That would utterly rock - no more ineffective drugs with side effects.
This of course raises the question of whether the drug companies that benefit from the current crop of drugs will stand for this. I imagine the smart ones are already working on nanoparticle based drug solutions. But truly effective drugs might not be so good for the bottom line! Nahhhh, no one would be that evil, riiiiiight?
While I'm sure there will be the prerequisite warp drive/time travel jokes about this, I think the most interesting aspect lies in potential applications to communications and computing. The potential of quantum computers is already quite impressive, but imagine coupling that with the ability to design a system without concern about the physical proximity of some components. Imagine being able to build a planetary computer capable of answering the question of life the universe and.... everything! Planetary should be big enough for that, right?
The only problems arise when Linux developers (as opposed to Microsoft developers porting something to Linux) have access to Microsoft "Intellectual Property" and may become "tainted" by it.
Yeah, that's definitely a danger of dancing with the bear. For now, I'll assume that the crossplatform love-in at MS is the real deal. If that is so, then there must be some business advantage to MS to do this now.
Heh heh, the malicious person doesn't even need money as a motivator. In this particular case, I don't see how anyone would profit anyway, at least monetarily.
After seeing what most MySpace pages look like, I think it's not such a bad thing that the content on social networking sites is not freely available! And with the API having been opened up to allow the launch of a million and one chintzy and loud page gadgets, I'm not too worried about Facebook being closed either. Besides, wasn't the allure of the social networking sites hanging out and sharing with a few (hundred?) friends, and not the whole friggin internet?
Stuff like this makes me not even care about the rules anymore. When you make it easier for your customers to get your product illegally, than legally, guess what happens? Yeah. Either the media industry is full of idiots, or someone needs to put their lawyers and spokespeople on a leash and shut them up.
I'm certainly all for keeping piles of gaming crap at a minimum! But I have not used GameTap yet, ironically in my efforts to get away from PC gaming in favor of consoles, the retro games on Xbox Live have given me a taste for some of the games now being offered on GameTap. I'm still on the fence, but I think GameTap may actually have some legs to it.
I don't know if mashups are legal in the strictest sense, but I do have an idea how I would want it to work. Academic publications are impossible to produce without citing the work of others. That's how research works. Information that did not originate with the author is attributed to its respective source(s). No muss, no fuss, usually, and there are accepted conventions for how this is done. Right now I don't think the web has any such accepted conventions, but it should. Practically speaking, it would be impossible to close down all aggregation sites anyway, so the best course of action, imho, would be to develop standards for citing information that comes from other sources. While these still can't be enforced 100%, peer pressure should at least give people the idea that citing sources is a good thing.
It's nice that they're determined to get the game out, but how is this going to happen if the Sony and Nintendo won't approve the game for their consoles? And I don't recall there being a PC version of the game. Of course they could port it to the PC and then just sell it online, maybe even with Steam. But unless they were planning this contingency all along, it will take time to port the game. Another question is whether Microsoft would allow the game on the 360. If they have to take the time to do a PC port, then a 360 port almost comes for free. Manhunt 2 as an Xbox 360/Windows Vista exclusive might actually make sense. Not only that, if they're successful, it could put a whole new spin on the AO rating issue. It might just remove the curse.
Ooooh, I see, Apple has filed phone related patents that utilize a scroll wheel, just like the iPod nano. Never mind that every other iPod(minus the shuffle) also has a scroll wheel.
Oh, I see where they might be going with this. Imagine a scroll wheel that has little dimples with the numbers on them around the circumference like an old rotary dial. That would take care of dialing without a touchscreen, a mix of modern and retro.
Still $300 for a phone is steep. I would hope and imagine that a nano based phone will be subsidized if they really want to appeal more to the mass market. Hopefully it would be free of the AT&T exclusivity as well, but that's a tougher matter to negotiate I would guess, depending on the current iPhone agreement between Apple and AT&T.
It seems to me that once again the question comes down to whether or not the freedoms of the many are going to be ripped away because of the misbehavior of a few trolls. There have always been people who abuse the system and cause grief wherever they go just because it is fun for them to aggravate people/authority/whatever. Does that mean that all of the rest of us have to live in chains? I think not. Humanity needs to learn that in order to have freedom, sometimes we have to allow people to do bad things and clean up the mess afterwards. There is no freedom to do good without also having the freedom to do evil. If we can't accept that, then we'd might as well give up all of this lip service to freedom and lock the handcuffs right now.
When are they going to learn that enacting unfair restrictions like this will only degrade people's respect for other, perhaps legitimate, restrictions? As others have noted, any such total ban on copying will largely be ignored by those with the means. And those who don't have the means to ignore and get around the restrictions will simply stop buying DVDs if they cannot easily view their purchase on the device of their choice.
