The JVC unit also has analog component video outputs, allowing 1080i playback on all existing HDTV's. This capability is one that Hollywood has been threatening to disable in HD receivers (block the "Analog Hole").
So they want your receiver to be able to receive 1080i movies, they just don't want it to actually output them?
Finally, Hollywood is coming to understand the only possible solution for the problem of illegal copying of copyrighted media. A box with no outputs at all.
... is the only truly well-commented code. Literate programming was invented by Knuth. If you don't know who Knuth is: he's the author of the definitive CS work called "The Art of Computer Programming". Ask any of your friends who actually studied computer science about it.
Knuth wrote more than books. For example, he wrote the typesetting program, TeX which is to this very day the most popular way academics in the CS field employ to write their papers (especially using a macro package called LaTex). He just wasn't satisfied with the available ways to write mathematical books at the time (early 80s). He had a good reason - you can see the difference in quality between it and anything else - especially Word (Ugh).
To ensure you'll have the right idea about the quality of his work, note he's actually sending people checks when they find a bug in his books or his code. Of course people tend to frame them rather than cache them:-). Also note that nobody has managed to obtain such a check for a long time.
So, what is literate programming anyway? Instead of inventing yet another definition, here's a pretty good definition which you can find in the site, together with many others:
Marc van Leeuwen. "Requirements for Literate Programming" in CWEBx Manual, pg. 3-4.
The basic idea of literate programming is to take a fundamentally different starting point for the presentation of programs to human readers, without any direct effect on the program as seen by the computer. Rather than to present the program in the form in which it will be compiled (or executed), and to intercalate comments to help humans understand what is going on (and which the compiler will kindly ignore), the presentation focuses on explaining to humans the design and construction of the program, while pieces of actual program code are inserted to make the description precise and to tell the computer what it should do. The program description should describe parts of the algorithm as they occur in the design process, rather than in the completed program text. For reasons of maintainability it is essential however that the program description defines the actual program text; if this were defined in a separate source document, then inconsistencies would be almost impossible to prevent. If programs are written in a way that concentrates on explaining their design to human readers, then they can be considered as works of (technical) literature; it is for this reason that Knuth has named this style of software construction and description "literate programming".
Does it work in practice? All I can say is that I have used it in a real-world project with great success. The main downsides to it, and this applies to any type of documentation, is that it takes up-front time (even if it does save time later), and that you need to employ people with some measure of writing ability. It is surprising how many people can code well, but are hard-pressed to write coherent, readable description of their code. Especially if you write your documentation in English and the programmer's native language is Hebrew or Russian:-(
Oh, and it also is hard to do in IDEs like Visual Studio. And you won't learn about it in your university, never mind your VB in 3 days course. Just like design by contract and many other techniques, the problem isn't that humanity doesn't know how to write software well - it is that humanity doesn't want to.
For a simple reason. A world where every digital-to-analog device contains strong encryption (to enforce copyright) is a world where any fanatic, terrorist or plain nut can use the same strong encryption for secure communications with his allies.
No way the goverment would go for this. In fact, I think this is the *only* reason it hasn't happened until now. We should be thankful for the NSA for fighting commercial encryption tooth and nail. They have given us at least a decade of encryption-free hardware.
If it weren't for them, companies would have taken notice of the potential of having encryption built into sound cards, digital TV sets, etc. Even into codecs such as MP3 (shudder). And people would have gone for it, because it would have been packaged together with the amazing improvement in quality offered through that decade.
What happened instead is that the commercial world is only now becoming aware of this, and is hampered by the huge installed base of unencrypted hardware and by the fact that (at least in audio) no significant improvement in quality can be offered to bait the hook.
That's why they are focusing on video, where there's no such installed base and the quality improvement is still possible.
Of course, it is as easy for a terrorist to send a video clip to his partner as it is to send a audio segment or a text file, so I'm counting on the NSA to block them there as well. If they manage to stall this for another decade, this whole issue would blow over and "content protection" would become completely irrelevant.
Who would have thought the the NSA would become *THE* champion of consumer rights, freedom, and privacy...
I once (around 90) worked in a place that ordered a Convex min-super-computer. This monster was two boxes each larger than a large refrigerator and cost about.25M$. At any rate... The happy day arived and a truck delivered a single crate to the yard before our offices. No way this monster could have been fallen in shipping, the crate was about the size of three large refrigerators, with a generous base, and was heavy as, well, as only something like this can be. Did I mention our offices were at the second floor? Now, we had some mobile cranes we used to lift stacks of maps (think lifting about one ton of paper at a time). And miraculously, our computer room was adjacent to a room by the external wall that had two *large* external metal doors (I have no idea why. Maybe it was a storage area). So, we got one of these cranes and tried to lift the crate. The crane whined and complained and got it about half a meter too low when it became obvious that if we push it any further we'll be smashing a quarter of a million dollars to the pavement. The next morning (luckily it didn't rain that night) a big truck with a huge crane arrived to do the lifting. Did I mention that our offices face an internal yard, the entrance to which is, well, "not generous"? It is sufficient to say that about noon the truck was finally in place. It lifted the crate easy as you please, inserted it into the large, gaping opening made by the two doors and landed it on the floor as gently as a petal dropping from a flower. It took all of 5 minutes. I did say this was the room *next* to the computer room. And it isn't as though the crate had any wheels. Moving it was out of the question. So we took it apart. About two hours later we were done. This thing was built *solid*. I mean, the computers were even bolted to the base with huge screwes that were only reachable from underneath (don't ask). Now, the computer was actually in two pieces, each somewhat larger than a large fridge. And much heavier. Consider that most of an average fridge is air, and most of the computer was plastic and metal. Solid, heavy, serious metal. Did I mention that our computer room had a floating floor that was raised by 30cm from the floor of the other rooms around it? And that its door was just a bit too narrow to let this monster through? And that it had, well, *computers* in it? So we made place there (this was done while dismantling the box) by disconnecting the computers at the entrance and clearing the path (just 2m) for the monster to reach its designated place. We then dismantled the door and someone found some wooden wedge we could use as a ramp. It had a slope of about 1/3. The computer did have wheels, so about 10 of us took each part in turn and heaved it up that slope. Did I mention the computer room entrance was at one side so we had to turn it as it was going in? Have you seen the archeologists concept of how blocks were raised to build pyramids? This was just this way except it was *cramped* and the "walls" were worth an annual salary per meter. We got it in place by late afternoon. Then reconnected all the computers we moved, put the door back in place, and collapsed. The next day a guy came from Convex to "actually install" the bloody thing. Took him all of half an hour to get it up and running, self-tested, connected to the network, etc. It worked without a hitch for years after that. I wasn't around when the time came to get it out of that room, almost a decade later. I wouldn't be surprised to hear they just threw it out of those doors...
Sending bits back in time
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Time Travel
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· Score: 1
Notice that he's talking about sending back in time - probably a very short period back - of just one subatomic particle. This doesn't require harnessing the insane amounts of energy, or the degree of fine control, required to transport something like a living human.
And relativity does allow for it. It would be a very interesting experiment. If it doesn't work even though it "should", it would have profound impact on physics.
And if it does work, well, imagine being able to send just a few bits abck in time. Like "don't eat the Salmon!":-)
As for breaking causality is harder then you might expect. As long as the same bits are sent back in time, it doesn't matter that nobody died from eating the salmon... But the bits need to be sent back anyway.
