Look, I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that a judge should have no amicable ties to companies that have a vested interest in the outcome of various court cases that judge will hear, but the GP's post is not about that. The GP's post is about judges having a sufficient level of technical knowledge related to a case to be able to judge the technical merits of the arguments presented and hence to be able to understand fully the ramifications of the outcomes of his judgement. The GP's post is _not_ about a judge with this experience _because_ they worked at a company entrenched in the industry about which the technical knowledge is required.
Here are a couple of examples related to yours to help show the difference. If the Awesome Judge Alsup's experience in coding had been acquired at Microsoft (or perhaps Oracle) then the GP's comment and your post's statement would logically follow. Or, if you modify your example to be about a judge who is assigned a fracking case who then goes out and researches the technical details of fracking in order to reach a cogent conclusion not biased by the lawyers' pro/against castings, then you have an example that is very close to what Awesome Judge Alsup has done. Or perhaps if the judge's backyard hobby is fracking and then he is assigned a fracking case, though your example falls down there because many people code as a hobby (or at least can) and nobody fracks for fun.
I think your post is a good-natured misunderstanding, though one of your ancestor comments about you praising 'ignorance over knowledge' hits home pretty hard. As the OP states, judges having in-depth technical knowledge about their cases (or even any knowledge is better than none) is definitely a good thing. Also, as you state, judges having a vested interest in a certain outcome because of pre-existing industry ties is a bad thing. No, they are not related here.
Asynchronous because the js call happens after the page has already beeen loaded and XML (ie XHTML) is what is returned from the call. Or rather, returned and inserted, if you want to be pedantic (which you obviously do.)
See a review of the previous experiments in this burgeoning field here. I can't believe more research hasn't been done on these kinds of possible accidents. I mean, how many people have to be stabbed before we sit up and demand that experiments are done to find out what happens to people when they're stabbed?
... about piracy of albums that weren't released with a user-pricing model? I want to know how many times other albums are downloaded comapared to purchased.
I know that Trent Reznor has publicly stated that he knows his latest album, Nine Inch Nails' 'Year Zero' was pirated a lot, and that he was happy people were listening to it, but unhappy about the albums pricing schemes and that he himself (and the musicians, audio engineers, etc. who made the album) didn't get much money from the album.
I'll bet Radiohead get more money from this than any of their other albums, despite the fact that the total amount of money made may be lower...
This is just patently untrue. I will agree that the argument is retarded, but only because of what you are arguing. As has been hashed and rehashed quite a few times on/., free speech does not mean that you are free to yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre, for example. Your freedom to yell random things is quashed by others freedom to remain alive and undamaged. Therefore, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
This axiom is also shown in the legal definition of slander or defamation. You _are free_ to say things that are untrue about some entity you dislike, but if your freedom of wagging tongue steps on that entity's freedom from unwarranted persecution, you are liable. Again, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
Are you getting this?
Are you seeing the point?
Your freedom of speech ends when it steps on others' freedoms we, as a society, have deemed more important. To say what you're saying, which is akin to something like 'I am not free to wave a knife wildly and randomly in public means I am not free at all.' is, as you have stated, a retarded argument.
A recent study which I won't cite because it might refute my claim states that about two-thirds of statistics are completely made up. Another study would seem to correlate that fact, stating that during periods of electioneering there is a consistent onslaught of made up studies. I won't cite my sources because it's better you take my word for it. Especially on/., because nobody here cares about reading those _boring_ studies discussing sociological trends.
A recent study shows that that last bit is a joke, for those of you with no sense for sarcasm.
I agree with this. I'm not sure if it's the same in the States, but up here in Canada each vote a party gets means another $2 or something goes into that party's coffers. Voting for a third party sends a message to the two in power that they need to do something different. As well, it spurs on greater political debate, which seems (?) like a good thing.
Anyway, perhaps the money given to a party as a result of a person's vote is far less than campaign contributions anyways, so it might be wholly unimportant. But still... I'll bet if one decides to go and vote for a third party, you'll go and do some cursory investigation about the political leanings of each possible third party, and that can only be a good thing.
Of course, you could just assume that the sibling poster knows what they're talking about and vote Libertarian, but that seems a cheap way to attempt to sway the vote... (; Go and google the parties and read their platforms a little. It doesn't take long to get an impression of which party wants what.
