It's easy to bitch "aaagh, they've stolen my privacy!!", but YOU figure out a way that you can
- identify or at least highlight potential terrorists...
I think that's the wrong goal. It should be about keeping weapons off planes, not terrorists. Personally, I don't care of Osama himself is sitting in coach, if we can be assured that there are no weapons or explosives available on the flight. That should be the goal of airport security. Finding terrorists and building a criminal case against them is the business of law enforcement, not baggage screeners and gate agents.
If you want secure flights, then:
Secure the cockpit door. done
Improve passenger and baggage screening. improved, but room for more
Reduce the amount of carry-on allowed on the flight. not done!
If you want to arrest terrorists who have committed crimes:
Make it a law-enforcement priority over lesser crimes.
My friend tried to use a demo iPod in a store the other day. It totally perplexed him. All he wanted to do was skip to the next song. He tried the buttons, but couldn't get it to work.
I'm not saying to iPod design is bad. I'm pointing out that even the best designs aren't easy for everyone--even for relatively simple devices that aren't overburdened with unreleated features.
Now that I think about it, iPod wheel thing was confusing to me, too. I thought it was just a visual feature, meant to look like a retro speaker grill. There's nothing about it that indicates it is a control. No affordance. No tactile feedback.
Remember this?: television will eliminate ignorance, education will be widespread, the people will have a voice with which to communicate.
"It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising clutter." --Herbert Hoover talking about allowing radio advertisements on television.
And MS shipped Solitaire to teach people how to use the mouse.
Newton didn't have the horsepower for good handwriting recognition. (It has to be real good to gain acceptance.) I think Graffiti is a brilliant compromise between the capabilities of the human and of the machine.
The obscenity rules have historically been applied to gratuitous material. Remember, NBC broadcast Shindler's List complete and uncut, with all the brutality, nudity, and four letter words? No complaints were lodged. In most of the country, it started during Prime Time. Couldn't do that today. Nor could PBS even pull out its own Tales of the City, which they've shown many times without bleeping, fuzzy rectangles, or cutting around the drug usage.
When you're a national broadcaster with hundreds of affiliates in different communities with different standards, do you cut back until it's not objectionable to the most conservative guidelines? The rules are too Draconian to risk aiming for the 80% group. In fact, you have to be even more careful, because the rules are too vague. Everything becomes a judgment call. Remember the radio station in Colorado that got fined for playing the radio-safe mix of an Eminem song?
Before the Superbowl, even the f-word was treated on a case-by-case basis. Sting (or was it Bono?) got away with it on an awards show, because he didn't use it in a nasty way. Now we have to worry about "blow job"? C'mon! The show is about (in part) a cop going to a brothel. Is the whole context of prostitution unobjectionable once you bleep four words that (I assume) are common in that environment?
Isn't it enough that we have content warning labels and V-chips to "protect" the kids? Vote with your remote, not the FCC. Mom and Pop Sixpack in Prudesville, U.S.A., should not have that much influence over other free adults' choices in the rest of the country.
Bizarre. I did use spaces, but they got swallowed up. Couldn't enter a tab, because that advances to the next control in the form. If they worked for you, it must be a difference in the browser. I used Firefox.
So if return 0 is supposed to be mapped to a successful return value, how would one return 0 to the system without it being remapped? In other words, if I'm writing for VMS, and I must indicate a particular error with a 0, how could I do this?
Except for the semicolon, as the other poster pointed out, this does have some portability problems. Not sure if you'd call them bugs or not.
#include<stdio.h>
You could argue that a preprocessor should allow this, some will indeed choke because there's no space before the <.
return 0;
The 0 is returned to the operating system, but operating systems have different rules for what return values mean. For example, in VMS, even numbers are errors, and
return 0;
will generate a nasty error message upon completion.
Some people argue that the compiler should return "success" when the code says to return a 0. I haven't read anything official that supports that. And if so, how would you return a 0 if that's indeed the error you need to return to the operating system?
For maximum portability with ANSI C, you probably want to do something like this:
#include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h>
int main(void)/* void makes it clear this is ANSI, not K&R */ { printf("Hello, World!");/* note ',' for proper grammar */ exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); /*NOTREACHED*//* Let lint know, that you won't get here. */ return 0;/* silences compiler warning */ }
[Slashcode says to use <ECODE> instead of
<PRE or <CODE, but how do I inline code or do indentation with <ECODE>?]
