My point, actually, was that it's the parents who are problematic, not the 'net.
I, in fact, agree with the.kids.us initiative-- it's the very first semi-intelligent initiative of the US government on the topic at all.
I don't agree that children should be restricted to a playpen where Ronald McDonald and Mattel are going to be the sole influences, but at least that solution doesn't attempt to coerce anything, it just creates the playpen.
What is scaring me is that there will very likely be a very great number of parents who will restrict their children to that playpen in order to avoid having to actually talk to them or spend time with them.
I'm sure this will produce good, docile little consumers who have been exposed to nothing but the American Way (made in Taiwan).
Not all parents want their 8 yr. olds to stumble across porn on the web.
That's my point! Why the hell not?
For one, most 8 year olds will, when faced with typical porn, go either "Ewww" or laugh out; but if they understand the basic idea of sexuality will understand what it's all about and just not be interrested in such imagery.
I can assure you that if some kid is digging for stuff on Harry Potter, and stumbles on some porn site, he'll just do like most of us and curse at the stupidity of not finding what he's after.
Unless, of course, you want to pretend that sex doesn't exist to your kids until it's much too late. Or perhaps you prefer to think that all humans are asexuate drones until some arbitary age?
Your kids will learn about sex. They will get access to imagery and texts. They will experiment amongst themselves.
Would you rather they understood nothing and be unprepared to make critical and moral judgement on their own?
I knew what sex was, and how it worked, and why people were so interrested in it young enough that I can't possibly remember being told specifically. That made me an accepting adult who is not completely fscked up with what is arguably the principal function of a living being.
While I don't particularly enjoy porn myself, I understand many do, and cannot think of single reason why that would be "bad" in any way.
My kids will be taught that some people like to be entertained by watching depictions of monsters horribly mutilating stupid teenagers, some by depicions of crime fighters doing impossible stunts to defeat the nefarious nemesis, and some by depictions of sexual activity both mundane and off-the-wall. All of them carfuly scripted (for the high quality stuff) fiction.
They'll get to decide which (if any) they enjoy for themselves.
[...] and making sure they do not come across things they shouldn't.
I don't get it. Why is this society so obsessed with the concept that children are some sort of retarded subhuman species?
I grew up with intelligent parents that cared. I was never denied any soure of information, regardless of how ridiculous and/or "innapropriate", but was taught to use my brain to discard garbage on my own.
My children will get the same opportunity.
I've grown up to be a responsible, sane adult who isn't mind-controled by the media. Obviously, being able to use one's own jugment to qualify what's out there is not a desired objective of the governments.
They'd much rather have drones who consume the information that was deemed good for them without question.
Do they really have any power to tell ICANN to revoke a domain name?
That's actually irrelevant. Given that they will control the zone files to the.kids.us SLD, removing an "offending" site is just a matter of commenting out an A record.
This is actually a Very Good Thing! It:
(a) allows parents who'd rather not teach their kids about using their brains (an amazing majority in these days of babysitting-by-TV) to assign a "safe" playpen.
(b) Does not make idiotic technical assumption, or impose a technical burden on other sysadmins,
(c) Does not coerce intelligent parents into restricting access to their kids to the domain alone, and
(d) makes no attemps to control the rest of the world.
What happened? Did the entire US legislative branch get kidnapped by aliens to be replaced by intelligent drones?
I think that this is the very first American law of note that I can say I agree with. Oh, well. There goes my value system.:)
Heh. Those are cool devices, but I very much doubt anyone would want to work by drumming their fingers on a flat surface all day. It gets/really/ unconfortable very soon, and not having mechanical feedback makes the whole process much more error prone.
It's a wonderful idea for occasional typing on a device that does not normally provide good facilities for that, but I doubt anyone would want this as a primary input device for day-to-day work.
This is why the TRON idea of a CRT (or other graphical device) lying beneath a transparent touch-sensitive surface is impractical (but amazingly cool-looking).
The whole idea has been prompted by a friend of mine (a librarian) that types during his whole work day in two languages but needs frequent short 'switches' to other character sets-- the ability to switch to, say, cyrillic and see the unfamiliar layout would be very useful.
But since that keyboard is used day-in and day-out, it is important that it 'feels' like a normal keyboard.
Yes. The problem is that I'm no mechanical engineer, and I can't seem to find a reasonable way of doing fiber.
