...attracting scammers, cheats, and frauds. My wife has had so many problems with eBay, and I'm so unimpressed with them anymore, that I wouldn't bother with their Express site. I can certainly get stuff cheap enough off of Amazon.
But then again, I think they do like rumors getting out, at least ones that are false, as it keeps their competition guessing, and may get them to sink money into areas Google isn't going to compete with them in. Disinformation can be mighty useful in the corporate world.
In the year 2005, Apple Computers released the new iMac, a device with a display screen and integrated camera which allowed a remote viewer to monitor whatever was going on in front of it.
And in the year 2011, iMacs and iPods will join together in a cyber-network to battle the ultra-powerful PS3 collective. Oops... you weren't supposed to know about that...
Ok, it's supposed to be unlawful to access copyrighted information on the Internet without the copyright holder's permission, right? I mean, that's the gist of the *AA's arguments right -- we hold the rights, you can't access this material unless we say so. So if the tool has to access the information to determine the copyright, wouldn't it be violating that principle? Nitpicking I know, but an interesting thought. They'd have to get dispensation from the *AAs to do it, wouldn't they?
Perhaps, but given the wide number of radio station formats with solid demographic ranges, and also given that people do still listen to the radio quite a bit despite the advance of technology (else why would there be satellite radio?), Google's making a smart move in trying to wedge its way in. After all, there is an untapped market for them -- the casual computer user. Someone who may use one at an Internet cafe or library for browsing, or has a computer at home but rarely uses it for more than email or to play Solitaire. While we'd like to believe Google is everywhere, there are places they've yet to reach. It seems to me that they are trying broaden their base to its limit, to ensure that not even a loss of net neutrality can break their dominance.
As an aside, why don't they just buy a NY radio station? I can hear it now... "Live from the heart of Manhattan, you're listen to WGGL... All Google, all the time... give us 40 milliseconds and we'll give you 5 million search results...
But still I don't see how CP, zoofilia and necrofilia can be set equal in the eyes of the criminal law.
But I wasn't talking about law. I was talking about what I find morally reprehensible. I don't condone these acts -- that's my personal belief. I don't expect my personal belief to be made into law. Why should my opinion count any more or any less than that of anyone else? The idea is to find a common ground that can apply to all citizens in the United States (or anywhere for that matter). Maybe there are those that enjoy the "idea" of sexual contact with minors and while I may find that troubling, they do not. It's when the "idea" becomes an "action" that I think the line has to be drawn there, and let's face it, if you're going to use children to make images of sexual contact with minors, is that really any different than the act?
Harming anyone for your own pleasure is as old as the hills. If the other person is consenting, there's nothing wrong with it, but I think in the case of children, especially pre-teens who have little sexual knowledge, that consent cannot be claimed to be knowingly given.
I still don't understand the concept behind making images illegal. Granted, someone who wants to look at this kind of stuff might have a really messed up sense of morality, and probably reality as well, but I don't see how this is a legal issue before there is an actual victim.
Well, the State (insert your favorite government here) is in the business of trying to tell people what to think. Despite the protections on speech and expression in the United States, the government (and certain religious persuasions) would prefer it if you didn't think about these things at all and don't wish to be subjected to the actualizations of the thoughts of others.
Now, I see child porn as morally reprehensible. Frankly, I think you have to somewhat depraved to enjoy thought of sexual contact with pre-teens (not to mention [though I will] the dead or animals). But as long as the thought is in your head, and does not lead to overt acts that can be said to be contrary to the social welfare and the welfare of individuals, what you do in your own head is your own business.
Thought has to be the last bastion of privacy we have available. It's the testing ground, where we let loose the demons that plague us regularly and where we can do it in a controlled fashion. I tend to think it's healthier to work out our aggression and rage in the relatively harmless environment of our mind than to let them out into the daylight. Trying to eliminate even the thought of something bad or wrong is a futile gesture at best.
This points out the blurring of the line between fantasy and imagination, and reality and causality. You can stop such artwork from being drawn and distributed (maybe), but you can't legislate what goes on in the mind of the creator of such work (yet).
Look at the CGI work that is done in movies. As computer-generated characters look and sound more like real actors, does what we can do to them change? No more violence, bestiality, child abuse depictions in movies? Take it a step further -- assume a CG character could be made alive via AI. Does this character now have the protection of the law? Can a CGAI character be made to perform in a gratuitously sexual manner?
Technology advances and as it does, it makes the moral distinctions we carry even more ambiguous than they were before. The question is, how do we handle this? At what point do we say enough?
