Of course, by saying that and posting on/., I've probably narrowed down my age, sex, and culture enough already. And I've identified my residence as parents' basement. Have they accounted for the mediating effects of Cheetos consumption on typing habits?
CES 2009, my friend, was more than a year ago. Some of the same ARM-based models were demoed at CES 2009 and CES 2010. All throughout 2009 we heard that they would come to market in "mid-2009" or "late 2009". Now we're hearing the same thing about 2010.
Me too! I had been keeping an eye out for ARM based "smartbooks" etc. for several months. Lots of reference designs, lots of demos at CES. No one ever brought anything decent to retail stores. I heard HP was releasing something in Spain. Lenovo is supposed to be releasing something in the US later this year.
I wanted something around a $200 price with decent battery life, capable of running Linux. I wanted ARM, too, because I didn't want to buy a machine that came with Windows only to wipe it. After months of waiting, I gave up.
A few weeks ago I purchased a used Acer Aspire One, along with a high capacity battery. Total price, including shipping and taxes for all items, was less than $200. The machine had originally come with Windows, but was sold without any OS installed. I put Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it, and I'm quite happy with it.
I'm now out of the market for one of these many rumored ARM-based devices... no one has any decent offerings (and no, the Touchbook is not what I would consider a decent, consumer-oriented offering, and they're not even in stock AFAICT), so I gave up. Also, $99 for this Moby Tablet? Yeah, right. Maybe the bill of materials is $99, but I doubt even that. This thing stinks badly of being vaporware.
Actually the WP article on the subject says the processor was specifically designed to avoid infringing the patent, but that they bought a license to be able to sell it as "MIPS compatible".
Then later they supposedly licensed entire architectures from MIPS, but IIRC what I read about RMS's machine dates before that happened. Also just because they license the architecture doesn't mean what they produce is potentially patent infringing; they could just be playing it safe to avoid trouble.
I had the same thought at first, but the summary says both mandatory and proprietary. I don't think they should ask schools to stop using or offering proprietary software, that's unrealistic, but what is the need to make it mandatory? If a student or their family truly wants to opt out for some reason, that should be permitted.
That assertion is not supported by the case you link to, at least not as summarized in the WP article. What I see is that if you have ID, you may be required to show it. But if you don't have ID, how can they require you to show what you don't have? It is not illegal to leave your wallet at home.
Furthermore, as I pointed out, not everyone has driver's licenses. Social Security Card clearly says "not for purposes of identification" printed on it. People don't carry around their birth certificates. How can you be required to show something that you are not required to even have?
The difference is that requiring you to have a driver's license, registration, and proof of insurance helps ME if you hit me with your car. And you're entirely free to walk around or take public transportation without any kind of identification whatsoever. That's not the case in many other countries. In the US, you are only required to have (and carry) a driver's license if you want to drive. Unless there's some law I'm unaware of that requires everyone to learn how to drive, which there isn't.
I thought it sounded weird, too. Since Dvorak places all the vowels on the left hand home row, it's almost impossible to type most words without alternating hands.
Whether Dvorak is superior in terms of speed or number of errors may be a toss-up, but as someone who first did hunt-and-peck, then learned to touch-type QWERTY, then relearned to touch-type Dvorak, my experience is that Dvorak is definitely more comfortable than QWERTY.
Besides, feelings of smug superiority can't be properly quantified in those studies.
That's what the letters on the keyboard are for. Seriously, this is a compelling reason for me not to rearrange keycaps for Dvorak. I touch type anyway, why would I need the keycaps to match what I'm typing? And then, for whatever reason, if I am forced to type in QWERTY (VNC and RDP sometimes do funny things with key mappings), I can just look down and see QWERTY letters.
And then there are the places you can't. For my parents, their options are 9.95 a month dialup, or long-range wireless which starts at about $70 a month, not including specialized hardware costs and required professional installation. There's probably also satellite internet service available, but I'm guessing that runs a bit more than $15 a month.
Unless someone can point me to a clause in the DMCA that allows the circumvention of public domain works, that is.
The DMCA would only apply to access control mechanisms that protect an underlying copyrighted work. There is case law on this; simply cracking an access control mechanism is not enough to run afoul of the DMCA, there has to be something copyrighted that is being protected by it (e.g. not just a short number for example). (However, cracking and access control mechanism to a copyrighted work without infringing the work will run afoul of the DMCA, so the law is still idiotic).
