The problem isn't with software patents per se, it's that the PTO doesn't have the expertise necessary to understand what is and isn't novel in the software field. There's no doubt in my mind that there are software patents that deserve patent protection. Off the top of my head, I'd say MP3, JPEG, MD5, DES(ede) would all be examples of things that should be patentable (though I believe only MP3 and parts of JPEG are patented). All four of those are non-obvious algorithms for accomplishing a certain task and all four have competing algorithms to accomplish the same task.
The problem is that in software its too easy to confuse a method and a concept. Even experienced developers will sometimes have problems. Where the PTO understands that patents on physical objects represent only the means of accomplishing the task and not accomplishing the task by any means, they haven't figured it out when it comes to software. Too many patents are granted for accomplishing a task rather than accomplishing a task using a given algorithm.
This doesn't mean that we should scrap the patent system entirely (for software, at least). What it means is that we need to push for education and reforms that reduce the abuse that we're currently seeing. For one, patent examiners need to be better educated, perhaps to the point where no examiner is not a specialist in the field of the patent. There are a ton of other things that would help too, but that's beyond the scope of this post.
In other words, better support for introducing favoritism between ISPs and content providers, so that (for example) AT&T can extort money from Google and shut down BitTorrent. No thanks; I prefer the "dumb," route-everything-equally, neutral Internet we have now.
There's a huge difference between allowing QoS at the transport layer and the non-neutral routing solutions proposed by the telcos. QoS makes a lot of sense. It enables new internet services like IPTV and helps ensure that VOIP / videoconferencing and the like are reliable.
The key is, that it needs to be neutral to who is sending it, not what is being sent. If the telcos are allowed to extort money from service providers based on not routing their specific traffic as highly as the traffic for someone else, that's going to suck for everyone except the telcos. But if the telcos are allowed to prioritize VOIP traffic ahead of web/email/torrent/etc, that makes sense so long as they prioritize all VOIP traffic.
The only problem I've had with safari is not this but there are just some webpages that don't seem to comlicated that make it grind to a halt and use 60% of the cpu.
Not that Safari doesn't have its problems, but have you considered that the authors of the website might not have tested in Safari like they did for IE and Firefox? Where I work, the front-end developers don't run OS X and don't test in Safari. Firefox is only rarely an issue, but when the page runs slowly in Firefox, the page is tweaked until it runs more smoothly. IE is much more frequently the culprit (due to its tendency to slow down exponentially as you create more JS objects), but even that eventually gets ironed out...it's a much bigger PITA, but every release of our site does run acceptably in Firefox and IE.
This is a problem that all fringe browsers will constantly be battling (and one which Firefox is finally getting over). It's a constant battle to imitate the browsers that sites are tested in becuase they know that very few sites will give QA attention to their browser. If you look at sites that are very mac oriented (apple.com, any of the mac rumor sites, etc), Safari does much better.
There's a third option. Spend time actually investigating the feasibility of and likelyhood of certain attacks, including types of attacks that have not yet happened.
In that scenario, you come up with answers like yes, it makes sense to lock the cockpit doors. This prevents the plane from being hijacked and used as a missile. There's also very few implications of this policy, beyond creating and minor inconvenience for pilots. But you also come up with conclusions like attempting to blow up an airplane using liquids is extremely unlikely even when the terrorist is an experienced chemist with access to the necessary chemicals. You balance that against not allowing people to bring water onto an airplane, something that leads to dehydration which can, in turn, cause people to become ill and miss work. All effort possible should be expended to quantify the risk being prevented and the sacrifice being made to prevent that risk. Then you can weigh the cost against the benefits beforing implementing new security features.
You'd also want to, as I alluded to earlier, have government agencies (FBI, DHS, etc) be actively trying to think like terrorists. Try to get suspicious packages into places where they shouldn't be without having them checked out first. Analyze our infrastructure to determine the most likely places terrorists might target.
In short if you approach the problem from an analytical and rationed point of view, you'll have a better chance of striking a good balance between inconvenience, privacy and safety. But if you mindlessly over-react to either terrorist attacks or the ACLU-ites arguing that too many freedoms are being lost, you're bound to fail, as you've noted.