I don't see a system that shoots paintballs or shuts off cell phones getting too far in the US. This really goes too far and can potentially create more chaos than it is worth. I can almost hear the lawsuits being filed now the first time one of those paintballs causes a wreck, or when a physician talking to a patient has his/her phone disabled rushing to the hospital. Technology is a great thing, but ultimately laws should be enforced via human education and discipline.
Over a million downloads of Safari for Windows probably means a whole lot of disappointed people at this point. I personally have had nothing but trouble with Safari, textless menus and lockups. I finally gave up and uninstalled the thing. I know that betas are test versions, but honestly, Safari for Windows feels more like alpha class software right now. The general public should not be using this right now. I think they rushed this out in this bad condition because Steve Jobs wanted to talk about it and Safari as the host for 3rd party apps on the iPhone. It's always a bad thing when software is released to the public too soon in order to satisfy some marketing goal.
Sony releasing a new stripped down version of the PS3 may not be so farfetched, but it would take some serious cast iron balls to do it at this point. I heard elsewhere that the price of Sony blu-ray players has come down which could be a signal that the PS3 might be relieved of its duties as the cheapest BD player...or not! The biggest problem with removing the BD player are the games that have already been released on BD. Pulling the drive would mean reissuing games on DVD(s), a nontrivial feat. But if Sony is desperate enough, and strong enough to admit they were wrong, it could be done.
This isn't very likely, but I'd love to see them try. Success would be like the New Coke story of the console industry.
A FFXIII PS3 exclusive would certainly help Sony move some consoles, but at the current price, the PS3 is still too expensive. If the price comes down a couple of hundred USD by the time of FFXIII release, then they may get people who have been waiting for a must have game to buy the system. In the meantime though, people are spending their money on Wii consoles and games. And in the US at least, the 360 cannot be ignored either. So I think Square's remarks are their way of hedging their bets. Since the 360 can't be ignored in the west against an overpriced PS3 (for now), crossplatform is a safe bet. Sony would have to pony up some major cash to secure a worldwide exclusive, so much cash that it may not be worth the trouble.
It makes me sad to see this once-great brand dragged through so many different flavors of me-too mud. Does anyone actually want this?
I can only see this of use in situations where the PHB is fixated on the Netscape name for some reason. They'll refuse Firefox, but Netscape is fine since they've used that forever.
Fermilab certainly doesn't want to lose any brain power, and they really won't. But physicists tend to move around like free agent professional atheletes. Everyone wants to be on the cutting edge, and in high energy physics that means working on LHC based experiments. There will still be good and interesting physics research done at Fermilab, but clearly the sun is setting on the Tevatron. I'm just glad I had the privilege of being a part of it long ago. I even got a chance to be part of a low mass Higgs search back in the day. So I think I can say with confidence that the scientists of Fermilab are every bit as excited by the LHC turn on next year as their colleagues at CERN.
Sometimes you've just gotta pony up the bucks and pay the piper. In my experience, workarounds tend to be a PITA, so if your company is serious about the work, then they should pay what is necessary to buy licenses for Adobe's Suite. Having "normal" users use a patch work of tools will just result in frustration for them and all involved. I've learned the hard way, that it's better to pay the money now, than pay in time and frustration later. If the company is too frugal to buy the tools they need, then why are they in business? Most of the time, if you tell the bean counters that you can't do X without Y, then they'll make a way, or just forget about doing X.
The other big advantage of sticking with Adobe's tools, is all of the support that's already available for those tools. I've spent way too much time in the past adapting a book or tutorial's lessons to other tools I've happened to be using at the time. It just isn't cost effective in the long run.
Interesting question, because datamining email to target ads is exactly what Google said they wanted to do when gmail got started. Since encrypted mail would make this impossible, I wonder if they'll take actions to stop the use of encryption tools with gmail. On the other hand, as it stands, unless they offer such tools themselves, I don't see most users encrypting their gmail anytime soon. So the losses may be acceptable to Google.
This reminds me of the scenes in Casablanca where the police are told to round up the usual suspects. Ultimately the accuracy doesn't matter to the government anyway. Worldwide, I think we are moving in a direction of less freedom rather than more, spearheaded by wrong-headed anti-terrorism hysteria in the US. So why should they care about accuracy, they'll just round up whoever fits the profile and sort it out later, or not.
This is just the usual running in place that politicians do so that they can say they've done something. I'm sad to see that it is the case in Germany, just as the US. In the end, this law will do nothing to stop the real criminals and be a potential pain for the professionals charged with thwarting said real criminals. h4x0r ftw!
Running scared? You don't know the Russian mafia very well do you? I'm betting they're working out how to get one of their hitmen in the same jail cell as Soloway.
You bet they are! They'd better have some Geiger counters handy, if you know what I mean!
Slashdot Mirror
That would utterly rock - no more ineffective drugs with side effects.
