The case will be overturned when it's revealed that Judge Thomas Horne received promises of several million dollars from an anonymous Nigerian benefactor in exchange for his help clearing a bank account. It's easy for us to look down on this sort of thing, but we need to realize that he needed the money because his wife left him because of he was being emailed by hot college coeds all the time. He tried to make it up to her by increasing the size of his sma1l p3n.i.s with he.rßal v1aggraa, but she left him before he got the drugs. Since then, he's had to remortgaged his home to afford prescription drugs like v4llium and viccodañ, but he really couldn't make ends meet.
...it's a shame it's necessary. Why is it that if I'm writing my blog, I can take any paragraph of text in the world, quote it, then tear it a part, but if I'm making a song and I sample 1 second's worth of The Beatles, my ass will be in court before the third chord progression?
It's definitely a step in the right direction that Lessig has codified the Creative Commons license, allowing us to make things like Wikipedia and one or two music sites, but really the CCL doesn't give us any rights that we shouldn't already have under Fair Use anyway. I mean, Walt Disney has been dead for 30 years. Why the hell can't I draw Mickey Mouse smoking a joint if I want to? Why is Magnavox still able to get license fees from people making video game consoles? Why does Nintendo still own the D-pad and A+B buttons? And what's up with Apple paying Amazon for one click shopping in iTunes? It's all just so ridiculous.
I recognize the need for some limited monopoly to spur innovation, but it's clear that at this point IP has spun out of control. Thank goodness for people like Lessig, Groklaw, and the EFF!
That's exactly my point. Europeans keep bringing up this "free" dial-up, as though to prove that America is behind the curve, but they're exactly backwards. In America we actually do have *truly free* dial-up from Juno.com and others. And now someone else is offering a free wifi hotspot network as well. Expensive European "free" plans are all well and good, but they don't really have anything to do with the topic at hand.
Some have speculated that DrunkenBatman is DrunkenBruceWayne, a theory I too once believed. However, after I publicly aired my suspicions, he and I were kidnapped by the DrunkenPenguin then saved by DrunkenBatman. So I've seen DrunkenBruceWayne and DrunkenBatman, together....However, I should note, where was DrunkenRobin during all this? Just hanging around the DrunkenBatcave? We can only drunkenly speculate, I guess.
Europeans keep bringing this up, but if you do the math, you're still getting screwed compared to Americans. We haven't paid by the minute for local calls in 20 years, so our costs for dial-up really aren't comparable.
Someone on another thread said 2 or 3p/minute for a local call, right?
2~3p=5 * 60 minutes = $3/hour.
That's not a good deal for dialup. AOL offered $5/hour to Americans back in like '96. If you use the internet more than 7 hours per month, you're better off paying the American standard rate of $20 for unlimited dial up.
This rate became the standard in America back during 1997.
Europeans really need to stop bringing up these "free" dial-up plans, because they're a worse deal that even terrible mom n' pop ISPs over here. That we have always had free local calls is the whole reason the internet got popular so much more quickly in America. If we had being European rates all along, the internet would have developed very differently.
Oh yeah, read your Plato. The Forms are awesome. First of all, there's the Form of the Good, which is a lot like the sun. And everyone else is like a slave in cave. (Basically, it's just a rip-off of the Matrix. Still, it's kind of interesting.)
So, if I understand this story correctly, Microsoft feels that Forms are just properties of webpages that already exist, but the others feel that Forms are timeless, ideal webpages that we can remember experiencing before our birth. You know, like the Englebart hypertext computer.
If the standards committee is really torn between these two ways of understand the Forms, it may come down to someone like Hegel, showing that the Forms are a historically evolving entity, moving towards an inevitable conclusion.
Or, Microsoft will do whatever the hell they want in IE7 and everyone will just have to complain about it.
Either way, it's good to see more public philosophy.
Their method is quite impressive. First, they made a layer with every prime number written on it. Then, they did a posterize effect, inversed the color, rasterized it, applied an outline filter, and added a second layer. On that second layer, they wrote the 42nd Mersenne Prime.
It just goes to show that Adobe has a long way to go to compete with the power of OSS.
