If I have to choose between competence and caring, I'll take competence. The majority of the people you interact with won't care about you at all. It took us quite a bit of socialization, evolution and technological development to get to a point where we don't have to care much at all on a personal level about the people feeding us, supplying us, paying us, healing us, or even educating us. Everyone can benefit from their expertise no matter how much we may not like them as people (or they us). Bypassing personal sympathies is the root of all progress.
So the teachers don't care. Clearly the parents do, or they wouldn't take the time to home school. So there's social friction between students. What better place to learn to socialize than an environment where people HAVE to be together and behave, then never see each other again after 4 years? So you disagree with the teachers views. Maybe now is a good time to teach your child just how few people exist in the world that he will probably like, and how to manage the majority he doesn't... like his boss. So you disagree with the curriculum. That can be a good way to teach the importance of critical thinking. (The alternatives are to never develop critical thinking skills, or to let them learn strictly by criticizing the person who home-schooled him.) So you think the schools are under-performing. Clearly, the parents are not doing too well on their own, with even fewer resources.
Unless you have embarked upon a carefully researched plan to realize a new Doc Savage, you are probably not going to benefit more from home schooling than you are from public education. In fact, even a mediocre public education frees the parent up to shore up matters of personal philosophy or touch on what he feels is important. If you believe that pretty much anybody can teach basic arithmetic, or English grammar, or U.S History (or whatever curricula don't seem to upset you), then why NOT leave that to a professional on the taxpayer's dime? If there's something in public education you disagree with strongly, then why not spend MOST of your time with your child talking about that?
I can see no more good reason to pass up a subsidized education of such quality as we have than I can see good reason to pass up a free mechanic, laundry, or grocer.
What do they hope to learn from this new super-secret surveillance unit... that's so very important... that they can't just get a warrant for?... This sounds more like CIA/NSA territory.
This sort of surveillance does sound more like what what you would expect out of the CIA -- which is hampered by federal laws limiting them to spying on international communications and foreign nationals -- or the NSA -- which has invested in a huge new facility after admitting that there's just not enough power to come close to breaking a significant amount of encrypted traffic. The big question is why the FBI would jump into something it's never been a major player in before.
Best guess: they're trying to update wiretapping. They've been getting increasingly alarmed and vocal about just how little wiretapping actually buys you now. If you really want to keep something secret, you can just use an https encrypted connection to any one of numerous services that keep no records and have no mechanisms for spying on their users.
They recently floated the idea of requiring backdoors be installed into such service, the way telecom hardware is legally required to support conventional wiretapping. that idea had no real support in technical or public circles. Even if you trust your government, it's much hard to game a system that requires someone to go to a location within the your country and physically connect to equipment owned and operated by a someone else than it is to find an exploit in a protocol that can be prodded by anyone online and which would have to be implement by everyone from Facebook to Club Penguin.
With no widespread support for spying-as-a-service, they're stuck traffic-tapping the hard way: inspect every packet for the start of an HTTPS handshake so you can break the connection, or somehow crack an encrypted stream with incomplete knowledge. They still have no idea how they would reliably accomplish either of these. However they do it, it will probably require new laws to make it feasible. It sounds like the program casts a wide net in an attempt to find something that works, and is trying to keep it quiet because they don't know what solution will rise to the top, or how knowledge gained about the process now could be used to defeat it technically or legally later.
My banking site insists I change my password every few months. It must have a capital letter, it must have a numerical character - and worst of all - it cannot be any of the last 5 passwords I chose.
You could just use a kernel password and tag on a date: MyPass112011, MyPass122011, MyPass0112012,.... That's what most of the bank officers do when they're forced to do that same thing.
I agree with your general sentiment that many of these icons are not particularly outdated so long as you accept the underlying metaphor to begin with. For example, a magnifying glass is probably no more or less used today than it was 60 years ago. It was always a very loose metaphor, referring more to a caricature of Sherlock Holmes than anything else. Bookmarks are also quite easy to grok if you accept the notion of the web as a "book" of independent documents (which even in the 90s seemed weird to me, as places in cyberspace metaphor worked much better for the web than the documents in a sequential book metaphor did, even then).