I think MMORPGs can be an addiction. I think IRC can be an addiction. I don't think "the internet" can be an addiction.
Therein lies the crux of the issue: do we blame "The Internet" or do we blame the profusion of activities the Internet allows you to indulge in (email, video, MMORPGs, porn, chat, etc.)? Put another way: who is to blame for an alcoholic's problem -- the alcoholic who buys the liquor or the store that sells the liquor? Blaming the Net for an addiction is blaming the store. Any addiction starts squarely with the addict. If you let anything in your world dominate what you do in your life, whether it be drugs, alcohol, fire, the Internet, it starts and ends with you. I don't tend to think of addictions as a mental illness, a la schizophrenia or bipolar disorder -- they're the simple overloading of a natural mechanism, and there are plenty of remedies available to deal with them.
Let's face it, people get addicted off of all sorts of things: alcohol, drugs, skydiving, mountain climbing, etc. Why should Internet use be any different? Especially if you find it useful to discover information about or talk to people with interests in something you yourself enjoy. And look at MMPORGs -- are you saying WoW doesn't suck large numbers of people in?
But there's being addicted, and then there's it being a "disease." Frankly, I think B. F. Skinner would scoff at the notion. To him, everything was stimulus -> response -> reinforcement, and the more reinforcing an activity was, the more an organism would engage in it. It's not a "disease" as such, but something hard-wired into out neural make-up, and the Internet has the potential to tap into that just like anything else.
But why do you have to maintain backward compatibility? Maybe for something like Word this is desirable, as you'd like to be able to open old Word documents with a new version and edit them. But a browser is just rendering text and pictures, and if there's a better way to do it that your machine doesn't support, then that's just too bad.
Backwards compatibility is a crutch -- it keeps users chained to old formats and bogs down code with all sorts of exceptions that have to be programmed in to allow older things to keep working. I say: make sure you build in the functionality to convert old data to new and go from there -- stop dragging around old code. I suspect backwards compatibility leads to a lot of the bugs and holes you see in products like Word, Outlook, etc.
When you boil it right down, anyone using one of the older versions of Windows (and I count 2000 in this, as MS doesn't support it anymore) is going to have to face up to the fact that technology advances, software changes, and no matter how much they love their old machine/OS, they're going to get left behind. Backwards compatibility leads to backwards thinking.
This will inevitably lead to... wait for it... Wikiverts! My only question is, will the user community get to edit the advertising -- and can you imagine the results.
If they charged, what would separate them from every other site out there that does the same thing? They have more of a place on the internet by doing what they are doing right now. If they charged, their niche would go away.
When you think about CraigsList is the original successful social networking site. It allows people to exchange goods and services with people in their general area or anywhere, and isn't cluttered up with useless nonsense or ads. It may not have all the "functionality" of someplace but it doesn't need to. It's more a small town, as opposed to a big city.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin dismisses threat of Adolph Hitler to European political stability. "He's just some misunderstood painter," the PM was quoted as saying.
The summary is very misleading in the way that it describes HP as paying money to make the case disappear. This wasn't a criminal case where they were buying off a judge to rule favorably. This was a civil matter. and 99 times out of 100, civil matters are about one thing: money. They can either pay money in the settlement, pay money as a result of a judgment from a trial, be dismissed through a motion, or be found not guilty from a trial. Settlement is COMMON, because it allows both sides to save costs from not having to pay for a costly trial. And trials are MUCH more costly than most of what happens pre-trial.
And the upshot for the State of California is that that a) they don't have to waste money pursuing the suit and b) they now have some cash to help pay off their staggering deficit. Normally I'd say put HP's feet to the fire, but I think here the Governator is being pragmatic and actually doing something to help his state in the long run.
But that's not a new problem. It's long been known that eyewitness testimony is highly unreliable, owing to the brains ability to "fill in" details of events with extra information. The classic example is of course the intro Psych course where an unknown assailant kills someone before the whole class, then runs from the room. Ask everyone in the room to describe the assailant and what occurred and you're liable to get as many different stories as there are people. The brain has a way of smoothing over memories and adding in extra bits of information it correlates with experiences to help aid in recall, but this of course leads to degradation of the memory's "truth." THis result should really not come as much of a shock.
I'll never understand why Americans are so bitter about this. I don't have a single colleague who can say they lost their job to offshore outsourcing, or even has any trouble getting a new job for great pay.
Well, I lost a cushy job to outsourcing... only it wasn't Indians... it was Canadians! Damn their ice hockey, bacon, and Rush!