IMNSHO, software patents should be eliminated entirely, and copyrights should only cover published works (i.e. source - you know, like books for which copyrights were origionally intended). What's left is trade secrets.
This is not necessarily a software patent. It's a process patent. In theory, they could stop you from performing the same process whether you're using a keyboard or doing it by hand.
* 50% of the phone calls I get are from sales people
I haven't gotten a telemarketing call in at least six years. I simply signed up for the DMA's telephone preference service (free) and had my phone number unlisted ($0.25 per month).
* 80% of the snail mail I get is marketing junk. The other 20% are bills.
This was much higher for me. When I moved into my house, I was receiving 110 mail-order catalogs a week (more near Christmas). Several bills were lost in the pages. My trash/recycling company said I was trying to put too much into the recycle bin. I've sent 450 letters and made more than 100 calls over three years to get the catalogs to stop. Now it's down to a trickle. Snail Mail spam is a scourge that needs a solution.
* 25-30% of TV time consists of commercials.
TiVo, baby. I only watch Superbowl commercials now.
* 10% of the email I see is spam. The other 200 spams go directly to Thunderwhatever's junk folder where I occasionally check them, then purge them.
99.7% of the email I see is spam. Takes several minutes to download it over my DSL line each day. Takes about 10 minutes to search for false positives each day.
I also highly recommend AdSubtract which eliminates nearly all ads, in addition to popups. Surf faster and with fewer distractions.
Show me someone who gets thousands of spams, and I'll show you somoene who has posted their email address to a public website or usenet or has clicked on install for some popup marketing tool for IE.
I call bullshit. I have email addresses that I've never used or posted anywhere that receive spam because of dictionary attacks on my domain. Not to mention all the hate-mail from people when spammers joe-job my domain.
I've used email since 1985. (OK, it was VMS MAIL before I was on the Internet.) Tremendously valuable. But I'm just about to give up on it.
It's not just the spam. The fact is, I get very little real email nowadays. I'm not sure why. I think many of my friends have given up on it. At work (I'm a software engineer), it's maybe 10 messages a day. I recall in 1992 keeping stats and learning that I was processing more than 100 real messages a day (no spam).
And the spam is a huge problem. I'm getting 300+ messages a day. Spam Assassin recognition is less than 10% of that, with about one false positive a week. It's just not worth wading through all that noise to find the ham. I recently went on a 10 day vacation, never checked email, and came home to discover I hadn't missed a thing.
And it's not just a matter of changing email addresses. I have my own domain. I regularly get dictionary attacks. I have email addresses that have never been used anywhere that get spam. My domain is also regularly joe-jobbed, so, in addition to everything else, I get pointless hate mail from strangers and webmasters who think I've been sending spam. I've tried to get my host provider to publish an SPF record, but they're swamped with other issues.
No, trade secret protection does not prevent others from using the same invention if they came up with it independently. There is very little law that protects a trade secret. It's the fact that it's secret that counts.
Not everything can be kept secret once it's put to use. Software that's delivered to customers can (usually) be reverse engineered. Mechanical devices can be duplicated. Thus trade secret protection usually applies to manufacturing methods (e.g., you might make a super-optimizing compiler that you don't sell, but you use to make other software that you do sell).
My point is that a trade secret may remain a secret indefinitely. That's closed-source and proprietary in the extreme. With a patent, the method is published even before the patent expires (sometimes even before it's granted now). In that sense, inventions become open, even if they're not freely copyable for a period of time. So I'd place patents in the middle of the spectrum between open- and closed-source (in software terms).
First, consider the phone system. Until Ma Bell was broken up and local phone companies were encouraged to innovate to survive, and third-party manufacturers were allowed to make phone gizmos that could be freely connected to the POTS network, progress in that field was glacial. Caller ID, 3-way calling, cheap wireless phones, fax machines in a computer printer (hell, even just having MORE than one phone on your line)... Consider the point made.