First off, its usefulness seem to depend on the ability to "switch" between keycaps while reusing the same light emitting hardware. Is that even possible?
Secondly, I would expect there is a hard problem with the keys' movement needing to bend the fibers up to several times per second for the lifetime of the keyboard. My understanding of fiber is that it's flexible, to a point, but prone to fatigue if bent repeatedly.
Those are indeed very cool, but they do not "feel" like a traditional keycap (yes, I have one I've been playing with).
LCD also suffers from angle of vision; you'd be surprised at how faded a keycap looks when it's at the edge of the keyboard. Place yourself in a confortable typing position and look at the numeric keypad on a typical PC keyboard: already over 30 degrees of angle for most people.
OLCD [as the editor suggested] looks promising, but very expensive.
Yes, while one can bemoan the fact that these monies needed to be spent at all, this will be generally useful.
I would expect, however, that the document will be rather redundant. It's not like one cannot find several very well documented debunkings out there (and on NASA's web site as well).
I could see the point if the document is ultimately meant to be printed to dead trees, but then who will get it? Teachers would make sense, and perhaps FOX programming executives.:-)
I don't think a great deal of money should be spent on wider distribution though, the only people likely to pick it up are those who didn't already buy into the cranks' insanity.
Simply moving over to GCC for all four platforms does seem to be the obvious choice; you can also flatten GUI differences by using a portable multiplatform library.
I've had some experience doing just that. To date, Qt is the most mature of those and will give you uniform access to GUI, networking, threading and even database access for Win32, Unices (including Linux) and MacOS.
If you aren't so worried about GUIs but need to output multimedia contents portably, SDL is a viable alternative. The portability of some of the more esoteric components is dubious but SDL has the distinct advantage of being completely free.
As for performance concerns some people have raised about archaic versions of GCC, don't let that stop you-- even if you don't use GCC 3.2 (which produces very good code) the subtle improvement is speed is very rarely worth the greatly increased complexity in development and maintenance.
Besides, with recent GCCs I'm hard-pressed to actually find any significant difference between code generated by it and other compilers (for IA32, anyways, and with all relevant optimizations turned on).
History is replete with Bad Things imposed by powerful entities (be it governement, warring factions, religious institution, corporations, etc). Usualy, those entities attempt to reduce resistance to those schemes by publicising them as good, advantageous, desirable even.
Censorship is a reccuring favorite. "It would be bad to let the counter-revolutionnaries / heretics / competitors to speak against the System". Another common theme is "We have to protect the weak / children / people against harm and/or themselves".
This is, however, the first time that I see something so obviously nefarious portrayed in such a positive light!
The onlyraison d'tre of Palladium (and the underlying mechanisms) is to prevent people from using their tools to process the data of their choice in the manner they choose. Be it to prevent the "evil pirates" from listening to their CD on their computer, or *gasp* using such-and-such technology without the "safe" and "approved" program (how much are you willing to bet that "approved" software will always be commercial, proprietary and expensive?)
This would be horrible enough to get even the general populace to react and protest... if it wasn't described as an "enhancement". "Safer" They say (for whom?). "More reliable" (at what?).
My OS and computing environment are safe enough for the tasks I give them as it is. I don't need "help" protecting me against myself!
We need to cry, shout and yell loud enough to be heard. The CDA was nothing compared to this, because our computer remained ours, we could always choose to obey the law or not.
While the emergence of a standard will quickly generate open source implementations (I can easily see, say, licq supporting the standard within days of the first draft) there is no incentive for the big corporate players to support it, and indeed a great many reasons not to.
Their interrest lies not in interoperability, but making sure that their customers can only talk to their customers so that if you want to be able to IM your brother-in-law or somesuch you have to subscribe to their service (even if it's in a way just as "simple" as feeding them your email for generating spam).
This means that, in the long run, the mass market consumer will not be able to talk to the open source clients we geeks will be using.
Like I said, wishful thinking. If we're really lucky this is how things will happen, and we'll have an IM that isn't swamped with hundreds of thousands of inane twinks and lusers spamming us with request for pr0n or cybersex.:-)
If M$ had managed to get their heads out of their butts long enough to think, this could have in fact been a Bad Thing for Linux and friends.
You see, they *could* have given the hardware and software. The cost to M$ would have been actually neglectable and they would still have achieved their real goals of locking down a poor country in their web for the future.
