How is that any different to any other profession? Why are artists entitled to unequal and enforced support from their industry, and welders or seamstresses are not? What makes an unsuccessful artist more worthy than an unsuccessful teacher?
In the digital age, what artists produce is not a scarce commodity. They can produce infinite copies of their songs (or whatever), and sell each copy. Inevitably, random artists will sell some huge amount of one of their songs and profit off of each sale.
Welders, seamstresses, teachers and most other professions all provide scarce goods or services. Yes, some will become very successful, but when they do, they can't just produce infinite product in a split second and make absurd megabucks.
If Microsoft did this everyone would be angry about it, but now that it's Apple its all fine and classy.
There are two snarky replies to this. I'll present both here for completeness.
1.
I bet that if Microsoft did this, everyone would be angry about this. Oh, wait. They already did with the Xbox [360]. So not really, no.
Keep in mind this argument applies not only to Microsoft, but also to Sony, Nintendo, and yes, Amazon. What we use it for does not change the fact that the Xbox, PS3, Wii, and Kindle are all computers, but you never saw anyone all that riled up before the iPhone/iPad. I'm not happy about it either, but at least be an equal-opportunity walled garden basher.
2.
I bet that if Microsoft did this, most techies would be angry about it. A non-techie standard Windows user, though, would not care. From where I'm standing, this is exactly what's happening to Apple. If you think Apple's not catching enough heat from this because they're Apple, you're shortsighted. Microsoft wouldn't get much heat either.
Stop framing this question as "Why are we letting Apple get away with this?" Start asking instead "Why is our culture letting everyone get away with this, and how can we change that?" It's more productive and less whiny.
The fundamental problem with selling music or other media over the internet is that data is not a scarce commodity. Copying music does not deprive anyone else of access to that music. It's much like copying an entire book without buying it. The book is still available for buying, and the store still owns it, so who cares?
Of course, this is a harmful position to take. If everyone thought nothing of "pirating" music, then artists would receive no compensation for their efforts, which is wrong. (Of course, imagine for a second an ideal world where all music purchases went right to the artist. The RIAA/MPAA just muddies things a bit.) Artists deserve compensation, but it will never work to sell data, which is inherently non-scarce, for money, which is scarce. Why spend money on something that has no actual scarce value at all? At least, there will always be people who will say that.
(Yes, the creative work of the songs themselves would be a scarce work, but in the end you're paying for a copy of the work, not the idea of the work itself. More on that in a second.)
The best solution would be for us to pay for copies of music with some non-scarce currency, but that sort of system is hard to set up and harder to maintain inside a predominately scarcity-based economy, because people tend to attach no value to non-scarce goods when there are scarce goods around. The two economic systems don't mix well at all. I suggest that, instead, artists give music away for free (or for Whuffie, real or imaginary), and sell the primary scarce thing they have left to sell: performance. Get artists to make their money on tour! Give the music away for free to get fans, and the fans will come to the concerts!
...
For more fun, consider that numbers cannot be copyrighted, and that all data can be represented by one really long number. I'm not so much trying to say that data can't be copyrighted, as I am that copyright should be seriously looked at again.
I do understand where this confusion comes from, I really do, but is it so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea of arbitrary version numbers? Because that's what they always are. Version numbers are arbitrarily chosen. Most commercial software will bump it up at meaningless times to get more money because 2.0 is better somehow than 1.0. Bigger numbers mean better, right? If software A is version 2.1, and software B is version 3.3, then B must be better, right? RIGHT?
(Of course, this would mean that emacs, at a lofty 23.1, is the best damned text editor/IDE/operating system/kitchen sink in the world. No arguments here!:P )
Most open source software follows this versioning scheme, or a variation of it, that actually makes sense and provides information: x.y.z. The same x means the two versions are fundamentally the same: there has been no rewrites or major restructuring. 0 usually is a special case, and means the structure isn't set in stone yet and could change before 1.0.0. y usually indicates different major releases, with new features and such. A lot of projects follow the Linux kernel here, where even numbers are stable releases while odd numbers are unstable. z usually only changes for bugfixes, and no new features.
