I could argue that the exact same situation holds true in the world of software and mobile devices (especially UI) worlds. The key difference is that these stem cell companies are all suing each other up front. What are they thinking? That's the honorable way to conduct yourself when you hold intellectual property but certainly not the most profitable. Haven't they learned that you're supposed to wait until an infringing product is sold the world over with their highest stock price in years before you start the license extortion/lawsuit?
I just heard on the news in the break room, that while the US still just barely has the top credit rating...they tell us that if we don't get the deficit under control pronto, they're gonna drop our credit rating.
Man, you think things are bad now...wait till THAT shoe drops.
I'm no economist but my take on things is: good. If that happens, the sooner the better because 1) we're not going to ever stop spending until it happens and 2) the longer we keep spending, the more exacerbated it's going to be when that "shoe drops." So do it now and get it over with, it's time for us to swallow our own medicine/reap what we've sewn/<bad metaphor here>.
I do get a kick out of these "oooh boy, you just wait" style omens when it comes to the economy. A long time ago my uncle set me straight about how China is artificially keeping the yuan low compared to the dollar so they can sell us cheap crap and undercut any American company. He was all "long run this" and "crisis that." He promised me one day Wal-Mart was going to find itself on top of this massive infrastructure across the country with no cheap Chinese goods to fill its shelves with because the USA and other nations had wised up and stopped this market manipulation. That was... four or five years ago? I spoke with him again over Christmas and he had exactly the same warning for me. Well, when does it hit?
The fact is, countries should not be investing in our money market. We're no "habitual defaulter" like Greece but we're being very stupid with our money and we should pay for that. You might be surprised to hear an American say this but: stop investing in us. Don't reward stupidity. Don't let us keep our perceived worth artificially high via bogus credit ratings. It's just as dangerous as China's artificially low yuan.
Our deficit is the greatest shame in my eyes and the blackest mark on my generation. Starting with Reagan, continuing through every president and transcending political lines, it has gotten completely out of control. Social Security is a ticking time bomb. Our patchwork on the financial and housing crisis is also a ticking time bomb. We're on borrowed time here and I have the gut feeling we would be better off paying sooner rather than later.
Most observers would say that is a good start, but is it reasonably doable?
First of all I realize you just copy/pasted the first paragraph from the article but "most observers" sounds a bit like weasel words and I didn't see where in the article anyone was calling this a "good start" nor can I think of anyone who would say that. This (like a lot of them) is a pretty polarizing issue and I'd bet "most people" are going to end up claiming it to be a waste of taxpayer money or too little too late. Not a whole lot of moderation out there these days in political views.
Secondly, sure it is achievable and you don't even have to raise taxes. Shift some of the oil subsidies toward this initiative. If you're afraid of losing jobs in the oil industry, include stipulations of domestic job creation and opportunities on these investments. I think Obama already promised to shrink oil subsidies down so that over the next decade $20 billion is saved by the taxpayer -- why not use that for this? Whether or not it's going to actually achieve a desired effect, now that's the real debate. Not whether or not it's 'doable.'
To be honest, my memory if it is actually a funny one. I remember chuckling at the guy still reading the telemetry data as if nothing had gone wrong after it blew up. I remember thinking "Hey asshole, you might want to look at your monitor." And even when he did realize something had gone wrong, I remember him calling it something like a "major malfunction." Yeah, major malfunction, no shit.
In his defense, there's not a lot of room for emotion in that line of work. And said emotion often leads to inefficiencies. Imagine what sort of data might have been missed had he exploded in tears and rushed out of the room. While information is still coming in, remaining stoic is probably the optimal course of action for such a position.
But the bigger problem is that HTML has effectively been abandoned to four companies: Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla. They are deciding the actual fate of HTML, not a truly independent standards process.
This reminds me of something that was promoted in a book I reviewed:
those who ship win
It's that simple. If this armchair talking head who wrote this article chastising the standards process were to magically code up a browser that better empowered me, a software developer, to deploy code to users that ran to my satisfaction then his standards would be realized first. And I might be tempted to use it and ask my users to use it so we can get good functionality.
Duh.
Back when the standards were still in flux (and still are) I was using Google Chrome to enjoy an Arcade Fire experiment that used many HTML5 elements. And guess what? I started using Chrome and the implementation of their perspective of the standards gained just a planck constant more marketshare.
This guy can sit around and complain all he wants but for better or for worse: those who ship win.
How can one be a Biology teacher without having a major in at least one of the sciences? Sad. Schools ought to demote these persons to HomeEc or English, and hire some actual degreed science majors to do the teaching.
Maybe they can't do that because of Union rules.
Wow. It's pretty evident you don't understand what's happening in schools in America.
