I believe this will in fact happen, and the ironic thing here is that a lot of the customer's dollar (yen, etc.) will be shifted to the bandwidth providers, rather than the creator of the content. This is really the opposite of the renaissance for artists internet distribution was hoped to provide.
(Related one-time-no-financial-interest-rant: How many hours of quality reading do you get in a week on Slashdot? Toss your five bucks into the hat already...)
A nice thing about RSS is it gives you control of the presentation. Like on my LiveJournal "friends" page, I've added a Dilbert RSS feed, which allows me to have the new Dilbert strips integrated in with my friends' blog entries, rather than going to the Dilbert site and viewing by clicking one at a time. I get them as they come out, and my page gives me all the recent ones on one handy page.
I the entire Adobe corporation couldn't get it right, perhaps the Slashdot message queue can be forgiven? Adobe managed to incorporate this and yet another non sequitur in a single sentence, on national TV... repeatedly.
Of course, Adobe, being a competent software firm, knows how to use the English language. Er... oops.
Re:All Your Base is post-Dot Com
on
Dotcom Era Fads
·
· Score: 1
Kibology is really old. Folklore class.
See here for 1993 commentary, including a post by Larry Wall.
A lawyer with coding experience. Very nice selection for the EFF. She certainly seems to a very good perspective, based on the interview.
I would think her background would give her a decided advantage in court against opposition such as SCO's legal team. Non-technical lawyers I'd expect would be rather limited in their ability to see the proverbial trees as well as the forest, leading to egregious, easily-destroyable assertions such as SCO's claim that, in effect, "Linux" is one particular whole, when a moment's consideration from one with a technical background would suggest it's actually a very dynamic, variable thing, and that to claim all Linux deployments violate a given set of supposed "infringments" is rather absurd.
I'd expect Ms. Seltzer will be able to bring good arguments to the table on this and many other Open Source challenges. Kudos to the EFF's fine choice.
NEC Corp. plans to market a laptop computer next year that can display 3-D images without requiring special glasses... The new laptop will feature a special liquid crystal display panel that is placed on top of a conventional screen. Users will be able to view digital photos of [sic] play online games with the 3-D image display or use the standard panel for viewing Web sites, Nikkei said.... Mercury3D, a software company in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, will also provide a program that converts standard 2-D images to 3-D on the new laptop, Nikkei said.
How is this supposed to work? No glasses, a special LCD on top of a standard monitor. How do we get actual or simulated 3D out of this? If it doesn't provide two different perspectives to each eye (as shutter glasses do), presumably the LCD must project the 3D image into midair. And how does the software generate 3D from a 2D image? There isn't enough data in the source image to do this properly. I'm betting vaporware here.
To put it in Genetic Algorithm terms, every corporation tries to maximize ROI(x). A Government literally changes the function "ROI", thus influencing every corporation.
Points for bravery in arguing "People aren't smart enough to govern themselves" on Slashdot, but...:)
Capitalism intrinsically has the notion of defining the scope and importance of a problem or goal. To determine whether something should or should not be pursued, factors such as the resources needed to reach the goal or solve the problem *must* be considered, by design. You don't build the equivalent of a V8 engine to push in a thumbtack. And you don't build it with no determined goal at all. These constraints are something that government methods generally lack, and *anything* can be argued to be something that *might* pay off or *might* be useful. How do you evaluate such claims, outside of ROI?
Freeways I answered in another thread. I gave that as an example as a possible preferred expenditure *if* we are going to stipulate non-core-Constitutional expenditures, and noted that historically much infrastructure development has taken place (including roads) on the basis of people paying their small share of some pragmatic goal, which they can personally realize benefit from.
The second-to-last paragraph, well, I like the expansion of choices. Arguing from the position of human stupidity doesn't give us much forward momentum. There's a fundamental difference between voting by ballot and voting with dollars, and both can apply to different situations, and that's a thread in of itself...
I'm glad we (U.S.) don't live in a complete democracy as well, and we never have. We live in a constitutionally-defined republic. The intended purpose for forming this republic is stated better than I could in the Declaration of Independence.
I don't agree that I'm shutting anything long-range down, that can be economically justified in the context of the time period.
Take, say, Sprint as an example. They have invested an enormous amount of money into building a digital cell phone network, and did a lot of research and engineering in the process. And they did it because they could see the ROI long-term. Your argument seems to be arguing in favor of projects for which there is no conceivable return--and "Well, maybe X" doesn't do it for me. I can come up with a million enormously expensive projects to do if I'm not constrained by ROI.
