If you've never done anything that crashed a mac, you've obviously not tried very hard. Ever use Netscape?:)
But seriously, I can't wait for OS X, it's about time they added useful Unix networking tools to the core of the OS! It was blantatly lacking them before - that's why I'd always pick windows above mac. Well, that, and the lack of a starcraft battle chest for the Mac platform...
What's interesting is that there's a case against the Onandoga nation, in upstate New York, who are selling non-taxed cigarettes over the interent and making a bundle. The Onandoga nation argues that the sale of cigarettes occurs on their ground, so it is outside the US tax law jurisdiction, but (I believe it was the Syracuse) D.A. says that the sale occurs on the users' side, and thus should be taxed. Interesting to see what the court decides...
Give anyone the ability to talk directly to search engines and you'll see what has been happening with those damn porn sites on a large scale - do a query for anything, and it'll come up with a totally unrelated porn site for you.
People figured out how to abuse keywords real quick, and this would just make it worse. Which is why I wonder about the contnued existence of search engines. I use \. as my search engine - I use it to index my way into the web every day. I think that's the way of the future.
PS I hate the G3 keyboards. They're tiny! It's like carpal tunnel syndrome x 5!!!
That's not necessarily true - think about creating a choatic system of simple non-linear equations and integrating that into the system's AI - then what? Predictibility can go out the window, because the state of the artificial program can depend on at what point it was started, rather than whether or not it was started. OK, I'm not a chaos theory expert (yet), can someone help me out here? And what about feedback systems?
Heck, who knows if even God designed the world to have a certain fate, or if he/she just set up initial conditions, rules, and boundaries and let the whole thing spin itself out? That is not a new thought - read a Breif History of Time by Stephen Hawkings and Choas - Making a New SCience by James Gleick.
Okay, I also agree. But why do we even need AI? What is the point of us assembling some basic for of life (because, after all, we are not really CREATING it, we're just putting together the pieces from the unlabeled diagram we found in the same box)? Why do we do these things? Is it to try and piss off G-d, and finally draw a response from the heavens, or is it to make life easier, or is it just because we really have no control over our actions as a whole and must go around creating new life and technology according to some instinct imbedded in our chromosomes?
All ideas are evolutionary, the most revolutionary ones even more so.
And patent law is the same thing - patent a triangular block, and someone can take your idea of a triangular block and add aerodynamic marks and a white circle to it, and then they can in turn patent that. Patents are good because they make the patenter release all of the guts behind what they do, and don't prevent people from building on those guts (as long as they're not the same guts). Which was a really bad metaphorical combination there...
But of course I Amazon isn't so stupid after all, because they won an injunction and set everyone in ecommerce back, showing them that any attempt to make web shopping easier is going to cost them $$$$ in legal fees. So, strategically, its a good move, even if morally it sucks.
Alright, this is probably going to be an unpopular post on a open-source haven like/., but I think that it's good that some of these companies have a way to protect themselves from competition. Internet sites offer so much to so many for, in most cases, real little. Think about it - you spend hours developing your competitive advantage and it's gone the second you go live. Not that companies should be able to patent non-revenue and widely used things like the technology behind downloading files off the net, but innovative methods like Priceline's and maybe Amazon's, that are not real difficult to reproduce but still unique, should have some protection.
Companies keeping track of of your web usage in cookies gets all that much worse if there's an easy way to hack cookies. As a site designer thinking about storing session variables and user passwords in encrypted cookies, I'm worrying about whether they really are secure.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've never done anything that crashed a mac, you've obviously not tried very hard. Ever use Netscape? :)
But seriously, I can't wait for OS X, it's about time they added useful Unix networking tools to the core of the OS! It was blantatly lacking them before - that's why I'd always pick windows above mac. Well, that, and the lack of a starcraft battle chest for the Mac platform...
nah, i heard it on the local Syracuse/Upstate NY news with Joe Zone.
What's interesting is that there's a case against the Onandoga nation, in upstate New York, who are selling non-taxed cigarettes over the interent and making a bundle. The Onandoga nation argues that the sale of cigarettes occurs on their ground, so it is outside the US tax law jurisdiction, but (I believe it was the Syracuse) D.A. says that the sale occurs on the users' side, and thus should be taxed. Interesting to see what the court decides...
Give anyone the ability to talk directly to search engines and you'll see what has been happening with those damn porn sites on a large scale - do a query for anything, and it'll come up with a totally unrelated porn site for you.
People figured out how to abuse keywords real quick, and this would just make it worse. Which is why I wonder about the contnued existence of search engines. I use \. as my search engine - I use it to index my way into the web every day. I think that's the way of the future.
PS I hate the G3 keyboards. They're tiny! It's like carpal tunnel syndrome x 5!!!
That's not necessarily true - think about creating a choatic system of simple non-linear equations and integrating that into the system's AI - then what? Predictibility can go out the window, because the state of the artificial program can depend on at what point it was started, rather than whether or not it was started. OK, I'm not a chaos theory expert (yet), can someone help me out here? And what about feedback systems?
Heck, who knows if even God designed the world to have a certain fate, or if he/she just set up initial conditions, rules, and boundaries and let the whole thing spin itself out? That is not a new thought - read a Breif History of Time by Stephen Hawkings and Choas - Making a New SCience by James Gleick.
Okay, I also agree. But why do we even need AI? What is the point of us assembling some basic for of life (because, after all, we are not really CREATING it, we're just putting together the pieces from the unlabeled diagram we found in the same box)? Why do we do these things? Is it to try and piss off G-d, and finally draw a response from the heavens, or is it to make life easier, or is it just because we really have no control over our actions as a whole and must go around creating new life and technology according to some instinct imbedded in our chromosomes?
(just for discussion)
All ideas are evolutionary, the most revolutionary ones even more so.
And patent law is the same thing - patent a triangular block, and someone can take your idea of a triangular block and add aerodynamic marks and a white circle to it, and then they can in turn patent that. Patents are good because they make the patenter release all of the guts behind what they do, and don't prevent people from building on those guts (as long as they're not the same guts). Which was a really bad metaphorical combination there...
But of course I Amazon isn't so stupid after all, because they won an injunction and set everyone in ecommerce back, showing them that any attempt to make web shopping easier is going to cost them $$$$ in legal fees. So, strategically, its a good move, even if morally it sucks.
Alright, this is probably going to be an unpopular post on a open-source haven like /., but I think that it's good that some of these companies have a way to protect themselves from competition. Internet sites offer so much to so many for, in most cases, real little. Think about it - you spend hours developing your competitive advantage and it's gone the second you go live. Not that companies should be able to patent non-revenue and widely used things like the technology behind downloading files off the net, but innovative methods like Priceline's and maybe Amazon's, that are not real difficult to reproduce but still unique, should have some protection.
Companies keeping track of of your web usage in cookies gets all that much worse if there's an easy way to hack cookies. As a site designer thinking about storing session variables and user passwords in encrypted cookies, I'm worrying about whether they really are secure.