The complaint tries to use the fact that Google bid for the patents as an extra point against the search giant.
This mainly implies that the law firm had not yet run into the filing document word limit. Most lawyers would cite vaginal birth as evidence of precocious sexuality.
Logically, one might presume that the winning bid is most likely to come from the side at greatest risk of being sunk were the patents were to be wielded against them. In this vein one would argue that Apple & Co. made the most lucrative bid to absolve themselves of their own infringements of the Nortel portfolio.
This great opera of stupidities proposed and disposed takes place while the aggrieved parties on both sides shower hundred dollar bills upon the jousting hookers of horseshit.
Moore's Law isn't even a law... it's a prediction.
If you were doing more than thinking in tiresome categories you might have called it a self-fulfilling projection which is pretty much exactly what it became.
To refine this even more precisely, it's an ex post self-fulfilling projection, where "ex post" modifies "self-fulfilling".
But wait, there's more! It's a virtuous ex post self-fulfilling projection, where "virtuous" modifies "self-fulfilling projection".
We're now deep into The Remains of the Day. I might even call it a pink leather virtuous ex post self-fulfilling projection. Sailed through menopause without a hiccup—to everyone's great surprise—but even lathering on a hair-net bale of Grecian Formula teaser treats the glory days are well behind us.
From the user's perspective the warranty claim is necessary until Apple communicates to the afflicted that it isn't, because they've solved the problem, the fix is available now, and it won't cost you two hours of your life to patch up Apple's incompetence.
That's also been my experience, for the most part. In the past when a Slashdot post has revealed enough information for me to dig through the edit history on Wikipedia to see what happened, I've sided with the Wikipedia editors.
One time I put quite a bit of effort into cleaning up an article about a fellow who set a dubious record long ago (less stupid than winning World Sauna Championships, but still inadvisable). There was a great deal of misinformation spread in the aftermath of this stunt. It was a tricky business to make correct logical assertions through the minefield of popular misinformation that ensued. A doctor who supervised this did eventually publish in a peer-reviewed journal enough of a factual synopsis to sort out which stories were candyfloss bullshit, and which weren't.
A week later another editor came along and "simplified" my careful prose into the language of careless, naked assertions. I chalked this up to a lesson learned.
The vast majority of my edits have fared better than that. These days I mainly restrict myself to adding isolated statements.
If anyone digs into the article's history, there's a version of the page with carefully worded prose. My contribution wasn't erased, it was merely buried. I wonder sometimes how many pages on Wikipedia have far superior text buried in deep sub strata of their page histories.
The real problem with the model is that there's no underlying arrow of progress. Given their editorial guidelines, credible sources are the foundational object. But sources are not first class objects on Wikipedia. Pastiches of credible sources (the actual articles) are the primary first class object. For the highly inculcated, formal dispute resolutions might also be considered first class objects (in many cases, rather fuzzy first class objects).
Until there's some method, at least semi-automatic en route to the semantic web, to enforce the use of a good source over a bad source at the level of isolated assertions, nothing much is going to change. Editors become possessive of pages because the effort of volunteers is the only force retaining any of the historical quality of an article from death by a thousand well-intentioned word changes.
The least reliable articles are often the ones apparently riddled with careful references. In many cases I've dug into the source and found it doesn't support the claim in any fashion whatsoever, or outright contradicts the claim in some larger frame of consideration.
One could define software engineering, if one wished to, as the art of pushing entropy up hill with quality control. The opposite of software engineering is politics. This can work for a while, until your free labour quits in disgust.
The other remark I'll make is that most people vastly underestimate the utility of mediocre information conveniently packaged. On just about any subject, fifteen minutes at Wikipedia is all I need to put together a mental game plan about what I need to pursue and how, and what is likely to be the most productive place to begin. Underneath the curling, worm-eaten, multi-coloured leaves of factual assertion, there's a pretty decent semantic graph lurking in the page structure, even if sometimes it's closer to the lyrics of Dem Bones than Gray's Anatomy.
The social graph is full of shit, too, lest we forget. One can glean a lot from a social graph full of shit, and many companies do.
I'm 6'7". I do my best not to fly (don't really want to be sexually abused) but when I have to, I am fucking miserable.
Yeah, tell me about it. I'm 6'4" (plus a 1/2" extra in the morning) but I have an especially long torso, so we'd probably be eye to eye sitting down. I don't know about you, but the seat in front of me prevents me from slouching the least bit, when I lean my head back on the head rest, my gaze is vertical. It's pretty close to a 90 degree bend, which I try out just for shits and giggles, while other people find ways to sleep.
Pro tip for tall fliers: the foam cushion usually rips off the aluminum seat frame (Velcro). If your ass can handle sitting on the hard, cold metal you might manage enough of a head rest to get a half hour snooze in the mid-flight red-eye hour of total desperation. I've done this many times.
I got stuck on the apron at Schiphol once while they replaced a starter motor. The middle-aged Germanic woman beside me had tree-trunk thighs, clad in tight black neoprene. Our thighs met in a thermonuclear embrace on my side of the arm rest for our entire stay on the apron, plus the return flight to Montreal.
At this point, the airlines can go fuck themselves. I'd rather not leave the ground.
Some number pencilled into an operating permit granted in 1969 is not the last word on how long these facilities will continue to operate safely.
There was—at the time—not a single reactor of a modern design with a forty year operational record on which to base even the wildest guess. The number "40 years" had more to do with investor ROI than any engineering crystal ball.
I recall one reactor shut down for an expensive refurbish a long time ago because circulation pipes had become unexpectedly brittle in less than a decade of exposure to a constant, low level of neutron flux.
Summary: we didn't know shit.
On day one, it's extremely hard to tell the difference between a Toyota and a Chevy. At year thirty, the stakeholders think they've won the lottery because it was a Toyota after all. At year thirty-five, Toyota develops a frightening latency in response to the graphite rods. At year forty-two you've got this headache sorted—or so you would like to believe. It was operator over-reaction to upgraded SCADA data collection rates. No, it was xenon capture by surface pockets in metals exposed to decades of micro-crystalline annealing. No, it was pockets of non-uniform fission density due to a very minor change in the fuel-pellet binding agent made as older mines ceased production.