In this case if the work's copyright had expired, there would be no valid copyright in question, so the DMCA would not apply. But your point about the ban on distribution of tools in interesting... since in this hypothetical situation, a circumvention tool would probably contain material that could crack access controls on both copyrighted and copyright-expired works.
Now all you need is a 8 bit ISA slot and you are set.
Won't a 16-bit slot do just as well? AFAIK, it's backward compatible.
On another note, projects like this (well, not exactly like this, but "hard hack" or bottom-up projects) tend to rely on what is now obsolete hardware. While reading through the "Will the serial port ever die" article the other day, I kept thinking about how useful the serial port is for people interested in microcontrollers or any kind of custom made hardware. Back in high school, I built the serial "black cable" to hook up my TI-86 to the computer. Later, I used it to program Basic Stamp clones and PIC microcontrollers.
Same goes for the parallel port... utterly simple to interface with, if you quickly want to throw together some basic hardware. I'm no engineer, but I was able to build the hardware and write enough code to function as a driver to read data from a magnetic stripe card reader into the parallel port. Today, if I had to do the same task via USB, the hardware alone would be much more complex... I'd probably need a microcontroller to sit between the reader and the USB port, instead of directly tying the two.
You can pick up prototyping boards that fit directly into ISA slots. You can also get them for PCI, but level of complexity begins to increase. What about PCI express?
Obviously the cost of microcontrollers that have built-in USB capability has dropped, but as consumer-level technology advances, does it become less friendly to homebrew and DIYers?
As for your comment, you have an interesting political philosophy. Ideas like property and ownership are neither inherent nor immutable. Absent government, society, and laws, things like "property", "ownership" and "mine/yours" are pretty much defined by what you can physically control or prevent others from taking from you. So sure, you own your shit (figuratively and literally) as long as you can stop anyone else from taking it. State of nature and all that.
Of course none of us are in the state of nature anymore, we all live in societies with governments and legal systems that define certain sets of property rights and interests. I don't claim to be up to date on ownership of tissue issues, just recall that case from a class I took a while ago. But my point is that you make a philosophical claim about the nature of property and base it on a relationship between a human and an object. But property is fundamentally social: it is about a relationship between a human and another human with respect to some object.
The whole point of qui tam actions are to encourage people to bring the suits in the first place. They do this with Medicaid fraud in many states, for example. The state might not have the resources to closely examine all possible instances of fraud, or private parties might have better information. So by giving people a cut off the award, you give them an incentive to look for the fraud and to bring it to the government's attention.
So what happens to all the products that have already been sold and are marked with patent numbers after those patents expire? Should the manufacturer contact all the buyers to inform them the patent has expired? Should they file off the patent numbers?
One could actually argue that marking a product with an expired patent number serves the public interest: that way, anyone who wants to duplicate it can simply look up the patent number and follow the process!
It's not really my analogy, but rather the author's analogy. And yes, it's true that kids are not 100% in their parents' control all the time. What happens when the kid goes to a friend's house and eats candy that the parents don't let the kid eat at home?
Same thing goes with the video games. Little Johnny isn't allowed to play GTA at home, so he goes to Bobby's house after school and plays it.
None of those situations sound like they are screaming out for government regulation, banning of sales, or taxes. It just sounds like life.
I really don't have much of an opinion one way or another. Just saying that there's a lot of political opposition to "fat taxes" already. I think a lot of people would be complaining about government intrusion if fat taxes became bans on sales to minors of unhealthy foods.
So, to continue with the article author's analogy, is his proposed policy to tax violent video games? Or to ban the sale to minors? Does the tax not apply to adults, since the study (or at least the article) seems not to mention them? What about the secondary market? How much will implementing any of these policies cost, and will the costs outweigh the benefits? Why is any tax or government regulation better than simply informing parents and letting them decide? Those are all questions that need to be answered before implementing any sort of policy, even if this meta-analysis is 100% rock solid.
As for fat taxes generally, one issue is that often legislatures are confused about what they want. They want more revenue, so they want to tax something, but they also want to discourage vices, so they tax vices... but by discouraging the vice, they get less revenue from taxing it. Meanwhile, you get deadweight loss associated with Pareto suboptimality.
There are also distributive questions about the individuals most likely to be affected by fat taxes (i.e., probably least likely to be well-informed about proper diet, and less likely to be able to afford healthy food). That in turn relates to your next point...
If you don't want the tax, then how about we do away with all the corn subsidies?
Completely in favor of ditching them. The US promotes agricultural liberalization all over the rest of the world, and we have yet to start practicing it here at home.
