OK, let me weigh these options. On one hand, there is the one-in-ten-million risk that someday I might need to have a cellphone conversation with ATC to talk me down when my entire panel fails. On the other hand, there is the virtual certainty that I will be sitting next to some compulsive-talking boiler-room operator on every commercial flight from now until eternity.
Which to choose, which to choose . . .
TrueCrypt is a mainstream encryption utility used by federal and state agencies, as well as Fortune 100 corporations, to protect data when it must be transported. How does this make it vulnerable to shut down by those same entities?
In the days when I was on a large network, I thought it was a bad practice for the IT department to have better setups than the end users. Some IT people had not just faster computers but leaner images with less integration and less overhead. Their machines flew.
But of course they had no appreciation of how bad it was to be in the trenches. Their computers performed so much better than the equivalent computers of the end users that they often did not realize how hard it was to get work done on a standard image.
When I reached the point where I ran one of the departments, I kept an old standard-image computer as my main computer and made sure I was always at the end of the upgrade queue. My view was that if something worked well on my computer, it would work on anyone's. And if something didn't work well on my computer, then it meant some of my users were having a bad experience.
So maybe if the IT department would just use the same image and hardware as the end users, they'd know enough to provide a decent standard image, which would solve a lot of user complaints.
I always liked the fact that AltaVista named their translation service "Babelfish." It would be interesting to catalog other examples of how Adams has left his mark on the Internet.
I took typing in high school so I learned the traditional way (correct finger on correct key, etc.). And I have always used a computer at work, so my skills have never become rusty. But by far, the single most significant event that affected my typing speed was using IRC in the mid 1990s. I went through a period when I chatted a lot, and it caused my typing to become almost conversational in its speed and fluency. My speed probably improved by 50% in that period. Responding in real time to a spirited conversation is just different than typing a document by yourself or taking a classroom exercise. So I guess my point is that exposure to the online environment is likely to cause natural improvement. But I'm still glad that I had the formal foundation.
What are they going to do to a non-existent business? Sue them?
Worse than that. Violation of an injunction is contempt of court, and willful violation could be deemed criminal contempt of court. Remember, corporations act through people, and people can be arrested, indicted, convicted, and punished. Bankruptcy and corporate status will not shield you from criminal liability.
Any chance they're going to release the code to their products?
The reason they went out of business is that a court issued an injunction against them. The court enjoined them from making their DVD ripper available, because the product is deemed to violate the DMCA. I think it is likely that distribution of the source code would constitute a violation of that injunction.
To date, the defining characteristic of manned space exploration has been this: it's so expensive that only major governments can do it. Accordingly, it has always been either inherently "political" in nature (national pride) or inherently "military" in nature (national defense). Since manned space exploration has always been funded with public money allocated by politicians, it has always been surrounded by ideological rhetoric and justifications, and these are not always fully rational.
But now we see SpaceShipOne and the advent of private initiatives in manned space flight. These initiatives are driven, in part, by private investment, and investors seek a return. So perhaps Van Allen's premise will now be tested. If there is a value to manned spaceflight beyond an ideology of adventure, private enterprise will presumably find it.
Or how about a more cynical view: what if this is driven by marketing, not quality? Consider automobiles. Which cars have the longest warranties? Cars like the Kia (ten years). Now which cars have the shortest warranties? Cars like the BMW (three years). Which is better engineered, better made? Which will last longer? Is a correlation between warranty length and quality? Is there a negative correlation? In light of the automotive evidence, I am not persuaded that length of warranty is any indication of product quality. It's only an indication that marketing believes the warranty will sell more units.
I hope the inventors complied with their duty to submit a copy of "Roger Rabbit" to the patent office. Benny the Cab anticipates every technology described in the article.
I have a friend who did this. She is a prominent laywer in one of the largest law firms in a major east coast city that is one the medical meccas of the world. By which I mean: she could afford the best that money could buy. Nevertheless, she had complications. For months afterwards, her eyes were too dry and she constantly had to put in eye drops to stay comfortable (and by constantly I mean that the dropper was always in her hand and she was applying drops in the midst of conversations and meetings and such). The doctors ended up plugging her eye ducts so the tears would not drain out so quickly, in an attempt to help keep her eyes moist enough. She still feels discomfort. Remember, these are your eyes we are talking about.