Having dated a couple teachers, let me explain to you how it works. If you're a teacher (and I'm talking grade school or high school) you get shit on. You don't get paid shit and your 'customer' treats you like shit. What's worse is that you cannot refuse your customer and it's your duty to make sure no child is left behind.
So let's say you get a degree in biology. Any lab job or anything else will pay much better right off the bat than a teaching position in grade or high school. Why anybody would get a degree in education is beyond me. Most teachers I think are psychology or sociology majors that, if they teach something like biology, have taken some specialized courses in teaching that material. Not actual high level biology coursework -- because they're not teaching that to students.
Your attempt to blame this on the unions amuses me. Public schools don't make money. That's not what they're there for. They're not some corporation or car manufacturer, they're a public utility that provides a human right to education. As such when a school is operating in the red, it would normally be really tempting to just cut teacher's wages. The unions are there to prevent crap like that from happening. Furthermore, they can't walk away from a customer so really bad interactions occur. And the unions are there to make sure that the teachers have the appropriate representation and responses. Schools don't compete with each other for the best students like a manufacturer competes for customers. The same can be said of hospitals and nursing unions. I don't know how a union would make sure that you can't teach Biology without being a Biology major.
The fact is that teachers have a really crappy job, they don't get paid much and that's why you don't see someone graduating with a Masters of Science in physics to go teach fourth graders science. Maybe you pay extra to send your kid to a magnate school or some private school where they guarantee that the teachers are such distinguished individuals but certainly not a public schools and until you're willing to pay a lot more in taxes to make those jobs desirable to such a graduate, I'd shut up.
An unknown hacker broke into the 26-year-old internet celebrity's Facebook account
I don't think that's an accurate account of what happened. It was his Fan Page, not his personal page. That may or may not have been updated by him -- most likely it was some staff or fan of Zuckerberg.
I was trying to keep my mouth shut as the end of this summary nearly caused me to fly off the handle. I agree with your post (after all, I recently moved to LibreOffice after inquiring that same question about Oracle). But I would like to add that the author of the summary seems to apply a different standard to FOSS than they apply to closed source or COTS applications. Nowhere does the author comment on the hundreds of proprietary 'camps creating such huge codebases for a fundamental application type' in word editing software or any other multitudes of software whether they be Microsoft, Apple or Google.
The logic applied here amuses me greatly but more so the Glenn Beck-ish puzzlement about what this says about open source:
It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.
Define 'clearly' because having tons of options sounds really really awesome to me. You make it sound like everyone has to throw their lot in together or this effort is for naught. Everyone knows that isn't true. Secondly, who presents open source to be 'idealistic?' And how do you figure that people working on what they want equates to anything sub-optimal?
The company acknowledges that some developers may not be pleased with the news
Hmmm, why would that be? Perhaps because:
Of course, Facebook gets something out of it: they take an industry-standard 30% cut whenever users purchase anything with Facebook Credits. That can add up to a lot of money -- we’ve heard elsewhere that Zynga is paying Facebook around $30 million a month for its Credits tax.
If anyone came up to me and said that five months from now they'd be harvesting thirty percent of my revenue, I don't think that conversation would last very long. My understanding is that a lot (if not all) of these game models is to get the user into the game for free and then urge them to pay small sums to improve their abilities in the game. I understand this move by Facebook avoids user lock-in to one developer but you'd think some credit card model could be implemented by a third party that would take far less than a thirty percent cut.
Also you're overlooking the interest. When an entity makes currency or "prints money" that is yet to be a realized transfer to the individual as goods or services, that money has the ability to accrue in value through interest or investing or whatever. The old model might have seen someone buying $50 of city cash and parceling it out over the course of the year. That cash flow will change subtly but importantly now as Facebook will be holding that $50 as it is parceled out to the possible game services. Facebook's cash reserves grow even if it eventually will be transferring that cash to game developers.
I understand these games would not have had the success they are enjoying without Facebook but surely there is some symbiotic relationship now that Zynga and other casual games have increased Facebook's crack-like effects.
So by this logic, using a longer cable to transmit the signal is also a copyright violation! They better regulate the maximum allowable cable lengths as well!
No, there's not a lot of material here but I think it has more to do with converting or capturing the signal to a framed encoding and then viewing this on a device unintended. There's the obvious facilitation of digital recording (like your own DVR) and redistribution or broadcasting to unintended individuals.
Basically I think it comes down to a problem with locked down system to potentially open system. The new technology could potentially facilitate this.
In this same pseudo-anonymous letter we learn that Mr. Reeves is 'enthusiastic' about developing a Bill & Ted 3. And we're supposed to believe this? Neither the Matrix IV nor Bill & Ted III show up at hsx.com (which is usually really good about this stuff if it's actually in development). The only piece of news from this that is credible is the 47 Ronin film mentioned.
