As I understand it, it's not at all a political move, it's certainly not just to have a higher number. As I understand it, the way Firefox development works is, there's the CVS HEAD, which I guess you could consider similar to the 2.5 kernel series back in the day - unstable and quickly changing. Every so often, they make a branch off the head that will become a stable release. These releases are kind of dead ends, but that allows them to be more stable and have more static APIs. So what this article actually means is, a while after the 1.0 fork, they started the 1.1 fork, but now they've decided that even the 1.1 fork is too far behind the head, and so they've opted to focus their stabilization efforts on the 1.5 fork, which already includes bugfixes that would otherwise have to be backported.
Actually, having read the statement, nothing in it struck me as factually inaccurate. Very CYA, but not inaccurate. For example:
"So far we have learned that the "hot coffee" modification is the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game. In violation of the software user agreement, hackers created the 'hot coffee' modification by disassembling and then combining, recompiling and altering the game's source code."
First sentence - they don't blame the hackers for the scene itself (which clearly they created), they blame them for the modification. And scenes were modified - no more bouncing camera outside the house, now you get the interior scene. And hacking the PC version would have involved disassembly, modification, reassembly. (After seeing the disassembled code, knowing which bits to twiddle in a save game file or in memory for the console versions, so as to enable the scenes without modifying binaries, would have become possible.) I can't find the link to the full article again, but as I recall, it's all similarly just barely technically correct.
I have no idea if this has been done already, but why brute force? There are a lot of shortcuts you can take. One big one is, you have a general idea where the ground is. It's a roughly horizontal approximate plane. On the horizon, check for matches with no shift, at the bottom, with whatever shift is right for however far the ground is usually at that point in your vision. Another huge simplification is that each frame is almost the same. No need to start fresh, look for a lock at the same shift it was before, then try closer (if you have other evidence you're moving forward.) You only really need brute force for large areas where these strategies don't work. You could probably find some way to let the focus of the cameras and which parts of the image are sharp give you information also.
I'm sure it's clear that I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'll post anyway...
That's pretty cool, but I'm looking forward to whole-keyboard remapping. I use Dvorak mostly, and it's great, but because I have a QWERTY keyboard, I can't hunt-n-peck with Dvorak, I can only touch type. It's annoying to have to move both hands to the keys just to fill in a form or something. So if the keyboard could switch between QWERTY and Dvorak (which is kinda it's point), it would be useful to me.
Two things bother me about its design, though. One, the Enter key. The enter key is the most important key; why is it that every other company thinks they can change it and it won't bother people? My enter key is a one-row two-column rectangle to the left of the apostrophe, and that's the way I like it. On the layout they show, the Enter key is a big 2x2 rectangle, and they put, of all things, a backslash key and a blank key where it should have been. I suppose I could remap it, but there's no reason for that.
And the other worrisome thing is the width. If my keyboard gets much wider I won't have a space to mouse. So why not just put the function keys on a row above the F keys, as most "multimedia" keyboards do?
Oh, and I'd like for the FAQ to answer the most interesting technical question - how are the keys electrically connected to the keyboard? And are they removable/cleanable/consumer-replacable?
I never said they should abandon MPEG-4 or AAC, I said they should also ship support for Vorbis. They should do this because they supposedly care about their customers, and doing this would save some of their customers some time, and it would make things interoperate better. They should support it for the same reason Adobe Photoshop supports PNG - because it makes their software more useful. But they don't, for some political or petty reason, which was exactly my point.
For which reason, while it may be an open standard by some definition, it's not an open standard in the sense that you can get the standard, write an implementation, and distribute it as open source without paying anyone in countries with software patents.
iTunes isn't quite as close to low cost and unrestricted files as a legal service can get. Specifically, a legal service could offer files that are restricted only by the long-standing tradition of copyright, but not by the technical quagmire of DRM. Think about it, if iTunes dropped the DRM, what would happen? NOTHING! Perhaps a slight increase in their sales. They could still make iTunes (the application) incompatible with other players, and the iPod would continue to dominate. (Heck, if they added Ogg support I might buy it, and with no DRM there's no advantage to owning a format, so there'd be nothing stopping them). Net effect on piracy? Zero. Net effect on fair use? Zero, iTunes was successful because its DRM didn't get in the way of that. Long-term effect on fair use? Positive, because the industry can't slowly add restrictions. I think that's why it doesn't happen.