Do I feel deceived Jennifer C.'s tears were fake? Hmmmmm.... had she "acted" them, what would have made them any more real?
As far as the movie goes, sure, the finished product is all that matters. But hollywood has a tradition of honoring participants in the creation process...a little ceremony that, if you believe the PR, is watched by over a billion people world-wide. So if Jennifer C managed to garner an Oscar nomination, whether she managed to squeeze out a few tears becomes entirely relevant. If the majority of the strong performance comes in post-production, then it's the director and visual effects artists that deserve the credit, not the actors. The time may come when actors are really models for their characters that merely provide detailed scans of their bodies and voice samples and the visual effects artists create the performance using CGI. While I'm not sure that situation will ever really happen (Americans are too much in love with celebrity gossip), the question is still an interesting one...at what point in the continuum between where we are now and a scenario when all performances are created on visual effects do we stop recognizing the talents of the actors who were only the inspiration for the character and played no part in bringing that character to life? This is almost the exact opposite of the debate over whether Andy Serkis deserved to be recognized for his acting that brought Gollum to life. The character looked nothing like him, yet the voice and movements were entirely his.
So while none of this matters much when it comes to enjoying the finished product, it is very relevant to the faux-royalty hype machine that Hollywood uses to justify the $20m+ paydays that actors receive. And that makes it very relevant to movie-goers since those $20m paydays are a big part of why it's almost impossible to find ticket prices under $10.
FYI...This latest "fiddling" with DST is designed to figure out just how much energy DST actually saves (if any). By adjusting the date when DST goes into effect, and measuring the difference in energy consumption compared to previous years, we should get a good idea of whether DST is providing any energy savings and whether that savings is worth the trade-offs (there are quantifiable costs associated with DST...things like increased auto accident rates around the changeover dates).
There's also some notion that in the modern world DST actually increases the country's energy consumption. DST was originally conjured up in a world where the bulk of the energy consumption came from lighting. In that world, giving people daylight at certain hours of the day reduced their need for artificial light. In our modern world, however, things aren't that simple. For one, we have lighting that uses less energy than before. But the biggest difference is that we now have air conditioners, something that uses significantly more energy than our modern lighting. In the modern world, by ensuring that there is natural light when people get home from work, we increase the likelyhood that they will need to use their air conditioners.
So, we really have no idea whether DST actually serves its purpose anymore or if it's merely an unecessary inconvenience for any modernized country. This year's change in the time that DST goes into effect will give us a good indication of whether we can eliminate DST entirely.
The USA simply has the power to fuck up the world the most, and seems to be good at it.
Ironically enough, among citizens of first world countries that elect their representatives, individual Americans have the among least power to influence our government.
Most other first world countries that elect their representatives have some form of parliametary system where the minority is represented and even the winners of the elections are forced to make concessions to the minority parties in order forge a coalition. That combined with the size of our electorate and our over-reaching mass media create a situation where the opinions of individuals are far more likely to be disregarded here.
President George W. Bush admitted back in 2004 that while broadband use had tripled over the previous four years, the U.S. then ranked 10th among industrialized nations for broadband availability, and he added, "Tenth is 10 spots too low, as far as I'm concerned."
<snide-remark>With intelligent leadership like that, it makes you wonder how we can be lagging so far behind.</snide-remark>
Im paying for it wth my taxes. Therefore its MY equipment.
Excellent point. So how does this affect the 15-year old myspace user that is the target of this bill? They haven't paid taxes on anything (including sales tax...that money came from their parents). Therefore, the equipment belongs to you and their parents, but not to them. Chances are, they are using the internet at the library specifically because they want to get around any restrictions that their parents have placed on their home internet access. Perhaps the bill should be ammended to say that only people capable of showing either proof of employment or that they are a legal adult (18+) be allowed unfiltered access to the internet, but by default, social networking sites are blocked. Would that satisfy you?
