I would take that chance in a second. To turn the question around, what do you think the odds are that commercial spaceflight will ever become viable in your lifetime? I regard spaceflight as one of the shining scientific achievements of all time, and I bet that I, personally, will never get a chance to take part in it. The odds that I'll be able to afford to take a trip into space are about 0. Thus, I have to look for other alternatives. Mir isn't the safest, but the Soyuz rockets are reasonably reliable. All spacecraft are built by the lowest bidder, so why worry about this one?
Walt
P.S. Does anyone know where I sign up to become a "Geek in Space"?
Re:like lawsuits, smarmy unresearched rants are go
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 1
Suck admits to preaching to the choir in the article, which I found hilarious. In the section "Discussions and cries of hypocrisy and malformed analogies have consumed megabyte upon megabyte of masturbatory rage and self-indulgent self-righteousness." Suck links "self-indulgent self-righteousness" to their own article! I thought that was hilarious, and I'm surprised more people don't give them credit for their sense of irony.
This would even protect you from the Club Card stores associating your credit card with your club card. Say that you pay cash for everything and also keep several club cards with bogus information on them. If you slip up and accidentally use a credit card, they can link up the club card accounts based on your CC number. With the new technology, they would not be able to do that so easily.
I would say there are certain fields in which having a degree helps more than a certification. Being a software architect does require experience designing large systems, but it helps a lot to have formal software design courses under your belt. Perhaps most importantly, you have reasonable expectations about how long it will take to write a given program. Something that most programmers fail to comprehend unless they've seen the research or done it a half-dozen times: Time spent actually writing the code should be well under 20% of the time budgeted for the entire project. I know it sounds painful, but in terms of programmer hours, companies spend the majority of time in design, fixing defects (bugs to those who regard them as inevitable rather than the product of poor design), and maintenance. This is just an example of the kind of thing you learn in a degree program. Most companies and certifications don't bother with a strong software engineering component, and I think it really contributes to the buggy code we all see every day. Having to take software design as a course and practice doing it right helps.
Also, if your idea of a fun job is to explore things that no one has ever done before, a degree and some research experience is very beneficial. Rather than go work for established software companies, I choose to take my BS from (shameless plus) Harvey Mudd and do research. While most places that are doing research require at least a BS as a standard thing, it makes sense because they don't want to be stuck with someone who has no experience in pursuing open-ended problems with no known solution. If you think you're in a research job, and you don't discover at least occaisonally that what you've been trying to do for the last week has been proved to be impossible, you're not doing research. Having a degree gets you experience with that sort of thing.
If you ask me, it's pretty damn sad that we have to rely on one deep pockets industry-funded group to protect us from one with even deeper pockets. As it becomes more and more expensive to affect the political process, I can't see this situation getting much better. Face it, with billions in profits it only takes a few tenths of a percent to buy several slightly used senators on key committees. Companies have become so large that even if they only devote a few cents of every sale they can afford lobbying and cotributions on a huge scale. I'll never miss the money that goes to taking away my freedoms, but I'll sure miss the freedoms. The EFF is a good start to pooling the power of freedom-minded individuals, but it's small and doesn't have the same level of funding. Ironically, people who have become wealthy in the last few years due to their success in technology, and should know better, are not helping out. Paul Allen owns a bunch of cable companies, for instance. You don't see him offering millions to the EFF to allow them to hire a full time staff of technical experts to advise all the clueless people in Washington. Instead, by conglomerating cable companies he is contributing to the imbalance.
I don't mean to be so negative. All is not lost; all it takes is consumers waking up and realizing that there are a lot more of them than there are CEOs.
Perhaps some definition of the term "clean room" is in order. A clean room implementation is one in which the hardware is treated as a black box, and then software is written to imitate its behavior under ever conceivable circumstance. The classic example of this was the Compaq reverse engineering of the original IBM PC BIOS. It would have been trivial for Compaq simply to slurp the BIOS off the EEPROM and make copies onto their own chips. That would be stealing, and not OK.