Bad example. The breakup of the phone company was good in some ways (creating a lot of business opportunities), but bad in a lot of others (overall quality and cost for the consumer). Nobody today makes a phone as good as the classic AT&T Princess phone (read The Design of Everyday Things for a list of reasons why). Long distance fees came down, but those statistics only track the per-minute charges, not actual cost to the consumer. Most people are spending more on their phone bill now, even in inflation-adjusted dollars because of bundling and fees that allow per-minute charges to be a loss leader. Phone companies now charge to have your name, address, and number unlisted in the directories they hand out. That's extortion ("pay us, or we'll tell the world about you"). Then they gave the listings to direct marketers and invented the evil CallerID as a way to combat telemarketing. [Despite my objections, my wife wants CallerID. If I add just that feature without buying a bundle of other features, SBC wants to add $36 per MONTH to our bill.] We have tons of cheap and expensive phones that don't work at all. The payphone network has all but vanished. [Spent an hour late one night, driving around looking for a payphone to call the police to report a hit-and-run.] Curly thermal fax paper with unsolicited ads! Does it get any worse? Slamming, cramming, 10-10 numbers. Insufficient network capacity for widespread disasters. Finger pointing when the phone company line to your house is so low quality that even your $350 14.4 modem can't make a connection. Inability to get a second line because there are no more lines available for your neighborhood. Inability to call 611 from your cell phone to report problems with your land line.
The breakup of MaBell and subsequent deregulation cost us a reliable, useful telecommunications system and ushered in a blight of fraud, extortion, telemarketing, etc.
And don't tell me you couldn't hook up a modem or answering machine to MaBell before the breakup. That problem was addressed long before the breakup.
Patents work for medicine, they don't work for software. A software patent is by definition a patent on a process, not a tangible result.
Non-starter. Many drug patents are for processes, like economical manufacturing. Also, inventing a process to make a drug stable at room temperature in pill form that previously was only available as a refrigerated injectable. This is comparable to inventing a codec that makes streaming a video feed feasible (or a DSP algorithm that makes accurate non-invasive monitoring of your blood gases feasible while you're on the operating table). Just Yup, it's a process, but it's a useful invention.
I'm always surprised that there's so much resistance to patent law among the open software crowd. One point of patents is to get the methods out into the open. If it weren't for patents, true inventions (even inventive processes) would often be held as trade secrets for much longer than patent protection lasts.
Yes, the patent system isn't perfect, and it's being abused. But I, a programmer, am against scrapping it completely. I'd suggest that we raise the bar for inventiveness during the application, adjust the length of protection depending on the type of patent and the field it applies to (very short for software, even longer for drugs, etc.), and get more rigorous with the requirement that patent holders defend their patents from the start rather than submarining them.
Even software patents inspire innovation. I doubt we would have the superior PNG format today if not for the compression patents underlying GIF.
There's one gas station in my area that I avoid because it always seems to pump more gasoline than my regular mileage would suggest. In fact, it once pumped over 12 gallons into my supposedly 11.5 gallon tank. I suppose that could be a fluke with tempature and the manufacturer rounding when reporting the size the of the tank, but it happens consistenly enough that I avoid the station. I seem to get very consistent results at the other stations I usually go to.
But there's one giant station that I went to twice. Both times, my credit card was charged exactly $0.10 more than the pump read (total, not per gallon). I complained to my credit card company both times, sent them copies of the pump receipts, and they credited my account. I haven't ventured back to that station to see if they've corrected their problem. I wonder how many people would recognize a $0.10 per transaction bump?
I also wonder if such a scheme (overcharging by $0.10 per transaction) would really be worth the risk. This is a big station, so maybe they do 1000 transactions a day. That's only $36,500 a year. Doesn't seem enough to risk getting slapped with a fraud charge.
VMS had a POSIX mode that was fully compliant with the spec. I did some poking around, and it looks like they [HP/Compaq/Digital] stopped supporting it. See POSIX Kit.
POSIX isn't a kernal. It's a standards specification. The first POSIX-compliant OS was VMS, which is about as un-unixy as you can get.
I went to a DECUS symposium in the early 1990s where two VMS engineers explained what they had to do to achieve POSIX-compliance. It was humorous in that the official validation suite couldn't necessarily run on a strictly POSIX-compliant OS, because it assumed the presence of common UNIX tools that weren't actually in the spec at the time.
ISBN numbers, which are intended to uniquely identify books, are also running out. This is due in part to the boom in self-publishing. Like VINs, some digits are reserved to identify the company (publisher), others are a serial number doled out by the publisher, and there's a simple check digit to catch typos, transpositions, etc.
