i know this is probably hard for indoctrinated Americans to understand.
It's probably even harder for indoctrinated non-Americans to understand that the vast majority of Americans aren't particularly narcissistic, or remotely wealthy. At this point, in fact, the bulk of us are starting to get pretty damn sick and tired of both those SUV-driving narcissistic fuckwits that we have to contend with on the way to work every day, and judgmental foreigners that insist upon treating America (of all countries) as a monolithic culture.
But so far as refusing the prize is concerned, you're right, I'm sure he has that satisfaction. But, contrary to popular belief, the academic/scientific world is just as rife with dissent, personalities and politics as any other human endeavor. Consequently it's quite likely he refused the prize because he was pissed off about something or someone.
Yes, but that still leaves the other Steve, and frankly he's even less cool than Bill Gates. He's so uncool he's scary, even. I mean, would you invite Steve Ballmer over for dinner?
And the penalty isn't for how many MP3s you may have downloaded to your drive, it is for how many times they might have been downloaded from you..
No it's not. Copyright law precedes the Internet by a couple of hundred years, and those dollar amounts were intended as a deterrent against criminal mass-production and resale of copyrighted works. That's understandable (if ineffective) and fair-use was supposed to prevent individuals from being persecuted by copyright owners. The fact such insane numbers are being applied to individuals is abusive beyond belief. Copyright law is simply not with the times when it comes to modern telecommunications, it just isn't. That judge is full of it... frankly, I'd like to see his bank account records for the past few months. At what point does Congress wake up and realize that their negligence (if not outright malfeasance: see Hatch, Orrin) is causing a lot of people a world of hurt? Of course, that applies to pretty much everything those pricks do, so I'm not holding my breath.
Nope. iPods aren't sold just on functionality, or even mostly for that reason. They are sold because they're cool. Apple is cool, Steve Jobs is cool... but Bill Gates and his company are not cool. They are, in fact, the antithesis of cool in spite of billions of marketing dollars spent in futile attempts to counteract that perception. Now, if G&B would step out of the limelight, Microsoft might, just might, mind you, manage to capture some of Apple's coolness. At a minimum that would mean replacing Gates with someone far more charismatic, or perhaps Bill Gates killing Steve Jobs and eating him in order to gain his power.
Sure, but they'd best be prepared do deal with my attorney in court if it turns out they made it up.
This is a little off-topic but does relate to vehicular surveillance. I was astonished to discover that in my state the cops are using high-gain microphones to eavesdrop on conversations in moving vehicles. If they hear a word they don't like (say, "pot") they simply pull you over. I know some people that got pulled over for discussing marijuana in their car, and had their vehicle searched. Searched, mind you, simply for saying the word. They were released without being ticketed, because it was pretty obvious that the police were simply looking for some successful test cases, which is the usual approach when trying to achieve general acceptance of some new extension of their authority. I understand that we don't have any expectation of privacy in a public place but... this is starting to get completely out of hand. Courts have repeatedly refused to allow police to apply warrantless high-tech surveillance (infrared imaging and remote mikes) to private residences, but if one can't carry on a "private" conversation in a car at speed on the highway then the true police state just got a notch closer. I simply do not want some cop deciding that he doesn't like my tone, or the topic of my conversation, pulling me over and searching my car.
I'd like to know just how well an pink noise generator (or some other technique) would work to mask their ability to eavesdrop. Matter of fact, it might be interesting to mount transducers to the windows and apply a noise source so that the windows themselves will mask it.
When I was very young, my father's attitude towards his children was to treat them like adults, adults with some limitations. If we screwed up, we got in trouble but we weren't presumed to be imbeciles either.
Look... they're Irish (I'm part Irish m'self so I know what I'm talking about) and I think we're just victims of an honest mistake. Most likely they simply had a bit too much Guinness and misread the output ammeter. No harm, no foul.
... but the possibility that it might be used as evidence against you in a case where you have committed a crime is silly.