Robert L. Forward's book "Timemaster" explains it saying that once something has traveled back in time, improbable events become probable to ensure the same thing does indeed get sent back in time... I understand that reflects at least some physicists understanding of how time travel can work in practice.
The first thing which drives me nuts is that news (usenet) readers and mail readers are completely saparate. Sure, at times they are both integrated into the same product, but they are still conceptually separate. What is so hard to understand in the following statement: being subscribed to a mailing list and tracking a usenet group should be *exactly the same*. And yes, Virginia, even normal E-mail "folders" *need to support threads*. Sigh.
The second thing is having to sort messages to "folders". I'd much rather be able to assign keywords to each message - multiple, independent keywords, both automatically using rules and manually when I read the message - and then view "virtual folders" based on queries on these keywords. Nothing ground breaking here... but I suspect it would take another 10 years until it would become mainstream. Ugh.
My final problem is that my work environment is based on Exchange's calendar so I'm stuck with using Outlook, so I'll die of old age before I see any of this, even if it does get into open-source viewers. Arrgghh!
Actually, if they were doing Amber as a series - *long* series - it could work, *with continuity*. The trick is to treat it in the spirit it was written. A *soap opera*.
Think about it... what other type of production faithfully captures the endless bizantine plots, discoveries, shifting coalitions, dramatic situations with sex and/or violance, mysterious relatives popping up from nowhere (and disappearing at the same speed) around the same core *family*? Go on and on and on and on with variations on the same theme?
I can imagine the little blurbs in the guide... "Chapter 117: Corwin impersonates father and discovers that his grandfather is the mad scientist and his grandmother is a single-horned goat.". Admit it, that's *classic* soap opera.
Alas, since it would be produced by the SF channel, it will turn into a "Lord of the Rings" wannabe. Sigh. I guess it will have to stay as another classic "could have been", like "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" done by the Monty Python group.
Imagine Amber as a 2-hour mini-series. It is enough to cover the first *book*, maybe. If anyone had the feeling that Lord of the Rings was rushed, this will be ten times worse.
Then 'Forever War'. One word: Battlesuits. Certainly the special effects technology is up to showing them... but *you can't see the actor's face* in a battlesuit. My bet is they'll throw away any part the book which doesn't relate to combat action, and botch that by throwing away the suits. Result: a 'Starship Troopers' clone. Enough Said.
WHY can't the movie industry *build* on the great SF out there? Imagine "Snow Crash" done with the technology used for "Final Fantasy". Imagine Lord of the Rings as a *series* - say, 5 hours for each book. Imagine a production of "Bridge of Birds" on the same lines as "Princes Bride". I could go on for *hours*.
Maybe "we" ("the guild of paying movie-goers and ad-watchers") don't deserve any better. Even when a good production gets made (by accident or thanks to the courage of some producer), it tends to be a commercial flop.
Take for example the animation move done based on "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle. Can you believe it? serious fantasy, in animation, not targeted at kids! In a word: a flop. You probably never even heard of it, but trust me, you won't regret seeing it, even if you've read the book.
BOOK. That's the answer, *read a good book*. Come to think of it... it doesn't have ads, it costs very favorably compared to a movie ticket, and you don't need Tivo to time-shift it!
44GB of data on a single magnetic tape with digital format sounds like a great backup media to me. If it catches on as a consumer product, readers/writers and blank media would be dirt cheap (as opposed to things like DLT).
OK, the 140GB disks around the corner mean it wouldn't be a perfect solution, but it would still be a very attractive one.
I've no idea how to rank these in terms of strength, but all of these have a non-negligible effect on the number of children of a human in this day and age.
These factors simply prevent (or drastically reduce) the number of children. Note that these only apply until the age of 35 or so. After that one probably had enough children so evolutionary pressure is negligible.
In the "advanced" parts of the world:
- Avoiding a career ruling out children.
- Avoiding traffic accidents.
- Avoiding the use of drugs.
- Avoiding being sent to jail.
Note *these don't necessarily kill you*, they just make you have *less or no children*, a point missed by the article. The first reason is especially strong in this regard. People in the western world tend to have less children due to it... Many careers seems to give one increased income and a lower tendency to have 10 kids. The human race seems to be selecting against being "too successful" - there are many interesting implications here.
There is one wild card reason which is to the advantage of the "too successful" people:
- Access to expensive medical treatments.
(Yes, a 15 year old doesn't make enough money to make a difference, but his parent do and we are looking for genetic factors, so it counts).
Today money for medical treatments is almost a non-issue when it comes to evolutionary considerations. But in the future, if genetic enhancement of children becomes available, the few childrens which richer people do have may be artifically improved... which is another big issue the article is ignoring.
In the (very) long range this may be our only hope as a species... and, as usual, the greatest danger it has ever faced.
In the "not that advanced" parts of the world, the good old evolutionary pressures keep on going:
- Starvation.
- Disease.
- Violence.
It is interesting that the evolutionary pressure is so different in different parts of the world. People have been known to make a great deal of it, especially given the very real possibility of the genetic enhancement "wild card" being used by one part of the world while diseases still rule the other.
In short, I'd bet anything that humans 10,000 years from now would be significantly different than humans today (of course, they may all be dead:-). I'd give excellent odds that humans a mere 1,000 years from now would be measurably different (due to the genetic engineering wild card).
Is to appear in the just-announced 20th James Bond movie. It sets a new standard for "Bondishness" that will be hard to beat.
In fact it seems a bit too perfect for the job... I knew there's a Holywood job description of "find the next James Bond wild transport" - after all, someone there has found the
para-ski for the world is not enough.
But given how well this beast fits the bill, it seems they've upgraded the job description to "go build us one" and added a few 1M$ to the budget.
That's one really nice job (if you can get it). And it seems the money was well spent too.
So expect it to be "coming soon to a theater near you" - not in the parking lot, that is. Speaking of which, I wouldn't suggest parking anywhere near this beast, radar or no radar:-)
True, most of the time a good book just doesn't convert to a good movie. It tends to get worse if the director makes an extreme choice about consistency with the book - either inventing stuff out of thin air or religiously sticking to every detail in the book.
And if the movie is an animation, well, your best chance is to either read the book or see the movie; if you do both, you are bound to be disappointed.
However, in life there's an exception for every rule (in case you think that's impossible, this rule is its own exception:-). So, go read Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Unicorn". Then see the movie. Yes, its animated. It is also very faithful to the book. And they are both great.
This movie is also an exception in being a fantasy animation movie for grown-ups. As a rule such movies aren't a commercial success (especially if they don't contain much violence and/or sex). This rule, alas, the movie isn't an exception for:-)
At any rate, as this movie (and very few others) show, it is possible to do an accurate adaptation of a good book to a good movie. And even though Dune is harder then most books to do it for, I believe it is still possible.
I don't have any high hopes, though - the chances of the right kind of talent and work being applied to this project are as low as the humidity on Arakis at noon.
The bad news is that obviously something along these lines will work. That is, if you are willing to assign a public/private key to each and every display device in the world, and if you are careful about key management, you can get a system where everybody can view the content but nobody can copy it. Note that the decryption has to be in the display device itself - ideally, integrated into the Digital-to-Analog chip.
It may be that this specific scheme suffers from some flaws, but that's beside the point. The principle is sound. It can be done.