All the reactors built in the 1970s were version 0.9. No reactor anywhere had a forty year operational track record with a modern design.
The real problem is that pinheads like you want to keep pretending that graduate students have a revenue problem instead of a spending problem. It's still possible to prevent a graduate student from having future credit issues, but to do that the graduate student would have to immediately cut educational expenses to less than he or she earns in employment income.
It appears that other particulars bear on the case.
America is the world's third most productive country by hours worked, more than double that of the Czech Republic, the strongest eastern-block country within that list (Lithuania, probably more representative, is even further behind). It strikes me that the American situation has more in common with the fall of Rome than the fall of the Soviet Union.
Or perhaps this tenuous juncture in America has more in common with the collapse of the Ottoman empire than the Soviet Union. I couldn't say—but look, a smoking gun:
[Berkes] suggested one of the reasons for Ottoman economic decline was the inability of the ruling class to make a clear choice between war and the more conventional types of capital formation.
No wait, it's different after all:
The Industrial Revolution saw even greater changes. The Ottoman Empire did not have a social structure well adjusted to the free-market capitalism needed to build factories. The Empire also lacked crucial supplies of coal and other needed commodities.
But dammit, on second though, maybe that's not so different after all.
It is also possible that this message was authored by an AI who is resident on the Internet and has no physical components at all. Call me Skynet. And be worried over whether I have launch control. Be very worried about whether I might tickle the stock markets a bit, just to see what kind of chaos I might cause.
You must be WOPR's little rug rat playing Fisher Price with the gullible planet. This is the level of misdirection of a toddler playing hide and go seek in the belief that if she can't see you, you can't see her.
So his publisher is forcing him to use Word. I would be annoyed as well. I know at least some publishers accept PDF (and some even LaTeX). So maybe he should just choose a different publisher.
Thank you, cheerleader for the lemmings of self-marginalization. Choosing from a restricted pool tends to lead to less excellent choices. But don't stop to complain about this, even if it bites you at every turn.
The reality here is that the Word ecosystem is at least as destructive to orderly progress as IE6 was the to progression of web site design, but it's proving a lot harder to pry the cold, callous fingers of corporations who are deeply invested in this ecosystem off of the central dysfunction.
For one thing, the entire cloud business model, for any company not Microsoft, depended on an interoperability standard that Microsoft couldn't scupper with the next software release. There was enhanced visibility of the issue, and giant pools of money behind the rearguard action, not to mention the aftermath of a court case that forced Microsoft to dribble with its head down, lest it be red carded yet again for charging down the court with two muscular arms cradling the basketball.
Word is such a monumental disaster that I actually smile when formatting my documents as PDF. This despite the fact that a large percentage of all two-column PDF documents have a one-column cut and paste text model (when you try to select the top half of the left column, you get the top half of both columns, with line fragments interspersed).
The semantic web is so far seemingly stillborn. The day will come when the algorithms wish to understand text at the same level as your trusty editor--I mean the person who helps you get it right.
The only reason we're still here is... because we've been here so long.
FTFY. But it's actually not entirely true. When I've made an effort to jump ship, I find that many of the alternative sites have not yet invented the paragraph.
Seriously, the background music in this video is the all-time low since the day I gleefully blacklisted Jon Katz. But sadly, this still beats conversing in sentence fragments. I've seen articles written by Katz since then, elsewhere, that were quite good. It's just that his round-about mush brain was a terrible fit at geek central. He was always trying to discover if he had anything at all to say by dangling it in front of enraged bulls with an actual clue.
For me, writing is thinking. So I pound out a few paragraphs here whenever I need to consolidate some nuance of my personal perspective on life, out of long habit. Sometimes I write to discharge something old, tired and ugly. Other times I write to embrace a fresh new slant on an old issue. It's useful to have a place to write where I can fully exploit the revolving door of mental evolution. If I were writing under my own name on a blog, or something more formal, there would be far less opportunity to write in the jettison mode.
For about fifteen years I used to patronize one of the first outstanding microbrews in town, in a heritage building with a patio overlooking the waterfront backed by the quaint skyline of the garden city. About eight years ago you could see their business model shifting. First, fetch your own beer from the bar turned into table service, who handed you a menu and didn't even bother to mention the special keg of something especially interesting at the end of the bar. Then the menu went all over the place, including a sojourn through expensive and unpalatable, before fixing the quality problem, but leaving the price alone, in the bracket where mainly tourists are willing to go.
Once a year or so, we meet there out of pure nostalgia. The beer's still good, but everything else is either sad or expensive. True beer lovers are not their target market any longer. We don't belong there. I don't belong, here, really. I just haven't completely kicked the inertia.
And precisely how did we decide that these paintings weren't painted by outcast males with girlish mittens? Did we exhume Leonardo or Michelangelo to make sure he was "one of us"?
As well, it's not clear how we go from hand prints to a conclusion about who painted the animal outlines. I just watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams last week and I was thinking these thoughts all the while. I doubt we will ever know with any degree of confidence.
That's why Hertzog titled his movie "Forgotten". Because we'll never know. Hertzog is a strange duck, but he's not stupid.
We wonder why so many Americans are ignorant of the standards of science when the only time anything scientific captures their attention, it's complete bullshit wrapped around an intriguing nugget. Selling the bullshit sizzle but not the steak is the reason the majority of the population remains clueless about this important food group.
The origins of Unicode date to 1987, when Joe Becker from Xerox and Lee Collins and Mark Davis from Apple started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set. In August 1988, Joe Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system, tentatively called Unicode". Although the term "Unicode" had previously been used for other purposes, such as the name of a programming language developed for the UNIVAC in the late 1950s, and most notably a universal telegraphic phrase-book that was first published in 1889, Becker may not have been aware of these earlier usages, and he explained that "[t]he name 'Unicode' is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding".
Advertising in general is just scummy shit to make people do what they don't want. Unfortunately Marti's argument falls apart by it being hinged on this insane "rational economy" assertion.
Sorry, bucko there's no free lunch on thinking straight.
As far as Don Marti goes, it's an extremely well-written article about factors many people don't bother to consider. It's a heavy lunch as it now stands. But still, he leaves too much out. Sometimes you can't win.