What they did instead was to give the BIOS to engineers who has not seen the assembler code on the chip and instruct them to duplicate it based on its behavior. So they sent various signals to the chip, and watched what it did as it booted up, and basically systematically looked at precisely what it was doing. They were then, with some trial and error, able to write code that duplicated all the observable behavior of the IBM BIOS. That is a cleanroom implementation, as evidenced by the fact that Compaq came out with a fine clone of the BIOS and was legally allowed to sell it. Mere use of the hardware is not enough to make it not a clean implementation
The CueCat reverse engineering is remarkably similar to this, except much more simple. The hackers merely had to figure out what the output meant, which apparently was pretty easy. They treated the CueCat as a black box, recording the output from the scanner and figuring out what it meant. No harm, no foul.
I like the comment later on in the artcle that "The RADEON supports IDCT (inverse discreet cosine transfer), which accelerates MPEG2 decoding." Thank goodness they won't be transferring my cosine out in the open, without any protection from prying eyes! I appreciate an MPEG board with a sense of decorum.
Why wouldn't you want to pay your caterer? My DJ is a PayPal user, and I just sent him our deposit by PayPal. At least I don't have to trust him with my credit card number... Of course, it's been a week, and we still haven't gotten back a signed contract, so maybe I should have used the credit card.
This is also the same company that trampled all over Sony's Restaurant. An unfortunate restaurant owner, whose nickname was Sony, pronounced "Sonny," named her restaurant after her nickname. This restaurant was started long before Sony was even selling products in the US, and yet they still sued her for trademark infringement. Not having money to defend against Sony's lawyers, she had to give in. Hell, she should have been able to sue *them*, especially since they now have restaurants at the Sony Metreon in San Francisco. Sigh, unless you've got deep pockets and the willingness to put up with the ultimate time suck that is a lawsuit, it's better just to stay underground, and like the parent post says, get the source out.
I think the "minimal help" refers to the fact that they used humans to put the motors into the robots. I assume the computer was told that there would be a motor of such and such a size and power, and it designed stuff based on that assumption. Each time it produced a design, a human would put the motor in and see what happened. I'm sure it would be possible to have yet another robot be in charge of putting the motor into the new robots, but what would the point be? I'm still impressed at the number of different kinds of locomotion the robot was able to come up with through experimentation.
There was an article in Discover Magazine about this a year or so ago. I believe it was a simpler chip than a voice recognition, its task was to generate a tone of a certain frequency. This is not as simple as it sounds; a constant frequency requires a timer, which is quite a large number of gates. The chip that the neural net designed used a very small number of gates, something like half that of the smallest human attempt. However, as you comment, it did have unconnected branches that would make the chip stop functioning when they were removed. The real problem was not the branches, which could be left intact, but the fact that the design would not work when moved to another FPGA of the same model. I think the solution for this was to use a bunch of different FPGAs and switch which one the program was run on at random.
I think the comment was a gentle joke about the AI's sharing their results amongst themselves. "Look, I was able to make a swimming robot with these parameters!" Actually, it probably would help the AIs get to a solution more quickly.
The Institute for Objectivist Studies has no affiliation with Ayn Rand whatsoever. I know, that sounds silly, but bear with me. IOS was founded by David Kelly, who was kicked out of "official" Objectivism for, essentially, disagreeing with Ayn Rand's followers about whether it is possible for someone to believe in collectivism through honest error. That is, could someone erroneously but honestly believe that Socialism is a good thing. the official Objectivists at the Ayn Rand Institute (founded and endorsed by her) believe that such an error is impossible or nearly so. Kelly believes that humans are capable of making tremendous errors in judgement, enough even to include the Objectivist opposite of goodness, collectivism.
After being kicked out, Kelly started the IOS, which is pursuing little "o" objectivism and having conferences, etc. However, since Ayn Rand defines Objectivism as *her* philosophy, there is no such thing as an Objectivist who disagrees with her. She has been quoted as saying something along the lines of "If you want to use my ideas, fine. But if you disagree with them in any significant way, do not call yourself an Objectivist." Kelly et al may call themselves Objectivists, but according to Ayn Rand they are not.