The scary part is that if they had done that, then, only us geeks would have been able to see the deception; the mass media would have played along (untwittingly or not) with the marketroids' plan and portrayed M$ as a savior of struggling countries whilst ignoring the dire long-term consequences.
Again, M$ stupitidy manages to cancel out M$ evil, and the world is a bit safer for it.
Oh, last time I saw a good proof was in a Communications of the ACM, IIRC June or July 97. I could go dig it up if you want (email me if you do; that issue would be deep in storage).
Basically, the whole concept relies on the fact that with the proper gait [sequence of movements to take a step] the center of gravity always remains within a triangle formed by three legs, and thus makes the whole contraption considerably harder to tip over, and makes tasks such as navigating holes or steps orders of magnitude simpler. (The center of gravity moving around is exactly what makes climbing steps a hard problem for a bipedal robot).
With more legs you gain additional resistance to environmental damage and a bit more flexibility with difficult obstacles, but you also increase complexity of construction and controlling by lots, and unless the environment is very hostile you normally wouldn't want to bother.
I'm sure a Google search will point you to a number of papers on the subject. MIT was especially interrested in that field in the early '90s.
Xie said he could have built the robot far more easily by giving it more legs or using wheels. But he said it was important to make the robot look as human as possible, so people would think it was smart.
"It's hard to convince people that a six-legged robot that looks like a cockroach is actually intelligent," he said.
A human appearance, he said, also encourages more natural communication between robot and master."
And here I was just six stories ago pointing out my not-so-humble opinion about how misguided trying to emulate biological systems was. This proves my point doesn't it?
A manufacturer went to a lot of trouble (and presumably expense) to make their device less reliable (hexapod locomotion is demonstrably optimal) and try to give a pointless appearance of intelligence.
If the robot had been built like a cockroach, arguably one of the most effective designs, I wouldn't have been any less likely to think it intelligent (it's not), but far more likely to think the designer was.
I would expect this, in fact, would give ammo to people fighting the legality of EULAs in the first place.
It presumes that any monies you have paid towards such a product is forfeit even if the circumstances dictating the business change are entirely outside your control.
I think this is a positive move in its effects; this will make a greater number of business consumers start reading EULAs very carefully indeed, and I expect very many won't like what they find in there. We may see some changes on the horizon.
Like the infamous we-reserve-the-right-to-inspect-your-business clause that found itself into a licence I won't name [because I'm not sure I remember exactly which]:-) meant to be Open Source some time ago.
[...]I'm going to have to disagree with you on this. For now, yes it's easier for us humans to adapt to the technology, but ideally any machine should be intuitive enought that there's no need to learn anything new[...]
Yes. And no. I think that emulating biological emulation is the absolute best example of counter intuitiveness; unless and until those emulation are perfect (which means at the very least interfacing at a neural level, absolute replication of every aspect, and no added latency) the fact that it is almost, but not quite, like the "real thing" is going to make learning to use it harder than it would be to use an arbitrary system.
Just look at the problems adolescent humans get trying to use their own limbs because their specs keep changing subtly, making them not-quite what they were when they were kids. The joke about teenagers tripping on their own feet because they forget how to use them isn't much of one.
Transparent and intuitive are perfect goals, but modeling tools against biological equivalents is the wrong way of acheiving this.
Look at a very simple interface: a door handle. There are no biological equivalent, but it does its task in a very simple fashion most humans learn without trouble.
You're working under the presumption that biological systems are inherently easier to comprehend, but look how long it takes humans to master their own body enough to walk, and most will never master it enough to dance ballet.
I happened to have worked on a project much like this one over six years ago for a customer of mine.
The article glosses over the fact that there are very, very few genuinely practical applications for this because of two insurmountable problems.
For one, our experiments at the time demonstrated that the hand-control idiom suffers from any lag; specifically that delicate manual operations are basically imposible with latency as low as 30ms which rule out things like surgery done this way. Hand dexterity depends on a very large number of relexive immediate movement in response to subtle stimuli like minute vibration of the tool, perceieved resistance, etc.
The second problem is one that operators of such devices very quickly become disoriented, often nauseated, because of the discordance between years of ingrained knowledge of how the world reacts to touch and the lagged/different input such tools provide.
People need to learn/new/ idioms for remote manipulation, not attempt to emulate biological systems. That's the same peoblem AI research has suffered from its inception: the day computers will display intelligence is when researchers start working on computer intelligence instead of trying to simulate human intelligence.
Same goes with tools.
