I have an ICQ account. I've never received spam on it. I have it set to accept IM's only from people on my contact list, so maybe they are coming-in, but I can't see them. That seems like a sane policy. And I don't get any invite-spam either, because I don't think invites work at all.
It sounds like you are using a really crappy ICQ client if it allows random people to send you IM's.
I think this is a non-issue because invites just aren't used any more. I'm not even certain that the modern clients support them.
Instead, you email a friend with your IM contact info: they add you, you add them, and now you can both IM each other. No invites required, no spim. I've been using IM for 5+ years and I've never received a single spam of any kind. And I've never used invites, or received one.
I agree with you when you say the actual teaching of I.D. is not relevant. But what is relevant is the general scientific attitude behind the areas of the country where those things are being taught. The issue isn't I.D., but the fact that we are raising a generation of children who are not capable of making the distinction between science and religion. And this is a symptom of a generation of parents who have the same problem. So we are already one full generation into the cycle, and we now see the cycle continuing.
It is terrible when I hear things like "Well, evolution is only a theory..." as though that meant something. Gravity is just a theory too but we teach that. And Creationism is not a theory at all. Not understanding the difference between fact, theory, and ideology is going to hurt these kids.
But it is much harder to do certain effects this way. Ray tracing gives free per-pixel lighting, shadowing, reflections, and radiosity with minimal or no added work on the part of the developer. Tto do that same on today's cards the programmer must master a whole series of mathematical and psychological tricks and shortcuts to fake-out the apperance of those same things, then implement those in some funky assembly language for the video card.
They can get around the analog hole: they can make everything digital. Today, that might seem insane, but it could happen several ways. Legislation would be one: and under the current knee-jerk anti-terrorism environment, they could claim it would allow the government to spy on people more easily, and that it would deter terrorists from profiting off of piracy. Another way would just be to form a consortium of electronics companies and step-on anyone who doesn't join. For example, how easily can one get a region-free DVD player in the US? Or how about one that lets you skipt he FBI warning? Those types of things are there because anyone who doesn't follow the rules doesn't get CSS and MPEG-4 licenses. So they've already proven that they can get away with delivering what the consumer doesn't want. If Americans were given the choice of boycotting their music and TV, or getting screwed -- they'll choose to get screwed, because they will go without eting before they go without TV or music.
Then it sounds like you've heard about the phony thing that the lobbyists are calling network neutrality. I find this to happen so often I wrote an article about the Myths of network neutrality.
Your second paragraph sums-up most of the myths quite well. AT&T etc. say that network neutrality proponents want a system where everyone pays the exact same amount, and nobody can pay for higher levels of service. That's not true at all. They are trying to redefine network neutrality to make it look bad. What they are basing that on is the fact that network neutrality propoonents want to make it illegal to artificially delay one person's network packets in favor of someone else's. Allow me to give a specific example:
Scenario 1: I want 1MBps down/1MBps up. So I pay $10/month. My neighbor wants 10Mbps down/1MBps per month. So he pays $40/month. Google wants 1000MBps down/1000MBps up. So they pay $10,000/month. This is totally fine and network neutral. Nobody has a problem with that. AT&T/Verizon/etc. want to make it out that network neutrality prevents that. It does not.
Scenario 2: The pipe for my street is a 10MBps up/down pipe. My neighbor wants 10 MBps down. I want 10MBps down. I call the phone company and say I'm only getting 5MBps most of the time. So they offer to make my packets higher priority over my neighbor. So my neighbor now gets 1MBps if I'm downloading a file at 9MBps. So he calls and complains, and gets the level 2 priority as well. So now we are both back to 5MBps. So I call and get level 3 priority, and so on and so forth. This is not network neutral. IF the phone company wants to change their TOS to say that the "PEAK" is 10MBps, and the total shared is 10MBPS that's fine. And if I call and say I want more bandwidth, they can say "oh, we can do that, but we have to upgrade the trunk like so that will cost you." That's totally fair and neutral.