The problem is that advertisers pursue mixed tactics. They burn money to burnish the brand silver, while also pushing your worst buttons, while moving mountains behind the scenes to obscure whatever direct quality signal the consumer might also observe.
In the rare case where a branding effort convinces me, I'll go to the corporate web site with a specific question about whether their product has a quality I regard as essential. It'll take me five minutes to even find the page that reveals this (or ten minutes of futility culminating in a boiling rage if the page doesn't even exist). Then I when I find the page, it might reveal what I wish to know or it might not. When it reveals what I wish to know, it might yet remain hard to determine exactly which models and which model years conform to my wishes.
When one steps back to do a NPV on the entire experience, the answer is "Why the fuck bother?"
My most recent horror-show experience involved procuring Nomacorc for some homemade wine which I wish to cellar for up to five years (my cellar is set up for upright bottle storage, so natural cork is a no-fly zone).
Check out this exercise in burning money: NomaSense OxiSense video. Labcoats, the musical, scored by John Williams. Notice the use of a thick French accent to extol product virtue, and the Swiss accent for the bean-counter spiff. This is a cool technology. I'm impressed, and not just in my shrivelled MTV reflex arc.
But mainly I just wanted to buy the best existing Nomcorc closure. Well, it took a long time on that horrid website to determine which of their product levels was best suited to my needs. Try it yourself.
Having figured this out, I started to call local wine supply retailers, and not a single one could tell me which expensively-branded Nomacorc they were actually purveying. Nomacorc (or their hapless distributor) ships out bags with no product markings, and neither do the individual corks have any such marking. If you bottle your fine Nebbiolo with a two-year cork by mistake, four years from now you can kiss your draino goodbye.
Eventually I found a hopeless geek such as myself who runs a brew-on-premise. I asked him which Nomacorc he sells. He launched into a tirade (without any prompting from me) "oh my god, I wasted of my life on their web site and putting through my order, but I did finally get a huge bail of corks suited to preserve wine for four plus years". I replied "thank you for saying that, I think we'll be friends for life".
As far as I'm concerned, the entire advertising industry can go stuff itself until the day comes when the supermarket informs me that I've selected a product that exceeds my personal guidelines for sodium or MSG or Monsanto extortion chemical, so I can reject it from my basket prior to paying. Until advertising is on-side with helping me enforce my better self (over my harried, impulsive fuckwit self) their business model will continue to circle the drain of preying on the weak, or the strong in weak moments.
The idea behind insurance is that it is a personal choice to have it or not.
Where the fuck did you get that? That's actually the founding idea and sole power source behind libertarianism: that all good things come from choice alone.
Insurance is about entering into social compact where individual risks are borne by the group. The Canadian health care system is an insurance system, even though I've never personally received a choice in whether to participate. Insurance actually works best when it casts a wide net, despite the exceedingly awkward conversation about where benefits end, for the diseases where medical science offers us the most heroic, astrobuck interventions. Not facing these adult questions doesn't make a system better, it just makes the system easier to stomach, living life with your head in the sand.
If you're not even conversant on Rawl's original position, it's going to be hard to draw you into meaningful debate. Rules that everyone would agree to before the first card is dealt will be portrayed as selectively punitive if introduced after people take a boo at their hole cards. Fly in the ointment: we all have hole cards already dealt.
Why did Europeans not adopt American notions of freedom and government long before America embarked on the great experiment? Because they reached a gridlock of vested interests, each pursuing their own glorious choices.
Now America has an advanced case of gridlock syndrome. The better path for all concerned is no longer an option. Democracy in the first place is all about facing the risk that your own choices will overruled by the choices of others, should they happen to outnumber you, or the electoral lines were cleverly gerrymandered, or the options presented/not presented have been engineered by the deepest pockets.
No matter how you slice it, choice is a social construct. Do you really think a libertarian paradise is immune to the vested interests of shadowy elites?
If I thought choice worked the way you think choice works, I'd be libertarian too. Choice is a superhero, but not a faultless superhero. Choice simply can not fix all problems. The fly in the ointment is biological interconnection.
The form of choice that must be most zealously guarded is that surrounding self-actualization. I'm sitting here at a keyboard, connected to the internet, in a country which guarantees free speech in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and generally enforces those laws with laudable diligence. If I fail to self-actualize, I'm sure as hell not blaming it on the Canadian health care system.
We're in a medical reality right now where large numbers of people take drugs such as Lipitor, where few benefit from doing so. This is fundamentally socialist. These drugs are explicitly designed to behave like this, by profit maximizing private interests. It's awfully darn hard to make a billion dollars a year selling a drug costing $500,000 for a course of treatment with 100% guarantee of permanent cure. Many of your prospective patients don't have $500,000 at hand, and even if they did, it means their children don't go to college.
That reality will change over time. Topol on the Creative Destruction of Medicine is a great overview of this. The day will come to circle the wagons around the American health care delivery model yet again. But you fear waiting for that day, don't you, because you know how damn important it is to the outcome of the debate that hole cards have already been dealt. People will then cling to the the Obamacare system using exactly the same arguments you are using to prevent its inception. And I'll still be here upbraiding those idiots, too, so long as my fingers obey my command.
Many of the Obamacare opponents are so prostate before the god of gridlock, that they conceive of Obamacare as terminal station. It's not a good terminal station. I agree. So let's kill gridlock and live like sensible humans.
I was reading Wikipedia just last night after viewing Cave of Forgotten Dreams on the origins of language, which the article proclaims is viewed by many[who?] as one of the hardest problems in science.
Noam Chomsky is a prominent proponent of discontinuity theory. "The views of Noam Chomsky on the nature of UG (innate universal grammar) have long been dominant within the field of linguistics, but they themselves have undergone marked changes from decade to decade" (Christiansen, 59).
He argues that a single chance mutation occurred in one individual on the order of 100,000 years ago, triggering the "instantaneous" emergence of the language faculty (a component of the mind-brain) in "perfect" or "near-perfect" form.
The philosophical argument runs, briefly, as follows: firstly, from what is known about evolution, any biological change in a species arises by a random genetic change in a single individual which spreads throughout its breeding group.