While this might be a geekly thing to do (handshake over the net) and quite a bit neat, it's neither revolutionnary nor interresting in the long run.
The fact that a governement wants to encourage restricting avaliable information to the subset it approves (via censorship) is not incompatible to wanting to defeat the same mechanism in place in other places to coerce that subset to be the same as theirs.
Of course, the US governement would want to make sure that no other country can do the same. This way, the insignificant other 95% of the human race can bask in the greatness that is the (properly sanitized) Internet as defined by them.
Couldn't "finding" a "hidden" URL be viewed as "defeating a measure designed to protect" protected works?
Given the prevalence of security (heh) through obscurity in suit-driven IT, that means a great number of idiotic prosecutions in the future.
I don't know about other/.readers, but I know I often do things like peruse HTML source to extract URLs to work around broken/incompatible javascript gunk and such. If those were meant as "protection" does that mean I'm now commiting a horrible crime?
I can see IE-only vbscript or somesuch being used to force people to access resources... scrary.
-- MA
... and he hardly knew what he was talking about
on
1+ GHz Commodore SX-64 Mod
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Sheesh.
Destroying a neat piece of collectible cruft like that is bad enough, but it appears he actually knew very little about what he was destroying.
- The video chip was named 'VIC' not 'VIC20' (which was another, bittier, box).
- Neither Pac-Man nor Donkey Kong were originals on that platform, or indeed even faithful reproductions.
- I'm not even going to go into that 'BASIC operating system' bit [but hey, now that I think of it, it does establish a pattern for Microsoft 'OS'es]
- The T-1000 was a nice piece of PCish hardware; but had no battery either. Mains or no dice.
... But most of all, I am amazed at even his missing the irony of stating he wouldn't be able to use a five year old computer "without complaining" yet one of his admitted design goals was that he could run an emulator so that he could.
Err, I feel obliged to point out that doing things how they want, not disclosing information, covering up their inner workings and eleminating the public voice is exactly what governements/do/ in the first place.
Sure, in the US there is supposed to be a democracy... but how would you feel when the rules for acquiring a domain name suddenly raise to the comlexity of (for a random example) Copyright or Patent law? So complex that even lawyers can't agree on which end to hold.
It's impractical because of the now enormous resources required to do this, but the only solution is to return DNS to what it was meant to be in the first place: collaborating but disjoint entities serving TLD out of geographically and/administratively/ disjoint areas.
It could be done. All it would need is some guts, a handful of competent sysadmins from around the world, a few months development time and one HELL of a big pipe!
Up here in the Great White French North (Quebec) the Caisse Populaires Dejardins (analogous to US S&L) have online banking that supports "officially" only IE and Netscape.
In practice, however, Konqueror works fine with their services and they will take pains to make sure their system is accessible from any browser. A few weeks ago when they made some tweaks to their login procedure that broke Konqueror access, I emailed to complain and they were very nice telling me they'd look into it and see why it broke. Two days layer it was fixed.
I'm not sure I'd call them saints, but they at least are aware that not everyone is mindlessly assimilated into the Collective.
-- MG
Slashdot Mirror
My point, actually, was that it's the parents who are problematic, not the 'net.
I, in fact, agree with the .kids.us initiative-- it's the very first semi-intelligent initiative of the US government on the topic at all.
I don't agree that children should be restricted to a playpen where Ronald McDonald and Mattel are going to be the sole influences, but at least that solution doesn't attempt to coerce anything, it just creates the playpen.
What is scaring me is that there will very likely be a very great number of parents who will restrict their children to that playpen in order to avoid having to actually talk to them or spend time with them.
I'm sure this will produce good, docile little consumers who have been exposed to nothing but the American Way (made in Taiwan).
Oh, well.
-- MG
That's my point! Why the hell not?
For one, most 8 year olds will, when faced with typical porn, go either "Ewww" or laugh out; but if they understand the basic idea of sexuality will understand what it's all about and just not be interrested in such imagery.
I can assure you that if some kid is digging for stuff on Harry Potter, and stumbles on some porn site, he'll just do like most of us and curse at the stupidity of not finding what he's after.
Unless, of course, you want to pretend that sex doesn't exist to your kids until it's much too late. Or perhaps you prefer to think that all humans are asexuate drones until some arbitary age?
Your kids will learn about sex. They will get access to imagery and texts. They will experiment amongst themselves.