For one, it isn't society that wants or needs DRM, it's the content industry. There's nothing but their own blind ambition stopping them from telling iTunes they could stop with the DRM facade, and if they did this, it would have a positive effect on legal sales and no effect on piracy. The reason DRM attempts keep recurring isn't because society needs it, it's a combination of the industry's quixotic quest to end fair use and the newly-existant DRM industry's self-preservation instinct, convincing the content industry they need some counterproductive gimmick that, coincidentally, it is selling.
Now, as for solutions, I can't think of any except no DRM. (Please enlighten me.) Open source does indeed need to kill DRM, because it's even more impossible to implement effective DRM in open source than it is in binary (or as Jon might call it, open assembly), and DRM in hardware is its own can of worms (and will be the end of the safety net of "all DRM will be broken"). And if most content moves to proprietary systems, we as a society are taking a huge risk, because only a very limited number of people will know how to display stored content. Someone gets hit by a bus (or a company goes under and nobody maintains the authentication server) and it wipes out everybody's ability to view their DRM-d copy of the next Star Wars. Not to mention that the next George Lucas can erase the crimethink idea that Han shot first from the public memory, and a million things worse. Think about that for a second. DRM, only one small step from what Microsoft will soon be selling as document management systems, makes Orwell's nightmare technically feasible. The moment you can't download a webpage until you prove to the server that your client won't let you copy it, history is mutable. It's scary stuff.
In my view, DRM isn't worth it. I only considered iTunes because it's DRM is meaningless and already cracked, but I'm reluctant to buy until it's nonexistant. DVDs, well, at long last I can view them now. Good luck selling me a HD-DVD before it's protection is broken, and if, after that, you try to sell me one with the compromised key rescinded, I'll just keep returning it until I get a working copy, and sue your sorry ass if I can't.
My microwave's CPU* has two functions - turning the microwave on and off, and telling me what time it is. Only one of these functions is even necessary. I will never, as long as I live, need the CPU in my microwave to do anything else. The company that manufactured the microwave has made hundreds of thousands of other microwaves that were identical to mine, and they used the same ROM for all of them, because it is cost effective and fulfills all the necessary requirements.
My computer, however has almost infinite functions, and I'd be pretty pissed if I couldn't do any of them. I'm always requiring my computer to do different things; I have several OSs loaded, I keep them updated, and in the future I might want to run others. My computer is a hodge-podge of mostly-modular parts that was put together by me, and there is only one just like it. Even Wal-mart PCs have more variety than microwaves. Because my computer has all these requirements, storing the OS on a ROM chip wouldn't work.
*Actually my microwave has a mechanical timer and power dial, and probably no CPU - it was the cheapest one Wal-mart had last year. Which means it's EMP-safe. We should just make computers out of dials, springs, and levers. My microwave can survive nuclear war, why can't your PC?
I almost hate to give anybody the idea, but the fuel-cell-battery fuel industry could turn out being exactly like the printer ink industry is now. *shudder*
Floppies and DOS may be reliable in that no other process will interrupt the burn, but they're just horrible from a data integrity standpoint. My BIOS is one of the most important few kilobytes of my entire computer, and I should copy it from the least-reliable storage format I own? I sure hope they use a lot of checksums to protect those images (but I'm not convinced they do).
Actually, instead of requiring either the CD or a USB key to verify games, let's have a system that works equally well - nothing!
Seriously. That's one area where what the industry needs isn't innovation, it's common sense. There are tons of artificial limits on what we can do that really don't have much basis in reality. There are tons of easy fixes that could be made, and tons of compatibility that could be added, but that for some political reason or other, isn't. Game publishers should stop making me waste five minutes installing the No-CD crack that they know will exist, they should just let me play without a disc. Microsoft should halt its failed attempt to own the web and spend the few months to make IE standards-compliant. Microsoft and Apple both should quit their format squabbles and ship with support for Ogg Vorbis (no effort on their part, the glue is already written). (DRM could be applied at the file level, there's no real advantage to owning the format.) On that subject, the music industry should get the clue with which iTunes's success has been beating them over the head - DRM only works when it's so dilute that it effectively doesn't exist, and therefore it's just an expensive bit of bloat that limits their market.