To use the Sprint example to address another part of your comment, look at how some countries that never were economically able to set up a land-line phone infrastructure are now able to go directly to cellular. This is how I would forsee wider space travel occurring, in time--by some other technology that is incidental to the primary goal of "getting to space", but makes it economically viable. The form of what that would be (some kind of transmitted solids-construction technique like the solids-faxing tech that is now being developed, perhaps?), I can't say at this point, but it's hardly a unique situation. Waiting until something makes economic sense based on the available tech is something people and countries do all the time, and there's no reason to hurry to Mars, other than it looks good on resumes and political shows.
I remain unconvinced that any raw materials in space are so valuable and not subject to using alternatives that it justifies sending spacecraft out to get them.
The *single most moronic* post? Wow. I'm in exclusive company, then...
War in Iraq? Also against.
I'm glad you want your sixty-three dollars to go to NASA. But that isn't what you're saying is it? You want *everyone's* sixty-three dollars to go to NASA. Otherwise, it's a nonissue.
Only people paying 9 million in taxes can express a view on where their tax money goes? That'd simplify things, I'm sure. But your argument is simplistic enough as it is.
Okay, I'll pass on the blatant ad hominem of the first sentence. Anything can be justified as "common sense" given the selection of ideology. Ideology drives all judgement, ultimately. "Common sense" doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you don't like the term "I believe", let's go with "I assert it is my right to view".
The solution to not yet having a black-and-white answer to an issue is not to add more gray.
Well, to be more specific, I'd want, say, a manned mission to Mars to be outsourced to GE, for them to look at the business case, think about it a moment, and say, "No."
Yes, but there's often multiple ways to improve the theoretical models. Computation is one of them. If I can model X programmatically, that's a much cheaper solution than launching something into space to look at it. And in the context of my argument, given an arbitrary amount of time before we really *need* to know certain things, there are likely to be pretty accurate and thorough models available.
Yes, my suggestions of road construction and the homeless are made primarily in the context of "Okay, if we are in fact going to spend money on things unrelated to the government's constitutional mandate, how about these...?"
I'll note that roads did in fact exist before there were state-sponsored expenditures for them; like ships, people are willing to pay part of the costs for the benefits of the travel.
There are no economic benefits to be had by China and India to be had when they win, I'll be willing to bet, once they put the costs on the balance sheet. China's interest in space, I'd say, has more to do with having their leadership "look good" than benefits to the citizens.
I wouldn't mind having this at all, even if each category was only used for approximate tax allocation purposes, or merely feedback to the government as to the prioritization the citizen personally has.
I have to admit up front that I am biased against NASA on primarily ethical grounds. To me, there's one basic valid purpose of government, and that's to defend the individual rights of its citizens. In the U.S., this is the principle upon which the Constitution and Bill of Rights is based, and the primary ligitimate activities of government, the police, courts, and defense, are inferrable from that.
Everything has an opportunity cost. The money spent on NASA could otherwise be spent elsewhere, such as aiding the homeless or better road infrastructure, and preferably on something the person earning the money (the taxpayer) himself chose.
Sure, it's nice to be able to explore space and determine facts about physics and cosmology, and test theories against empirical information, but I think at some point the costs associated with expanding the realm of science to more obscure areas, in the shorter term, are too high. And, yes, I know the argument that expanding basic science can lead to invention that benefits the individual, but personally I'd put more faith in the ability of industry to use the money making targeted investments while hiring scientists, than effective production from NASA. At some point I think we have to say the money can be better spent than knowing more about the behavior of some unreachable binary star. Eventually, that information will likely come anyway, as a function of better theoretical models. Why do we need it now, assuming it isn't primarily to give a Ph.D. something to play with?
NASA exists in an enviroment that offers none of the efficiency advantages of modern industry.
- No effective competition
- No way to inexpensively prototype or proof-of-concept things and test them in the intended deployment environment
- Few efficiencies of scale from being able to buy parts widely used and commoditized
- Little economic justification for the expense, even in the instances where the mission is "successful"
- No realistic, market-driven benchmarks for the performance of the managers or engineers
In the end, I don't feel that NASA is an optimal way to spend money, and since it's at least in part my money, I should be able to make this decision. Perhaps some kind of opt-in "NASA" checkbox, like I've seen opt-in "environmental" checkboxes on tax forms. I'd be content with that.