Because without it they couldn't stop you from breaking the DRM and disseminating the How-To to a wider audience, who would then be very hard to catch actually infringing.
Yeah, that's worked real well. How many tutorials for ripping DVDs can you find in a few seconds on Google?
With Anti-Circumvention laws you can both discourage people from breaking the DRM (or at least telling people about it) and take legal action against anyone who does, whether they've actually done anything "illegal" beyond circumventing the DRM or not.
If they haven't done anything beyond circumventing DRM, why should we care? The harm comes from infringing copyrights, not from circumventing DRM. Anti-cirumvention provisions are an "attack the tool" approach that's both ineffective and misguided.
Anti-circumvention provisions, particularly as they have been applied in the US, are often used as an anti-competitive device to block legitimate competitors from making interoperable or replacement products. Anti-circumvention provisions also effectively make legal tasks illegal. E.g., ripping a portion of a DVD for commentary or criticism is allowable under fair use, but the process by which one would do so is illegal because it involves violating the DMCA, even though the end result is not illegal.
Besides, do such provisions actually add anything useful? In order for anti-circumvention to be violated, the underlying work must be copyrighted. In any case of real harm, then the underlying copyright would be infringed as well, in which case you could sue for infringement. If an access control was circumvented but the copyright was NOT infringed, then what harm could there be? On the contrary, it is precisely those situations that we would want to allow for interoperability, etc.
If the argument is because it stops the spread of anti-circumvention tools, it doesn't. Dozens of DMCA-violating tools are a click of a mouse button away from being installed.
Any Oregonians, call Senator Ron Wyden. He is a member of the Senate Finance Committee, and the US Trade Representative Ron Kirk (lead US man behind ACTA) is scheduled to testify before the committee this week, discussing the US trade policy agenda. In January, Wyden sent a letter to Kirk inquiring about the lack of transparency and questionable provisions in ACTA. Ask Wyden to grill Kirk on ACTA!
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Joke's on them - I use Dvorak!
Of course, by saying that and posting on /., I've probably narrowed down my age, sex, and culture enough already. And I've identified my residence as parents' basement. Have they accounted for the mediating effects of Cheetos consumption on typing habits?
CES 2009, my friend, was more than a year ago. Some of the same ARM-based models were demoed at CES 2009 and CES 2010. All throughout 2009 we heard that they would come to market in "mid-2009" or "late 2009". Now we're hearing the same thing about 2010.
Me too! I had been keeping an eye out for ARM based "smartbooks" etc. for several months. Lots of reference designs, lots of demos at CES. No one ever brought anything decent to retail stores. I heard HP was releasing something in Spain. Lenovo is supposed to be releasing something in the US later this year.
I wanted something around a $200 price with decent battery life, capable of running Linux. I wanted ARM, too, because I didn't want to buy a machine that came with Windows only to wipe it. After months of waiting, I gave up.
A few weeks ago I purchased a used Acer Aspire One, along with a high capacity battery. Total price, including shipping and taxes for all items, was less than $200. The machine had originally come with Windows, but was sold without any OS installed. I put Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it, and I'm quite happy with it.
I'm now out of the market for one of these many rumored ARM-based devices... no one has any decent offerings (and no, the Touchbook is not what I would consider a decent, consumer-oriented offering, and they're not even in stock AFAICT), so I gave up. Also, $99 for this Moby Tablet? Yeah, right. Maybe the bill of materials is $99, but I doubt even that. This thing stinks badly of being vaporware.
Not if you use a 64-bit version of Windows, you can't.
Also I have my doubts about whether you actually could run those on a 32-bit version, but I'm not about to whip out VirtualBox and try.
s/TLD/playground/g
Actually the WP article on the subject says the processor was specifically designed to avoid infringing the patent, but that they bought a license to be able to sell it as "MIPS compatible".
Then later they supposedly licensed entire architectures from MIPS, but IIRC what I read about RMS's machine dates before that happened. Also just because they license the architecture doesn't mean what they produce is potentially patent infringing; they could just be playing it safe to avoid trouble.
Last I heard RMS was using a Longsoon based machine from China that supposedly has open technical specs, etc.
I had the same thought at first, but the summary says both mandatory and proprietary. I don't think they should ask schools to stop using or offering proprietary software, that's unrealistic, but what is the need to make it mandatory? If a student or their family truly wants to opt out for some reason, that should be permitted.
Fancy seeing you here :-)
Reminds me of the questions surrounding "Where's George", or the times I've seen stamps and such on bills.