This game isn't new. When caller ID came-out, they charged for a code that disabled caller id on outgoing calls. Then they charged for special caller-id units that displayed the caller information even if it was blocked. So then they sold stuff that blocks calls from non-caller-id phones. Then they sold codes that get around the blocks. etc. etc. They never provided any new services ever -- they just pitted their customers against each other and sld phony pseudo-services.
IMHO, the FTC should ban such a practice. All it will do is make the phone companies richer, and they won't have to upgrade their trunk service anymore, they can just re-sell the same bandwidth over and over again.
...bringing together lawyers, academics, economists, and technologists... Those people represent the pro-network neutrality side. Now, please invite the CEO of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast as well, so we can get the view of all 3 people on the other side.
Not all "strange" computer keyboards need to be innovative technologies.
The MacBook Pro keyboard is weird enough to qualify. Backspace is called delete, there's two enter keys, and no delete key. Less odd, but still strange, are the eject button, missing print screen, and swapped "apple/windows" and alt keys. And this isn't an anti-mac rant or anything (since I am typing on my Macbook Pro now) but this keyboard is neither Macintosh "standard" or Windows "standard" - It's just odd.
Even in light of that, it sounds to me like someone is trying to twist the meanings of words. Lay-people will read this and think about "file sharing" instead of "copyright infringement" much like if I had an article about "walking around town" being illegal, but really I meant it in the context of walking around town while selling illegal drugs on the streets. Even if everyone understood that, it is a method that can be used to apply the connotation of one thing onto another. Pretty soon, you should expect to hear people talking about how file sharing is illegal, or should be illegal, or how they are glad that a law is being passed to make file sharing legal even though it already is. It really sounds like a setup to me.
Wait... is file sharing illegal in Sweden? I didn't know any governments that ban file sharing. I share files all the time with people via my web site, email, IM, FTP, and bittorrent. In the U.S. none of these things are illegal. However, in most countries, copyright infringement is illegal. It sounds to me like the entire article confuses the terms "file sharing" with "copyright infringement" which sounds like a form of doublespeak to me.
This useless comment is just so I can undo a moderation where it looks like I selected the wrong item from the drop-down list. Doh! Stupid scroll wheel!
I see lots of comments about how old code is solid and reliable and should not be refactored. This group must be working in a very different environment than the ones I am accustomed too. All too often, I come into a project where the same bugs keep re-asserting their heads over and over again, and they keep getting fixed over and over again. Usually, it is because the original code contains some routines that were copied and pasted over and over again, and by refactoring you take the best block of code and re-use it. The result is smaller, more readable, and less error-prone.
The phone companies fought hard to get the FCC to say that internet service is not a common carrier service. That means that the phone companies can do all kinds of strange things like not providing service equally, or modifying and inserting packets on the network, or charging unequally, or charging for priority packets, or inserting ads... The price they pay for that ability is they are now liable for what goes over their networks. They are liable for hate speech, libel, slander, sedition, treason, and copyright infringement. The common-carrier laws were established to prevent this can of worms, and it is why AT&T does not have to filter your phone conversations and why UPS doesn't have to inspect packages for copyright infringement. They dug themselves this hole, and it is to the great detriment of themselves and their customers. I highly doubt that they can profit enough by changing ads on web pages and charging to re-prioritize traffic, to make up for the legal and ethical costs.
Basically, AT&T should give-in no and start asking the FCC to make them common carriers so they can stop this nonsense, before the real disaster hits.
You are right that it would be more efficient, but it is harder to roll out and more environmentally damaging. I really don't like the idea of having thousands of square miles of land covered in solar panels when I could have every roof on the planet covered. The things really aren't that hard to maintain. There's also political benefits - Imagine a world with very few power companies, because everyone can produce their own. It also means that people who think this is a good idea now can just do it for themselves, no need to wait for the politicians and the big business people to come to an agreement over land and subsidies. Just let the people start installing them on their own roofs.
I see lots of posts decrying both Java and C, for different reasons. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Teaching only Java yields students who do not understand pointers, or assembly, or optimizations, or any low-level thinking. Teaching C is abhorently difficult because there are too many stumbling blocks and subtle things that can go wrong.
