My favorite sites to point out to people whenever this debate arises is a site like this. Yes, if you look at extremely short timelines, like 20,000 years, it appears that OMFG we are experiencing the warmest temperatures EVAR! *gasp**full melodrama* However, when you put things into their proper perspective you see that for the last 25 Million years or so, we have been coming out of an unusually long period of glaciation. In fact, if you change the logrithmic timescale in the last link to linear, it is easy to see that paleoclimatologists best estimates are that, through the history of the earth, it has only spent approximately one quarter of the time as cold as we are now. The temp we are at now seems to be one of the semi-stable resting points for global temperature. The Earth has spent slightly less than that at what seems to be mid-stable point approximatly 4-6 C above the current average, and has spent over 50% of the entire history at a very stable point 8-10 C above our current average. Most of the time spent below that highest level can be directly attributed to extraordinary circumstances such as meteor impacts, or extreme vulcanism.
So, while we are undoubtably warming, it also undoubtably is something that would happen Homo Sapiens or not. The only question is whether we are speeding the process to any noticable degree or not.
This is something just too important to put in a black box. To me it's the very fabric of our nation at stake.
Of course why a paper ballot and pen isn't good enough baffles me...
One of the points of the law in question is to eliminate the "black box" aspect of this. Unfortunately it doesn't go nearly far enough. As the GP indicated what is needed is a smarter government procurement system. If a state government issued a spec for voting equipment demanding paper output and a fully open and verifiable source code. Add-in other must-have definitions like number of races/candidates that it must handle, etc., etc. Add-in local variations like number of additional languages that must be selectable for ballot display, etc., etc. This would still allow for many companies to compete, in an open and free market environment, make a profit, and the government and citizens all get a good system.
Any closed system is susceptible to corruption and manipulation. Rather than call for the unbelievability of letting for-profit companies perform this task, you should be instead be stressing the non-auditability of the systems being proposed. Nothing wrong with a company making a reasonable profit for doing a necessary task. It's allowing them to do it in secret that is the crime.
As for the pen and paper, try volunteering as a voting attendent the next election. Hopefully you will be in a small precinct, with a relatively minor election slate. Then you may still have some of your hair left and only reasonable sized dent marks in your forehead from banging your head against the desk and pulling your hair out. Try it in a populus precinct, and/or during a presidential election and you might not survive the sheer incompetence of the average voter. Add to that the magnitude of accurately counting 100 million or so votes in a time period considered "reasonable" by our instant gratification society, and going to electronic voting makes huge sense and should have been done long ago. As others have pointed out, it isn't a difficult or complicated task. Anyone reading this post could probably pop something completly usable out in a weekend coding session. That's why all of this obfuscation and secrecy really bothers me. If they didn't have something to hide, they wouldn't be trying so hard to hide it.
And the people in charge would be bending over backwards to try to let them.
None of this is for monitoring traffic volume. It is for monitoring speed and density (or flow). The available technology for evaluating speed and density from video cameras is extremely poor. I've been testing this stuff since 1995 and it is totally unreliable. Right now, the best point source of speed and density is radar scanners by a company called wavetronix. The biggest drawback, however, to both these and video monitoring is that both are expensive to deploy, require extensive communications infrastructure to retreive the information in real-time, and are point sources of information. The huge advantage to tracking aggregate cell data is that side-of-the-road sensors, and their concurrant communications needs, are not necessary. Instead all of the information is coming from cell towers, which are already in place and which already have high bandwidth connections available for transferring data. The other big advantage is that you get wide area coverage and data, as opposed to a single point on a single roadway. So far all of the agreements and systems I have reviewed or demo'd for doing this supply only aggregate, not individual data from the cell service provider to the traffic agency. The cell company already knows who you are and where you are for 911 purposes. They are being very careful, with information to be handed to non-law enforcement agencies, to only provide anonymized, or aggregate data, outside of their network. I.e. that may say that vehicle ID XJalkdjfh877634 was detected at location latX, lonX at time Z1, and then later detected at latY, lonY at time Z2, or, more frequently, they will provide information that all devices detected along road segment X in the last 5 minutes traveled the Y distance in Z time.