Dude, it's already happened using the limited diagnostic capability of the existing OBDII devices (talk about your law of unintended consequences.) I could cite some of the examples I've read about but I'm sure you can Google them quite nicely for yourself. The sophistication of the next generation of black boxes (and the expanded storage of location data combined with GPS) makes them downright scary from a privacy perspective. You're talking about the post-9/11 United States, remember. This is not George Bush Sr's "Kindler, Gentler America".
Privacy rights are not supposed to keep you from getting cought committing crimes.
Of course they are, among other things. That's why we are talking about rights, not privileges. Governments always have the ability to eradicate personal privacy if they need to: the question is under what conditions they are permitted to so abuse their citizens. If the U.S. government's minions want to break down your privacy, they have traditionally had to go through specific legal procedures in order to do so, and furthermore must have good reason to believe you committed a crime before they invade your privacy! Worse, in this case we are talking about personal property being used in a manner inconsistent with the wishes of the owner of said property. That's just wrong. The essence of ownership is control, if the government controls my property to that extent then I don't really own it. It's particularly bad if we are forced, under penalty of law, to have such a device installed in our vehicles whether we want it or not. We're already forced to have insurance in many states, which means we're already paying for the privilege of totalling out our cars. I see no reason to provide insurance companies even more ammunition to avoid a payout, and law enforcement even more ability than it already has to monitor my movements and my whereabouts. In either case, it really is simply NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS unless the individual chooses to make it their business, or has done something to warrant a criminal investigation.
Attitutes like yours are, I'm afraid, making a very unpleasant bed for all of us to lie in.
Is it safe to say "none of your damned business" any more?
The short answer is "No". If you try to say that to an officer of the law, the presumption is that you have something to hide. And that presumption is often correct, but the further presumption is that what you are trying to hide would incriminate you in some way. And that presumption is usually automatic in law enforcement, who feel entitled to know everything about us whether we want them to or not. All of us (and I mean, ALL OF US) have something to hide, whether it be criminal or merely something unpleasant that we would rather other people didn't know. Civilization functions because we don't know everything about each other! It's time the government understood that by eroding privacy as they are doing, they are simultaneously damaging a core aspect of civilized society: the right to tell anybody, even the government (maybe especially the government) to just fuck off and leave us the hell alone. If we lose that right, we pretty much lose it all.
Ultimately, it comes down to who has control of the data. If the police can routinely interrogate these devices without the vehicle owner's permission (much less a warrant) then they are of little value to the consumer. The preliminary OBDIII (On Board Diagnostics III) specifications that I've looked at include the ability for cops (or anyone with the proper equipment) to retrieve information from these things wirelessly and without notifying the driver. I really don't think I like that.
Frankly, there's a good chance that any such black box that is installed in any car I purchase will suffer the effects of a nearby lightning strike. Or maybe a transient short in the ignition system will take care of the problem. Unfortunately, odds are that this will not be a separate device but simply more memory and firmware in the existing vehicle computer.
If the RIAA's minions ever acquire the legal authority to "bust down my door" for any reason whatsoever, this society has far greater problems to concern itself with than ill-gotten music.
All I know is, I had a 25" Sony CRT that I got in 1984 and only finally died last year. And it wasn't the tube that failed, but the power supply... the picture tube is still working! That's over twenty years of heavy service. Face it, CRTs are a refined technology, and that kind of refinement takes a lot more decades of research and development than have been put into anything else. Televisions started out as a significant investment for a family, and it was expected that they would last (would you accept a refrigerator with a lifetime comparable to a plasma TV?) Hell, we used to have people called "TV Repairmen", who would actually fix a busted receiver. Television sets were advertised as being easily serviceable (anyone remember RCA's "Works In A Drawer"?)
Then they got us to accept televisions as disposable commodities akin to automobiles, and in fact they're marketed in a fashion very similar to cars (that is, based upon trivial differences and a lot of hype.) Granted, we still repair cars. But I don't want to replace something as expensive as a big-screen TV every few years because it just up and dies. I want to replace it when I decide it's time for something better, not because the manufacturer decides I need a new one.