The advantage to this system is that it's easy to tell the likely amount of change between two versions. The downside is that projects can stay in 0.y.z land for ages, and a 2.2.0 can have many more features than 2.0.0, even though it may not seem obvious to the uninformed. Also, 2.12.0 is a later version than 2.2.0, because 12 > 2, though this conflicts with intuitive decimal orderings... but really, who ever saw a number with two decimal places?
The system is weird and unintuitive to outsiders, but historically traditional and informative to those in the know. Everyone should just get over it and know that version numbers are arbitrary and should not be taken as a sign of quality.
Unfortunately this is not an ideal medium for explaining these sorts of problems, but I'm sure there are well illustrated articles on this subject if you feel interested enough to find them.
Using a wormhole for FTL isn't really FTL at all, because you've just shortened the distance between two points instead of sending a message faster, so there's no problems with that. I'm talking about literally v > c, and I'm assuming special relativity only (no hairy business with gravity; I have no good experience with General Relativity).
As for how easy the message to past thing is, it gets easier as the speed of the transmission increases. Especially for instant, you could just launch a satellite to fly away from Earth, and there you have it. You send a message after it's been on it's way for a while, and it'll be guaranteed to be sent back all the way to launch: it'll relay back through time, and the satellite is known to be in range for that long.
For the first set of send/reply, indeed, causality is maintained in the satellite's frame... but not afterwards. If we send it's reply back to the relay, we have the same issue as first, except the frames are switched. The satellite gets it's own message back before it sends it. So, causality is still there on one side for each interaction, but it changes each time.
As for your plane flight analogy, the difference is that you couldn't get back in that plane, fly home, and have the sun even earlier in the sky. If you fly back, it's back to where it was. In this case, the message comes back genuinely earlier by any method of timekeeping we can use, in any (non FTL) frame.
Besides, Physics as we have it now maintains two things as axioms: causality and universal laws. That is, everyone, no matter what frame, will agree in the order of cause/effect events, and that objects behave according to only one set of laws. Special Relativity can be derived from just this, and the experimental evidence that the speed of light is always constant. Relativity may be wrong, and maybe there's some more elegant theory that allows FTL, but right now Relativity and FTL breaks causality in not too subtle ways. Without causality, we can't assume relativity anymore. They're incompatible.
Ah, here's the practical, worked example you want:
As noted in the article I linked you, if you have instantaneous communication, then if you send a message to something moving at any speed, and they reply, you'll get the reply before you send the first message. You'll get it exactly x*v/c^2 earlier, with v as the relay's velocity and x its distance from you. You can just ping messages back and forth and gain more time each trip, so you don't even need that fast a relay. You can do all sorts of naughty things to causality with the ability to send messages back in time.
What's more fun, is for merely FTL communication (not instantaneous), you just need a relay that moves faster than c^2/v with v the speed of communication, and the same thing happens: you can send messages to the past. This rule actually holds true for any communication system... when communication uses light, you'd have to move faster than c, which works out.
What this rule also shows is that if you can move objects faster than c, then you can send messages to the past with only lightspeed communication, but that's a less interesting consequence.
Being able to send messages to the past with relative ease would certainly keep me up at night, but luckily it's more likely that FTL is impossible than the universe to have some sort of trick that prevents self-consistency funny business. I'd really rather not have FTL than have to deal with causality issues, myself.
(Thanks for the discussion, I love working with relativity and hadn't had the chance for a while, and it's always rewarding. I myself never knew about using FTL as a messenger to the past until I looked it up for this.)
I wish I could whip up some spacetime diagrams to show you, as that's really the clearest way, but I lack the time and hosting. Here is a similar, though different, example with some pretty well made diagrams.
What it really boils down to is, with one event outside of your light cone, not everybody agrees on the order of events. You may say that A happens before B, but if A is farther from B in space than in time, there's always some other frame that says B happened before A. This is trouble when we connect A and B with some cause, like FTL travel or communication.