Secondly, from a computational perspective on the theory of language: the only change that was needed was the cognitive ability to construct and process recursive data structures in the mind (the property of "discrete infinity", which appears to be unique to the human mind). This genetic change, which endowed the human mind with the property of discrete infinity, Chomsky argues, essentially amounts to a jump from being able to count up to N, where N is a fixed number, to being able to count indefinitely (i.e. if N can be constructed then so can N+1).
It follows from these assertions that the evolution of the human language faculty is saltational since, as a matter of logical fact, there is no way to gradually transition from a mind capable only of counting up to a fixed number, to a mind capable of counting indefinitely.
The picture then, by loose analogy, is that the formation of the language faculty in humans is akin to the formation of a crystal; discrete infinity was the seed crystal in a super-saturated primate brain, on the verge of blossoming into the human mind, by physical law, once a single small, but crucial, key stone was added by evolution. It thus follows from this theory that language did appear rather suddenly within the history of human evolution.
Does anyone else find it weird that in Chomsky's view, the magic moment in human evolution is something that our computational mechanisms have possessed at least since Turing showed in 1937 that Turing machines equal the lambda calculus in expressiveness?
Or does Chomsky somehow secretly believe that the gene for human mental recursion is more supercalifragilisticexpialidocious than lambda calculus?
Freud and Chomsky share a unique gift in their capacity to make impressive technical accomplishments without uprooting or disturbing too much of the psychedelic wu underbrush.
Unless this people building this system have come up with a way to program a creative spirit into the system, I'm skeptical
Daniel Dennett made himself a career out of arguing against this kind of twaddle. Whenever I listen to him, I always wonder what he's making such a big deal about, then I head back out into the world, and sure enough, he's busy saying what needs to be said.
There's a pattern here, "the story of my life", as Dennett puts it. People assume unrealistic ideals of what free will, selfhood or rationality are and then get upset when Dennett says: "It's not the overwhelming supercalifragilisticexpialidocious phenomenon that you thought it was." But it's still real enough. The problem is simply: "Both free will and consciousness have been, by my lights, inflated in the popular imagination and in the philosophical imagination," and so "anybody who has a view of either one that is chopped down to size" is accused of "a wretched subterfuge", as Kant memorably put it.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious travels under many aliases. One of these is "creative spirit". A calling card of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is that there can be no such thing as incremental progress. You either have it, or you're wasting your time. There's a grain of truth to this. It's hard to sneak up on a moving bar that travels by teleportation whenever encroached.
This kind of logic is itself part of the problem. It presumes that people are engaged in the political dimensions of their life activities everywhere and always. Now perhaps you think the world would be a better place if this were true, and you might have the view—from within the confines of your evidently narrow and sheltered life—that we all have limitless capacity to politicize our every twitch and sneeze. But we don't, and it's not effective.
I have a range of issues where I'm especially well placed (though aptitude, knowledge, experience, and social connections) to speak out loudly and effectively. The rest of the time, like everyone else, I'm merely trying to get through life without succumbing to death by paper cut. Facebook is a cancer, so I don't go there at all, but if I did, I wouldn't regard Social Fixer as part of the problem. I'd regard it as a dry pair of socks, so I could live to hike another day.
But sure, if your boots pinch, burn your socks. It's true: you won't ever buy a bad-fitting pair of boots ever again. Too bad about those refrigerated vaccines you were trekking into a remote African village. Better luck next year.
Regardless, the jump from "you're not doing what we ask" to "we get to install a black box on your network and spoof as you, trust us not to abuse this" seems excessive if not absurd as lavabit's core business is centered around privacy.
Considering the likely demographics of their clientele, if word leaks out that Lavabit's entire service is wearing an FBI wire, the Lavabit proprietors are about as long for the good life as Adriana La Cerva during her Pepto-Bismol phase.
Ah, thanks for that. Without a gratuitous ad distronem attack within the first page of comments, I wouldn't be sure I was reading something about BSD.
As for de Raadt's "unsupportable fuckwittery", the infallably polite are soon back-doored and sent to PRISM. The Philistines didn't send Goliath down to challenge the Israelites in single combat because he was the life of the party. His rawhide posse seems to get a lot done, despite the incessant hail of small stones. If only they'd sent Theo instead. Thirty thousand rueful historical Philistines can't be wrong.
There's many things that Apple might not have invented, but did nonetheless popularize.
It was IBM who "popularized" the PC among the ranks of accountants and economists and statisticians and MBAs who never felt the magic of the cramped Apple II keyboard or the 40 column display with no lowercase letters. These dullards constituted a far larger market than Apple commanded until the distant dawn of gadget manna.
For the tablet, some company that loomed large in the public imagination needed to step up and offer legitimacy that this wasn't just a niche product doomed to forever remain a niche product, just as IBM did with the original PC—this while Xerox already had the bones of the Apple Lisa/Macintosh with mice and networking in an advanced state of development within their research lab.
Funny how the worm turns.
The entirely of the PC revolution was set in motion by a combination of Leibniz/Babbage and the invention of solid state semiconductors and would have unfolded much as it has without any of the companies we know today who muscled their way into the vanguard of brand recognition by some combination of skill and luck (far more luck than usually admitted in the retrospective hagiography).
Bell Labs' attorneys soon discovered Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and devices based on it patented in 1930 by Julius Lilienfeld, who filed his MESFET-like patent in Canada on October 22, 1925.
Fifty years later, we arrive at Apple's founding moment:
The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, the 6502 was by a considerable margin, the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market, selling for less than one-sixth the cost of competing designs from larger companies, such as Motorola and Intel.
Innovation is a fifty-lap relay race around a marathon track. I'd also give props to Colossus, System/360 (mainframe), the Unix philosophy, and the massive scale of Google's data center search appliance (cloudframe). Apple never made it into this league.
Throughout this period the Colossus remained secret, long after any of its technical details were of any importance. This was due to the UK's intelligence agencies use of Enigma-like machines which they promoted and sold to other governments, and then broke the codes using a variety of methods. Had the knowledge of the codebreaking machines been widely known, no one would have accepted these machines; rather, they would have developed their own methods for encryption, methods that the UK services might not have been able to break.
The scope of PRISM is a big surprise? To anyone? Really?
It's pretty obvious with Coke that cultivating their global brand was their core innovation. This is less obvious with Apple, but closer to the mark than most suppose.