Mr. Reeves is a sequel whore committed to leaching money off of success or even moderate success. Fortunately, producers and directors (or maybe his agent) around him seem to be pushing him to new things like A Scanner Darkly or the aforementioned 47 Ronin -- even though these are already books or old films. The Matrix and Bill & Ted death throes will probably deflate just like Constantine 2... or we can at least hope.
The RIAA is apparently trying to piss off everyone they can. I don't get it.
Dear Everybody,
You're not us. So that means you're either a pirate or a pirate pretending to be a consumer. That includes ICANN. That includes the Vatican. That includes OPEC. That includes the United States Government.
You want to use the word "music?" We can assure you, only if you pay royalties to us and right now all we see is people profiting off of our artist's copyrighted works (i.e. all music) that we broke our backs locking down with crippling contracts.
Remember our motto: "If you're not us, you're against us."
No, that wasn't a typo. We're sick of making weak individuals our enemies -- it's time we pick on someone our own size.
Notes, scales, chords, percussion, etc. It's only a matter of time before we own those words and what they represent.
Printed on the product's packaging, the key is a unique identifier that promises that the game is the real deal - and usually verifies itself with an online server
So in order to play disc games you're going to require an internet connection?
And, just as speculation, wouldn't it be possible for someone to figure out what the server is sending the gaming console as an acknowledgment code and then setup a local area network that directs the PS3's requests to that IP address to connect to your own computer and send the same key acknowledgment notification? Sure, it's more work but history has shown that just means a little more time.
This just seems implausible and ineffective on so many levels...
This screw design was patented in - 1974. Yeah keep that conspiracy going, boys.
I don't know what the screw design patent has to do with it, it's more the fact that the average household does not have a pentalobular screwdriver. I'm reminded of Tim Wu's proposition that there were two Apples: Steve Wozniak's and Steve Jobs'.
There is no conspiracy, it's just another omen that we have moved so far away from Wozniak's Apple that we are seeing this in Jobs' Apple. There's no question who's been making the most money but the days of Apple encouraging the user and hobbyist to open up their products and tinker and learn are over. Wozniak's Apple is dead. This is no conspiracy. This is simply fact; the final screw in the hobbyist's ass is yet more unneeded evidence indicating this.
The venerable Richard Stallman was given complete control of the Kalamazoo government today at which point he announced that -- in order to battle pollution -- the oak leaf will replace the dollar bill inside city limits and the city council's podium will now have timeslices of 15 ms handed out to members (or 'threads' as the new law worded it) that will be violently and forcefully switched out by very strong bailiffs (or 'schedulers'). All city buildings are to be rebuilt in glass to improve the ability to see what goes on inside and very expensive, cancer causing X-ray devices will be issued to citizens so that at any point in time they can check any government official to verify first hand that the official in question is not a member of the lizard people elite that rule the United Kingdom.
After cracking a very strange grin, RMS promised the people they would experience open source in new and profound ways starting today.
Even though this is probably wrong, just based on the sheer number of prior failures...
Okay, so I'm going to agree with you that it's probably wrong. After reading the paper once last night in a sort of sleepy state, it's certainly a novel way of massaging each 3-Sat problem into an expanded space of memory (compact triplets structures) and then reducing this to solve the problem (all within polynomial time).
So the great thing about this paper is that it's short, it's not theoretical (which is a double-edged sword)/has been implemented (in Java, no less) and it's incredibly falsifiable. I'm not intelligent enough to poke holes in his proofs for this work but people can apply the code to DIMACS formatted problems to their heart's content and if they find one that produces the wrong answer then this is falsified.
I hope we find someone capable of commenting on the proof involving the transformation of the problem from compact triplets formula to compact triplets structure and the hyperstructures presented in the paper. If this is legit, the 3-Sat problem is one that more complex problems are reduced to in order to show that said complex problems are NP-complete. And that's something that's been proved by the Cook-Levin theorem and given in the classic Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness by Garey and Johnson.
Refreshingly tangible implementation, if I may say so myself!
With the manga fanatics on Wikipedia. And the Star Wars nutjobs (myself included). And you know, I have to agree with Wikipedia on this one and I would suggest for gamers to go to Wikia and get a specific wiki on there going with the deleted pages from Wikipedia's history. There are already tons of game specific wikis on there and very successful ones like Wookiepedia and Mangawiki. I don't understand why people have a problem with this, Wikipedia is for the normal populace -- not the hardcore fans of specific interests. So either throw in your lot with MUD wiki or make a new MUDpedia or something and move on. You'll get a link in on the history of gaming page at the real wikipedia and you can go crazy nuts in your own little specific area.