That said, there are not significant practical differences in the ethical and political beliefs of IOS and ARI, so anyone who is involved with those groups can be counted on to be very much on the individualist, enlightened self-interest end of the political spectrum. Like me, for instance...:)
In fairness, it's not exactly a trivial issue to deal with configuring games to run on all the linux systems out their either. What's funny is that MS is centralized, with no one allowed to make changes unless the designers approve, and yet it has the same problems with different platforms as Linux. For Linux, where anyone can make changes to the system, to be doing only as poorly as MS in terms of consistent configuration is pretty good. Just think of all the different distros out there, and yet most software is easily portable among them.
Walt
Re:No console competes with the genre of games for
on
Salon on the XBox
·
· Score: 3
If you read the article, PC games *aren't* popular. "Console games can sell a whole bunch more copies," says Keighley. "Console games like Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot have sold about 5, 8, million minimum. The biggest hit PC game will sell maybe 2 million copies. Half-Life is up at that number now. Myst has a bit short of 4 million copies after more than a half-decade." They may be somewhat shallow (although I would argue that good console RPGs are not less deep than their PC counterparts), but they are nothing if not popular.
If you admit that this sort of question can help the community as a whole, why does it matter that the answers will be used by only one person. This person is taking time to refute patent idocy, whic is a Good Thing. I would think the least/. can do is post it as a discussion and help out. I agree, there's a lot of stupid patents out there, and/. certainly can't be responsible for finding prior art for all of them, but this particular patent seems especially overbroad and far-reaching.
As a side note, is there a stupid patent archive somewhere? Where people could post a link to a moronic patent and have others take a look at it. Sort of the Oracle for patents.
An evaulation chip that is a production chip is not a reasonable thing to be screwed up. An evaulation unit is like a video card manufacturer giving boards to reviewers in advance of them going on sale to consumers. It's the same as the retail product, but without the slowness of going through the retail distribution chain. The Intel part is the same chip that was already working its way through the chain to be sold to OEMs. It is not a preview or a sample. Think of it as being the same as an early copy of software once it has gone "gold". Same as retail, just earlier.
Acid-free paper does not have a lifespan that would come into play on the scale of a human lifetime. As long as a book has been stored out of sunlight, it will be perfectly readable perhaps hundreds of years in the future. I have very inexpensive paper from the 1800s that was used by a great-great-great aunt or somebody for her math and spelling exercises. This was scratch paper, and yet it is perfectly readable. Sure, it is cracking a little around the edges, but the point is the loss is not catastrophic.
Computer documents tend to be lost catastrophically (be completely unreadable) and this has happened in less than 50 years. My dad was programming at MIT 1963-1969, and has punchcards and source printouts from code he wrote then. I'm pretty sure the number of systems that can read and run those now could be counted on one hand. Sure, computers are much more ubiquitous now. In the early days a given computer might be unique, now there are millions of popular models. However, have you tried buying parts for an IBM PC, one of the originals? IBM sold quite a few of these, and yet most of them have been thrown out because they are no longer useful.
I'm pretty sure that there are no specific "freedom of the press laws," just the familiar "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;...". Can anyone supply a reference that says the press have greater protections on their speech than private individuals? Even if there were such protections, I don't believe it should matter. From my point of view, 2600 is as much a news entity as CNN. Besides, the DMCA is explicit about DeCSS being illegal; if it can violate the freedom of speech clause, why not the freedom of the press clause?
Walt
P.S. I'm not sure that people watching/. told CNN to pull the link. More likely, an eager reader wrote CNN a mocking email and pointed out the illegality of the link.
I would say that Google is fundamentally different because there is no Google community, while there is a rather large and passionate/. community. If Google started to suck big time (however you want to define it, banner ads, selling results, whatever) I wouldn't feel bad about it, I wouldn't write heartfelt letters to the CEO, because I have no idea who he or she is. Yes, I read the article, but really, I don't care who the CEO is as long as my search works.