The bridge example - isn't this example of "reversed causality" just a matter of observations made by the FTL traveler appearing to occur in reverse because of the normal lightspeed limit on how fast the information can reach them?
This is what I thought too at first, but strange things happen at c and above. If you travel at the speed of light, your time and space axes merge into one, which is odd enough. Faster than c and they switch places. Meaning that you can always find a frame where the two events switch places in time, as long as they are not in the same place. This is true even when you extrapolate when they actually occurred, correcting for light lag. (And, in this case with FTL travel, this is true for any two events, even those where both are within your light cone.)
As for why causality is important, imagine if we fire two bullets at a barn, and set the doors to close when the first bullet hits the back wall with an FTL link. You can set it up so there's a frame where bullet 1 is outside the barn when 2 hits the back (and the doors close), and another where bullet 1 is inside. (Again, diagrams make this easier to see.) Of course, that means in one frame the bullet hits the door, and in the other it hits the back wall, and the two frames have mutually incompatible histories.
Sorry if I'm not too helpful here... I love relativity and it's so frustrating without being able to draw diagrams.
Relativity basically forbids faster than light anything if we want to retain causality. If you start traveling faster than light, then you can end up with causality reversals, like if on earth removing a support from a bridge causes the bridge to fall, then on a faster than light ship the bridge rising into place causes the support to rise up.
Something similar happens with FTL communication. An ansible operator tells someone to launch the ship, but in a sufficiently fast frame, the ship launches before the order is given.
FTL communication would be convenient, but I'd rather retain some semblance of free will. Relativity, FTL, and free will: choose two.
I'm going to say that s and c are a string and a character, respectively, as s is being treated like a pointer to an array of characters. That being the case, these names are exactly as idiomatic as i.
People are really complaining too much about having a buggy BIND 10 implementation. This is alpha software, with a long life cycle. This software will be expected to last years, so taking a few to make sure all the bugs are ironed out properly is not a big deal. As far as I can tell the development team is approaching this the right way.
Myst and Riven are two examples of games with exactly these opposites. In Myst, the only three characters in the entire game were played by Rand and Robyn Miller, who designed the game. The acting was not terrible, but you could sort of tell that acting wasn't what they did. Rand ended up playing Atrus in all the Myst games, but he always said he was never an actor. (He was better in the later games.)
Riven, of course, saw the return of Rand as Atrus, but all of the other actors were professionals, if not well known. Gehn was played by John Keston, who is a theatrically trained British actor, with a bit of skill at opera. There's an easter egg in Riven that shows Gehn singing "O Sole Mio". This acting was wonderful, and it made Riven a great game to play.
They're a click on "install" and a password away. Make sure she knows that when the computer asks for a password, it's asking to do something that could seriously screw things up, and should only be done with expert help.
Besides, you do know that the official nVidia driver is available in Ubuntu through the "Restricted Drivers" window, right? These get updated with the kernel, so this shouldn't even be a problem.
Erm... Cocoa is for the UI layer, like toolbars, buttons etc., when did you ever see a standard toolbar in a game? Almost every game uses custom UI, so if steam games are using OpenGL(which is the only accelerated graphics API on the Mac), it should be easy to port it to Linux/BSD.
It should be easier to port to Linux (et al.) than it was before they made a Mac version, but not easy exactly.
As noted before, basically every user-facing program on OS X uses a ton of Cocoa calls. Cocoa is used for more than just the UI layer: it provides a generous standard library of data types, os calls, and other useful things. Think of cocoa as an Objective C / OS X friendly libc. Objective C itself does not easily translate from the Mac to other systems, as well. Last I checked, GNUstep didn't have a working Objective C 2.0 runtime yet.
As Lessig said in his latest website chat, 75% of studies not funded by the cellphone industry found evidence for a connection.