Do you mean that if the US government were, in your opinion, to get so out of control that the only recourse was to overthrow it, do you honestly believe you (and perhaps a few hundred of your buddies) could? You're seriously outmanned and outgunned.
Just to play the devil's advocate, would you then assert that John Hinckley Jr, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray had no impact on the course of American history because they were "seriously outmanned and outgunned"? I in no way endorse that sort of behavior, but it's pretty undeniable that one well-placed bullet can make an enormous political statement.
...but it's pretty clear what the companies want that own the music they license out to iTunes.
It's really sad that this is becoming the popular notion. It means that the content cartels are succeding with their campaign to legitimize terms like "Intellectual Property."
However, in point of fact, content companies do not own the music they license to iTMS. They own the copyright on that music. There's a slight, but extremely important difference between the two.
In the content creator's world, where art created by them becomes their "Property", they own the music and give you as little rights to their creation as is possible while still convincing you to pay for it.
In the world envisioned by the creators of the copyright notion, the content creators have two choices. They are free to not share their creations with the world to the detriment of the people who would have otherwise benefited from the creation in the first place. Or they can be incented to give their creation to the world in exchange for a limited monopoly that makes that sacrifice worthwhile. Regardless of what those incentives are, the choice is still an all-or-nothing proposition with regard to who "owns" the creation--keep your creation to yourself or give it to the world. There is no middle ground.
If we, as consumers of created content, continue to allow them to transition from a notion wherein created works are given to the public domain in exchange for limited benefits to a notion where created works are owned by their creators, we will continue to lose ground in the fight against DRM and other technologies that seek to limit the rights of the consumer and expand the rights of content creators.
...i don't think content creators have enough business muscle AND international clout to completely limit the range of drm-free options we as consumers will be able to access hardware-wise.
If only that were true. Unfortunately, because of the way the content companies have been able to exert control over the US government, they do have a disporportional amount of "clout" internationally. US influence over the WTO is making strong protection for copyrights and patents a requirement for membership in that body (see the WTO's TRIPS site for more info). This requirement basically extends the reach of content creators into countries who don't want to be shut out of the globalization process. In short, because of the WTO, the US is exporting our crazy laws on copyrights and patents to the rest of the world and content creators need only exert influence on Congress to exert influence on the rest of the world.
/me wishes we'd finally overhaul our campaign finance laws so we could get back to a situation where our elected officials actually behave as if they have our (the people's) best interests in mind instead of others (people willing to spend the money to get them re-elected). The number of problems where this is the necessary first step (including the one discussed above) is disheartening.
...in the absence of any indication of what a user has downloaded or uploaded
Why wouldn't there be an indication that the user has downloaded or uploaded something? There's nothing that prevents them from actually connecting to the tracker and pretending to be a BitTorrent client, so all they have to do is start downloading and anyone who actually sends them something will give them a clear indication that they've both downloaded and uploaded copyrighted material. Moreover, they'll have an exact idea of what that copyrighted content is.
This isn't rocket science, it's just going the extra mile to actually prove the infringement took place rather than simply taking a short cut and making an assumption that can obviously prove to be wrong.
What Gates should have done was to try to encourage Russian authorities to use this publicity as a catalyst for cracking down on people selling pirated software. He should have publicly stated that he thought an appropriate punishment for unknowingly purchasing stolen software should be nothing more than a somewhat stiff fine and that the attention of law enforcement and the harshest punishments should go to those supplying the pirated software. This is the tact that Microsoft employs in the US with their program of selling genuine copies of Windows at a reduced price to anyone with a pirate copy who gives them information on the person who sold them that copy.
With this strategy, he'd come off as supporting the teacher, who obviously has the sympathies of most of the country. He'd also help focus law enforcement on distributors rather than consumers...something that is much more likely to reduce piracy. As it is now, this situation makes it not out of the realm of possiblity that Russia will reduce the punishments for copyright violations or even reduce the protections offered to copyright holders.