The ISBN format was a little more flexible, though. The publisher identifer could be a variable number of digits. Big publishers got short codes, and thus more digits for the serial number. Small houses got long codes and just a few digits for the serial number. Thus a lot more of the identity space can be used.
But the internet self-publishing (or print-on-demand) companies (e.g., iUniverse, FirstBooks, etc.) were late to the game, so they didn't get the short publisher codes like other prolific houses. In the end it works out, as you can assign multiple publisher codes to a publisher that prints more titles than originally allowed for.
The self-publishing companies are cranking out hundreds of titles a year. Unlike a traditional publisher, there's no drawback to setting up a title that may never sell since the author pays these costs. This is rapidly accelerating the depletion of code numbers. And since self-publishing companies never take books "out-of-print," they can't recycle serial numbers in their space. (I'm not certain recycling is allowed in the system, but you could imagine doing so for books that are long out-of-print.
Obviously, there are advantages to having meaning built into the number rather than using a strictly serial number. Auto insurers can get most of what they need to know about the car out of the VIN (manufacturer, model year, body type, etc.). Book sellers can figure out which publisher's catalog to check by looking up the beginning of an ISBN. But the trade-off is severely limiting flexibility for when the identity space is depleted (as with VIN and ISBN), or the assumptions change radically (as with ISBN in a self-publishing world).
First off, Disneyland's choice regarding the Disneyland Monorail had nothing to do with cost, or efficiency.
My friend in Southern California works for a company that builds concrete structures (bridges, parking garages, etc.). On several occasions he has worked up bids for extensions and modifications of the Disneyland monorail. Those projects were all cancelled because of price. There was a phenomenally high per-foot price for the beam, but I won't try to pull an actual number out of my fuzzy memory. Disney did make some small changes to accomodate California Adventure. My friend's company bid, but lost on that project.
Secondly, please provide some proof to the claim that Monorail is more expensive than an elevated, grade seperate light rail.
I wasn't comparing it to elevated light rail. Monorail, by it's nature, must be elevated. Light rail does not, and thus can be significantly cheaper.
Thirdly, evacuating a monorail is no different than any other elevated train. If you have no catwalk (like the Disneyland monorails, or even the Chicago "El"), you just don't.
Many elevated trains do have catwalk and thus can be evacuated relatively easily. An elevated train without a catwalk would have the some complications as a monorail. The evacuation procedures that a former WDW had posted to the Web were for extreme circumstances, like the train itself being on fire. In such cases, you cannot wait for the ladder trucks and cherry pickers. The operator was suppose to go through a ceiling hatch and walk or crawl along the top of the train, opening ceiling hatches for each compartment. The operator was then suppose to lead the passengers along the top of the train to one end. Everyone had to slide down the curved windshield, and then proceed along the beam to the nearst station. There are many spots, even in Disneyland's short run where it would be impossible to get to all of the cars with a ladder truck.
City of Anaheim ladder trucks were used, one of which is stationed ON DISNEYLAND PROPERTY anyway.
Disneyland does have some fire fighting and rescue equipment on the property, but I don't believe the have ladder trucks or cherry pickers tall enough for a monorail evacuation. I've been there when they had to bring in the tall cherry pickers to extract people from the Skyway (now closed) when it broke down. Those trucks didn't came from outside. Heck, Disneyland is hesitant to allow paramedics into an area where they may be seen by guests (though they've gotten better about that in recent years).
A couple of years ago, SF-MUNI (the light rail system in San Francisco) experienced a complete failure of the automation system that runs the subway. Trains were stopped, dead, inside underground tunnels. No effort was made by SF-MUNI to evacuate passengers, even though the SF-MUNI subways are equipped with catwalks and emergency exits. Some passengers were stuck in trains for 2 or more hours.
That's BART. MUNI is the bus system. The failure was less than two years ago, and there was no immediate danger, such as a fire in the tunnel. As I've already pointed out, the evacuation procedures for the monorail were for extreme circumstances.
The fact of the matter is, very few rail systems routinely evacuate passengers to the catwalks....
It was quite routine for the Disneyland People Mover (now gone, not sure if you'd consider it a rail system), even when there was no danger. It happened to me on two occasions, and it was almost a daily occurrence during its final years. In fact, I've seen it happen more than once on the same day. It was no big deal because there were catwalks everywhere.