*an emaciated Steve Jobs returns from medical leave* Lord Jobs: Why is there porn on my iPad, Captain Cook?! Tim Cook: Uh, well, you see, the uh, engineers they... ack! uck! *Jobs holds up his fingers pinched together* Lord Jobs: You have failed me for the last time, Captain.
If you're saying "citation needed" to imply that the placebo effect is not real, then I ask you why so many reputable institutions almost require a placebo group? It's obviously so they are capable of renormalizing the results to account for the placebo effect and not wrongly attribute their drug to something the patients caused themselves to believe they felt or to actually feel.
I might take issue with his claim that the placebo effect 'caused the muscle relaxant molecules to be more effective in relaxing the muscles' (or however he rambled it) as I have always thought that the placebo effect operated on a psychosomatic or neurological level.
This is still a learning process as they're one of the biggest guys out there usage-wise. It's hard to tell what's real and what's fake but I reviewed Beautiful Data for Slashdot a while ago and am reminded of a chapter by Jeff Hammerbacher about Facebook's database in the early days. Maybe the culture is still a little bit like those early days with the database where they spend more time constantly addressing data issues and trying to step up to the next <prefix>abyte? You can go ahead and presume all you want but I'm going to guess the developers are pretty busy dealing with some serious scaling issues. Past performance of the website reinforces this and, let's face it, the "chat" feature was and always will be a nightmare to use.
At a staff of 200, I would also wager that new features take a back seat and would propose that this is why we see Facebook's "upgrades" as being almost purely cosmetic (i.e. layout, markup, etc.).
Doesn't the Anthropic Principle adequately deal with this issue in any case?
From the paper I linked in the summary:
Perhaps a more common view among physicists today is the idea that there is a multiverse with a wide range of values for the constants of physics, and by the selection principle of observership (the weak anthropic principle), we find ourselves in the part of the multiverse where life is possible and/or relatively common (at least compared to other parts of the multiverse) [7]. However, there is still considerable controversy over whether such a multiverse that would be necessary for this explanation really exists.
And then later the author says (calling this the 'third view'):
The third view, of observer selection within a multiverse, is hard to prove or disprove directly, since it appears very difficult to obtain direct information about other possible parts of a multiverse. However, if a simple theory were developed that gives good statistical explanations for what we do observe and that also predicts a multiverse that we cannot directly observe, such a theory could become highly convincing (analogous to the prediction by general relativity of very high curvature in black-hole interior regions that cannot be directly observed).
I believe the intent of this paper was to directly address the claims instead of using the weak anthropic principle. More importantly, his argument is falsifiable (that coveted trait in the scientific process) whereby the other three views are not at this time. As other posters have pointed out we can now attempt to reason out this theory further.
The real hackers write the toolkits and then distribute them to kids like this who then get in trouble and get caught. Once caught, they occupy all the "cyber law enforcement" people's time they have to "protect" us and then the real hackers go about their way unnoticed and never caught. The internet is awash with people calling themselves 'hackers' while a very low percentage 1) actually investigate ways to hack systems and 2) never let their identities and preferably actions known for obvious reasons. It's obvious that they offer up a toolkit to let idiots run around painting targets on themselves so they can mess around unhindered.
About Microsoft's first foray into the tablet market the article says:
Their tablet should have been about disrupting the PC market with something light, cheap and simple. Instead, Microsoft tried to make it do everything.
Okay, so we establish that tablets have a subset of functionality as PCs. I agree with this, I don't do software development, word processing or gaming on a tablet. But then the article notes that tablets herald the end of PCs. So are we expecting the software makers to bridge that gap that prevents me from playing World of Warcraft, writing a book in Word or LibreOffice, coding in Radrails, etc? I just don't see that happening. I think there's a fundamental hardware issue with capacitive touch. I am not certain it will ever get to the point where I feel comfortable doing serious work or serious gaming using a glassy surface as my input device. Maybe I'm getting old but I just have never been impressed with even the latest cellphone displays and their response.
I would speculate that most tablet users are first PC users at home and at the office. The tablet is a subset of the desktop computer and it's hard to reach all levels of functionality with only a tablet. So I would almost argue that tablets will bite into the PC market only in markets with people who just need a computer to surf the internet, play casual games and maybe e-mail. In my opinion, it's highly likely that Wintel and Armdroid will continue to coexist for many years with different functional targets.
this year's CES marked the end of the Wintel platform's dominance
There's potential but if you counted all the Wintel machines in use right now and all the Armdroid devices in use right now, I would bet Wintel would retain dominance in numbers. It's fun to get exited when it makes sense to you that this should happen but the reality is that Wintel still sits comfortably above a throne of untouchable marketshare.
