Ah, that reminds me of the old days, ten or eleven years ago when my family bought a Macintosh. Our previous computer was an 8086 DOS laptop, so none of our old software would run on the new machine. So we just called the companies, and a few of them let us send back the boxes of the PC software and sent us Mac versions, for free! Now since the old computer had no hard drive, we made backups of all the disks and used the backup copies to run the programs, and I remember reading the license agreements then, and this was the encouraged way of doing things. We just threw out all the old backup copies.
I also remember reading some of the licenses for that old software (I was a regular 3rd grade copyright lawyer), and some of it actually allowed reselling as long as all the backup copies were destroyed.
This sounds dumb, but it's a damn shame people can't be trusted. I guess the problem with allowing eBook resale, even assuming no piracy, from a vendor perspective is that an eBook doesn't degrade, so it kills the sales model for dead-tree books...
But e-books can't be successful unless they can take advantage of their medium to deliver additional value.
I think that's what most people would need; unfortunately, that doesn't seem like the direction that computing is going.
Of course, it seems pretty obvious; the reader is going to want the full promise of the e-book medium, the true ownership that you get from a book and the easy copying and device interoperability that you get from a computer. However, the publishers want to take the most restrictive feature of a book, the difficulty of making quality full-text copies, and combine it with this "the software owns you" quality in modern commercial licensing agreements.
Shows some of the security problems with the voting machines. Even if the article is over a year old, it's still troubling: storing results in MS Access databases, introducing the ability to "correct" vote tallies and erase the trail. If voting machines are going to be computer systems, they need to be designed from the ground up for security, not just "secure enough right now". And not having any backup as in this story? Sounds like these machines were made by amateurs.
It's important, to avoid coersion, to ensure that a person can vote his or her conscience in private. So having a personal vote check would be bad. Having a hard-copy record of how you just voted would be nice.
What would be even nicer is if you could see it being printed after making the vote, but couldn't take it out of the booth... like have a printer spooling off in a direction so that it's easy to read for the voter, but behind glass, and also so that it folds up neatly into stacks when it's done. Seems like it wouldn't be all *that* hard to make, and it would be worth it to ensure the fairness of the election.
I RdTFA and I don't know why Mr. Michael Fitzgerald couldn'ta just put all that info in a nice table rather than trying to amuse us with silly "OMG my laptop almost died, I couldn't make this up, ask my mom!" blather.
Humans aren't physically able to cross the oceans or even swim for more than a few miles (that if you're very fit). We built boats, and made a few mistakes that ended up working out (difference being that on this planet you'll eventually hit terra firma somewhere that's probably somehow inhabitable, and there's a lot higher density of land on Earth than planets in space. I wouldn't say that makes space exploration a totally different concept, though). Did sea exploration make the world a better place? Maybe. It made it a different place. It helped some people learn things; it also caused conflicts that would drive other cultures to near-extinction (but they're not the cultures from which we derive our ambition for exploration, so who cares about them, right?).
As far as people talking about cooked food, cooked food IIRC is an example of a human adaption: early humans that gathered nuts and berries somehow lost that supply (forget just how) and turned to meat, but humans physically/psychologically can't eat meat the way that carnivores do it so they came up with a way to eat it so they could survive. Then they applied the cooking to other things and made appetizing food. Is the world a better place because we started eating meat? Maybe. I wouldn't say our current system of meat production is a model of humanity, but the fact that somewhere in history some humans figured out how to cook meat ensured their survival. Now that we don't need to eat meat anymore many of us don't, but we still cook and bake things. Like cookies. I don't want to live in a world without cookies.
I think Thoreau said that an amazing feature of the human race is its ability to make its own fate (highly paraphrased). Manned space flight isn't blanketly a bad or good thing, but one good thing they create is an incentive to push forward technology.
Well if Froogles to Google is considered enough name similarity to sue over, then the person that invented the iThis and iThat naming scheme would be cleaning up.
I'd hate to live in a world where upon choosing a name for something one had to look into a crystal ball to see what name a big company might choose. The Froogles main page doesn't look like it's trying to rip off Google in any way... this guy should have a more valid complaint against Google than the other way around.
I can't quite get my head around how this affects me, actually... I'm a student at University of Illinois, I use an @uiuc.edu email address. If I live in an apartment off campus, however, I send my outgoing mail to my ISP's smtp server with my uiuc.edu address as the "from" address, because that's where I prefer to get my e-mail. So will this put my e-mail to SPF-enabled receivers under scrutiny? Or am I OK as long as my ISP is legit according to this system?
Based on the article, it seems like it would... and that's no beef with Microsoft, it's a beef with the filtering systems.
I don't know if they would grant Apple a patent that broad, seeing that dear Clarus' innovation lies in its dog-cow interface, not in the already-existing dog and cow themselves.