It seems to me that the ideal solution would be to teach a C-like language that didn't have certain stupidities. For example: printf("%s", 5) results in a memory dump of whatever is at address 5, up until the next 0 byte. (Notice "d" is next to "s" on the keyboard). It's a great learning experinence, it's important that they see and understand that the computer is doing exactly what it was told to do. And there's nothing wrong with an efficient language that skips bounds-checking and allows pointer arithmetic. But that is too subtle of an error for a programmer to understand on day 1. So it would be nice to have a beginner version of C that instead displays "5 is not a string" or something like that. It would help students and teachers get over the hump and into the real business of what they are doing, then switch to the more powerful language after they get their feet wet.
I thought there were lots of 3rd-party Flash players for Linux? Am I incorrect? I know of deveopers who use embedded flash, and they have several Flash engines. And I thought there was at least one open-source player implementation. (Not that I know the difference between Flash 5,6,7,8, or 9. Same thing to me. Are they breaking compatibility?) Maybe Silverlight is good then - it will keep Adobe from doing crap like that.
I just bought a MacBook Pro, and half the allure of OS X is that instead of dual-booting Windows / Linux, I can dual-boot Windows / OS X. OS X is like Linux++ for me. It's like every Linux distro I've ever used, but with a usable and consistent GUI layer on top of it.
I went to a presentation on Silverlight hosted by a local MSDN users group. From what I can tell, Microsoft made a donation to a non-profit, and earmarked the money to go to a MS partner who would redo their existing (and very dated) Flash site in Silverlight. At the end of the presentation, I talked to the presenters about a Silverlight project that my employer was considering. The response I got from both Microsoft Gold partners was "Don't use Silverlight!!!!" They went on to explain how anything that Silverlight can do, Flash can do better in terms of both final result, and development time. (They were using Flash 1.1 beta at the time). Basically, Flash is a ubiquitous open-standard with mature development tools and tons of 3rd-party partners. Silverlight is a quickly cobbled-together Flash clone with 1/10th the features, completely immature tools, and no 3rd-party support. The presenters gave me their cards, told me to call if I had questions, and gave me a list of tools that they recommended I use for the project.
It was very enlightening. They left me with the one final note that, in a year, their opinion may change as Silverlight matures. But based on the examples they gave me, there's just no reason for anyone to ever adopt Silverlight.
Going into the political aspects here... this is exactly what Microsoft does well - they clone something, pay people to adopt it, and use their gigantic Windows Update distribution system to put it on 90% of the desktops around the world. Flash's days will be numbered when we get to the point where Microsoft starts to introduce Flash compatibility. That's the embreace-extend-extingush approach, and we should run for the hills when that happens. It's too bad that Microsoft can't just compete by using the open standard instead of flooding the market with an incompatible clone and cramming it down people's throats.
So THAT'S why they started cracking down on mod chips. I know about 2 dozen people with DS mod chips who turned their DS's into a PDA/VOIP Phone/Media player/etc. It's absurd that they spend money in one country developing a product, then spend money in another country stopping the equivalent product from hitting the market. But now it makes sense -- they probably fear that by opening this line of communication between the Wii and the DS will make it easier for the mod chip makers to become mass pirates. If download ability is there, it suddenly becomes much simpler to download/upload games without requiring leet hacker skills.
That's not true. I own the PC Magazine issue, from just a few months ago, where they reviewed the MacBook Pro and gave it thier Editor's Choice award for best mainstream laptop. It is why I just bought one.
Is it not that hard to imagine that WalMart sold a piece of crap computer with Linux pre-loaded to keep the costs down.
The additional market for CFLs that this will generate will create consumer demand for CFLs with as identical a color spectrum as physically possible to an incandescent bulb. Sounds nice, but economics works the other way around. If the color of the bulb is a barrier to entry, then the manufacturers no longer have an incentive to eliminate that barrier. People will be forced to buy CFLs even if they don't like the color, so the incentive is gone.
Realistically, these forces will probably balance out. The demand is there either way, and there is sufficient R&D dollars to go into this already, and such bulbs are really already available, just not at reasonable prices yet. But don't make the mistaken assumption that government intervention is likely to improve the quality of the market.
it actually increases the amount of energy coming in to the Earth. That's what I used to think, but it turns out not to be a significant amount of energy. It's far less than the amount of heat trapped by the resulting CO2 form burning oil. It's isn't about the production of heat as much as it is about the trapping of heat.