Slashdot Mirror
I could argue that the exact same situation holds true in the world of software and mobile devices (especially UI) worlds. The key difference is that these stem cell companies are all suing each other up front. What are they thinking? That's the honorable way to conduct yourself when you hold intellectual property but certainly not the most profitable. Haven't they learned that you're supposed to wait until an infringing product is sold the world over with their highest stock price in years before you start the license extortion/lawsuit?
I just heard on the news in the break room, that while the US still just barely has the top credit rating...they tell us that if we don't get the deficit under control pronto, they're gonna drop our credit rating.
Man, you think things are bad now...wait till THAT shoe drops.
I'm no economist but my take on things is: good. If that happens, the sooner the better because 1) we're not going to ever stop spending until it happens and 2) the longer we keep spending, the more exacerbated it's going to be when that "shoe drops." So do it now and get it over with, it's time for us to swallow our own medicine/reap what we've sewn/<bad metaphor here>.
... four or five years ago? I spoke with him again over Christmas and he had exactly the same warning for me. Well, when does it hit?
I do get a kick out of these "oooh boy, you just wait" style omens when it comes to the economy. A long time ago my uncle set me straight about how China is artificially keeping the yuan low compared to the dollar so they can sell us cheap crap and undercut any American company. He was all "long run this" and "crisis that." He promised me one day Wal-Mart was going to find itself on top of this massive infrastructure across the country with no cheap Chinese goods to fill its shelves with because the USA and other nations had wised up and stopped this market manipulation. That was
The fact is, countries should not be investing in our money market. We're no "habitual defaulter" like Greece but we're being very stupid with our money and we should pay for that. You might be surprised to hear an American say this but: stop investing in us. Don't reward stupidity. Don't let us keep our perceived worth artificially high via bogus credit ratings. It's just as dangerous as China's artificially low yuan.
Our deficit is the greatest shame in my eyes and the blackest mark on my generation. Starting with Reagan, continuing through every president and transcending political lines, it has gotten completely out of control. Social Security is a ticking time bomb. Our patchwork on the financial and housing crisis is also a ticking time bomb. We're on borrowed time here and I have the gut feeling we would be better off paying sooner rather than later.
Most observers would say that is a good start, but is it reasonably doable?
First of all I realize you just copy/pasted the first paragraph from the article but "most observers" sounds a bit like weasel words and I didn't see where in the article anyone was calling this a "good start" nor can I think of anyone who would say that. This (like a lot of them) is a pretty polarizing issue and I'd bet "most people" are going to end up claiming it to be a waste of taxpayer money or too little too late. Not a whole lot of moderation out there these days in political views.
Secondly, sure it is achievable and you don't even have to raise taxes. Shift some of the oil subsidies toward this initiative. If you're afraid of losing jobs in the oil industry, include stipulations of domestic job creation and opportunities on these investments. I think Obama already promised to shrink oil subsidies down so that over the next decade $20 billion is saved by the taxpayer -- why not use that for this? Whether or not it's going to actually achieve a desired effect, now that's the real debate. Not whether or not it's 'doable.'
To be honest, my memory if it is actually a funny one. I remember chuckling at the guy still reading the telemetry data as if nothing had gone wrong after it blew up. I remember thinking "Hey asshole, you might want to look at your monitor." And even when he did realize something had gone wrong, I remember him calling it something like a "major malfunction." Yeah, major malfunction, no shit.
In his defense, there's not a lot of room for emotion in that line of work. And said emotion often leads to inefficiencies. Imagine what sort of data might have been missed had he exploded in tears and rushed out of the room. While information is still coming in, remaining stoic is probably the optimal course of action for such a position.
While I hate eldavojohn as much as anyone ...
Seriously, why do I even bother with this site?
But the bigger problem is that HTML has effectively been abandoned to four companies: Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla. They are deciding the actual fate of HTML, not a truly independent standards process.
This reminds me of something that was promoted in a book I reviewed:
those who ship win
It's that simple. If this armchair talking head who wrote this article chastising the standards process were to magically code up a browser that better empowered me, a software developer, to deploy code to users that ran to my satisfaction then his standards would be realized first. And I might be tempted to use it and ask my users to use it so we can get good functionality.
Duh.
Back when the standards were still in flux (and still are) I was using Google Chrome to enjoy an Arcade Fire experiment that used many HTML5 elements. And guess what? I started using Chrome and the implementation of their perspective of the standards gained just a planck constant more marketshare.
This guy can sit around and complain all he wants but for better or for worse: those who ship win.
How can one be a Biology teacher without having a major in at least one of the sciences? Sad. Schools ought to demote these persons to HomeEc or English, and hire some actual degreed science majors to do the teaching.
Maybe they can't do that because of Union rules.
Wow. It's pretty evident you don't understand what's happening in schools in America.