If the patent were just on the code, you could change just a few variable names, and sell it as your own.
If The Beatles are allowed to keep DJ Dangermouse from releasing "The Gray Album," which sounds only vaguely like the "The White Album" but used sounds from it in its construction, I'm sure that copyright is sufficient to cover the simple renaming of variables. Software patents are basically unnecessary. Trade secret and copyright laws are more than enough to ensure due compensation is given to the creators of software. Adding patents into the mix just lets people monopolize very broad concepts, like Priceline's reverse bidding patent or Eloas' web browsing patent.
Man, for those of us living in Japan, a grapefruit sized piece of fissionable material is significantly less expensive than an equivalent amount of fissionable material. Fruit is so expensive that many a morning, I consider cost/benefit analysis of switching to a nuclear annihilation based diet. Much as Godzilla has already done.
The problem with that idea is that space battles are exciting, whereas people doing research is not. About the only thing less interesting to the general public than science is fake science, so I'm not sure that anyone would tune into a show about a civilian starship crew.True, it's kind of politically questionable that the Enterprise is supposed to be a Navy battleship and the Costeau's Calypso all rolled into one, but it just creates more story possibilities to do it that way.
25 million downloads is definitely something for the Firefox team to be proud of. However, it's worth bearing in mind that with 90+% of computers running Windows, Microsoft can easily get 25 million people to download a mere security fix for IE. This means we still have a long way to go.
I've been thinking a bit about the return of the browser wars a bit recently, and I think one fundamental problem for challengers to Microsoft is that they render webpages in bad faith. Let me explain what I mean by this. When, say, Opera opens a page, the designers of Opera have done their best to try to ensure that the page will render as it is intended to render. There are some bugs and problems and whatnot, but the Opera team makes a good faith effort to have the page come out well. The same can be said of Gecko, Konqueror, and almost all of the other modern engines. For engine's like those, you can read the designers' weblogs as they struggle to understand the W3C recommendations and come up with a way to satisfy those recommendation while keeping the code light and make sure that old pages still render acceptably. (Dave Hyatt's blog is particularly interesting.) Microsoft however is an exception to this trend.
Microsoft, because they have a business model that focuses on introducing new features in order to entice users to upgrade, is not primarily interested in rendering a page as intended by the W3C. Instead, they are most interested in adding new features. This tendency wouldn't be so bad in itself, but even more than that, they are interested in adding new, exclusive features.
For a product like Office, having a new, exclusive feature is the way to generate sales. Back when only Office '95 had wavy red misspelling underlining, '95 was the product you had to have if you wanted to use that feature. So, it makes sense that MS is concentrating on adding features to, say, Windows Media Player or the XBox.
The trouble is that the whole mentality of "add the feature, put a check box on the list, move on" doesn't really work for the web. The web isn't useful if it's exclusive. The goal for the Mozilla group isn't (and shouldn't be) making Mozilla the only web browser that gets pages "right." The goal is, and should be, conforming to the way that pages out to look, and the way that pages out to look is the way that looked when they were imagined by the designers. That means no shifting standards of code. It means not just backwards compatibility, but also FORWARD compatibility. New features added to Mozilla have to "degrade gracefully" in less evolved browsers. You can add new stuff to your browser, but only if it plays well with all the old stuff already out there. MS just fundamentally does not get this.
There's another well known problem caused by Microsoft's check box-itis, namely security. Security can never be a check box on the spec sheet (since it necessarily revolves around stuff you never thought of). Furthermore, the drive to add new features reduces the time you spend thinking through the consequences of old features. (Active X is of course the key example of a incompletely thought through feature. "It's like Java but more powerful!" check box sounded great, until we realized the extra power could be used to insert malicious code.) Hopefully, since Mozilla is open source, there are more eyes looking at its code, and thus more people thinking about the security implications of things one might not think of oneself. This isn't to say Mozilla or open source software is always better, just that since there's no rush to release, there's more time to think things through in theory.
Anyhow, I could keep going on like this, but that's enough for now.
25 million downloads is definitely something for the Firefox team to be proud of. However, it's worth bearing in mind that with 90+% of computers running Windows, Microsoft can easily get 25 million people to download a mere security fix for IE. This means we still have a long way to go.