I hear there are some excellent underwater basket weaving programs in major universities... my HS bio teacher suggested some to me when I chose an answer in yards instead of meters on a multiple choice test because the answer was actually closer to being correct.
I wonder what makes animal protein useful for data storage... and, the eternal vegetarian question... can it be replaced with soy?
(or perhaps a kind of slurry made of beans and lentils? ok there goes the end of my ideas...)
I think you make a very good point, part of which that I thought about just after I posted the first time. It would be more of a pain-in-the-ass for huge companies to have to lobby every state legislature and pay off every piddling state rep.
On the other hand, the more localized government gets, the more it tends towards cronyism with local businesses.
I, personally, don't see the need to make the funding of Federal projects like NASA up to states. If the Federal gov. was out of the way of more local gov.s on the issues they're supposed to be on, they wouldn't need to pull as much tax money and could be more focused on their missions.
However, it's kind of a silly discussion at this level, because big corporations like a big central government that can give them big centralized tax exemptions and big centralized regulation loopholes with a big centralized high barrier of entry to keep concerned citizens' groups a miniscule voice.
Hooray for the big decentralized (mostly) Internet.
Fuck deficits and the national debt. Why don't we just keep spending money we don't have until we eventually go extinct. Oh, sure, a big equals sign will come flying out of the sky demanding we balance the books, but (and here's the kicker) WE'LL BE DEAD so fuck him too!
Only trouble'll be for those that believe in an afterlife, spending eternity in Hades with a credit card bill of several trill...
Sure, Microsoft is getting sued this time. But Microsoft can afford it. They have a lot more to gain than to lose by patent warfare.
It's different for Apple, which doesn't have the dominant market share that Microsoft does (and thus the ability to quelch competition with their own suits).
Go to Mars with an international group. Put up a hundred different flags. Causing a hundred times the environmental trauma to Mars' previously virgin soil!
Won't somebody think of the underground microorganisms' children!?!??!
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, that reminds me of the old days, ten or eleven years ago when my family bought a Macintosh. Our previous computer was an 8086 DOS laptop, so none of our old software would run on the new machine. So we just called the companies, and a few of them let us send back the boxes of the PC software and sent us Mac versions, for free! Now since the old computer had no hard drive, we made backups of all the disks and used the backup copies to run the programs, and I remember reading the license agreements then, and this was the encouraged way of doing things. We just threw out all the old backup copies.
I also remember reading some of the licenses for that old software (I was a regular 3rd grade copyright lawyer), and some of it actually allowed reselling as long as all the backup copies were destroyed.
This sounds dumb, but it's a damn shame people can't be trusted. I guess the problem with allowing eBook resale, even assuming no piracy, from a vendor perspective is that an eBook doesn't degrade, so it kills the sales model for dead-tree books...
But e-books can't be successful unless they can take advantage of their medium to deliver additional value.
I think that's what most people would need; unfortunately, that doesn't seem like the direction that computing is going.
Of course, it seems pretty obvious; the reader is going to want the full promise of the e-book medium, the true ownership that you get from a book and the easy copying and device interoperability that you get from a computer. However, the publishers want to take the most restrictive feature of a book, the difficulty of making quality full-text copies, and combine it with this "the software owns you" quality in modern commercial licensing agreements.
This article is over a year old, but...
5 .htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S0006
Shows some of the security problems with the voting machines. Even if the article is over a year old, it's still troubling: storing results in MS Access databases, introducing the ability to "correct" vote tallies and erase the trail. If voting machines are going to be computer systems, they need to be designed from the ground up for security, not just "secure enough right now". And not having any backup as in this story? Sounds like these machines were made by amateurs.
It's important, to avoid coersion, to ensure that a person can vote his or her conscience in private. So having a personal vote check would be bad. Having a hard-copy record of how you just voted would be nice.
What would be even nicer is if you could see it being printed after making the vote, but couldn't take it out of the booth... like have a printer spooling off in a direction so that it's easy to read for the voter, but behind glass, and also so that it folds up neatly into stacks when it's done. Seems like it wouldn't be all *that* hard to make, and it would be worth it to ensure the fairness of the election.
Why did Pac-Man get 0wn3d?
I RdTFA and I don't know why Mr. Michael Fitzgerald couldn'ta just put all that info in a nice table rather than trying to amuse us with silly "OMG my laptop almost died, I couldn't make this up, ask my mom!" blather.
Humans aren't physically able to cross the oceans or even swim for more than a few miles (that if you're very fit). We built boats, and made a few mistakes that ended up working out (difference being that on this planet you'll eventually hit terra firma somewhere that's probably somehow inhabitable, and there's a lot higher density of land on Earth than planets in space. I wouldn't say that makes space exploration a totally different concept, though). Did sea exploration make the world a better place? Maybe. It made it a different place. It helped some people learn things; it also caused conflicts that would drive other cultures to near-extinction (but they're not the cultures from which we derive our ambition for exploration, so who cares about them, right?).
