I'm surprised no one came up with the following. Unless this is under the category of "We've always done it that way"
You neglected to notice that the legal system that creates and enforces any such ban on underage smoking is not necessarily based on any logical argument.
One reason we do not ban smoking for everyone is because theres a big population that is addicted and is used to being able to legally obtain tobacco. Another is that there is a business interest that profits from tobacco sales. No amount of logic will work against an addict. It takes an awfully compelling argument to counter the profit argument. The compelling argument is slowly shrinking the tobacco industry. Extremely slowly.
The reason we ban underage smoking is because we acknowledge it is not a good idea to smoke.
If you didn't get anything approaching the above argument, which seemed obvious to me, then I would argue the the Mechanical Turk is lame.
I think Jobs has made a deal with the devil to get the price down to something 1% of cell phone owners are willing to pay. I bet the manufacturing cost is more than the retail. Cingular (now AT&T again) makes big bucks on extras like ringtones. They are not going to go for something hackable to get around any of their revenue streams. The only hope is that it (and the rest of the us wireless market) opens up after the end of their contract with apple.
The interesting thing will be how they deal with the european market. Just having a replaceable sim card is going to open it up part way.
For now I have the cheapest dumb phone that I can get. Ringtones are for teenagers.
I'm so tired of shills for industry putting words in my mouth.
It's the right wing nut job columnists who are always trying to connect the "environmentalists" (as if there's some monolithic "environmentalist" orthodoxy) to some imaginary anti-technology, peta-whacko, everything-would-be-better-if-we-lived-as-before-X -technology-was-invented nut jobs. These fanatics have zero political clout, and are in fact a vanishingly small minority. Believing in global-warming, advocating laws restricting how much pollution can be emitted, conserving non-renewable resources, or protecting some ecosystem does not mean I want to send us back to the stone age.
I've seen so many of these columns trying to fire up the right wing reactionary base associate rational calls for a little restraint and thought with a desire to see us all living on Pol Pot's Utopian stone-age farms.
Funny.
I was expecting a little double-cross from Jobs at the end.
"Now that we have them busy we can work on NEXT_COOL_THING and let them founder trying to rewrite and delay. We can release for the holiday season and MS won't have anything to show. Hahahahaha!" He smiles and places his pinkie knowingly at the corner of his mouth.
We explored the concept of draconian DRM in which devices that handle managed content do not handle unmanaged content at all. Draconian DRM could potentially be effective at eliminating piracy if it were ubiquitously adopted, but introduces a new problem of how to handle public content.
Aren't DVDs an example of draconian drm? The media has DRM and the players enforce it. By licensing the dvd decoding technology they can force all the licensees to enforce the drm. Of course, it is still the case that a savvy pro pirate can defeat the drm and the uninformed user cannot.
AFAI can tell the movie studios are doing very well with this setup as long as the price point on dvds doesn't get too far ahead of the cost of marketing the pirated copies.
It reminds me of the conflict between Lucid and Stallman over emacs.
Lucid had a product to get out, Stallman wanted to do everything right and his way. It resulted in the emacs/Xeamcs schism. I didn't work on this directly, but saw my coworkers dealing with this as it happened. My view of the whole thing certainly biased by my experience there. Regardless, it wasn't pretty.
Wherever there are multiple development teams
this tension between the ones that want to get the product out now, and the ones that want to do "the right thing" will exist. I personally think the tension is good. You should strive to do the right thing, but when it comes right down to it you need to produce something people can use in a timely manner.
In acrobat reader 7.0 take a look at the about box and click on "Patent and Legal Notices". After the listing of patent numbers, and standard copyright for adobe there must be hundreds of "portions copyright by..." sections each different with many names familiar to./ers. I noticed at least one reference to GPL
What does this say about "not invented here" and for that matter what does it say about how seriously adobe's lawywers take the "GPL as virus" notion?
Everyone on the western edge of a time zone thinks this is stupid. I spent most of my life on the west edge of a time zone. I went through 2 winters in high school walking to school in the dark. My kids now go to school in the semi dark today.
I do really like the late evening twilight
Those on the eastern edge of a time zone probably won't mind.
