Their have been ordered to remove other peoples news from their news service, and have decided to additional punish the source by also removing them from the search index.
Or, they removed them from the search to preclude getting sued for news articles that show up in a general search (as opposed to showing up on the news.google.com site). Sounds practical to me.
Computers, at least at the PC level, are a commodity good that are produced with very narrow cost to sales price margins. This makes them very similar to toasters, coffemakers, small refrigerators, etc. IBM wants to sell its PC unit because it can no longer compete or doesn't want to continue expending the energy and resources it takes to compete. This competition arises from the fact that there are any number of other producers in the market turning out computers which are almost indistiguishable from the ones IBM is producing. Some of these other producers are in China. So, it appears that this ruling would stop IBM from selling to a Chinese firm a capabilty other Chinese firms already possess and which is causing the market pressures that pushed IBM to consider the sale in first place.
Where in all of that is a national security concern?
As a couple of posters have already pointed out, this seems more like directed falling or gliding than flying. So, would someone here like to take a shot at clarifying the dividing lines between falling, gliding and flying?
Since parachutists can do all sorts of aerobatic maneuvers by stretching out their arms and making their bodies into airfoils their maneuverability would seem to make what they are doing flying or maybe gliding. But, other than my intent to slow my descent before landing, what differentiates falling from this kind of flying?
You say most of the grant money goes to teachers' projects. Can you combine what you do into a course offered to students with advanced technical computer skills - sort of an Honors Class in Support? Request the new equipment you need as part of a grant to support the new course.
Yeah, I know. It's clear I don't have any experience in the administration requirements of a public school district, and there are probably any number of hurdles to doing this (a teaching certificate might be one of them). But I thought I'd bring the idea up anyway.
Education should be free. Especially now that information can be distributed so cheaply and so efficiently
You have confused information and education. Information is the raw material. Education is the (never-quite-completely-) finished product.
You have also discounted the value of teachers and professors guiding you through the mass of information available in order to help you to use it to get an education. Their efforts are valuable and worthy of compensation. They can be paid for by your tuition fees, by a tax on all of us (in which case, you owe us some benefit in return for you studies), or a combination of the two. But, there is no free (as in beer) education.
It will also be interesting to see if anyone runs a project to see how much of the historical material was lifted from earlier writers. For example, how much did the US founding fathers "borrow" from other published works? A number of the early US statesmen attended Harvard (the second President of the United States, John Adams springs to mind), and it would be interesting to see how much, if any, of their writing was copied. John Locke's writing influenced much of the political opinion around the time of the founding. Did he "contribute" more than we know?
I was wondering pretty much the same thing you were. I have usually found a convenient flat surface to set the "laptop" down on so I could work with it more comfortably. On the rare occasions when I haven't been able to find a table or something, I have usually balanced the laptop on top of my thighs out toward my knees. If anything is heating the "little guys" it is probably the fact that I am holding my thighs together to keep the computer from falling through.
From one of TFAs: The Cell workstation is designed to deliver tremendous computational power, helping digital entertainment content creators generate higher quality content with richer and more dynamic scenes, much faster than current development systems.
This points at more than just game consoles. This looks like Sony is looking ahead to a future in which they can dispense with actors entirely and rely on realistic computer generated characters. Should be a good bit of money to be saved if you don't have to pay an actor millions to star in your film. Could be other applications too: Animated news announcers with features finely tuned to inspire trust in the viewer, human-like avatars in intelligent appliances, human-like answering machines and customer service line responders, etc.
So, how far are we from the footage ala William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and the "live" entertainment ala Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age?
A number of the posters here have referred to the long design, test and deployment cycle in the military, and in very many cases, their comments are accurate. But, there is a history of wartime hacks thought up by soldiers or people who knew soldiers. A good example from the WWI was the trench periscope. During WWII, Sgt. Curtis Culin welded pieces of steel cannibalized from German beach defenses to make the "Rhino", a tank capable of cutting through the high bushy walls that lined the roads in Normandy. Today, US Reservists and National Guardsmen are figuring out ways of mounting steel plates as armor on their HUMMVs. That soldiers and marines are coming up with field expedient devices external to the Department of Defense R&D system is nothing new. Some of the hacks get incorporated into actual milspec equipment; some doesn't. The DoD has whole organizations dedicated to cataloging and studying these things as "lessons-learned". It will be interesting to see if this idea gets picked up and widely applied in Iraq.