I've also been evacuated from the DC Metro for a minor derailment. (I say minor, because the train was able to limp off on its own once they unloaded the passengers.) At first we had no idea what had happened, but a local explained to us that that it happened "all the time."
Do any of the cell phones with cameras in them take video clips? If so, wouldn't it then be illegal to take your cell phone (recording device) into the theater?
What about a wireless cam that doesn't actually record? If somebody someone broadcast the film to his buddy out in the parking lot, would that just be a copyright violation or would that fix under the new recording device law?
Monorail "track" is a lot more expensive to build per foot than light rail. That's the main reason Disney hasn't built any new monorail for a while, even when they moved all the parking a couple blocks away from the Anaheim park entrance.
There's no good way to evacuate an elevated monorail train in an emergency. Somewhere on the net I've read a copy of the procedures for the WDW monorail, which involves helping passengers slide down the curved windshield so they can walk along the beam to the nearest station. Yeah, right.
Say all you want about the lightrail system Los Angeles built. Fact is, it's far more popular than ever anticipated. Yeah, it goes through some pretty scary neighborhoods. But the point is to make it possible for people who live there to get into downtown where the jobs are. It's worked pretty well. And the Metrolink extensions do take some of the commuter burden off the Orange County to LA freeways.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's the wrong goal. It should be about keeping weapons off planes, not terrorists. Personally, I don't care of Osama himself is sitting in coach, if we can be assured that there are no weapons or explosives available on the flight. That should be the goal of airport security. Finding terrorists and building a criminal case against them is the business of law enforcement, not baggage screeners and gate agents.
If you want secure flights, then:
If you want to arrest terrorists who have committed crimes:
You mean like the legal monopoly over distribution of the infringed work?
My friend tried to use a demo iPod in a store the other day. It totally perplexed him. All he wanted to do was skip to the next song. He tried the buttons, but couldn't get it to work.
I'm not saying to iPod design is bad. I'm pointing out that even the best designs aren't easy for everyone--even for relatively simple devices that aren't overburdened with unreleated features.
Now that I think about it, iPod wheel thing was confusing to me, too. I thought it was just a visual feature, meant to look like a retro speaker grill. There's nothing about it that indicates it is a control. No affordance. No tactile feedback.
"It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising clutter." --Herbert Hoover talking about allowing radio advertisements on television.
And MS shipped Solitaire to teach people how to use the mouse.
Newton didn't have the horsepower for good handwriting recognition. (It has to be real good to gain acceptance.) I think Graffiti is a brilliant compromise between the capabilities of the human and of the machine.
The obscenity rules have historically been applied to gratuitous material. Remember, NBC broadcast Shindler's List complete and uncut, with all the brutality, nudity, and four letter words? No complaints were lodged. In most of the country, it started during Prime Time. Couldn't do that today. Nor could PBS even pull out its own Tales of the City, which they've shown many times without bleeping, fuzzy rectangles, or cutting around the drug usage.
When you're a national broadcaster with hundreds of affiliates in different communities with different standards, do you cut back until it's not objectionable to the most conservative guidelines? The rules are too Draconian to risk aiming for the 80% group. In fact, you have to be even more careful, because the rules are too vague. Everything becomes a judgment call. Remember the radio station in Colorado that got fined for playing the radio-safe mix of an Eminem song?
Before the Superbowl, even the f-word was treated on a case-by-case basis. Sting (or was it Bono?) got away with it on an awards show, because he didn't use it in a nasty way. Now we have to worry about "blow job"? C'mon! The show is about (in part) a cop going to a brothel. Is the whole context of prostitution unobjectionable once you bleep four words that (I assume) are common in that environment?
Isn't it enough that we have content warning labels and V-chips to "protect" the kids? Vote with your remote, not the FCC. Mom and Pop Sixpack in Prudesville, U.S.A., should not have that much influence over other free adults' choices in the rest of the country.
Seems like Ishii's work should invalidate the University of North Carolina patents.
From the article:
Bizarre. I did use spaces, but they got swallowed up. Couldn't enter a tab, because that advances to the next control in the form. If they worked for you, it must be a difference in the browser. I used Firefox.
So if return 0 is supposed to be mapped to a successful return value, how would one return 0 to the system without it being remapped? In other words, if I'm writing for VMS, and I must indicate a particular error with a 0, how could I do this?
Except for the semicolon, as the other poster pointed out, this does have some portability problems. Not sure if you'd call them bugs or not.
