I would probably only care if I made the purchase on the basis of it being a V8. Ask any 100 car owners how many cylinders the engine in their car has, and I suspect more than half would have to think a bit before answering.
I concur with both of your points. Aircraft is a bad analogy because the buyer is an airline, not an individual traveler. Trucks are also bad analogy because knowing about your truck's engine (whether you really know what any of the specs really mean or not) is part of truck owner culture.
That said, I stand by the statement that most people just don't care about CPUs any more. That doesn't mean that large numbers of folks aren't very excited about the latest CPU developments. I'm not, and I believe in that respect I'm like most of the general population.
Do I care if my truck has a Hemi or some other engine? No. I care if it offers the right balance of strength, carrying capacity, looks, and gas mileage.
Do I care if the airplane I'm flying in uses GE or Pratt & Whitney or Rolls Royce engines? No. I care if the plane will get me where I need to go comfortably, safely, and quickly.
In the early days of computing, it was a thrilling thing to have hardware that could keep pace with software. I still have painful memories of Photoshop 3 screen redraws. These days it is a given that while there may be differences in response time, for anything but serious gaming, the hardware is going to keep up with the software. Keeping track of what processor is inside the computer is, for most people, akin to keeping track of which subcontractor supplies the tires for a car. Sure, some people care a great deal about the tires, but the rest of us could care less.
Why was taxpayer money spent making and passing such a bill?
Because when you can't tackle real problems, you have to be able to point out how you're "defending traditional values", no matter how absurd the legislation.
WordWorld is not prior art. There is a difference between showing words composed of letterforms that have characteristics associated with the word, and creating words with a computer system that allows for manipulation of typography on the basis of the words.
Yes, the patent system is broken. Yes, the concept of fonts with feelings is absurd. But believe it or not, any time you see something that looks remotely related to a patent you dislike doesn't mean you can scream "prior art!" and make it mean anything.
I saw the headline for this story and thought, "Ah, yes, Ebert has waved a red flag in front of the Slashdot audience."
If you play a lot of video games, you're probably not a disinterested observer either. That doesn't mean you'd be wrong to say that video games are art, but I'm inclined to take all of the smoke and fury in this discussion with a pinch of salt.
I play video games only occasionally, but I still play pencil & paper RPGs. Are they art? I enjoy playing them, but the fact that I enjoy them doesn't mean I consider the games themselves to be art. Other gamers may not agree with me, but if art truly is in the eye of the beholder, then there's room for both opinions.
If you (my next door neighbor) kill my family by purposefully spreading rat poison in our fresh vegetable garden, I promise to only shoot back at you with my pellet gun. But only if you don't own a gun.
We're talking about nuclear weapons. We're talking about whether we encourage or discourage the proliferation and use of weapons that can kill tens of thousands of people in an instant. I don't think it requires a cute analogy for the average person to understand.
The FCC barely touches broadband. For example, rudimentary research into broadband competition in the late 1990s will show you that the FCC sat by while the Baby Bells colluded to squash upstart competitors. As for regulation in the broader sense, the FCC has failed to keep up with technology on many counts. However, without the FCC, terrestrial radio and over the air TV would be a complete goat rodeo.
The FCC needs a complete overhaul. Their relationship with the public is terrible; they make it incredibly difficult to find even the most basic information on their site, and they are notorious for being incredibly bureaucratic. But I'm not sanguine at the thought of telcos being given free rein, given the amount of tax money they've gobbled up over the years with empty promises, and the anticompetitive behavior they've engaged in time and time again.
Seems pretty clear that this falls squarely within it's right to regulate. Unless you can explain how the Internet isn't "communication by wire or radio".
The legal reasoning is solid on this one. The court told the FCC it can't regulate broadband on the basis of broad principles. It has to regulate on the basis of laws it has been mandated to implement.
BigGov haters, this is not a repudiation of the FCC's authority. It just means the FCC can't go off on its own and make major policy changes on the basis of broad principles created by itself, rather than by laws created by elected Congresscritters.
BigCorp haters, this does not mean the telcos can suddenly do whatever they like. This ruling may actually strengthen the case in Congress for a serious revisiting of the regulatory structure around broadband. Comcast has definitely won this battle, but they may still lose the war.
Thanks for keeping religion out of it
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
I like how you put this review together: Pluses, minuses, questions left unanswered, thoughts on how the device could be improved. The religious debates will continue, and I'll be right there in the thick of it, but it's nice to see someone attempting to discuss the iPad objectively.