Has a violation of a EULA ever been successfully prosecuted? Not copyright violation, but a company successfully getting a conviction that someone did or didn't do something printed in a dialog box they clicked on? I haven't personally heard of any, so if someone could enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.
A couple thoughts on this:
How is it proven that you clicked the "OK" button?
Doesn't this create a situation much like "submarine patents" for the average user, in that it just sets up so many conditions for use that if the user was aware of them beforehand, he wouldn't buy the product in the first place, but rather creates a legal exposure for himself later?
Something requiring a signature is generally understood to be legally "serious", and often reviewed by a lawyer. Is my and my lawyer's time taken fully reading and analyzing the EULA's contents billable back to the software vendor? Most things I buy don't require me to make a substantial additional money investment to be able to use them.
I think we're doing ourselves a disservice if EULA is either unserious ("Just click OK...") or serious ("You posted.NET benchmarks. Uninstall all your software and prepare to meet our lawyer.") at the vendor's discretion.
Juels said that he foresees a day when tags in clothes can tell washing machines the proper way they need to be washed.
This just seems like really stretching for a scenario in which RFID tags will be useful beyond inventory tracking (What happens when 5% of your laundry says "warm" and the rest says "hot")?
Before paying RSA for advanced laundry stealth technology, I think I'd first try something a little more straightforward, like a few seconds in my microwave.
The implementation can be local or distributed across a network, and is automatically invoked based upon type information in the document or associated with the object's data.
It seems on initial glance that if this patent holds up, it could be argued to apply to the entire model of MIME types by which browsers invoke different behavior based on type.
It also seems to directly apply to the notion of having Word launch when clicking on a ".doc" file.
Couldn't one consider a browser and a word processor to both be "plug-ins" to the operating system? What specifically differentiates a "plug-in" from any other type of application functionality?
Surely there is massive prior art on this going back at least to the early 80's. This patent is obscene.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe this will in fact happen, and the ironic thing here is that a lot of the customer's dollar (yen, etc.) will be shifted to the bandwidth providers, rather than the creator of the content. This is really the opposite of the renaissance for artists internet distribution was hoped to provide.
(Related one-time-no-financial-interest-rant: How many hours of quality reading do you get in a week on Slashdot? Toss your five bucks into the hat already...)
...can you rock me now? Good...
A nice thing about RSS is it gives you control of the presentation. Like on my LiveJournal "friends" page, I've added a Dilbert RSS feed, which allows me to have the new Dilbert strips integrated in with my friends' blog entries, rather than going to the Dilbert site and viewing by clicking one at a time. I get them as they come out, and my page gives me all the recent ones on one handy page.
Personally, I'm more intrigued by the company's anti-kidnapping technology. I'll sleep easier once that's out of the way.
I the entire Adobe corporation couldn't get it right, perhaps the Slashdot message queue can be forgiven? Adobe managed to incorporate this and yet another non sequitur in a single sentence, on national TV... repeatedly.
Of course, Adobe, being a competent software firm, knows how to use the English language. Er... oops.
Kibology is really old. Folklore class.
See here for 1993 commentary, including a post by Larry Wall.
A lawyer with coding experience. Very nice selection for the EFF. She certainly seems to a very good perspective, based on the interview.
I would think her background would give her a decided advantage in court against opposition such as SCO's legal team. Non-technical lawyers I'd expect would be rather limited in their ability to see the proverbial trees as well as the forest, leading to egregious, easily-destroyable assertions such as SCO's claim that, in effect, "Linux" is one particular whole, when a moment's consideration from one with a technical background would suggest it's actually a very dynamic, variable thing, and that to claim all Linux deployments violate a given set of supposed "infringments" is rather absurd.
I'd expect Ms. Seltzer will be able to bring good arguments to the table on this and many other Open Source challenges. Kudos to the EFF's fine choice.
NEC Corp. plans to market a laptop computer next year that can display 3-D images without requiring special glasses... The new laptop will feature a special liquid crystal display panel that is placed on top of a conventional screen. Users will be able to view digital photos of [sic] play online games with the 3-D image display or use the standard panel for viewing Web sites, Nikkei said. ... Mercury3D, a software company in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, will also provide a program that converts standard 2-D images to 3-D on the new laptop, Nikkei said.