Perhaps you are right. I was reading the "commercial purposes" requirement as modifying the whole shebang, but if "use" is specified separately and independently, then use alone would be a violation per your statement.
Of course, the best source to determine what the court really ordered would be to see the court's order. At this point, we are still relying only the the Register's blurb. But your semantic analysis is better than mine.
The Slashdot blurb for this article is wrong and makes an incorrect analogy. The blurb says, "It's like saying you can't modify your car or your house or your clothes!"
But if you read the article, the description of the decision is substantially different: "The UK High Court has judged that the sale, advertisement, possession for commercial purposes and use of PlayStation 2 modification chips is illegal in this country."
The distinction is huge. It means that you are allowed to "modify your car" (to use the proposed analogy). You just aren't allowed to commercialize your modifications. You can tinker all you want, but you can't sell the results of your tinkering.
It's still a significant limitation, but we should at least be arguing about the actual limitation, not the incorrect one.
Maybe the FSF or someone in that league should try to trademark Open* names and reserve them for Open programs?
Under USPTO regulations, I do not believe that you are allowed to "reserve" trademark names. I believe that you can only trademark names that you are actually using in active commerce or that you are actively preparing to launch in commerce. This is probably a good thing, because otherwise it would be like the situation with domain names -- people registering hundreds or thousands of names that they have no intention of ever using on the hope that they will pre-empt somone else's usage, and then extort a payoff.
Pre-announcing a major ($3) dividend to be paid many months from now seems kind of funky. This will be immediately priced into the share value, of course -- every share is immediately worth that much more since everyone knows the distribution is coming. It's analogous to the "ex dividend" period of that occurs when a distribution is pending, except that the amount is huge and it's much longer in the future (almost half a year!). On top of that, a major buyback plan means that there will be sustained buying pressure on the stock.
So call me cynical, but this is the first thought that came into my head: These events will cause all of the executives to hit the strike price on their stock options.
Silverberg says, "In the past Microsoft was the low cost solution and Microsoft was then competing and attacking expensive proprietary systems from below."
In the realm of personal computers, I do not think this observation is accurate at all. Microsoft's approach was not to compete on price in the normal sense of the word. Rather, Microsoft's approach was to bundle applications with the operating system. Since these applications and utilities were thus already "paid for" (or included for "free" in people's minds), people had less incentive to buy competing applications, even though the competing applications were often better.
I think the distinction is important. If a particular application becomes popoular, Microsoft just rolls a copy of it into the OS, thereby gutting the market for that application. How many people buy Eudora anymore? Or Netscape? Or Trumpet Winsock? This is not the same thing as competing on price.
In my book gets 4.5 stars. But the java/javascript errors that come up constantly are a bitch and a half.
I give it 4.5 stars as well. I've been using Opera since version 3. My favorite features are the very simple things that let you browse painlessly even on poorly designed sites. For example, there is a button on the toolbar that lets you toggle images on and off without the need for changing your preferences. There is another button that lets you instantly override the color and font setting of a page with your own defaults. You can also turn off all plugins with a single checkbox. I tend to browse primarily for information, and nothing annoys me so much as poorly chosen backgrounds, graphics, and fonts that get in the way of reading the text. Opera lets me get straight to the content. It's a good browser, even though it is a bit flaky on javascript.
I would include a compiler or interpreter so the kids can learn how to do some programming. That way, they are actually learning to use the computer "as a computer" and not just for running apps. For example, the qbasic interpreter is a lot of fun to play with and you can write some neat little programs with it.