You completely missed my point. The point being that the government is generally fairly ineffectual and that corruption internal to the government is endemic. This combination almost assures that this tracking ability will be misused by government agents. Just do a little research on how many of the crimes persecuted (spelling in context) under the PATRIOT act actually have anything to do with terrorism for an example. In addition, the forced, and generally secret, tracking of all color laser printed documents is so completly out of proportion to the extremely limited impact that small-time counterfeiters have on the economy versus the major impact to the ability to publish anonymously that the trade off is far too dear to be taken lightly. Be assured that the large scale counterfeiters aren't doing it on Xerox machines.
Having read Trotsky, he was unabashedly in favor of strong central government "taking care" of the people. Yes, he and Stalin were opposed, mainly because Stalin was a typical dictator and only marginally followed the ideals of Communism.
And, no, the evils associated with communism aren't due to Stalin. The evils associated with communism (the economic theory, not the political theory) are that Marx assigns all value to the raw materials of production and little to no value on the process and craftsmanship involved in production. Thus a highly skilled and dedicated craftsman has the same value (in Marxist communism as well as Skinnerian communism/socialism) as an unskilled, unmotivated laborer. This failure to recognize the difference in the relative value to the economy and society of two very different workers, and that their compensation should be different in relation to their individual contributions, is why pure communism can not succeed any more than pure capitalism. When you only recompense workers for their efforts based on their needs, and craftsmen see themselves getting no more than laborers, they will fail to produce at the level they could with proper incentive. Thus, if the central agency's goal is to maximize economic capacity to provide the highest quality of life for all of its citizens, then the agency must provide that incentive, either by adjusting the compensation, which comes perilously (for political Communists) close to capitalism, or you provide incentive via threats and punishment which devolves into Dictatorship.
Ah, but you see... the current opinion of both the fascists (far right) and liberals (far left) is that the general mass of people is too stupid to figure out what is "right" on their own. Without proper guidance and control, they will be mislead by all the false and evil people out there (read the liberals/fascists respectively) and will make wrong decisions and follow bad ideas left to themselves.
Actually, being a traffic engineer, I can comment somewhat authoritatively on that story. All of the systems we have been looking at to do this, deliberately obfuscate any distinct ID information from the phones. The phone company already has all of the information to track a specific phone and connect it to a specific account holder (and I'm sure law enforcement has the ability to subpeona this information). All the systems I've seen for traffic flow tracking make a very clear distinction between phone company information and operations and information passed to anyone outside the phone company. The systems we look at either assign a randomized code to a phone when it connects to the network and provides position information only on the randomized ID to outside agencies, or more frequently, all of the position information is translated to speed and flow information completely internal to the phone network, and only the aggregated results are passed to outside agencies.
My tin-foil hat is screwed on about as tight as anyone's, and since my profession is on one of the leading edges of the "slippery slope" (along with law enforcement and homeland insecurity) I pay very close attention to the systems that are proposed or implemented that have privacy threatening aspects. Some examples:
1) Traffic video surveillance - Cameras to see crash sites, and watch congestion are absolutely essential to keep peak hour traffic moving through a congested City. I can not stress enough how incredibly useful this capability is. My implementation of this has NO regular recording, has far too poor resolution for anything more than color and type of vehicle identification, and highest priority on camera selection and control is always traffic personnel. Yes, the video is distributed to Police, Fire, Dispatch, and the City's contract tow company, but 90% of their use is when we are all dealing with a crash site and everyone is trying to get as much information as possible to clear the wreck and get traffic moving again as quickly as possible. There are very few and specific instances where the video system has been used for Police surveillance, and, at least so far, every single one of them I have had the authority to approve or deny.