I've been thinking a bit about the return of the browser wars a bit recently, and I think one fundamental problem for challengers to Microsoft is that they render webpages in bad faith. Let me explain what I mean by this. When, say, Opera opens a page, the designers of Opera have done their best to try to ensure that the page will render as it is intended to render. There are some bugs and problems and whatnot, but the Opera team makes a good faith effort to have the page come out well. The same can be said of Gecko, Konqueror, and almost all of the other modern engines. For engine's like those, you can read the designers' weblogs as they struggle to understand the W3C recommendations and come up with a way to satisfy those recommendation while keeping the code light and make sure that old pages still render acceptably. (Dave Hyatt's blog is particularly interesting.) Microsoft however is an exception to this trend.
Microsoft, because they have a business model that focuses on introducing new features in order to entice users to upgrade, is not primarily interested in rendering a page as intended by the W3C. Instead, they are most interested in adding new features. This tendency wouldn't be so bad in itself, but even more than that, they are interested in adding new, exclusive features.
For a product like Office, having a new, exclusive feature is the way to generate sales. Back when only Office '95 had wavy red misspelling underlining, '95 was the product you had to have if you wanted to use that feature. So, it makes sense that MS is concentrating on adding features to, say, Windows Media Player or the XBox.
The trouble is that the whole mentality of "add the feature, put a check box on the list, move on" doesn't really work for the web. The web isn't useful if it's exclusive. The goal for the Mozilla group isn't (and shouldn't be) making Mozilla the only web browser that gets pages "right." The goal is, and should be, conforming to the way that pages out to look, and the way that pages out to look is the way that looked when they were imagined by the designers. That means no shifting standards of code. It means not just backwards compatibility, but also FORWARD compatibility. New features added to Mozilla have to "degrade gracefully" in less evolved browsers. You can add new stuff to your browser, but only if it plays well with all the old stuff already out there. MS just fundamentally does not get this.
There's another well known problem caused by Microsoft's check box-itis, namely security. Security can never be a check box on the spec sheet (since it necessarily revolves around stuff you never thought of). Furthermore, the drive to add new features reduces the time you spend thinking through the consequences of old features. (Active X is of course the key example of a incompletely thought through feature. "It's like Java but more powerful!" check box sounded great, until we realized the extra power could be used to insert malicious code.) Hopefully, since Mozilla is open source, there are more eyes looking at its code, and thus more people thinking about the security implications of things one might not think of oneself. This isn't to say Mozilla or open source software is always better, just that since there's no rush to release, there's more time to think things through in theory.
Anyhow, I could keep going on like this, but that's enough for now.
Check out http://www.pokia.com/. They make adaptors to plug conventional analog phone receivers into cellphones. In fact, some of their fancier models even have bluetooth, so you can be walking down the street, talking on the batphone, while your call is routed through your normal cellphone in your pocket. I think it's a pretty sweet idea.
Isn't the whole point of time-continuous media to watch it through a continued period of time? Putting hyperlinks into a video just turns your web browser into an improved version of the Sega CD or 3DO.
I'll admit this technology has its place, but I wonder how big that place is...
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Once we install enough tidal energy collectors, there will be no more big waves. Before long, all the newspapers will be full of stories about sad and lonely surfers:
"Dude, I heard about a gnarly 1 foot wave off the coast of the Bering Strait."
"Woah, what are we waiting for? Let's grab our boards and ride!"
In the short run, of course, a lot of people are going to be burned by this. But it could have some positive effects in the longer run. Once it becomes clear that using Social Security numbers as a form of ID is asking for trouble and that any information given to marketers is bound to be 0wned eventually, we'll start to see some legislative and commercial movements away from the current monolithic data hoarding. Right now, no one wants to endorse the right to privacy, since it "helps terrorists" and "hey, YOU have nothing to hide, right?" but once people realize that identity theft can effect them, we'll start to see some change.
Hopefully.