Diebold also makes ATMs that work day and night flawlessly (well, 99% flawlessly) with paper trails so that banks know EXACTLY where the money went and if anything has gone wrong. You are correct in saying that these voting machines exhibit 'awful engineering, Crappy programming, bad design, lazy execution.", but when you consider that the company has a track record of the opposite in a (slightly) different field, the needle seems to point more towards maliciousness than carelessness...
You are technically correct. However, Take-Two is just pointing out to the judge where Jack had been in contempt and the judge missed it. To continue the GP's example, just because the judge happened not see the media interview that Jack took part of during the trial doesn't make Jack any less in contempt-of-court. It just means that the judge happened to be watching a different channel that night (or maybe the interview didn't air until later, for example.)
No. They're trying to protect the word 'podcast' (or the prefix 'pod' as used to reference something to do with digital media players) from being trademarked by _another company_. They're not simply going after everyone who uses / creates their own variant of pod/podcast. They're trying to prevent the term from being locked up at all. They're not trying to lock it up for themselves, just to keep it open so that everyone can use it.
Sorry for the OT rant. This is just something that everyone seems to have gotten wrong and is a pet peeve of mine.
If you think there are things that your child could experiment with that wouldn't have a permanently detrimental effect on their subsequent well-being (and yours, if you are indeed a sufficiently empathetic person) you are sorely mistaken.
Here is a list of things you can let your child 'experiment' with to show my point: - Eating foxglove. (Heart stops virtually instantaneously) - Jumping off a large cliff. (Everything stops virtually instantaneously) - Dropping out of school. (Learning stops virtually instantaneously) - Unprotected sex. (Variable consequences. Please note that your child experimenting with drugs will increase the likelyhood of this experiment.)
Plus, you have to factor in to the equation that not all people are able to control themselves in the face of temptation in the same manner. Your child may be influenced to go beyond his boundaries and could possibly damage his mental capacity as a result of this. Even physiologically speaking, everyone is different. Chemicals do different things to different people. Much of 'experimentation' is learning from your community, but if a child is the only person in the community affected by this substance in a certain way, it might be difficult for that child to discern this, considering their nascence in the field of examining their consciousness...
I don't have a clue as to why the parent is modded 'Insightful'. He states that 'you need a pointing device that is close to the keyboard' and then says that 'a regular mouse is OK too'... For some reason he's trying to imply that this rotated mouse would be farther away from the keyboard than a regular mouse, when in actual fact, it would be the same distance. It's not like you need to hold it at arms length or get up from your chair to use it just because the mouse is rotated.
And I must say that I think claiming that having to 'keep rolling your wrist' is bad is utterly baseless. I work as a software developer writing code day in and day out, and I'm constantly reaching for things other than the keyboard that I have to rotate my wrist to grab. My pen is not magically oriented the exact way my hand is every time I need to use it, but still I manage to pick it up without ever having to think, "Oh, now I need to rotate my wrist 30 degrees clock-wise in order to successfully grab this pen. How inconvenient." As well, the rotation for this mouse is exactly the same as that which I use to pick up my ever-present cup of coffee or glass of water, and these actions are surely no difficulty.
The worst thing about this comment, above all else, is that the subject line ('Horrible to use with a keyboard') is such an across-the-board no-truth-but-this-could-exist statement. Your conclusion that you 'Can't see this being efficient or easy' shows that you obviously haven't tried it. I think your neophobic prejudice is showing through. I'm sad to see that such a blatantly unfounded pre-judging opinion has been modded 'Insightful' by the erudite/. crew...
(cue joke about me being new here...)
I think this mouse shows some major potential. When I use a mouse, I can notice the small amount of strain it takes to orient my wrist to the mouse's plane. In fact, I can feel the same strain when I'm typing... Might anybody be creating a keyboard that works similarly? I'm not sure if I've seen that yet... might someone have a link?
Rubbish? You've built your own truth. He did say, and I quote your quote, 'I would disregard any _degrees_ from online universities' (emphasis obviously mine) and didn't say that that candidate's resume would be rejected just because they had a degree from an online university.
I brush my teeth every morning on my commute to work (I love being an efficiency whore.) When I'm fully concentrating on the road I can keep my speed consistently 10 above the limit, keep a consistent picture of the speedy death machines(cars) around me, continually ask myself whether or not I'm in somebody's way (ie. are they trying to go faster than I, is there a way to get out of their way, does the person I just hit need medical attention, etc,) and still sing along and bob my head to the awesome music.
I know that in the couple instances where I was driving while talking on the cell phone I could not really do any of these things. I could keep my speed generally about the same, but I was just not aware of anybody else around me except at critical moments (ie, going through an intersection.) On the other hand, when I brush my teeth I'm still bobbing away with a full picture of all the speedy death machines around me.