2) Photo enforcement of Red Light runners - I have been one of the key people influencing the implementation of these in Texas. We have managed to come up with a system that only takes a picture of the back of the vehicle, and does not identify the driver or passengers in the car. The ticket goes to the owner, and is similar in consequences to a parking ticket. Yes, the deterrent is much less than a full red light running ticket with points against your license, however, it is much better than full frontal picture with personal identification for privacy and general societal reasons. One of the amazing things about getting authorization to do this was that, in the process, stricken from the state law was the requirement that yellow and all-red times follow recognized guidlines. That should have been left in. And make no mistake, red light running is the cause of 50% of all injury crashes in my City and almost all of the fatalities that don't involve alcohol. If you run a red light that has a properly timed Yellow interval, you deserve to have your vehicle destroyed and to be put in the hospital, unfortunately you'll probably end up taking innocents with you.
3) Photo enforcement of Speed Limits - I am dead set against this. This would have to be a moving violation, by definition, which requires positive identification of the driver. In addition, since I am forced by political reality to set speed limits absurdly low, it is unjust and unfair. So far I have been able to throw every speed enforcement vendor out of my City, with prejudice.
Using cell phones (we're also looking at using toll tags) to determine traffic flow and congestion levels would be a tremendous boon to enable me to do my job better. But I won't implement a system that reduces my
Which is exactly why, if you want that market advantage, you should have to pay for the licensing fee from Apple.
Apple spends tens of dollars a year in hyping the iPod label. If you expect to benefit from that, despite the fact that your product may-or-may-not 1)work perfectly well with non-iPod equipment, 2)work better than non-labelled components, then you should expect to pay.
I don't know that the lack of a database would make the information useless. It may work like running ballistics tests on a shell casing found at a crime scene and matching it to a weapon seized from a suspect.
Lack of a database for ballistic testing? Stating that this is like ballistic testing is truer than you know. Have a BLAST.
Actually Amazon has it "on sale" for $38.99, with the regular retail price being $59.99. Most shows are coming out with retail pricing of $60 for popular/current shows, or $40 for less popular/cancelled shows, and Amazon discount pricing around $20-$40.
So $24 per season sounds about right to get episodes within a week of their airing and pre-DVD release. Except for the fact that you aren't getting DVD quality video, and it takes significant, non-obvious effort to "backup" your purchase onto hard media. Having a corrupted hard drive and losing all of that downloaded media is much more likely than scratching or damaging a physical DVD, and I'm sure they aren't going to let you re-download for free to replace damaged or lost files.
Actually, my Dell Axim x50v has 640x480 resolution and mobile video looks great on it. I can use DVDdecryptor and AutoGK to convert a full DVD movie into a ~250Mb file that sits on my 4Gb CF card. Use iPod style headphones and it's great for watching while on long road trips.
Now, if I can get episodes of TV series that I like and have missed, in the week after they air, this would be a great way to catch up on the series before the next episode while at lunch, or any of the other times during the day wher I have a 20-30 minute wait for something.
Yeah, unfortunately I bought my new PDA in late August. Lost my Tungsten T3 and decided for a new PDA I definitely wanted VGA, blutooth, WiFi. After looking everything over, I ended up going over to the dark side. Bought a Dell Axim x50v, the Lifedrive just didn't look quite as good and was significantly higher in price at the time.
I have to say that I like the x50v better than the T3, but I don't particularly like Windows Mobile. No hard resets yet, but daily soft resets are extremely common for everyone that has it. My T3 in 2 years had 2 hard resets and 5-10 soft resets. The battery life was also a lot longer for the T3, but it didn't have any radios in it. And the Veo camera has some significant problems with the x50v. I've managed to find almost all of the same or equivalent 'essential' apps for Windows that I had for Palm, but the developer world for WM is much, much smaller than for PalmOS. Thre were tons of little, even silly, apps that I had on the T3 that just don't exist in Windows world. And almost every app for WM is commercial, very little decent freeware.
Given the same choice today I would jump on the T|X, although one really nice thing about the x50v is both SD and CF card slots. A 4Gb CF and 1 Gb SD makes for a lot of nice storage.
