People don't often worry about tigers or apes escaping, either of which are a lot smarter than any lizard from 64+ million years ago.
Crows are quite smart. They have been found to use tools to solve problems, have memory of people that they like and don't like, et al. Parrots as well. I'd say crows are probably better at problem-solving than tigers are. And so as modern birds descend from dinosaurs, there's no reason to believe some species of dinosaurs weren't equally as smart as crows are.
Is there even any case law which upholds EULAs as enforceable? AFAIK a EULA validity case hasn't gone to the Supreme Court. I guess Steam is a little more in the clear, but in cases where you must buy a product before you can even read the license agreement, I don't see how those could ever hold up to legal scrutiny.
Twitter has been a powerful tool for social change, especially during the 'Arab Spring'. There's a lot of garbage there, but there's a lot of garbage everywhere. But for disseminating news and information quickly and democratically, it's really changed the way people communicate. Twitter and Facebook really shouldn't be spoken in the same breath. They serve different purposes, and while Twitter is an open land, Facebook is a walled prison.
Yeah, sure there were 'free' sites in the 90s -- that's because they were all seeded with VC money during Dotcom 1.0. There's plenty of those now as well, but most of them are social networks whose business model is hoping to get bought out.
1. Free doesn't mean free, it just means the cost is in another form (usually, your privacy) 2. VC money is the evil of the industry. Free products are not sustainable. It's akin to the Chinese flooding local markets with cheap goods. Local goods manufacturers cannot compete, and in the same way startups who want to build an ethically-minded product which has a real cost cannot compete. 3. The battle of the early web was over advertising vs. subscription. People chose 'free' because free. But people weren't happy with even that arrangement. Now they want truly free, in the same way people want free music, free movies. Free content is unsustainable. Greed destroyed the Good Thing we had. Greed from site owners who kept putting more ads on their sites, and greed from users who want something for nothing. The problem is, where do we go from here? Will younger generations who grew up with Facebook consider their privacy free? Is our privacy the only currency left? 4. Advertising is not necessarily dead. On the web it is becoming so. On mobile devices, most people can't block ads in apps. However we have yet to see mobile ad revenue reflect this captive audience. 5. The open, free web is dying. Mobile device apps are replacing it with proprietary silos of content. Oh sure, the web will stay around for a quite a while, but it will cease to be the content flagship. In company meetings the phrase "oh, we should probably make a web site for this" will be heard instead of "oh, we should probably make an app for this". Two companies, Apple and Google, will control how content is delivered to you. How advertising is shown, what content is shown. The age of democratic knowledge is drawing to a close, and the age of knowledge autocracies is dawning.
I'm not sure why this article was posted on slashdot without mentioning that the shooter was in grad school for neuroscience. It seems as least somewhat relevant to this audience to reveal, without ascribing any causation.
How does a guy who was smart enough and focused enough to be going for his graduate degree in neuroscience end up dressing up as the Joker and going off the deep end? I suppose it will come out that he was suffering from emotional issues combined with some psychological problems, but you would think he would be more aware of these issues than the average person due to his study of interest.
She's probably writing code to save up for her own boob job.
Okay mate, I think you need to go back to the basement for a timeout. Your misogynistic and ignorant comment certainly gives credence to her point-of-view.
No, I think most people want to see prisoners rehabilitated, though this is hard to follow through on when they are released into the same economic and cultural mess that got them into trouble in the first place.
What I think people don't want is to see prisoners be provided things like cable TVs with their tax money, when they can't even afford such a luxury themselves.
Then there are private prisons, which don't want to see prisoners rehabilitated at all because that takes away a "resource" from their industry.
Judges -- for better or worse -- cannot invalidate patents. They can only rule on whether company X has infringed on the patent as it stands. It is up to company X to make a separate challenge to the validity of the patent through the Patent Office.
Of course, prior art also seems to be ignored during the patent approval process. Patent System: fucked from A to Z.