Would you rather they understood nothing and be unprepared to make critical and moral judgement on their own?
I knew what sex was, and how it worked, and why people were so interrested in it young enough that I can't possibly remember being told specifically. That made me an accepting adult who is not completely fscked up with what is arguably the principal function of a living being.
While I don't particularly enjoy porn myself, I understand many do, and cannot think of single reason why that would be "bad" in any way.
My kids will be taught that some people like to be entertained by watching depictions of monsters horribly mutilating stupid teenagers, some by depicions of crime fighters doing impossible stunts to defeat the nefarious nemesis, and some by depictions of sexual activity both mundane and off-the-wall. All of them carfuly scripted (for the high quality stuff) fiction.
They'll get to decide which (if any) they enjoy for themselves.
-- MG
I don't get it. Why is this society so obsessed with the concept that children are some sort of retarded subhuman species?
I grew up with intelligent parents that cared. I was never denied any soure of information, regardless of how ridiculous and/or "innapropriate", but was taught to use my brain to discard garbage on my own.
My children will get the same opportunity.
I've grown up to be a responsible, sane adult who isn't mind-controled by the media. Obviously, being able to use one's own jugment to qualify what's out there is not a desired objective of the governments.
They'd much rather have drones who consume the information that was deemed good for them without question.
-- MG
That's actually irrelevant. Given that they will control the zone files to the .kids.us SLD, removing an "offending" site is just a matter of commenting out an A record.
This is actually a Very Good Thing! It:
(a) allows parents who'd rather not teach their kids about using their brains (an amazing majority in these days of babysitting-by-TV) to assign a "safe" playpen.
(b) Does not make idiotic technical assumption, or impose a technical burden on other sysadmins,
(c) Does not coerce intelligent parents into restricting access to their kids to the domain alone, and
(d) makes no attemps to control the rest of the world.
What happened? Did the entire US legislative branch get kidnapped by aliens to be replaced by intelligent drones?
I think that this is the very first American law of note that I can say I agree with. Oh, well. There goes my value system. :)
-- MG
It's a wonderful idea for occasional typing on a device that does not normally provide good facilities for that, but I doubt anyone would want this as a primary input device for day-to-day work.
This is why the TRON idea of a CRT (or other graphical device) lying beneath a transparent touch-sensitive surface is impractical (but amazingly cool-looking).
The whole idea has been prompted by a friend of mine (a librarian) that types during his whole work day in two languages but needs frequent short 'switches' to other character sets-- the ability to switch to, say, cyrillic and see the unfamiliar layout would be very useful.
But since that keyboard is used day-in and day-out, it is important that it 'feels' like a normal keyboard.
-- MG
First off, its usefulness seem to depend on the ability to "switch" between keycaps while reusing the same light emitting hardware. Is that even possible?
Secondly, I would expect there is a hard problem with the keys' movement needing to bend the fibers up to several times per second for the lifetime of the keyboard. My understanding of fiber is that it's flexible, to a point, but prone to fatigue if bent repeatedly.
-- MG
LCD also suffers from angle of vision; you'd be surprised at how faded a keycap looks when it's at the edge of the keyboard. Place yourself in a confortable typing position and look at the numeric keypad on a typical PC keyboard: already over 30 degrees of angle for most people.
OLCD [as the editor suggested] looks promising, but very expensive.
-- MG
I would expect, however, that the document will be rather redundant. It's not like one cannot find several very well documented debunkings out there (and on NASA's web site as well).
I could see the point if the document is ultimately meant to be printed to dead trees, but then who will get it? Teachers would make sense, and perhaps FOX programming executives. :-)
I don't think a great deal of money should be spent on wider distribution though, the only people likely to pick it up are those who didn't already buy into the cranks' insanity.
-- MG
I've had some experience doing just that. To date, Qt is the most mature of those and will give you uniform access to GUI, networking, threading and even database access for Win32, Unices (including Linux) and MacOS.
If you aren't so worried about GUIs but need to output multimedia contents portably, SDL is a viable alternative. The portability of some of the more esoteric components is dubious but SDL has the distinct advantage of being completely free.
As for performance concerns some people have raised about archaic versions of GCC, don't let that stop you-- even if you don't use GCC 3.2 (which produces very good code) the subtle improvement is speed is very rarely worth the greatly increased complexity in development and maintenance.
Besides, with recent GCCs I'm hard-pressed to actually find any significant difference between code generated by it and other compilers (for IA32, anyways, and with all relevant optimizations turned on).