Actually the more I look at the T|X, the more I want to order one just to play with it.
Actually we could partially make it work by allowing people accused of infringing on the patent to show in court that the design they are producing is innovative and different from the design patented.
The patent office would grant the initial patent, pretty much like they do now, with no knowledgable review of it at all. Then if the patent holder sues someone for infringment the alternating experts could argue about it in front of a judge. If the Q23/Q24 oscillator pair functions 10khz off the patented design, is that a significant enough difference to be new and innovative? If it is just immediately rectified before being fed into an identical circuit then no, if however, the entire rest of the circuit is designed to operate at the different frequency, then maybe.
Basically this would allow the patent system to recognize that the same end product can be produced through two totally independant and different methods. Unfortunately, it still would require the defending party to assume the burden of an expensive lawsuit.
Part of the problem with the current system is that without having the details of a process on file somewhere prior to any infringement it is impossible for a developer to tell if his new design uses the same method as an existing patent. And it allows people to patent the end result, whether or not they have any idea of how to actually achieve that result, and claim that anyone else who achieves their result must defacto being using "their" method.
But is that disclaimer by Cablevision meant to cover themselves because your side of the connection is likely to go down due to lack of power, or their side? I'm willing to bet that the reason they have it is because most of their customers don't have UPS. I've worked in several cable company head-ends and all of them were on generator backup. When power goes out at our house I can still get weather updates, news, etc., because I have the cable box and TV on their own UPS.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be new here.
Never let a good fact get in the way of mounting hysteria.
RAmen!
My favorite sites to point out to people whenever this debate arises is a site like this. Yes, if you look at extremely short timelines, like 20,000 years, it appears that OMFG we are experiencing the warmest temperatures EVAR! *gasp**full melodrama* However, when you put things into their proper perspective you see that for the last 25 Million years or so, we have been coming out of an unusually long period of glaciation. In fact, if you change the logrithmic timescale in the last link to linear, it is easy to see that paleoclimatologists best estimates are that, through the history of the earth, it has only spent approximately one quarter of the time as cold as we are now. The temp we are at now seems to be one of the semi-stable resting points for global temperature. The Earth has spent slightly less than that at what seems to be mid-stable point approximatly 4-6 C above the current average, and has spent over 50% of the entire history at a very stable point 8-10 C above our current average. Most of the time spent below that highest level can be directly attributed to extraordinary circumstances such as meteor impacts, or extreme vulcanism.
So, while we are undoubtably warming, it also undoubtably is something that would happen Homo Sapiens or not. The only question is whether we are speeding the process to any noticable degree or not.
One of the points of the law in question is to eliminate the "black box" aspect of this. Unfortunately it doesn't go nearly far enough. As the GP indicated what is needed is a smarter government procurement system. If a state government issued a spec for voting equipment demanding paper output and a fully open and verifiable source code. Add-in other must-have definitions like number of races/candidates that it must handle, etc., etc. Add-in local variations like number of additional languages that must be selectable for ballot display, etc., etc. This would still allow for many companies to compete, in an open and free market environment, make a profit, and the government and citizens all get a good system.
Any closed system is susceptible to corruption and manipulation. Rather than call for the unbelievability of letting for-profit companies perform this task, you should be instead be stressing the non-auditability of the systems being proposed. Nothing wrong with a company making a reasonable profit for doing a necessary task. It's allowing them to do it in secret that is the crime.
As for the pen and paper, try volunteering as a voting attendent the next election. Hopefully you will be in a small precinct, with a relatively minor election slate. Then you may still have some of your hair left and only reasonable sized dent marks in your forehead from banging your head against the desk and pulling your hair out. Try it in a populus precinct, and/or during a presidential election and you might not survive the sheer incompetence of the average voter. Add to that the magnitude of accurately counting 100 million or so votes in a time period considered "reasonable" by our instant gratification society, and going to electronic voting makes huge sense and should have been done long ago. As others have pointed out, it isn't a difficult or complicated task. Anyone reading this post could probably pop something completly usable out in a weekend coding session. That's why all of this obfuscation and secrecy really bothers me. If they didn't have something to hide, they wouldn't be trying so hard to hide it.