RMS is typically strident and way off-course from the meat of Emily White's post and David Lowery's response. His ridiculous solution for compensating artists is to tax internet access and distribute the profits to artists in a scaled manner via some sort of popularity poll. RMS should've stayed out of this debate.
When music was imprinted on a physical good, the music itself was physical. It was part of something you bought, touched. The cover art, liner notes, it was part of the experience of the music. Paying for the music was as much a certainty as paying for a magazine or cup of coffee. No one debated that owning music meant you paid for it.
When you transfer the concept of music to a digital realm, that breaks down. I think that humans by and large have trouble with the concept of digital goods. They see it as theoretical. The experience is no longer tangible. And so by proxy, the artist itself becomes theoretical, intangible. And when that happens, the moral imperative that the artist be compensated goes out the window. And you can see that in Emily's post. She states that she doesn't think she and her peers "will ever pay for albums." She drive to a coffee shop to spend money on her organic, fair trade latte to make sure workers in Columbia are fairly compensated for their labor, but she won't pay for music because it's too inconvenient.
So why is it she and her generation will pay extra for fair trade coffee, but not pay an artist for their work? I can only conclude that her brain cannot process that the music streaming in to her iPhone and her laptop was actually created by people who labored equally. It's just something that exists intangibly, but still something that she desires be omnipresent in her life.
The lack of attachment to a physical good is one part of it, but there is a wider social shift at work here. We have seen a shift from pre-war craftsman trades to post-war industrialized society, and now to a western society that format-shifted to only create ideas, not products. The average person in western countries no longer associates products with the people who create them. Why should they, when most things are mass-produced in Chinese, Taiwanese, and Indian factories? So when even tangible products become detached from the human context in which they were created, younger generations that grew up after this shift to globalized production will not imagine or care that digital goods were products produced by real people who are struggling to get by. This is a much tougher nut to crack than the immediate issues of digital music.
More aptly, the Big Red Button on the TRS-80 Model III computer. When I was in 4th grade, they had those in the school computer lab. The teachers had taped paper with "do not press!" on top of the button. Of course, a 4th grader wants nothing more than to press it. Our tendency towards chaos, or at least the curiosity to see what arises from a change in the system, starts young.
I don't think so. Cases that can't be opened means batteries that can't be recycled. So consumers end up throwing away the old iPhone instead of recycling the battery.
1. Hmm, I can open the case on my Mac Pro just fine and replace anything I like. The Retina Macbook Pro is one product out of their lineup, most of which are fairly customer-maintainable. And the materials Apple uses by-and-large lead the industry in environmental friendliness. Surely the Retina MBP is worrisome in terms of signaling a trend, but I hope this backpedaling will also show in their future manufacturing practices.
2. Have you ever known someone who actually threw away their iPhone? Come on. I still have one of the original iPhones, and the battery works just fine. And even if they did decide to throw it away, Apple has a recycling program. To wit: do you know anyone that's still rocking a Treo from the 2000s? Smartphones get passed down via the used market, but eventually they all fall out of favor. At least Apple has a path to sustainable recycling for the product when that time comes. You may disagree with the disposable culture that smartphones and tablet devices bring, but that's a different issue and something that applies industry-wide.
And I can't speak to the sustainability of Apple's headquarters, but California building code requires that commercial building windows be un-openable. At least anything built since the 90's...I'm not quite sure when that code went into effect. I don't know much about green building design, but I would imagine openable windows in a giant air conditioned building would result in a lot of wasted energy. So I'm not sure what your point was there.
p.s. -- I've been making the point lately of not using the word 'consumer'. That's a word made up by corporations to change our relationship to big business. Customer denotes that the business exists to serve us, consumer denotes that we exist to serve the business. I don't like to give that word or that type of business relationship legitimacy.
It reminds "fans" to think about the environmental (and social) impact of Apple's manufacturing practices, and believe me, that is not something Apple wants people thinking about
Guess what! Apple's products are still much more environmentally-friendly than any other PC or phone manufacturer. Apple can do better, but they could do a LOT worse. And most PCs that the Linux slashdot crowd run ARE doing worse.
