It seems to me to be more along the lines of, there's no real legal need for AT&T to do this, as they're already immune to prosecution by copyright holders [snip]. Thus, the only reason they would have to implement something like this involves the crisp, green lining in their pockets getting a bit thicker.
Or it could be the RIAA/MPAA suggesting to AT&T that cracking down on piracy would be a good way to avoid dealing with hordes of high-priced entertainment industry lawyers for many years....
Other than the iPod, which of the descriptions you give are you claiming is inaccurate, exactly?
Not inaccurate so much as short-sighted, because the criticisms are minor compared with their virtues. All of them (except OS X) have been hugely influential, often redefining the "niches" they were in. I expect the iPhone to do the same, and so it's no surprise people are excited.
This minor fact seems to be getting lost in the Slashdot hysteria. Yes, it's a neat phone, certainly. But it's...just...a...phone.
Of course, all that has been said of Apple products many, many times before:
1977: The Apple II: one of many personal computers.
1984: Macintosh - just another GUI, hard to upgrade.
1998: iMac - just another all-in-one PC, hard to upgrade.
1999-2001: OS X - just another Unix (or proprietary OS, depending on your POV)
2001: iPod - just another MP3 player.
Honestly, is it really a surprise when people are excited that Apple is coming out with a phone?
A pentagon is a very traditional shape for fortifications. [snip] It would be an amazing coincidence if The Pentagon was pentagonal for any reason but this.
As the article says, it was originally designed as an irregular pentagon to fit a particular piece of land that was also an irregular pentagon.
When I was a kid, I always thought the shape of the Pentagon was a patriotic reflection of the shape of the five-pointed star on the American flag, Army Air Corps insignia, general's stars, etc.: connect the five points and you have a perfect pentagon. (Also, trim off the five arms and you're left with another.) The article mentions nothing about this, but it's hard to believe they didn't notice this.
The beauty behind this idea is that no special infrastructure would be needed. Starch could be distributed by your local grocery store.
Yeah, someone isnt thinking energy alternatives through again. 1,000 people a day probably visit my grocery store. How are they going to pull 13 gallons of starch each? Where will by store put 13,000 gallons a day. In the cereal aisle?
I think you're a bit unfair here. What I think he means to say is "The starch could be distributed by your local grocery store," or "It could be starch distributed by your local grocery store." The point is not that all vehicle fuel will henceforth be bought at grocery stores, but that the substance is already widely available, and wouldn't need a new, special infrastructure the way mass distribution of hydrogen would.
I'm thinking the real purpose of this list is to say "here's stuff I think is really important but most people don't. Since I don't think it was featured enough, I'll going to just claim it was censored by news networks."
Bingo. While there are some important stories here, lack of coverage isn't the same as censorship, and the ideological bias of Project Censored is obvious. I'm sure some right-wing group could compile an equivalent list of stories they feel were "censored" by inadequate coverage.
I've come to realize that management (with a bug in their collective bonnets about some new-fangled technology), do a better job of screwing up design and usability than the technology itself.
Oh, so true. But in my experience, it's not usually new-fangled technology that's the problem. It's old-fashioned stuff: All 20 managers want their pet project/event prominently featured on the home page. Or every page must be cluttered with numerous "call to action" ads for free trials, newsletters, conferences, etc. Or my personal favorite: one particular main menu item must open in a new window! I nearly got fired trying to resist that one....
they don't want to be in the music business, at least no more than they have to be.
Not to be a conspiracy theorist or anything, but I wonder about this. That is Jobs' pitch to the record companies: "We're not your competition, we just want to sell iPods." But is it really true? Jobs thinks long-term. Maybe he's just lying low, trying not to spook his prey until it's too late. With iTunes becoming huge, what young musician wouldn't be tempted to sign up with iTunes as a label? Particularly if, instead of the artists getting a small slice of the record companies' cut of an iTunes sale, they got most or all of it? Wouldn't that increase the artists' income from digital sales by something like 400%?