And the people in charge would be bending over backwards to try to let them.
What's worse is some mod rated an RTFA post "Informative"...
Mod must be new here too. They'll give mod points to anyone these days.
Actually, I just thought it was a babelfish translation of Vogon poetry...
None of this is for monitoring traffic volume. It is for monitoring speed and density (or flow). The available technology for evaluating speed and density from video cameras is extremely poor. I've been testing this stuff since 1995 and it is totally unreliable. Right now, the best point source of speed and density is radar scanners by a company called wavetronix. The biggest drawback, however, to both these and video monitoring is that both are expensive to deploy, require extensive communications infrastructure to retreive the information in real-time, and are point sources of information. The huge advantage to tracking aggregate cell data is that side-of-the-road sensors, and their concurrant communications needs, are not necessary. Instead all of the information is coming from cell towers, which are already in place and which already have high bandwidth connections available for transferring data. The other big advantage is that you get wide area coverage and data, as opposed to a single point on a single roadway. So far all of the agreements and systems I have reviewed or demo'd for doing this supply only aggregate, not individual data from the cell service provider to the traffic agency. The cell company already knows who you are and where you are for 911 purposes. They are being very careful, with information to be handed to non-law enforcement agencies, to only provide anonymized, or aggregate data, outside of their network. I.e. that may say that vehicle ID XJalkdjfh877634 was detected at location latX, lonX at time Z1, and then later detected at latY, lonY at time Z2, or, more frequently, they will provide information that all devices detected along road segment X in the last 5 minutes traveled the Y distance in Z time.
Once again, only thanks to modern technology...
I actually wish I still had my 300 baud acoustic... now that was classic technology.
Compaq luggable computer, Cap'n Crunch whistle, and a pay phone with a shelf. Ha! Who needs these new fangled "hot spots"?
The chicks, of course.
You completely missed my point. The point being that the government is generally fairly ineffectual and that corruption internal to the government is endemic. This combination almost assures that this tracking ability will be misused by government agents. Just do a little research on how many of the crimes persecuted (spelling in context) under the PATRIOT act actually have anything to do with terrorism for an example. In addition, the forced, and generally secret, tracking of all color laser printed documents is so completly out of proportion to the extremely limited impact that small-time counterfeiters have on the economy versus the major impact to the ability to publish anonymously that the trade off is far too dear to be taken lightly. Be assured that the large scale counterfeiters aren't doing it on Xerox machines.
Having read Trotsky, he was unabashedly in favor of strong central government "taking care" of the people. Yes, he and Stalin were opposed, mainly because Stalin was a typical dictator and only marginally followed the ideals of Communism.
And, no, the evils associated with communism aren't due to Stalin. The evils associated with communism (the economic theory, not the political theory) are that Marx assigns all value to the raw materials of production and little to no value on the process and craftsmanship involved in production. Thus a highly skilled and dedicated craftsman has the same value (in Marxist communism as well as Skinnerian communism/socialism) as an unskilled, unmotivated laborer. This failure to recognize the difference in the relative value to the economy and society of two very different workers, and that their compensation should be different in relation to their individual contributions, is why pure communism can not succeed any more than pure capitalism. When you only recompense workers for their efforts based on their needs, and craftsmen see themselves getting no more than laborers, they will fail to produce at the level they could with proper incentive. Thus, if the central agency's goal is to maximize economic capacity to provide the highest quality of life for all of its citizens, then the agency must provide that incentive, either by adjusting the compensation, which comes perilously (for political Communists) close to capitalism, or you provide incentive via threats and punishment which devolves into Dictatorship.
Well, there's my Offtopic mod for the day.