For some of your specifics, though, I have to disagree. First, there is a definite bias towards items a paper-heavy office. That's fine, but the largest consumers of technology don't work in those anymore. Some are not in offices, and others are in offices where all of their work is through a company system on the computer.
Anything that's based on technology from 60-100 years ago is definitely dated, because they have to pic a single incarnation of the technology that stands out as much as possible from other items. Modern design aesthetic is to smooth corners, hide the pokey bit, and as much as possible reduce every device to a rectangle with a screen (which maybe you can touch).
Polaroids look like Polaroid prints. Most pictures look like Kodak prints (rectangles with a picture covering it completely) and pretty much no one prints their photos anymore. They are stored on their computer instead of in an album, or carried on a phone instead of in a wallet.
Many people receive bills in the form of an email saying either, "it's time to log in to the web site and pay your bill," or, "we have deducted the required amount from the bank account you provided. Thank you for using auto-pay."
Microphones used in bars an stages look something like a metal ice cream cone -- a conical grip and an a wire mesh screen -- not in the studio style, like a mesh hot dog suspended by a forked base.
The voicemail icon is wrong on a couple of different levels, because the answering machines that were replaced by voicemail hadn't used a removable reel-to-reel cassette in a decade. They really had to reach back.
I'm a little surprised how little I've seen so far on how difficult this makes security for browsers. Because most of the TLDs now are country codes such as.uk, and those countries in turn have their own sub-TLDs suck as example.co.uk, browsers keep a list of which TLDS and sub-TLDs are real suffixes. This lets them know that mail.google.com can read/set cookies for google.com, but evil.co.uk can't read/set cookies for all of "co.uk", much less safe.co.uk.
As you may have guessed, this doesn't always work out properly. It's kind of a crap shoot with sites that use the country TLD directly, such as nhs.uk. With unlimited and variable TLDs, this implementation becomes even more questionable.
Does anybody know if browsers have gotten smarter about this in the past few years, or are we racing towards one of those security nightmares that forces content companies and standards bodies to actually get their acts together?
The cited section basically talks about widespread French spying on American companies, and then claiming it was all a big conspiracy to make the French look bad once it came to light.
The fact remains that even if the U.S. government were willing to steal information and share it with American companies -- and this is pretty unlikely given that the U.S. doesn't have the sort of cozy, formal overlap of public and private sectors that France, China, or even Great Britain have -- most other countries haven't had anything we want. You have to go back to 1793 Pawtucket to find a good example of the U.S. gaining an edge through industrial espionage.
Don't get me wrong, the U.S. government has shown it's willing to co-op private technology for its own ends. (For example, when it co-opted the patent for Phillip French's Crater Coupler and then used that state secrets privilege to get the dispute tossed out of court.) They just haven't been shown to help private U.S. firms with any of it, or to do it specifically to improve the competitive advantage of a U.S. company.
That said, you'd think people would have heard about this and avoid I-10 like the plague in that part of the state.
Or they could, you know, not bring weed into Texas. It's not like it's hard to find anywhere in America. Sure, there'll be a premium for competing with other tourists, just like with food, lodging, and gas. But does that really make taking it across state lines (on a week you know they're going to step up their presence on highways to deal with all the out-of-towners) seem like a good idea?
Going through old comments. This will probably never be read, but what the hell:
re: equivocating Forethought + disagreement = shilling. Got it. Not a very sound opinion, but certainly a convenient one.
Regarding the more substantial part of your post on the free market:
A market is free, not free, or somewhat free. Economists aren't thrilled by it, but the fact is that in practice most markets are not completely free. A bigger mistake, however, is to refer to the Market as a singular. There is no market. There are markets. And many of them are not even remotely free.