That assertion is not supported by the case you link to, at least not as summarized in the WP article. What I see is that if you have ID, you may be required to show it. But if you don't have ID, how can they require you to show what you don't have? It is not illegal to leave your wallet at home.
Furthermore, as I pointed out, not everyone has driver's licenses. Social Security Card clearly says "not for purposes of identification" printed on it. People don't carry around their birth certificates. How can you be required to show something that you are not required to even have?
The difference is that requiring you to have a driver's license, registration, and proof of insurance helps ME if you hit me with your car. And you're entirely free to walk around or take public transportation without any kind of identification whatsoever. That's not the case in many other countries. In the US, you are only required to have (and carry) a driver's license if you want to drive. Unless there's some law I'm unaware of that requires everyone to learn how to drive, which there isn't.
I thought it sounded weird, too. Since Dvorak places all the vowels on the left hand home row, it's almost impossible to type most words without alternating hands.
Whether Dvorak is superior in terms of speed or number of errors may be a toss-up, but as someone who first did hunt-and-peck, then learned to touch-type QWERTY, then relearned to touch-type Dvorak, my experience is that Dvorak is definitely more comfortable than QWERTY.
Besides, feelings of smug superiority can't be properly quantified in those studies.
That's what the letters on the keyboard are for. Seriously, this is a compelling reason for me not to rearrange keycaps for Dvorak. I touch type anyway, why would I need the keycaps to match what I'm typing? And then, for whatever reason, if I am forced to type in QWERTY (VNC and RDP sometimes do funny things with key mappings), I can just look down and see QWERTY letters.
And then there are the places you can't. For my parents, their options are 9.95 a month dialup, or long-range wireless which starts at about $70 a month, not including specialized hardware costs and required professional installation. There's probably also satellite internet service available, but I'm guessing that runs a bit more than $15 a month.
Unless someone can point me to a clause in the DMCA that allows the circumvention of public domain works, that is.
The DMCA would only apply to access control mechanisms that protect an underlying copyrighted work. There is case law on this; simply cracking an access control mechanism is not enough to run afoul of the DMCA, there has to be something copyrighted that is being protected by it (e.g. not just a short number for example). (However, cracking and access control mechanism to a copyrighted work without infringing the work will run afoul of the DMCA, so the law is still idiotic).
In this case if the work's copyright had expired, there would be no valid copyright in question, so the DMCA would not apply. But your point about the ban on distribution of tools in interesting... since in this hypothetical situation, a circumvention tool would probably contain material that could crack access controls on both copyrighted and copyright-expired works.
Now all you need is a 8 bit ISA slot and you are set.
Won't a 16-bit slot do just as well? AFAIK, it's backward compatible.
On another note, projects like this (well, not exactly like this, but "hard hack" or bottom-up projects) tend to rely on what is now obsolete hardware. While reading through the "Will the serial port ever die" article the other day, I kept thinking about how useful the serial port is for people interested in microcontrollers or any kind of custom made hardware. Back in high school, I built the serial "black cable" to hook up my TI-86 to the computer. Later, I used it to program Basic Stamp clones and PIC microcontrollers.
Same goes for the parallel port... utterly simple to interface with, if you quickly want to throw together some basic hardware. I'm no engineer, but I was able to build the hardware and write enough code to function as a driver to read data from a magnetic stripe card reader into the parallel port. Today, if I had to do the same task via USB, the hardware alone would be much more complex... I'd probably need a microcontroller to sit between the reader and the USB port, instead of directly tying the two.
You can pick up prototyping boards that fit directly into ISA slots. You can also get them for PCI, but level of complexity begins to increase. What about PCI express?
Obviously the cost of microcontrollers that have built-in USB capability has dropped, but as consumer-level technology advances, does it become less friendly to homebrew and DIYers?
On the legal side, Moore v. Regents of the University of California is one of the most important cases on this issue.
As for your comment, you have an interesting political philosophy. Ideas like property and ownership are neither inherent nor immutable. Absent government, society, and laws, things like "property", "ownership" and "mine/yours" are pretty much defined by what you can physically control or prevent others from taking from you. So sure, you own your shit (figuratively and literally) as long as you can stop anyone else from taking it. State of nature and all that.
Of course none of us are in the state of nature anymore, we all live in societies with governments and legal systems that define certain sets of property rights and interests. I don't claim to be up to date on ownership of tissue issues, just recall that case from a class I took a while ago. But my point is that you make a philosophical claim about the nature of property and base it on a relationship between a human and an object. But property is fundamentally social: it is about a relationship between a human and another human with respect to some object.