The major labels would excrete bricks if this happened, but if iTunes gets much larger, it may be inevitable. At that point Jobs will have the major record companies over a barrel, and could make them obsolete while getting cheers from everyone else by vastly increasing what musicians make for digital sales and giving the fans what they want.
Imagine the PR coup that would be. I see it as a "One more thing..." item at a future MacWorld Expo keynote.
You've made a good case against business interests on this issue, but let's not ignore the role of various "public interest" advocates. One specific example: back in the early-mid '90s (IIRC), some rich guy had a heart attack, and after he recovered decided to devote some effort to getting companies to remove coconut oil, one of the good natural oils on your list, from all products. This ticked me off when they reformulated a favorite guilty pleasure of mine: Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies. Since then, they've never tasted the same. And now you're telling me they're even less healthy for me than they were?? The bastards!
As a web developer, my biggest concern (aside from the difficulties creating multi-column CSS layouts) involves differences in the way browsers render pages. It's incredibly frustrating to write perfectly valid HTML/XHTML and CSS and have the pages show up very differently depending on the browser. The biggest offender, of course, is Internet Explorer, and now that version 7 is out but many haven't switched to it, I have to test in both 6 and 7. And since I couldn't figure out a way to install both on one PC, my workstation now has a Mac and two PCs for IE6 and IE7 browser testing. I consider this Microsoft's contribution to global warming....
I estimate that at least 10% of my time is spent avoiding and tracking down browser display differences that really shouldn't exist in the first place. I get paid by the hour so maybe I shouldn't complain, but the inefficiency of the whole thing still bugs me.
Tim Berners-Lee, bless him, didn't seem to understand that anyone would ever want a web page with more than one column. So some genius (a name I've forgotten) thought of using tables for layout, and many problems were solved: multi-column layouts with headers and footers which stretched to accomodate content and rendered the same way (more or less) across all browsers and platforms. Hooray!
Then came CSS: coding could be much cleaner and more flexible, but tables-for-layout was considered bad, and we began wrestling with creating layouts using divs and clears and floats, having to use such kludges as negative margins in order to replicate table-like behavior. It can be done, but it's harder. So for HTML5, how about setting aside creating new but not-very-helpful features like "overline" (who uses that?) and coming up with things that actually help us create web pages? Why not create a tag called "grid" that acts like a table, but is designed for page layout? Most graphic designers use grids, and it would really help web design as a whole if something like that existed for us.
How about a way of having content reflow from one column to another when a window is resized? Page layout programs have done this for 20+ years, so shouldn't it be possible for a web page and a browser today?
So please, HTML5 people, don't just talk to computer scientists and advocates for the disabled when creating this new specification. Think of the people who actually have to lay out pages!
This sounds like the idea of terraforming Mars just got a lot closer to doable. Wouldn't evaporating or boiling some of the water via nuclear reactors or orbiting mirrors increase the humidity and heat retention of the atmosphere, and eventually create a climate in which many earth organisms could thrive?
the software keyboard, multi-touch or not, is not good enough - it doesn't provide tactile feedback fast typing.
I wonder if this would work: All cell phones have a vibrate mode, correct? So what if keypresses caused a short vibration? I realize it wouldn't be as good as a mechanical keyboard, but it might give enough tactile feedback to make it worthwhile.
One of the examples in his book is a Playboy centerfold of a beautiful blonde reclining on some silky sheets. The brilliant Mr. Key discovered that if you hold the page up to the light so that the printing on the back shows through, and look carefully at the folds of the sheets in a lower corner of the photo, you can kinda-sorta see the letters "s e x".
I read that and thought: How naive of the rest of us to think the sexiness was due to something as obvious as a large, clear photo of a beautiful naked woman, when the real secret was three fuzzy letters in the corner that can't even be seen under normal magazine reading conditions! In other words, the guy's a loon.