I couldn't find anything official on their website, but looking at the results everyone who finished the race completed the swim in 2 hours (with allowances made for the fact that it's not possible to start all the racers at the exact moment the gun goes off). Also keep in mind that this is open-ocean swimming...a whole different proposition than pool swimming, even in the tropical temperatures of the water in Hawaii.
My hat's off to you if you could do it. It's an impressive feat. Personally, it would be my most difficult leg and is the reason I'm not able to compete in any of the longer triathlons. Currently, I can only swim about a mile in the open ocean, and about another half mile in a pool. And even that leaves me too exhausted to ride or run. Without the swim, however, I think I could do it. I ride centuries on a regular basis, though with more hills and cooler temperatures and I've completed two marathons.
Still, just the fact that you and I, probably both in our 20s, are speculating about whether we could complete something that 43 people 65+ actually did accomplish pretty much sums up my point. This is a difficult proposition for people in their 20s, let alone for a senior citizen. For the original poster to whom I replied to suggest that older people should just give up on attempting strenuous physical activity because their cardio-vascular system can't handle it is patently false as a blanket statement. For many, it may be the case. But for some it isn't.
Better yet, the next Mac ad could make light of this exploit.
PC: Hi, I'm a PC. Mac: and I'm a Mac. PC: Now that I run vista, I can accept voice commands! Mac: Wow, that sounds cool. But what if someone tells you to punch yourself in the face? PC punches self in the face and nose begins to bleed PC: Ouch, that hurt! Mac: I'm sorry PC, I didn't realize that just telling you to do something like "poke yourself in the eye"... PC pokes finger into his eye Mac:...or "begin sneezing incesantly"... PC starts to uncontrollably sneeze, the blood from his nose splattering everywhere Mac:...would make you actually do it. PC: groan I'm sorry if I splattered on you. Mac: That's ok PC, I'm pretty immune to viruses, so I think I'll be alright.
Re:If you are that old, ACCEPT IT!
on
Jim Gray Is Missing
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Try telling all that to the 43 people aged 65 or older who finished the IronMan triathlon last year...
Not that it needs saying, but these people all swam 2.4 miles, biked 112 miles and then ran a marathon (26.2 miles). Also keep in mind there are cutoff times that every competitor must achieve in order to be allowed to continue and everyone who finishes made each cutoff time.
All three parts of the race, on their own, would be beyond the capabilities of most 20-somethings. Most can't even swim 1 mile, let alone 2.4. Most can't ride 50 miles, let alone 112. And most can't run 10 miles, let alone a whole marathon.
I don't know that a device like this will ever really work as an ebook reader. The current batch that use Phillips' Electronic Paper technology seem more promising. It's just a lot easier to read for extended amounts of time than an LCD and LCD requires a lot more power.
I've only seen two of these readers on the market (the iRex Iliad and the Sony Librie which seems to be only available in Japan so far), but I'm sure more will follow and the prices will come down.
Congress can't really do much about the war. Under the current understanding of the constitution (whether right or not), the President has pretty much unfettered power regarding combat tactics in his position as Commander In Chief.
While true for the most part, there is one power given to congress to deal with a President run amok. Whether lying about evidence to ellicit support for the war or lying about getting a BJ from a chubby intern, perjury is an impeachable offense. Not that Bush could actually get impeached (the Dems didn't gain that many seats in the past election), but the threat of impeachment procedings or even the commencement of those procedings if the initial threats are ignored would no doubt curtail Bush's policies in Iraq.
It's going to be a question of which comes first, then end of Bush's 2nd term or the point at which popularity for the war reaches such a low point that 2/3 of the congresscritters believe their re-elections would be made easier by taking this drastic anti-war stance. Most likely, we'll have to live through 2 more years of Bush, but it's important to remind your representatives that they do have 1 power that can be leveraged in a few different ways to encourage the President to find a way out of Iraq.
...rather than one of the hundreds of professional robotics researchers in the country.
Even that would seem a bit myopic...Toyota, for one, has a robotics program (well...at their museum, they have a robot that dances and plays the trumpet).