For a long time, what prevented this from hapenning was that by definition this places strong encryption at the hand of the people. Any would be evil person would be able to send data securely to his partner using consumer hardware. So the TLAs (NSA etc.) have killed any such notion in the past.
This exposes a dilema of the "free stuff" movement. For a long time it has pushed for allowing people to freely use encryption, against the aforementioned TLAs. It has killed notions of key escrow which would have made encryption palatable to these TLAs. At the same time, it had fought the right of the FLAs (RIAA, etc.) to use encryption for their purposes.
Now, so far this movement was successful. It has brought us both PGP and Napster. But this double success can't last; a double standard rarely can. After all, if "information wants to be free", it should apply to your shopping history as well as to the digital copy of the Matrix. It is silly, or hypocritical, to claim you can/should protect one but not the other.
Allowing everyone to use strong encryption allows for content control schemes.
So, here's the choice. Either fight encryption tooth and nail - "information wants to be free" - give up privacy, and end up with something like David Brin's "transparent society"; or fight for encryption, protect your privacy, and give up on content control.
Bad choice, you say. Well, here's what will happen if we don't choose one and actively fight for it: we'll lose both our privacy and content control (e.g., by key escrow, but there are many other ways).
Personally, I'd rather protect my privacy. Let them build an RSA engine into their D2A chips. Market forces will keep the price of "The Matrix" at a tolerable level, and a lot of micro-payment systems are possible if strong encryption is massively available. It will be a strugle to ensure that consumer privacy is maintained, but this is possible.
The alternative, IMVHO, is worse. First, it isn't very consistent; "information wants to be free" - except for encryption information. Yeah, right. Second, there's no bound on the abuse large organizations (e.g., goverments) will inflict on people given the chance (and zero privacy allows them to do almost anything they want).
I'd love to see an open-source project for a standard, strong system for content control which also ensures privacy. If we do it we'll know it is done right, and if we join the FLAs we'll be able to beat the TLAs. Otherwise, we risk them joining forces. We'll really regret that.
That is, to publish an algorithm it is common to cast it in the form of working code which is made available as an attachment to the academic article. The article by itself is of little value without the attached code - or at least, of greatly reduced value to other researchers.
Now, presumably, such academic articles are "expressive", and given that program code is a vital part of such articles, it must be "expressive" as well.
Then again, perhaps it is only the article which is "expressive" and the code merely "adds value". Lawyers live in a strange world... (obviously, IANAL).
The whole question of whether anything is "expressive" seems strange to me. "Everything communicates" - everything man-made, that is. Whenever there's choice involved in something, there's "expression" of the "opinion" of which choice is better; and since there's no human activity which can only be done in exactly one way (I can't think of anything off hand), it seems that "everything is expressive".
Of course, if you are willing to limit the law to apply to certain types of "expression", that's something else. "Expressing" technical elegance and "expressing" political opinion are pretty far apart...
It is about time someone tried something along these lines. Assume that we put *all* known math proofs into a single database. Imagine what a power tool that would be for mathematicians! (well, once they get used to the idea:-)
- It would allow you to really check your new earth-shattering proof. No more working on one for years, presenting it to the world to great acclaim, and withdrawing it a year later because somebody finds that tiny flaw (as has happened to one of the Ferma's proofs). Instead, just feed in your result to the database, hit "verify", and presto! a clear yes/no answer (and a pointer to the problem step in the proof if its a "no"). Keep in mind *verifying* a proof is trivial work for a computer - it is coming up with one which takes genius.
- It would also make it easier for you to construct new proofs. The computer would be able to automate much of the "dirty work" involved. Yes, math is an art but even in the most inspired proof you have to laboriously construct proof steps which are "obvious", boring, and vital (for ensuring the proof does indeed work). A computer would be able to fill these in for you, using a not-that-bright theorem prover. Everyone doubting the usefulness of this should ask grad math students about the assignments they get from their professors - physicists too, coming to think of it:-)
- You could also use spare CPU cycles globally to look for proofs for interesting theorems - something along the lines of the seti@home project. Brute force *does* work, if you have enough of it... and, of course, it would give the AI people a wonderful playground for trying out their stuff. This is a much tougher problem then chess - but a much more useful one to solve.
Of course, it would be a whale of a project. It would take some serious commitment from math departments... So the best way is to start with some specific sub-field of math, which the Metamath people have done. Moaning that this isn't "all math" yet, or that it isn't "the most important part of math", is silly. You have to start somewhere. Their web site states they are already expanding the project to other fields.
Actually the maximal they list is 6.5, but that's close enough. The specs refer to vertical distance, anyway; I suspect making a seven foot forward leap with these should be possible.
At any rate, you do _not_ want to use seven leage boots. After all we are talking about a device whose main purpose is to position your feet seven leages apart... Ouch!
Anyone has an idea how they are going to handle the resulting anti-Hydrogen? I know there are devices which can hold just anti-protons for a long time using magnetic fields, but how would you prevent anti-Hydrogen from touching normal matter? AFAIK, (anti-)Hydrogen isn't even magnetic.
I also wonder what their efficiency is (energy invested vs. energy captured in the anti-matter). Anti-matter is very useful (Robert L. Forward lists examples in his book "Indistinguishable from Magic").
And for anyone worried they'll make bombs out of it, don't. We haven't reached the limit on the size of an H-bomb yet (assuming there is one. Think "the sun":-) Fusion is already an overkill for any "practical" purpose anyway. So what if they manage to replicate the same bomb power using another technology? Who would you use it against, anyway?
On the other hand, if we could build those super-efficient rockets...
On Linux (or any UNIX, really), you get the benefits of tools written by programmers for programmers. With a choice between several high-quality competings tools. For free. And if the best one is just close to what you need, well, being a programmer and given the source, you can make it into exactly what you need.
Take for example Aegis. Find me a tool like that for Windows which costs less then 1000$ per seat. Or compare the editing power of UNIX editors to the pitiful editor built into most IDEs - not to mention their brain dead build process (BTW, both Emacs and VI can and are commonly used as a UNIX "IDE" to great effect). It goes without saying that you can't replace your IDE's editor or build process, even if you are willing to pay.
Sure, UNIX developement tools are harder to learn (they are not harder to use). But one can hardly claim to be a serious professional and dismiss the UNIX tools as too hard to use. These tools simply assume a power user - one willing to invesrt the extra effort to get the (large) additional benefits. That's what being a professional programmer is all about.
Why is there an issue with taxing Internet commerce in the first place? That is, in what way is taxing Internet orders different then taxing mail catalog orders?
The ordering method is the same: I pick up the phone - literaly - and contact a seller in another city, state or country, placing some order.
Delivery method is the same: mail, FedEx, UPS, etc.
Payment method is the same: credit card, money transfer, etc.
Location issues are the same: the seller's phone number (or web site) is just a contact point; the actual warehouse might be elsewhere, the ultimate source of the goods in a third place, and of course the client can be anywhere.
IANAL, but it seems to me that "Internet order == mail order" for any tax purpose. Isn't this what happens already?
I have both catalog-ordered and Internet-ordered things from the USA to Israel and didn't percieve any difference... And I don't see how one could enforce any such difference, anyway.
It is trivial to convert one form to another. Specify significantly different taxing rules and you'll end up with people paying the lesser tax for each individual case.
I can smell a multi-million startup opportunity here: "convert your Internet order to a catalog order by using LessTax.com services!":-) Actually, the fact that there's no such reverse service - "convert your catalog order to an Internet one" is a good indication that the Internet is not given significant tax breaks over mail catalogs.