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I have an ICQ account. I've never received spam on it. I have it set to accept IM's only from people on my contact list, so maybe they are coming-in, but I can't see them. That seems like a sane policy. And I don't get any invite-spam either, because I don't think invites work at all.
It sounds like you are using a really crappy ICQ client if it allows random people to send you IM's.
I think this is a non-issue because invites just aren't used any more. I'm not even certain that the modern clients support them.
Instead, you email a friend with your IM contact info: they add you, you add them, and now you can both IM each other. No invites required, no spim. I've been using IM for 5+ years and I've never received a single spam of any kind. And I've never used invites, or received one.
I agree with you when you say the actual teaching of I.D. is not relevant. But what is relevant is the general scientific attitude behind the areas of the country where those things are being taught. The issue isn't I.D., but the fact that we are raising a generation of children who are not capable of making the distinction between science and religion. And this is a symptom of a generation of parents who have the same problem. So we are already one full generation into the cycle, and we now see the cycle continuing.
It is terrible when I hear things like "Well, evolution is only a theory..." as though that meant something. Gravity is just a theory too but we teach that. And Creationism is not a theory at all. Not understanding the difference between fact, theory, and ideology is going to hurt these kids.
But it is much harder to do certain effects this way. Ray tracing gives free per-pixel lighting, shadowing, reflections, and radiosity with minimal or no added work on the part of the developer. Tto do that same on today's cards the programmer must master a whole series of mathematical and psychological tricks and shortcuts to fake-out the apperance of those same things, then implement those in some funky assembly language for the video card.
Lots of laptops have this problem. My Macbook Pro has it, and I know of some friends with plastic laptops that have it too.
Darmack and Gillard at Tenagra! Shaka, when the walls fell.
They can get around the analog hole: they can make everything digital. Today, that might seem insane, but it could happen several ways. Legislation would be one: and under the current knee-jerk anti-terrorism environment, they could claim it would allow the government to spy on people more easily, and that it would deter terrorists from profiting off of piracy. Another way would just be to form a consortium of electronics companies and step-on anyone who doesn't join. For example, how easily can one get a region-free DVD player in the US? Or how about one that lets you skipt he FBI warning? Those types of things are there because anyone who doesn't follow the rules doesn't get CSS and MPEG-4 licenses. So they've already proven that they can get away with delivering what the consumer doesn't want. If Americans were given the choice of boycotting their music and TV, or getting screwed -- they'll choose to get screwed, because they will go without eting before they go without TV or music.
This article is entirely speculation. The only source it links to is an article that was not printed, and the link points to a 404 page.
Then it sounds like you've heard about the phony thing that the lobbyists are calling network neutrality. I find this to happen so often I wrote an article about the Myths of network neutrality.
Your second paragraph sums-up most of the myths quite well. AT&T etc. say that network neutrality proponents want a system where everyone pays the exact same amount, and nobody can pay for higher levels of service. That's not true at all. They are trying to redefine network neutrality to make it look bad. What they are basing that on is the fact that network neutrality propoonents want to make it illegal to artificially delay one person's network packets in favor of someone else's. Allow me to give a specific example:
Scenario 1:
I want 1MBps down/1MBps up. So I pay $10/month.
My neighbor wants 10Mbps down/1MBps per month. So he pays $40/month.
Google wants 1000MBps down/1000MBps up. So they pay $10,000/month.
This is totally fine and network neutral. Nobody has a problem with that. AT&T/Verizon/etc. want to make it out that network neutrality prevents that. It does not.
Scenario 2:
The pipe for my street is a 10MBps up/down pipe.
My neighbor wants 10 MBps down.
I want 10MBps down.
I call the phone company and say I'm only getting 5MBps most of the time. So they offer to make my packets higher priority over my neighbor. So my neighbor now gets 1MBps if I'm downloading a file at 9MBps. So he calls and complains, and gets the level 2 priority as well. So now we are both back to 5MBps. So I call and get level 3 priority, and so on and so forth. This is not network neutral. IF the phone company wants to change their TOS to say that the "PEAK" is 10MBps, and the total shared is 10MBPS that's fine. And if I call and say I want more bandwidth, they can say "oh, we can do that, but we have to upgrade the trunk like so that will cost you." That's totally fair and neutral.