If I heard that they died in a plane crash, I would be momentarily sorry, and then in that great human denial effect of "if it didn't happen right in front of me or someone I know, it didn't happen" I would forget about it. But the main thing I would worry about would be the search. Is there anyone out there who cares about Google for Google? Not to disparage them; I love the search, and I even admit to a persistent fondness for the little cartoons that they have around their logo from time to time. But beyond that they just don't have anything to get me emotionally involved.
There are plenty of people out there who are hard core Debian developers, or are simply interested in seeing the latest and greatest before anyone else. These people, although a smaller group than those interested in running a testing build, will be willing to run unstable. It's all part of the geometric series of the number of people using any given piece of code, as in this example from a commercial company:
A new class: 1 person, the developer
Added to internal build: 100 people, the other developers
Alpha given to interested customers: 1000 people
Beta with wide distribution: 10,000 people
Release: 100,000 people, everyone
With debian, the series was getting inverted. The unstable branch was stable enough and had enough new features that it was a better choice than the stable branch. This is not what you want unstable to be used for. In order to restore the "normal" order the Debian folks decided to make a "good enough" version that is suitable for many people to use. Sounds like a sensible idea to me.
If you are interested in buying other brands, as the eralier poster said you have to be careful. AIWA, for instance, is a quality, less expensive alternative to more high-end Sony stereo gear. You guessed it, AIWA is a brand owned by Sony so they can get low-end sales without appearing to cater to the low end with their flagship brand. Seriously, someone needs to make a big tree of all the brands and product lines that Sony owns. It's so huge, you'd really need computerized assistance to figure out if a given product is or is not a Sony.
No, the real reason is that the Moscone center in SF is just a block away from the Metreon with virtual bowling, the Dance Dance Revolution video game, and, until a few months ago, holographic head scans! All the toys that geeks like, and walking distance from the subway. Having it in SF sure makes it easier for people like me living far to the east to get there, since the train doesn't make it down to San Jose.
Slashdot Mirror
I would take that chance in a second. To turn the question around, what do you think the odds are that commercial spaceflight will ever become viable in your lifetime? I regard spaceflight as one of the shining scientific achievements of all time, and I bet that I, personally, will never get a chance to take part in it. The odds that I'll be able to afford to take a trip into space are about 0. Thus, I have to look for other alternatives. Mir isn't the safest, but the Soyuz rockets are reasonably reliable. All spacecraft are built by the lowest bidder, so why worry about this one?
Walt
P.S. Does anyone know where I sign up to become a "Geek in Space"?
Suck admits to preaching to the choir in the article, which I found hilarious. In the section "Discussions and cries of hypocrisy and malformed analogies have consumed megabyte upon megabyte of masturbatory rage and self-indulgent self-righteousness." Suck links "self-indulgent self-righteousness" to their own article! I thought that was hilarious, and I'm surprised more people don't give them credit for their sense of irony.
Walt
This would even protect you from the Club Card stores associating your credit card with your club card. Say that you pay cash for everything and also keep several club cards with bogus information on them. If you slip up and accidentally use a credit card, they can link up the club card accounts based on your CC number. With the new technology, they would not be able to do that so easily.
Walt
I would say there are certain fields in which having a degree helps more than a certification. Being a software architect does require experience designing large systems, but it helps a lot to have formal software design courses under your belt. Perhaps most importantly, you have reasonable expectations about how long it will take to write a given program. Something that most programmers fail to comprehend unless they've seen the research or done it a half-dozen times: Time spent actually writing the code should be well under 20% of the time budgeted for the entire project. I know it sounds painful, but in terms of programmer hours, companies spend the majority of time in design, fixing defects (bugs to those who regard them as inevitable rather than the product of poor design), and maintenance. This is just an example of the kind of thing you learn in a degree program. Most companies and certifications don't bother with a strong software engineering component, and I think it really contributes to the buggy code we all see every day. Having to take software design as a course and practice doing it right helps.