And so on. The general idea is, for a variety of really stupid political reasons, from an outsider's perspective, technology is going backwards in a lot of cases. When hard drives were 60MB and games came on 2 floppies, you could install them and then play them without the floppies. Now we have 2000 times that capacity, but you can't do that.
Hmm, it would be nice if this presentation layer were able to do cool things like display formatted content from multiple server on a global network. Maybe it could even have scripting languages, thus allowing Google to not only provide search results and advertising, but also create useful applications. I wonder what such a beast would be called. Firegoogle? GFox?
Heh, that would be interesting - ads with more fine print than medicine ads.
Star Wars Episode III - own* it** today***!
*This product is licensed, not sold. Advertising to the contrary notwithstanding, you will never own anything even remotely related to Star Wars, not even action figures, which we own, but if you choke on them, it's still your fault. The disc may possibly work on your LucasFilm(tm) certified entertainment system, if we feel like it, provided nobody has ever opened the case of a similar model (in which case we reserve the right to revoke the player keys, and to break into your house unannounced and steal your disc (which is our property**)). **The physical disc, the content on it, the ideas embodied in such content, and any thoughts, feelings, writings, or speech inspired in, or created by, anyone who has viewed said content, regardless of their having agreed to this license, belongs to us in perpetuity. All such person's previous agreements with third parties, including but not limited to their employer, their wife, and satan, are hereby null and void. As congress has declared a war on piracy, any person not submitting to our aforementioned ownership, who does not wear the Jolly Roger flag or other easily recognized pirate symbols, is an illegal combatant. *** Not only can you not own the disc, you can't even watch it the day you buy it, as there is a 2 week waiting period during which we perform a backround check to ensure you aren't a pirate, as evidenced by incriminating activies such as owning a VCR, camcorder, or computer, or having read pirate sites such as Slashdot and Google, which link to stolen property and therefore are terrorists. If you've read this far, congradulations - here's some more, just so this sentence isn't last: Also, by having read this ad, you agree not only to the terms and limitations described herein, and to buy the content mentioned above, but also to hold all organizations remotely connected to this farce forever harmless, and you agree that no, we aren't a monopoly, and you agree that you will not vote for and move to impeach any congressperson, judge, legislator, or person who believes this is not the case. We're more powerful than Major League Baseball and Microsoft combined! Also, not only do you not own the disc, you don't own Congress, we do, and we've used our Congress (herinafter refered to as AOLTimeWarnerCongress, just to rub it in) to reinterpret the McConstitution such that "limited times" now refers to your use of our content, not our obviously perpetual property right to it, and therefore, your use of the content expires in fourteen weeks, as the framers intended.
Assuming this isn't some elaborate hoax, I'd really like to see someone break that agreement and get sued for it. It could give EULAs a run for their money.
It's possible using cryptography to make it pratically impossible to make a monitor emulator that will work. Barring bugs, which actually could be completely eliminated, you have nothing more than the analog hole to fall back on.
DeCSS failed because the crypto was weak back in the day of export restrictions on it, and because the keys were stored in software. These won't be problems now for hardware manufacturers.
Suppose we don't offer a secure copy-protection mechanism, and only a few companies are willing to offer content. Suppose Company X decides "Because we can't screw our customers completely enough while doing so, we're not going to offer HD content." Suppose Company Y decides "Oh well, we'll sell HD content anyway." Now, who makes more money in this scenario?
The way I see it, we could either forfeit our fair-use rights forever (and cripple our computers) in order to see Company X's stuff in HD right now, or we could wait two weeks while Company X realizes it's losing out to Company Y and gives in to market forces. Now, as a result of the Z Association of America, helping X and Y conspire against customers, we might have to wait longer than two weeks, but the market, the customers, will eventually win. If they are understand. If they are patient.
I don't think anyone has the right to make their content one-peek-per-customer.
First, it destroys the balance of copyright, and in so doing worsens the effect of the monopoly in entertainment. Consider the idea that 'if the industry doesn't adopt copy-protection technology, providers won't offer content.' Now, if there were a healthy market here, some content providers might not, but they'd be at a huge disadvantage to those who do, those who allow customers more freedom and who don't force them to buy new but less-capable hardware. The market would force all companies to release their content, which is exactly what the Constitution says copyright should do. But instead, at least the music and movie industries are controlled largely by cartels which fix prices, choose formats, and blackmail congress and consumers with their unfortunate ability to act as one body, above market forces. Because of this reality, consumers need an advocate.