Most countries do not permit prostitution: sex is effectively free to distribute between people, so long as it's a gift. It's a service you just aren't permitted to sell.
Emissions trading was a hot point in debate in recent years because it introduced a market where none was before. The issue, of course, was that many people thought it was evidence of corrupt politicians letting big industry buy their way out of failure. In fact, a better way to think of it was the government attempting to put a price on something that (up to a limit) had been given away for free: clean air for industry to sully. This was to be an application of market pressures to regulate something that was previously very binary. And, for the harshest toxins, policy experts all made the same recommendation: don't allow such emissions allowances to be traded at all.
The printing of backed currency is reserved to various governments, which is pretty much necessary for those commodious little pieces of paper to have any value. Back when the value was backed by specie, such metals ALSO had to be traded through the government, or else through licensed buyers (a fact most people who fantasize about the gold standard seem to have forgotten).
Food and devices are regulated for safety and fitness for a particular purpose. Labeling, fitness, and safety laws exist to cover gaps in what a consumer can know. A consumer would never choose to buy poisonous food, or faulty cribs, but since they can't know 100% what they're buying, the market distortion is necessary. This returns to what I said about a perfect solution: as consumers approaching perfect information about the products, their processes and compositions, and the alternatives, free markets become optimal solutions for trade. But in the real world, we can never get perfect information, at least not without cost.
Pretty much every product on the market today is subject to some form of regulation, even raw labor. In the real world, a free market is a nice goal, insofar as improvements in consumer awareness allows us to consider a free market to be a better and better approximation of our ideal means of maximizing resource utilization. But the real world has limits, and every industry fudges on the "free market" notion a little, and some industries are complete non-starters because of it.
There you go again. Either the market's free, or it's not free. Yes, it's binary. Either you believe in the invisible hand, and that supply and demand *should* determine worth, and that buyers and sellers are equals, or you don't. Either you believe in truth in marketing, or you want to fiddle with the market's guts until it works the way you want it to.
It would be naive to hope that a few examples and a relatively short post on the internet will change your mind. I try, but I don't hold much hope. I will simply say that this last comment of yours illustrates _exactly_ what I said earlier about the Free Market as an object of religious devotion. The invisible hand does not guarantee you cheap goods, or even long-term stability. It guarantees you that and small discrepancies between wants and means eventually stabilize (though they are of course free to be replaced by _other_ disturbances to the equilibrium). It's an observation about the long run, and nothing more. Saying that that is all ye know of the markets, and all ye need to know is just ridiculous. It's li
Going through old comments. This will probably never be read, but what the hell:
Business method patents are not identical process patents. All sorts of processes are patentable, such as teh processes for distilling chemical components, manufacturing steel, etc. Business method patents are a recent invention arising from a Federal Circuit case, where the judge ruled that pretty much anything can be patented. Amazon attempted to patent the idea of an online "shopping cart": not a specific implementation in code, or even an abstract management system, just the entire notion of "a list metaphorically referred to as a 'shopping cart' of items a person has selected as those he might like to purchase is the near future." These have been written to cover whole business _models_. Including, ironically, a business method patent for patent trolling.
Looking back, I think that my post above would have better served as two separate posts. Had I not been in such a hurry, I probably would have written one post commenting on the similarity between the unwritten rules and basic patent protection, then another later on the difference between software and hardware open source.
Again, my goal is not to belittle the movement or the practices the community is using now. I'm just concerned that the fact that there are fewer protection mechanisms for hardware projects will make licenses more difficult to enforce, and ultimately will make open source hardware projects more difficult to manage and keep in line than their software counterparts.
Fortunately, there are still software protections available for applications requiring controller firmware. That's usually the difficult part of a project to even experienced designers, and the firmware covers a lot of the real knowledge that goes into a working device (proper timing, error checking, signal processing). If an application is trying to avoid costly embedded operating systems, then the tasks become more difficult and there is even more reason to embrace an open source solution rather than try to start from scratch.