Yes, it should have been in the deal to begin with, and probably now will be, which might raise the costs of said goods. Or, alternatively we might see less major label music artists in video games.
This ruling doesn't say that separate payments to copyright holders for performance of the work is unconstitutional, it says that a discrete creative work cannot be broken into its constituent parts for financial double-dipping. Any individual creative works that are used must be licensed properly before the work is released to the public.
The skinhead culture started in the early 60s, when reggae and rocksteady were big in Britain. For whatever reason, the culture adopted the music and the style and fused it with their working class fashion. At the time, there was nothing inherently racist about skinheads. That happened in the 70s and early 80s, mostly fueled by racist ideas of foreigners stealing jobs in what was a depressed economy. It was this racist form of skinhead that was imported into the U.S. Most people in the US only equate the term with white supremacists.
By the way, the British film This Is England does a pretty great job of covering the early 80s skinhead scene, and is just a really good film in general.
Wowthat is so philosophically incorrect, I can only assume you must be making some kind of ironic joke. Jefferson was adamantly against industrialization and big business that was encroaching from Britain on America's primarily agrarian society. He was against the power big companies could wield over employees, and thus over society itself.
Now Alexander Hamilton, yeah he would've been high-fiving the Supreme Court justices over Citizens United. Hamilton would *love* the 21st century. Hell, he got the whole snowball to hell rolling when he pushed through the United States' first federal banking system.
I know you're just being funny, but this is/. so I'll press the pedantic button. Benjamin Franklin actually had very little to do with the creation of the Constitution. Although he was a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, by that time Franklin was getting up in years and was rather frail, and generally let the younger delegates battle it out. The few times that Franklin did speak at some length, he would either ramble about something that didn't really concern the topic at hand, or he would suggest solutions that weren't very well thought-out. However, the other delegates respected him immensely, and so they let him speak without interruption.
The more likely undead to rewrite the Constitution would be either Zombie James Madison or Zombie Charles Pickney. Zombie Madison, when not thinking about brainzzzz, would likely take away some of the powers of the national government that he was so adamant to give during the Convention. Madison began to change his views after seeing the Federalist policies of Alexander Hamilton and President John Adams.
"Evolution is evidence that God is alive"? That sounds like 'Intelligent Design' to me. There is no evidence of a supernatural power having been involved in the evolutionary process of anything.
You kind of circled around my central point though. Sure, Microsoft could have used HTML/JS, just as Palm did. My point is, the operating system itself had to be different. OS support for multi-touch gestures like page flicking, system-level UI interfaces that make sense in a tablet where you don't have a mouse available, developer APIs for things like viewing media fullscreen. But what Microsoft did was tweak Windows XP to give it pen input support as an alternate form of text entry. Basically, it was Windows XP.
So how were manufacturers supposed to innovate with that? Microsoft didn't spend the research dollars on building a new OS to fit the tablet. They just tried to jam XP into a portable format. I think manufacturers saw this was a half-assed offering, and weren't going to invest heavily when MS certainly didn't. Now, fast-forward to today, you can certainly see MS being justified in criticizing its vendors for not innovating with Windows 8 on tablets. But back then? It was a mess. And I'm sure Bill Gates was pissed when he saw the iPad, but he was so entrenched in a corporate culture that put innovation in UI and user experience pretty low on the list that he didn't have much of a chance.
The iPad's success wasn't any one thing, but surely the App Store (and the ease of creating multi-touch apps with their SDK) was as significant to the equation as the hardware. Apple recognized that a different hardware paradigm dictated different kinds of software. Different ways of interacting with them. And they knew they needed to make this software effortlessly within reach of your average consumer.
Microsoft never considered this aspect, because Bill Gates (the tablet was his pet project) was never really a software visionary. He never thought about re-architecting an OS specifically for tablets from the ground up.
I think that's what most of us wanted, considering China is a communist country who is rapidly increasing the size and technical capacity of their military. And of course the nuclear warheads they have. Why would we want to give them cutting-edge missile technology?