Having dated a couple teachers, let me explain to you how it works. If you're a teacher (and I'm talking grade school or high school) you get shit on. You don't get paid shit and your 'customer' treats you like shit. What's worse is that you cannot refuse your customer and it's your duty to make sure no child is left behind.
So let's say you get a degree in biology. Any lab job or anything else will pay much better right off the bat than a teaching position in grade or high school. Why anybody would get a degree in education is beyond me. Most teachers I think are psychology or sociology majors that, if they teach something like biology, have taken some specialized courses in teaching that material. Not actual high level biology coursework -- because they're not teaching that to students.
Your attempt to blame this on the unions amuses me. Public schools don't make money. That's not what they're there for. They're not some corporation or car manufacturer, they're a public utility that provides a human right to education. As such when a school is operating in the red, it would normally be really tempting to just cut teacher's wages. The unions are there to prevent crap like that from happening. Furthermore, they can't walk away from a customer so really bad interactions occur. And the unions are there to make sure that the teachers have the appropriate representation and responses. Schools don't compete with each other for the best students like a manufacturer competes for customers. The same can be said of hospitals and nursing unions. I don't know how a union would make sure that you can't teach Biology without being a Biology major.
The fact is that teachers have a really crappy job, they don't get paid much and that's why you don't see someone graduating with a Masters of Science in physics to go teach fourth graders science. Maybe you pay extra to send your kid to a magnate school or some private school where they guarantee that the teachers are such distinguished individuals but certainly not a public schools and until you're willing to pay a lot more in taxes to make those jobs desirable to such a graduate, I'd shut up.
An unknown hacker broke into the 26-year-old internet celebrity's Facebook account
I don't think that's an accurate account of what happened. It was his Fan Page, not his personal page. That may or may not have been updated by him -- most likely it was some staff or fan of Zuckerberg.
"Sue" isn't the best choice of words here. It was an ITC Complaint that Microsoft hopes will result in the banning of TiVo imports from Mexico that allegedly infringe on Microsoft's patents. The patents are 5,585,838, 5,731,844, 6,028,604, and 5,758,258. You can find confirmation from Microsoft's mouth here.
The logic applied here amuses me greatly but more so the Glenn Beck-ish puzzlement about what this says about open source:
It clearly isn't the idealistic world it tries to present itself as.
Define 'clearly' because having tons of options sounds really really awesome to me. You make it sound like everyone has to throw their lot in together or this effort is for naught. Everyone knows that isn't true. Secondly, who presents open source to be 'idealistic?' And how do you figure that people working on what they want equates to anything sub-optimal?
The company acknowledges that some developers may not be pleased with the news
Hmmm, why would that be? Perhaps because:
Of course, Facebook gets something out of it: they take an industry-standard 30% cut whenever users purchase anything with Facebook Credits. That can add up to a lot of money -- we’ve heard elsewhere that Zynga is paying Facebook around $30 million a month for its Credits tax.
If anyone came up to me and said that five months from now they'd be harvesting thirty percent of my revenue, I don't think that conversation would last very long. My understanding is that a lot (if not all) of these game models is to get the user into the game for free and then urge them to pay small sums to improve their abilities in the game. I understand this move by Facebook avoids user lock-in to one developer but you'd think some credit card model could be implemented by a third party that would take far less than a thirty percent cut.
Also you're overlooking the interest. When an entity makes currency or "prints money" that is yet to be a realized transfer to the individual as goods or services, that money has the ability to accrue in value through interest or investing or whatever. The old model might have seen someone buying $50 of city cash and parceling it out over the course of the year. That cash flow will change subtly but importantly now as Facebook will be holding that $50 as it is parceled out to the possible game services. Facebook's cash reserves grow even if it eventually will be transferring that cash to game developers.
I understand these games would not have had the success they are enjoying without Facebook but surely there is some symbiotic relationship now that Zynga and other casual games have increased Facebook's crack-like effects.
So by this logic, using a longer cable to transmit the signal is also a copyright violation! They better regulate the maximum allowable cable lengths as well!
No, there's not a lot of material here but I think it has more to do with converting or capturing the signal to a framed encoding and then viewing this on a device unintended. There's the obvious facilitation of digital recording (like your own DVR) and redistribution or broadcasting to unintended individuals.
... looks like Slingbox's strategy is not valid in Japan.
Basically I think it comes down to a problem with locked down system to potentially open system. The new technology could potentially facilitate this.
Remember, early on Slingbox and Tivo faced these same questionable legal issues
In this same pseudo-anonymous letter we learn that Mr. Reeves is 'enthusiastic' about developing a Bill & Ted 3. And we're supposed to believe this? Neither the Matrix IV nor Bill & Ted III show up at hsx.com (which is usually really good about this stuff if it's actually in development). The only piece of news from this that is credible is the 47 Ronin film mentioned.
... or we can at least hope.