-- MG
History is replete with Bad Things imposed by powerful entities (be it governement, warring factions, religious institution, corporations, etc). Usualy, those entities attempt to reduce resistance to those schemes by publicising them as good, advantageous, desirable even.
Censorship is a reccuring favorite. "It would be bad to let the counter-revolutionnaries / heretics / competitors to speak against the System". Another common theme is "We have to protect the weak / children / people against harm and/or themselves".
This is, however, the first time that I see something so obviously nefarious portrayed in such a positive light!
The only raison d'tre of Palladium (and the underlying mechanisms) is to prevent people from using their tools to process the data of their choice in the manner they choose. Be it to prevent the "evil pirates" from listening to their CD on their computer, or *gasp* using such-and-such technology without the "safe" and "approved" program (how much are you willing to bet that "approved" software will always be commercial, proprietary and expensive?)
This would be horrible enough to get even the general populace to react and protest... if it wasn't described as an "enhancement". "Safer" They say (for whom?). "More reliable" (at what?).
My OS and computing environment are safe enough for the tasks I give them as it is. I don't need "help" protecting me against myself!
We need to cry, shout and yell loud enough to be heard. The CDA was nothing compared to this, because our computer remained ours, we could always choose to obey the law or not.
They are trying to take that choice away from us.
-- MG
While the emergence of a standard will quickly generate open source implementations (I can easily see, say, licq supporting the standard within days of the first draft) there is no incentive for the big corporate players to support it, and indeed a great many reasons not to.
Their interrest lies not in interoperability, but making sure that their customers can only talk to their customers so that if you want to be able to IM your brother-in-law or somesuch you have to subscribe to their service (even if it's in a way just as "simple" as feeding them your email for generating spam).
This means that, in the long run, the mass market consumer will not be able to talk to the open source clients we geeks will be using.
Like I said, wishful thinking. If we're really lucky this is how things will happen, and we'll have an IM that isn't swamped with hundreds of thousands of inane twinks and lusers spamming us with request for pr0n or cybersex. :-)
-- MG
You see, they *could* have given the hardware and software. The cost to M$ would have been actually neglectable and they would still have achieved their real goals of locking down a poor country in their web for the future.
The scary part is that if they had done that, then, only us geeks would have been able to see the deception; the mass media would have played along (untwittingly or not) with the marketroids' plan and portrayed M$ as a savior of struggling countries whilst ignoring the dire long-term consequences.
Again, M$ stupitidy manages to cancel out M$ evil, and the world is a bit safer for it.
-- MG
Basically, the whole concept relies on the fact that with the proper gait [sequence of movements to take a step] the center of gravity always remains within a triangle formed by three legs, and thus makes the whole contraption considerably harder to tip over, and makes tasks such as navigating holes or steps orders of magnitude simpler. (The center of gravity moving around is exactly what makes climbing steps a hard problem for a bipedal robot).
With more legs you gain additional resistance to environmental damage and a bit more flexibility with difficult obstacles, but you also increase complexity of construction and controlling by lots, and unless the environment is very hostile you normally wouldn't want to bother.
I'm sure a Google search will point you to a number of papers on the subject. MIT was especially interrested in that field in the early '90s.
-- MG
And here I was just six stories ago pointing out my not-so-humble opinion about how misguided trying to emulate biological systems was. This proves my point doesn't it?
A manufacturer went to a lot of trouble (and presumably expense) to make their device less reliable (hexapod locomotion is demonstrably optimal) and try to give a pointless appearance of intelligence.
If the robot had been built like a cockroach, arguably one of the most effective designs, I wouldn't have been any less likely to think it intelligent (it's not), but far more likely to think the designer was.
-- MG
It presumes that any monies you have paid towards such a product is forfeit even if the circumstances dictating the business change are entirely outside your control.
I think this is a positive move in its effects; this will make a greater number of business consumers start reading EULAs very carefully indeed, and I expect very many won't like what they find in there. We may see some changes on the horizon.
Like the infamous we-reserve-the-right-to-inspect-your-business clause that found itself into a licence I won't name [because I'm not sure I remember exactly which] :-) meant to be Open Source some time ago.
-- MG
Yes. And no. I think that emulating biological emulation is the absolute best example of counter intuitiveness; unless and until those emulation are perfect (which means at the very least interfacing at a neural level, absolute replication of every aspect, and no added latency) the fact that it is almost, but not quite, like the "real thing" is going to make learning to use it harder than it would be to use an arbitrary system.
