From what's outlined on SCOTUSblog, it kind of sounds like they're concerned about software object code. I imagine there's no chance the court would decide that software patents are invalid, but maybe in the worst case it would still be possible for OSS programmers to work on patent-impacted projects by modifying/committing only non-impacted sections of the software and by avoiding any U.S.-hosted mirrors of projects or binaries?
Metal, after oil, is our least renewable resource. Given that computers use more metal than any other consumer product it makes economic sense (or is that cents!) to reclaim it.
Another useful component is the rare-earth magnets that are in hard drives. Those are pricey and certainly outlast the drives they come in.
There were some pretty interesting things that could be done with the programming language that DVDs use, but to my knowledge it wasn't to the point of being able to write meaningful games. I wonder if the "interactivity" means including things like a pseudorandom number generator so one could throw in, for example, a video poker game as an easter egg (or is there a way to do this on regular DVDs that didn't occur to me?)
Granted, I've always enjoyed easter eggs, but I have to figure audio commentary takes up a huge chunk of HDD space -- space that's already all-too-scarce when games now take multigigs to install. It's not bloat if you want it, but if you don't want it can you get rid of it?
For the cost of all these stickers (physical materials, labor, employee time spent in proper implementation meetings, enforcement), will consumers be one jot safer?
Well intentioned as this might be, it's probably worse than doing nothing at all. If you don't know what wi-fi does you shouldn't be buying it, and a five page manual (even with a cautionary sticker) is hardly going to cover the fundamentals of wireless encryption and firewalling a user needs to approach the security of a wired connection.
The legislators get the credit and the votes for "taking a principled stand". The state's taxpayers get the bill for lawyers' fees. Come November it'd be nice to see some incumbents voted out over this issue, but it's a pretty safe position (like "tough on crime") because people who aren't directly affected won't fire up the necessary neurons to examine the consequences of success -- it's not something they're into, cleaning it up can only be a good thing, vote "yes".
There used to be this concept that what you can do and what you ought to do were two distinct categories. There's no law that says we must chew with our mouths closed, hold the door open for the person behind you or ever utter the phrase "Thank you", but we'd all think a little less of people who do none of these.
The law has very little to do with what is or isn't ethical. The first aims to provide an objective means of evaluating compatibility with a stable social environment, the second is a highly-subjective means of evaluating compatibility with an individual's ideal of a stable social environment. It is the collection of our ethical concerns -- moderated, averaged, and hopefully transformed into a sane and consistent if not perfectly reflective model -- which should shape the law... not the other way around.
Is it better to participate in actively censoring a population or leave them without your services? You know, I had this all chalked up to doing whatever it takes to get in on the ground floor of a developing and potentially lucrative market. But the way you say it... our IT companies are downright charitable.
Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor
Which vendors are doing more to improve their security?
Given what they had to start with, I think it's very difficult to claim anybody's done what they've accomplished between 95 and XP SP2. You tell me one other vendor that's gone so far as using tools like authentication and WGA to combat the worst offenders of security -- the users themselves? Linux users, Mac users, even the *BSD user is free to boot their operating systems without the slightest arbitrary challenge to their right to do so and from there go on to face any number of potential security issues; but with Windows, you need only upgrade your CD drive emulator a handful of times or use Windows Update as directed to find yourself relieved of the concerns users of lesser operating systems face.
They had the most potential with regards to security and they've finally met it, and I say kudos.
We are very isolated. We spend more and more time on our jobs. We drive to and from work alone. We arrive home and pop on the TV first thing, often with barely a nod to our spouses and children. We often rush through meals without visiting each other.
We lose more and more of human contact. We contact more and more with machines. The TV. The Net. The bank machine. The headphones we wear even when we are out in public. The cell phones. He said something about the cell phones that just about punched me in the stomach. I't not human contact on the phone. It's a substitute of being there in person. He's listened to cell phone conversations and he immediately knew there is a big difference in the interaction between people on those than in person. It's one thing to be with your loved ones in person than to jabber on the phone while you are driving.
As we get more lonely and isolated, we lose confidence in ourselves. We also lose conscience of what we want of community. The community is just not there.
It's odd; I've had a similar conversation within the last week. I went to the mall for the first time in maybe seven years and noticed what a different experience it was just walking around the place -- people just wandering in front of me when everybody used to be kind of aware of what's around them, maybe one in six talking on a cellphone instead of the people walking with them. Dazed.
I like technology far too much to ever consider becoming a luddite, but I think we've been introducing it into our lives more quickly than we can determine how it can best serve us. I've never had or witnessed good conversation where a cellphone was involved -- just yelling, repeating, and half-attentive yammering -- but I've had more than a few good conversations broken up by them. I'm happier for not worrying about checking my e-mail every hour and not fumbling to answer a cellphone.