Doesn't mean anything when you consider the market share of Apple vs. all of the Microsoft-licensed stores combined. Clearly people will be cracking the more-popular DRM, and that happens to be Apple's FairPlay.
Indeed, and let's also note that a sample size of 2 is rather small to support the conclusion that licensing a DRM system doesn't make it less secure. From a purely statistical standpoint, isn't it obvious that the more people who know about a secret, the less likely it is to stay a secret? You can't license a DRM system without telling more people exactly how it works.
And to get conspiratorial for a moment, what if a competitor of Apple's decided to sabotage iTunes by releasing its secrets? That would be easier if there were licensees to target for espionage. Or what if the major labels set up an iTunes competitor, licensed FairPlay, then "accidentally" leaked the secret? They could then pull their music from iTunes, leaving themselves as the only legal source for the music.
I don't think those scenarios are likely, but I tend to believe Jobs when he says he doesn't want to take the extra risk.
Choreography and pantomimes are also copyrightable dramatic works. Choreography is
the composition and arrangement of dance movements and patterns usually intended to be
accompanied by music. As distinct from choreography, pantomime is the art of imitating or
acting out situations, characters, or other events. To be protected by copyright, pantomimes
and choreography need not tell a story or be presented before an audience. Each work,
however, must be fixed in a tangible medium of expression from which the work can be
performed.
But in today's world of politics and jockeying for money, this will never see the light of day. Projects over 4 years are guaranteed to get the boot at some point down the road for either political reasons or just flat out budget issues.
You might be right (though this phenomenon is older than "today's world"). If we really want to make this happen, why not just sponsor something like the X-Prize? Instead of asking Congress to pour $X billions into NASA, offer the same amount as a prize for the first moon colony established by an American company/consortium. (Sorry to be nationalistic, but Congress won't want to give the money to a foreign entity.) NASA administers the contest and helps the finalist(s). Getting Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Burt Rutan in a race for a prize might well produce better results than just funding a government bureaucracy.
A formative childhood book (Man to the Moon: The Wonderful New Book of Project Apollo by Hanniford Rush [1962]) had an illustration of a moon base built by exploding a warhead under the surface, building an airlock over the entrance hole, inflating a large liner in the cavity, and building a base inside that. I'm not sure how serious a proposal this ever was, though, because the picture is credited to George Solonevich and not to NASA or GE or Martin.
Another of Jobs' projects, the original NeXTcube, also came without a floppy drive. Instead it had a cutting-edge but oddball 256MB magneto-optical drive. Too bad disks cost about $100 and pretty much nobody else used them.
I remember that at the time Jobs disparaged floppy drives as "1970s technology," and I thought: Yeah, and keyboards are 19th century technology, but I wouldn't want a computer without one. Eventually he caved and by 1990 the NeXTstation had a 2.88MB floppy drive.
The market share percentage is certainly misleading when you look at the raw numbers: the Zune was introduced in November, and by June (7 months later) they say they will have sold 1 million. On the other hand, Apple sold 21 million iPods in the last quarter alone, and over 8 million in each of the previous 3 quarters.
In other words, by June Apple should be selling about as many iPods every 10 days as there were Zunes sold in 7 months. Put it that way, and it's hard for Microsoft to brag about.
They were warned. They still went ahead. That's worse than manslaughter
IANAL, but I think it really is precisely involuntary manslaughter, according to this and other definitions:
Involuntary Manslaughter. Homicides caused by recklessness or gross criminal negligence.
Maybe there are degrees of involuntary manslaughter, but "worse than manslaughter" sounds like you mean murder, which this case is not because there was no intent to kill.
Seriously though, how absurd is it that anyone thinks this is going to make any difference: it's a Communist dictatorship. The government runs food production and distribution, so of course they don't have enough food. All the rabbits in the world won't change that. It's sad and absurd that the average North Korean is still paying the price for a government that ignores that basic fact, proven so thoroughly and with so many graves in the 20th century.