This game isn't new. When caller ID came-out, they charged for a code that disabled caller id on outgoing calls. Then they charged for special caller-id units that displayed the caller information even if it was blocked. So then they sold stuff that blocks calls from non-caller-id phones. Then they sold codes that get around the blocks. etc. etc. They never provided any new services ever -- they just pitted their customers against each other and sld phony pseudo-services.
IMHO, the FTC should ban such a practice. All it will do is make the phone companies richer, and they won't have to upgrade their trunk service anymore, they can just re-sell the same bandwidth over and over again.
...bringing together lawyers, academics, economists, and technologists... Those people represent the pro-network neutrality side. Now, please invite the CEO of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast as well, so we can get the view of all 3 people on the other side.Not all "strange" computer keyboards need to be innovative technologies.
The MacBook Pro keyboard is weird enough to qualify. Backspace is called delete, there's two enter keys, and no delete key. Less odd, but still strange, are the eject button, missing print screen, and swapped "apple/windows" and alt keys. And this isn't an anti-mac rant or anything (since I am typing on my Macbook Pro now) but this keyboard is neither Macintosh "standard" or Windows "standard" - It's just odd.
Thanks for the background.
Even in light of that, it sounds to me like someone is trying to twist the meanings of words. Lay-people will read this and think about "file sharing" instead of "copyright infringement" much like if I had an article about "walking around town" being illegal, but really I meant it in the context of walking around town while selling illegal drugs on the streets. Even if everyone understood that, it is a method that can be used to apply the connotation of one thing onto another. Pretty soon, you should expect to hear people talking about how file sharing is illegal, or should be illegal, or how they are glad that a law is being passed to make file sharing legal even though it already is. It really sounds like a setup to me.
Wait... is file sharing illegal in Sweden? I didn't know any governments that ban file sharing. I share files all the time with people via my web site, email, IM, FTP, and bittorrent. In the U.S. none of these things are illegal. However, in most countries, copyright infringement is illegal. It sounds to me like the entire article confuses the terms "file sharing" with "copyright infringement" which sounds like a form of doublespeak to me.
This useless comment is just so I can undo a moderation where it looks like I selected the wrong item from the drop-down list. Doh! Stupid scroll wheel!
I see lots of comments about how old code is solid and reliable and should not be refactored. This group must be working in a very different environment than the ones I am accustomed too. All too often, I come into a project where the same bugs keep re-asserting their heads over and over again, and they keep getting fixed over and over again. Usually, it is because the original code contains some routines that were copied and pasted over and over again, and by refactoring you take the best block of code and re-use it. The result is smaller, more readable, and less error-prone.
The phone companies fought hard to get the FCC to say that internet service is not a common carrier service. That means that the phone companies can do all kinds of strange things like not providing service equally, or modifying and inserting packets on the network, or charging unequally, or charging for priority packets, or inserting ads... The price they pay for that ability is they are now liable for what goes over their networks. They are liable for hate speech, libel, slander, sedition, treason, and copyright infringement. The common-carrier laws were established to prevent this can of worms, and it is why AT&T does not have to filter your phone conversations and why UPS doesn't have to inspect packages for copyright infringement. They dug themselves this hole, and it is to the great detriment of themselves and their customers. I highly doubt that they can profit enough by changing ads on web pages and charging to re-prioritize traffic, to make up for the legal and ethical costs.
Basically, AT&T should give-in no and start asking the FCC to make them common carriers so they can stop this nonsense, before the real disaster hits.
You are right that it would be more efficient, but it is harder to roll out and more environmentally damaging. I really don't like the idea of having thousands of square miles of land covered in solar panels when I could have every roof on the planet covered. The things really aren't that hard to maintain. There's also political benefits - Imagine a world with very few power companies, because everyone can produce their own. It also means that people who think this is a good idea now can just do it for themselves, no need to wait for the politicians and the big business people to come to an agreement over land and subsidies. Just let the people start installing them on their own roofs.