Pinkham was struck by how different the machines looked â" and how hot they were. Even then, Google was running its website on dirt-cheap, stripped-down servers slotted into extremely tight spaces. They didnâ(TM)t even have plastic cases.
This was at least as central to Google's business model as their brand-building Page Rank algorithm. And it requires building a robust data-center OS.
If I had to name one thing that Apple innovated outside of brand/fit-and-finish (and gleanings from NeXT) while doing the lion's share of the work themselves, it would be this:
The combination of the LaserWriter, PostScript, PageMaker and the Mac's GUI and built-in AppleTalk networking would ultimately transform the landscape of computer
I dare anyone, especially after mr. Snowden's revelations, to contradict mr. Stallman's points.
Snowden's unprecedented disclosed of hard evidence from the inside was in no way revelatory to those of us who have followed the NSA story since The Puzzle Palace. Stallman's tiresome drone about the collectivisation of digital works as an inalienable freedom has been equally predictable for just as long. Here's the problem. RMS's political philosophy has all the subtlety of Benito Mussolini.
Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
Let me rephrase RMS:
Everything within freedom, nothing outside freedom, nothing against freedom.
Did I miss anything? For some reason I persist in the view that the good society is far less polar in its optimal constitution. That's all I'm going to give you for a dare offered up (how generous of you) a decade after this debate widely circulated, and two full decades after the broad outlines were firmly in place.
If you don't count noticing that the gear cogs of the antikythera could be made ever smaller and smaller by ongoing advances in Swiss craftsmen 1600 years later, then Star Trek was indeed ahead of its time in guessing that a large phone might become a small phone with batteries (the Baghdad Battery dates to roughly the same age as the antikythera) and a radio (1887) carried by some exotic flux such as neutrinos (as named by Fermi in 1933).
On a sidenote, imagine the horror if all women of the world would have their period exactly synchronized!
From what I've been reading lately—in recent books—about half of the crabbiness is due to women not eating enough to compensate for their increased metabolic rate during their periods. Men also get crabby when we don't eat enough to replenish our willpower reserves. It takes willpower to make the generous response rather than the first lizard response that enters our brain.
Slashdot Mirror
This mainly implies that the law firm had not yet run into the filing document word limit. Most lawyers would cite vaginal birth as evidence of precocious sexuality.
Logically, one might presume that the winning bid is most likely to come from the side at greatest risk of being sunk were the patents were to be wielded against them. In this vein one would argue that Apple & Co. made the most lucrative bid to absolve themselves of their own infringements of the Nortel portfolio.
This great opera of stupidities proposed and disposed takes place while the aggrieved parties on both sides shower hundred dollar bills upon the jousting hookers of horseshit.
If you were doing more than thinking in tiresome categories you might have called it a self-fulfilling projection which is pretty much exactly what it became.
To refine this even more precisely, it's an ex post self-fulfilling projection, where "ex post" modifies "self-fulfilling".
But wait, there's more! It's a virtuous ex post self-fulfilling projection, where "virtuous" modifies "self-fulfilling projection".
We're now deep into The Remains of the Day. I might even call it a pink leather virtuous ex post self-fulfilling projection. Sailed through menopause without a hiccup—to everyone's great surprise—but even lathering on a hair-net bale of Grecian Formula teaser treats the glory days are well behind us.
From the user's perspective the warranty claim is necessary until Apple communicates to the afflicted that it isn't, because they've solved the problem, the fix is available now, and it won't cost you two hours of your life to patch up Apple's incompetence.
How To Irritate People - The Car Salesman
That's also been my experience, for the most part. In the past when a Slashdot post has revealed enough information for me to dig through the edit history on Wikipedia to see what happened, I've sided with the Wikipedia editors.
One time I put quite a bit of effort into cleaning up an article about a fellow who set a dubious record long ago (less stupid than winning World Sauna Championships, but still inadvisable). There was a great deal of misinformation spread in the aftermath of this stunt. It was a tricky business to make correct logical assertions through the minefield of popular misinformation that ensued. A doctor who supervised this did eventually publish in a peer-reviewed journal enough of a factual synopsis to sort out which stories were candyfloss bullshit, and which weren't.
A week later another editor came along and "simplified" my careful prose into the language of careless, naked assertions. I chalked this up to a lesson learned.
The vast majority of my edits have fared better than that. These days I mainly restrict myself to adding isolated statements.
If anyone digs into the article's history, there's a version of the page with carefully worded prose. My contribution wasn't erased, it was merely buried. I wonder sometimes how many pages on Wikipedia have far superior text buried in deep sub strata of their page histories.
The real problem with the model is that there's no underlying arrow of progress. Given their editorial guidelines, credible sources are the foundational object. But sources are not first class objects on Wikipedia. Pastiches of credible sources (the actual articles) are the primary first class object. For the highly inculcated, formal dispute resolutions might also be considered first class objects (in many cases, rather fuzzy first class objects).
Until there's some method, at least semi-automatic en route to the semantic web, to enforce the use of a good source over a bad source at the level of isolated assertions, nothing much is going to change. Editors become possessive of pages because the effort of volunteers is the only force retaining any of the historical quality of an article from death by a thousand well-intentioned word changes.
The least reliable articles are often the ones apparently riddled with careful references. In many cases I've dug into the source and found it doesn't support the claim in any fashion whatsoever, or outright contradicts the claim in some larger frame of consideration.
One could define software engineering, if one wished to, as the art of pushing entropy up hill with quality control. The opposite of software engineering is politics. This can work for a while, until your free labour quits in disgust.
The other remark I'll make is that most people vastly underestimate the utility of mediocre information conveniently packaged. On just about any subject, fifteen minutes at Wikipedia is all I need to put together a mental game plan about what I need to pursue and how, and what is likely to be the most productive place to begin. Underneath the curling, worm-eaten, multi-coloured leaves of factual assertion, there's a pretty decent semantic graph lurking in the page structure, even if sometimes it's closer to the lyrics of Dem Bones than Gray's Anatomy.
The social graph is full of shit, too, lest we forget. One can glean a lot from a social graph full of shit, and many companies do.