Slashdot Mirror
The case will be overturned when it's revealed that Judge Thomas Horne received promises of several million dollars from an anonymous Nigerian benefactor in exchange for his help clearing a bank account. It's easy for us to look down on this sort of thing, but we need to realize that he needed the money because his wife left him because of he was being emailed by hot college coeds all the time. He tried to make it up to her by increasing the size of his sma1l p3n.i.s with he.rßal v1aggraa, but she left him before he got the drugs. Since then, he's had to remortgaged his home to afford prescription drugs like v4llium and viccodañ, but he really couldn't make ends meet.
...it's a shame it's necessary. Why is it that if I'm writing my blog, I can take any paragraph of text in the world, quote it, then tear it a part, but if I'm making a song and I sample 1 second's worth of The Beatles, my ass will be in court before the third chord progression?
It's definitely a step in the right direction that Lessig has codified the Creative Commons license, allowing us to make things like Wikipedia and one or two music sites, but really the CCL doesn't give us any rights that we shouldn't already have under Fair Use anyway. I mean, Walt Disney has been dead for 30 years. Why the hell can't I draw Mickey Mouse smoking a joint if I want to? Why is Magnavox still able to get license fees from people making video game consoles? Why does Nintendo still own the D-pad and A+B buttons? And what's up with Apple paying Amazon for one click shopping in iTunes? It's all just so ridiculous.
I recognize the need for some limited monopoly to spur innovation, but it's clear that at this point IP has spun out of control. Thank goodness for people like Lessig, Groklaw, and the EFF!
...who saw that headline and thought that A List Apart was biting the hand that feeds it?
That's exactly my point. Europeans keep bringing up this "free" dial-up, as though to prove that America is behind the curve, but they're exactly backwards. In America we actually do have *truly free* dial-up from Juno.com and others. And now someone else is offering a free wifi hotspot network as well. Expensive European "free" plans are all well and good, but they don't really have anything to do with the topic at hand.
Who is DrunkenBatman?
...However, I should note, where was DrunkenRobin during all this? Just hanging around the DrunkenBatcave? We can only drunkenly speculate, I guess.
Some have speculated that DrunkenBatman is DrunkenBruceWayne, a theory I too once believed. However, after I publicly aired my suspicions, he and I were kidnapped by the DrunkenPenguin then saved by DrunkenBatman. So I've seen DrunkenBruceWayne and DrunkenBatman, together.
Europeans keep bringing this up, but if you do the math, you're still getting screwed compared to Americans. We haven't paid by the minute for local calls in 20 years, so our costs for dial-up really aren't comparable.
Someone on another thread said 2 or 3p/minute for a local call, right?
2~3p=5 * 60 minutes = $3/hour.
That's not a good deal for dialup. AOL offered $5/hour to Americans back in like '96. If you use the internet more than 7 hours per month, you're better off paying the American standard rate of $20 for unlimited dial up.
This rate became the standard in America back during 1997.
Europeans really need to stop bringing up these "free" dial-up plans, because they're a worse deal that even terrible mom n' pop ISPs over here. That we have always had free local calls is the whole reason the internet got popular so much more quickly in America. If we had being European rates all along, the internet would have developed very differently.
Thinking even more, Microsoft is quite plainly Thrasymachus:
"Justice/innovation is nothing but the advantage of the stronger."
Ah, so Microsoft is Sophist and/or Post-Modern. Now I get it.
Oh yeah, read your Plato. The Forms are awesome. First of all, there's the Form of the Good, which is a lot like the sun. And everyone else is like a slave in cave. (Basically, it's just a rip-off of the Matrix. Still, it's kind of interesting.)
So, if I understand this story correctly, Microsoft feels that Forms are just properties of webpages that already exist, but the others feel that Forms are timeless, ideal webpages that we can remember experiencing before our birth. You know, like the Englebart hypertext computer.
If the standards committee is really torn between these two ways of understand the Forms, it may come down to someone like Hegel, showing that the Forms are a historically evolving entity, moving towards an inevitable conclusion.
Or, Microsoft will do whatever the hell they want in IE7 and everyone will just have to complain about it.
Either way, it's good to see more public philosophy.
Their method is quite impressive. First, they made a layer with every prime number written on it. Then, they did a posterize effect, inversed the color, rasterized it, applied an outline filter, and added a second layer. On that second layer, they wrote the 42nd Mersenne Prime.