I see lots of posts decrying both Java and C, for different reasons. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Teaching only Java yields students who do not understand pointers, or assembly, or optimizations, or any low-level thinking. Teaching C is abhorently difficult because there are too many stumbling blocks and subtle things that can go wrong.
It seems to me that the ideal solution would be to teach a C-like language that didn't have certain stupidities. For example: printf("%s", 5) results in a memory dump of whatever is at address 5, up until the next 0 byte. (Notice "d" is next to "s" on the keyboard). It's a great learning experinence, it's important that they see and understand that the computer is doing exactly what it was told to do. And there's nothing wrong with an efficient language that skips bounds-checking and allows pointer arithmetic. But that is too subtle of an error for a programmer to understand on day 1. So it would be nice to have a beginner version of C that instead displays "5 is not a string" or something like that. It would help students and teachers get over the hump and into the real business of what they are doing, then switch to the more powerful language after they get their feet wet.
I thought there were lots of 3rd-party Flash players for Linux? Am I incorrect? I know of deveopers who use embedded flash, and they have several Flash engines. And I thought there was at least one open-source player implementation. (Not that I know the difference between Flash 5,6,7,8, or 9. Same thing to me. Are they breaking compatibility?) Maybe Silverlight is good then - it will keep Adobe from doing crap like that.
I just bought a MacBook Pro, and half the allure of OS X is that instead of dual-booting Windows / Linux, I can dual-boot Windows / OS X. OS X is like Linux++ for me. It's like every Linux distro I've ever used, but with a usable and consistent GUI layer on top of it.
I went to a presentation on Silverlight hosted by a local MSDN users group. From what I can tell, Microsoft made a donation to a non-profit, and earmarked the money to go to a MS partner who would redo their existing (and very dated) Flash site in Silverlight. At the end of the presentation, I talked to the presenters about a Silverlight project that my employer was considering. The response I got from both Microsoft Gold partners was "Don't use Silverlight!!!!" They went on to explain how anything that Silverlight can do, Flash can do better in terms of both final result, and development time. (They were using Flash 1.1 beta at the time). Basically, Flash is a ubiquitous open-standard with mature development tools and tons of 3rd-party partners. Silverlight is a quickly cobbled-together Flash clone with 1/10th the features, completely immature tools, and no 3rd-party support. The presenters gave me their cards, told me to call if I had questions, and gave me a list of tools that they recommended I use for the project.
It was very enlightening. They left me with the one final note that, in a year, their opinion may change as Silverlight matures. But based on the examples they gave me, there's just no reason for anyone to ever adopt Silverlight.
Going into the political aspects here... this is exactly what Microsoft does well - they clone something, pay people to adopt it, and use their gigantic Windows Update distribution system to put it on 90% of the desktops around the world. Flash's days will be numbered when we get to the point where Microsoft starts to introduce Flash compatibility. That's the embreace-extend-extingush approach, and we should run for the hills when that happens. It's too bad that Microsoft can't just compete by using the open standard instead of flooding the market with an incompatible clone and cramming it down people's throats.
So THAT'S why they started cracking down on mod chips. I know about 2 dozen people with DS mod chips who turned their DS's into a PDA/VOIP Phone/Media player/etc. It's absurd that they spend money in one country developing a product, then spend money in another country stopping the equivalent product from hitting the market. But now it makes sense -- they probably fear that by opening this line of communication between the Wii and the DS will make it easier for the mod chip makers to become mass pirates. If download ability is there, it suddenly becomes much simpler to download/upload games without requiring leet hacker skills.
That's not true. I own the PC Magazine issue, from just a few months ago, where they reviewed the MacBook Pro and gave it thier Editor's Choice award for best mainstream laptop. It is why I just bought one.
Is it not that hard to imagine that WalMart sold a piece of crap computer with Linux pre-loaded to keep the costs down.
Realistically, these forces will probably balance out. The demand is there either way, and there is sufficient R&D dollars to go into this already, and such bulbs are really already available, just not at reasonable prices yet. But don't make the mistaken assumption that government intervention is likely to improve the quality of the market.