In short, the whole thing seems silly. Don't all these legislators have something better to do with their time? Say, trying to figure out how to say one is allowed to write software VCRs but not software DVD players, or something?:-)
Thinking of "Knowledge as asset" got me thinking that there's a new way of looking at open source vs. proprietary software.
Control over a proprietary platform allows a company to control the value of all knowledge related to this platform. This means it can increase its own internal knowledge value and decrease the value of all other companies knowledge by constantly (and needlessly) modifying the platform. The knowledge of people inside the company, who actually design the modifications, will be more valuable then the knowledge of people outside who have to wait for them to be released, and would not be part of their design.
Open source, on the other hand, acts as an equalizer. It is difficult for any group to devalue the knowledge of other groups, since all developement is open. If any improvement to the code is made, it is true the developer will have an advantage; but given that even the design process is open, this advantage would be small.
So there's another incentive for companies to make proprietary software unstable. Besides the usual ones - cheaper and faster development, forcing users to upgrade often - there's a secondary one, devaluating the knowledge of all potentially competing developers.
Call it "knowledge inflation". The company creates more and more knowledge internally, just like a goverment prints more and more money. In both cases, the effect is similar - devaluating it, in effect imposing a tax on anyone without direct access to the printing press.
We all know how well Microsoft played this game... And many are worried that Sun will try to do the same with Java. In fact, every company trying to control a public standard is playing this game.
Sticking with open source is like sticking with a "gold standard" - there's no way someone can devalue it, barring producing a lot more gold - that is, a lot more open source code.
I wonder how far one can push this analogy. Do competeing platforms behave like different currencies? Can one compute an "interest rate:-)" on knowledge value?
Specify that the company requesting the patent has to keep it secret for a period X in order to get a patent for a period of 10*X. If the same invention is made independently by another party during the initial secrecy period, the patent is deemed "obvious" and is canceled.
Why is this good? Because, for a truly non-obvious patent, a company would be willing to sit on it for a year or two to get a 10 - 20 year patent, safe in the knowledge that it won't be rediscovered. RSA is a good example of a software patent where the inventors would have little reason to fear independent discovery. I have no problem with something of this caliber being granted a 10 or 20 year patent.
On the other hand, a company which comes up with something like one-click ordering would sit on it for just a month or so, getting a one or two year patent. That minimizes the damage the company can do with "obvious" patents.
The beauty of the scheme is that it is self-adjusting. In mature, static fields, where each new invention requires real innovation, patents would be granted for a long period of time. In dynamic, chaotic fields, where inventions are a dime a dozen, patents would be granted for a short period of time. Either way, the patent time would be in sync with the "technology generation time" of the field in question, automatically.
Not that I believe for a second that there's any chance of the patent law being changed this way:-(
Voice recognition is useful for a PDA
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Voice-Op Linux PDA
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· Score: 4
I don't grok the objections people raise to voice recognition. Sure, a keyboard is a better interface for VI and a mouse is a better interface for GIMP. So?
The killer applications for a PDA are the contact info, schedule, and memos - in general, maintaining a database made of records with a small amount of data in each field. Short messaging (integrated with E-mail) too, I guess - still small amount of data. Everything else is bells and whistles. People do not write long texts on a PDA - they use laptops, or at least buy one of the nifty folding keyboards for their PDA. People do not run GIMP on a PDA.
For these killer apps, a voice API is great: "show today's schedule". "new meeting, March 14th, at 10, with L&H". "new memo: buy milk for santa". "new expense: the L&H account, 112$, business lunch". "show contact Joe". "Message to Jane: Lunch at 2?".
I'd expect you'll need to push a button to make the PDA listen - I wouldn't like one which listens all the time (it might make sense for a desktop system but not for a PDA). I also expect you'd still have a touch-sensitive display, and be able to use a stylus for menu navigation and writing. Just like desktop systems did not give up the keyboard when they got the mouse!
Something like the "Itsy" would be perfect for the above. Take my REX-PRO and add handwriting recognition like the Palm's and voice recognition like the above and you end up with the perfect PDA. The only possible improvement would be integrating it with a cellular phone, or maybe with a holographic projector:-)
Obviously working on the voice UI would take a lot of effort to get right. I predict the initial offering - by L&H or whoever - will flop like the Newton, to be followed by a Palm-like successor which would get it right.
And both L&H and Compaq know this. Thats why they are both using Linux; writing a voice UI that works is a classical open source "itch to scratch". They'll be able to obsolete the first generation software and replace it with a second open-sourced generation - while maintaining the same hardware platform, escaping the Newton's fate. Good move for them, good move for us, bad news for Microsoft:-)
This is just a guess - I've no special access to the "media companies" decision making process. But it seems to me that we've got to thank all the anti-crypto agencies for saving us from the more severe forms of copy protection.
Consider the ideal copy protection. The data on the DVD is strongly encrypted. The player has some protected hardware which is able to access the encrypted media, and decrypt it. It never sends out the bits in clear text, though.
The display device (monitor, or maybe just the video card) also has protected hardware. The player and display negotiate a key (using a zero-knowledge protocol) and the data between them is exchanged encrypted using this key.
This means you can only play the media on a certified player and using a certified display device. You'll never have access to the unencrypted bits; sniffing the trafic between player and display device gives you nothing.
You can physically replicate the media, right, but a certified home writer would insist on taking unencrypted movies and encrypting them before writing to the media. No way you could replicate movies this way, but you could burn your own DVD of the last ski trip.
Everyone could build a factory which replicates media, but there's no helping that. This is a whole separate issue - it is more international politics then technical difficulties.
This does not prevent anyone from providing other forms of media (e.g., a large hard disk) which are large enough to store the movies. But you'll never be able to play a copy of an encrypted movie of such media; the data is encrypted and only a certified player will decrypt it. And no such player will read from a hard disk.
The up side is that you'd be able to play such media on Linux or other open-source systems. It is just a matter of drivers, all the encryption is in hardware. The down side is that you'll never be able to make a backup copy. Seems a perfect tradeoff for an industry which want to sell more movies then players...
So why don't they do it? Besides the cost of something like a smart card in both the player and the display device, that is?
Imagine a would-be terrorist in Iraq, burning a DVD with a video message to his partner in the USA. He just has to hook up his computer with the Panasonic player to the internet, and have it talk with his partner's computer with the Diamond display card. Instant secure communication. And that's before considering him taking apart the players and using the smart cards directly...
This keeps the NSA awake at nights. Of course, the possibility that the same terrorist would use PGP instead doesn't cross their minds. Sigh.
Thanks to such far sightedness, we get both PGP to encrypt our E-mails and DVDs with encryption which one must break to play on Linux (which seems fair use under current law) - hence, in effect, no encryption at all. So we have secure E-mail and can make backup copies of our DVDs. The best of all possible worlds! (Given a favorable court ruling, that is).
One day they'll notice the HDTV spec requires broadcasting the movies in unencrypted digital format which puts DVDs to shame. Imagine a TiVo like system for HDTV... The fuss they make over DeCss would be mild by comparison. Why do you think they flatly refuse to define a standard for sending HDTV over cable?
I know, I'm giving the "bad guys" ideas, so I'd better stop now:-) I really pity them, though. Being squeezed by the NSA on the one hand and by the open source movement on the other, how can they do anything else but lose?