One such advocate is the original intent of copyright law, which "one-peek-per-customer" runs counter to. The law was originally written about books and maps, and it's really an accident that it mentions making copies, instead of just distributing them. At the time, reading (or listening to or watching) a work didn't require making a copy as it does now with computers. When I buy a book I can keep it for as long as I want, take it where I will, and read it as many times as I want. Similarly I think when I buy music or movies, I ought to be able to back them up, copy them between devices I use, and watch them whenever. Why should I lose these rights just because the new digital medium now requires making (but not distributing) copies to do all those things?
The weakness here is the rental or library model - I can check out books and I have to return them, but if I could make copies of them, I wouldn't be as inclined to buy them. (Never mind that people could do this with records, tapes, and CDs, yet the industry has survived.) Without DRM, it would be difficult to make the rental model work with digital media and computers, right?
In that case, I say let it not work. The rental model only barely works for things like books and CDs, which are tied to a physical object which doesn't need to be permanently copied to be used. It could be made to work on the internet, but the cost is very high - we essentially would need to cripple the basic strength of computers, just to provide more protection to one relatively new and small business model. The people crusading to make this work want computers that won't run what the user wants, monitors that won't show what the user wants, and a vast amount of technology to enforce it, attempting to turn the general-purpose PC into nothing more than an entertainment machine. They may or may not succeed, but they certainly don't have the right to do it.
Care to site any concrete evidence for your claim of a 3-5x increase in decoding resources? It's not nearly that bad, and only because not as much time has been spent optimizing it, and as you said, hardware decoders are not as widespread.
There are several different bottlenecks that can interfere with typing speed. Two big ones are physical ability - how fast can your hands move through the required positions, and neural ability - how fast can you tell your hands what to do. Now, optimizing a layout for alternating-hand typing obviously helps you physically to type faster, while tightening the neural bottleneck. A tradeoff.
When I first learned Dvorak, the more frequent alternation in Dvorak was a problem, leading to frequent transpoistion errors, and I had to type more slowly to remain accurate. In other words, I had hit the neural barrier before I hit the physical barrier.
However,
the more I practice Dvorak, the less of an issue this is. To a much greater extent than our bodies, our brains can adapt. By trading a harder barrier for a softer one, I think Dvorak increases your potential. It's telling that the fastest typist ever used Dvorak. And I think that if people started with Dvorak when they were young, the neural barrier wouldn't be much of an issue at all.
Well, I wouldn't quite say precludes, just that such a machine would probably have to be pretty big to have a chance of working reliably (and maybe you could never prove that it would always work). Consider that it's likely that God does play dice with the universe, though this doesn't interfere with computers too much.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand it, it's not at all a political move, it's certainly not just to have a higher number. As I understand it, the way Firefox development works is, there's the CVS HEAD, which I guess you could consider similar to the 2.5 kernel series back in the day - unstable and quickly changing. Every so often, they make a branch off the head that will become a stable release. These releases are kind of dead ends, but that allows them to be more stable and have more static APIs. So what this article actually means is, a while after the 1.0 fork, they started the 1.1 fork, but now they've decided that even the 1.1 fork is too far behind the head, and so they've opted to focus their stabilization efforts on the 1.5 fork, which already includes bugfixes that would otherwise have to be backported.
I sure hope everyone who reads that has a working sarcasm detector.
I'm sure it's clear that I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'll post anyway...
Two things bother me about its design, though. One, the Enter key. The enter key is the most important key; why is it that every other company thinks they can change it and it won't bother people? My enter key is a one-row two-column rectangle to the left of the apostrophe, and that's the way I like it. On the layout they show, the Enter key is a big 2x2 rectangle, and they put, of all things, a backslash key and a blank key where it should have been. I suppose I could remap it, but there's no reason for that.
And the other worrisome thing is the width. If my keyboard gets much wider I won't have a space to mouse. So why not just put the function keys on a row above the F keys, as most "multimedia" keyboards do?
Oh, and I'd like for the FAQ to answer the most interesting technical question - how are the keys electrically connected to the keyboard? And are they removable/cleanable/consumer-replacable?
I never said they should abandon MPEG-4 or AAC, I said they should also ship support for Vorbis. They should do this because they supposedly care about their customers, and doing this would save some of their customers some time, and it would make things interoperate better. They should support it for the same reason Adobe Photoshop supports PNG - because it makes their software more useful. But they don't, for some political or petty reason, which was exactly my point.