Not that it isn't somewhat valid to critique OS X usability based solely on Apple's offering, but it's a bit disingenuous to criticise OS X for things that become incredibly simple when you install Quicksilver.
The rare application example is made incredibly simple in Quicksilver. I've basically removed everything from my dock because I can launch applications through Quicksilver. This allows me to use the dock similarly to manage only applications that are currently running.
Similarly, people often criticize OS X because you can only switch between open applications, not directly to individual windows of a running application. But Witch makes this task trivial.
There's a ton of these little utility programs that don't have Windows equivalents that contributing to making the OS X experience more enjoyable. I wish some of these critique articles considered the entire Mac experience with these commonly installed utilities rather than just the stock OS X install.
I won't say I hate Micros~1, I'm just very much aware of how much more difficult they've made my life.
I've worked in tech support for an ISP doing both Windows and Mac support (and *nix too, though this was early 90's, so the number of end users using those OSs was small). With how much more clueless Mac users were than PC users, supporting Windows was still, by far, the more difficult. Whereas Mac problems were usually a matter of getting the user to understand how to click the right things and type in the right places, Windows users seemed to be constantly having bizarre issues that would only go away after a reboot (something we weren't supposed to advise until we had tried everything else, since that meant 2-3 minutes of dead time that we could've used helping someone else).
It was just before I left the ISP that I discovered BeOS. I had never realized how pleasant using a computer could be until that time. Micros~1 did everything they could via their (what has now been determined to be illegal) OEM licensing practices to kill BeOS. After that, it took until OS X that I found something that truly replaced BeOS in terms of ease of use.
After working tech support, I moved on and became a web developer. And supporting their array of crappy browsers made my job miserable. This was back in the Netscape 4 days, so I had to make my pages render correctly in Netscape and IE 3, 4, 5 (PC) and 5 (Mac). Their array of browsers, each with their own set of annoying bugs and quirks basically multiplied my workload by 5 (ok...there was a lot of overlap, but it would still take hours to make a simple page render correctly on all platforms).
Then I moved on to web backends, mostly in Java. I thought I had finally ventured beyond their ability to make my life hell. Then came spyware and the constant requests from friends with infected Windows installs. It's taken me a number of years, but I've finally got nearly all of my friends and relatives (happily) running OS X.
Also during this last period, an online vendor that I had purchased an event ticket from (only available from that source) got hacked due to one of the many IIS vulnerabilities that they failed to release patches for in time. It took me almost a month to convince my CC company that all the charges run up by the hacker were fraudulent...granted this had a lot to do with my (now ex-) credit card company, but their software still contributed to one of the worst months of my life.
So now again, I'm hoping against all hope that I've escaped their ability to make my life significantly harder. I still live with the annoyances that are Entourage (please, please, please...use native widgets! there's no valid reason for insisting on using custom-drawn widgets other than becuase you feel the need to slow down my Mac for no reason) and the rest of Office 2004, but that's relatively minor.
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The problem isn't with software patents per se, it's that the PTO doesn't have the expertise necessary to understand what is and isn't novel in the software field. There's no doubt in my mind that there are software patents that deserve patent protection. Off the top of my head, I'd say MP3, JPEG, MD5, DES(ede) would all be examples of things that should be patentable (though I believe only MP3 and parts of JPEG are patented). All four of those are non-obvious algorithms for accomplishing a certain task and all four have competing algorithms to accomplish the same task.
The problem is that in software its too easy to confuse a method and a concept. Even experienced developers will sometimes have problems. Where the PTO understands that patents on physical objects represent only the means of accomplishing the task and not accomplishing the task by any means, they haven't figured it out when it comes to software. Too many patents are granted for accomplishing a task rather than accomplishing a task using a given algorithm.
This doesn't mean that we should scrap the patent system entirely (for software, at least). What it means is that we need to push for education and reforms that reduce the abuse that we're currently seeing. For one, patent examiners need to be better educated, perhaps to the point where no examiner is not a specialist in the field of the patent. There are a ton of other things that would help too, but that's beyond the scope of this post.