It just goes to show that Adobe has a long way to go to compete with the power of OSS.
Fuckety hell, I need to start using the preview button.
Grr.
Man, for those of us living in Japan, a grapefruit sized piece of fissionable material is significantly less expensive than an
equivalent amount of fissionable material. Fruit is so expensive that many a morning, I consider cost/benefit analysis of switching to a nuclear annihilation based diet. Much as Godzilla has already done.
I think Microsoft selling anti-virus/spyware software is most like a fireworks store owning an emergency room.
"Hey, it's not our fault that the roman candle broke! Now, do you want your burns treated or not?"
The problem with that idea is that space battles are exciting, whereas people doing research is not. About the only thing less interesting to the general public than science is fake science, so I'm not sure that anyone would tune into a show about a civilian starship crew.True, it's kind of politically questionable that the Enterprise is supposed to be a Navy battleship and the Costeau's Calypso all rolled into one, but it just creates more story possibilities to do it that way.
25 million downloads is definitely something for the Firefox team to be proud of. However, it's worth bearing in mind that with 90+% of computers running Windows, Microsoft can easily get 25 million people to download a mere security fix for IE. This means we still have a long way to go.
I've been thinking a bit about the return of the browser wars a bit recently, and I think one fundamental problem for challengers to Microsoft is that they render webpages in bad faith. Let me explain what I mean by this. When, say, Opera opens a page, the designers of Opera have done their best to try to ensure that the page will render as it is intended to render. There are some bugs and problems and whatnot, but the Opera team makes a good faith effort to have the page come out well. The same can be said of Gecko, Konqueror, and almost all of the other modern engines. For engine's like those, you can read the designers' weblogs as they struggle to understand the W3C recommendations and come up with a way to satisfy those recommendation while keeping the code light and make sure that old pages still render acceptably. (Dave Hyatt's blog is particularly interesting.) Microsoft however is an exception to this trend.
Microsoft, because they have a business model that focuses on introducing new features in order to entice users to upgrade, is not primarily interested in rendering a page as intended by the W3C. Instead, they are most interested in adding new features. This tendency wouldn't be so bad in itself, but even more than that, they are interested in adding new, exclusive features.
For a product like Office, having a new, exclusive feature is the way to generate sales. Back when only Office '95 had wavy red misspelling underlining, '95 was the product you had to have if you wanted to use that feature. So, it makes sense that MS is concentrating on adding features to, say, Windows Media Player or the XBox.
The trouble is that the whole mentality of "add the feature, put a check box on the list, move on" doesn't really work for the web. The web isn't useful if it's exclusive. The goal for the Mozilla group isn't (and shouldn't be) making Mozilla the only web browser that gets pages "right." The goal is, and should be, conforming to the way that pages out to look, and the way that pages out to look is the way that looked when they were imagined by the designers. That means no shifting standards of code. It means not just backwards compatibility, but also FORWARD compatibility. New features added to Mozilla have to "degrade gracefully" in less evolved browsers. You can add new stuff to your browser, but only if it plays well with all the old stuff already out there. MS just fundamentally does not get this.
There's another well known problem caused by Microsoft's check box-itis, namely security. Security can never be a check box on the spec sheet (since it necessarily revolves around stuff you never thought of). Furthermore, the drive to add new features reduces the time you spend thinking through the consequences of old features. (Active X is of course the key example of a incompletely thought through feature. "It's like Java but more powerful!" check box sounded great, until we realized the extra power could be used to insert malicious code.) Hopefully, since Mozilla is open source, there are more eyes looking at its code, and thus more people thinking about the security implications of things one might not think of oneself. This isn't to say Mozilla or open source software is always better, just that since there's no rush to release, there's more time to think things through in theory.
Anyhow, I could keep going on like this, but that's enough for now.