For which reason, while it may be an open standard by some definition, it's not an open standard in the sense that you can get the standard, write an implementation, and distribute it as open source without paying anyone in countries with software patents.
iTunes isn't quite as close to low cost and unrestricted files as a legal service can get. Specifically, a legal service could offer files that are restricted only by the long-standing tradition of copyright, but not by the technical quagmire of DRM. Think about it, if iTunes dropped the DRM, what would happen? NOTHING! Perhaps a slight increase in their sales. They could still make iTunes (the application) incompatible with other players, and the iPod would continue to dominate. (Heck, if they added Ogg support I might buy it, and with no DRM there's no advantage to owning a format, so there'd be nothing stopping them). Net effect on piracy? Zero. Net effect on fair use? Zero, iTunes was successful because its DRM didn't get in the way of that. Long-term effect on fair use? Positive, because the industry can't slowly add restrictions. I think that's why it doesn't happen.
Now, as for solutions, I can't think of any except no DRM. (Please enlighten me.) Open source does indeed need to kill DRM, because it's even more impossible to implement effective DRM in open source than it is in binary (or as Jon might call it, open assembly), and DRM in hardware is its own can of worms (and will be the end of the safety net of "all DRM will be broken"). And if most content moves to proprietary systems, we as a society are taking a huge risk, because only a very limited number of people will know how to display stored content. Someone gets hit by a bus (or a company goes under and nobody maintains the authentication server) and it wipes out everybody's ability to view their DRM-d copy of the next Star Wars. Not to mention that the next George Lucas can erase the crimethink idea that Han shot first from the public memory, and a million things worse. Think about that for a second. DRM, only one small step from what Microsoft will soon be selling as document management systems, makes Orwell's nightmare technically feasible. The moment you can't download a webpage until you prove to the server that your client won't let you copy it, history is mutable. It's scary stuff.
In my view, DRM isn't worth it. I only considered iTunes because it's DRM is meaningless and already cracked, but I'm reluctant to buy until it's nonexistant. DVDs, well, at long last I can view them now. Good luck selling me a HD-DVD before it's protection is broken, and if, after that, you try to sell me one with the compromised key rescinded, I'll just keep returning it until I get a working copy, and sue your sorry ass if I can't.
My computer, however has almost infinite functions, and I'd be pretty pissed if I couldn't do any of them. I'm always requiring my computer to do different things; I have several OSs loaded, I keep them updated, and in the future I might want to run others. My computer is a hodge-podge of mostly-modular parts that was put together by me, and there is only one just like it. Even Wal-mart PCs have more variety than microwaves. Because my computer has all these requirements, storing the OS on a ROM chip wouldn't work.
*Actually my microwave has a mechanical timer and power dial, and probably no CPU - it was the cheapest one Wal-mart had last year. Which means it's EMP-safe. We should just make computers out of dials, springs, and levers. My microwave can survive nuclear war, why can't your PC?
I almost hate to give anybody the idea, but the fuel-cell-battery fuel industry could turn out being exactly like the printer ink industry is now. *shudder*
Floppies and DOS may be reliable in that no other process will interrupt the burn, but they're just horrible from a data integrity standpoint. My BIOS is one of the most important few kilobytes of my entire computer, and I should copy it from the least-reliable storage format I own? I sure hope they use a lot of checksums to protect those images (but I'm not convinced they do).
Sounds to me like basically you want in the short term a faster hard drive, and in the long term, non-mechanical fast permanent storage.
Seriously. That's one area where what the industry needs isn't innovation, it's common sense. There are tons of artificial limits on what we can do that really don't have much basis in reality. There are tons of easy fixes that could be made, and tons of compatibility that could be added, but that for some political reason or other, isn't. Game publishers should stop making me waste five minutes installing the No-CD crack that they know will exist, they should just let me play without a disc. Microsoft should halt its failed attempt to own the web and spend the few months to make IE standards-compliant. Microsoft and Apple both should quit their format squabbles and ship with support for Ogg Vorbis (no effort on their part, the glue is already written). (DRM could be applied at the file level, there's no real advantage to owning the format.) On that subject, the music industry should get the clue with which iTunes's success has been beating them over the head - DRM only works when it's so dilute that it effectively doesn't exist, and therefore it's just an expensive bit of bloat that limits their market.