I would like say that (as I understand it) Lessig pointed this out to get the obvious reaction from his audience ("Oh wow, the cell phone industry is trying to lie to us!"). He wanted to point out that this is the reaction people always have when they see something like this, and to examine what in our society causes that mistrust and how we may be able to fix it. He uses this specifically when he talks about corporate funding for political campaigns, later on.
When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.
-- Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
(which, though the rest of the book is completely unrelated to this topic, is an excellent read if only because it reads so much like a nerdy action flick. It's grown-up brother, The Diamond Age, is as excellent but substantially different and more serious.)
The functions involved here are cutting close to the kernel. It could be that it's not possible (or easy) to expose this functionality in a way that prevents access to system-breaking interfaces, or that using these functions can keep some integral part of the iPhone OS from functioning properly. Apple is understandably very protective about the lowest-level radio controls on a cell phone.
No, other apps that do the same thing are still allowed and available in the app store.
As far as I can tell, these other apps don't scan actively for access points. That is, they don't use the private framework.
(on Mac OS X, you need to use the private Apple80211.framework, not sure about iPhone OS X).
No you don't.
Yes, you do.
That is, unless you want to rewrite the portion of the Darwin kernel that interfaces with the plethora of wireless network devices that Mac OS X is designed to handle, and provide support for that, all for your wifi stumbler or whatever. The option is always open to roll your own code, even in these cases on the iPhone. Sometimes, though, that option is just stupid.
Unlike with iPhones and iPads, with their crippled phoneOS, I can use any framework I want that I can install on my MacBook Pro.
The iPhone OS is far from crippled. It's a full UNIX running on a phone, with a full-featured Apple Objective-C runtime, with a snazzy custom multitouch UI. The sandbox and features given to developers through the official Apple program is crippled. The OS is not.
To be pedantic, as well, you can use any framework you want that you can install on your iPhone as well. You may have to jailbreak it to get write access to the frameworks, but you can still use it once it's on there.
I'm not defending that argument, I'm just pointing out that they at least have a reason that it's possible to argue against. There are so many systems out there without even that, so why do people hate Apple so much?
It seems to me from the content of your post that you read my first and last paragraphs, and completely skipped the middle one where I made essentially the same points.
This is like Microsoft telling you what software you can install on Windows!
Just so we're clear here, it'd be like if Microsoft could decide what software it wanted to host on it's servers, and provide a shop framework for. Which, last time I checked, they have every right to do.
There is a difference here, obviously. For most people (those who haven't jailbroken), Apple's store is the only place to get software. Apple has to approve this software. But since when is this any different than the software released for the xbox 360 or any other game console? At least Apple has a reasonable excuse: their phone has to work on a cell network, and it needs to have restrictions placed on software. Game consoles have no such excuse.
I'm not saying it's not stupid, I'm just saying that it's their right to do this. I don't see why people can be so uppity about the iPhone when there are plenty of other closed systems to complain about that have been around for much longer.
How in the hell did this get modded informative? It might be funny to read this, and it is certainly even funnier when it's tagged "informative", but really, this is a mod system failure.
It's not a selling point, it's a starting point. It's a sine qua non. For an application like video on the Web, nothing non-free can even enter the conversation.
Unfortunately, it's quickly becoming nothing non-free should even enter the conversation, but they do. I don't see how people can accept an open internet with non-free formats.
I'm not sure where I heard this idea, but it bears repeating:
Future historians will hate us, with a passion, because we encrypt even the most banal things. We encrypt movies, for God's sake! Where's the justification in that? We're robbing the future of our culture, even from things like movies with talking hamsters!
I have had a good experience with DreamHost. Their support is snappy and helpful, and the people who work there seem generally kind. They have a fine set of dreamhost-specific howtos maintained on their wiki, and a powerful but easy to use panel for administration.
They run linux boxes with the full complement of command line tools (with compilers and everything!), and the only restriction is no persistent processes. If you want to do that, you can buy their pricier private server option which gives you your own private server instance.
They have some great terms of use (as far as storage and bandwidth are concerned), and their prices are reasonable. I got a great deal a while back on two years of hosting, and now I'm hooked on the service.