Testing at low bitrates emphasizes certain weaknesses of a codec. At high bitrates, it takes a more sensitive and trained ear to detect the artifacts and flaws. But as you reduce the bitrate, the differences become apparent. If you've never tried experimenting with it you might find it interesting, because the various codecs produce very different sounds with the same source file when the bitrate is drastically reduced. But I wonder if this is a proper way to evaluate the best design overall, since some of these codecs are certainly not optimized for low bitrates, and I do not know if there is necessarily a correlation between the flaws of a codec at low bitrates and those at higher bitrates.
Indeed, there is no necessary correlation between a company's stock price and its profitability or even its value to society. SCO is a fine example. The factors that drive stock prices can be completely independent of the factors that drive profitability. If incentives were based on profit sharing, or sales, or other tangible positive values, instead of stock options, the incentive would be to make the company profitable rather that to drive up its stock price. Accordingly, stock options may well create an incentive to breach fiduciary duties rather than to support them.
I'd rather see it broken apart, melted and recycled in more useful form than have a never-used moon rocket sitting in a museum.
Going to the moon may have been the greatest single physical achievement of the human race. There are only three remaining examples of the engine that took us there. This is one of them. I say, let's keep it.
Emphasizing humans as carriers for this data is quite rediculous.
Yes, I agree with this completely if you are referring only to electronic transactions. But in the portion of the Negroponte interview that inspired this particular thread, that is exactly what Negroponte suggested. He opines that in the future, the P2P model would apply not only to electronic transactions, but also to basic physical transactions. He specifically mentions bartering and food distribution. Such transactions are not subject to the kind of structures that you identify in the electronic realm. Hence my belief that Negroponte is trying to extend the P2P model farther than it can really go.
That's the most ridiculous dismissal I've seen in a while.
Actually, I meant it in a different way than you have interpreted. Let me try to say it better.
Centralized governments do not encourage econcomic processes that are not subject to audit and taxation. That is why smuggling is illegal. That is why barter transactions must be reported on your income tax (if you are a US taxpayer). The point I meant to make was that Negroponte's theory does not take this into account. Therefore, I believe it is unlikely that his vision of a decentralized, unregulated, economically-significant distribution system could now come into existence.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, let me weigh these options. On one hand, there is the one-in-ten-million risk that someday I might need to have a cellphone conversation with ATC to talk me down when my entire panel fails. On the other hand, there is the virtual certainty that I will be sitting next to some compulsive-talking boiler-room operator on every commercial flight from now until eternity. Which to choose, which to choose . . .
TrueCrypt is a mainstream encryption utility used by federal and state agencies, as well as Fortune 100 corporations, to protect data when it must be transported. How does this make it vulnerable to shut down by those same entities?
In the days when I was on a large network, I thought it was a bad practice for the IT department to have better setups than the end users. Some IT people had not just faster computers but leaner images with less integration and less overhead. Their machines flew.
But of course they had no appreciation of how bad it was to be in the trenches. Their computers performed so much better than the equivalent computers of the end users that they often did not realize how hard it was to get work done on a standard image.
When I reached the point where I ran one of the departments, I kept an old standard-image computer as my main computer and made sure I was always at the end of the upgrade queue. My view was that if something worked well on my computer, it would work on anyone's. And if something didn't work well on my computer, then it meant some of my users were having a bad experience.
So maybe if the IT department would just use the same image and hardware as the end users, they'd know enough to provide a decent standard image, which would solve a lot of user complaints.
... a copy of mozock.dll. So I can review a local copy -- in my browser!
I always liked the fact that AltaVista named their translation service "Babelfish." It would be interesting to catalog other examples of how Adams has left his mark on the Internet.
I took typing in high school so I learned the traditional way (correct finger on correct key, etc.). And I have always used a computer at work, so my skills have never become rusty. But by far, the single most significant event that affected my typing speed was using IRC in the mid 1990s. I went through a period when I chatted a lot, and it caused my typing to become almost conversational in its speed and fluency. My speed probably improved by 50% in that period. Responding in real time to a spirited conversation is just different than typing a document by yourself or taking a classroom exercise. So I guess my point is that exposure to the online environment is likely to cause natural improvement. But I'm still glad that I had the formal foundation.
What are they going to do to a non-existent business? Sue them?