I've read 'em in the last year, for whatever they're worth:
Leopard may have some built-in P2P functionality, allowing Apple to do BitTorrent-like distribution of movies from the iTunes Store. You could earn credit by being a seed.
Leopard might be very multi-core aware, taking advantage of multiple cores regardless of whether a specific application is written to do so. More here.
Hear, hear. Too bad I don't have mod points at the moment.
Of course, age and/or a knowledge of history gives one perspective on all this. There were claims that Clinton was going to cancel the 2000 election, that George Bush 41 was going to enslave us all in the New World Order, that Reagan was going to starve the poor and start a nuclear war, that Carter was going to sell us out to the Soviets and the Red Chinese, that Nixon and Johnson both had concentration camps prepared out West for all the hippies and protestors, etc. etc. FDR, Lincoln, and probably other Presidents were called dictators who destroyed the Constitution. Now, I think many of the criticisms had some validity, but overheated rhetoric claiming everything's a civil liberties crisis is not enlightening or helpful. In fact, I'd argue it often damages the cause of civil liberties, as in the Boy Who Cried Wolf: people tune you out after a while, and then what do you do when there's a real crisis?
Slashdot Mirror
Or it could be the RIAA/MPAA suggesting to AT&T that cracking down on piracy would be a good way to avoid dealing with hordes of high-priced entertainment industry lawyers for many years....
Not inaccurate so much as short-sighted, because the criticisms are minor compared with their virtues. All of them (except OS X) have been hugely influential, often redefining the "niches" they were in. I expect the iPhone to do the same, and so it's no surprise people are excited.
Of course, all that has been said of Apple products many, many times before:
1977: The Apple II: one of many personal computers.
1984: Macintosh - just another GUI, hard to upgrade.
1998: iMac - just another all-in-one PC, hard to upgrade.
1999-2001: OS X - just another Unix (or proprietary OS, depending on your POV)
2001: iPod - just another MP3 player.
Honestly, is it really a surprise when people are excited that Apple is coming out with a phone?
As the article says, it was originally designed as an irregular pentagon to fit a particular piece of land that was also an irregular pentagon.
When I was a kid, I always thought the shape of the Pentagon was a patriotic reflection of the shape of the five-pointed star on the American flag, Army Air Corps insignia, general's stars, etc.: connect the five points and you have a perfect pentagon. (Also, trim off the five arms and you're left with another.) The article mentions nothing about this, but it's hard to believe they didn't notice this.
I think you're a bit unfair here. What I think he means to say is "The starch could be distributed by your local grocery store," or "It could be starch distributed by your local grocery store." The point is not that all vehicle fuel will henceforth be bought at grocery stores, but that the substance is already widely available, and wouldn't need a new, special infrastructure the way mass distribution of hydrogen would.
Bingo. While there are some important stories here, lack of coverage isn't the same as censorship, and the ideological bias of Project Censored is obvious. I'm sure some right-wing group could compile an equivalent list of stories they feel were "censored" by inadequate coverage.
Oh, so true. But in my experience, it's not usually new-fangled technology that's the problem. It's old-fashioned stuff: All 20 managers want their pet project/event prominently featured on the home page. Or every page must be cluttered with numerous "call to action" ads for free trials, newsletters, conferences, etc. Or my personal favorite: one particular main menu item must open in a new window! I nearly got fired trying to resist that one....
Not to be a conspiracy theorist or anything, but I wonder about this. That is Jobs' pitch to the record companies: "We're not your competition, we just want to sell iPods." But is it really true? Jobs thinks long-term. Maybe he's just lying low, trying not to spook his prey until it's too late. With iTunes becoming huge, what young musician wouldn't be tempted to sign up with iTunes as a label? Particularly if, instead of the artists getting a small slice of the record companies' cut of an iTunes sale, they got most or all of it? Wouldn't that increase the artists' income from digital sales by something like 400%?