If the open source hardware movement wants to become sustainable as more than a hobbyist endeavor -- and bear in mind, that's not strictly necessary, as there are a lot of electronics hobbyist out there -- they should focus on what's useful to developers as much as end users. Open source software is successful mainly because developers leverage the free operating systems, development tools, and packages to minimize R&D time on other products like servers, monitors, and mobile devices. The end user doesn't care about the fact that 90% of their toy is based on FOSS, but the companies that built the toy benefit from it, and so too does the FOSS community.
Coordinate with FOSS developers to get better tools, and for the love of God standardize on and optimize a good suite the way so many standardized on GNU in the early days. (Sadly, most people I know use Eagle, which is a good schematic capture and layout suite, but is only the best free-as-in-beer option. The free-as-in-speech options I've looked at are ages behind.) Embrace and develop a good, stable RTOS that doesn't require a $10,000 per end product fee, and work to ultimately get it certified for safety-critical systems. Grow the tools, the tools will grow business, and businesses will grow the community.
I think what's being proposed is actually a weak form of patent protection.
"So I see you're selling something called 'noTV'. Is that a clone of TV-B-Gone?" "Yes." "Did you improve upon it somehow?" (see "Cloning ain't cool") "Yes." "Great, then you're doing something useful! How did you improve it?" "Okay, so that was a lie. It's a direct clone." "That's not good. You shouldn't do that. At the very least you should pay royalties you work out with the TV-B-Gone team." (see "We pay each other royalties...", "we credit each other, a lot") "No, thanks." "Well! Expect a stern look the next time we see you!" (As I said, weak protection.)
If you like the idea of patents, but ultimately want them to be toothless and enforced only by social mechanisms, then these ideas are for you. Which is about the right level of enforcement, given that most of these things can't be protected under patent (not novel) or copyright.
Open source software actually has stronger protection mechanism under copyright (and in some instances such as a Linux kernel, software patents) to make up for the lower barrier of entry for imitators (copiers). At the very least there are licenses that let you stipulate what applications you don't want your software being used for, how you can brand it, whether improvements MUST be fed back into the original project, and what kinds of other software it can interface with, if the author is so inclined to place those restrictions on a work. And ultimately, those agreements have legal teeth.
For hardware of this sort, the barrier to entry is only cost to build and market such hardware, and the protection is very weak. There are some trade secret laws that electronics manufacturers can usually invoke for direct rip-offs before a product hits market, but after it reaches the market tear-downs are legal, and products are easy enough to copy. Most designs boil down to "reading the IC manufacturer's intended application circuit from the datasheet," and that's about it. Very difficult to protect. That's why most cases today (such as Apple vs... well, everyone) involve using software patents to disrupt a competitor.
I expect that the open-source hardware movement will have an increasingly difficult time enforcing these unspoken rules as it gains traction. And none of this touches on problems arising from applying the open source model to hardware, such as whether or not updating an old designs based on EOL'd parts to use newer parts is a new design, a major improvement, or a trivial change.
There's that, and then there's the bit that the whole patent system is a gov't granted monopoly hack intended to skew the workings of the free market. In programmer terms, it's as bad as a goto. There are lots of ways to do what that intends to do without doing it in such an ugly way.
The issue with the patent system is not with the system itself. The issue is with timing, and uniformity.
Patents originally granted relatively short protection periods to allow the creators to recoup certain R&D costs, and to give nacient or niche industries a chance to establish themselves. But the protection times can't be allowed to become large relative to R&D costs. When chemistry and pharmaceuticals were most difficult to research, they got the longest-running protection. I believe they still do. Logically, now that a new product area with drastically lower R&D costs has come around (software and networking) patent protection should be possible, but over a shorter time.