Worse than that. Violation of an injunction is contempt of court, and willful violation could be deemed criminal contempt of court. Remember, corporations act through people, and people can be arrested, indicted, convicted, and punished. Bankruptcy and corporate status will not shield you from criminal liability.
Any chance they're going to release the code to their products?
The reason they went out of business is that a court issued an injunction against them. The court enjoined them from making their DVD ripper available, because the product is deemed to violate the DMCA. I think it is likely that distribution of the source code would constitute a violation of that injunction.
To date, the defining characteristic of manned space exploration has been this: it's so expensive that only major governments can do it. Accordingly, it has always been either inherently "political" in nature (national pride) or inherently "military" in nature (national defense). Since manned space exploration has always been funded with public money allocated by politicians, it has always been surrounded by ideological rhetoric and justifications, and these are not always fully rational.
But now we see SpaceShipOne and the advent of private initiatives in manned space flight. These initiatives are driven, in part, by private investment, and investors seek a return. So perhaps Van Allen's premise will now be tested. If there is a value to manned spaceflight beyond an ideology of adventure, private enterprise will presumably find it.
Or how about a more cynical view: what if this is driven by marketing, not quality? Consider automobiles. Which cars have the longest warranties? Cars like the Kia (ten years). Now which cars have the shortest warranties? Cars like the BMW (three years). Which is better engineered, better made? Which will last longer? Is a correlation between warranty length and quality? Is there a negative correlation? In light of the automotive evidence, I am not persuaded that length of warranty is any indication of product quality. It's only an indication that marketing believes the warranty will sell more units.
I hope the inventors complied with their duty to submit a copy of "Roger Rabbit" to the patent office. Benny the Cab anticipates every technology described in the article.
I have a friend who did this. She is a prominent laywer in one of the largest law firms in a major east coast city that is one the medical meccas of the world. By which I mean: she could afford the best that money could buy. Nevertheless, she had complications. For months afterwards, her eyes were too dry and she constantly had to put in eye drops to stay comfortable (and by constantly I mean that the dropper was always in her hand and she was applying drops in the midst of conversations and meetings and such). The doctors ended up plugging her eye ducts so the tears would not drain out so quickly, in an attempt to help keep her eyes moist enough. She still feels discomfort. Remember, these are your eyes we are talking about.
Perhaps you are right. I was reading the "commercial purposes" requirement as modifying the whole shebang, but if "use" is specified separately and independently, then use alone would be a violation per your statement.
Of course, the best source to determine what the court really ordered would be to see the court's order. At this point, we are still relying only the the Register's blurb. But your semantic analysis is better than mine.
The Slashdot blurb for this article is wrong and makes an incorrect analogy. The blurb says, "It's like saying you can't modify your car or your house or your clothes!"
But if you read the article, the description of the decision is substantially different: "The UK High Court has judged that the sale, advertisement, possession for commercial purposes and use of PlayStation 2 modification chips is illegal in this country."
The distinction is huge. It means that you are allowed to "modify your car" (to use the proposed analogy). You just aren't allowed to commercialize your modifications. You can tinker all you want, but you can't sell the results of your tinkering.
It's still a significant limitation, but we should at least be arguing about the actual limitation, not the incorrect one.
Maybe the FSF or someone in that league should try to trademark Open* names and reserve them for Open programs?
Under USPTO regulations, I do not believe that you are allowed to "reserve" trademark names. I believe that you can only trademark names that you are actually using in active commerce or that you are actively preparing to launch in commerce. This is probably a good thing, because otherwise it would be like the situation with domain names -- people registering hundreds or thousands of names that they have no intention of ever using on the hope that they will pre-empt somone else's usage, and then extort a payoff.
Pre-announcing a major ($3) dividend to be paid many months from now seems kind of funky. This will be immediately priced into the share value, of course -- every share is immediately worth that much more since everyone knows the distribution is coming. It's analogous to the "ex dividend" period of that occurs when a distribution is pending, except that the amount is huge and it's much longer in the future (almost half a year!). On top of that, a major buyback plan means that there will be sustained buying pressure on the stock.