How is this supposed to work? No glasses, a special LCD on top of a standard monitor. How do we get actual or simulated 3D out of this? If it doesn't provide two different perspectives to each eye (as shutter glasses do), presumably the LCD must project the 3D image into midair. And how does the software generate 3D from a 2D image? There isn't enough data in the source image to do this properly. I'm betting vaporware here.
Anyone have an insight?
To put it in Genetic Algorithm terms, every corporation tries to maximize ROI(x). A Government literally changes the function "ROI", thus influencing every corporation.
:)
Very intriguing statement. I Shall Ponder This.
Mod parent up.
G'night.
Points for bravery in arguing "People aren't smart enough to govern themselves" on Slashdot, but... :)
Capitalism intrinsically has the notion of defining the scope and importance of a problem or goal. To determine whether something should or should not be pursued, factors such as the resources needed to reach the goal or solve the problem *must* be considered, by design. You don't build the equivalent of a V8 engine to push in a thumbtack. And you don't build it with no determined goal at all. These constraints are something that government methods generally lack, and *anything* can be argued to be something that *might* pay off or *might* be useful. How do you evaluate such claims, outside of ROI?
Freeways I answered in another thread. I gave that as an example as a possible preferred expenditure *if* we are going to stipulate non-core-Constitutional expenditures, and noted that historically much infrastructure development has taken place (including roads) on the basis of people paying their small share of some pragmatic goal, which they can personally realize benefit from.
The second-to-last paragraph, well, I like the expansion of choices. Arguing from the position of human stupidity doesn't give us much forward momentum. There's a fundamental difference between voting by ballot and voting with dollars, and both can apply to different situations, and that's a thread in of itself...
I'm glad we (U.S.) don't live in a complete democracy as well, and we never have. We live in a constitutionally-defined republic. The intended purpose for forming this republic is stated better than I could in the Declaration of Independence.
Enough thread followups for me for today...
I don't agree that I'm shutting anything long-range down, that can be economically justified in the context of the time period.
Take, say, Sprint as an example. They have invested an enormous amount of money into building a digital cell phone network, and did a lot of research and engineering in the process. And they did it because they could see the ROI long-term. Your argument seems to be arguing in favor of projects for which there is no conceivable return--and "Well, maybe X" doesn't do it for me. I can come up with a million enormously expensive projects to do if I'm not constrained by ROI.
To use the Sprint example to address another part of your comment, look at how some countries that never were economically able to set up a land-line phone infrastructure are now able to go directly to cellular. This is how I would forsee wider space travel occurring, in time--by some other technology that is incidental to the primary goal of "getting to space", but makes it economically viable. The form of what that would be (some kind of transmitted solids-construction technique like the solids-faxing tech that is now being developed, perhaps?), I can't say at this point, but it's hardly a unique situation. Waiting until something makes economic sense based on the available tech is something people and countries do all the time, and there's no reason to hurry to Mars, other than it looks good on resumes and political shows.
Right.
At least until some now-unforeseen technology makes it economically viable.
I remain unconvinced that any raw materials in space are so valuable and not subject to using alternatives that it justifies sending spacecraft out to get them.
The *single most moronic* post? Wow. I'm in exclusive company, then...
War in Iraq? Also against.
I'm glad you want your sixty-three dollars to go to NASA. But that isn't what you're saying is it? You want *everyone's* sixty-three dollars to go to NASA. Otherwise, it's a nonissue.
Only people paying 9 million in taxes can express a view on where their tax money goes? That'd simplify things, I'm sure. But your argument is simplistic enough as it is.
I'll just suggest two things here.
Competition between governments *as* governments is competition between forms of socialism.
As for small business and big government, I think in the end you can have one or the other.
Okay, I'll pass on the blatant ad hominem of the first sentence. Anything can be justified as "common sense" given the selection of ideology. Ideology drives all judgement, ultimately. "Common sense" doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you don't like the term "I believe", let's go with "I assert it is my right to view".
The solution to not yet having a black-and-white answer to an issue is not to add more gray.
Well, to be more specific, I'd want, say, a manned mission to Mars to be outsourced to GE, for them to look at the business case, think about it a moment, and say, "No."
Yes, but there's often multiple ways to improve the theoretical models. Computation is one of them. If I can model X programmatically, that's a much cheaper solution than launching something into space to look at it. And in the context of my argument, given an arbitrary amount of time before we really *need* to know certain things, there are likely to be pretty accurate and thorough models available.
Yes, my suggestions of road construction and the homeless are made primarily in the context of "Okay, if we are in fact going to spend money on things unrelated to the government's constitutional mandate, how about these...?"