Slashdot Mirror
Crows are quite smart. They have been found to use tools to solve problems, have memory of people that they like and don't like, et al. Parrots as well. I'd say crows are probably better at problem-solving than tigers are. And so as modern birds descend from dinosaurs, there's no reason to believe some species of dinosaurs weren't equally as smart as crows are.
Is there even any case law which upholds EULAs as enforceable? AFAIK a EULA validity case hasn't gone to the Supreme Court. I guess Steam is a little more in the clear, but in cases where you must buy a product before you can even read the license agreement, I don't see how those could ever hold up to legal scrutiny.
What's up, snopes. Nice tall tale, though.
Twitter has been a powerful tool for social change, especially during the 'Arab Spring'. There's a lot of garbage there, but there's a lot of garbage everywhere. But for disseminating news and information quickly and democratically, it's really changed the way people communicate. Twitter and Facebook really shouldn't be spoken in the same breath. They serve different purposes, and while Twitter is an open land, Facebook is a walled prison.
Yeah, sure there were 'free' sites in the 90s -- that's because they were all seeded with VC money during Dotcom 1.0. There's plenty of those now as well, but most of them are social networks whose business model is hoping to get bought out.
1. Free doesn't mean free, it just means the cost is in another form (usually, your privacy)
2. VC money is the evil of the industry. Free products are not sustainable. It's akin to the Chinese flooding local markets with cheap goods. Local goods manufacturers cannot compete, and in the same way startups who want to build an ethically-minded product which has a real cost cannot compete.
3. The battle of the early web was over advertising vs. subscription. People chose 'free' because free. But people weren't happy with even that arrangement. Now they want truly free, in the same way people want free music, free movies. Free content is unsustainable. Greed destroyed the Good Thing we had. Greed from site owners who kept putting more ads on their sites, and greed from users who want something for nothing. The problem is, where do we go from here? Will younger generations who grew up with Facebook consider their privacy free? Is our privacy the only currency left?
4. Advertising is not necessarily dead. On the web it is becoming so. On mobile devices, most people can't block ads in apps. However we have yet to see mobile ad revenue reflect this captive audience.
5. The open, free web is dying. Mobile device apps are replacing it with proprietary silos of content. Oh sure, the web will stay around for a quite a while, but it will cease to be the content flagship. In company meetings the phrase "oh, we should probably make a web site for this" will be heard instead of "oh, we should probably make an app for this". Two companies, Apple and Google, will control how content is delivered to you. How advertising is shown, what content is shown. The age of democratic knowledge is drawing to a close, and the age of knowledge autocracies is dawning.
This is just a BIT ironic, or at the least bad timing, considering the Colorado shooter was in grad school for neuroscience.
I'm not sure why this article was posted on slashdot without mentioning that the shooter was in grad school for neuroscience. It seems as least somewhat relevant to this audience to reveal, without ascribing any causation.
How does a guy who was smart enough and focused enough to be going for his graduate degree in neuroscience end up dressing up as the Joker and going off the deep end? I suppose it will come out that he was suffering from emotional issues combined with some psychological problems, but you would think he would be more aware of these issues than the average person due to his study of interest.
Okay mate, I think you need to go back to the basement for a timeout. Your misogynistic and ignorant comment certainly gives credence to her point-of-view.
No, I think most people want to see prisoners rehabilitated, though this is hard to follow through on when they are released into the same economic and cultural mess that got them into trouble in the first place.
What I think people don't want is to see prisoners be provided things like cable TVs with their tax money, when they can't even afford such a luxury themselves.
Then there are private prisons, which don't want to see prisoners rehabilitated at all because that takes away a "resource" from their industry.
Judges -- for better or worse -- cannot invalidate patents. They can only rule on whether company X has infringed on the patent as it stands. It is up to company X to make a separate challenge to the validity of the patent through the Patent Office.
Of course, prior art also seems to be ignored during the patent approval process. Patent System: fucked from A to Z.