And so on. The general idea is, for a variety of really stupid political reasons, from an outsider's perspective, technology is going backwards in a lot of cases. When hard drives were 60MB and games came on 2 floppies, you could install them and then play them without the floppies. Now we have 2000 times that capacity, but you can't do that.
Hmm, it would be nice if this presentation layer were able to do cool things like display formatted content from multiple server on a global network. Maybe it could even have scripting languages, thus allowing Google to not only provide search results and advertising, but also create useful applications. I wonder what such a beast would be called. Firegoogle? GFox?
Honest technical question - is it even possible to set most computers to a date before 1970?
Assuming this isn't some elaborate hoax, I'd really like to see someone break that agreement and get sued for it. It could give EULAs a run for their money.
DeCSS failed because the crypto was weak back in the day of export restrictions on it, and because the keys were stored in software. These won't be problems now for hardware manufacturers.
The way I see it, we could either forfeit our fair-use rights forever (and cripple our computers) in order to see Company X's stuff in HD right now, or we could wait two weeks while Company X realizes it's losing out to Company Y and gives in to market forces. Now, as a result of the Z Association of America, helping X and Y conspire against customers, we might have to wait longer than two weeks, but the market, the customers, will eventually win. If they are understand. If they are patient.
First, it destroys the balance of copyright, and in so doing worsens the effect of the monopoly in entertainment. Consider the idea that 'if the industry doesn't adopt copy-protection technology, providers won't offer content.' Now, if there were a healthy market here, some content providers might not, but they'd be at a huge disadvantage to those who do, those who allow customers more freedom and who don't force them to buy new but less-capable hardware. The market would force all companies to release their content, which is exactly what the Constitution says copyright should do. But instead, at least the music and movie industries are controlled largely by cartels which fix prices, choose formats, and blackmail congress and consumers with their unfortunate ability to act as one body, above market forces. Because of this reality, consumers need an advocate.
One such advocate is the original intent of copyright law, which "one-peek-per-customer" runs counter to. The law was originally written about books and maps, and it's really an accident that it mentions making copies, instead of just distributing them. At the time, reading (or listening to or watching) a work didn't require making a copy as it does now with computers. When I buy a book I can keep it for as long as I want, take it where I will, and read it as many times as I want. Similarly I think when I buy music or movies, I ought to be able to back them up, copy them between devices I use, and watch them whenever. Why should I lose these rights just because the new digital medium now requires making (but not distributing) copies to do all those things?
The weakness here is the rental or library model - I can check out books and I have to return them, but if I could make copies of them, I wouldn't be as inclined to buy them. (Never mind that people could do this with records, tapes, and CDs, yet the industry has survived.) Without DRM, it would be difficult to make the rental model work with digital media and computers, right?
In that case, I say let it not work. The rental model only barely works for things like books and CDs, which are tied to a physical object which doesn't need to be permanently copied to be used. It could be made to work on the internet, but the cost is very high - we essentially would need to cripple the basic strength of computers, just to provide more protection to one relatively new and small business model. The people crusading to make this work want computers that won't run what the user wants, monitors that won't show what the user wants, and a vast amount of technology to enforce it, attempting to turn the general-purpose PC into nothing more than an entertainment machine. They may or may not succeed, but they certainly don't have the right to do it.
Care to site any concrete evidence for your claim of a 3-5x increase in decoding resources? It's not nearly that bad, and only because not as much time has been spent optimizing it, and as you said, hardware decoders are not as widespread.
When I first learned Dvorak, the more frequent alternation in Dvorak was a problem, leading to frequent transpoistion errors, and I had to type more slowly to remain accurate. In other words, I had hit the neural barrier before I hit the physical barrier.
However,
the more I practice Dvorak, the less of an issue this is. To a much greater extent than our bodies, our brains can adapt. By trading a harder barrier for a softer one, I think Dvorak increases your potential. It's telling that the fastest typist ever used Dvorak. And I think that if people started with Dvorak when they were young, the neural barrier wouldn't be much of an issue at all.
Well, I wouldn't quite say precludes, just that such a machine would probably have to be pretty big to have a chance of working reliably (and maybe you could never prove that it would always work). Consider that it's likely that God does play dice with the universe, though this doesn't interfere with computers too much.
Sure, take out the useless consts.