Re:this is BAD in my opinion
on
Netscape Reborn?
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· Score: 2, Funny
...promote both project by naming it Netscpae [sic] Firefox.
Or, how about "Fire (E)scape"?
(Doesn't really matter what they name it first, though. If history is any guide, they will probably change the name several times.)
Even if it is just a Linux Live CD for someone to play with, at least then they can get their feet wet.
I am assuming that you mean that the PC manufacturer would be including a Linux Live CD with a machine that has Windows pre-installed on it. I am quite certain that doing something like that would cause the manufacturer no end of problems with Microsoft.
As other posters have noted, this sounds a lot like T9, which is used in cell phones for predictive text entry. T9 is a great utility, but it has happened that what I am writing is less predictable or the there is a more often used combination of letters that results from the keys I have hit. If I don't pay attention, I get the wrong word.
I can't help but think of someone entering a mathematical equation and concentrating more on his idea than what is being written to the screen. Due to this inattention, the equation doesn't work, he figures he's just wrong, and spends hours/days to find the point at which the computer put in its prediction and not what he thought he entered. Worst case, he could abandon what would have been a great idea.
Or, imagine this applied to writing computer programs. Say for example, you are writing a program to calculate the correct distance the probe should hold above the atmosphere so it doesn't burn up. Your cube mate distracts you briefly, and...
Well, I would certainly be glad to have a robot that cuts my lawn for me (even better if it does edging), but I wonder how it would handle objects in its path. Would I have to go around first and pick all the twigs, etc. out of my lawn first? Would it pick the stuff up with a robotic arm and move it out of the way? Or, would it avoid the obstacle and leave little islands of longer grass in my yard to mark where the dog toys are?
And what about toes? I fall asleep in a lawn chair while enjoying the extra time I now have not having to mow the lawn, and to pay me back for my sloth, the robot runs over my feet.
Yes, I could see how that would be a problem, although in general, I preferred having multiple assignments dependant on each other. The alternative was to get multiple (weekly) assignments that each demanded their own cycle of concept, design, execution and debugging. Granted, one objective of the courses I took was to teach us to conceive and design, so having to do that weekly may have reinforced that aspect of the courses. It was done, however, at the cost of not teaching us how to optimize and re-use code.
Don't provide solution sheets that contain code that will actually compile. After the frustration of working unsuccessfully for days (nights) to get her assigned programming project to compile and run correctly, what the student really wants is the character building exercise of debugging the instructor's solution to the exercise. When the students see that their instructor also has problems writing bug-free code, it will help to buttress their self-confidence.
"Constant nuisance" if the EPIA-M board I have is any indication.
Oh sure, it'll run simple applications that aren't all that demanding, but I had to stop running the distributed.net client on it because it would heat up and shutdown. Their video and sound drivers are also difficult to get running on anything other than the outdated distros they offer binaries for. Trying to turn the box into a linux-based PVR was just too much work, so I'll be turning it into a router and building my PVR with an EPoX MicroATX board and an AMD 2600+ XP CPU.
I have anecdotal evidence to the contrary. My roommate in college set one of his plants atop one of the large speakers we had in the living room of our apartment. It was fed a fairly eclectic blend of classical, hard rock, American folk, new wave and punk. The plant grew to almost surround the speaker, and when we moved out, we had to cut it away from the speaker. (My roommate found another speaker to set it on in his new place. The plant continued to thrive.)
"Free riding" not always undesirable
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
"...'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable..."
This statement is not true. Free riding is not always undesirable. In fact, free riding built much of the early American frontier, a number of Lima, Peru's neighborhoods, areas in Cairo, and many other areas of the developing world. In the case of the American frontier, the land belonged to the US Government and was completely undeveloped until settlers, dissatisfied with their lives elsewhere built cabins, planted crops and began to establish townships. In Lima, Peru, a similar dynamic was in place, with the exception that the people were moving from the countryside to the city. An excellent book on this topic is Hernando DeSoto's The Mystery of Capital, or, if you'd like a more detailed look, check out De Soto's The Other Path.
These examples could, however, support Lemley's thesis, since these people essentially took a resource that was not being utilized and made it productive. Taking someone else's idea and making it productive and of benefit to others is probably in most cases a good thing, which should be supported.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, they removed them from the search to preclude getting sued for news articles that show up in a general search (as opposed to showing up on the news.google.com site). Sounds practical to me.
Change out lives?
I'm more worried about changing out the batteries.