Why should people on the other end of a gadget constantly take priority over the people good enough to spend their time in our company?
"The core security system has not been broken. However, on some Xbox 360 consoles the authentication protocol between the optical disc drive and the console may be attacked."
Cheers for the core security system! Jeers for the authentication protocol!
It's easy to confuse the success of open source with the degree of its acceptance and promotion within the business world. The ideal has always been to find some means of getting paid for developing software you can share for free.
But the strength of open source has always been in its community of people with common goals who develop and exchange software freely. Perhaps this will include the WWW; perhaps not. It's worth noting that most of the problems open source faces have come with its commercial acceptance -- legal threats, negative PR, unreasonable support demands -- and it's probable that if open source is not at the forefront of the next IT fad it'll simply grow in a different direction.
If anything, his background enhances his SF writing. I disagree that he's insane (although I reject his opinions in that essay) but I've noticed that much of my favorite science fiction has been written by people with radically different opinions or, um, mental deviations from contemporary social norms.
Part of what makes this country great is the (unfortunately declining) encouragement to tolerate people that are wrong. The alternative is worse.
It drops you into a not-entirely-alien universe, first amazing you with how different things are then amazing you with how little has really changed. Then it ends at the end of one or two books or two seasons, wrapping everything up.
The worst stuff just drags on and on, rehashing the same tired prejudices and routines with regularity until it's mercifully cancelled. You're not normally supposed to hate the protagonists and root for the end of humanity by raging alien hordes, but each Star Trek has gotten better at inspiring this kind of "hope".
A lot of the pioneers of this technology were people who felt they were expanding their horizons -- electronics were one facet, psychedelics another.
This was previous to the discovery that the first would drive business around the world and the second would destroy as much as it seemed to help. It was really just a bunch of people that thought they were expanding their minds, whether through silicon or drugs.
The hippies (counterculture) were busy protesting. It was the people who were into maths, technology, and study that were into computer development.
Computing while high is a relatively recent development that only became possible with the invention of the computer mouse. You can't innovate without concentration.
I'm not a big fan of the RIAA's behavior or our current copyright laws (the length of copyright should have gotten shorter since Jefferson owing to cheaper production and wider/faster distribution), but I would have a hard time dictating artists must perform their work live to get paid.
Not all music translates well to concerts. Not all artists want to or have the health/lifestyle that permits them to tour or play live continuously. Some depend on album money and honestly wouldn't produce any music without it. I believe the current market can sustain casual downloading if it is followed up with enough music purchases, but you can't enforce that and if people were told tomorrow that such an honor system was in effect the industry may very well be bankrupt by the end of the year.
Watch the lifecycle of a BitTorrent stream if you don't believe me. Features like ratio-enforcement and banning appear because if you rely on the goodwill of the masses you'll get screwed over. That doesn't even take money into account -- just bandwidth.
Like many others, I feel that the Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) universe has a great deal of unrealized promise. Instead of fixing what's wrong, they just made it wronger.
One of the underlying precepts of the Star Wars universe is balance. I am penalized for seeking the same by creating a character that is a dancer/janitor with two slots for Jedi proficiencies. Not only can't I block or heal attacks against mental, but I am unable to pilot a ship -- despite the fact that Luke (a guy that tinkers with robots and farms sand) rises through the ranks to pilot his own X-Wing against the Death Star and defeat both Darth Vader and the Emperor!
The simple fact is that Jedis can do virtually anything in the movies, something completely lost on the game designers. I don't know for certain that Jedis can fly, but a little creative license would only help the gameplay there. Actually now that I think about it, every player should start as a Jedi.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to the fans.
People don't generally care about the patent system because they don't realize how much it limits choice and increases prices.
They generally think outsourcing is good because they can buy things for half the cost, and drive to Canada to pick up prescription medication because it's more than they can afford here. If they were fully informed about how much the current patent system was costing them fewer would be on the fence about it.
The problem here is that the underlying assumptions about the lawsuit being both over and baseless are unfounded. The claim that a failure to find copied code today proves that previous processes were uncontaminated is fallacious. And the presumptive consequence about due diligence having been widely rendered is unsupported wishful thinking.
The crux of the matter is this: IBM does not have to prove previous processes were uncontaminated to win the case -- rather, the burden is on SCO to prove that they were, and they don't appear to have come up with anything substantial. Perhaps this is a wake-up call to open source developers to vet submitted code carefully, but I don't believe the wishful thinking is coming from the Linux camp.
It's good that a quality piece of open source software is getting the recognition it deserves, improving the experience of millions of users and increasing the likelihood of HTML-compatible webpages being developed and published.
It's bad that a quality piece of open source software is getting the recognition it deserves, because it will fall even faster than IE to surreptitious purveyors of spyware and virii taking advantage of the source to discover new ways to subvert our web browsers without our knowledge.