I do not think that word means what you think...
on
iPad Jailbroken
·
· Score: 1
I was in Best Buy a week ago (that is, pre-iPad), and I didn't see a tablet PC running Windows or Linux.
Didn't Microsoft introduce TabletPC in 2001? Aren't there lots of iPad killers about to hit the shelves? Didn't the iPad *just* launch?
How is Apple monopolizing the market for tablet computing devices?
Being a big corp means they can find some tangentially related idea within the bowels of the Cupertino campus and call that prior art.
Prior art is implementations that have been used in the public sphere, not secrets you created in a lab and never showed anyone. And being a big corp doesn't mean Apple will win a patent case. Big guys get gunned down in patent litigation by little guys all the time. That's part of the reason so many big corporations feel we should move to a first to file system.
...when you compare democracy to the alternatives.
Just ask any one of the millions of people who are trying to get out of non-democratic countries and into democracies. This is not a "love it or leave it" statement. It's reality. That doesn't mean that democracies are perfect, but it does mean that relative to the actual (as opposed to theoretical) alternatives, it's well-regarded by more than a few humans.
As for corporations, remember that they are not naturally-occurring entities. "When they work" at all, it is because governments established laws allowing for their creation. The corporation is a legal fiction. It's a series of laws and regulations that ensure that people can come together, take a risk and start a business, and won't be drawn and quartered by unpaid creditors if the company craters. Ever wonder why there aren't any world-beating corporations that hail from Sicily?
A citation shouldn't be needed for things that have appeared on slashdot a dozen times, is in fact common knowledge...
Um... because if an article wherein Nokia claims Apple is infringing is proof of fault, and "common knowledge" that Apple is violating patents is equivalent to a court ruling?
Let's crowdsource the HTC v. Apple tangle, too. What does everyone think? Based on what we've seen from short press pieces and a flurry of Slashdot comments and the mood of the crowd, how should we decide their arguments?
Schmidt, however, owes his allegience to the shareholders. Or at least feels the pull and responsibility of profit more so than any sort of ethical dilemma.
It's not about whether he understands the ethical dilemma or not. As the CEO of a public company, he is obliged, not just out of a sense of responsibility, but he is legally obliged to go after profits. There are plenty of historic court cases that make it quite clear to CEOs that if shareholders bring a lawsuit for failure to act first and foremost to generate profits, the CEO is the one who will lose. There are ways Schmidt can justify exiting China to shareholders, but if some activist shareholder gets in a lather and goes after Schmidt for putting ideals above profits, he'll have to defend himself.
This is part of the reason why "do no evil" is such an absurd claim for a public company to make. It's a great idea, but when push comes to shove, "do no evil" loses to "make money".
I'm not sure that's accurate. We all have different ideas about privacy. To some people, a fence around the back yard is vital for protecting privacy. Some people don't care about shielding what they're doing in their back yard from their neighbors. Some people will tell you all about their recent colonoscopy. Some people feel that's their business alone. Some people join the EFF, some people don't even know it exists. I know people who share all kinds of stories on Facebook that I would never share in an online venue.
It appears to me that you value the privacy of your email messages. Keeping them away from prying eyes is important to you. But there are plenty of people out there who, if they found out their emails had been read by someone else, would just shrug their shoulders. You can call it stupidity or laziness, but I think most people just figure the probability that anyone would ever care about their email correspondence is vanishingly small, and the negative effect of it being read is minimal.
Just for sheots and giggles, I looked up the members of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The youngest member, William H. Pryor, Jr., was born in 1962. Beverly B. Martin, the next youngest, was born in 1955. But the judges ages aren't necessarily a valid indicator of how tech-savvy they are. Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit, was born in 1950, and is well-known for, among other things, his grasp of technology.
The other thing to remember is that the onus of responsibility is on the lawyers who are presenting their case to the court. If they didn't do a good enough job of explaining the intricacies of email to the judges, they failed in their role as advocates.
For those who may have wondered, the Eleventh Circuit covers Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. Finally, for something other than a knee-jerk reaction to the ruling, Professor Volokh's article (the one linked to in the post) is worth reading.
Slashdot Mirror
I would probably only care if I made the purchase on the basis of it being a V8. Ask any 100 car owners how many cylinders the engine in their car has, and I suspect more than half would have to think a bit before answering.