This didn't happen for two reasons. First, a member of the judiciary extended an existing law, essentially doing an end-run around the legislature. The issue of software patent existence and longevity should have been debated in Congress before protection was given. Now that protection has been given by the judiciary, it's hard to strip it away. Second, various international agreement discourage countries from creating new categories of IP. They worry that a country will reap the benefit of NAFTA, ACTA, etc. by agreeing to the treaty, then stripping away inconvenient protections by re-categorizing products through local legislation. So by trying to make the treaty hard to weasel out of, we also tie our own hands.
If we are willing to move back to a system where it's A-OK for the legislature to create new categories of patents (explicitly create software or business method patents, though I am skeptical about the validity of the sceond under any terms) and allow those new categories to have protections appropriate to the pain taken in advancing the art (say, 2-4 years of protection for new software methods), then we would be in a much better position..
Further, you (and many) seem to speak of the free market as a goal and not a means. The Free Market is not a religion. It's a good idea. Under certain conditions, it's a perfect solution. But int he real, limited world, it's an option. It's a widely-used option that works in may areas of society, but not all. And in this context, a situation involving no protection and the alternative of unlimited term, unforgiving, rigid patents could BOTH be called a "free market" so long as the end products are up for sale somewhere. While this is a monumental subject, I will limit myself to saying that both a protection-free solution and a completely rights-driven solution will lead to problems and inefficiencies. Free software works for the majority of end users because it shortens development time for engineers who develop the products the end users REALLY want, not the products bored volunteers give them for free. Patents often work for the end user because it lets the developers actually found companies that make the products end users REALLY want, not just what's already on the market doing half the job. The fact that most major open-source projects today are driven by paid employees of major companies (who in turn also rely on a large number of patents) underscores this. Both methods make development more profitable. Either alone may work, but not as well. And, as with most things, one-sided approach to a complicated issue guarantees failure.
Plenty of vibrant industries don't rely on the patent system at all (eg. the fashion industry). The patent system enriches lawyers, full stop. It doesn't "promote the sciences and useful arts" at all, and seeing how capricious and how easily gamed it is as presently implemented, it should be abandoned.
Your comment about the fashion industry is misguided. The indus
I accidentally participated in an accidental "social search" of sorts a few years ago. It basically demonstrated that it helps find shallow information quickly, but that you become even more blind to results you may want instead.
Part of an assignment I had was to find a certain number of websites describing the Smith Chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Chart). (I'm still not sure why we were doing this, as it was described pretty thoroughly in the text.) I did one Google search, sifted through about 20 pages of results, found 4 or 5 mediocre ones, bookmarked them and went to dinner. I came back, tried a slightly different search, and found that my previous five were all in the top results. There were a few I hadn't seen, but it surprised me that such a small variation could lead to such a dramatic change when I had had to dig for anything of value before. That's when I realized that variations on "Smith Chart" aren't common searches, and the 15 people in the class had generated a mini-trend. Google's algorithms did what they do, and anything that had been clicked on in the vainest hope that it might not be garbage (like most of the results) floated to the top. Unfortunately, most of those sites were still not great, and now everyone in the class would have the two good ones. If you wanted to find a unique site or a different explanation, digging became progressively harder.
Because of the niche topic, my search became somewhat like a social search: my "friends" (classmates) had all posted sites as relevant (or rather, Google's algorithm did on their behalf after they clicked the links), and I found the same shallow information as them, but now it was harder to break away from those (still poor) results. If you're trying to collect all the information generated by or about a single source -- everything your friend has ever posted or tweeted about their 2011 trip to the Grand Canyon -- then yeah, a social search will get you there faster without doing the filtering yourself. If you're looking for something, anything about a topic no matter who wrote it -- say, a workaround to a UI bug in a web browser, or a notable product that many people could have written about -- you're just going to be putting on blinders.
And sadly, true social networks requires the least effort to search of any network. By definition, you will know someone who knows the info you're looking for. Even if it's not immediately apparent from a wall or twitter feed, you can just ask them. It makes no search to take search technology in that direction. I would much rather have a topic-focused search (If the result for ASP says nothing about computers and a lot about Egypt or herpatology, I don't want it) than a social one.