Computers, at least at the PC level, are a commodity good that are produced with very narrow cost to sales price margins. This makes them very similar to toasters, coffemakers, small refrigerators, etc. IBM wants to sell its PC unit because it can no longer compete or doesn't want to continue expending the energy and resources it takes to compete. This competition arises from the fact that there are any number of other producers in the market turning out computers which are almost indistiguishable from the ones IBM is producing. Some of these other producers are in China. So, it appears that this ruling would stop IBM from selling to a Chinese firm a capabilty other Chinese firms already possess and which is causing the market pressures that pushed IBM to consider the sale in first place.
Where in all of that is a national security concern?
As a couple of posters have already pointed out, this seems more like directed falling or gliding than flying. So, would someone here like to take a shot at clarifying the dividing lines between falling, gliding and flying?
Since parachutists can do all sorts of aerobatic maneuvers by stretching out their arms and making their bodies into airfoils their maneuverability would seem to make what they are doing flying or maybe gliding. But, other than my intent to slow my descent before landing, what differentiates falling from this kind of flying?
You say most of the grant money goes to teachers' projects. Can you combine what you do into a course offered to students with advanced technical computer skills - sort of an Honors Class in Support? Request the new equipment you need as part of a grant to support the new course.
Yeah, I know. It's clear I don't have any experience in the administration requirements of a public school district, and there are probably any number of hurdles to doing this (a teaching certificate might be one of them). But I thought I'd bring the idea up anyway.
Education should be free. Especially now that information can be distributed so cheaply and so efficiently
You have confused information and education. Information is the raw material. Education is the (never-quite-completely-) finished product.
You have also discounted the value of teachers and professors guiding you through the mass of information available in order to help you to use it to get an education. Their efforts are valuable and worthy of compensation. They can be paid for by your tuition fees, by a tax on all of us (in which case, you owe us some benefit in return for you studies), or a combination of the two. But, there is no free (as in beer) education.
That may be true, but it is not all in one place. It is strategically scattered along the San Andreas Fault.
It will also be interesting to see if anyone runs a project to see how much of the historical material was lifted from earlier writers. For example, how much did the US founding fathers "borrow" from other published works? A number of the early US statesmen attended Harvard (the second President of the United States, John Adams springs to mind), and it would be interesting to see how much, if any, of their writing was copied. John Locke's writing influenced much of the political opinion around the time of the founding. Did he "contribute" more than we know?
I was wondering pretty much the same thing you were. I have usually found a convenient flat surface to set the "laptop" down on so I could work with it more comfortably. On the rare occasions when I haven't been able to find a table or something, I have usually balanced the laptop on top of my thighs out toward my knees. If anything is heating the "little guys" it is probably the fact that I am holding my thighs together to keep the computer from falling through.
From one of TFAs: The Cell workstation is designed to deliver tremendous computational power, helping digital entertainment content creators generate higher quality content with richer and more dynamic scenes, much faster than current development systems.
This points at more than just game consoles. This looks like Sony is looking ahead to a future in which they can dispense with actors entirely and rely on realistic computer generated characters. Should be a good bit of money to be saved if you don't have to pay an actor millions to star in your film. Could be other applications too: Animated news announcers with features finely tuned to inspire trust in the viewer, human-like avatars in intelligent appliances, human-like answering machines and customer service line responders, etc.
So, how far are we from the footage ala William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and the "live" entertainment ala Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age?
Huh?!? I thought NetBSD was dead.
When you push down the lever, the toaster browns the bread using the heat of the CPU doing an `emerge world`.
A number of the posters here have referred to the long design, test and deployment cycle in the military, and in very many cases, their comments are accurate. But, there is a history of wartime hacks thought up by soldiers or people who knew soldiers. A good example from the WWI was the trench periscope. During WWII, Sgt. Curtis Culin welded pieces of steel cannibalized from German beach defenses to make the "Rhino", a tank capable of cutting through the high bushy walls that lined the roads in Normandy. Today, US Reservists and National Guardsmen are figuring out ways of mounting steel plates as armor on their HUMMVs. That soldiers and marines are coming up with field expedient devices external to the Department of Defense R&D system is nothing new. Some of the hacks get incorporated into actual milspec equipment; some doesn't. The DoD has whole organizations dedicated to cataloging and studying these things as "lessons-learned". It will be interesting to see if this idea gets picked up and widely applied in Iraq.
...promote both project by naming it Netscpae [sic] Firefox.