I concur with both of your points. Aircraft is a bad analogy because the buyer is an airline, not an individual traveler. Trucks are also bad analogy because knowing about your truck's engine (whether you really know what any of the specs really mean or not) is part of truck owner culture.
That said, I stand by the statement that most people just don't care about CPUs any more. That doesn't mean that large numbers of folks aren't very excited about the latest CPU developments. I'm not, and I believe in that respect I'm like most of the general population.
Do I care if my truck has a Hemi or some other engine? No. I care if it offers the right balance of strength, carrying capacity, looks, and gas mileage. Do I care if the airplane I'm flying in uses GE or Pratt & Whitney or Rolls Royce engines? No. I care if the plane will get me where I need to go comfortably, safely, and quickly. In the early days of computing, it was a thrilling thing to have hardware that could keep pace with software. I still have painful memories of Photoshop 3 screen redraws. These days it is a given that while there may be differences in response time, for anything but serious gaming, the hardware is going to keep up with the software. Keeping track of what processor is inside the computer is, for most people, akin to keeping track of which subcontractor supplies the tires for a car. Sure, some people care a great deal about the tires, but the rest of us could care less.
Why was taxpayer money spent making and passing such a bill?
Because when you can't tackle real problems, you have to be able to point out how you're "defending traditional values", no matter how absurd the legislation.
WordWorld is not prior art. There is a difference between showing words composed of letterforms that have characteristics associated with the word, and creating words with a computer system that allows for manipulation of typography on the basis of the words. Yes, the patent system is broken. Yes, the concept of fonts with feelings is absurd. But believe it or not, any time you see something that looks remotely related to a patent you dislike doesn't mean you can scream "prior art!" and make it mean anything.
It's a shame, really. MS spends a lot of money on R&D, but they seem to get so few groundbreaking shipping products from it.
I saw the headline for this story and thought, "Ah, yes, Ebert has waved a red flag in front of the Slashdot audience."
If you play a lot of video games, you're probably not a disinterested observer either. That doesn't mean you'd be wrong to say that video games are art, but I'm inclined to take all of the smoke and fury in this discussion with a pinch of salt.
I play video games only occasionally, but I still play pencil & paper RPGs. Are they art? I enjoy playing them, but the fact that I enjoy them doesn't mean I consider the games themselves to be art. Other gamers may not agree with me, but if art truly is in the eye of the beholder, then there's room for both opinions.
Sure, Flash isn't proprietary. Ask any hundred Flash developers, and they'll all tell you about Tamarin, Gnash, and swfdec. They live by it.
Yeah, the KinMeisters used Flash to market the thing.
The free/open source OS will run the proprietary multimedia software. Openness triumphs again!
"Sources close to me, that is, at the desk next to mine here at Adobe's PR agency... ."
... a hit from that bong Tim Wu is inhaling.
If you (my next door neighbor) kill my family by purposefully spreading rat poison in our fresh vegetable garden, I promise to only shoot back at you with my pellet gun. But only if you don't own a gun.
We're talking about nuclear weapons. We're talking about whether we encourage or discourage the proliferation and use of weapons that can kill tens of thousands of people in an instant. I don't think it requires a cute analogy for the average person to understand.
The FCC barely touches broadband. For example, rudimentary research into broadband competition in the late 1990s will show you that the FCC sat by while the Baby Bells colluded to squash upstart competitors. As for regulation in the broader sense, the FCC has failed to keep up with technology on many counts. However, without the FCC, terrestrial radio and over the air TV would be a complete goat rodeo.
The FCC needs a complete overhaul. Their relationship with the public is terrible; they make it incredibly difficult to find even the most basic information on their site, and they are notorious for being incredibly bureaucratic. But I'm not sanguine at the thought of telcos being given free rein, given the amount of tax money they've gobbled up over the years with empty promises, and the anticompetitive behavior they've engaged in time and time again.
Seems pretty clear that this falls squarely within it's right to regulate. Unless you can explain how the Internet isn't "communication by wire or radio".
The legal reasoning is solid on this one. The court told the FCC it can't regulate broadband on the basis of broad principles. It has to regulate on the basis of laws it has been mandated to implement.
BigGov haters, this is not a repudiation of the FCC's authority. It just means the FCC can't go off on its own and make major policy changes on the basis of broad principles created by itself, rather than by laws created by elected Congresscritters.
BigCorp haters, this does not mean the telcos can suddenly do whatever they like. This ruling may actually strengthen the case in Congress for a serious revisiting of the regulatory structure around broadband. Comcast has definitely won this battle, but they may still lose the war.