The key is, that it needs to be neutral to who is sending it, not what is being sent. If the telcos are allowed to extort money from service providers based on not routing their specific traffic as highly as the traffic for someone else, that's going to suck for everyone except the telcos. But if the telcos are allowed to prioritize VOIP traffic ahead of web/email/torrent/etc, that makes sense so long as they prioritize all VOIP traffic.
This is a problem that all fringe browsers will constantly be battling (and one which Firefox is finally getting over). It's a constant battle to imitate the browsers that sites are tested in becuase they know that very few sites will give QA attention to their browser. If you look at sites that are very mac oriented (apple.com, any of the mac rumor sites, etc), Safari does much better.
There's a third option. Spend time actually investigating the feasibility of and likelyhood of certain attacks, including types of attacks that have not yet happened.
In that scenario, you come up with answers like yes, it makes sense to lock the cockpit doors. This prevents the plane from being hijacked and used as a missile. There's also very few implications of this policy, beyond creating and minor inconvenience for pilots. But you also come up with conclusions like attempting to blow up an airplane using liquids is extremely unlikely even when the terrorist is an experienced chemist with access to the necessary chemicals. You balance that against not allowing people to bring water onto an airplane, something that leads to dehydration which can, in turn, cause people to become ill and miss work. All effort possible should be expended to quantify the risk being prevented and the sacrifice being made to prevent that risk. Then you can weigh the cost against the benefits beforing implementing new security features.
You'd also want to, as I alluded to earlier, have government agencies (FBI, DHS, etc) be actively trying to think like terrorists. Try to get suspicious packages into places where they shouldn't be without having them checked out first. Analyze our infrastructure to determine the most likely places terrorists might target.
In short if you approach the problem from an analytical and rationed point of view, you'll have a better chance of striking a good balance between inconvenience, privacy and safety. But if you mindlessly over-react to either terrorist attacks or the ACLU-ites arguing that too many freedoms are being lost, you're bound to fail, as you've noted.
So while none of this matters much when it comes to enjoying the finished product, it is very relevant to the faux-royalty hype machine that Hollywood uses to justify the $20m+ paydays that actors receive. And that makes it very relevant to movie-goers since those $20m paydays are a big part of why it's almost impossible to find ticket prices under $10.
FYI...This latest "fiddling" with DST is designed to figure out just how much energy DST actually saves (if any). By adjusting the date when DST goes into effect, and measuring the difference in energy consumption compared to previous years, we should get a good idea of whether DST is providing any energy savings and whether that savings is worth the trade-offs (there are quantifiable costs associated with DST...things like increased auto accident rates around the changeover dates).
There's also some notion that in the modern world DST actually increases the country's energy consumption. DST was originally conjured up in a world where the bulk of the energy consumption came from lighting. In that world, giving people daylight at certain hours of the day reduced their need for artificial light. In our modern world, however, things aren't that simple. For one, we have lighting that uses less energy than before. But the biggest difference is that we now have air conditioners, something that uses significantly more energy than our modern lighting. In the modern world, by ensuring that there is natural light when people get home from work, we increase the likelyhood that they will need to use their air conditioners.
So, we really have no idea whether DST actually serves its purpose anymore or if it's merely an unecessary inconvenience for any modernized country. This year's change in the time that DST goes into effect will give us a good indication of whether we can eliminate DST entirely.
Most other first world countries that elect their representatives have some form of parliametary system where the minority is represented and even the winners of the elections are forced to make concessions to the minority parties in order forge a coalition. That combined with the size of our electorate and our over-reaching mass media create a situation where the opinions of individuals are far more likely to be disregarded here.
<snide-remark>With intelligent leadership like that, it makes you wonder how we can be lagging so far behind.</snide-remark>
However, in point of fact, content companies do not own the music they license to iTMS. They own the copyright on that music. There's a slight, but extremely important difference between the two.
In the content creator's world, where art created by them becomes their "Property", they own the music and give you as little rights to their creation as is possible while still convincing you to pay for it.