This tech has been avilable since the 1980s, but we've yet to see it in consumer-grade vehicles. Why is that? I'm willing to bet mandatory use of such tech would save at least 2000-3000 lives every year on the highways; after all, it's not the speeding but the tailgating that kills you.
Because the technology is going to be adapted to solve the problem from another angle: semi-autonomous roadside missile launchers. Using Doppler radar and lasers, the system will measure the speed and distances between cars and automatically take out tailgaters and speeders. Lock and load!
Slashdot Mirror
Shortly after Grand Theft Auto: Busted By The Cops.
...attracting scammers, cheats, and frauds. My wife has had so many problems with eBay, and I'm so unimpressed with them anymore, that I wouldn't bother with their Express site. I can certainly get stuff cheap enough off of Amazon.
Well, they took a first step with this, but how much further will they be willing to go? What does SAMBA stand to lose if they lock out Novell?
But then again, I think they do like rumors getting out, at least ones that are false, as it keeps their competition guessing, and may get them to sink money into areas Google isn't going to compete with them in. Disinformation can be mighty useful in the corporate world.
In the year 2005, Apple Computers released the new iMac, a device with a display screen and integrated camera which allowed a remote viewer to monitor whatever was going on in front of it.
And in the year 2011, iMacs and iPods will join together in a cyber-network to battle the ultra-powerful PS3 collective. Oops... you weren't supposed to know about that...
Or cleverly disguised attempt to monitor people by the Department of Homeland Security? You be the judge!
Ok, it's supposed to be unlawful to access copyrighted information on the Internet without the copyright holder's permission, right? I mean, that's the gist of the *AA's arguments right -- we hold the rights, you can't access this material unless we say so. So if the tool has to access the information to determine the copyright, wouldn't it be violating that principle? Nitpicking I know, but an interesting thought. They'd have to get dispensation from the *AAs to do it, wouldn't they?
Perhaps, but given the wide number of radio station formats with solid demographic ranges, and also given that people do still listen to the radio quite a bit despite the advance of technology (else why would there be satellite radio?), Google's making a smart move in trying to wedge its way in. After all, there is an untapped market for them -- the casual computer user. Someone who may use one at an Internet cafe or library for browsing, or has a computer at home but rarely uses it for more than email or to play Solitaire. While we'd like to believe Google is everywhere, there are places they've yet to reach. It seems to me that they are trying broaden their base to its limit, to ensure that not even a loss of net neutrality can break their dominance.
As an aside, why don't they just buy a NY radio station? I can hear it now... "Live from the heart of Manhattan, you're listen to WGGL... All Google, all the time... give us 40 milliseconds and we'll give you 5 million search results...
But I wasn't talking about law. I was talking about what I find morally reprehensible. I don't condone these acts -- that's my personal belief. I don't expect my personal belief to be made into law. Why should my opinion count any more or any less than that of anyone else? The idea is to find a common ground that can apply to all citizens in the United States (or anywhere for that matter). Maybe there are those that enjoy the "idea" of sexual contact with minors and while I may find that troubling, they do not. It's when the "idea" becomes an "action" that I think the line has to be drawn there, and let's face it, if you're going to use children to make images of sexual contact with minors, is that really any different than the act?
Harming anyone for your own pleasure is as old as the hills. If the other person is consenting, there's nothing wrong with it, but I think in the case of children, especially pre-teens who have little sexual knowledge, that consent cannot be claimed to be knowingly given.
Well, the State (insert your favorite government here) is in the business of trying to tell people what to think. Despite the protections on speech and expression in the United States, the government (and certain religious persuasions) would prefer it if you didn't think about these things at all and don't wish to be subjected to the actualizations of the thoughts of others.
Now, I see child porn as morally reprehensible. Frankly, I think you have to somewhat depraved to enjoy thought of sexual contact with pre-teens (not to mention [though I will] the dead or animals). But as long as the thought is in your head, and does not lead to overt acts that can be said to be contrary to the social welfare and the welfare of individuals, what you do in your own head is your own business.
Thought has to be the last bastion of privacy we have available. It's the testing ground, where we let loose the demons that plague us regularly and where we can do it in a controlled fashion. I tend to think it's healthier to work out our aggression and rage in the relatively harmless environment of our mind than to let them out into the daylight. Trying to eliminate even the thought of something bad or wrong is a futile gesture at best.
And better yet, share it with their friends...