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How is that any different to any other profession? Why are artists entitled to unequal and enforced support from their industry, and welders or seamstresses are not? What makes an unsuccessful artist more worthy than an unsuccessful teacher?
In the digital age, what artists produce is not a scarce commodity. They can produce infinite copies of their songs (or whatever), and sell each copy. Inevitably, random artists will sell some huge amount of one of their songs and profit off of each sale.
Welders, seamstresses, teachers and most other professions all provide scarce goods or services. Yes, some will become very successful, but when they do, they can't just produce infinite product in a split second and make absurd megabucks.
If Microsoft did this everyone would be angry about it, but now that it's Apple its all fine and classy.
There are two snarky replies to this. I'll present both here for completeness.
1.
I bet that if Microsoft did this, everyone would be angry about this. Oh, wait. They already did with the Xbox [360]. So not really, no.
Keep in mind this argument applies not only to Microsoft, but also to Sony, Nintendo, and yes, Amazon. What we use it for does not change the fact that the Xbox, PS3, Wii, and Kindle are all computers, but you never saw anyone all that riled up before the iPhone/iPad. I'm not happy about it either, but at least be an equal-opportunity walled garden basher.
2.
I bet that if Microsoft did this, most techies would be angry about it. A non-techie standard Windows user, though, would not care. From where I'm standing, this is exactly what's happening to Apple. If you think Apple's not catching enough heat from this because they're Apple, you're shortsighted. Microsoft wouldn't get much heat either.
Stop framing this question as "Why are we letting Apple get away with this?" Start asking instead "Why is our culture letting everyone get away with this, and how can we change that?" It's more productive and less whiny.
I am not an economist, but...
The fundamental problem with selling music or other media over the internet is that data is not a scarce commodity. Copying music does not deprive anyone else of access to that music. It's much like copying an entire book without buying it. The book is still available for buying, and the store still owns it, so who cares?
Of course, this is a harmful position to take. If everyone thought nothing of "pirating" music, then artists would receive no compensation for their efforts, which is wrong. (Of course, imagine for a second an ideal world where all music purchases went right to the artist. The RIAA/MPAA just muddies things a bit.) Artists deserve compensation, but it will never work to sell data, which is inherently non-scarce, for money, which is scarce. Why spend money on something that has no actual scarce value at all? At least, there will always be people who will say that.
(Yes, the creative work of the songs themselves would be a scarce work, but in the end you're paying for a copy of the work, not the idea of the work itself. More on that in a second.)
The best solution would be for us to pay for copies of music with some non-scarce currency, but that sort of system is hard to set up and harder to maintain inside a predominately scarcity-based economy, because people tend to attach no value to non-scarce goods when there are scarce goods around. The two economic systems don't mix well at all. I suggest that, instead, artists give music away for free (or for Whuffie, real or imaginary), and sell the primary scarce thing they have left to sell: performance. Get artists to make their money on tour! Give the music away for free to get fans, and the fans will come to the concerts!
...
For more fun, consider that numbers cannot be copyrighted, and that all data can be represented by one really long number. I'm not so much trying to say that data can't be copyrighted, as I am that copyright should be seriously looked at again.
I do understand where this confusion comes from, I really do, but is it so hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea of arbitrary version numbers? Because that's what they always are. Version numbers are arbitrarily chosen. Most commercial software will bump it up at meaningless times to get more money because 2.0 is better somehow than 1.0. Bigger numbers mean better, right? If software A is version 2.1, and software B is version 3.3, then B must be better, right? RIGHT?
(Of course, this would mean that emacs, at a lofty 23.1, is the best damned text editor/IDE/operating system/kitchen sink in the world. No arguments here! :P )
Most open source software follows this versioning scheme, or a variation of it, that actually makes sense and provides information: x.y.z. The same x means the two versions are fundamentally the same: there has been no rewrites or major restructuring. 0 usually is a special case, and means the structure isn't set in stone yet and could change before 1.0.0. y usually indicates different major releases, with new features and such. A lot of projects follow the Linux kernel here, where even numbers are stable releases while odd numbers are unstable. z usually only changes for bugfixes, and no new features.
