thing about the law is that it's there to screw you over when you least expect it. What exactly, using your example, is to be gained with the donkey law? Who is protected by this law? Maybe your mother, if she doesn't want to part with the donkey, but there's a law against selling something that isn't yours against the wishes of the true owner (theft). No, the only person that stands to benefit from this sort of law is the person who can get rich off it: some lawyer.
As I said in my original post, this is just a theory, just an idea. Of course there are problems with it, just as there are with this abbhoration we call a legal system.
As far as the review system is concerned: this works when there is a fairly even distribution of legal resources, which there is most definitiely not. For example: the RIAA was just given a patent for burning CDs immediately after a concert. This puts DiskLive in a bind because now there's legal backing for ClearChannel to mop the floor with them. It's a complete misuse of a legal tool, and there's no way that a company as small as DiskLive could put up a legal fight with CC. So legal review is out.
Google is going to have to spend hard-earned money to undo the damage these state lawmakers have done. If the lawmakers had something better to do (like, nothing, for example, or maybe repealing other dumb laws) this wouldn't be a problem. The thing is, there's no political reason for an elected official to go around cleaning up.
My suggestion is a response to this observation. When I mention this to people, people almost immediately fall into one of two camps: 1) That'd be great! 2) That's retarded. It's not too often that somebody can give me a convincing argument why it wouldn't work (or why it would), and you haven't either.
I think it's a GOOD thing for lawmakers to revise old statutes every once in a while, rather than just adding more to them. The legal code, like the tax code, is just too complicated for people to understand, and frankly I think it hurts our economy.
This definitely is a tricky concept, and the points that you raise are definitely good ones. My rationalle for making the re-vote harder is to avoid the situation where the lawmakers look at their morning docket and just say "yeah, this all looks good" and just vote with the party line. Furthermore, if a law was passed some time ago and it has turned out to be a good law, then lawmakers would catch flak for trying to overturn it.
In any event, there are two big problems that you bring up, but I don't think this situation would make the problem worse:
1) Corruption and political winds: Politicians are already incredibly corrupt, or at least, they use horrible judgement. And there are always going to be political winds. Sure, if a controversial law came up for a revote this last go-around, people on both sides of the issue certainly would have made a huge noise about it, and it would have sparked national debate--but national debate is something we've long ago exchanged for national voyeurism (think Condit, think Lewinsky, think Schwartzenegger) and i would definitely welcome it back.
2) Riders: You're absolutely correct that riders would be a problem. If I attach, say, a pointless pork project to an otherwise acceptable bill, lawmakers are currently forced to vote for the entirety of the bill. This is the root of the problem and the solution is to keep the scope of bills narrow. That's an entirely different problem, so if that was fixed, it wouldn't be a problem for the recurring vote scenario.
I'm also sort of a conspiracy theorist, at least when it comes to restricting the growth of lawbooks. Consider that lawmakers are by and large lawyers, and even those that aren't are still subject to very powerful lobbies. They have a vested interest in keeping the law complicated, because it not only keeps them employed, it also keeps them rich. No, lawmakers would never go for this idea.
(This also goes for the accounting and finance industries along with the IRS Tax Code: a simplified tax code would put thousands of people out of work!)
Just one of my many ideas on how to make government better: affix a time limit on every law. When the time limit is up, they have to vote on it again, and it has to pass with a larger percentage than it did the first time. Not only would this cull out silly knee-jerk laws like Patriot or this Google nonsense, it would also force lawmakers to deal with their mistakes by repealing laws, rather than spending time fucking things up for everybody else and increasing the number of laws on the books.
Re California: If Cally is so cool, why are you all migrating to Colorado?
I just have to point this out:
"So in conclusion, Jakob Nielsen's latest AlertBox has no scientific validity whatsoever. (ok-cancel.com)
amen.
OK, details on these nefarious Monsanto things?
Wouldn't it be cool if you could go to the online grocery web page and
* type in your own recipe, or
* pick from an easy-to-use list of recipies
* how many people will be involved w/each meal
...and it gives you not only the list of ingredients and how much of each you will need, but also a map in the store to optimize your time?
You could do this from home, or from a computer kiosk at the grocery store itself. I always forget an ingredient, or spend too much time wandering around the store looking for a hard-to-find item.
Now THIS would be a useful application of technology to a very low-tech thing. (Remember, spray on usability is bad)
Most lowtech/hightech fusions that have gone down in publicly hilarious fireballs are due to the gross MISapplication of technology. Simply using a web page to pick out individual ingredients (separate from what the meal of which they are just a component) is just taking the existing paradigm and putting it on a web page. Won't work.
Lots of non-high-tech markets have industry groups that regulate quality and standards, above and beyond (sometimes below) governmental standards. Sometimes this is just for marketing reasons (e.g. "Intel Inside" but other instances it has significant meaning to people who know what to look for (e.g. "not animal tested", "OSI approved").
Google could do the world another favor and let software groups put the "We follow Google's lead" seal on their internet software that lets users know, just from seeing the seal, that the software isn't evil.