The larger part is that most of these songs have lyrics and intentions to protest against common GOP policies and political positions. Having the refrain ripped off to further GOP election chances is spitting on the artist and the meaning of the lyrics themselves.
You may have noted that never, in the history of the country, have we cared about the artist or the meaning of lyrics. Yankee Doodle? An insulting song by Europeans about those silly American bumpkins and nabobs. And since Lexington and Concord it's been inseparable from the truly patriotic anthems. The Star Spangle Banner borrowed music from a number of songs before a old British tavern song finally stuck and it eventually became the national anthem. American Woman, Fortunate Son, Born in the USA, and a slew of other protest rock songs are played on campaign trails, at the superbowl, and in over-the-top "America Wins"-themed movies. It is impossible to insult America -- or any institution which perceives itself as fundamentally American -- in song. Everyone just fixates on the fact that, "hey, they're singing about us!"
(As a side note, this is generally due to a massive cultural inferiority complex. American society was looked down on for so long and so hard by Europe that every little bit of news about America was considered a win. Dr. Franklin, the discovery of Dinosaurs, hell, even particularly large moose available for taxidermy. Again and again in American history, you see people screaming, "look at this! See, we have things too! Our nature is even wilder! Our industry is capable!" China seems much the same these days, though it's hard to say if that inferiority complex lies with the people as a whole or just the state media. Naturally, after World War II, when America was the only world power not absolutely crippled economically, we went from being the little brother screaming to be recognized to being a dominant world power, with only the USSR comparable in resources, manpower, and the ability to project power globally. This is probably the worst way for inferiority to be remedied, since you go straight from being ignored to deciding that you really are better off without everyone else. Coupled with a "good fences make good neighbors" protestant ethic, this pretty much guaranteed we as a people would never care what any other country thinks ever again.)
Good or bad the games industry is fed up with used games, and piracy.
Good or bad, the game industry is fed up with customers. And customers with them. That's why big production teams are worked like slaves to roll out a huge, overpriced game that higher-ups pray will make a splash in the first week before people find out how little of the money was spent on playability. Meanwhile, the people who took a week to re-skinned a tried-and-true trajectory game to be about birds angry at pigs are raking it in.
Game companies can't figure out how to make money because they haven't realized that main principle of 21st century media: That is makes no sense to imitate movie studios if you are not a movie studio, especially as movie studios have demonstrated that they have no clue what they're doing.
Digital and film media have never been comfortable with the fact that someday they will be just like paper publishing: competing like gladiators over razor-thin margins and the attention of an audience that has no loyalty and frankly doesn't give a damn about development costs. The industry expect customers to always care about names like Nintendo and Sony, even though they couldn't tell tell you if the last book they read was from Del Ray, Dover, or Random House. They expect people to shell out $50 bucks for the latest shooter from a no-name studio when the highest public estimation the of a director, actor, or writer is, "oh, I love his stuff; once the price gets below $10, I may check that out." They are in for a rude awakening.
Google ads aren't generally splashed over the entire top of the intial screen loaded page.
So in other words, Google is implementing a change in it's search search service that adversely affects the customers of competitors to its advertising service. And since Google ads don't demonstrate the behavior being punished, their ads will never cause a customer's search ranking to drop. Also, who's to say what behavior Google Search will find "annoying to the user" next week.
Back when apps were first becoming a craze, with the slogan "there's an app for that," my immediate reaction was "there's a website for that." In fact, most apps are split down the middle between games you could play in flash, or things you could figure out from a Google query.
Now that they charge for the apps, my opinion hasn't changed. They've added value in terms of a streamlined interface, but not enough for me to care. Certainly not enough for me to pay a dollar. If you bookmark a common query, you can probably get results equally quickly.