I thought the point was to be able to "read" the card without having to dig it out. But if you have to dig it out to read a key, the technology doesn't buy you anything.
It would help if they explained what the advantages of using RFID in cards would be -- i.e., what do they expect to do with it. I think it'd be helpful to make sure you pass through various checkpoints instead of loitering or sneaking around them, but is it possible if you have to authenticate access to the card?
While I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn Common Lisp for practical purposes, I have a hard time imagining the practical purposes to which Common Lisp could be put that are not met or exceeded by other computer languages.
It is new enough to contain features such as strong typing and lexically-scoped parameters that programmers today rely upon to implement OOP and RAII techniques, but programs are made unnecessarily complex by the lack of exceptions and garbage collection -- available in the most current crop of languages (C#, Java).
You can use BASIC for web programming too, but I wouldn't recommend it. It only really makes sense to learn Lisp for a CS course or AI programming, it being the lingua franca of these niches.
If you live in the area, that kind of cash simply won't cut it unless he sets up a shanty town on a waste dump and feeds you slop twice a day. Then you can get by as long as you don't mind living three to a room.
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From what's outlined on SCOTUSblog, it kind of sounds like they're concerned about software object code. I imagine there's no chance the court would decide that software patents are invalid, but maybe in the worst case it would still be possible for OSS programmers to work on patent-impacted projects by modifying/committing only non-impacted sections of the software and by avoiding any U.S.-hosted mirrors of projects or binaries?
Metal, after oil, is our least renewable resource. Given that computers use more metal than any other consumer product it makes economic sense (or is that cents!) to reclaim it.
Another useful component is the rare-earth magnets that are in hard drives. Those are pricey and certainly outlast the drives they come in.
There were some pretty interesting things that could be done with the programming language that DVDs use, but to my knowledge it wasn't to the point of being able to write meaningful games. I wonder if the "interactivity" means including things like a pseudorandom number generator so one could throw in, for example, a video poker game as an easter egg (or is there a way to do this on regular DVDs that didn't occur to me?)
If you buy a movie stored on one of these discs, do you have rights to six copies of that movie (the three on the disc + three archival copies?)
Granted, I've always enjoyed easter eggs, but I have to figure audio commentary takes up a huge chunk of HDD space -- space that's already all-too-scarce when games now take multigigs to install. It's not bloat if you want it, but if you don't want it can you get rid of it?
For the cost of all these stickers (physical materials, labor, employee time spent in proper implementation meetings, enforcement), will consumers be one jot safer?
Well intentioned as this might be, it's probably worse than doing nothing at all. If you don't know what wi-fi does you shouldn't be buying it, and a five page manual (even with a cautionary sticker) is hardly going to cover the fundamentals of wireless encryption and firewalling a user needs to approach the security of a wired connection.
Will it?
The legislators get the credit and the votes for "taking a principled stand". The state's taxpayers get the bill for lawyers' fees. Come November it'd be nice to see some incumbents voted out over this issue, but it's a pretty safe position (like "tough on crime") because people who aren't directly affected won't fire up the necessary neurons to examine the consequences of success -- it's not something they're into, cleaning it up can only be a good thing, vote "yes".
There used to be this concept that what you can do and what you ought to do were two distinct categories. There's no law that says we must chew with our mouths closed, hold the door open for the person behind you or ever utter the phrase "Thank you", but we'd all think a little less of people who do none of these.
The law has very little to do with what is or isn't ethical. The first aims to provide an objective means of evaluating compatibility with a stable social environment, the second is a highly-subjective means of evaluating compatibility with an individual's ideal of a stable social environment. It is the collection of our ethical concerns -- moderated, averaged, and hopefully transformed into a sane and consistent if not perfectly reflective model -- which should shape the law... not the other way around.
Is it better to participate in actively censoring a population or leave them without your services? You know, I had this all chalked up to doing whatever it takes to get in on the ground floor of a developing and potentially lucrative market. But the way you say it... our IT companies are downright charitable.
Port 25 has on occasion put out FUD such as claiming Microsoft is doing more to improve security than any other vendor
Which vendors are doing more to improve their security?
Given what they had to start with, I think it's very difficult to claim anybody's done what they've accomplished between 95 and XP SP2. You tell me one other vendor that's gone so far as using tools like authentication and WGA to combat the worst offenders of security -- the users themselves? Linux users, Mac users, even the *BSD user is free to boot their operating systems without the slightest arbitrary challenge to their right to do so and from there go on to face any number of potential security issues; but with Windows, you need only upgrade your CD drive emulator a handful of times or use Windows Update as directed to find yourself relieved of the concerns users of lesser operating systems face.
They had the most potential with regards to security and they've finally met it, and I say kudos.