Ah, but you see... the current opinion of both the fascists (far right) and liberals (far left) is that the general mass of people is too stupid to figure out what is "right" on their own. Without proper guidance and control, they will be mislead by all the false and evil people out there (read the liberals/fascists respectively) and will make wrong decisions and follow bad ideas left to themselves.
Ah yes, because the government is soooo good at defending against counterfeiters and unauthorized money.
Enjoy your freedom (when the U.S. Army starts quoting Trotsky, be afraid. Very afraid.)
Actually, being a traffic engineer, I can comment somewhat authoritatively on that story. All of the systems we have been looking at to do this, deliberately obfuscate any distinct ID information from the phones. The phone company already has all of the information to track a specific phone and connect it to a specific account holder (and I'm sure law enforcement has the ability to subpeona this information). All the systems I've seen for traffic flow tracking make a very clear distinction between phone company information and operations and information passed to anyone outside the phone company. The systems we look at either assign a randomized code to a phone when it connects to the network and provides position information only on the randomized ID to outside agencies, or more frequently, all of the position information is translated to speed and flow information completely internal to the phone network, and only the aggregated results are passed to outside agencies.
My tin-foil hat is screwed on about as tight as anyone's, and since my profession is on one of the leading edges of the "slippery slope" (along with law enforcement and homeland insecurity) I pay very close attention to the systems that are proposed or implemented that have privacy threatening aspects. Some examples:
1) Traffic video surveillance - Cameras to see crash sites, and watch congestion are absolutely essential to keep peak hour traffic moving through a congested City. I can not stress enough how incredibly useful this capability is. My implementation of this has NO regular recording, has far too poor resolution for anything more than color and type of vehicle identification, and highest priority on camera selection and control is always traffic personnel. Yes, the video is distributed to Police, Fire, Dispatch, and the City's contract tow company, but 90% of their use is when we are all dealing with a crash site and everyone is trying to get as much information as possible to clear the wreck and get traffic moving again as quickly as possible. There are very few and specific instances where the video system has been used for Police surveillance, and, at least so far, every single one of them I have had the authority to approve or deny.
2) Photo enforcement of Red Light runners - I have been one of the key people influencing the implementation of these in Texas. We have managed to come up with a system that only takes a picture of the back of the vehicle, and does not identify the driver or passengers in the car. The ticket goes to the owner, and is similar in consequences to a parking ticket. Yes, the deterrent is much less than a full red light running ticket with points against your license, however, it is much better than full frontal picture with personal identification for privacy and general societal reasons. One of the amazing things about getting authorization to do this was that, in the process, stricken from the state law was the requirement that yellow and all-red times follow recognized guidlines. That should have been left in. And make no mistake, red light running is the cause of 50% of all injury crashes in my City and almost all of the fatalities that don't involve alcohol. If you run a red light that has a properly timed Yellow interval, you deserve to have your vehicle destroyed and to be put in the hospital, unfortunately you'll probably end up taking innocents with you.
3) Photo enforcement of Speed Limits - I am dead set against this. This would have to be a moving violation, by definition, which requires positive identification of the driver. In addition, since I am forced by political reality to set speed limits absurdly low, it is unjust and unfair. So far I have been able to throw every speed enforcement vendor out of my City, with prejudice.
Using cell phones (we're also looking at using toll tags) to determine traffic flow and congestion levels would be a tremendous boon to enable me to do my job better. But I won't implement a system that reduces my
Ahh..your comment beat me to it.
I was going to mention that here in the US we're paying 1/3-1/2 the cost of gasoline, so I can drive to all the web addresses I want much cheaper.
Which is exactly why, if you want that market advantage, you should have to pay for the licensing fee from Apple.
Apple spends tens of dollars a year in hyping the iPod label. If you expect to benefit from that, despite the fact that your product may-or-may-not 1)work perfectly well with non-iPod equipment, 2)work better than non-labelled components, then you should expect to pay.
Lack of a database for ballistic testing? Stating that this is like ballistic testing is truer than you know. Have a BLAST.