RMS is typically strident and way off-course from the meat of Emily White's post and David Lowery's response. His ridiculous solution for compensating artists is to tax internet access and distribute the profits to artists in a scaled manner via some sort of popularity poll. RMS should've stayed out of this debate.
When music was imprinted on a physical good, the music itself was physical. It was part of something you bought, touched. The cover art, liner notes, it was part of the experience of the music. Paying for the music was as much a certainty as paying for a magazine or cup of coffee. No one debated that owning music meant you paid for it.
When you transfer the concept of music to a digital realm, that breaks down. I think that humans by and large have trouble with the concept of digital goods. They see it as theoretical. The experience is no longer tangible. And so by proxy, the artist itself becomes theoretical, intangible. And when that happens, the moral imperative that the artist be compensated goes out the window. And you can see that in Emily's post. She states that she doesn't think she and her peers "will ever pay for albums." She drive to a coffee shop to spend money on her organic, fair trade latte to make sure workers in Columbia are fairly compensated for their labor, but she won't pay for music because it's too inconvenient.
So why is it she and her generation will pay extra for fair trade coffee, but not pay an artist for their work? I can only conclude that her brain cannot process that the music streaming in to her iPhone and her laptop was actually created by people who labored equally. It's just something that exists intangibly, but still something that she desires be omnipresent in her life.
The lack of attachment to a physical good is one part of it, but there is a wider social shift at work here. We have seen a shift from pre-war craftsman trades to post-war industrialized society, and now to a western society that format-shifted to only create ideas, not products. The average person in western countries no longer associates products with the people who create them. Why should they, when most things are mass-produced in Chinese, Taiwanese, and Indian factories? So when even tangible products become detached from the human context in which they were created, younger generations that grew up after this shift to globalized production will not imagine or care that digital goods were products produced by real people who are struggling to get by. This is a much tougher nut to crack than the immediate issues of digital music.
Yeah...keep telling yourself that, as they stuff the cost of the phone into your contract.
The difference is, if there's a fire in the house, your cloud will go up in smoke.
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.
More aptly, the Big Red Button on the TRS-80 Model III computer. When I was in 4th grade, they had those in the school computer lab. The teachers had taped paper with "do not press!" on top of the button. Of course, a 4th grader wants nothing more than to press it. Our tendency towards chaos, or at least the curiosity to see what arises from a change in the system, starts young.
1. Hmm, I can open the case on my Mac Pro just fine and replace anything I like. The Retina Macbook Pro is one product out of their lineup, most of which are fairly customer-maintainable. And the materials Apple uses by-and-large lead the industry in environmental friendliness. Surely the Retina MBP is worrisome in terms of signaling a trend, but I hope this backpedaling will also show in their future manufacturing practices.
2. Have you ever known someone who actually threw away their iPhone? Come on. I still have one of the original iPhones, and the battery works just fine. And even if they did decide to throw it away, Apple has a recycling program. To wit: do you know anyone that's still rocking a Treo from the 2000s? Smartphones get passed down via the used market, but eventually they all fall out of favor. At least Apple has a path to sustainable recycling for the product when that time comes. You may disagree with the disposable culture that smartphones and tablet devices bring, but that's a different issue and something that applies industry-wide.
And I can't speak to the sustainability of Apple's headquarters, but California building code requires that commercial building windows be un-openable. At least anything built since the 90's...I'm not quite sure when that code went into effect. I don't know much about green building design, but I would imagine openable windows in a giant air conditioned building would result in a lot of wasted energy. So I'm not sure what your point was there.
p.s. -- I've been making the point lately of not using the word 'consumer'. That's a word made up by corporations to change our relationship to big business. Customer denotes that the business exists to serve us, consumer denotes that we exist to serve the business. I don't like to give that word or that type of business relationship legitimacy.
Guess what! Apple's products are still much more environmentally-friendly than any other PC or phone manufacturer. Apple can do better, but they could do a LOT worse. And most PCs that the Linux slashdot crowd run ARE doing worse.