The whole point of qui tam actions are to encourage people to bring the suits in the first place. They do this with Medicaid fraud in many states, for example. The state might not have the resources to closely examine all possible instances of fraud, or private parties might have better information. So by giving people a cut off the award, you give them an incentive to look for the fraud and to bring it to the government's attention.
So what happens to all the products that have already been sold and are marked with patent numbers after those patents expire? Should the manufacturer contact all the buyers to inform them the patent has expired? Should they file off the patent numbers?
One could actually argue that marking a product with an expired patent number serves the public interest: that way, anyone who wants to duplicate it can simply look up the patent number and follow the process!
It's not really my analogy, but rather the author's analogy. And yes, it's true that kids are not 100% in their parents' control all the time. What happens when the kid goes to a friend's house and eats candy that the parents don't let the kid eat at home?
Same thing goes with the video games. Little Johnny isn't allowed to play GTA at home, so he goes to Bobby's house after school and plays it.
None of those situations sound like they are screaming out for government regulation, banning of sales, or taxes. It just sounds like life.
What's so bad about a fat/sugar tax?
I really don't have much of an opinion one way or another. Just saying that there's a lot of political opposition to "fat taxes" already. I think a lot of people would be complaining about government intrusion if fat taxes became bans on sales to minors of unhealthy foods.
So, to continue with the article author's analogy, is his proposed policy to tax violent video games? Or to ban the sale to minors? Does the tax not apply to adults, since the study (or at least the article) seems not to mention them? What about the secondary market? How much will implementing any of these policies cost, and will the costs outweigh the benefits? Why is any tax or government regulation better than simply informing parents and letting them decide? Those are all questions that need to be answered before implementing any sort of policy, even if this meta-analysis is 100% rock solid.
As for fat taxes generally, one issue is that often legislatures are confused about what they want. They want more revenue, so they want to tax something, but they also want to discourage vices, so they tax vices... but by discouraging the vice, they get less revenue from taxing it. Meanwhile, you get deadweight loss associated with Pareto suboptimality.
There are also distributive questions about the individuals most likely to be affected by fat taxes (i.e., probably least likely to be well-informed about proper diet, and less likely to be able to afford healthy food). That in turn relates to your next point...
If you don't want the tax, then how about we do away with all the corn subsidies?
Completely in favor of ditching them. The US promotes agricultural liberalization all over the rest of the world, and we have yet to start practicing it here at home.
Because without it they couldn't stop you from breaking the DRM and disseminating the How-To to a wider audience, who would then be very hard to catch actually infringing.
Yeah, that's worked real well. How many tutorials for ripping DVDs can you find in a few seconds on Google?
With Anti-Circumvention laws you can both discourage people from breaking the DRM (or at least telling people about it) and take legal action against anyone who does, whether they've actually done anything "illegal" beyond circumventing the DRM or not.
If they haven't done anything beyond circumventing DRM, why should we care? The harm comes from infringing copyrights, not from circumventing DRM. Anti-cirumvention provisions are an "attack the tool" approach that's both ineffective and misguided.
Anti-circumvention provisions, particularly as they have been applied in the US, are often used as an anti-competitive device to block legitimate competitors from making interoperable or replacement products. Anti-circumvention provisions also effectively make legal tasks illegal. E.g., ripping a portion of a DVD for commentary or criticism is allowable under fair use, but the process by which one would do so is illegal because it involves violating the DMCA, even though the end result is not illegal.
Besides, do such provisions actually add anything useful? In order for anti-circumvention to be violated, the underlying work must be copyrighted. In any case of real harm, then the underlying copyright would be infringed as well, in which case you could sue for infringement. If an access control was circumvented but the copyright was NOT infringed, then what harm could there be? On the contrary, it is precisely those situations that we would want to allow for interoperability, etc.
If the argument is because it stops the spread of anti-circumvention tools, it doesn't. Dozens of DMCA-violating tools are a click of a mouse button away from being installed.
Any Oregonians, call Senator Ron Wyden. He is a member of the Senate Finance Committee, and the US Trade Representative Ron Kirk (lead US man behind ACTA) is scheduled to testify before the committee this week, discussing the US trade policy agenda. In January, Wyden sent a letter to Kirk inquiring about the lack of transparency and questionable provisions in ACTA. Ask Wyden to grill Kirk on ACTA!