The trouble here is that the threshold for "celebrity" is becoming alarmingly low. The idea that you choose cede a certain amount of privacy when you choose to become highly visible -- and make no mistake, this is ALSO a very new notion in human history -- doesn't really make sense as cameras become omnipresent, and all media is instantly shared. Tagging is really just a mechanism for allowing that sharing, but the sharing plus the tidal wave of recordings is what marks a change.
You can use the "chosen celebrity" argument when you claim you have no sympathy for the privacy woes of, say, Demi Moore. But what about Rebecca Black? Jessi Slaughter? If a webcam and two minutes of 4chan's attention is all you need to become an internet celebrity or pariah, isn't that setting the bar pretty damn low?
In this case, Vint Cerf is a celebrity. To someone. Pretty much everyone can be called "a celebrity to someone" if you talk about a narrow enough circle of interests. Andy Warhol used to talk about everyone's 15 minutes. These days people like to talk about the 1000 True Fans that better networking allows. It all boils down to a lowered barrier between invisible private life and highly visible public life. Untagging yourself is never an option at this level. You're trying to do work to cancel the work of many more people (fans and friends), using many services, some of which you may not know about, all believing that they are the very least acting harmlessly. In this case, Cerf has basically just been good at his job, and outspoken in promoting History's Next Great Thing that he was lucky enough to be around for. Does that really justify publicizing every part of his public life? If so, what does that say for competent, ambitious workers of the future? Are the options really "get comfortable on camera or don't participate in society"?
Pretty much all privacy cases involving governments devolve into the arguments that to be able to spy is to spy (whether spying is actively being done right now or not). In civil cases, it comes down to whether the aggrieved had a reasonable expectation of privacy, "reasonable" being established by an average person from the greater community. In an existential way, it must be a bit terrifying to one of his generation that an entire younger generation has grown comfortable with, and actually embraces a level of self-surveillance the Stasi wouldn't even be able to dream of.
The trouble is, you now CAN copyright databases. It's been made explicit in EU law, but I think it's still defensible under US law. The idea is that the organization of facts is copyrightable (take for example, encyclopedias, atlases, etc.). The trouble is, copyright transcends specific media, while a database separated from a specific medium is a mundane collection of facts. The argument here is that Olson's TZ database just cribbed Thomas Shanks' atlas.
This seems like it's troll action. They're not going to be able to get anything of value out of Olson, so they probably want to get a judgment against him as leverage for payments from companies that uses the timezone database through Linux. On the other hand, those companies would be insane not to just bankroll Olson's defense. It's seems like a pretty weak case in a gray area, so it could go either way. Since Olson has announced his desire to retire from the project, I guess this was a "now or never" opportunity for the trolls.
As a side note, the infowars portion of the suit has begun. The reference to Shanks on the "Tz database" page was added as close to the top as could be managed by user JulDes on Sept. 3, which seems to be the day the account was created. As of May 2006, "Thomas Shanks" on Wikipedia redirected to Irish footballer Tommy Shanks. As of One month ago, it now instead has information on the otherwise unknown author of the American Atlas, 1978, ACS publications. The editing account, "TZ Master" seems to have been created expressly for the purpose 5 minutes earlier.
The data actually makes a lot of sense: Windows 7 gave user's the ability to pin program icons to the taskbar even when they're not running. So now your most frequently used programs don't need to be in the start menu or on the desktop to quickly get to them. I would imagine start menu usage would fall dramatically once the programs you use 90% of the time are pinned to the task bar.
I find the new start screen to be an odd solution to this problem. For that matter, I find it odd to thing of the drop as a "problem".
It is true that you can get a patent without a working prototype. The act of thinking of something is the invention, not the act of building it. If your device actually does work, you can either build it yourself or license others to do so, and profit. If it doesn't work, then when someone comes along who CAN make it work, they'll probably have a different enough invention that they can get their own patent. Your previous patent will probably fall under prior art, but that doesn't matter too much. And no, if they have their own patent, you don't get to sue them. (well, unless you're claiming that the patent was incorrectly awarded that is.)