The major labels would excrete bricks if this happened, but if iTunes gets much larger, it may be inevitable. At that point Jobs will have the major record companies over a barrel, and could make them obsolete while getting cheers from everyone else by vastly increasing what musicians make for digital sales and giving the fans what they want.
Imagine the PR coup that would be. I see it as a "One more thing..." item at a future MacWorld Expo keynote.
You've made a good case against business interests on this issue, but let's not ignore the role of various "public interest" advocates. One specific example: back in the early-mid '90s (IIRC), some rich guy had a heart attack, and after he recovered decided to devote some effort to getting companies to remove coconut oil, one of the good natural oils on your list, from all products. This ticked me off when they reformulated a favorite guilty pleasure of mine: Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies. Since then, they've never tasted the same. And now you're telling me they're even less healthy for me than they were?? The bastards!
As a web developer, my biggest concern (aside from the difficulties creating multi-column CSS layouts) involves differences in the way browsers render pages. It's incredibly frustrating to write perfectly valid HTML/XHTML and CSS and have the pages show up very differently depending on the browser. The biggest offender, of course, is Internet Explorer, and now that version 7 is out but many haven't switched to it, I have to test in both 6 and 7. And since I couldn't figure out a way to install both on one PC, my workstation now has a Mac and two PCs for IE6 and IE7 browser testing. I consider this Microsoft's contribution to global warming....
I estimate that at least 10% of my time is spent avoiding and tracking down browser display differences that really shouldn't exist in the first place. I get paid by the hour so maybe I shouldn't complain, but the inefficiency of the whole thing still bugs me.
Tim Berners-Lee, bless him, didn't seem to understand that anyone would ever want a web page with more than one column. So some genius (a name I've forgotten) thought of using tables for layout, and many problems were solved: multi-column layouts with headers and footers which stretched to accomodate content and rendered the same way (more or less) across all browsers and platforms. Hooray!
Then came CSS: coding could be much cleaner and more flexible, but tables-for-layout was considered bad, and we began wrestling with creating layouts using divs and clears and floats, having to use such kludges as negative margins in order to replicate table-like behavior. It can be done, but it's harder. So for HTML5, how about setting aside creating new but not-very-helpful features like "overline" (who uses that?) and coming up with things that actually help us create web pages? Why not create a tag called "grid" that acts like a table, but is designed for page layout? Most graphic designers use grids, and it would really help web design as a whole if something like that existed for us.
How about a way of having content reflow from one column to another when a window is resized? Page layout programs have done this for 20+ years, so shouldn't it be possible for a web page and a browser today?
So please, HTML5 people, don't just talk to computer scientists and advocates for the disabled when creating this new specification. Think of the people who actually have to lay out pages!
This sounds like the idea of terraforming Mars just got a lot closer to doable. Wouldn't evaporating or boiling some of the water via nuclear reactors or orbiting mirrors increase the humidity and heat retention of the atmosphere, and eventually create a climate in which many earth organisms could thrive?
I wonder if this would work: All cell phones have a vibrate mode, correct? So what if keypresses caused a short vibration? I realize it wouldn't be as good as a mechanical keyboard, but it might give enough tactile feedback to make it worthwhile.
One of the examples in his book is a Playboy centerfold of a beautiful blonde reclining on some silky sheets. The brilliant Mr. Key discovered that if you hold the page up to the light so that the printing on the back shows through, and look carefully at the folds of the sheets in a lower corner of the photo, you can kinda-sorta see the letters "s e x".
I read that and thought: How naive of the rest of us to think the sexiness was due to something as obvious as a large, clear photo of a beautiful naked woman, when the real secret was three fuzzy letters in the corner that can't even be seen under normal magazine reading conditions! In other words, the guy's a loon.
Indeed, and let's also note that a sample size of 2 is rather small to support the conclusion that licensing a DRM system doesn't make it less secure. From a purely statistical standpoint, isn't it obvious that the more people who know about a secret, the less likely it is to stay a secret? You can't license a DRM system without telling more people exactly how it works.