And speaking of speedy death machines, I'm getting a call on my cell phone right now.
If the HR department are looking for a certain type of people, wouldn't you like that information to be made public? I mean, it saves them time from having to sift through the large population of non-H1-B applications they don't want and the people sending the applications. Although, maybe they can just put 'Excellent coder with great references and 10+ years of experience. English optional. Beginning salary: 30k.' but I somehow think the flag would be raised in a different manner there...
I must say, I disagree wholeheartedly with the philosophy of DRM, however, having said that, you're fooling yourself if you think ANY of the money AllOfMP3 gets goes to the artist. I recently read an article discussing the flow of money and AllOfMP3 simply takes a portion of your money and passes the rest to some sort of holding company that is designed by Russian law accept money on behalf of artists they have contracts with and 'hold it for them.' The problem is, the money never leaves these companies. AllOfMP3 isn't doing anything 'illegal,' it's these holding companies that are ripping the artist off. Of course, AllOfMP3 is likely owned by a friend of a holding company owner. Gee... I wonder what that means. Of course, AllOfMP3 can make some of that money back by selling your CC number later, too.
Now, I would say (and obviously you, too) that AllOfMP3 fills a great niche. We need a service like that in North America that actually compensates the artists. www.bleep.com is a step in the right direction, and certainly for me, WARP Records puts out a bunch of music I enjoy, but it's not for everybody. As it stands, I have a backlog of albums I've downloaded from p2p networks that I need to pay the artists for. The artists themselves really need to set up some sort of 'donation' network, and then just allow people to pay them for music they've downloaded elsewhere.
I'm not sure the spirit of this protest is in the right place. Sure, the RIAA is putting DRM in saleable material and that's bad, except the RIAA exists to enforce the 'rights' of the people _distributing_ the music. They care not about the people who actually _create_ the music, and to me, those people are the only important ones. Now that we have the internets, I can download whatever the eff I please, from whomever it pleases me to download it from. That's known as 'distribution.' The RIAA (and, more locally specific, the CRIA) has no place in my life.
I think you're taking the example a little too literally. Sure, pushing documents around might not make sense in most contexts. I agree with you there, and in fact thought the exact same thing that you said, about making a mess just by moving a document being kind of stupid. But that's not to say there are _no_ applications for it. And having an interface that can support that modality, which you will obviously be able to turn off, is better than not having that option. Just like the option to display the content of the files as the 'artifact'.
Your gripe about all the icons being the same is refuted by TFV (you did WTFV, did you not? (; ) where they show the picture and webpage artifacts displaying content being treated in the same manner. They are different views of the same objects. I mean, what you're basically saying is that _you_ yourself cannot think of a particular use for all the icons being the same. But, I mean, what OS are you on? I use both Linux and Windows and both of those have file explorers where the different icons are different file types and aren't showing some indication of the document's actual content.
I will admit, though, that the video given shows no 'categorization' of sets of disparate objects. IE, they show sorting by type, but they don't show anything like the folder hierarchy of objects we're used to. You could imagine folders being like depressions in the ground here, though, with each object sitting in the depression hierarchy that it is associated with. You could literally throw objects from one folder to another just by clicking and dragging, like we do today. Then the camera could zoom up and down from an overview of the entire file-hierarchy, down to an individual 'category.' This would provide much needed sorting functionality, while allowing the folder hierarchy to be much more transparent than it is right now. All using the same input mode as we normally do. IE, a pointer with a click ability. I think the fact that it was designed on a tablet with a pen is simply an interface constraint on this particular implementation, not something that wouldn't transfer to more traditional methods of interaction.
Basically, I think most of your gripes are about individual configuration of the interaction scheme, whereas the actual mode of interaction has much promise and could offer some interesting freedoms.
Anyway, I do agree with the point about having to have extremely advanced graphics processing just to interact with documents like this, but I'll bet somebody said the same thing about moving from a command-line interface to a GUI... (cut to shot of old man grumbling in the background)
Slashdot Mirror
Reply to remove incorrect moderation.
They already have this. It's called: Canada.
(:
Look, I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that a judge should have no amicable ties to companies that have a vested interest in the outcome of various court cases that judge will hear, but the GP's post is not about that. The GP's post is about judges having a sufficient level of technical knowledge related to a case to be able to judge the technical merits of the arguments presented and hence to be able to understand fully the ramifications of the outcomes of his judgement. The GP's post is _not_ about a judge with this experience _because_ they worked at a company entrenched in the industry about which the technical knowledge is required.