Also, if your idea of a fun job is to explore things that no one has ever done before, a degree and some research experience is very beneficial. Rather than go work for established software companies, I choose to take my BS from (shameless plus) Harvey Mudd and do research. While most places that are doing research require at least a BS as a standard thing, it makes sense because they don't want to be stuck with someone who has no experience in pursuing open-ended problems with no known solution. If you think you're in a research job, and you don't discover at least occaisonally that what you've been trying to do for the last week has been proved to be impossible, you're not doing research. Having a degree gets you experience with that sort of thing.
Walt
No, I mean it, it's the goatse picture, mod it down. This troll is using his +2 bonus, and not even an offtopic? Sheesh.
If you ask me, it's pretty damn sad that we have to rely on one deep pockets industry-funded group to protect us from one with even deeper pockets. As it becomes more and more expensive to affect the political process, I can't see this situation getting much better. Face it, with billions in profits it only takes a few tenths of a percent to buy several slightly used senators on key committees. Companies have become so large that even if they only devote a few cents of every sale they can afford lobbying and cotributions on a huge scale. I'll never miss the money that goes to taking away my freedoms, but I'll sure miss the freedoms. The EFF is a good start to pooling the power of freedom-minded individuals, but it's small and doesn't have the same level of funding. Ironically, people who have become wealthy in the last few years due to their success in technology, and should know better, are not helping out. Paul Allen owns a bunch of cable companies, for instance. You don't see him offering millions to the EFF to allow them to hire a full time staff of technical experts to advise all the clueless people in Washington. Instead, by conglomerating cable companies he is contributing to the imbalance.
I don't mean to be so negative. All is not lost; all it takes is consumers waking up and realizing that there are a lot more of them than there are CEOs.
Walt
Perhaps some definition of the term "clean room" is in order. A clean room implementation is one in which the hardware is treated as a black box, and then software is written to imitate its behavior under ever conceivable circumstance. The classic example of this was the Compaq reverse engineering of the original IBM PC BIOS. It would have been trivial for Compaq simply to slurp the BIOS off the EEPROM and make copies onto their own chips. That would be stealing, and not OK.
What they did instead was to give the BIOS to engineers who has not seen the assembler code on the chip and instruct them to duplicate it based on its behavior. So they sent various signals to the chip, and watched what it did as it booted up, and basically systematically looked at precisely what it was doing. They were then, with some trial and error, able to write code that duplicated all the observable behavior of the IBM BIOS. That is a cleanroom implementation, as evidenced by the fact that Compaq came out with a fine clone of the BIOS and was legally allowed to sell it. Mere use of the hardware is not enough to make it not a clean implementation
The CueCat reverse engineering is remarkably similar to this, except much more simple. The hackers merely had to figure out what the output meant, which apparently was pretty easy. They treated the CueCat as a black box, recording the output from the scanner and figuring out what it meant. No harm, no foul.
Walt
I like the comment later on in the artcle that "The RADEON supports IDCT (inverse discreet cosine transfer), which accelerates MPEG2 decoding." Thank goodness they won't be transferring my cosine out in the open, without any protection from prying eyes! I appreciate an MPEG board with a sense of decorum.
Walt
Why wouldn't you want to pay your caterer? My DJ is a PayPal user, and I just sent him our deposit by PayPal. At least I don't have to trust him with my credit card number... Of course, it's been a week, and we still haven't gotten back a signed contract, so maybe I should have used the credit card.
Walt
This must be how urban legends get started. The story is mostly true, but I got a lot of the particulars wrong. If you want details go to this link.
This is also the same company that trampled all over Sony's Restaurant. An unfortunate restaurant owner, whose nickname was Sony, pronounced "Sonny," named her restaurant after her nickname. This restaurant was started long before Sony was even selling products in the US, and yet they still sued her for trademark infringement. Not having money to defend against Sony's lawyers, she had to give in. Hell, she should have been able to sue *them*, especially since they now have restaurants at the Sony Metreon in San Francisco. Sigh, unless you've got deep pockets and the willingness to put up with the ultimate time suck that is a lawsuit, it's better just to stay underground, and like the parent post says, get the source out.