I had two books with me on basic training - "Catch-22" and "The brave soldier Shveck (sp? Mine was in Hebrew, the original is "Svejka")". Not that I had time to read them, you understand, but knowing they were there was a great comfort and kept me sane through these grueling three months.
Actually there was one saturday we had a few hours off; I got a wheelbarrow from somewhere, dumped a mattres over it so it looked somewhat like a lawn comfort chair, got a cool drink and was reading Catch-22 in the sun, happy as only an idle trainee can be, when the sargent walked by. I was the perfect image of a tourist reading by a pool - minus the pool (but shorts, sun tan lotion and sun glasses included).
He passed me, walked back, passed me again, and just couldn't make up his mind what to do with me. I obviously wasn't showing the right spirit, but I obviously wasn't doing anything against regulation, either. Poor man. Finally he decided to pretend this isn't hapenning and left. He did keep an eye on me for the next few weeks, just in case I has other weird notions:-)
At any rate, I doubt either is right for a 13 year old girl. I read them at 16 or 17 - they are quite OK for that age.
Get "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame" collection (Silverberg was the editor). It contains a large collection of the best SF short stories, as voted by SF writers. These are really good stories, it is certain she'll find some she likes, and she'll definitely get a good feel for the SF field. This collection is "SF 101" rolled into a single book: Everyone from Asimov to Zelazny, and I'm talking the best story of each.
Besides, you might save her life: it contains "The Cold Equations". Nobody reading this story will pull a crazy dangerous stunt without at least one second thought.
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The JVC unit also has analog component video outputs, allowing 1080i playback on all existing HDTV's. This capability is one that Hollywood has been threatening to disable in HD receivers (block the "Analog Hole").
So they want your receiver to be able to receive 1080i movies, they just don't want it to actually output them?
Finally, Hollywood is coming to understand the only possible solution for the problem of illegal copying of copyrighted media. A box with no outputs at all.
... is the only truly well-commented code. Literate programming was invented by Knuth. If you don't know who Knuth is: he's the author of the definitive CS work called "The Art of Computer Programming". Ask any of your friends who actually studied computer science about it.
Knuth wrote more than books. For example, he wrote the typesetting program, TeX which is to this very day the most popular way academics in the CS field employ to write their papers (especially using a macro package called LaTex). He just wasn't satisfied with the available ways to write mathematical books at the time (early 80s). He had a good reason - you can see the difference in quality between it and anything else - especially Word (Ugh).
To ensure you'll have the right idea about the quality of his work, note he's actually sending people checks when they find a bug in his books or his code. Of course people tend to frame them rather than cache them :-). Also note that nobody has managed to obtain such a check for a long time.
So, what is literate programming anyway? Instead of inventing yet another definition, here's a pretty good definition which you can find in the site, together with many others:
Marc van Leeuwen. "Requirements for Literate Programming" in CWEBx Manual, pg. 3-4.
The basic idea of literate programming is to take a fundamentally different starting point for the presentation of programs to human readers, without any direct effect on the program as seen by the computer. Rather than to present the program in the form in which it will be compiled (or executed), and to intercalate comments to help humans understand what is going on (and which the compiler will kindly ignore), the presentation focuses on explaining to humans the design and construction of the program, while pieces of actual program code are inserted to make the description precise and to tell the computer what it should do. The program description should describe parts of the algorithm as they occur in the design process, rather than in the completed program text. For reasons of maintainability it is essential however that the program description defines the actual program text; if this were defined in a separate source document, then inconsistencies would be almost impossible to prevent. If programs are written in a way that concentrates on explaining their design to human readers, then they can be considered as works of (technical) literature; it is for this reason that Knuth has named this style of software construction and description "literate programming".
Does it work in practice? All I can say is that I have used it in a real-world project with great success. The main downsides to it, and this applies to any type of documentation, is that it takes up-front time (even if it does save time later), and that you need to employ people with some measure of writing ability. It is surprising how many people can code well, but are hard-pressed to write coherent, readable description of their code. Especially if you write your documentation in English and the programmer's native language is Hebrew or Russian :-(
Oh, and it also is hard to do in IDEs like Visual Studio. And you won't learn about it in your university, never mind your VB in 3 days course. Just like design by contract and many other techniques, the problem isn't that humanity doesn't know how to write software well - it is that humanity doesn't want to.
For a simple reason. A world where every digital-to-analog device contains strong encryption (to enforce copyright) is a world where any fanatic, terrorist or plain nut can use the same strong encryption for secure communications with his allies.
No way the goverment would go for this. In fact, I think this is the *only* reason it hasn't happened until now. We should be thankful for the NSA for fighting commercial encryption tooth and nail. They have given us at least a decade of encryption-free hardware.
If it weren't for them, companies would have taken notice of the potential of having encryption built into sound cards, digital TV sets, etc. Even into codecs such as MP3 (shudder). And people would have gone for it, because it would have been packaged together with the amazing improvement in quality offered through that decade.
What happened instead is that the commercial world is only now becoming aware of this, and is hampered by the huge installed base of unencrypted hardware and by the fact that (at least in audio) no significant improvement in quality can be offered to bait the hook.
That's why they are focusing on video, where there's no such installed base and the quality improvement is still possible.
Of course, it is as easy for a terrorist to send a video clip to his partner as it is to send a audio segment or a text file, so I'm counting on the NSA to block them there as well. If they manage to stall this for another decade, this whole issue would blow over and "content protection" would become completely irrelevant.
Who would have thought the the NSA would become *THE* champion of consumer rights, freedom, and privacy...
THANK YOU NSA! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
I once (around 90) worked in a place that ordered a Convex min-super-computer. This monster was two boxes each larger than a large refrigerator and cost about .25M$. At any rate...
The happy day arived and a truck delivered a single crate to the yard before our offices. No way this monster could have been fallen in shipping, the crate was about the size of three large refrigerators, with a generous base, and was heavy as, well, as only something like this can be.
Did I mention our offices were at the second floor?
Now, we had some mobile cranes we used to lift stacks of maps (think lifting about one ton of paper at a time). And miraculously, our computer room was adjacent to a room by the external wall that had two *large* external metal doors (I have no idea why. Maybe it was a storage area).
So, we got one of these cranes and tried to lift the crate. The crane whined and complained and got it about half a meter too low when it became obvious that if we push it any further we'll be smashing a quarter of a million dollars to the pavement.
The next morning (luckily it didn't rain that night) a big truck with a huge crane arrived to do the lifting.
Did I mention that our offices face an internal yard, the entrance to which is, well, "not generous"?
It is sufficient to say that about noon the truck was finally in place. It lifted the crate easy as you please, inserted it into the large, gaping opening made by the two doors and landed it on the floor as gently as a petal dropping from a flower. It took all of 5 minutes.
I did say this was the room *next* to the computer room. And it isn't as though the crate had any wheels. Moving it was out of the question. So we took it apart.
About two hours later we were done. This thing was built *solid*. I mean, the computers were even bolted to the base with huge screwes that were only reachable from underneath (don't ask).
Now, the computer was actually in two pieces, each somewhat larger than a large fridge. And much heavier. Consider that most of an average fridge is air, and most of the computer was plastic and metal. Solid, heavy, serious metal.
Did I mention that our computer room had a floating floor that was raised by 30cm from the floor of the other rooms around it? And that its door was just a bit too narrow to let this monster through? And that it had, well, *computers* in it?