Actually Amazon has it "on sale" for $38.99, with the regular retail price being $59.99. Most shows are coming out with retail pricing of $60 for popular/current shows, or $40 for less popular/cancelled shows, and Amazon discount pricing around $20-$40.
So $24 per season sounds about right to get episodes within a week of their airing and pre-DVD release. Except for the fact that you aren't getting DVD quality video, and it takes significant, non-obvious effort to "backup" your purchase onto hard media. Having a corrupted hard drive and losing all of that downloaded media is much more likely than scratching or damaging a physical DVD, and I'm sure they aren't going to let you re-download for free to replace damaged or lost files.
And yet, still no Shakespear...
Actually, my Dell Axim x50v has 640x480 resolution and mobile video looks great on it. I can use DVDdecryptor and AutoGK to convert a full DVD movie into a ~250Mb file that sits on my 4Gb CF card. Use iPod style headphones and it's great for watching while on long road trips.
Now, if I can get episodes of TV series that I like and have missed, in the week after they air, this would be a great way to catch up on the series before the next episode while at lunch, or any of the other times during the day wher I have a 20-30 minute wait for something.
Heisenberg? Wouldn't that be Schrodinger?
Heisenburg just says that you can never really be sure where the keys actually are, or your fingers for that matter.
Yeah, unfortunately I bought my new PDA in late August. Lost my Tungsten T3 and decided for a new PDA I definitely wanted VGA, blutooth, WiFi. After looking everything over, I ended up going over to the dark side. Bought a Dell Axim x50v, the Lifedrive just didn't look quite as good and was significantly higher in price at the time.
I have to say that I like the x50v better than the T3, but I don't particularly like Windows Mobile. No hard resets yet, but daily soft resets are extremely common for everyone that has it. My T3 in 2 years had 2 hard resets and 5-10 soft resets. The battery life was also a lot longer for the T3, but it didn't have any radios in it. And the Veo camera has some significant problems with the x50v. I've managed to find almost all of the same or equivalent 'essential' apps for Windows that I had for Palm, but the developer world for WM is much, much smaller than for PalmOS. Thre were tons of little, even silly, apps that I had on the T3 that just don't exist in Windows world. And almost every app for WM is commercial, very little decent freeware.
Given the same choice today I would jump on the T|X, although one really nice thing about the x50v is both SD and CF card slots. A 4Gb CF and 1 Gb SD makes for a lot of nice storage.
Actually the more I look at the T|X, the more I want to order one just to play with it.
Actually we could partially make it work by allowing people accused of infringing on the patent to show in court that the design they are producing is innovative and different from the design patented.
The patent office would grant the initial patent, pretty much like they do now, with no knowledgable review of it at all. Then if the patent holder sues someone for infringment the alternating experts could argue about it in front of a judge. If the Q23/Q24 oscillator pair functions 10khz off the patented design, is that a significant enough difference to be new and innovative? If it is just immediately rectified before being fed into an identical circuit then no, if however, the entire rest of the circuit is designed to operate at the different frequency, then maybe.
Basically this would allow the patent system to recognize that the same end product can be produced through two totally independant and different methods. Unfortunately, it still would require the defending party to assume the burden of an expensive lawsuit.
Part of the problem with the current system is that without having the details of a process on file somewhere prior to any infringement it is impossible for a developer to tell if his new design uses the same method as an existing patent. And it allows people to patent the end result, whether or not they have any idea of how to actually achieve that result, and claim that anyone else who achieves their result must defacto being using "their" method.
It's a matter of shades of grey and relative evils.
No camera, but it does have an SD slot. So check out this.
But is that disclaimer by Cablevision meant to cover themselves because your side of the connection is likely to go down due to lack of power, or their side? I'm willing to bet that the reason they have it is because most of their customers don't have UPS. I've worked in several cable company head-ends and all of them were on generator backup. When power goes out at our house I can still get weather updates, news, etc., because I have the cable box and TV on their own UPS.