Yes, but it's only recently that KDE and Gnome have begun putting in postfixes to describe the application. In any event, your comment revolves around the way a particular distro (or you yourself) have organized the menus and described the software. I was referring the the actual project names given to the applications by their developers, which are frequently chosen for their cuteness factor, some "obvious" (to a software engineer) play on words, or other criteria having nothing to do with recognizability by an end user. Using a few of your examples without the added descriptions, from the perspective of a new user:
Drivel (what? well, at least it's in the dictionary)
Ekiga (wtf?)
Epiphany (bible research?)
Evolution (something scientific, I guess)
Firefox (hey, I've heard of that!)
Firestarter (Ah, a free Stephen King e-book! Cool!)
Gaim (Huh?)
Liferea (???)
I guess that's one problem you have when you're simply including open source applications written by many other developers into your own distro... you pretty much have to call it what it is, regardless of how goofy it sounds. Microsoft has the luxury of naming all their default applications like "Notepad", "Calculator", "Paint", etc. This isn't in defense of Microsoft, per se, it's just that everyone here seems to want Linux to become popular among Joe Sixpacks, grandmothers, and other comparatively computer-illiterate individuals (why, I don't know... Gates-envy, I suppose) and if you're going to do that you need to avoid confusing people any more than you absolutely have to.
Re:No ATSC for you, check back later!
on
DirecTV's New HD-DVR
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· Score: 2, Informative
For this reason alone, I think Sony's DVR is preferable.
It's a Sony, so whatever you do don't plug it into your computer.
And then there's another one with a funky name I cannot remember..
Yes, and the funky naming of major applications is a whole 'nother issue that has an impact on consumer acceptance of Linux. Given that most users of computer systems will give up on something if they can't figure it out in half a minute, making said user waste any of that precious thirty seconds trying to figure out that his browser is called "Konqueror" is silly, and most of the other standard Linux apps have equally off-the-wall names. Sure, Explorer doesn't make a whole more sense... but at least Microsoft put the word "Internet" in front of it. Marketing 101 is a class that a lot of Linux development houses should take.
All that aside, the reality of the situation is this: Linux purists would like their favorite OS to stay as free of proprietary binaries as possible. And that's a worthy goal. But it is also true that mainstream acceptance of Linux is being hampered by hardware compatibility issues. I can install XP on a machine and right out of the box it supports accelerated video on pretty much any video card out there. With most of the Linuxes I've used I have to fiddle around to make anything work. As a software engineer I don't mind that... but the oft-referred-to Joe Sixpack does. So, if (and that's a big "if") the idea is to have Linux-on-the-desktop become a successful competitor to Microsoft Windows it will have to achieve a similar level of plug-and-playability. That really is the crux of the matter: is displacing Windows such a priority to Linux developers that they will sacrifice the ideals that attracted them to that OS in the first place? I think the real fear is that by making such a compromise now, the hybrid distributions will become more popular because they simply work better, and that there will be no way to put the genie back in the bottle and return to a truly free environment.
'Magic' is when a device does something well, which one did not expect technology to be able to do, and in a way that does not make it obvious how the technology is implemented..
It's more basic than that. In the Clarkian sense it means that some action or effect cannot even be recognized or interpreted as technological by those without sufficient understanding. People from most modern societies would, if faced with some apparently magical happening, probably suspect that a machine was behind it even if they had no clue how such a thing could be. Couldn't be magic, of course... everyone knows there's no such thing as magic.
On the other hand, comparatively primitive cultures are more easily fooled: the first Native Americans that faced firearms had no choice but to perceive those weapons as supernatural. They had no understanding of gunpowder or explosives, no referents they could use to properly categorize those weapons as machines, or any real concept of "machine" as we know it. So, the guns were magic.
At the current state-of-the-art, the artifacts of our machine culture are generally recognizable as such. That will not always be the case, particularly if nanotechnology becomes sophisticated, self-maintaining, and commonplace. Eventually there will be magic loose in the world... or at least something so close to magic that it makes no practical difference.
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Well, the stereotypical white-lab-coated emotionless scientist is just as ridiculous a cultural icon now as it was in all those 50's B-grades.
i know this is probably hard for indoctrinated Americans to understand.