You, sir, have not the faintest inkling of a shred of understanding of quantum superposition in the non-hands of an omniscient, omnipotent non-being.
Yeah, tell me about it. I'm 6'4" (plus a 1/2" extra in the morning) but I have an especially long torso, so we'd probably be eye to eye sitting down. I don't know about you, but the seat in front of me prevents me from slouching the least bit, when I lean my head back on the head rest, my gaze is vertical. It's pretty close to a 90 degree bend, which I try out just for shits and giggles, while other people find ways to sleep.
Pro tip for tall fliers: the foam cushion usually rips off the aluminum seat frame (Velcro). If your ass can handle sitting on the hard, cold metal you might manage enough of a head rest to get a half hour snooze in the mid-flight red-eye hour of total desperation. I've done this many times.
I got stuck on the apron at Schiphol once while they replaced a starter motor. The middle-aged Germanic woman beside me had tree-trunk thighs, clad in tight black neoprene. Our thighs met in a thermonuclear embrace on my side of the arm rest for our entire stay on the apron, plus the return flight to Montreal.
At this point, the airlines can go fuck themselves. I'd rather not leave the ground.
What do 'best before' dates on food really mean?
Some number pencilled into an operating permit granted in 1969 is not the last word on how long these facilities will continue to operate safely.
There was—at the time—not a single reactor of a modern design with a forty year operational record on which to base even the wildest guess. The number "40 years" had more to do with investor ROI than any engineering crystal ball.
I recall one reactor shut down for an expensive refurbish a long time ago because circulation pipes had become unexpectedly brittle in less than a decade of exposure to a constant, low level of neutron flux.
Summary: we didn't know shit.
On day one, it's extremely hard to tell the difference between a Toyota and a Chevy. At year thirty, the stakeholders think they've won the lottery because it was a Toyota after all. At year thirty-five, Toyota develops a frightening latency in response to the graphite rods. At year forty-two you've got this headache sorted—or so you would like to believe. It was operator over-reaction to upgraded SCADA data collection rates. No, it was xenon capture by surface pockets in metals exposed to decades of micro-crystalline annealing. No, it was pockets of non-uniform fission density due to a very minor change in the fuel-pellet binding agent made as older mines ceased production.
All the reactors built in the 1970s were version 0.9. No reactor anywhere had a forty year operational track record with a modern design.
It appears that other particulars bear on the case.
Soviet-style collapse?
Economy of the Soviet Union
And you have the gall to call other people pinheads? The only thing in common is an expensive war, badly judged.
List of countries by GDP (PPP) per hour worked
America is the world's third most productive country by hours worked, more than double that of the Czech Republic, the strongest eastern-block country within that list (Lithuania, probably more representative, is even further behind). It strikes me that the American situation has more in common with the fall of Rome than the fall of the Soviet Union.
Or perhaps this tenuous juncture in America has more in common with the collapse of the Ottoman empire than the Soviet Union. I couldn't say—but look, a smoking gun:
No wait, it's different after all:
But dammit, on second though, maybe that's not so different after all.
You must be WOPR's little rug rat playing Fisher Price with the gullible planet. This is the level of misdirection of a toddler playing hide and go seek in the belief that if she can't see you, you can't see her.
Thank you, cheerleader for the lemmings of self-marginalization. Choosing from a restricted pool tends to lead to less excellent choices. But don't stop to complain about this, even if it bites you at every turn.
The reality here is that the Word ecosystem is at least as destructive to orderly progress as IE6 was the to progression of web site design, but it's proving a lot harder to pry the cold, callous fingers of corporations who are deeply invested in this ecosystem off of the central dysfunction.
For one thing, the entire cloud business model, for any company not Microsoft, depended on an interoperability standard that Microsoft couldn't scupper with the next software release. There was enhanced visibility of the issue, and giant pools of money behind the rearguard action, not to mention the aftermath of a court case that forced Microsoft to dribble with its head down, lest it be red carded yet again for charging down the court with two muscular arms cradling the basketball.
Word is such a monumental disaster that I actually smile when formatting my documents as PDF. This despite the fact that a large percentage of all two-column PDF documents have a one-column cut and paste text model (when you try to select the top half of the left column, you get the top half of both columns, with line fragments interspersed).
The semantic web is so far seemingly stillborn. The day will come when the algorithms wish to understand text at the same level as your trusty editor--I mean the person who helps you get it right.
Maybe then this problem will sort itself out.
Perfect solutions are often NP-hard in systems where pretty-good solutions are nowhere close to NP-hard in many practical circumstances.
The declaration of NP-hard is way overrated. We use it mostly because mathematics still can't chew "pretty good" in any rigorous way.
FTFY. But it's actually not entirely true. When I've made an effort to jump ship, I find that many of the alternative sites have not yet invented the paragraph.
Seriously, the background music in this video is the all-time low since the day I gleefully blacklisted Jon Katz. But sadly, this still beats conversing in sentence fragments. I've seen articles written by Katz since then, elsewhere, that were quite good. It's just that his round-about mush brain was a terrible fit at geek central. He was always trying to discover if he had anything at all to say by dangling it in front of enraged bulls with an actual clue.
For me, writing is thinking. So I pound out a few paragraphs here whenever I need to consolidate some nuance of my personal perspective on life, out of long habit. Sometimes I write to discharge something old, tired and ugly. Other times I write to embrace a fresh new slant on an old issue. It's useful to have a place to write where I can fully exploit the revolving door of mental evolution. If I were writing under my own name on a blog, or something more formal, there would be far less opportunity to write in the jettison mode.
For about fifteen years I used to patronize one of the first outstanding microbrews in town, in a heritage building with a patio overlooking the waterfront backed by the quaint skyline of the garden city. About eight years ago you could see their business model shifting. First, fetch your own beer from the bar turned into table service, who handed you a menu and didn't even bother to mention the special keg of something especially interesting at the end of the bar. Then the menu went all over the place, including a sojourn through expensive and unpalatable, before fixing the quality problem, but leaving the price alone, in the bracket where mainly tourists are willing to go.
Once a year or so, we meet there out of pure nostalgia. The beer's still good, but everything else is either sad or expensive. True beer lovers are not their target market any longer. We don't belong there. I don't belong, here, really. I just haven't completely kicked the inertia.