You could argue that a preprocessor should allow this, some will indeed choke because there's no space before the <.
The 0 is returned to the operating system, but operating systems have different rules for what return values mean. For example, in VMS, even numbers are errors, and
will generate a nasty error message upon completion.Some people argue that the compiler should return "success" when the code says to return a 0. I haven't read anything official that supports that. And if so, how would you return a 0 if that's indeed the error you need to return to the operating system?
For maximum portability with ANSI C, you probably want to do something like this:
[Slashcode says to use <ECODE> instead of <PRE or <CODE, but how do I inline code or do indentation with <ECODE>?]
Even his sig has a typo!
This is not necessarily a software patent. It's a process patent. In theory, they could stop you from performing the same process whether you're using a keyboard or doing it by hand.
I haven't gotten a telemarketing call in at least six years. I simply signed up for the DMA's telephone preference service (free) and had my phone number unlisted ($0.25 per month).
This was much higher for me. When I moved into my house, I was receiving 110 mail-order catalogs a week (more near Christmas). Several bills were lost in the pages. My trash/recycling company said I was trying to put too much into the recycle bin. I've sent 450 letters and made more than 100 calls over three years to get the catalogs to stop. Now it's down to a trickle. Snail Mail spam is a scourge that needs a solution.
TiVo, baby. I only watch Superbowl commercials now.
99.7% of the email I see is spam. Takes several minutes to download it over my DSL line each day. Takes about 10 minutes to search for false positives each day.
I also highly recommend AdSubtract which eliminates nearly all ads, in addition to popups. Surf faster and with fewer distractions.
I call bullshit. I have email addresses that I've never used or posted anywhere that receive spam because of dictionary attacks on my domain. Not to mention all the hate-mail from people when spammers joe-job my domain.
I've used email since 1985. (OK, it was VMS MAIL before I was on the Internet.) Tremendously valuable. But I'm just about to give up on it.
It's not just the spam. The fact is, I get very little real email nowadays. I'm not sure why. I think many of my friends have given up on it. At work (I'm a software engineer), it's maybe 10 messages a day. I recall in 1992 keeping stats and learning that I was processing more than 100 real messages a day (no spam).
And the spam is a huge problem. I'm getting 300+ messages a day. Spam Assassin recognition is less than 10% of that, with about one false positive a week. It's just not worth wading through all that noise to find the ham. I recently went on a 10 day vacation, never checked email, and came home to discover I hadn't missed a thing.
And it's not just a matter of changing email addresses. I have my own domain. I regularly get dictionary attacks. I have email addresses that have never been used anywhere that get spam. My domain is also regularly joe-jobbed, so, in addition to everything else, I get pointless hate mail from strangers and webmasters who think I've been sending spam. I've tried to get my host provider to publish an SPF record, but they're swamped with other issues.
Email is already dead.
No, trade secret protection does not prevent others from using the same invention if they came up with it independently. There is very little law that protects a trade secret. It's the fact that it's secret that counts.
Not everything can be kept secret once it's put to use. Software that's delivered to customers can (usually) be reverse engineered. Mechanical devices can be duplicated. Thus trade secret protection usually applies to manufacturing methods (e.g., you might make a super-optimizing compiler that you don't sell, but you use to make other software that you do sell).
My point is that a trade secret may remain a secret indefinitely. That's closed-source and proprietary in the extreme. With a patent, the method is published even before the patent expires (sometimes even before it's granted now). In that sense, inventions become open, even if they're not freely copyable for a period of time. So I'd place patents in the middle of the spectrum between open- and closed-source (in software terms).
Bad example. The breakup of the phone company was good in some ways (creating a lot of business opportunities), but bad in a lot of others (overall quality and cost for the consumer). Nobody today makes a phone as good as the classic AT&T Princess phone (read The Design of Everyday Things for a list of reasons why). Long distance fees came down, but those statistics only track the per-minute charges, not actual cost to the consumer. Most people are spending more on their phone bill now, even in inflation-adjusted dollars because of bundling and fees that allow per-minute charges to be a loss leader. Phone companies now charge to have your name, address, and number unlisted in the directories they hand out. That's extortion ("pay us, or we'll tell the world about you"). Then they gave the listings to direct marketers and invented the evil CallerID as a way to combat telemarketing. [Despite my objections, my wife wants CallerID. If I add just that feature without buying a bundle of other features, SBC wants to add $36 per MONTH to our bill.] We have tons of cheap and expensive phones that don't work at all. The payphone network has all but vanished. [Spent an hour late one night, driving around looking for a payphone to call the police to report a hit-and-run.] Curly thermal fax paper with unsolicited ads! Does it get any worse? Slamming, cramming, 10-10 numbers. Insufficient network capacity for widespread disasters. Finger pointing when the phone company line to your house is so low quality that even your $350 14.4 modem can't make a connection. Inability to get a second line because there are no more lines available for your neighborhood. Inability to call 611 from your cell phone to report problems with your land line.