So we made place there (this was done while dismantling the box) by disconnecting the computers at the entrance and clearing the path (just 2m) for the monster to reach its designated place. We then dismantled the door and someone found some wooden wedge we could use as a ramp. It had a slope of about 1/3.
The computer did have wheels, so about 10 of us took each part in turn and heaved it up that slope.
Did I mention the computer room entrance was at one side so we had to turn it as it was going in?
Have you seen the archeologists concept of how blocks were raised to build pyramids? This was just this way except it was *cramped* and the "walls" were worth an annual salary per meter.
We got it in place by late afternoon. Then reconnected all the computers we moved, put the door back in place, and collapsed.
The next day a guy came from Convex to "actually install" the bloody thing. Took him all of half an hour to get it up and running, self-tested, connected to the network, etc. It worked without a hitch for years after that.
I wasn't around when the time came to get it out of that room, almost a decade later. I wouldn't be surprised to hear they just threw it out of those doors...
Notice that he's talking about sending back in time - probably a very short period back - of just one subatomic particle. This doesn't require harnessing the insane amounts of energy, or the degree of fine control, required to transport something like a living human.
:-)
And relativity does allow for it. It would be a very interesting experiment. If it doesn't work even though it "should", it would have profound impact on physics.
And if it does work, well, imagine being able to send just a few bits abck in time. Like "don't eat the Salmon!"
As for breaking causality is harder then you might expect. As long as the same bits are sent back in time, it doesn't matter that nobody died from eating the salmon... But the bits need to be sent back anyway.
Robert L. Forward's book "Timemaster" explains it saying that once something has traveled back in time, improbable events become probable to ensure the same thing does indeed get sent back in time... I understand that reflects at least some physicists understanding of how time travel can work in practice.
The first thing which drives me nuts is that news (usenet) readers and mail readers are completely saparate. Sure, at times they are both integrated into the same product, but they are still conceptually separate. What is so hard to understand in the following statement: being subscribed to a mailing list and tracking a usenet group should be *exactly the same*. And yes, Virginia, even normal E-mail "folders" *need to support threads*. Sigh.
The second thing is having to sort messages to "folders". I'd much rather be able to assign keywords to each message - multiple, independent keywords, both automatically using rules and manually when I read the message - and then view "virtual folders" based on queries on these keywords. Nothing ground breaking here... but I suspect it would take another 10 years until it would become mainstream. Ugh.
My final problem is that my work environment is based on Exchange's calendar so I'm stuck with using Outlook, so I'll die of old age before I see any of this, even if it does get into open-source viewers. Arrgghh!
Actually, if they were doing Amber as a series - *long* series - it could work, *with continuity*. The trick is to treat it in the spirit it was written. A *soap opera*.
Think about it... what other type of production faithfully captures the endless bizantine plots, discoveries, shifting coalitions, dramatic situations with sex and/or violance, mysterious relatives popping up from nowhere (and disappearing at the same speed) around the same core *family*? Go on and on and on and on with variations on the same theme?
I can imagine the little blurbs in the guide... "Chapter 117: Corwin impersonates father and discovers that his grandfather is the mad scientist and his grandmother is a single-horned goat.". Admit it, that's *classic* soap opera.
Alas, since it would be produced by the SF channel, it will turn into a "Lord of the Rings" wannabe. Sigh. I guess it will have to stay as another classic "could have been", like "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" done by the Monty Python group.
Imagine Amber as a 2-hour mini-series. It is enough to cover the first *book*, maybe. If anyone had the feeling that Lord of the Rings was rushed, this will be ten times worse.
Then 'Forever War'. One word: Battlesuits. Certainly the special effects technology is up to showing them... but *you can't see the actor's face* in a battlesuit. My bet is they'll throw away any part the book which doesn't relate to combat action, and botch that by throwing away the suits. Result: a 'Starship Troopers' clone. Enough Said.
WHY can't the movie industry *build* on the great SF out there? Imagine "Snow Crash" done with the technology used for "Final Fantasy". Imagine Lord of the Rings as a *series* - say, 5 hours for each book. Imagine a production of "Bridge of Birds" on the same lines as "Princes Bride". I could go on for *hours*.
Maybe "we" ("the guild of paying movie-goers and ad-watchers") don't deserve any better. Even when a good production gets made (by accident or thanks to the courage of some producer), it tends to be a commercial flop.
Take for example the animation move done based on "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle. Can you believe it? serious fantasy, in animation, not targeted at kids! In a word: a flop. You probably never even heard of it, but trust me, you won't regret seeing it, even if you've read the book.
BOOK. That's the answer, *read a good book*. Come to think of it... it doesn't have ads, it costs very favorably compared to a movie ticket, and you don't need Tivo to time-shift it!
44GB of data on a single magnetic tape with digital format sounds like a great backup media to me. If it catches on as a consumer product, readers/writers and blank media would be dirt cheap (as opposed to things like DLT).
OK, the 140GB disks around the corner mean it wouldn't be a perfect solution, but it would still be a very attractive one.
I've no idea how to rank these in terms of strength, but all of these have a non-negligible effect on the number of children of a human in this day and age.
:-). I'd give excellent odds that humans a mere 1,000 years from now would be measurably different (due to the genetic engineering wild card).
These factors simply prevent (or drastically reduce) the number of children. Note that these only apply until the age of 35 or so. After that one probably had enough children so evolutionary pressure is negligible.
In the "advanced" parts of the world:
- Avoiding a career ruling out children.
- Avoiding traffic accidents.
- Avoiding the use of drugs.
- Avoiding being sent to jail.
Note *these don't necessarily kill you*, they just make you have *less or no children*, a point missed by the article. The first reason is especially strong in this regard. People in the western world tend to have less children due to it... Many careers seems to give one increased income and a lower tendency to have 10 kids. The human race seems to be selecting against being "too successful" - there are many interesting implications here.
There is one wild card reason which is to the advantage of the "too successful" people:
- Access to expensive medical treatments.
(Yes, a 15 year old doesn't make enough money to make a difference, but his parent do and we are looking for genetic factors, so it counts).
Today money for medical treatments is almost a non-issue when it comes to evolutionary considerations. But in the future, if genetic enhancement of children becomes available, the few childrens which richer people do have may be artifically improved... which is another big issue the article is ignoring.
In the (very) long range this may be our only hope as a species... and, as usual, the greatest danger it has ever faced.
In the "not that advanced" parts of the world, the good old evolutionary pressures keep on going:
- Starvation.
- Disease.
- Violence.
It is interesting that the evolutionary pressure is so different in different parts of the world. People have been known to make a great deal of it, especially given the very real possibility of the genetic enhancement "wild card" being used by one part of the world while diseases still rule the other.
In short, I'd bet anything that humans 10,000 years from now would be significantly different than humans today (of course, they may all be dead
In fact it seems a bit too perfect for the job... I knew there's a Holywood job description of "find the next James Bond wild transport" - after all, someone there has found the para-ski for the world is not enough. But given how well this beast fits the bill, it seems they've upgraded the job description to "go build us one" and added a few 1M$ to the budget. That's one really nice job (if you can get it). And it seems the money was well spent too.
So expect it to be "coming soon to a theater near you" - not in the parking lot, that is. Speaking of which, I wouldn't suggest parking anywhere near this beast, radar or no radar :-)
True, most of the time a good book just doesn't convert to a good movie. It tends to get worse if the director makes an extreme choice about consistency with the book - either inventing stuff out of thin air or religiously sticking to every detail in the book.
