Then you're being just as bad as the micromanagers. Check for messages once a day (email, phone, snail, whatever you have), so you don't miss something that actually has a time constraint ("Hey, wanna go for dinner and see what else happens this weekend?" shouldn't be ignored)
Hey, the entertainment industry paid good money to get the DMCA in place, and reputable lawmakers STAY bought. The same legislatures that put it in place will not take it away.
Good point; there are LOTS of patents for UARTs and DMA systems. But my point is that each of them patents a particular implementation of a particular feature set. And there have been continual legal battles, because of the argument that each of the incremental ideas would be obvious to a person having "ordinary skill in the art". I suppose I weaken my discussion of software patent by comparing it to hardware; should have said: Imagine of someone had patented the concept of "data structure" or "linked list" or "queue".
When I was in college, software was considered unpatentable, because a software program is an algorithm, and algorithms were unpatentable because they are essentially a "law of nature" or "scientific discovery". At some point the law changed to accept "business method" patents (which led to the "with a computer" patents). Imagine if someone had patented the concept of "an interrupt" or "DMA" or "UART", how everything would be completely incompatible - or there would be a small handful of oligarchies running hardware just as they do software. Oddly enough, at the same time as software patents were being enforced, Intel lost its case that its 8080 instruction set was patentable; the finding split the difference between the DESCRIPTION of the instruction set and the IMPLEMENTATION. So direct cloning of an x86 chip would be prohibited, but making a new chip that implemented the same instruction set (and a few more besides) allowed Zilog to make the Z80 just slightly better than - and upwardly compatible with - the 8080. This begat CP/M, which begat the personal computer industry, which was brilliantly co-opted by the IBM Personal Computer (note the capital letters, that makes it COMPLETELY different). And then in turn IBM lost control of the "IBM-compatible" computer market, which at this point is defined by the motherboard specification from the *software* company.
>> I still want my DVR to keep recorded shows locally stored at my house.
Yes, I even have an extra ESATA drive attached. Except when there was a problem with the FIOS somewhere, and I couldn't get TV, and figured I would watch a DVR recording instead, it WOULDN'T LET ME WATCH because it couldn't get the online approval that I was paid up. So it's not good enough that they encrypt the drive, and use a nonstandard disk format (which I know because it was a pain to recover when my old hard drive crashed), they need internet access for the DRM. It's not good enough that I paid for the service to record the shows, they have to check that I'm still allowed to watch them.
The only solution is to rewrite the regulations and require treating paying customers like CUSTOMERS rather than fleeced sheep. I expect hell to freeze first.
I would say, more narrowly, that video is better for some purposes than pictures or diagrams. I would rather have the technical documentation with video accompaniment, with the pictures/diagrams being essentially screen grabs from the video. (For music or other performing arts, the discussion is completely different.)
>>>... will impart the relevant information in a fraction of the time....
I have to disagree with this, because I constantly get information-free messages like "I have a question for you, please call me back" (rather than "I wanted to ask you..." and stating the question). I believe the difference is in the nature of the person doing the communicating.
Second the motion. Binary search could be wrong, linear search will always work, and if the table is small enough it's not worth going crazy over. OTOH why are we searching a table in the first place, maybe it's in the wrong order . . .
Worse, people are more likely to be negative towards things they dislike than positive about things they like. And zealots are likely to be zealous about their positions. Thus the effect you mention is likely to push towards polar extremes . . . not unlike the current US political debate.
This sort of issue demonstrates the difficulty of running society as truly libertarian or truly un-governed. "Free Speech" is generally seen as a good idea; everyone should be free to express themselves as they see fit. OTOH there are concepts of "civil behavior", like not expressing yourself by loudly swearing in the middle of a children's playground. But OTOOH the boundary of "civil behavior" that any particular onlooker draws may exclude what others consider acceptable, like: a child brought to that playground by an adult with tattoos (thus "exposing" the onlooker's child to something the onlooker disapproves of), or a "nonstandard" couple (ditto).
We want freedom for all in the abstract. But we also want our own freedom from other people's freedom impinging on ours, which is the broadest definition of "civility". "Abusing freedom" is a contradiction in terms; one cannot possibly misuse freedom in the abstract, because it means one can do whatever one wants. The problems are judging the point at which one person's freedom of speech impinges on another person's freedom from interference and harassment, and enforcing any kind of limitation on that freedom when we have already committed to freedom in the abstract.
The press release says it all. "Unfettered internet access" leads to people getting all sorts of confusing information, alternate viewpoints, non-religiously-restricted perspectives, and all of the ills of modern society. People are just too free, dammit. We need to restrict their thinking, and the first way to do it is to restrict their access to information. Porn is just a straw man; most people would agree that child porn is bad (I agree too), which is why it is already mentioned in law, but we do not place restrictions and surveillance on all magazine publication to prevent printed child porn, and we should not place such censorship power in anyone's hands.