The breakup of MaBell and subsequent deregulation cost us a reliable, useful telecommunications system and ushered in a blight of fraud, extortion, telemarketing, etc.
And don't tell me you couldn't hook up a modem or answering machine to MaBell before the breakup. That problem was addressed long before the breakup.
Non-starter. Many drug patents are for processes, like economical manufacturing. Also, inventing a process to make a drug stable at room temperature in pill form that previously was only available as a refrigerated injectable. This is comparable to inventing a codec that makes streaming a video feed feasible (or a DSP algorithm that makes accurate non-invasive monitoring of your blood gases feasible while you're on the operating table). Just Yup, it's a process, but it's a useful invention.
I'm always surprised that there's so much resistance to patent law among the open software crowd. One point of patents is to get the methods out into the open. If it weren't for patents, true inventions (even inventive processes) would often be held as trade secrets for much longer than patent protection lasts.
Yes, the patent system isn't perfect, and it's being abused. But I, a programmer, am against scrapping it completely. I'd suggest that we raise the bar for inventiveness during the application, adjust the length of protection depending on the type of patent and the field it applies to (very short for software, even longer for drugs, etc.), and get more rigorous with the requirement that patent holders defend their patents from the start rather than submarining them.
Even software patents inspire innovation. I doubt we would have the superior PNG format today if not for the compression patents underlying GIF.
There's one gas station in my area that I avoid because it always seems to pump more gasoline than my regular mileage would suggest. In fact, it once pumped over 12 gallons into my supposedly 11.5 gallon tank. I suppose that could be a fluke with tempature and the manufacturer rounding when reporting the size the of the tank, but it happens consistenly enough that I avoid the station. I seem to get very consistent results at the other stations I usually go to.
But there's one giant station that I went to twice. Both times, my credit card was charged exactly $0.10 more than the pump read (total, not per gallon). I complained to my credit card company both times, sent them copies of the pump receipts, and they credited my account. I haven't ventured back to that station to see if they've corrected their problem. I wonder how many people would recognize a $0.10 per transaction bump?
I also wonder if such a scheme (overcharging by $0.10 per transaction) would really be worth the risk. This is a big station, so maybe they do 1000 transactions a day. That's only $36,500 a year. Doesn't seem enough to risk getting slapped with a fraud charge.
VMS had a POSIX mode that was fully compliant with the spec. I did some poking around, and it looks like they [HP/Compaq/Digital] stopped supporting it. See POSIX Kit.
VMS was (and may still be) POSIX-compliant, though it would be weird to refer to it as a Unix operating system.
Yes, I do know it's spelled kernel. How embarrassing!
POSIX isn't a kernal. It's a standards specification. The first POSIX-compliant OS was VMS, which is about as un-unixy as you can get.
I went to a DECUS symposium in the early 1990s where two VMS engineers explained what they had to do to achieve POSIX-compliance. It was humorous in that the official validation suite couldn't necessarily run on a strictly POSIX-compliant OS, because it assumed the presence of common UNIX tools that weren't actually in the spec at the time.
ISBN numbers, which are intended to uniquely identify books, are also running out. This is due in part to the boom in self-publishing. Like VINs, some digits are reserved to identify the company (publisher), others are a serial number doled out by the publisher, and there's a simple check digit to catch typos, transpositions, etc.
The ISBN format was a little more flexible, though. The publisher identifer could be a variable number of digits. Big publishers got short codes, and thus more digits for the serial number. Small houses got long codes and just a few digits for the serial number. Thus a lot more of the identity space can be used.