This points out the blurring of the line between fantasy and imagination, and reality and causality. You can stop such artwork from being drawn and distributed (maybe), but you can't legislate what goes on in the mind of the creator of such work (yet).
Look at the CGI work that is done in movies. As computer-generated characters look and sound more like real actors, does what we can do to them change? No more violence, bestiality, child abuse depictions in movies? Take it a step further -- assume a CG character could be made alive via AI. Does this character now have the protection of the law? Can a CGAI character be made to perform in a gratuitously sexual manner?
Technology advances and as it does, it makes the moral distinctions we carry even more ambiguous than they were before. The question is, how do we handle this? At what point do we say enough?
Therein lies the crux of the issue: do we blame "The Internet" or do we blame the profusion of activities the Internet allows you to indulge in (email, video, MMORPGs, porn, chat, etc.)? Put another way: who is to blame for an alcoholic's problem -- the alcoholic who buys the liquor or the store that sells the liquor? Blaming the Net for an addiction is blaming the store. Any addiction starts squarely with the addict. If you let anything in your world dominate what you do in your life, whether it be drugs, alcohol, fire, the Internet, it starts and ends with you. I don't tend to think of addictions as a mental illness, a la schizophrenia or bipolar disorder -- they're the simple overloading of a natural mechanism, and there are plenty of remedies available to deal with them.
Let's face it, people get addicted off of all sorts of things: alcohol, drugs, skydiving, mountain climbing, etc. Why should Internet use be any different? Especially if you find it useful to discover information about or talk to people with interests in something you yourself enjoy. And look at MMPORGs -- are you saying WoW doesn't suck large numbers of people in?
But there's being addicted, and then there's it being a "disease." Frankly, I think B. F. Skinner would scoff at the notion. To him, everything was stimulus -> response -> reinforcement, and the more reinforcing an activity was, the more an organism would engage in it. It's not a "disease" as such, but something hard-wired into out neural make-up, and the Internet has the potential to tap into that just like anything else.
About the same time that people get rid of their AS/400 machines.
But why do you have to maintain backward compatibility? Maybe for something like Word this is desirable, as you'd like to be able to open old Word documents with a new version and edit them. But a browser is just rendering text and pictures, and if there's a better way to do it that your machine doesn't support, then that's just too bad.
Backwards compatibility is a crutch -- it keeps users chained to old formats and bogs down code with all sorts of exceptions that have to be programmed in to allow older things to keep working. I say: make sure you build in the functionality to convert old data to new and go from there -- stop dragging around old code. I suspect backwards compatibility leads to a lot of the bugs and holes you see in products like Word, Outlook, etc.
When you boil it right down, anyone using one of the older versions of Windows (and I count 2000 in this, as MS doesn't support it anymore) is going to have to face up to the fact that technology advances, software changes, and no matter how much they love their old machine/OS, they're going to get left behind. Backwards compatibility leads to backwards thinking.
This will inevitably lead to... wait for it... Wikiverts! My only question is, will the user community get to edit the advertising -- and can you imagine the results.
When you think about CraigsList is the original successful social networking site. It allows people to exchange goods and services with people in their general area or anywhere, and isn't cluttered up with useless nonsense or ads. It may not have all the "functionality" of someplace but it doesn't need to. It's more a small town, as opposed to a big city.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin dismisses threat of Adolph Hitler to European political stability. "He's just some misunderstood painter," the PM was quoted as saying.
And the upshot for the State of California is that that a) they don't have to waste money pursuing the suit and b) they now have some cash to help pay off their staggering deficit. Normally I'd say put HP's feet to the fire, but I think here the Governator is being pragmatic and actually doing something to help his state in the long run.
But that's not a new problem. It's long been known that eyewitness testimony is highly unreliable, owing to the brains ability to "fill in" details of events with extra information. The classic example is of course the intro Psych course where an unknown assailant kills someone before the whole class, then runs from the room. Ask everyone in the room to describe the assailant and what occurred and you're liable to get as many different stories as there are people. The brain has a way of smoothing over memories and adding in extra bits of information it correlates with experiences to help aid in recall, but this of course leads to degradation of the memory's "truth." THis result should really not come as much of a shock.
Well, I lost a cushy job to outsourcing... only it wasn't Indians... it was Canadians! Damn their ice hockey, bacon, and Rush!
Flame on!!!!
Because the technology is going to be adapted to solve the problem from another angle: semi-autonomous roadside missile launchers. Using Doppler radar and lasers, the system will measure the speed and distances between cars and automatically take out tailgaters and speeders. Lock and load!