Mr. Reeves is a sequel whore committed to leaching money off of success or even moderate success. Fortunately, producers and directors (or maybe his agent) around him seem to be pushing him to new things like A Scanner Darkly or the aforementioned 47 Ronin -- even though these are already books or old films. The Matrix and Bill & Ted death throes will probably deflate just like Constantine 2
The RIAA is apparently trying to piss off everyone they can. I don't get it.
Dear Everybody,
You're not us. So that means you're either a pirate or a pirate pretending to be a consumer. That includes ICANN. That includes the Vatican. That includes OPEC. That includes the United States Government.
You want to use the word "music?" We can assure you, only if you pay royalties to us and right now all we see is people profiting off of our artist's copyrighted works (i.e. all music) that we broke our backs locking down with crippling contracts.
Remember our motto: "If you're not us, you're against us."
No, that wasn't a typo. We're sick of making weak individuals our enemies -- it's time we pick on someone our own size.
Notes, scales, chords, percussion, etc. It's only a matter of time before we own those words and what they represent.
The RIAA
P.S. Resistance is futile.
Printed on the product's packaging, the key is a unique identifier that promises that the game is the real deal - and usually verifies itself with an online server
So in order to play disc games you're going to require an internet connection?
...
And, just as speculation, wouldn't it be possible for someone to figure out what the server is sending the gaming console as an acknowledgment code and then setup a local area network that directs the PS3's requests to that IP address to connect to your own computer and send the same key acknowledgment notification? Sure, it's more work but history has shown that just means a little more time.
This just seems implausible and ineffective on so many levels
This screw design was patented in - 1974. Yeah keep that conspiracy going, boys.
I don't know what the screw design patent has to do with it, it's more the fact that the average household does not have a pentalobular screwdriver. I'm reminded of Tim Wu's proposition that there were two Apples: Steve Wozniak's and Steve Jobs'.
There is no conspiracy, it's just another omen that we have moved so far away from Wozniak's Apple that we are seeing this in Jobs' Apple. There's no question who's been making the most money but the days of Apple encouraging the user and hobbyist to open up their products and tinker and learn are over. Wozniak's Apple is dead. This is no conspiracy. This is simply fact; the final screw in the hobbyist's ass is yet more unneeded evidence indicating this.
The venerable Richard Stallman was given complete control of the Kalamazoo government today at which point he announced that -- in order to battle pollution -- the oak leaf will replace the dollar bill inside city limits and the city council's podium will now have timeslices of 15 ms handed out to members (or 'threads' as the new law worded it) that will be violently and forcefully switched out by very strong bailiffs (or 'schedulers'). All city buildings are to be rebuilt in glass to improve the ability to see what goes on inside and very expensive, cancer causing X-ray devices will be issued to citizens so that at any point in time they can check any government official to verify first hand that the official in question is not a member of the lizard people elite that rule the United Kingdom.
After cracking a very strange grin, RMS promised the people they would experience open source in new and profound ways starting today.
Even though this is probably wrong, just based on the sheer number of prior failures ...
Okay, so I'm going to agree with you that it's probably wrong. After reading the paper once last night in a sort of sleepy state, it's certainly a novel way of massaging each 3-Sat problem into an expanded space of memory (compact triplets structures) and then reducing this to solve the problem (all within polynomial time).
So the great thing about this paper is that it's short, it's not theoretical (which is a double-edged sword)/has been implemented (in Java, no less) and it's incredibly falsifiable. I'm not intelligent enough to poke holes in his proofs for this work but people can apply the code to DIMACS formatted problems to their heart's content and if they find one that produces the wrong answer then this is falsified.
I hope we find someone capable of commenting on the proof involving the transformation of the problem from compact triplets formula to compact triplets structure and the hyperstructures presented in the paper. If this is legit, the 3-Sat problem is one that more complex problems are reduced to in order to show that said complex problems are NP-complete. And that's something that's been proved by the Cook-Levin theorem and given in the classic Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness by Garey and Johnson.
Refreshingly tangible implementation, if I may say so myself!
With the manga fanatics on Wikipedia. And the Star Wars nutjobs (myself included). And you know, I have to agree with Wikipedia on this one and I would suggest for gamers to go to Wikia and get a specific wiki on there going with the deleted pages from Wikipedia's history. There are already tons of game specific wikis on there and very successful ones like Wookiepedia and Mangawiki. I don't understand why people have a problem with this, Wikipedia is for the normal populace -- not the hardcore fans of specific interests. So either throw in your lot with MUD wiki or make a new MUDpedia or something and move on. You'll get a link in on the history of gaming page at the real wikipedia and you can go crazy nuts in your own little specific area.
*an emaciated Steve Jobs returns from medical leave* ... ack! uck!