Here are a couple of examples related to yours to help show the difference. If the Awesome Judge Alsup's experience in coding had been acquired at Microsoft (or perhaps Oracle) then the GP's comment and your post's statement would logically follow. Or, if you modify your example to be about a judge who is assigned a fracking case who then goes out and researches the technical details of fracking in order to reach a cogent conclusion not biased by the lawyers' pro/against castings, then you have an example that is very close to what Awesome Judge Alsup has done. Or perhaps if the judge's backyard hobby is fracking and then he is assigned a fracking case, though your example falls down there because many people code as a hobby (or at least can) and nobody fracks for fun.
I think your post is a good-natured misunderstanding, though one of your ancestor comments about you praising 'ignorance over knowledge' hits home pretty hard. As the OP states, judges having in-depth technical knowledge about their cases (or even any knowledge is better than none) is definitely a good thing. Also, as you state, judges having a vested interest in a certain outcome because of pre-existing industry ties is a bad thing. No, they are not related here.
Replying to remove wrong-click moderation.
Replying to remove incorrectly selected moderation. Apologies.
You are wrong:
AJAX: Asynchronous JavaScript And XML
Asynchronous because the js call happens after the page has already beeen loaded and XML (ie XHTML) is what is returned from the call. Or rather, returned and inserted, if you want to be pedantic (which you obviously do.)
See a review of the previous experiments in this burgeoning field here. I can't believe more research hasn't been done on these kinds of possible accidents. I mean, how many people have to be stabbed before we sit up and demand that experiments are done to find out what happens to people when they're stabbed?
I chose to tag this 'itwasatrap'
(;
... about piracy of albums that weren't released with a user-pricing model? I want to know how many times other albums are downloaded comapared to purchased.
I know that Trent Reznor has publicly stated that he knows his latest album, Nine Inch Nails' 'Year Zero' was pirated a lot, and that he was happy people were listening to it, but unhappy about the albums pricing schemes and that he himself (and the musicians, audio engineers, etc. who made the album) didn't get much money from the album.
I'll bet Radiohead get more money from this than any of their other albums, despite the fact that the total amount of money made may be lower...
This is just patently untrue. I will agree that the argument is retarded, but only because of what you are arguing. As has been hashed and rehashed quite a few times on /., free speech does not mean that you are free to yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre, for example. Your freedom to yell random things is quashed by others freedom to remain alive and undamaged. Therefore, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
This axiom is also shown in the legal definition of slander or defamation. You _are free_ to say things that are untrue about some entity you dislike, but if your freedom of wagging tongue steps on that entity's freedom from unwarranted persecution, you are liable. Again, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
Are you getting this?
Are you seeing the point?
Your freedom of speech ends when it steps on others' freedoms we, as a society, have deemed more important. To say what you're saying, which is akin to something like 'I am not free to wave a knife wildly and randomly in public means I am not free at all.' is, as you have stated, a retarded argument.
And by a corporation, no less!
A recent study which I won't cite because it might refute my claim states that about two-thirds of statistics are completely made up. Another study would seem to correlate that fact, stating that during periods of electioneering there is a consistent onslaught of made up studies. I won't cite my sources because it's better you take my word for it. Especially on /., because nobody here cares about reading those _boring_ studies discussing sociological trends.
A recent study shows that that last bit is a joke, for those of you with no sense for sarcasm.
(;
I agree with this. I'm not sure if it's the same in the States, but up here in Canada each vote a party gets means another $2 or something goes into that party's coffers. Voting for a third party sends a message to the two in power that they need to do something different. As well, it spurs on greater political debate, which seems (?) like a good thing.
Anyway, perhaps the money given to a party as a result of a person's vote is far less than campaign contributions anyways, so it might be wholly unimportant. But still... I'll bet if one decides to go and vote for a third party, you'll go and do some cursory investigation about the political leanings of each possible third party, and that can only be a good thing.
Of course, you could just assume that the sibling poster knows what they're talking about and vote Libertarian, but that seems a cheap way to attempt to sway the vote... (; Go and google the parties and read their platforms a little. It doesn't take long to get an impression of which party wants what.
...And this is an illustration of nobody getting the joke being made by your GP...
It's funny, because in calling him an idiot because you don't understand his joke is delicious irony.