:-). So, go read Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Unicorn". Then see the movie. Yes, its animated. It is also very faithful to the book. And they are both great.
:-)
And if the movie is an animation, well, your best chance is to either read the book or see the movie; if you do both, you are bound to be disappointed.
However, in life there's an exception for every rule (in case you think that's impossible, this rule is its own exception
This movie is also an exception in being a fantasy animation movie for grown-ups. As a rule such movies aren't a commercial success (especially if they don't contain much violence and/or sex). This rule, alas, the movie isn't an exception for
At any rate, as this movie (and very few others) show, it is possible to do an accurate adaptation of a good book to a good movie. And even though Dune is harder then most books to do it for, I believe it is still possible.
I don't have any high hopes, though - the chances of the right kind of talent and work being applied to this project are as low as the humidity on Arakis at noon.
It may be that this specific scheme suffers from some flaws, but that's beside the point. The principle is sound. It can be done.
For a long time, what prevented this from hapenning was that by definition this places strong encryption at the hand of the people. Any would be evil person would be able to send data securely to his partner using consumer hardware. So the TLAs (NSA etc.) have killed any such notion in the past.
This exposes a dilema of the "free stuff" movement. For a long time it has pushed for allowing people to freely use encryption, against the aforementioned TLAs. It has killed notions of key escrow which would have made encryption palatable to these TLAs. At the same time, it had fought the right of the FLAs (RIAA, etc.) to use encryption for their purposes.
Now, so far this movement was successful. It has brought us both PGP and Napster. But this double success can't last; a double standard rarely can. After all, if "information wants to be free", it should apply to your shopping history as well as to the digital copy of the Matrix. It is silly, or hypocritical, to claim you can/should protect one but not the other.
Allowing everyone to use strong encryption allows for content control schemes.
So, here's the choice. Either fight encryption tooth and nail - "information wants to be free" - give up privacy, and end up with something like David Brin's "transparent society"; or fight for encryption, protect your privacy, and give up on content control.
Bad choice, you say. Well, here's what will happen if we don't choose one and actively fight for it: we'll lose both our privacy and content control (e.g., by key escrow, but there are many other ways).
Personally, I'd rather protect my privacy. Let them build an RSA engine into their D2A chips. Market forces will keep the price of "The Matrix" at a tolerable level, and a lot of micro-payment systems are possible if strong encryption is massively available. It will be a strugle to ensure that consumer privacy is maintained, but this is possible.
The alternative, IMVHO, is worse. First, it isn't very consistent; "information wants to be free" - except for encryption information. Yeah, right. Second, there's no bound on the abuse large organizations (e.g., goverments) will inflict on people given the chance (and zero privacy allows them to do almost anything they want).
I'd love to see an open-source project for a standard, strong system for content control which also ensures privacy. If we do it we'll know it is done right, and if we join the FLAs we'll be able to beat the TLAs. Otherwise, we risk them joining forces. We'll really regret that.
Now, presumably, such academic articles are "expressive", and given that program code is a vital part of such articles, it must be "expressive" as well.
Then again, perhaps it is only the article which is "expressive" and the code merely "adds value". Lawyers live in a strange world... (obviously, IANAL).
The whole question of whether anything is "expressive" seems strange to me. "Everything communicates" - everything man-made, that is. Whenever there's choice involved in something, there's "expression" of the "opinion" of which choice is better; and since there's no human activity which can only be done in exactly one way (I can't think of anything off hand), it seems that "everything is expressive".
Of course, if you are willing to limit the law to apply to certain types of "expression", that's something else. "Expressing" technical elegance and "expressing" political opinion are pretty far apart...
- It would allow you to really check your new earth-shattering proof. No more working on one for years, presenting it to the world to great acclaim, and withdrawing it a year later because somebody finds that tiny flaw (as has happened to one of the Ferma's proofs). Instead, just feed in your result to the database, hit "verify", and presto! a clear yes/no answer (and a pointer to the problem step in the proof if its a "no"). Keep in mind *verifying* a proof is trivial work for a computer - it is coming up with one which takes genius.
- It would also make it easier for you to construct new proofs. The computer would be able to automate much of the "dirty work" involved. Yes, math is an art but even in the most inspired proof you have to laboriously construct proof steps which are "obvious", boring, and vital (for ensuring the proof does indeed work). A computer would be able to fill these in for you, using a not-that-bright theorem prover. Everyone doubting the usefulness of this should ask grad math students about the assignments they get from their professors - physicists too, coming to think of it
- You could also use spare CPU cycles globally to look for proofs for interesting theorems - something along the lines of the seti@home project. Brute force *does* work, if you have enough of it... and, of course, it would give the AI people a wonderful playground for trying out their stuff. This is a much tougher problem then chess - but a much more useful one to solve.
Of course, it would be a whale of a project. It would take some serious commitment from math departments... So the best way is to start with some specific sub-field of math, which the Metamath people have done. Moaning that this isn't "all math" yet, or that it isn't "the most important part of math", is silly. You have to start somewhere. Their web site states they are already expanding the project to other fields.
Actually the maximal they list is 6.5, but that's close enough. The specs refer to vertical distance, anyway; I suspect making a seven foot forward leap with these should be possible.
At any rate, you do _not_ want to use seven leage boots. After all we are talking about a device whose main purpose is to position your feet seven leages apart... Ouch!
I also wonder what their efficiency is (energy invested vs. energy captured in the anti-matter). Anti-matter is very useful (Robert L. Forward lists examples in his book "Indistinguishable from Magic").
And for anyone worried they'll make bombs out of it, don't. We haven't reached the limit on the size of an H-bomb yet (assuming there is one. Think "the sun"
On the other hand, if we could build those super-efficient rockets...
Take for example Aegis. Find me a tool like that for Windows which costs less then 1000$ per seat. Or compare the editing power of UNIX editors to the pitiful editor built into most IDEs - not to mention their brain dead build process (BTW, both Emacs and VI can and are commonly used as a UNIX "IDE" to great effect). It goes without saying that you can't replace your IDE's editor or build process, even if you are willing to pay.
Sure, UNIX developement tools are harder to learn (they are not harder to use). But one can hardly claim to be a serious professional and dismiss the UNIX tools as too hard to use. These tools simply assume a power user - one willing to invesrt the extra effort to get the (large) additional benefits. That's what being a professional programmer is all about.
The ordering method is the same: I pick up the phone - literaly - and contact a seller in another city, state or country, placing some order.
Delivery method is the same: mail, FedEx, UPS, etc.
Payment method is the same: credit card, money transfer, etc.
Location issues are the same: the seller's phone number (or web site) is just a contact point; the actual warehouse might be elsewhere, the ultimate source of the goods in a third place, and of course the client can be anywhere.
IANAL, but it seems to me that "Internet order == mail order" for any tax purpose. Isn't this what happens already?
I have both catalog-ordered and Internet-ordered things from the USA to Israel and didn't percieve any difference... And I don't see how one could enforce any such difference, anyway.
It is trivial to convert one form to another. Specify significantly different taxing rules and you'll end up with people paying the lesser tax for each individual case.
I can smell a multi-million startup opportunity here: "convert your Internet order to a catalog order by using LessTax.com services!" :-) Actually, the fact that there's no such reverse service - "convert your catalog order to an Internet one" is a good indication that the Internet is not given significant tax breaks over mail catalogs.