The last time they changed DST I had to deal with a slew of bug reports (for Lucid Common lisp if anyone cares). I then discovered a failry nice declarative format for describing when to adjust the time. It really shouldn't be a big programming deal. Most slashdotters don't ever see the sun anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised no one came up with the following. Unless this is under the category of "We've always done it that way"
You neglected to notice that the legal system that creates and enforces any such ban on underage smoking is not necessarily based on any logical argument.
One reason we do not ban smoking for everyone is because theres a big population that is addicted and is used to being able to legally obtain tobacco. Another is that there is a business interest that profits from tobacco sales. No amount of logic will work against an addict. It takes an awfully compelling argument to counter the profit argument. The compelling argument is slowly shrinking the tobacco industry. Extremely slowly.
The reason we ban underage smoking is because we acknowledge it is not a good idea to smoke.
If you didn't get anything approaching the above argument, which seemed obvious to me, then I would argue the the Mechanical Turk is lame.
I think Jobs has made a deal with the devil to get the price down to something 1% of cell phone owners are willing to pay. I bet the manufacturing cost is more than the retail. Cingular (now AT&T again) makes big bucks on extras like ringtones. They are not going to go for something hackable to get around any of their revenue streams. The only hope is that it (and the rest of the us wireless market) opens up after the end of their contract with apple. The interesting thing will be how they deal with the european market. Just having a replaceable sim card is going to open it up part way. For now I have the cheapest dumb phone that I can get. Ringtones are for teenagers.
I'm so tired of shills for industry putting words in my mouth.X -technology-was-invented nut jobs. These fanatics have zero political clout, and are in fact a vanishingly small minority. Believing in global-warming, advocating laws restricting how much pollution can be emitted, conserving non-renewable resources, or protecting some ecosystem does not mean I want to send us back to the stone age.
It's the right wing nut job columnists who are always trying to connect the "environmentalists" (as if there's some monolithic "environmentalist" orthodoxy) to some imaginary anti-technology, peta-whacko, everything-would-be-better-if-we-lived-as-before-
I've seen so many of these columns trying to fire up the right wing reactionary base associate rational calls for a little restraint and thought with a desire to see us all living on Pol Pot's Utopian stone-age farms.
Funny.
I was expecting a little double-cross from Jobs at the end.
"Now that we have them busy we can work on NEXT_COOL_THING and let them founder trying to rewrite and delay. We can release for the holiday season and MS won't have anything to show. Hahahahaha!" He smiles and places his pinkie knowingly at the corner of his mouth.
Aren't DVDs an example of draconian drm? The media has DRM and the players enforce it. By licensing the dvd decoding technology they can force all the licensees to enforce the drm. Of course, it is still the case that a savvy pro pirate can defeat the drm and the uninformed user cannot.
AFAI can tell the movie studios are doing very well with this setup as long as the price point on dvds doesn't get too far ahead of the cost of marketing the pirated copies.
It reminds me of the conflict between Lucid and Stallman over emacs.
Lucid had a product to get out, Stallman wanted to do everything right and his way. It resulted in the emacs/Xeamcs schism. I didn't work on this directly, but saw my coworkers dealing with this as it happened. My view of the whole thing certainly biased by my experience there. Regardless, it wasn't pretty.
Wherever there are multiple development teams this tension between the ones that want to get the product out now, and the ones that want to do "the right thing" will exist. I personally think the tension is good. You should strive to do the right thing, but when it comes right down to it you need to produce something people can use in a timely manner.
I just hope this doesn't produce another schism.
In acrobat reader 7.0 take a look at the about box and click on "Patent and Legal Notices". After the listing of patent numbers, and standard copyright for adobe there must be hundreds of "portions copyright by ..." sections each different with many names familiar to ./ers. I noticed at least one reference to GPL
What does this say about "not invented here" and for that matter what does it say about how seriously adobe's lawywers take the "GPL as virus" notion?
Everyone on the western edge of a time zone thinks this is stupid. I spent most of my life on the west edge of a time zone. I went through 2 winters in high school walking to school in the dark. My kids now go to school in the semi dark today. I do really like the late evening twilight Those on the eastern edge of a time zone probably won't mind. The last time they changed DST I had to deal with a slew of bug reports (for Lucid Common lisp if anyone cares). I then discovered a failry nice declarative format for describing when to adjust the time. It really shouldn't be a big programming deal. Most slashdotters don't ever see the sun anyway.