It's probably even harder for indoctrinated non-Americans to understand that the vast majority of Americans aren't particularly narcissistic, or remotely wealthy. At this point, in fact, the bulk of us are starting to get pretty damn sick and tired of both those SUV-driving narcissistic fuckwits that we have to contend with on the way to work every day, and judgmental foreigners that insist upon treating America (of all countries) as a monolithic culture.
But so far as refusing the prize is concerned, you're right, I'm sure he has that satisfaction. But, contrary to popular belief, the academic/scientific world is just as rife with dissent, personalities and politics as any other human endeavor. Consequently it's quite likely he refused the prize because he was pissed off about something or someone.
Barney may be the Antichrist (and I'm not saying he isn't) but there are an awful lot of lawyers that definitely qualify as minions.
Yes, but that still leaves the other Steve, and frankly he's even less cool than Bill Gates. He's so uncool he's scary, even. I mean, would you invite Steve Ballmer over for dinner?
And the penalty isn't for how many MP3s you may have downloaded to your drive, it is for how many times they might have been downloaded from you..
... frankly, I'd like to see his bank account records for the past few months. At what point does Congress wake up and realize that their negligence (if not outright malfeasance: see Hatch, Orrin) is causing a lot of people a world of hurt? Of course, that applies to pretty much everything those pricks do, so I'm not holding my breath.
No it's not. Copyright law precedes the Internet by a couple of hundred years, and those dollar amounts were intended as a deterrent against criminal mass-production and resale of copyrighted works. That's understandable (if ineffective) and fair-use was supposed to prevent individuals from being persecuted by copyright owners. The fact such insane numbers are being applied to individuals is abusive beyond belief. Copyright law is simply not with the times when it comes to modern telecommunications, it just isn't. That judge is full of it
Is this finally enough to unseat Apple?
... but Bill Gates and his company are not cool. They are, in fact, the antithesis of cool in spite of billions of marketing dollars spent in futile attempts to counteract that perception. Now, if G&B would step out of the limelight, Microsoft might, just might, mind you, manage to capture some of Apple's coolness. At a minimum that would mean replacing Gates with someone far more charismatic, or perhaps Bill Gates killing Steve Jobs and eating him in order to gain his power.
Nope. iPods aren't sold just on functionality, or even mostly for that reason. They are sold because they're cool. Apple is cool, Steve Jobs is cool
Sure, but they'd best be prepared do deal with my attorney in court if it turns out they made it up.
... this is starting to get completely out of hand. Courts have repeatedly refused to allow police to apply warrantless high-tech surveillance (infrared imaging and remote mikes) to private residences, but if one can't carry on a "private" conversation in a car at speed on the highway then the true police state just got a notch closer. I simply do not want some cop deciding that he doesn't like my tone, or the topic of my conversation, pulling me over and searching my car.
This is a little off-topic but does relate to vehicular surveillance. I was astonished to discover that in my state the cops are using high-gain microphones to eavesdrop on conversations in moving vehicles. If they hear a word they don't like (say, "pot") they simply pull you over. I know some people that got pulled over for discussing marijuana in their car, and had their vehicle searched. Searched, mind you, simply for saying the word. They were released without being ticketed, because it was pretty obvious that the police were simply looking for some successful test cases, which is the usual approach when trying to achieve general acceptance of some new extension of their authority. I understand that we don't have any expectation of privacy in a public place but
I'd like to know just how well an pink noise generator (or some other technique) would work to mask their ability to eavesdrop. Matter of fact, it might be interesting to mount transducers to the windows and apply a noise source so that the windows themselves will mask it.
Well, about the best one-word description of the result would be "ZAP!"
When I was very young, my father's attitude towards his children was to treat them like adults, adults with some limitations. If we screwed up, we got in trouble but we weren't presumed to be imbeciles either.
Look ... they're Irish (I'm part Irish m'self so I know what I'm talking about) and I think we're just victims of an honest mistake. Most likely they simply had a bit too much Guinness and misread the output ammeter. No harm, no foul.
No, it just means that iPods are going to be around for a long, long time.
... but the possibility that it might be used as evidence against you in a case where you have committed a crime is silly.