Lord Jobs: Why is there porn on my iPad, Captain Cook?!
Tim Cook: Uh, well, you see, the uh, engineers they
*Jobs holds up his fingers pinched together*
Lord Jobs: You have failed me for the last time, Captain.
Could not find the vomiting study in the rotating drum but I believe the muscle relaxant study was of Carisoprodol and can be found at this PDF. The asthma placebo effect study appears to be this study on this new bronchodilator.
If you're saying "citation needed" to imply that the placebo effect is not real, then I ask you why so many reputable institutions almost require a placebo group? It's obviously so they are capable of renormalizing the results to account for the placebo effect and not wrongly attribute their drug to something the patients caused themselves to believe they felt or to actually feel.
I might take issue with his claim that the placebo effect 'caused the muscle relaxant molecules to be more effective in relaxing the muscles' (or however he rambled it) as I have always thought that the placebo effect operated on a psychosomatic or neurological level.
This is still a learning process as they're one of the biggest guys out there usage-wise. It's hard to tell what's real and what's fake but I reviewed Beautiful Data for Slashdot a while ago and am reminded of a chapter by Jeff Hammerbacher about Facebook's database in the early days. Maybe the culture is still a little bit like those early days with the database where they spend more time constantly addressing data issues and trying to step up to the next <prefix>abyte? You can go ahead and presume all you want but I'm going to guess the developers are pretty busy dealing with some serious scaling issues. Past performance of the website reinforces this and, let's face it, the "chat" feature was and always will be a nightmare to use.
At a staff of 200, I would also wager that new features take a back seat and would propose that this is why we see Facebook's "upgrades" as being almost purely cosmetic (i.e. layout, markup, etc.).
Doesn't the Anthropic Principle adequately deal with this issue in any case?
From the paper I linked in the summary:
Perhaps a more common view among physicists today is the idea that there is a multiverse with a wide range of values for the constants of physics, and by the selection principle of observership (the weak anthropic principle), we find ourselves in the part of the multiverse where life is possible and/or relatively common (at least compared to other parts of the multiverse) [7]. However, there is still considerable controversy over whether such a multiverse that would be necessary for this explanation really exists.
And then later the author says (calling this the 'third view'):
The third view, of observer selection within a multiverse, is hard to prove or disprove directly, since it appears very difficult to obtain direct information about other possible parts of a multiverse. However, if a simple theory were developed that gives good statistical explanations for what we do observe and that also predicts a multiverse that we cannot directly observe, such a theory could become highly convincing (analogous to the prediction by general relativity of very high curvature in black-hole interior regions that cannot be directly observed).
I believe the intent of this paper was to directly address the claims instead of using the weak anthropic principle. More importantly, his argument is falsifiable (that coveted trait in the scientific process) whereby the other three views are not at this time. As other posters have pointed out we can now attempt to reason out this theory further.
The real hackers write the toolkits and then distribute them to kids like this who then get in trouble and get caught. Once caught, they occupy all the "cyber law enforcement" people's time they have to "protect" us and then the real hackers go about their way unnoticed and never caught. The internet is awash with people calling themselves 'hackers' while a very low percentage 1) actually investigate ways to hack systems and 2) never let their identities and preferably actions known for obvious reasons. It's obvious that they offer up a toolkit to let idiots run around painting targets on themselves so they can mess around unhindered.
Their tablet should have been about disrupting the PC market with something light, cheap and simple. Instead, Microsoft tried to make it do everything.
Okay, so we establish that tablets have a subset of functionality as PCs. I agree with this, I don't do software development, word processing or gaming on a tablet. But then the article notes that tablets herald the end of PCs. So are we expecting the software makers to bridge that gap that prevents me from playing World of Warcraft, writing a book in Word or LibreOffice, coding in Radrails, etc? I just don't see that happening. I think there's a fundamental hardware issue with capacitive touch. I am not certain it will ever get to the point where I feel comfortable doing serious work or serious gaming using a glassy surface as my input device. Maybe I'm getting old but I just have never been impressed with even the latest cellphone displays and their response.
I would speculate that most tablet users are first PC users at home and at the office. The tablet is a subset of the desktop computer and it's hard to reach all levels of functionality with only a tablet. So I would almost argue that tablets will bite into the PC market only in markets with people who just need a computer to surf the internet, play casual games and maybe e-mail. In my opinion, it's highly likely that Wintel and Armdroid will continue to coexist for many years with different functional targets.
this year's CES marked the end of the Wintel platform's dominance
There's potential but if you counted all the Wintel machines in use right now and all the Armdroid devices in use right now, I would bet Wintel would retain dominance in numbers. It's fun to get exited when it makes sense to you that this should happen but the reality is that Wintel still sits comfortably above a throne of untouchable marketshare.