Walt
I think the "minimal help" refers to the fact that they used humans to put the motors into the robots. I assume the computer was told that there would be a motor of such and such a size and power, and it designed stuff based on that assumption. Each time it produced a design, a human would put the motor in and see what happened. I'm sure it would be possible to have yet another robot be in charge of putting the motor into the new robots, but what would the point be? I'm still impressed at the number of different kinds of locomotion the robot was able to come up with through experimentation.
Walt
There was an article in Discover Magazine about this a year or so ago. I believe it was a simpler chip than a voice recognition, its task was to generate a tone of a certain frequency. This is not as simple as it sounds; a constant frequency requires a timer, which is quite a large number of gates. The chip that the neural net designed used a very small number of gates, something like half that of the smallest human attempt. However, as you comment, it did have unconnected branches that would make the chip stop functioning when they were removed. The real problem was not the branches, which could be left intact, but the fact that the design would not work when moved to another FPGA of the same model. I think the solution for this was to use a bunch of different FPGAs and switch which one the program was run on at random.
Walt
I think the comment was a gentle joke about the AI's sharing their results amongst themselves. "Look, I was able to make a swimming robot with these parameters!" Actually, it probably would help the AIs get to a solution more quickly.
Walt
The Institute for Objectivist Studies has no affiliation with Ayn Rand whatsoever. I know, that sounds silly, but bear with me. IOS was founded by David Kelly, who was kicked out of "official" Objectivism for, essentially, disagreeing with Ayn Rand's followers about whether it is possible for someone to believe in collectivism through honest error. That is, could someone erroneously but honestly believe that Socialism is a good thing. the official Objectivists at the Ayn Rand Institute (founded and endorsed by her) believe that such an error is impossible or nearly so. Kelly believes that humans are capable of making tremendous errors in judgement, enough even to include the Objectivist opposite of goodness, collectivism.
:)
After being kicked out, Kelly started the IOS, which is pursuing little "o" objectivism and having conferences, etc. However, since Ayn Rand defines Objectivism as *her* philosophy, there is no such thing as an Objectivist who disagrees with her. She has been quoted as saying something along the lines of "If you want to use my ideas, fine. But if you disagree with them in any significant way, do not call yourself an Objectivist." Kelly et al may call themselves Objectivists, but according to Ayn Rand they are not.
That said, there are not significant practical differences in the ethical and political beliefs of IOS and ARI, so anyone who is involved with those groups can be counted on to be very much on the individualist, enlightened self-interest end of the political spectrum. Like me, for instance...
Walt
In fairness, it's not exactly a trivial issue to deal with configuring games to run on all the linux systems out their either. What's funny is that MS is centralized, with no one allowed to make changes unless the designers approve, and yet it has the same problems with different platforms as Linux. For Linux, where anyone can make changes to the system, to be doing only as poorly as MS in terms of consistent configuration is pretty good. Just think of all the different distros out there, and yet most software is easily portable among them.
Walt
If you read the article, PC games *aren't* popular. "Console games can sell a whole bunch more copies," says Keighley. "Console games like Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot have sold about 5, 8, million minimum. The biggest hit PC game will sell maybe 2 million copies. Half-Life is up at that number now. Myst has a bit short of 4 million copies after more than a half-decade." They may be somewhat shallow (although I would argue that good console RPGs are not less deep than their PC counterparts), but they are nothing if not popular.
Walt
If you admit that this sort of question can help the community as a whole, why does it matter that the answers will be used by only one person. This person is taking time to refute patent idocy, whic is a Good Thing. I would think the least /. can do is post it as a discussion and help out. I agree, there's a lot of stupid patents out there, and /. certainly can't be responsible for finding prior art for all of them, but this particular patent seems especially overbroad and far-reaching.
As a side note, is there a stupid patent archive somewhere? Where people could post a link to a moronic patent and have others take a look at it. Sort of the Oracle for patents.
Walt
An evaulation chip that is a production chip is not a reasonable thing to be screwed up. An evaulation unit is like a video card manufacturer giving boards to reviewers in advance of them going on sale to consumers. It's the same as the retail product, but without the slowness of going through the retail distribution chain. The Intel part is the same chip that was already working its way through the chain to be sold to OEMs. It is not a preview or a sample. Think of it as being the same as an early copy of software once it has gone "gold". Same as retail, just earlier.