Dude, it's already happened using the limited diagnostic capability of the existing OBDII devices (talk about your law of unintended consequences.) I could cite some of the examples I've read about but I'm sure you can Google them quite nicely for yourself. The sophistication of the next generation of black boxes (and the expanded storage of location data combined with GPS) makes them downright scary from a privacy perspective. You're talking about the post-9/11 United States, remember. This is not George Bush Sr's "Kindler, Gentler America".
Privacy rights are not supposed to keep you from getting cought committing crimes.
Of course they are, among other things. That's why we are talking about rights, not privileges. Governments always have the ability to eradicate personal privacy if they need to: the question is under what conditions they are permitted to so abuse their citizens. If the U.S. government's minions want to break down your privacy, they have traditionally had to go through specific legal procedures in order to do so, and furthermore must have good reason to believe you committed a crime before they invade your privacy! Worse, in this case we are talking about personal property being used in a manner inconsistent with the wishes of the owner of said property. That's just wrong. The essence of ownership is control, if the government controls my property to that extent then I don't really own it. It's particularly bad if we are forced, under penalty of law, to have such a device installed in our vehicles whether we want it or not. We're already forced to have insurance in many states, which means we're already paying for the privilege of totalling out our cars. I see no reason to provide insurance companies even more ammunition to avoid a payout, and law enforcement even more ability than it already has to monitor my movements and my whereabouts. In either case, it really is simply NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS unless the individual chooses to make it their business, or has done something to warrant a criminal investigation.
Attitutes like yours are, I'm afraid, making a very unpleasant bed for all of us to lie in.
Actually, they'll outlaw it right up front. Doesn't mean that such mods won't happen though.
Is it safe to say "none of your damned business" any more?
The short answer is "No". If you try to say that to an officer of the law, the presumption is that you have something to hide. And that presumption is often correct, but the further presumption is that what you are trying to hide would incriminate you in some way. And that presumption is usually automatic in law enforcement, who feel entitled to know everything about us whether we want them to or not. All of us (and I mean, ALL OF US) have something to hide, whether it be criminal or merely something unpleasant that we would rather other people didn't know. Civilization functions because we don't know everything about each other! It's time the government understood that by eroding privacy as they are doing, they are simultaneously damaging a core aspect of civilized society: the right to tell anybody, even the government (maybe especially the government) to just fuck off and leave us the hell alone. If we lose that right, we pretty much lose it all.
And that's why, immediately after purchase of the vehicle, a clip lead should be briefly applied between the black box and the ignition coil.
Ultimately, it comes down to who has control of the data. If the police can routinely interrogate these devices without the vehicle owner's permission (much less a warrant) then they are of little value to the consumer. The preliminary OBDIII (On Board Diagnostics III) specifications that I've looked at include the ability for cops (or anyone with the proper equipment) to retrieve information from these things wirelessly and without notifying the driver. I really don't think I like that.
... firmware can be replaced.
Frankly, there's a good chance that any such black box that is installed in any car I purchase will suffer the effects of a nearby lightning strike. Or maybe a transient short in the ignition system will take care of the problem. Unfortunately, odds are that this will not be a separate device but simply more memory and firmware in the existing vehicle computer.
Still
If the RIAA's minions ever acquire the legal authority to "bust down my door" for any reason whatsoever, this society has far greater problems to concern itself with than ill-gotten music.
All I know is, I had a 25" Sony CRT that I got in 1984 and only finally died last year. And it wasn't the tube that failed, but the power supply ... the picture tube is still working! That's over twenty years of heavy service. Face it, CRTs are a refined technology, and that kind of refinement takes a lot more decades of research and development than have been put into anything else. Televisions started out as a significant investment for a family, and it was expected that they would last (would you accept a refrigerator with a lifetime comparable to a plasma TV?) Hell, we used to have people called "TV Repairmen", who would actually fix a busted receiver. Television sets were advertised as being easily serviceable (anyone remember RCA's "Works In A Drawer"?)
Then they got us to accept televisions as disposable commodities akin to automobiles, and in fact they're marketed in a fashion very similar to cars (that is, based upon trivial differences and a lot of hype.) Granted, we still repair cars. But I don't want to replace something as expensive as a big-screen TV every few years because it just up and dies. I want to replace it when I decide it's time for something better, not because the manufacturer decides I need a new one.
it brings a new meaning to the term "Muscle TV".