In short, the whole thing seems silly. Don't all these legislators have something better to do with their time? Say, trying to figure out how to say one is allowed to write software VCRs but not software DVD players, or something? :-)
Control over a proprietary platform allows a company to control the value of all knowledge related to this platform. This means it can increase its own internal knowledge value and decrease the value of all other companies knowledge by constantly (and needlessly) modifying the platform. The knowledge of people inside the company, who actually design the modifications, will be more valuable then the knowledge of people outside who have to wait for them to be released, and would not be part of their design.
Open source, on the other hand, acts as an equalizer. It is difficult for any group to devalue the knowledge of other groups, since all developement is open. If any improvement to the code is made, it is true the developer will have an advantage; but given that even the design process is open, this advantage would be small.
So there's another incentive for companies to make proprietary software unstable. Besides the usual ones - cheaper and faster development, forcing users to upgrade often - there's a secondary one, devaluating the knowledge of all potentially competing developers.
Call it "knowledge inflation". The company creates more and more knowledge internally, just like a goverment prints more and more money. In both cases, the effect is similar - devaluating it, in effect imposing a tax on anyone without direct access to the printing press.
We all know how well Microsoft played this game... And many are worried that Sun will try to do the same with Java. In fact, every company trying to control a public standard is playing this game.
Sticking with open source is like sticking with a "gold standard" - there's no way someone can devalue it, barring producing a lot more gold - that is, a lot more open source code.
I wonder how far one can push this analogy. Do competeing platforms behave like different currencies? Can one compute an "interest rate
Why is this good? Because, for a truly non-obvious patent, a company would be willing to sit on it for a year or two to get a 10 - 20 year patent, safe in the knowledge that it won't be rediscovered. RSA is a good example of a software patent where the inventors would have little reason to fear independent discovery. I have no problem with something of this caliber being granted a 10 or 20 year patent.
On the other hand, a company which comes up with something like one-click ordering would sit on it for just a month or so, getting a one or two year patent. That minimizes the damage the company can do with "obvious" patents.
The beauty of the scheme is that it is self-adjusting. In mature, static fields, where each new invention requires real innovation, patents would be granted for a long period of time. In dynamic, chaotic fields, where inventions are a dime a dozen, patents would be granted for a short period of time. Either way, the patent time would be in sync with the "technology generation time" of the field in question, automatically.
Not that I believe for a second that there's any chance of the patent law being changed this way
The killer applications for a PDA are the contact info, schedule, and memos - in general, maintaining a database made of records with a small amount of data in each field. Short messaging (integrated with E-mail) too, I guess - still small amount of data. Everything else is bells and whistles. People do not write long texts on a PDA - they use laptops, or at least buy one of the nifty folding keyboards for their PDA. People do not run GIMP on a PDA.
For these killer apps, a voice API is great: "show today's schedule". "new meeting, March 14th, at 10, with L&H". "new memo: buy milk for santa". "new expense: the L&H account, 112$, business lunch". "show contact Joe". "Message to Jane: Lunch at 2?".
I'd expect you'll need to push a button to make the PDA listen - I wouldn't like one which listens all the time (it might make sense for a desktop system but not for a PDA). I also expect you'd still have a touch-sensitive display, and be able to use a stylus for menu navigation and writing. Just like desktop systems did not give up the keyboard when they got the mouse!
Something like the "Itsy" would be perfect for the above. Take my REX-PRO and add handwriting recognition like the Palm's and voice recognition like the above and you end up with the perfect PDA. The only possible improvement would be integrating it with a cellular phone, or maybe with a holographic projector
Obviously working on the voice UI would take a lot of effort to get right. I predict the initial offering - by L&H or whoever - will flop like the Newton, to be followed by a Palm-like successor which would get it right.
And both L&H and Compaq know this. Thats why they are both using Linux; writing a voice UI that works is a classical open source "itch to scratch". They'll be able to obsolete the first generation software and replace it with a second open-sourced generation - while maintaining the same hardware platform, escaping the Newton's fate. Good move for them, good move for us, bad news for Microsoft
Consider the ideal copy protection. The data on the DVD is strongly encrypted. The player has some protected hardware which is able to access the encrypted media, and decrypt it. It never sends out the bits in clear text, though.
The display device (monitor, or maybe just the video card) also has protected hardware. The player and display negotiate a key (using a zero-knowledge protocol) and the data between them is exchanged encrypted using this key.
This means you can only play the media on a certified player and using a certified display device. You'll never have access to the unencrypted bits; sniffing the trafic between player and display device gives you nothing.
You can physically replicate the media, right, but a certified home writer would insist on taking unencrypted movies and encrypting them before writing to the media. No way you could replicate movies this way, but you could burn your own DVD of the last ski trip.
Everyone could build a factory which replicates media, but there's no helping that. This is a whole separate issue - it is more international politics then technical difficulties.
This does not prevent anyone from providing other forms of media (e.g., a large hard disk) which are large enough to store the movies. But you'll never be able to play a copy of an encrypted movie of such media; the data is encrypted and only a certified player will decrypt it. And no such player will read from a hard disk.
The up side is that you'd be able to play such media on Linux or other open-source systems. It is just a matter of drivers, all the encryption is in hardware. The down side is that you'll never be able to make a backup copy. Seems a perfect tradeoff for an industry which want to sell more movies then players...
So why don't they do it? Besides the cost of something like a smart card in both the player and the display device, that is?
Imagine a would-be terrorist in Iraq, burning a DVD with a video message to his partner in the USA. He just has to hook up his computer with the Panasonic player to the internet, and have it talk with his partner's computer with the Diamond display card. Instant secure communication. And that's before considering him taking apart the players and using the smart cards directly...
This keeps the NSA awake at nights. Of course, the possibility that the same terrorist would use PGP instead doesn't cross their minds. Sigh.
Thanks to such far sightedness, we get both PGP to encrypt our E-mails and DVDs with encryption which one must break to play on Linux (which seems fair use under current law) - hence, in effect, no encryption at all. So we have secure E-mail and can make backup copies of our DVDs. The best of all possible worlds! (Given a favorable court ruling, that is).
One day they'll notice the HDTV spec requires broadcasting the movies in unencrypted digital format which puts DVDs to shame. Imagine a TiVo like system for HDTV... The fuss they make over DeCss would be mild by comparison. Why do you think they flatly refuse to define a standard for sending HDTV over cable?
I know, I'm giving the "bad guys" ideas, so I'd better stop now
Actually there was one saturday we had a few hours off; I got a wheelbarrow from somewhere, dumped a mattres over it so it looked somewhat like a lawn comfort chair, got a cool drink and was reading Catch-22 in the sun, happy as only an idle trainee can be, when the sargent walked by. I was the perfect image of a tourist reading by a pool - minus the pool (but shorts, sun tan lotion and sun glasses included).
He passed me, walked back, passed me again, and just couldn't make up his mind what to do with me. I obviously wasn't showing the right spirit, but I obviously wasn't doing anything against regulation, either. Poor man. Finally he decided to pretend this isn't hapenning and left. He did keep an eye on me for the next few weeks, just in case I has other weird notions
At any rate, I doubt either is right for a 13 year old girl. I read them at 16 or 17 - they are quite OK for that age.
Besides, you might save her life: it contains "The Cold Equations". Nobody reading this story will pull a crazy dangerous stunt without at least one second thought.