The advantage to this system is that it's easy to tell the likely amount of change between two versions. The downside is that projects can stay in 0.y.z land for ages, and a 2.2.0 can have many more features than 2.0.0, even though it may not seem obvious to the uninformed. Also, 2.12.0 is a later version than 2.2.0, because 12 > 2, though this conflicts with intuitive decimal orderings... but really, who ever saw a number with two decimal places?
The system is weird and unintuitive to outsiders, but historically traditional and informative to those in the know. Everyone should just get over it and know that version numbers are arbitrary and should not be taken as a sign of quality.
Unfortunately this is not an ideal medium for explaining these sorts of problems, but I'm sure there are well illustrated articles on this subject if you feel interested enough to find them.
Using a wormhole for FTL isn't really FTL at all, because you've just shortened the distance between two points instead of sending a message faster, so there's no problems with that. I'm talking about literally v > c, and I'm assuming special relativity only (no hairy business with gravity; I have no good experience with General Relativity).
As for how easy the message to past thing is, it gets easier as the speed of the transmission increases. Especially for instant, you could just launch a satellite to fly away from Earth, and there you have it. You send a message after it's been on it's way for a while, and it'll be guaranteed to be sent back all the way to launch: it'll relay back through time, and the satellite is known to be in range for that long.
For the first set of send/reply, indeed, causality is maintained in the satellite's frame... but not afterwards. If we send it's reply back to the relay, we have the same issue as first, except the frames are switched. The satellite gets it's own message back before it sends it. So, causality is still there on one side for each interaction, but it changes each time.
As for your plane flight analogy, the difference is that you couldn't get back in that plane, fly home, and have the sun even earlier in the sky. If you fly back, it's back to where it was. In this case, the message comes back genuinely earlier by any method of timekeeping we can use, in any (non FTL) frame.
Besides, Physics as we have it now maintains two things as axioms: causality and universal laws. That is, everyone, no matter what frame, will agree in the order of cause/effect events, and that objects behave according to only one set of laws. Special Relativity can be derived from just this, and the experimental evidence that the speed of light is always constant. Relativity may be wrong, and maybe there's some more elegant theory that allows FTL, but right now Relativity and FTL breaks causality in not too subtle ways. Without causality, we can't assume relativity anymore. They're incompatible.
Ah, here's the practical, worked example you want:
As noted in the article I linked you, if you have instantaneous communication, then if you send a message to something moving at any speed, and they reply, you'll get the reply before you send the first message. You'll get it exactly x*v/c^2 earlier, with v as the relay's velocity and x its distance from you. You can just ping messages back and forth and gain more time each trip, so you don't even need that fast a relay. You can do all sorts of naughty things to causality with the ability to send messages back in time.
What's more fun, is for merely FTL communication (not instantaneous), you just need a relay that moves faster than c^2/v with v the speed of communication, and the same thing happens: you can send messages to the past. This rule actually holds true for any communication system... when communication uses light, you'd have to move faster than c, which works out.
What this rule also shows is that if you can move objects faster than c, then you can send messages to the past with only lightspeed communication, but that's a less interesting consequence.
Being able to send messages to the past with relative ease would certainly keep me up at night, but luckily it's more likely that FTL is impossible than the universe to have some sort of trick that prevents self-consistency funny business. I'd really rather not have FTL than have to deal with causality issues, myself.
(Thanks for the discussion, I love working with relativity and hadn't had the chance for a while, and it's always rewarding. I myself never knew about using FTL as a messenger to the past until I looked it up for this.)
I wish I could whip up some spacetime diagrams to show you, as that's really the clearest way, but I lack the time and hosting. Here is a similar, though different, example with some pretty well made diagrams.