Indeed ... I trust it to be subverted at the earliest opportunity.
Yes, but it's only recently that KDE and Gnome have begun putting in postfixes to describe the application. In any event, your comment revolves around the way a particular distro (or you yourself) have organized the menus and described the software. I was referring the the actual project names given to the applications by their developers, which are frequently chosen for their cuteness factor, some "obvious" (to a software engineer) play on words, or other criteria having nothing to do with recognizability by an end user. Using a few of your examples without the added descriptions, from the perspective of a new user:
... you pretty much have to call it what it is, regardless of how goofy it sounds. Microsoft has the luxury of naming all their default applications like "Notepad", "Calculator", "Paint", etc. This isn't in defense of Microsoft, per se, it's just that everyone here seems to want Linux to become popular among Joe Sixpacks, grandmothers, and other comparatively computer-illiterate individuals (why, I don't know ... Gates-envy, I suppose) and if you're going to do that you need to avoid confusing people any more than you absolutely have to.
Drivel (what? well, at least it's in the dictionary)
Ekiga (wtf?)
Epiphany (bible research?)
Evolution (something scientific, I guess)
Firefox (hey, I've heard of that!)
Firestarter (Ah, a free Stephen King e-book! Cool!)
Gaim (Huh?)
Liferea (???)
I guess that's one problem you have when you're simply including open source applications written by many other developers into your own distro
For this reason alone, I think Sony's DVR is preferable.
It's a Sony, so whatever you do don't plug it into your computer.
And then there's another one with a funky name I cannot remember..
... but at least Microsoft put the word "Internet" in front of it. Marketing 101 is a class that a lot of Linux development houses should take.
... but the oft-referred-to Joe Sixpack does. So, if (and that's a big "if") the idea is to have Linux-on-the-desktop become a successful competitor to Microsoft Windows it will have to achieve a similar level of plug-and-playability. That really is the crux of the matter: is displacing Windows such a priority to Linux developers that they will sacrifice the ideals that attracted them to that OS in the first place? I think the real fear is that by making such a compromise now, the hybrid distributions will become more popular because they simply work better, and that there will be no way to put the genie back in the bottle and return to a truly free environment.
Yes, and the funky naming of major applications is a whole 'nother issue that has an impact on consumer acceptance of Linux. Given that most users of computer systems will give up on something if they can't figure it out in half a minute, making said user waste any of that precious thirty seconds trying to figure out that his browser is called "Konqueror" is silly, and most of the other standard Linux apps have equally off-the-wall names. Sure, Explorer doesn't make a whole more sense
All that aside, the reality of the situation is this: Linux purists would like their favorite OS to stay as free of proprietary binaries as possible. And that's a worthy goal. But it is also true that mainstream acceptance of Linux is being hampered by hardware compatibility issues. I can install XP on a machine and right out of the box it supports accelerated video on pretty much any video card out there. With most of the Linuxes I've used I have to fiddle around to make anything work. As a software engineer I don't mind that
'Magic' is when a device does something well, which one did not expect technology to be able to do, and in a way that does not make it obvious how the technology is implemented..
... everyone knows there's no such thing as magic.
... or at least something so close to magic that it makes no practical difference.
It's more basic than that. In the Clarkian sense it means that some action or effect cannot even be recognized or interpreted as technological by those without sufficient understanding. People from most modern societies would, if faced with some apparently magical happening, probably suspect that a machine was behind it even if they had no clue how such a thing could be. Couldn't be magic, of course
On the other hand, comparatively primitive cultures are more easily fooled: the first Native Americans that faced firearms had no choice but to perceive those weapons as supernatural. They had no understanding of gunpowder or explosives, no referents they could use to properly categorize those weapons as machines, or any real concept of "machine" as we know it. So, the guns were magic.
At the current state-of-the-art, the artifacts of our machine culture are generally recognizable as such. That will not always be the case, particularly if nanotechnology becomes sophisticated, self-maintaining, and commonplace. Eventually there will be magic loose in the world
Those who can't do ... teach^h^h^h^h^hsue!