Just look at the problems adolescent humans get trying to use their own limbs because their specs keep changing subtly, making them not-quite what they were when they were kids. The joke about teenagers tripping on their own feet because they forget how to use them isn't much of one.
Transparent and intuitive are perfect goals, but modeling tools against biological equivalents is the wrong way of acheiving this.
Look at a very simple interface: a door handle. There are no biological equivalent, but it does its task in a very simple fashion most humans learn without trouble.
You're working under the presumption that biological systems are inherently easier to comprehend, but look how long it takes humans to master their own body enough to walk, and most will never master it enough to dance ballet.
-- MG
The article glosses over the fact that there are very, very few genuinely practical applications for this because of two insurmountable problems.
For one, our experiments at the time demonstrated that the hand-control idiom suffers from any lag; specifically that delicate manual operations are basically imposible with latency as low as 30ms which rule out things like surgery done this way. Hand dexterity depends on a very large number of relexive immediate movement in response to subtle stimuli like minute vibration of the tool, perceieved resistance, etc.
The second problem is one that operators of such devices very quickly become disoriented, often nauseated, because of the discordance between years of ingrained knowledge of how the world reacts to touch and the lagged/different input such tools provide.
People need to learn /new/ idioms for remote manipulation, not attempt to emulate biological systems. That's the same peoblem AI research has suffered from its inception: the day computers will display intelligence is when researchers start working on computer intelligence instead of trying to simulate human intelligence.
Same goes with tools.
While this might be a geekly thing to do (handshake over the net) and quite a bit neat, it's neither revolutionnary nor interresting in the long run.
-- MG
The fact that a governement wants to encourage restricting avaliable information to the subset it approves (via censorship) is not incompatible to wanting to defeat the same mechanism in place in other places to coerce that subset to be the same as theirs.
Of course, the US governement would want to make sure that no other country can do the same. This way, the insignificant other 95% of the human race can bask in the greatness that is the (properly sanitized) Internet as defined by them.
This is all self consistent. (And scary).
--MH
Couldn't "finding" a "hidden" URL be viewed as "defeating a measure designed to protect" protected works?
Given the prevalence of security (heh) through obscurity in suit-driven IT, that means a great number of idiotic prosecutions in the future.
I don't know about other /.readers, but I know I often do things like peruse HTML source to extract URLs to work around broken/incompatible javascript gunk and such. If those were meant as "protection" does that mean I'm now commiting a horrible crime?
I can see IE-only vbscript or somesuch being used to force people to access resources... scrary.
-- MA
Destroying a neat piece of collectible cruft like that is bad enough, but it appears he actually knew very little about what he was destroying.
- The video chip was named 'VIC' not 'VIC20' (which was another, bittier, box).
- Neither Pac-Man nor Donkey Kong were originals on that platform, or indeed even faithful reproductions.
- I'm not even going to go into that 'BASIC operating system' bit [but hey, now that I think of it, it does establish a pattern for Microsoft 'OS'es]
- The T-1000 was a nice piece of PCish hardware; but had no battery either. Mains or no dice.
-- MG
Sure, in the US there is supposed to be a democracy... but how would you feel when the rules for acquiring a domain name suddenly raise to the comlexity of (for a random example) Copyright or Patent law? So complex that even lawyers can't agree on which end to hold.
It's impractical because of the now enormous resources required to do this, but the only solution is to return DNS to what it was meant to be in the first place: collaborating but disjoint entities serving TLD out of geographically and /administratively/ disjoint areas.
It could be done. All it would need is some guts, a handful of competent sysadmins from around the world, a few months development time and one HELL of a big pipe!
-- MG
That would be the second half of 2003, I.e.: somewhere late in 2004. :)
-- MG
Up here in the Great White French North (Quebec) the Caisse Populaires Dejardins (analogous to US S&L) have online banking that supports "officially" only IE and Netscape. In practice, however, Konqueror works fine with their services and they will take pains to make sure their system is accessible from any browser. A few weeks ago when they made some tweaks to their login procedure that broke Konqueror access, I emailed to complain and they were very nice telling me they'd look into it and see why it broke. Two days layer it was fixed. I'm not sure I'd call them saints, but they at least are aware that not everyone is mindlessly assimilated into the Collective. -- MG