This of course raises the question of whether the drug companies that benefit from the current crop of drugs will stand for this. I imagine the smart ones are already working on nanoparticle based drug solutions. But truly effective drugs might not be so good for the bottom line! Nahhhh, no one would be that evil, riiiiiight?
While I'm sure there will be the prerequisite warp drive/time travel jokes about this, I think the most interesting aspect lies in potential applications to communications and computing. The potential of quantum computers is already quite impressive, but imagine coupling that with the ability to design a system without concern about the physical proximity of some components. Imagine being able to build a planetary computer capable of answering the question of life the universe and .... everything! Planetary should be big enough for that, right?
The only problems arise when Linux developers (as opposed to Microsoft developers porting something to Linux) have access to Microsoft "Intellectual Property" and may become "tainted" by it.
Yeah, that's definitely a danger of dancing with the bear. For now, I'll assume that the crossplatform love-in at MS is the real deal. If that is so, then there must be some business advantage to MS to do this now.
Heh heh, the malicious person doesn't even need money as a motivator. In this particular case, I don't see how anyone would profit anyway, at least monetarily.
After seeing what most MySpace pages look like, I think it's not such a bad thing that the content on social networking sites is not freely available! And with the API having been opened up to allow the launch of a million and one chintzy and loud page gadgets, I'm not too worried about Facebook being closed either. Besides, wasn't the allure of the social networking sites hanging out and sharing with a few (hundred?) friends, and not the whole friggin internet?
Stuff like this makes me not even care about the rules anymore. When you make it easier for your customers to get your product illegally, than legally, guess what happens? Yeah. Either the media industry is full of idiots, or someone needs to put their lawyers and spokespeople on a leash and shut them up.
I'm certainly all for keeping piles of gaming crap at a minimum! But I have not used GameTap yet, ironically in my efforts to get away from PC gaming in favor of consoles, the retro games on Xbox Live have given me a taste for some of the games now being offered on GameTap. I'm still on the fence, but I think GameTap may actually have some legs to it.
Hmmm, I'm not sure there is really a difference! XD
I don't know if mashups are legal in the strictest sense, but I do have an idea how I would want it to work. Academic publications are impossible to produce without citing the work of others. That's how research works. Information that did not originate with the author is attributed to its respective source(s). No muss, no fuss, usually, and there are accepted conventions for how this is done. Right now I don't think the web has any such accepted conventions, but it should. Practically speaking, it would be impossible to close down all aggregation sites anyway, so the best course of action, imho, would be to develop standards for citing information that comes from other sources. While these still can't be enforced 100%, peer pressure should at least give people the idea that citing sources is a good thing.
It's nice that they're determined to get the game out, but how is this going to happen if the Sony and Nintendo won't approve the game for their consoles? And I don't recall there being a PC version of the game. Of course they could port it to the PC and then just sell it online, maybe even with Steam. But unless they were planning this contingency all along, it will take time to port the game. Another question is whether Microsoft would allow the game on the 360. If they have to take the time to do a PC port, then a 360 port almost comes for free. Manhunt 2 as an Xbox 360/Windows Vista exclusive might actually make sense. Not only that, if they're successful, it could put a whole new spin on the AO rating issue. It might just remove the curse.
Ooooh, I see, Apple has filed phone related patents that utilize a scroll wheel, just like the iPod nano. Never mind that every other iPod(minus the shuffle) also has a scroll wheel.
Oh, I see where they might be going with this. Imagine a scroll wheel that has little dimples with the numbers on them around the circumference like an old rotary dial. That would take care of dialing without a touchscreen, a mix of modern and retro.
Still $300 for a phone is steep. I would hope and imagine that a nano based phone will be subsidized if they really want to appeal more to the mass market. Hopefully it would be free of the AT&T exclusivity as well, but that's a tougher matter to negotiate I would guess, depending on the current iPhone agreement between Apple and AT&T.
It seems to me that once again the question comes down to whether or not the freedoms of the many are going to be ripped away because of the misbehavior of a few trolls. There have always been people who abuse the system and cause grief wherever they go just because it is fun for them to aggravate people/authority/whatever. Does that mean that all of the rest of us have to live in chains? I think not. Humanity needs to learn that in order to have freedom, sometimes we have to allow people to do bad things and clean up the mess afterwards. There is no freedom to do good without also having the freedom to do evil. If we can't accept that, then we'd might as well give up all of this lip service to freedom and lock the handcuffs right now.
When are they going to learn that enacting unfair restrictions like this will only degrade people's respect for other, perhaps legitimate, restrictions? As others have noted, any such total ban on copying will largely be ignored by those with the means. And those who don't have the means to ignore and get around the restrictions will simply stop buying DVDs if they cannot easily view their purchase on the device of their choice.
The thing I found most amazing was that after a 12-hour shift grinding, some of these guys played their own toons for fun.