I like how you put this review together: Pluses, minuses, questions left unanswered, thoughts on how the device could be improved. The religious debates will continue, and I'll be right there in the thick of it, but it's nice to see someone attempting to discuss the iPad objectively.
I was in Best Buy a week ago (that is, pre-iPad), and I didn't see a tablet PC running Windows or Linux.
Didn't Microsoft introduce TabletPC in 2001? Aren't there lots of iPad killers about to hit the shelves? Didn't the iPad *just* launch?
How is Apple monopolizing the market for tablet computing devices?
Being a big corp means they can find some tangentially related idea within the bowels of the Cupertino campus and call that prior art.
Prior art is implementations that have been used in the public sphere, not secrets you created in a lab and never showed anyone. And being a big corp doesn't mean Apple will win a patent case. Big guys get gunned down in patent litigation by little guys all the time. That's part of the reason so many big corporations feel we should move to a first to file system.
...when you compare democracy to the alternatives.
Just ask any one of the millions of people who are trying to get out of non-democratic countries and into democracies. This is not a "love it or leave it" statement. It's reality. That doesn't mean that democracies are perfect, but it does mean that relative to the actual (as opposed to theoretical) alternatives, it's well-regarded by more than a few humans.
As for corporations, remember that they are not naturally-occurring entities. "When they work" at all, it is because governments established laws allowing for their creation. The corporation is a legal fiction. It's a series of laws and regulations that ensure that people can come together, take a risk and start a business, and won't be drawn and quartered by unpaid creditors if the company craters. Ever wonder why there aren't any world-beating corporations that hail from Sicily?
A citation shouldn't be needed for things that have appeared on slashdot a dozen times, is in fact common knowledge...
Um... because if an article wherein Nokia claims Apple is infringing is proof of fault, and "common knowledge" that Apple is violating patents is equivalent to a court ruling?
Let's crowdsource the HTC v. Apple tangle, too. What does everyone think? Based on what we've seen from short press pieces and a flurry of Slashdot comments and the mood of the crowd, how should we decide their arguments?
Nicely put.
Only nutjob Ultra-New Earthist would say that. We conservative New Earthists reject your anti-Faith radicalism!
Schmidt, however, owes his allegience to the shareholders. Or at least feels the pull and responsibility of profit more so than any sort of ethical dilemma.
It's not about whether he understands the ethical dilemma or not. As the CEO of a public company, he is obliged, not just out of a sense of responsibility, but he is legally obliged to go after profits. There are plenty of historic court cases that make it quite clear to CEOs that if shareholders bring a lawsuit for failure to act first and foremost to generate profits, the CEO is the one who will lose. There are ways Schmidt can justify exiting China to shareholders, but if some activist shareholder gets in a lather and goes after Schmidt for putting ideals above profits, he'll have to defend himself.
This is part of the reason why "do no evil" is such an absurd claim for a public company to make. It's a great idea, but when push comes to shove, "do no evil" loses to "make money".
Convenience trumps all, always.
I'm not sure that's accurate. We all have different ideas about privacy. To some people, a fence around the back yard is vital for protecting privacy. Some people don't care about shielding what they're doing in their back yard from their neighbors. Some people will tell you all about their recent colonoscopy. Some people feel that's their business alone. Some people join the EFF, some people don't even know it exists. I know people who share all kinds of stories on Facebook that I would never share in an online venue.
It appears to me that you value the privacy of your email messages. Keeping them away from prying eyes is important to you. But there are plenty of people out there who, if they found out their emails had been read by someone else, would just shrug their shoulders. You can call it stupidity or laziness, but I think most people just figure the probability that anyone would ever care about their email correspondence is vanishingly small, and the negative effect of it being read is minimal.
Just for sheots and giggles, I looked up the members of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The youngest member, William H. Pryor, Jr., was born in 1962. Beverly B. Martin, the next youngest, was born in 1955. But the judges ages aren't necessarily a valid indicator of how tech-savvy they are. Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit, was born in 1950, and is well-known for, among other things, his grasp of technology.
The other thing to remember is that the onus of responsibility is on the lawyers who are presenting their case to the court. If they didn't do a good enough job of explaining the intricacies of email to the judges, they failed in their role as advocates.
For those who may have wondered, the Eleventh Circuit covers Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. Finally, for something other than a knee-jerk reaction to the ruling, Professor Volokh's article (the one linked to in the post) is worth reading.