It's odd; I've had a similar conversation within the last week. I went to the mall for the first time in maybe seven years and noticed what a different experience it was just walking around the place -- people just wandering in front of me when everybody used to be kind of aware of what's around them, maybe one in six talking on a cellphone instead of the people walking with them. Dazed.
I like technology far too much to ever consider becoming a luddite, but I think we've been introducing it into our lives more quickly than we can determine how it can best serve us. I've never had or witnessed good conversation where a cellphone was involved -- just yelling, repeating, and half-attentive yammering -- but I've had more than a few good conversations broken up by them. I'm happier for not worrying about checking my e-mail every hour and not fumbling to answer a cellphone.
Why should people on the other end of a gadget constantly take priority over the people good enough to spend their time in our company?
"The core security system has not been broken. However, on some Xbox 360 consoles the authentication protocol between the optical disc drive and the console may be attacked."
Cheers for the core security system! Jeers for the authentication protocol!
It's easy to confuse the success of open source with the degree of its acceptance and promotion within the business world. The ideal has always been to find some means of getting paid for developing software you can share for free.
But the strength of open source has always been in its community of people with common goals who develop and exchange software freely. Perhaps this will include the WWW; perhaps not. It's worth noting that most of the problems open source faces have come with its commercial acceptance -- legal threats, negative PR, unreasonable support demands -- and it's probable that if open source is not at the forefront of the next IT fad it'll simply grow in a different direction.
Part of what makes this country great is the (unfortunately declining) encouragement to tolerate people that are wrong. The alternative is worse.
The worst stuff just drags on and on, rehashing the same tired prejudices and routines with regularity until it's mercifully cancelled. You're not normally supposed to hate the protagonists and root for the end of humanity by raging alien hordes, but each Star Trek has gotten better at inspiring this kind of "hope".
This was previous to the discovery that the first would drive business around the world and the second would destroy as much as it seemed to help. It was really just a bunch of people that thought they were expanding their minds, whether through silicon or drugs.
Computing while high is a relatively recent development that only became possible with the invention of the computer mouse. You can't innovate without concentration.
Not all music translates well to concerts. Not all artists want to or have the health/lifestyle that permits them to tour or play live continuously. Some depend on album money and honestly wouldn't produce any music without it. I believe the current market can sustain casual downloading if it is followed up with enough music purchases, but you can't enforce that and if people were told tomorrow that such an honor system was in effect the industry may very well be bankrupt by the end of the year.
Watch the lifecycle of a BitTorrent stream if you don't believe me. Features like ratio-enforcement and banning appear because if you rely on the goodwill of the masses you'll get screwed over. That doesn't even take money into account -- just bandwidth.
One of the underlying precepts of the Star Wars universe is balance. I am penalized for seeking the same by creating a character that is a dancer/janitor with two slots for Jedi proficiencies. Not only can't I block or heal attacks against mental, but I am unable to pilot a ship -- despite the fact that Luke (a guy that tinkers with robots and farms sand) rises through the ranks to pilot his own X-Wing against the Death Star and defeat both Darth Vader and the Emperor!
The simple fact is that Jedis can do virtually anything in the movies, something completely lost on the game designers. I don't know for certain that Jedis can fly, but a little creative license would only help the gameplay there. Actually now that I think about it, every player should start as a Jedi.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to the fans.
That, and it's orbiting a brown dwarf.
They generally think outsourcing is good because they can buy things for half the cost, and drive to Canada to pick up prescription medication because it's more than they can afford here. If they were fully informed about how much the current patent system was costing them fewer would be on the fence about it.
The crux of the matter is this: IBM does not have to prove previous processes were uncontaminated to win the case -- rather, the burden is on SCO to prove that they were, and they don't appear to have come up with anything substantial. Perhaps this is a wake-up call to open source developers to vet submitted code carefully, but I don't believe the wishful thinking is coming from the Linux camp.
It's bad that a quality piece of open source software is getting the recognition it deserves, because it will fall even faster than IE to surreptitious purveyors of spyware and virii taking advantage of the source to discover new ways to subvert our web browsers without our knowledge.
It would help if they explained what the advantages of using RFID in cards would be -- i.e., what do they expect to do with it. I think it'd be helpful to make sure you pass through various checkpoints instead of loitering or sneaking around them, but is it possible if you have to authenticate access to the card?
It is new enough to contain features such as strong typing and lexically-scoped parameters that programmers today rely upon to implement OOP and RAII techniques, but programs are made unnecessarily complex by the lack of exceptions and garbage collection -- available in the most current crop of languages (C#, Java).
You can use BASIC for web programming too, but I wouldn't recommend it. It only really makes sense to learn Lisp for a CS course or AI programming, it being the lingua franca of these niches.
If you live in the area, that kind of cash simply won't cut it unless he sets up a shanty town on a waste dump and feeds you slop twice a day. Then you can get by as long as you don't mind living three to a room.