That proves it then, crack's got nothing on WoW!
I don't see a system that shoots paintballs or shuts off cell phones getting too far in the US. This really goes too far and can potentially create more chaos than it is worth. I can almost hear the lawsuits being filed now the first time one of those paintballs causes a wreck, or when a physician talking to a patient has his/her phone disabled rushing to the hospital. Technology is a great thing, but ultimately laws should be enforced via human education and discipline.
Over a million downloads of Safari for Windows probably means a whole lot of disappointed people at this point. I personally have had nothing but trouble with Safari, textless menus and lockups. I finally gave up and uninstalled the thing. I know that betas are test versions, but honestly, Safari for Windows feels more like alpha class software right now. The general public should not be using this right now. I think they rushed this out in this bad condition because Steve Jobs wanted to talk about it and Safari as the host for 3rd party apps on the iPhone. It's always a bad thing when software is released to the public too soon in order to satisfy some marketing goal.
Sony releasing a new stripped down version of the PS3 may not be so farfetched, but it would take some serious cast iron balls to do it at this point. I heard elsewhere that the price of Sony blu-ray players has come down which could be a signal that the PS3 might be relieved of its duties as the cheapest BD player...or not! The biggest problem with removing the BD player are the games that have already been released on BD. Pulling the drive would mean reissuing games on DVD(s), a nontrivial feat. But if Sony is desperate enough, and strong enough to admit they were wrong, it could be done.
This isn't very likely, but I'd love to see them try. Success would be like the New Coke story of the console industry.
A FFXIII PS3 exclusive would certainly help Sony move some consoles, but at the current price, the PS3 is still too expensive. If the price comes down a couple of hundred USD by the time of FFXIII release, then they may get people who have been waiting for a must have game to buy the system. In the meantime though, people are spending their money on Wii consoles and games. And in the US at least, the 360 cannot be ignored either. So I think Square's remarks are their way of hedging their bets. Since the 360 can't be ignored in the west against an overpriced PS3 (for now), crossplatform is a safe bet. Sony would have to pony up some major cash to secure a worldwide exclusive, so much cash that it may not be worth the trouble.
It makes me sad to see this once-great brand dragged through so many different flavors of me-too mud. Does anyone actually want this?
I can only see this of use in situations where the PHB is fixated on the Netscape name for some reason. They'll refuse Firefox, but Netscape is fine since they've used that forever.
Fermilab certainly doesn't want to lose any brain power, and they really won't. But physicists tend to move around like free agent professional atheletes. Everyone wants to be on the cutting edge, and in high energy physics that means working on LHC based experiments. There will still be good and interesting physics research done at Fermilab, but clearly the sun is setting on the Tevatron. I'm just glad I had the privilege of being a part of it long ago. I even got a chance to be part of a low mass Higgs search back in the day. So I think I can say with confidence that the scientists of Fermilab are every bit as excited by the LHC turn on next year as their colleagues at CERN.
Sometimes you've just gotta pony up the bucks and pay the piper. In my experience, workarounds tend to be a PITA, so if your company is serious about the work, then they should pay what is necessary to buy licenses for Adobe's Suite. Having "normal" users use a patch work of tools will just result in frustration for them and all involved. I've learned the hard way, that it's better to pay the money now, than pay in time and frustration later. If the company is too frugal to buy the tools they need, then why are they in business? Most of the time, if you tell the bean counters that you can't do X without Y, then they'll make a way, or just forget about doing X.
The other big advantage of sticking with Adobe's tools, is all of the support that's already available for those tools. I've spent way too much time in the past adapting a book or tutorial's lessons to other tools I've happened to be using at the time. It just isn't cost effective in the long run.
Interesting question, because datamining email to target ads is exactly what Google said they wanted to do when gmail got started. Since encrypted mail would make this impossible, I wonder if they'll take actions to stop the use of encryption tools with gmail. On the other hand, as it stands, unless they offer such tools themselves, I don't see most users encrypting their gmail anytime soon. So the losses may be acceptable to Google.
This reminds me of the scenes in Casablanca where the police are told to round up the usual suspects. Ultimately the accuracy doesn't matter to the government anyway. Worldwide, I think we are moving in a direction of less freedom rather than more, spearheaded by wrong-headed anti-terrorism hysteria in the US. So why should they care about accuracy, they'll just round up whoever fits the profile and sort it out later, or not.
This is just the usual running in place that politicians do so that they can say they've done something. I'm sad to see that it is the case in Germany, just as the US. In the end, this law will do nothing to stop the real criminals and be a potential pain for the professionals charged with thwarting said real criminals. h4x0r ftw!
Running scared? You don't know the Russian mafia very well do you? I'm betting they're working out how to get one of their hitmen in the same jail cell as Soloway.
You bet they are! They'd better have some Geiger counters handy, if you know what I mean!