And precisely how did we decide that these paintings weren't painted by outcast males with girlish mittens? Did we exhume Leonardo or Michelangelo to make sure he was "one of us"?
As well, it's not clear how we go from hand prints to a conclusion about who painted the animal outlines. I just watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams last week and I was thinking these thoughts all the while. I doubt we will ever know with any degree of confidence.
That's why Hertzog titled his movie "Forgotten". Because we'll never know. Hertzog is a strange duck, but he's not stupid.
We wonder why so many Americans are ignorant of the standards of science when the only time anything scientific captures their attention, it's complete bullshit wrapped around an intriguing nugget. Selling the bullshit sizzle but not the steak is the reason the majority of the population remains clueless about this important food group.
I'm usually pretty good about that.
Here follows some anti-lameness fodder:
Sorry, bucko there's no free lunch on thinking straight.
Actually burning money is déclassé. (So is failing to render basic Unicode.) However, conspicuous consumption really works when done right. Thorstein Veblen, this is Mr Cecil Rhodes. You'll get along famously.
As far as Don Marti goes, it's an extremely well-written article about factors many people don't bother to consider. It's a heavy lunch as it now stands. But still, he leaves too much out. Sometimes you can't win.
The problem is that advertisers pursue mixed tactics. They burn money to burnish the brand silver, while also pushing your worst buttons, while moving mountains behind the scenes to obscure whatever direct quality signal the consumer might also observe.
In the rare case where a branding effort convinces me, I'll go to the corporate web site with a specific question about whether their product has a quality I regard as essential. It'll take me five minutes to even find the page that reveals this (or ten minutes of futility culminating in a boiling rage if the page doesn't even exist). Then I when I find the page, it might reveal what I wish to know or it might not. When it reveals what I wish to know, it might yet remain hard to determine exactly which models and which model years conform to my wishes.
When one steps back to do a NPV on the entire experience, the answer is "Why the fuck bother?"
My most recent horror-show experience involved procuring Nomacorc for some homemade wine which I wish to cellar for up to five years (my cellar is set up for upright bottle storage, so natural cork is a no-fly zone).
Check out this exercise in burning money: NomaSense OxiSense video. Labcoats, the musical, scored by John Williams. Notice the use of a thick French accent to extol product virtue, and the Swiss accent for the bean-counter spiff. This is a cool technology. I'm impressed, and not just in my shrivelled MTV reflex arc.
But mainly I just wanted to buy the best existing Nomcorc closure. Well, it took a long time on that horrid website to determine which of their product levels was best suited to my needs. Try it yourself.
Having figured this out, I started to call local wine supply retailers, and not a single one could tell me which expensively-branded Nomacorc they were actually purveying. Nomacorc (or their hapless distributor) ships out bags with no product markings, and neither do the individual corks have any such marking. If you bottle your fine Nebbiolo with a two-year cork by mistake, four years from now you can kiss your draino goodbye.
Eventually I found a hopeless geek such as myself who runs a brew-on-premise. I asked him which Nomacorc he sells. He launched into a tirade (without any prompting from me) "oh my god, I wasted of my life on their web site and putting through my order, but I did finally get a huge bail of corks suited to preserve wine for four plus years". I replied "thank you for saying that, I think we'll be friends for life".
As far as I'm concerned, the entire advertising industry can go stuff itself until the day comes when the supermarket informs me that I've selected a product that exceeds my personal guidelines for sodium or MSG or Monsanto extortion chemical, so I can reject it from my basket prior to paying. Until advertising is on-side with helping me enforce my better self (over my harried, impulsive fuckwit self) their business model will continue to circle the drain of preying on the weak, or the strong in weak moments.
Where the fuck did you get that? That's actually the founding idea and sole power source behind libertarianism: that all good things come from choice alone.
Insurance is about entering into social compact where individual risks are borne by the group. The Canadian health care system is an insurance system, even though I've never personally received a choice in whether to participate. Insurance actually works best when it casts a wide net, despite the exceedingly awkward conversation about where benefits end, for the diseases where medical science offers us the most heroic, astrobuck interventions. Not facing these adult questions doesn't make a system better, it just makes the system easier to stomach, living life with your head in the sand.
If you're not even conversant on Rawl's original position, it's going to be hard to draw you into meaningful debate. Rules that everyone would agree to before the first card is dealt will be portrayed as selectively punitive if introduced after people take a boo at their hole cards. Fly in the ointment: we all have hole cards already dealt.
Why did Europeans not adopt American notions of freedom and government long before America embarked on the great experiment? Because they reached a gridlock of vested interests, each pursuing their own glorious choices.
Now America has an advanced case of gridlock syndrome. The better path for all concerned is no longer an option. Democracy in the first place is all about facing the risk that your own choices will overruled by the choices of others, should they happen to outnumber you, or the electoral lines were cleverly gerrymandered, or the options presented/not presented have been engineered by the deepest pockets.
No matter how you slice it, choice is a social construct. Do you really think a libertarian paradise is immune to the vested interests of shadowy elites?
If I thought choice worked the way you think choice works, I'd be libertarian too. Choice is a superhero, but not a faultless superhero. Choice simply can not fix all problems. The fly in the ointment is biological interconnection.
The form of choice that must be most zealously guarded is that surrounding self-actualization. I'm sitting here at a keyboard, connected to the internet, in a country which guarantees free speech in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and generally enforces those laws with laudable diligence. If I fail to self-actualize, I'm sure as hell not blaming it on the Canadian health care system.
We're in a medical reality right now where large numbers of people take drugs such as Lipitor, where few benefit from doing so. This is fundamentally socialist. These drugs are explicitly designed to behave like this, by profit maximizing private interests. It's awfully darn hard to make a billion dollars a year selling a drug costing $500,000 for a course of treatment with 100% guarantee of permanent cure. Many of your prospective patients don't have $500,000 at hand, and even if they did, it means their children don't go to college.
That reality will change over time. Topol on the Creative Destruction of Medicine is a great overview of this. The day will come to circle the wagons around the American health care delivery model yet again. But you fear waiting for that day, don't you, because you know how damn important it is to the outcome of the debate that hole cards have already been dealt. People will then cling to the the Obamacare system using exactly the same arguments you are using to prevent its inception. And I'll still be here upbraiding those idiots, too, so long as my fingers obey my command.