As far as people talking about cooked food, cooked food IIRC is an example of a human adaption: early humans that gathered nuts and berries somehow lost that supply (forget just how) and turned to meat, but humans physically/psychologically can't eat meat the way that carnivores do it so they came up with a way to eat it so they could survive. Then they applied the cooking to other things and made appetizing food. Is the world a better place because we started eating meat? Maybe. I wouldn't say our current system of meat production is a model of humanity, but the fact that somewhere in history some humans figured out how to cook meat ensured their survival. Now that we don't need to eat meat anymore many of us don't, but we still cook and bake things. Like cookies. I don't want to live in a world without cookies.
I think Thoreau said that an amazing feature of the human race is its ability to make its own fate (highly paraphrased). Manned space flight isn't blanketly a bad or good thing, but one good thing they create is an incentive to push forward technology.
Hey, I'm not selling 12-song devices and I'm not winning... must be something else...
Well if Froogles to Google is considered enough name similarity to sue over, then the person that invented the iThis and iThat naming scheme would be cleaning up.
I'd hate to live in a world where upon choosing a name for something one had to look into a crystal ball to see what name a big company might choose. The Froogles main page doesn't look like it's trying to rip off Google in any way... this guy should have a more valid complaint against Google than the other way around.
Lot of Google stories on today...
Isn't the apache license non-copyleft?
And there's nothing wrong with selling GPL apps as long as you make the source available.
HEY! My (work) Windows box has no C:\! Only E:\! You insensitive clod!
($DIETY willing, this breaks viruses as frequently as it breaks program installs)
Who cares if it can tell time!?!? That's what your computer's for!
I think the vast majority of people in this topic are blaming the users.
It's pretty easy to keep a Windows machine going without viruses.
As far as engineering it away goes, no project can engineer away viruses. They'll always go to the weakest link in the system: dumbass users.
That's right, all of you.
I can't quite get my head around how this affects me, actually... I'm a student at University of Illinois, I use an @uiuc.edu email address. If I live in an apartment off campus, however, I send my outgoing mail to my ISP's smtp server with my uiuc.edu address as the "from" address, because that's where I prefer to get my e-mail. So will this put my e-mail to SPF-enabled receivers under scrutiny? Or am I OK as long as my ISP is legit according to this system?
Based on the article, it seems like it would... and that's no beef with Microsoft, it's a beef with the filtering systems.
I think a revolt against the ASSHATS is just what we need.
I don't know if they would grant Apple a patent that broad, seeing that dear Clarus' innovation lies in its dog-cow interface, not in the already-existing dog and cow themselves.
Actually, that sounds more like Glass than Mahler.
'Eh, me too.
I hear there are some excellent underwater basket weaving programs in major universities... my HS bio teacher suggested some to me when I chose an answer in yards instead of meters on a multiple choice test because the answer was actually closer to being correct.
I wonder what makes animal protein useful for data storage... and, the eternal vegetarian question... can it be replaced with soy?
(or perhaps a kind of slurry made of beans and lentils? ok there goes the end of my ideas...)
Or, in the case that you listen to Mahler, maybe half of an mp3 file.
I think you make a very good point, part of which that I thought about just after I posted the first time. It would be more of a pain-in-the-ass for huge companies to have to lobby every state legislature and pay off every piddling state rep.
On the other hand, the more localized government gets, the more it tends towards cronyism with local businesses.
I, personally, don't see the need to make the funding of Federal projects like NASA up to states. If the Federal gov. was out of the way of more local gov.s on the issues they're supposed to be on, they wouldn't need to pull as much tax money and could be more focused on their missions.
However, it's kind of a silly discussion at this level, because big corporations like a big central government that can give them big centralized tax exemptions and big centralized regulation loopholes with a big centralized high barrier of entry to keep concerned citizens' groups a miniscule voice.
Hooray for the big decentralized (mostly) Internet.
Fuck deficits and the national debt. Why don't we just keep spending money we don't have until we eventually go extinct. Oh, sure, a big equals sign will come flying out of the sky demanding we balance the books, but (and here's the kicker) WE'LL BE DEAD so fuck him too!
Only trouble'll be for those that believe in an afterlife, spending eternity in Hades with a credit card bill of several trill...
Sure, Microsoft is getting sued this time. But Microsoft can afford it. They have a lot more to gain than to lose by patent warfare.
It's different for Apple, which doesn't have the dominant market share that Microsoft does (and thus the ability to quelch competition with their own suits).
We go to Mars, put up one flag. w00t.
Go to Mars with an international group. Put up a hundred different flags. Causing a hundred times the environmental trauma to Mars' previously virgin soil!
Won't somebody think of the underground microorganisms' children!?!??!