Diebold also makes ATMs that work day and night flawlessly (well, 99% flawlessly) with paper trails so that banks know EXACTLY where the money went and if anything has gone wrong. You are correct in saying that these voting machines exhibit 'awful engineering, Crappy programming, bad design, lazy execution.", but when you consider that the company has a track record of the opposite in a (slightly) different field, the needle seems to point more towards maliciousness than carelessness...
You are technically correct. However, Take-Two is just pointing out to the judge where Jack had been in contempt and the judge missed it. To continue the GP's example, just because the judge happened not see the media interview that Jack took part of during the trial doesn't make Jack any less in contempt-of-court. It just means that the judge happened to be watching a different channel that night (or maybe the interview didn't air until later, for example.)
No. They're trying to protect the word 'podcast' (or the prefix 'pod' as used to reference something to do with digital media players) from being trademarked by _another company_. They're not simply going after everyone who uses / creates their own variant of pod/podcast. They're trying to prevent the term from being locked up at all. They're not trying to lock it up for themselves, just to keep it open so that everyone can use it.
Sorry for the OT rant. This is just something that everyone seems to have gotten wrong and is a pet peeve of mine.
Disclaimer: I have never owned an Apple product.
If you think there are things that your child could experiment with that wouldn't have a permanently detrimental effect on their subsequent well-being (and yours, if you are indeed a sufficiently empathetic person) you are sorely mistaken.
Here is a list of things you can let your child 'experiment' with to show my point:
- Eating foxglove. (Heart stops virtually instantaneously)
- Jumping off a large cliff. (Everything stops virtually instantaneously)
- Dropping out of school. (Learning stops virtually instantaneously)
- Unprotected sex. (Variable consequences. Please note that your child experimenting with drugs will increase the likelyhood of this experiment.)
Plus, you have to factor in to the equation that not all people are able to control themselves in the face of temptation in the same manner. Your child may be influenced to go beyond his boundaries and could possibly damage his mental capacity as a result of this. Even physiologically speaking, everyone is different. Chemicals do different things to different people. Much of 'experimentation' is learning from your community, but if a child is the only person in the community affected by this substance in a certain way, it might be difficult for that child to discern this, considering their nascence in the field of examining their consciousness...
Just some food for thought...
I don't have a clue as to why the parent is modded 'Insightful'. He states that 'you need a pointing device that is close to the keyboard' and then says that 'a regular mouse is OK too'... For some reason he's trying to imply that this rotated mouse would be farther away from the keyboard than a regular mouse, when in actual fact, it would be the same distance. It's not like you need to hold it at arms length or get up from your chair to use it just because the mouse is rotated.
/. crew...
And I must say that I think claiming that having to 'keep rolling your wrist' is bad is utterly baseless. I work as a software developer writing code day in and day out, and I'm constantly reaching for things other than the keyboard that I have to rotate my wrist to grab. My pen is not magically oriented the exact way my hand is every time I need to use it, but still I manage to pick it up without ever having to think, "Oh, now I need to rotate my wrist 30 degrees clock-wise in order to successfully grab this pen. How inconvenient." As well, the rotation for this mouse is exactly the same as that which I use to pick up my ever-present cup of coffee or glass of water, and these actions are surely no difficulty.
The worst thing about this comment, above all else, is that the subject line ('Horrible to use with a keyboard') is such an across-the-board no-truth-but-this-could-exist statement. Your conclusion that you 'Can't see this being efficient or easy' shows that you obviously haven't tried it. I think your neophobic prejudice is showing through. I'm sad to see that such a blatantly unfounded pre-judging opinion has been modded 'Insightful' by the erudite
(cue joke about me being new here...)
I think this mouse shows some major potential. When I use a mouse, I can notice the small amount of strain it takes to orient my wrist to the mouse's plane. In fact, I can feel the same strain when I'm typing... Might anybody be creating a keyboard that works similarly? I'm not sure if I've seen that yet... might someone have a link?
Rubbish? You've built your own truth. He did say, and I quote your quote, 'I would disregard any _degrees_ from online universities' (emphasis obviously mine) and didn't say that that candidate's resume would be rejected just because they had a degree from an online university.
I brush my teeth every morning on my commute to work (I love being an efficiency whore.) When I'm fully concentrating on the road I can keep my speed consistently 10 above the limit, keep a consistent picture of the speedy death machines(cars) around me, continually ask myself whether or not I'm in somebody's way (ie. are they trying to go faster than I, is there a way to get out of their way, does the person I just hit need medical attention, etc,) and still sing along and bob my head to the awesome music.