Many of the Obamacare opponents are so prostate before the god of gridlock, that they conceive of Obamacare as terminal station. It's not a good terminal station. I agree. So let's kill gridlock and live like sensible humans.
PS post.
I was reading Wikipedia just last night after viewing Cave of Forgotten Dreams on the origins of language, which the article proclaims is viewed by many[who?] as one of the hardest problems in science.
Does anyone else find it weird that in Chomsky's view, the magic moment in human evolution is something that our computational mechanisms have possessed at least since Turing showed in 1937 that Turing machines equal the lambda calculus in expressiveness?
Or does Chomsky somehow secretly believe that the gene for human mental recursion is more supercalifragilisticexpialidocious than lambda calculus?
Freud and Chomsky share a unique gift in their capacity to make impressive technical accomplishments without uprooting or disturbing too much of the psychedelic wu underbrush.
Daniel Dennett made himself a career out of arguing against this kind of twaddle. Whenever I listen to him, I always wonder what he's making such a big deal about, then I head back out into the world, and sure enough, he's busy saying what needs to be said.
From Daniel Dennett: 'You can make Aristotle look like a flaming idiot':
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious travels under many aliases. One of these is "creative spirit". A calling card of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is that there can be no such thing as incremental progress. You either have it, or you're wasting your time. There's a grain of truth to this. It's hard to sneak up on a moving bar that travels by teleportation whenever encroached.
As I recall, Dennett goes into this in the last third of Daniel Dennett: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. It's a virtuous and mildly tedious sermon if you already belong to the choir.
This kind of logic is itself part of the problem. It presumes that people are engaged in the political dimensions of their life activities everywhere and always. Now perhaps you think the world would be a better place if this were true, and you might have the view—from within the confines of your evidently narrow and sheltered life—that we all have limitless capacity to politicize our every twitch and sneeze. But we don't, and it's not effective.
I have a range of issues where I'm especially well placed (though aptitude, knowledge, experience, and social connections) to speak out loudly and effectively. The rest of the time, like everyone else, I'm merely trying to get through life without succumbing to death by paper cut. Facebook is a cancer, so I don't go there at all, but if I did, I wouldn't regard Social Fixer as part of the problem. I'd regard it as a dry pair of socks, so I could live to hike another day.
But sure, if your boots pinch, burn your socks. It's true: you won't ever buy a bad-fitting pair of boots ever again. Too bad about those refrigerated vaccines you were trekking into a remote African village. Better luck next year.
Considering the likely demographics of their clientele, if word leaks out that Lavabit's entire service is wearing an FBI wire, the Lavabit proprietors are about as long for the good life as Adriana La Cerva during her Pepto-Bismol phase.
Adriana La Cerva cooperates with the FBI
Ah, thanks for that. Without a gratuitous ad distronem attack within the first page of comments, I wouldn't be sure I was reading something about BSD.
As for de Raadt's "unsupportable fuckwittery", the infallably polite are soon back-doored and sent to PRISM. The Philistines didn't send Goliath down to challenge the Israelites in single combat because he was the life of the party. His rawhide posse seems to get a lot done, despite the incessant hail of small stones. If only they'd sent Theo instead. Thirty thousand rueful historical Philistines can't be wrong.
It was IBM who "popularized" the PC among the ranks of accountants and economists and statisticians and MBAs who never felt the magic of the cramped Apple II keyboard or the 40 column display with no lowercase letters. These dullards constituted a far larger market than Apple commanded until the distant dawn of gadget manna.
For the tablet, some company that loomed large in the public imagination needed to step up and offer legitimacy that this wasn't just a niche product doomed to forever remain a niche product, just as IBM did with the original PC—this while Xerox already had the bones of the Apple Lisa/Macintosh with mice and networking in an advanced state of development within their research lab.
Funny how the worm turns.
The entirely of the PC revolution was set in motion by a combination of Leibniz/Babbage and the invention of solid state semiconductors and would have unfolded much as it has without any of the companies we know today who muscled their way into the vanguard of brand recognition by some combination of skill and luck (far more luck than usually admitted in the retrospective hagiography).
Fifty years later, we arrive at Apple's founding moment:
Innovation is a fifty-lap relay race around a marathon track. I'd also give props to Colossus, System/360 (mainframe), the Unix philosophy, and the massive scale of Google's data center search appliance (cloudframe). Apple never made it into this league.
The scope of PRISM is a big surprise? To anyone? Really?
It's pretty obvious with Coke that cultivating their global brand was their core innovation. This is less obvious with Apple, but closer to the mark than most suppose.
How Amazon Followed Google Into the World of Secret Servers
This was at least as central to Google's business model as their brand-building Page Rank algorithm. And it requires building a robust data-center OS.
If I had to name one thing that Apple innovated outside of brand/fit-and-finish (and gleanings from NeXT) while doing the lion's share of the work themselves, it would be this:
Snowden's unprecedented disclosed of hard evidence from the inside was in no way revelatory to those of us who have followed the NSA story since The Puzzle Palace. Stallman's tiresome drone about the collectivisation of digital works as an inalienable freedom has been equally predictable for just as long. Here's the problem. RMS's political philosophy has all the subtlety of Benito Mussolini.
Let me rephrase RMS:
Did I miss anything? For some reason I persist in the view that the good society is far less polar in its optimal constitution. That's all I'm going to give you for a dare offered up (how generous of you) a decade after this debate widely circulated, and two full decades after the broad outlines were firmly in place.
If you don't count noticing that the gear cogs of the antikythera could be made ever smaller and smaller by ongoing advances in Swiss craftsmen 1600 years later, then Star Trek was indeed ahead of its time in guessing that a large phone might become a small phone with batteries (the Baghdad Battery dates to roughly the same age as the antikythera) and a radio (1887) carried by some exotic flux such as neutrinos (as named by Fermi in 1933).
From what I've been reading lately—in recent books—about half of the crabbiness is due to women not eating enough to compensate for their increased metabolic rate during their periods. Men also get crabby when we don't eat enough to replenish our willpower reserves. It takes willpower to make the generous response rather than the first lizard response that enters our brain.