But the internet self-publishing (or print-on-demand) companies (e.g., iUniverse, FirstBooks, etc.) were late to the game, so they didn't get the short publisher codes like other prolific houses. In the end it works out, as you can assign multiple publisher codes to a publisher that prints more titles than originally allowed for.
The self-publishing companies are cranking out hundreds of titles a year. Unlike a traditional publisher, there's no drawback to setting up a title that may never sell since the author pays these costs. This is rapidly accelerating the depletion of code numbers. And since self-publishing companies never take books "out-of-print," they can't recycle serial numbers in their space. (I'm not certain recycling is allowed in the system, but you could imagine doing so for books that are long out-of-print.
Obviously, there are advantages to having meaning built into the number rather than using a strictly serial number. Auto insurers can get most of what they need to know about the car out of the VIN (manufacturer, model year, body type, etc.). Book sellers can figure out which publisher's catalog to check by looking up the beginning of an ISBN. But the trade-off is severely limiting flexibility for when the identity space is depleted (as with VIN and ISBN), or the assumptions change radically (as with ISBN in a self-publishing world).
My friend in Southern California works for a company that builds concrete structures (bridges, parking garages, etc.). On several occasions he has worked up bids for extensions and modifications of the Disneyland monorail. Those projects were all cancelled because of price. There was a phenomenally high per-foot price for the beam, but I won't try to pull an actual number out of my fuzzy memory. Disney did make some small changes to accomodate California Adventure. My friend's company bid, but lost on that project.
I wasn't comparing it to elevated light rail. Monorail, by it's nature, must be elevated. Light rail does not, and thus can be significantly cheaper.
Many elevated trains do have catwalk and thus can be evacuated relatively easily. An elevated train without a catwalk would have the some complications as a monorail. The evacuation procedures that a former WDW had posted to the Web were for extreme circumstances, like the train itself being on fire. In such cases, you cannot wait for the ladder trucks and cherry pickers. The operator was suppose to go through a ceiling hatch and walk or crawl along the top of the train, opening ceiling hatches for each compartment. The operator was then suppose to lead the passengers along the top of the train to one end. Everyone had to slide down the curved windshield, and then proceed along the beam to the nearst station. There are many spots, even in Disneyland's short run where it would be impossible to get to all of the cars with a ladder truck.
Disneyland does have some fire fighting and rescue equipment on the property, but I don't believe the have ladder trucks or cherry pickers tall enough for a monorail evacuation. I've been there when they had to bring in the tall cherry pickers to extract people from the Skyway (now closed) when it broke down. Those trucks didn't came from outside. Heck, Disneyland is hesitant to allow paramedics into an area where they may be seen by guests (though they've gotten better about that in recent years).
That's BART. MUNI is the bus system. The failure was less than two years ago, and there was no immediate danger, such as a fire in the tunnel. As I've already pointed out, the evacuation procedures for the monorail were for extreme circumstances.
It was quite routine for the Disneyland People Mover (now gone, not sure if you'd consider it a rail system), even when there was no danger. It happened to me on two occasions, and it was almost a daily occurrence during its final years. In fact, I've seen it happen more than once on the same day. It was no big deal because there were catwalks everywhere.
I've also been evacuated from the DC Metro for a minor derailment. (I say minor, because the train was able to limp off on its own once they unloaded the passengers.) At first we had no idea what had happened, but a local explained to us that that it happened "all the time."
Do any of the cell phones with cameras in them take video clips? If so, wouldn't it then be illegal to take your cell phone (recording device) into the theater?
What about a wireless cam that doesn't actually record? If somebody someone broadcast the film to his buddy out in the parking lot, would that just be a copyright violation or would that fix under the new recording device law?
Responses to several comments here:
Monorail "track" is a lot more expensive to build per foot than light rail. That's the main reason Disney hasn't built any new monorail for a while, even when they moved all the parking a couple blocks away from the Anaheim park entrance.
There's no good way to evacuate an elevated monorail train in an emergency. Somewhere on the net I've read a copy of the procedures for the WDW monorail, which involves helping passengers slide down the curved windshield so they can walk along the beam to the nearest station. Yeah, right.
Say all you want about the lightrail system Los Angeles built. Fact is, it's far more popular than ever anticipated. Yeah, it goes through some pretty scary neighborhoods. But the point is to make it possible for people who live there to get into downtown where the jobs are. It's worked pretty well. And the Metrolink extensions do take some of the commuter burden off the Orange County to LA freeways.