What it really boils down to is, with one event outside of your light cone, not everybody agrees on the order of events. You may say that A happens before B, but if A is farther from B in space than in time, there's always some other frame that says B happened before A. This is trouble when we connect A and B with some cause, like FTL travel or communication.
The bridge example - isn't this example of "reversed causality" just a matter of observations made by the FTL traveler appearing to occur in reverse because of the normal lightspeed limit on how fast the information can reach them?
This is what I thought too at first, but strange things happen at c and above. If you travel at the speed of light, your time and space axes merge into one, which is odd enough. Faster than c and they switch places. Meaning that you can always find a frame where the two events switch places in time, as long as they are not in the same place. This is true even when you extrapolate when they actually occurred, correcting for light lag. (And, in this case with FTL travel, this is true for any two events, even those where both are within your light cone.)
As for why causality is important, imagine if we fire two bullets at a barn, and set the doors to close when the first bullet hits the back wall with an FTL link. You can set it up so there's a frame where bullet 1 is outside the barn when 2 hits the back (and the doors close), and another where bullet 1 is inside. (Again, diagrams make this easier to see.) Of course, that means in one frame the bullet hits the door, and in the other it hits the back wall, and the two frames have mutually incompatible histories.
Sorry if I'm not too helpful here... I love relativity and it's so frustrating without being able to draw diagrams.
Relativity basically forbids faster than light anything if we want to retain causality. If you start traveling faster than light, then you can end up with causality reversals, like if on earth removing a support from a bridge causes the bridge to fall, then on a faster than light ship the bridge rising into place causes the support to rise up.
Something similar happens with FTL communication. An ansible operator tells someone to launch the ship, but in a sufficiently fast frame, the ship launches before the order is given.
FTL communication would be convenient, but I'd rather retain some semblance of free will. Relativity, FTL, and free will: choose two.
NO CLAMDIGGER!
I'm going to say that s and c are a string and a character, respectively, as s is being treated like a pointer to an array of characters. That being the case, these names are exactly as idiomatic as i.
People are really complaining too much about having a buggy BIND 10 implementation. This is alpha software, with a long life cycle. This software will be expected to last years, so taking a few to make sure all the bugs are ironed out properly is not a big deal. As far as I can tell the development team is approaching this the right way.
Myst and Riven are two examples of games with exactly these opposites. In Myst, the only three characters in the entire game were played by Rand and Robyn Miller, who designed the game. The acting was not terrible, but you could sort of tell that acting wasn't what they did. Rand ended up playing Atrus in all the Myst games, but he always said he was never an actor. (He was better in the later games.)
Riven, of course, saw the return of Rand as Atrus, but all of the other actors were professionals, if not well known. Gehn was played by John Keston, who is a theatrically trained British actor, with a bit of skill at opera. There's an easter egg in Riven that shows Gehn singing "O Sole Mio". This acting was wonderful, and it made Riven a great game to play.
They're a click on "install" and a password away. Make sure she knows that when the computer asks for a password, it's asking to do something that could seriously screw things up, and should only be done with expert help.
Besides, you do know that the official nVidia driver is available in Ubuntu through the "Restricted Drivers" window, right? These get updated with the kernel, so this shouldn't even be a problem.
Erm... Cocoa is for the UI layer, like toolbars, buttons etc., when did you ever see a standard toolbar in a game? Almost every game uses custom UI, so if steam games are using OpenGL(which is the only accelerated graphics API on the Mac), it should be easy to port it to Linux/BSD.
It should be easier to port to Linux (et al.) than it was before they made a Mac version, but not easy exactly.
As noted before, basically every user-facing program on OS X uses a ton of Cocoa calls. Cocoa is used for more than just the UI layer: it provides a generous standard library of data types, os calls, and other useful things. Think of cocoa as an Objective C / OS X friendly libc. Objective C itself does not easily translate from the Mac to other systems, as well. Last I checked, GNUstep didn't have a working Objective C 2.0 runtime yet.
As Lessig said in his latest website chat, 75% of studies not funded by the cellphone industry found evidence for a connection.