I'll note that roads did in fact exist before there were state-sponsored expenditures for them; like ships, people are willing to pay part of the costs for the benefits of the travel.
There are no economic benefits to be had by China and India to be had when they win, I'll be willing to bet, once they put the costs on the balance sheet. China's interest in space, I'd say, has more to do with having their leadership "look good" than benefits to the citizens.
Sure!
I wouldn't mind having this at all, even if each category was only used for approximate tax allocation purposes, or merely feedback to the government as to the prioritization the citizen personally has.
I have to admit up front that I am biased against NASA on primarily ethical grounds. To me, there's one basic valid purpose of government, and that's to defend the individual rights of its citizens. In the U.S., this is the principle upon which the Constitution and Bill of Rights is based, and the primary ligitimate activities of government, the police, courts, and defense, are inferrable from that.
Everything has an opportunity cost. The money spent on NASA could otherwise be spent elsewhere, such as aiding the homeless or better road infrastructure, and preferably on something the person earning the money (the taxpayer) himself chose.
Sure, it's nice to be able to explore space and determine facts about physics and cosmology, and test theories against empirical information, but I think at some point the costs associated with expanding the realm of science to more obscure areas, in the shorter term, are too high. And, yes, I know the argument that expanding basic science can lead to invention that benefits the individual, but personally I'd put more faith in the ability of industry to use the money making targeted investments while hiring scientists, than effective production from NASA. At some point I think we have to say the money can be better spent than knowing more about the behavior of some unreachable binary star. Eventually, that information will likely come anyway, as a function of better theoretical models. Why do we need it now, assuming it isn't primarily to give a Ph.D. something to play with?
NASA exists in an enviroment that offers none of the efficiency advantages of modern industry.
- No effective competition
- No way to inexpensively prototype or proof-of-concept things and test them in the intended deployment environment
- Few efficiencies of scale from being able to buy parts widely used and commoditized
- Little economic justification for the expense, even in the instances where the mission is "successful"
- No realistic, market-driven benchmarks for the performance of the managers or engineers
In the end, I don't feel that NASA is an optimal way to spend money, and since it's at least in part my money, I should be able to make this decision. Perhaps some kind of opt-in "NASA" checkbox, like I've seen opt-in "environmental" checkboxes on tax forms. I'd be content with that.
Has a violation of a EULA ever been successfully prosecuted? Not copyright violation, but a company successfully getting a conviction that someone did or didn't do something printed in a dialog box they clicked on? I haven't personally heard of any, so if someone could enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.
.NET benchmarks. Uninstall all your software and prepare to meet our lawyer.") at the vendor's discretion.
A couple thoughts on this:
How is it proven that you clicked the "OK" button?
Doesn't this create a situation much like "submarine patents" for the average user, in that it just sets up so many conditions for use that if the user was aware of them beforehand, he wouldn't buy the product in the first place, but rather creates a legal exposure for himself later?
Something requiring a signature is generally understood to be legally "serious", and often reviewed by a lawyer. Is my and my lawyer's time taken fully reading and analyzing the EULA's contents billable back to the software vendor? Most things I buy don't require me to make a substantial additional money investment to be able to use them.
I think we're doing ourselves a disservice if EULA is either unserious ("Just click OK...") or serious ("You posted
I assume you mean this at least semi-seriously, but posting AC doesn't give people an ongoing means of making suggestions.
Perhaps a Yahoo Group, maybe here, or some other suitable venue for discussion?
Juels said that he foresees a day when tags in clothes can tell washing machines the proper way they need to be washed.
This just seems like really stretching for a scenario in which RFID tags will be useful beyond inventory tracking (What happens when 5% of your laundry says "warm" and the rest says "hot")?
Before paying RSA for advanced laundry stealth technology, I think I'd first try something a little more straightforward, like a few seconds in my microwave.
From the W3C statement:
The implementation can be local or distributed across a network, and is automatically invoked based upon type information in the document or associated with the object's data.
It seems on initial glance that if this patent holds up, it could be argued to apply to the entire model of MIME types by which browsers invoke different behavior based on type.
It also seems to directly apply to the notion of having Word launch when clicking on a ".doc" file.
Couldn't one consider a browser and a word processor to both be "plug-ins" to the operating system? What specifically differentiates a "plug-in" from any other type of application functionality?
Surely there is massive prior art on this going back at least to the early 80's. This patent is obscene.