Yes, it should have been in the deal to begin with, and probably now will be, which might raise the costs of said goods. Or, alternatively we might see less major label music artists in video games.
This ruling doesn't say that separate payments to copyright holders for performance of the work is unconstitutional, it says that a discrete creative work cannot be broken into its constituent parts for financial double-dipping. Any individual creative works that are used must be licensed properly before the work is released to the public.
The skinhead culture started in the early 60s, when reggae and rocksteady were big in Britain. For whatever reason, the culture adopted the music and the style and fused it with their working class fashion. At the time, there was nothing inherently racist about skinheads. That happened in the 70s and early 80s, mostly fueled by racist ideas of foreigners stealing jobs in what was a depressed economy. It was this racist form of skinhead that was imported into the U.S. Most people in the US only equate the term with white supremacists.
By the way, the British film This Is England does a pretty great job of covering the early 80s skinhead scene, and is just a really good film in general.
Wowthat is so philosophically incorrect, I can only assume you must be making some kind of ironic joke. Jefferson was adamantly against industrialization and big business that was encroaching from Britain on America's primarily agrarian society. He was against the power big companies could wield over employees, and thus over society itself.
Now Alexander Hamilton, yeah he would've been high-fiving the Supreme Court justices over Citizens United. Hamilton would *love* the 21st century. Hell, he got the whole snowball to hell rolling when he pushed through the United States' first federal banking system.
I know you're just being funny, but this is /. so I'll press the pedantic button. Benjamin Franklin actually had very little to do with the creation of the Constitution. Although he was a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, by that time Franklin was getting up in years and was rather frail, and generally let the younger delegates battle it out. The few times that Franklin did speak at some length, he would either ramble about something that didn't really concern the topic at hand, or he would suggest solutions that weren't very well thought-out. However, the other delegates respected him immensely, and so they let him speak without interruption.
The more likely undead to rewrite the Constitution would be either Zombie James Madison or Zombie Charles Pickney. Zombie Madison, when not thinking about brainzzzz, would likely take away some of the powers of the national government that he was so adamant to give during the Convention. Madison began to change his views after seeing the Federalist policies of Alexander Hamilton and President John Adams.
"Evolution is evidence that God is alive"? That sounds like 'Intelligent Design' to me. There is no evidence of a supernatural power having been involved in the evolutionary process of anything.
You kind of circled around my central point though. Sure, Microsoft could have used HTML/JS, just as Palm did. My point is, the operating system itself had to be different. OS support for multi-touch gestures like page flicking, system-level UI interfaces that make sense in a tablet where you don't have a mouse available, developer APIs for things like viewing media fullscreen. But what Microsoft did was tweak Windows XP to give it pen input support as an alternate form of text entry. Basically, it was Windows XP.
So how were manufacturers supposed to innovate with that? Microsoft didn't spend the research dollars on building a new OS to fit the tablet. They just tried to jam XP into a portable format. I think manufacturers saw this was a half-assed offering, and weren't going to invest heavily when MS certainly didn't. Now, fast-forward to today, you can certainly see MS being justified in criticizing its vendors for not innovating with Windows 8 on tablets. But back then? It was a mess. And I'm sure Bill Gates was pissed when he saw the iPad, but he was so entrenched in a corporate culture that put innovation in UI and user experience pretty low on the list that he didn't have much of a chance.
The iPad's success wasn't any one thing, but surely the App Store (and the ease of creating multi-touch apps with their SDK) was as significant to the equation as the hardware. Apple recognized that a different hardware paradigm dictated different kinds of software. Different ways of interacting with them. And they knew they needed to make this software effortlessly within reach of your average consumer.
Microsoft never considered this aspect, because Bill Gates (the tablet was his pet project) was never really a software visionary. He never thought about re-architecting an OS specifically for tablets from the ground up.
I think that's what most of us wanted, considering China is a communist country who is rapidly increasing the size and technical capacity of their military. And of course the nuclear warheads they have. Why would we want to give them cutting-edge missile technology?
Welcome to 2003: Room 641A.