I would like say that (as I understand it) Lessig pointed this out to get the obvious reaction from his audience ("Oh wow, the cell phone industry is trying to lie to us!"). He wanted to point out that this is the reaction people always have when they see something like this, and to examine what in our society causes that mistrust and how we may be able to fix it. He uses this specifically when he talks about corporate funding for political campaigns, later on.
When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.
-- Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
(which, though the rest of the book is completely unrelated to this topic, is an excellent read if only because it reads so much like a nerdy action flick. It's grown-up brother, The Diamond Age, is as excellent but substantially different and more serious.)
Maybe a life [...] ..if you are into that.
Ugh.
I honestly can't believe what morally outrageous things you youngsters do today.
The functions involved here are cutting close to the kernel. It could be that it's not possible (or easy) to expose this functionality in a way that prevents access to system-breaking interfaces, or that using these functions can keep some integral part of the iPhone OS from functioning properly. Apple is understandably very protective about the lowest-level radio controls on a cell phone.
No, other apps that do the same thing are still allowed and available in the app store.
As far as I can tell, these other apps don't scan actively for access points. That is, they don't use the private framework.
(on Mac OS X, you need to use the private Apple80211.framework, not sure about iPhone OS X).
No you don't.
Yes, you do.
That is, unless you want to rewrite the portion of the Darwin kernel that interfaces with the plethora of wireless network devices that Mac OS X is designed to handle, and provide support for that, all for your wifi stumbler or whatever. The option is always open to roll your own code, even in these cases on the iPhone. Sometimes, though, that option is just stupid.
Unlike with iPhones and iPads, with their crippled phoneOS, I can use any framework I want that I can install on my MacBook Pro.
The iPhone OS is far from crippled. It's a full UNIX running on a phone, with a full-featured Apple Objective-C runtime, with a snazzy custom multitouch UI. The sandbox and features given to developers through the official Apple program is crippled. The OS is not.
To be pedantic, as well, you can use any framework you want that you can install on your iPhone as well. You may have to jailbreak it to get write access to the frameworks, but you can still use it once it's on there.
I'm not defending that argument, I'm just pointing out that they at least have a reason that it's possible to argue against. There are so many systems out there without even that, so why do people hate Apple so much?
It seems to me from the content of your post that you read my first and last paragraphs, and completely skipped the middle one where I made essentially the same points.
You need to work on your quick-reading.
This is like Microsoft telling you what software you can install on Windows!
Just so we're clear here, it'd be like if Microsoft could decide what software it wanted to host on it's servers, and provide a shop framework for. Which, last time I checked, they have every right to do.
There is a difference here, obviously. For most people (those who haven't jailbroken), Apple's store is the only place to get software. Apple has to approve this software. But since when is this any different than the software released for the xbox 360 or any other game console? At least Apple has a reasonable excuse: their phone has to work on a cell network, and it needs to have restrictions placed on software. Game consoles have no such excuse.
I'm not saying it's not stupid, I'm just saying that it's their right to do this. I don't see why people can be so uppity about the iPhone when there are plenty of other closed systems to complain about that have been around for much longer.
How in the hell did this get modded informative? It might be funny to read this, and it is certainly even funnier when it's tagged "informative", but really, this is a mod system failure.
It's not a selling point, it's a starting point. It's a sine qua non. For an application like video on the Web, nothing non-free can even enter the conversation.
Unfortunately, it's quickly becoming nothing non-free should even enter the conversation, but they do. I don't see how people can accept an open internet with non-free formats.
I'm not sure where I heard this idea, but it bears repeating:
Future historians will hate us, with a passion, because we encrypt even the most banal things. We encrypt movies, for God's sake! Where's the justification in that? We're robbing the future of our culture, even from things like movies with talking hamsters!
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They run linux boxes with the full complement of command line tools (with compilers and everything!), and the only restriction is no persistent processes. If you want to do that, you can buy their pricier private server option which gives you your own private server instance.
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