Or, how about "Fire (E)scape"?
(Doesn't really matter what they name it first, though. If history is any guide, they will probably change the name several times.)
Even if it is just a Linux Live CD for someone to play with, at least then they can get their feet wet.
I am assuming that you mean that the PC manufacturer would be including a Linux Live CD with a machine that has Windows pre-installed on it. I am quite certain that doing something like that would cause the manufacturer no end of problems with Microsoft.
...we find the unpredictable more interesting.
And, there are no predictable new ideas. Who could've guessed that Einstein would follow the equals sign with "mc^2".
As other posters have noted, this sounds a lot like T9, which is used in cell phones for predictive text entry. T9 is a great utility, but it has happened that what I am writing is less predictable or the there is a more often used combination of letters that results from the keys I have hit. If I don't pay attention, I get the wrong word.
I can't help but think of someone entering a mathematical equation and concentrating more on his idea than what is being written to the screen. Due to this inattention, the equation doesn't work, he figures he's just wrong, and spends hours/days to find the point at which the computer put in its prediction and not what he thought he entered. Worst case, he could abandon what would have been a great idea.
Or, imagine this applied to writing computer programs. Say for example, you are writing a program to calculate the correct distance the probe should hold above the atmosphere so it doesn't burn up. Your cube mate distracts you briefly, and...
Well, I would certainly be glad to have a robot that cuts my lawn for me (even better if it does edging), but I wonder how it would handle objects in its path. Would I have to go around first and pick all the twigs, etc. out of my lawn first? Would it pick the stuff up with a robotic arm and move it out of the way? Or, would it avoid the obstacle and leave little islands of longer grass in my yard to mark where the dog toys are?
And what about toes? I fall asleep in a lawn chair while enjoying the extra time I now have not having to mow the lawn, and to pay me back for my sloth, the robot runs over my feet.
Yes, I could see how that would be a problem, although in general, I preferred having multiple assignments dependant on each other. The alternative was to get multiple (weekly) assignments that each demanded their own cycle of concept, design, execution and debugging. Granted, one objective of the courses I took was to teach us to conceive and design, so having to do that weekly may have reinforced that aspect of the courses. It was done, however, at the cost of not teaching us how to optimize and re-use code.
Don't provide solution sheets that contain code that will actually compile. After the frustration of working unsuccessfully for days (nights) to get her assigned programming project to compile and run correctly, what the student really wants is the character building exercise of debugging the instructor's solution to the exercise. When the students see that their instructor also has problems writing bug-free code, it will help to buttress their self-confidence.
...could be a way of increasing the pre-release hype?
"Constant nuisance" if the EPIA-M board I have is any indication.
Oh sure, it'll run simple applications that aren't all that demanding, but I had to stop running the distributed.net client on it because it would heat up and shutdown. Their video and sound drivers are also difficult to get running on anything other than the outdated distros they offer binaries for. Trying to turn the box into a linux-based PVR was just too much work, so I'll be turning it into a router and building my PVR with an EPoX MicroATX board and an AMD 2600+ XP CPU.
I have anecdotal evidence to the contrary. My roommate in college set one of his plants atop one of the large speakers we had in the living room of our apartment. It was fed a fairly eclectic blend of classical, hard rock, American folk, new wave and punk. The plant grew to almost surround the speaker, and when we moved out, we had to cut it away from the speaker. (My roommate found another speaker to set it on in his new place. The plant continued to thrive.)
"...'free riding' off of someone else's land or other physical property rights is always undesirable..."
This statement is not true. Free riding is not always undesirable. In fact, free riding built much of the early American frontier, a number of Lima, Peru's neighborhoods, areas in Cairo, and many other areas of the developing world. In the case of the American frontier, the land belonged to the US Government and was completely undeveloped until settlers, dissatisfied with their lives elsewhere built cabins, planted crops and began to establish townships. In Lima, Peru, a similar dynamic was in place, with the exception that the people were moving from the countryside to the city. An excellent book on this topic is Hernando DeSoto's The Mystery of Capital, or, if you'd like a more detailed look, check out De Soto's The Other Path.
These examples could, however, support Lemley's thesis, since these people essentially took a resource that was not being utilized and made it productive. Taking someone else's idea and making it productive and of benefit to others is probably in most cases a good thing, which should be supported.
I usually use "cowboyneal@slashdot.org". I mean, every question has to have a cowboyneal option, right?