Walt
Acid-free paper does not have a lifespan that would come into play on the scale of a human lifetime. As long as a book has been stored out of sunlight, it will be perfectly readable perhaps hundreds of years in the future. I have very inexpensive paper from the 1800s that was used by a great-great-great aunt or somebody for her math and spelling exercises. This was scratch paper, and yet it is perfectly readable. Sure, it is cracking a little around the edges, but the point is the loss is not catastrophic.
Computer documents tend to be lost catastrophically (be completely unreadable) and this has happened in less than 50 years. My dad was programming at MIT 1963-1969, and has punchcards and source printouts from code he wrote then. I'm pretty sure the number of systems that can read and run those now could be counted on one hand. Sure, computers are much more ubiquitous now. In the early days a given computer might be unique, now there are millions of popular models. However, have you tried buying parts for an IBM PC, one of the originals? IBM sold quite a few of these, and yet most of them have been thrown out because they are no longer useful.
Beware the impermanence of the digital age.
Walt
I'm pretty sure that there are no specific "freedom of the press laws," just the familiar "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;...". Can anyone supply a reference that says the press have greater protections on their speech than private individuals? Even if there were such protections, I don't believe it should matter. From my point of view, 2600 is as much a news entity as CNN. Besides, the DMCA is explicit about DeCSS being illegal; if it can violate the freedom of speech clause, why not the freedom of the press clause?
/. told CNN to pull the link. More likely, an eager reader wrote CNN a mocking email and pointed out the illegality of the link.
Walt
P.S. I'm not sure that people watching
I would say that Google is fundamentally different because there is no Google community, while there is a rather large and passionate /. community. If Google started to suck big time (however you want to define it, banner ads, selling results, whatever) I wouldn't feel bad about it, I wouldn't write heartfelt letters to the CEO, because I have no idea who he or she is. Yes, I read the article, but really, I don't care who the CEO is as long as my search works.
If I heard that they died in a plane crash, I would be momentarily sorry, and then in that great human denial effect of "if it didn't happen right in front of me or someone I know, it didn't happen" I would forget about it. But the main thing I would worry about would be the search. Is there anyone out there who cares about Google for Google? Not to disparage them; I love the search, and I even admit to a persistent fondness for the little cartoons that they have around their logo from time to time. But beyond that they just don't have anything to get me emotionally involved.
Walt
There are plenty of people out there who are hard core Debian developers, or are simply interested in seeing the latest and greatest before anyone else. These people, although a smaller group than those interested in running a testing build, will be willing to run unstable. It's all part of the geometric series of the number of people using any given piece of code, as in this example from a commercial company:
A new class: 1 person, the developer
Added to internal build: 100 people, the other developers
Alpha given to interested customers: 1000 people
Beta with wide distribution: 10,000 people
Release: 100,000 people, everyone
With debian, the series was getting inverted. The unstable branch was stable enough and had enough new features that it was a better choice than the stable branch. This is not what you want unstable to be used for. In order to restore the "normal" order the Debian folks decided to make a "good enough" version that is suitable for many people to use. Sounds like a sensible idea to me.
Walt
If you are interested in buying other brands, as the eralier poster said you have to be careful. AIWA, for instance, is a quality, less expensive alternative to more high-end Sony stereo gear. You guessed it, AIWA is a brand owned by Sony so they can get low-end sales without appearing to cater to the low end with their flagship brand. Seriously, someone needs to make a big tree of all the brands and product lines that Sony owns. It's so huge, you'd really need computerized assistance to figure out if a given product is or is not a Sony.
Walt
No, the real reason is that the Moscone center in SF is just a block away from the Metreon with virtual bowling, the Dance Dance Revolution video game, and, until a few months ago, holographic head scans! All the toys that geeks like, and walking distance from the subway. Having it in SF sure makes it easier for people like me living far to the east to get there, since the train doesn't make it down to San Jose.
Walt