So call me cynical, but this is the first thought that came into my head: These events will cause all of the executives to hit the strike price on their stock options.
Silverberg says, "In the past Microsoft was the low cost solution and Microsoft was then competing and attacking expensive proprietary systems from below."
In the realm of personal computers, I do not think this observation is accurate at all. Microsoft's approach was not to compete on price in the normal sense of the word. Rather, Microsoft's approach was to bundle applications with the operating system. Since these applications and utilities were thus already "paid for" (or included for "free" in people's minds), people had less incentive to buy competing applications, even though the competing applications were often better.
I think the distinction is important. If a particular application becomes popoular, Microsoft just rolls a copy of it into the OS, thereby gutting the market for that application. How many people buy Eudora anymore? Or Netscape? Or Trumpet Winsock? This is not the same thing as competing on price.
In my book gets 4.5 stars. But the java/javascript errors that come up constantly are a bitch and a half.
I give it 4.5 stars as well. I've been using Opera since version 3. My favorite features are the very simple things that let you browse painlessly even on poorly designed sites. For example, there is a button on the toolbar that lets you toggle images on and off without the need for changing your preferences. There is another button that lets you instantly override the color and font setting of a page with your own defaults. You can also turn off all plugins with a single checkbox. I tend to browse primarily for information, and nothing annoys me so much as poorly chosen backgrounds, graphics, and fonts that get in the way of reading the text. Opera lets me get straight to the content. It's a good browser, even though it is a bit flaky on javascript.
I would include a compiler or interpreter so the kids can learn how to do some programming. That way, they are actually learning to use the computer "as a computer" and not just for running apps. For example, the qbasic interpreter is a lot of fun to play with and you can write some neat little programs with it.
Testing at low bitrates emphasizes certain weaknesses of a codec. At high bitrates, it takes a more sensitive and trained ear to detect the artifacts and flaws. But as you reduce the bitrate, the differences become apparent. If you've never tried experimenting with it you might find it interesting, because the various codecs produce very different sounds with the same source file when the bitrate is drastically reduced. But I wonder if this is a proper way to evaluate the best design overall, since some of these codecs are certainly not optimized for low bitrates, and I do not know if there is necessarily a correlation between the flaws of a codec at low bitrates and those at higher bitrates.
Indeed, there is no necessary correlation between a company's stock price and its profitability or even its value to society. SCO is a fine example. The factors that drive stock prices can be completely independent of the factors that drive profitability. If incentives were based on profit sharing, or sales, or other tangible positive values, instead of stock options, the incentive would be to make the company profitable rather that to drive up its stock price. Accordingly, stock options may well create an incentive to breach fiduciary duties rather than to support them.
And Agrajag is a fine name. But nothing can hold a candle to "Slartibartfast."
I'd rather see it broken apart, melted and recycled in more useful form than have a never-used moon rocket sitting in a museum.
Going to the moon may have been the greatest single physical achievement of the human race. There are only three remaining examples of the engine that took us there. This is one of them. I say, let's keep it.
Emphasizing humans as carriers for this data is quite rediculous.
Yes, I agree with this completely if you are referring only to electronic transactions. But in the portion of the Negroponte interview that inspired this particular thread, that is exactly what Negroponte suggested. He opines that in the future, the P2P model would apply not only to electronic transactions, but also to basic physical transactions. He specifically mentions bartering and food distribution. Such transactions are not subject to the kind of structures that you identify in the electronic realm. Hence my belief that Negroponte is trying to extend the P2P model farther than it can really go.
That's the most ridiculous dismissal I've seen in a while.
Actually, I meant it in a different way than you have interpreted. Let me try to say it better.
Centralized governments do not encourage econcomic processes that are not subject to audit and taxation. That is why smuggling is illegal. That is why barter transactions must be reported on your income tax (if you are a US taxpayer). The point I meant to make was that Negroponte's theory does not take this into account. Therefore, I believe it is unlikely that his vision of a decentralized, unregulated, economically-significant distribution system could now come into existence.