And to get conspiratorial for a moment, what if a competitor of Apple's decided to sabotage iTunes by releasing its secrets? That would be easier if there were licensees to target for espionage. Or what if the major labels set up an iTunes competitor, licensed FairPlay, then "accidentally" leaked the secret? They could then pull their music from iTunes, leaving themselves as the only legal source for the music.
I don't think those scenarios are likely, but I tend to believe Jobs when he says he doesn't want to take the extra risk.
True, but apparently you can copyright choreography:
You might be right (though this phenomenon is older than "today's world"). If we really want to make this happen, why not just sponsor something like the X-Prize? Instead of asking Congress to pour $X billions into NASA, offer the same amount as a prize for the first moon colony established by an American company/consortium. (Sorry to be nationalistic, but Congress won't want to give the money to a foreign entity.) NASA administers the contest and helps the finalist(s). Getting Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Burt Rutan in a race for a prize might well produce better results than just funding a government bureaucracy.
A formative childhood book (Man to the Moon: The Wonderful New Book of Project Apollo by Hanniford Rush [1962]) had an illustration of a moon base built by exploding a warhead under the surface, building an airlock over the entrance hole, inflating a large liner in the cavity, and building a base inside that. I'm not sure how serious a proposal this ever was, though, because the picture is credited to George Solonevich and not to NASA or GE or Martin.
Another of Jobs' projects, the original NeXTcube, also came without a floppy drive. Instead it had a cutting-edge but oddball 256MB magneto-optical drive. Too bad disks cost about $100 and pretty much nobody else used them.
I remember that at the time Jobs disparaged floppy drives as "1970s technology," and I thought: Yeah, and keyboards are 19th century technology, but I wouldn't want a computer without one. Eventually he caved and by 1990 the NeXTstation had a 2.88MB floppy drive.
The market share percentage is certainly misleading when you look at the raw numbers: the Zune was introduced in November, and by June (7 months later) they say they will have sold 1 million. On the other hand, Apple sold 21 million iPods in the last quarter alone, and over 8 million in each of the previous 3 quarters.
In other words, by June Apple should be selling about as many iPods every 10 days as there were Zunes sold in 7 months. Put it that way, and it's hard for Microsoft to brag about.
IANAL, but I think it really is precisely involuntary manslaughter, according to this and other definitions:
Maybe there are degrees of involuntary manslaughter, but "worse than manslaughter" sounds like you mean murder, which this case is not because there was no intent to kill.
In Soviet North Korea, rabbits eat you!
Seriously though, how absurd is it that anyone thinks this is going to make any difference: it's a Communist dictatorship. The government runs food production and distribution, so of course they don't have enough food. All the rabbits in the world won't change that. It's sad and absurd that the average North Korean is still paying the price for a government that ignores that basic fact, proven so thoroughly and with so many graves in the 20th century.
I've read 'em in the last year, for whatever they're worth:
Hear, hear. Too bad I don't have mod points at the moment.
Of course, age and/or a knowledge of history gives one perspective on all this. There were claims that Clinton was going to cancel the 2000 election, that George Bush 41 was going to enslave us all in the New World Order, that Reagan was going to starve the poor and start a nuclear war, that Carter was going to sell us out to the Soviets and the Red Chinese, that Nixon and Johnson both had concentration camps prepared out West for all the hippies and protestors, etc. etc. FDR, Lincoln, and probably other Presidents were called dictators who destroyed the Constitution. Now, I think many of the criticisms had some validity, but overheated rhetoric claiming everything's a civil liberties crisis is not enlightening or helpful. In fact, I'd argue it often damages the cause of civil liberties, as in the Boy Who Cried Wolf: people tune you out after a while, and then what do you do when there's a real crisis?
Sorry, I think your buds in Army Signals pulled a prank on you....