For the youngsters: a 1977 movie (based on a book) about hijacking and booby-trapping the blimp covering the Super Bowl so that it will blow up over the stadium.
Somebody wants to save money on equipment. Rather than put a permanent installation on a stadium that's not in use all the time, they want to move extra bandwidth over the highways during rush hour, then "downtown" during the day (or over whichever shopping center / industrial park pays for it). It would be cheaper to use cherry-picker trucks, drive them on station and put up the antennas, but yes, not hip enough, and requires paying a driver while the truck is standing there waiting to be vandalized. The ability to cover a spontaneous location, like a concert or a moving demonstration, would be a bonus.
Or perhaps it's the other way around. A generation or two have been raised to question any "authority", to the point that science and technology are matters of opinion.
My wife and I prefer to think of them as "pretty good point-and-shoot cameras that we always happen to have on hand" (as opposed to the much-better point-and-shoot and the excellent DSLR that we carry when we expect to take real photos).
Performance might be an issue while actively taking video, but not for saving and transferring data. The performance would also be good enough for things like all of the cached data during web browsing or map directions, most of which is useless after a single access.
Part of the problem is the way iPhones sync their data. If you delete it off the phone, iTunes deletes it from your computer backup. Yes, I know, one can copy the data elsewhere in between (and I do); but a lot of people assume that an iTunes "backup" is a BACKUP rather than a mirror, and are surprised when things disappear from the capacious computer drive after making space on the little phone.
US security agencies and US congresspeople have insisted that intrusive surveillance is the only path to security, and security experts have tried to point out that personal privacy and government surveillance are contradictory. Now that the known-to-be-bad Soviet - sorry, Russian - government, led by a known-to-be-megalomaniac who is known to have his political opponents killed, has a formal law in place, the people pushing the same laws here must explain whether we're not becoming the same police state that we decry.
... though I suppose one can continue to run an old version. And it's not reasonable to expect open source volunteers to do double work. But it is still a loss.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you're being just as bad as the micromanagers. Check for messages once a day (email, phone, snail, whatever you have), so you don't miss something that actually has a time constraint ("Hey, wanna go for dinner and see what else happens this weekend?" shouldn't be ignored)
Heck, you can already BE president and get away with it. That was Republicans, though, so you left that out.
Hey, the entertainment industry paid good money to get the DMCA in place, and reputable lawmakers STAY bought. The same legislatures that put it in place will not take it away.
Good point; there are LOTS of patents for UARTs and DMA systems. But my point is that each of them patents a particular implementation of a particular feature set. And there have been continual legal battles, because of the argument that each of the incremental ideas would be obvious to a person having "ordinary skill in the art". I suppose I weaken my discussion of software patent by comparing it to hardware; should have said: Imagine of someone had patented the concept of "data structure" or "linked list" or "queue".
When I was in college, software was considered unpatentable, because a software program is an algorithm, and algorithms were unpatentable because they are essentially a "law of nature" or "scientific discovery". At some point the law changed to accept "business method" patents (which led to the "with a computer" patents). Imagine if someone had patented the concept of "an interrupt" or "DMA" or "UART", how everything would be completely incompatible - or there would be a small handful of oligarchies running hardware just as they do software. Oddly enough, at the same time as software patents were being enforced, Intel lost its case that its 8080 instruction set was patentable; the finding split the difference between the DESCRIPTION of the instruction set and the IMPLEMENTATION. So direct cloning of an x86 chip would be prohibited, but making a new chip that implemented the same instruction set (and a few more besides) allowed Zilog to make the Z80 just slightly better than - and upwardly compatible with - the 8080. This begat CP/M, which begat the personal computer industry, which was brilliantly co-opted by the IBM Personal Computer (note the capital letters, that makes it COMPLETELY different). And then in turn IBM lost control of the "IBM-compatible" computer market, which at this point is defined by the motherboard specification from the *software* company.
Changing the status quo == costing me money.
>> I still want my DVR to keep recorded shows locally stored at my house.
Yes, I even have an extra ESATA drive attached. Except when there was a problem with the FIOS somewhere, and I couldn't get TV, and figured I would watch a DVR recording instead, it WOULDN'T LET ME WATCH because it couldn't get the online approval that I was paid up. So it's not good enough that they encrypt the drive, and use a nonstandard disk format (which I know because it was a pain to recover when my old hard drive crashed), they need internet access for the DRM. It's not good enough that I paid for the service to record the shows, they have to check that I'm still allowed to watch them.
The only solution is to rewrite the regulations and require treating paying customers like CUSTOMERS rather than fleeced sheep. I expect hell to freeze first.