In the world envisioned by the creators of the copyright notion, the content creators have two choices. They are free to not share their creations with the world to the detriment of the people who would have otherwise benefited from the creation in the first place. Or they can be incented to give their creation to the world in exchange for a limited monopoly that makes that sacrifice worthwhile. Regardless of what those incentives are, the choice is still an all-or-nothing proposition with regard to who "owns" the creation--keep your creation to yourself or give it to the world. There is no middle ground.
If we, as consumers of created content, continue to allow them to transition from a notion wherein created works are given to the public domain in exchange for limited benefits to a notion where created works are owned by their creators, we will continue to lose ground in the fight against DRM and other technologies that seek to limit the rights of the consumer and expand the rights of content creators.
Copyright isn't called ownership for a reason.
This isn't rocket science, it's just going the extra mile to actually prove the infringement took place rather than simply taking a short cut and making an assumption that can obviously prove to be wrong.
What Gates should have done was to try to encourage Russian authorities to use this publicity as a catalyst for cracking down on people selling pirated software. He should have publicly stated that he thought an appropriate punishment for unknowingly purchasing stolen software should be nothing more than a somewhat stiff fine and that the attention of law enforcement and the harshest punishments should go to those supplying the pirated software. This is the tact that Microsoft employs in the US with their program of selling genuine copies of Windows at a reduced price to anyone with a pirate copy who gives them information on the person who sold them that copy.
With this strategy, he'd come off as supporting the teacher, who obviously has the sympathies of most of the country. He'd also help focus law enforcement on distributors rather than consumers...something that is much more likely to reduce piracy. As it is now, this situation makes it not out of the realm of possiblity that Russia will reduce the punishments for copyright violations or even reduce the protections offered to copyright holders.
You might try searching either this search engine or this search engine...you might find better results.
I couldn't find anything official on their website, but looking at the results everyone who finished the race completed the swim in 2 hours (with allowances made for the fact that it's not possible to start all the racers at the exact moment the gun goes off). Also keep in mind that this is open-ocean swimming...a whole different proposition than pool swimming, even in the tropical temperatures of the water in Hawaii.
My hat's off to you if you could do it. It's an impressive feat. Personally, it would be my most difficult leg and is the reason I'm not able to compete in any of the longer triathlons. Currently, I can only swim about a mile in the open ocean, and about another half mile in a pool. And even that leaves me too exhausted to ride or run. Without the swim, however, I think I could do it. I ride centuries on a regular basis, though with more hills and cooler temperatures and I've completed two marathons.
Still, just the fact that you and I, probably both in our 20s, are speculating about whether we could complete something that 43 people 65+ actually did accomplish pretty much sums up my point. This is a difficult proposition for people in their 20s, let alone for a senior citizen. For the original poster to whom I replied to suggest that older people should just give up on attempting strenuous physical activity because their cardio-vascular system can't handle it is patently false as a blanket statement. For many, it may be the case. But for some it isn't.
Better yet, the next Mac ad could make light of this exploit.
...or "begin sneezing incesantly"... ...would make you actually do it.
PC: Hi, I'm a PC.
Mac: and I'm a Mac.
PC: Now that I run vista, I can accept voice commands!
Mac: Wow, that sounds cool. But what if someone tells you to punch yourself in the face?
PC punches self in the face and nose begins to bleed
PC: Ouch, that hurt!
Mac: I'm sorry PC, I didn't realize that just telling you to do something like "poke yourself in the eye"...
PC pokes finger into his eye
Mac:
PC starts to uncontrollably sneeze, the blood from his nose splattering everywhere
Mac:
PC: groan I'm sorry if I splattered on you.
Mac: That's ok PC, I'm pretty immune to viruses, so I think I'll be alright.
Try telling all that to the 43 people aged 65 or older who finished the IronMan triathlon last year...
Not that it needs saying, but these people all swam 2.4 miles, biked 112 miles and then ran a marathon (26.2 miles). Also keep in mind there are cutoff times that every competitor must achieve in order to be allowed to continue and everyone who finishes made each cutoff time.