I know that in the couple instances where I was driving while talking on the cell phone I could not really do any of these things. I could keep my speed generally about the same, but I was just not aware of anybody else around me except at critical moments (ie, going through an intersection.) On the other hand, when I brush my teeth I'm still bobbing away with a full picture of all the speedy death machines around me.
And speaking of speedy death machines, I'm getting a call on my cell phone right now.
If the HR department are looking for a certain type of people, wouldn't you like that information to be made public? I mean, it saves them time from having to sift through the large population of non-H1-B applications they don't want and the people sending the applications. Although, maybe they can just put 'Excellent coder with great references and 10+ years of experience. English optional. Beginning salary: 30k.' but I somehow think the flag would be raised in a different manner there...
(;
I must say, I disagree wholeheartedly with the philosophy of DRM, however, having said that, you're fooling yourself if you think ANY of the money AllOfMP3 gets goes to the artist. I recently read an article discussing the flow of money and AllOfMP3 simply takes a portion of your money and passes the rest to some sort of holding company that is designed by Russian law accept money on behalf of artists they have contracts with and 'hold it for them.' The problem is, the money never leaves these companies. AllOfMP3 isn't doing anything 'illegal,' it's these holding companies that are ripping the artist off. Of course, AllOfMP3 is likely owned by a friend of a holding company owner. Gee... I wonder what that means. Of course, AllOfMP3 can make some of that money back by selling your CC number later, too.
m l?mi=D8I08K6G0 'under Russian copyright law, [ROMS] does not need permission from copyright holders to license the sale of music on the Internet.'
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/ap/article.ht
Now, I would say (and obviously you, too) that AllOfMP3 fills a great niche. We need a service like that in North America that actually compensates the artists. www.bleep.com is a step in the right direction, and certainly for me, WARP Records puts out a bunch of music I enjoy, but it's not for everybody. As it stands, I have a backlog of albums I've downloaded from p2p networks that I need to pay the artists for. The artists themselves really need to set up some sort of 'donation' network, and then just allow people to pay them for music they've downloaded elsewhere.
I'm not sure the spirit of this protest is in the right place. Sure, the RIAA is putting DRM in saleable material and that's bad, except the RIAA exists to enforce the 'rights' of the people _distributing_ the music. They care not about the people who actually _create_ the music, and to me, those people are the only important ones. Now that we have the internets, I can download whatever the eff I please, from whomever it pleases me to download it from. That's known as 'distribution.' The RIAA (and, more locally specific, the CRIA) has no place in my life.
Perhaps I should call them and tell them that.
I think you're taking the example a little too literally. Sure, pushing documents around might not make sense in most contexts. I agree with you there, and in fact thought the exact same thing that you said, about making a mess just by moving a document being kind of stupid. But that's not to say there are _no_ applications for it. And having an interface that can support that modality, which you will obviously be able to turn off, is better than not having that option. Just like the option to display the content of the files as the 'artifact'.
Your gripe about all the icons being the same is refuted by TFV (you did WTFV, did you not? (; ) where they show the picture and webpage artifacts displaying content being treated in the same manner. They are different views of the same objects. I mean, what you're basically saying is that _you_ yourself cannot think of a particular use for all the icons being the same. But, I mean, what OS are you on? I use both Linux and Windows and both of those have file explorers where the different icons are different file types and aren't showing some indication of the document's actual content.
I will admit, though, that the video given shows no 'categorization' of sets of disparate objects. IE, they show sorting by type, but they don't show anything like the folder hierarchy of objects we're used to. You could imagine folders being like depressions in the ground here, though, with each object sitting in the depression hierarchy that it is associated with. You could literally throw objects from one folder to another just by clicking and dragging, like we do today. Then the camera could zoom up and down from an overview of the entire file-hierarchy, down to an individual 'category.' This would provide much needed sorting functionality, while allowing the folder hierarchy to be much more transparent than it is right now. All using the same input mode as we normally do. IE, a pointer with a click ability. I think the fact that it was designed on a tablet with a pen is simply an interface constraint on this particular implementation, not something that wouldn't transfer to more traditional methods of interaction.
Basically, I think most of your gripes are about individual configuration of the interaction scheme, whereas the actual mode of interaction has much promise and could offer some interesting freedoms.
Anyway, I do agree with the point about having to have extremely advanced graphics processing just to interact with documents like this, but I'll bet somebody said the same thing about moving from a command-line interface to a GUI... (cut to shot of old man grumbling in the background)
(:
Here's a link to the paper that contains links to the videos in .avi format.
0 627.htm
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press/2003/June/03