You have to believe in the concept of "government" for this to work.
I would say, more narrowly, that video is better for some purposes than pictures or diagrams. I would rather have the technical documentation with video accompaniment, with the pictures/diagrams being essentially screen grabs from the video. (For music or other performing arts, the discussion is completely different.)
>>> ... will impart the relevant information in a fraction of the time ....
..." and stating the question). I believe the difference is in the nature of the person doing the communicating.
I have to disagree with this, because I constantly get information-free messages like "I have a question for you, please call me back" (rather than "I wanted to ask you
Second the motion. Binary search could be wrong, linear search will always work, and if the table is small enough it's not worth going crazy over. OTOH why are we searching a table in the first place, maybe it's in the wrong order . . .
Worse, people are more likely to be negative towards things they dislike than positive about things they like. And zealots are likely to be zealous about their positions. Thus the effect you mention is likely to push towards polar extremes . . . not unlike the current US political debate.
And I think there needs to be a -1: too stupid to realize that a statement overloaded with hyperbole is likely to be sarcasm.
This sort of issue demonstrates the difficulty of running society as truly libertarian or truly un-governed. "Free Speech" is generally seen as a good idea; everyone should be free to express themselves as they see fit. OTOH there are concepts of "civil behavior", like not expressing yourself by loudly swearing in the middle of a children's playground. But OTOOH the boundary of "civil behavior" that any particular onlooker draws may exclude what others consider acceptable, like: a child brought to that playground by an adult with tattoos (thus "exposing" the onlooker's child to something the onlooker disapproves of), or a "nonstandard" couple (ditto).
We want freedom for all in the abstract. But we also want our own freedom from other people's freedom impinging on ours, which is the broadest definition of "civility". "Abusing freedom" is a contradiction in terms; one cannot possibly misuse freedom in the abstract, because it means one can do whatever one wants. The problems are judging the point at which one person's freedom of speech impinges on another person's freedom from interference and harassment, and enforcing any kind of limitation on that freedom when we have already committed to freedom in the abstract.
The press release says it all. "Unfettered internet access" leads to people getting all sorts of confusing information, alternate viewpoints, non-religiously-restricted perspectives, and all of the ills of modern society. People are just too free, dammit. We need to restrict their thinking, and the first way to do it is to restrict their access to information. Porn is just a straw man; most people would agree that child porn is bad (I agree too), which is why it is already mentioned in law, but we do not place restrictions and surveillance on all magazine publication to prevent printed child porn, and we should not place such censorship power in anyone's hands.
For the youngsters: a 1977 movie (based on a book) about hijacking and booby-trapping the blimp covering the Super Bowl so that it will blow up over the stadium.
Somebody wants to save money on equipment. Rather than put a permanent installation on a stadium that's not in use all the time, they want to move extra bandwidth over the highways during rush hour, then "downtown" during the day (or over whichever shopping center / industrial park pays for it). It would be cheaper to use cherry-picker trucks, drive them on station and put up the antennas, but yes, not hip enough, and requires paying a driver while the truck is standing there waiting to be vandalized. The ability to cover a spontaneous location, like a concert or a moving demonstration, would be a bonus.
Or perhaps it's the other way around. A generation or two have been raised to question any "authority", to the point that science and technology are matters of opinion.
Incorrect punctuation. This . . . . . Is . . . . . SLASHDOT! Though I'm not sure how you're going to kick your opponent down a well here . . .
Then you're not using enough crap. Go download more crap and get with the program!
My wife and I prefer to think of them as "pretty good point-and-shoot cameras that we always happen to have on hand" (as opposed to the much-better point-and-shoot and the excellent DSLR that we carry when we expect to take real photos).
Performance might be an issue while actively taking video, but not for saving and transferring data. The performance would also be good enough for things like all of the cached data during web browsing or map directions, most of which is useless after a single access.
Part of the problem is the way iPhones sync their data. If you delete it off the phone, iTunes deletes it from your computer backup. Yes, I know, one can copy the data elsewhere in between (and I do); but a lot of people assume that an iTunes "backup" is a BACKUP rather than a mirror, and are surprised when things disappear from the capacious computer drive after making space on the little phone.
US security agencies and US congresspeople have insisted that intrusive surveillance is the only path to security, and security experts have tried to point out that personal privacy and government surveillance are contradictory. Now that the known-to-be-bad Soviet - sorry, Russian - government, led by a known-to-be-megalomaniac who is known to have his political opponents killed, has a formal law in place, the people pushing the same laws here must explain whether we're not becoming the same police state that we decry.
... though I suppose one can continue to run an old version. And it's not reasonable to expect open source volunteers to do double work. But it is still a loss.