25 million downloads is definitely something for the Firefox team to be proud of. However, it's worth bearing in mind that with 90+% of computers running Windows, Microsoft can easily get 25 million people to download a mere security fix for IE. This means we still have a long way to go. I've been thinking a bit about the return of the browser wars a bit recently, and I think one fundamental problem for challengers to Microsoft is that they render webpages in bad faith. Let me explain what I mean by this. When, say, Opera opens a page, the designers of Opera have done their best to try to ensure that the page will render as it is intended to render. There are some bugs and problems and whatnot, but the Opera team makes a good faith effort to have the page come out well. The same can be said of Gecko, Konqueror, and almost all of the other modern engines. For engine's like those, you can read the designers' weblogs as they struggle to understand the W3C recommendations and come up with a way to satisfy those recommendation while keeping the code light and make sure that old pages still render acceptably. (Dave Hyatt's blog is particularly interesting.) Microsoft however is an exception to this trend. Microsoft, because they have a business model that focuses on introducing new features in order to entice users to upgrade, is not primarily interested in rendering a page as intended by the W3C. Instead, they are most interested in adding new features. This tendency wouldn't be so bad in itself, but even more than that, they are interested in adding new, exclusive features. For a product like Office, having a new, exclusive feature is the way to generate sales. Back when only Office '95 had wavy red misspelling underlining, '95 was the product you had to have if you wanted to use that feature. So, it makes sense that MS is concentrating on adding features to, say, Windows Media Player or the XBox. The trouble is that the whole mentality of "add the feature, put a check box on the list, move on" doesn't really work for the web. The web isn't useful if it's exclusive. The goal for the Mozilla group isn't (and shouldn't be) making Mozilla the only web browser that gets pages "right." The goal is, and should be, conforming to the way that pages out to look, and the way that pages out to look is the way that looked when they were imagined by the designers. That means no shifting standards of code. It means not just backwards compatibility, but also FORWARD compatibility. New features added to Mozilla have to "degrade gracefully" in less evolved browsers. You can add new stuff to your browser, but only if it plays well with all the old stuff already out there. MS just fundamentally does not get this. There's another well known problem caused by Microsoft's check box-itis, namely security. Security can never be a check box on the spec sheet (since it necessarily revolves around stuff you never thought of). Furthermore, the drive to add new features reduces the time you spend thinking through the consequences of old features. (Active X is of course the key example of a incompletely thought through feature. "It's like Java but more powerful!" check box sounded great, until we realized the extra power could be used to insert malicious code.) Hopefully, since Mozilla is open source, there are more eyes looking at its code, and thus more people thinking about the security implications of things one might not think of oneself. This isn't to say Mozilla or open source software is always better, just that since there's no rush to release, there's more time to think things through in theory. Anyhow, I could keep going on like this, but that's enough for now.
People have been talking about making video turntables for years. If it was going to happen, we would have seen a successful example of it by now.
I think one problem is that with audio, it's easy to just fade one song into another, but with video, there's not as clear an equivalent.
What we need is a machine that automatically adds "star wipe" to every conceivable frame of video. Now that would be sweet.
Since when is the concept of a guitar patented? There must be one crazy rich old Spanish dude somewhere...
Check out http://www.pokia.com/. They make adaptors to plug conventional analog phone receivers into cellphones. In fact, some of their fancier models even have bluetooth, so you can be walking down the street, talking on the batphone, while your call is routed through your normal cellphone in your pocket. I think it's a pretty sweet idea.
Isn't the whole point of time-continuous media to watch it through a continued period of time? Putting hyperlinks into a video just turns your web browser into an improved version of the Sega CD or 3DO. I'll admit this technology has its place, but I wonder how big that place is...
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Once we install enough tidal energy collectors, there will be no more big waves. Before long, all the newspapers will be full of stories about sad and lonely surfers:
"Dude, I heard about a gnarly 1 foot wave off the coast of the Bering Strait."
"Woah, what are we waiting for? Let's grab our boards and ride!"
Won't someone please think of the surfers!
In the short run, of course, a lot of people are going to be burned by this. But it could have some positive effects in the longer run. Once it becomes clear that using Social Security numbers as a form of ID is asking for trouble and that any information given to marketers is bound to be 0wned eventually, we'll start to see some legislative and commercial movements away from the current monolithic data hoarding. Right now, no one wants to endorse the right to privacy, since it "helps terrorists" and "hey, YOU have nothing to hide, right?" but once people realize that identity theft can effect them, we'll start to see some change. Hopefully.