All three parts of the race, on their own, would be beyond the capabilities of most 20-somethings. Most can't even swim 1 mile, let alone 2.4. Most can't ride 50 miles, let alone 112. And most can't run 10 miles, let alone a whole marathon.
It looks funny (in that depressing sort of way) to those inside as well...I think Monsieur Colbert said it pretty well...
Heh...my subconscious has a pretty good sense of humor.
I don't know that a device like this will ever really work as an ebook reader. The current batch that use Phillips' Electronic Paper technology seem more promising. It's just a lot easier to read for extended amounts of time than an LCD and LCD requires a lot more power.
I've only seen two of these readers on the market (the iRex Iliad and the Sony Librie which seems to be only available in Japan so far), but I'm sure more will follow and the prices will come down.
It's going to be a question of which comes first, then end of Bush's 2nd term or the point at which popularity for the war reaches such a low point that 2/3 of the congresscritters believe their re-elections would be made easier by taking this drastic anti-war stance. Most likely, we'll have to live through 2 more years of Bush, but it's important to remind your representatives that they do have 1 power that can be leveraged in a few different ways to encourage the President to find a way out of Iraq.
Not that it isn't somewhat valid to critique OS X usability based solely on Apple's offering, but it's a bit disingenuous to criticise OS X for things that become incredibly simple when you install Quicksilver.
The rare application example is made incredibly simple in Quicksilver. I've basically removed everything from my dock because I can launch applications through Quicksilver. This allows me to use the dock similarly to manage only applications that are currently running.
Similarly, people often criticize OS X because you can only switch between open applications, not directly to individual windows of a running application. But Witch makes this task trivial.
There's a ton of these little utility programs that don't have Windows equivalents that contributing to making the OS X experience more enjoyable. I wish some of these critique articles considered the entire Mac experience with these commonly installed utilities rather than just the stock OS X install.
I won't say I hate Micros~1, I'm just very much aware of how much more difficult they've made my life.
I've worked in tech support for an ISP doing both Windows and Mac support (and *nix too, though this was early 90's, so the number of end users using those OSs was small). With how much more clueless Mac users were than PC users, supporting Windows was still, by far, the more difficult. Whereas Mac problems were usually a matter of getting the user to understand how to click the right things and type in the right places, Windows users seemed to be constantly having bizarre issues that would only go away after a reboot (something we weren't supposed to advise until we had tried everything else, since that meant 2-3 minutes of dead time that we could've used helping someone else).
It was just before I left the ISP that I discovered BeOS. I had never realized how pleasant using a computer could be until that time. Micros~1 did everything they could via their (what has now been determined to be illegal) OEM licensing practices to kill BeOS. After that, it took until OS X that I found something that truly replaced BeOS in terms of ease of use.
After working tech support, I moved on and became a web developer. And supporting their array of crappy browsers made my job miserable. This was back in the Netscape 4 days, so I had to make my pages render correctly in Netscape and IE 3, 4, 5 (PC) and 5 (Mac). Their array of browsers, each with their own set of annoying bugs and quirks basically multiplied my workload by 5 (ok...there was a lot of overlap, but it would still take hours to make a simple page render correctly on all platforms).
Then I moved on to web backends, mostly in Java. I thought I had finally ventured beyond their ability to make my life hell. Then came spyware and the constant requests from friends with infected Windows installs. It's taken me a number of years, but I've finally got nearly all of my friends and relatives (happily) running OS X.
Also during this last period, an online vendor that I had purchased an event ticket from (only available from that source) got hacked due to one of the many IIS vulnerabilities that they failed to release patches for in time. It took me almost a month to convince my CC company that all the charges run up by the hacker were fraudulent...granted this had a lot to do with my (now ex-) credit card company, but their software still contributed to one of the worst months of my life.
So now again, I'm hoping against all hope that I've escaped their ability to make my life significantly harder. I still live with the annoyances that are Entourage (please, please, please...use native widgets! there's no valid reason for insisting on using custom-drawn widgets other than becuase you feel the need to slow down my Mac for no reason) and the rest of Office 2004, but that's relatively minor.