Before, you could challenge a patent on the basis that you actually invented something first, even though the party currently holding the patent filed first. At that point, the court would have to determine who truly invented the device or process first, usually by considering evidence such as notes, lab books, or private correspondence. Bell had to do this at one point when his telephone patent was challenged, and apocryphally came down to the question of who really understood what it meant for an "undulating" (AC) current to carry a signal. Gould, on the other hand, successfully challenged for the patent to the laser, and received the patent just in time to reap the rewards.
Pretty much every other nation on Earth is first-to-file. That means the first person to get the paperwork through wins. Thought of it first? Then you should have patented. It's easier and cheaper on the bureaucracy, so it's no surprise. There is an argument that, now that we're moving to first-to-file, the garage inventor now has no recourse against the large corporations with armies of lawyers. The people in favor say that was always true, practically speaking, and that the procedural change will save the People loads of money in court costs. However, they forget that this further incentivizes all companies to file early and file often. It will probably increase the load for the already over-worked patent office, and the quality of patents will probably go down.
First, let me say that all colleges and universities have slightly different curricula, so mileage may vary. But...
Computer Engineerin/Science is probably not going to teach you control systems. It will teach you how to understand the problems and trade-offs of software design, and how to employ higher-level patterns to quickly solve common problems optimally. That will probably not be used in controlling a feedback system with a microcontroller, or in controlling a large scale plant. Automatic control generally falls into Electrical Engineering, though it will also be a large part of more specialized degrees if they are offered by your school: chemical engineering (emphasis on plants and processing), petroleum engineering (again, emphasis on plants), process engineering (duh), and automotive engineering.
I would take a healthy dose of engineering economics. The auto industry is motivated by having very good system redundandy under harsh conditions with minimal cost. I know, that's theoretically every engineer's job, but the conditions here really are harsh, the redundancy is mandatary, and the margins are tight. Also, consider your willingness to travel, and what other fields (aeronautics?) your degree could be useful in once complete. Tough market out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that what already happens when we fail to pay our annual usage fee? (You know, property taxes....)
If I have to choose between competence and caring, I'll take competence. The majority of the people you interact with won't care about you at all. It took us quite a bit of socialization, evolution and technological development to get to a point where we don't have to care much at all on a personal level about the people feeding us, supplying us, paying us, healing us, or even educating us. Everyone can benefit from their expertise no matter how much we may not like them as people (or they us). Bypassing personal sympathies is the root of all progress.
So the teachers don't care. Clearly the parents do, or they wouldn't take the time to home school.
So there's social friction between students. What better place to learn to socialize than an environment where people HAVE to be together and behave, then never see each other again after 4 years?
So you disagree with the teachers views. Maybe now is a good time to teach your child just how few people exist in the world that he will probably like, and how to manage the majority he doesn't... like his boss.
So you disagree with the curriculum. That can be a good way to teach the importance of critical thinking. (The alternatives are to never develop critical thinking skills, or to let them learn strictly by criticizing the person who home-schooled him.)
So you think the schools are under-performing. Clearly, the parents are not doing too well on their own, with even fewer resources.
Unless you have embarked upon a carefully researched plan to realize a new Doc Savage, you are probably not going to benefit more from home schooling than you are from public education. In fact, even a mediocre public education frees the parent up to shore up matters of personal philosophy or touch on what he feels is important. If you believe that pretty much anybody can teach basic arithmetic, or English grammar, or U.S History (or whatever curricula don't seem to upset you), then why NOT leave that to a professional on the taxpayer's dime? If there's something in public education you disagree with strongly, then why not spend MOST of your time with your child talking about that?
I can see no more good reason to pass up a subsidized education of such quality as we have than I can see good reason to pass up a free mechanic, laundry, or grocer.
What do they hope to learn from this new super-secret surveillance unit ... that's so very important ... that they can't just get a warrant for? ...
This sounds more like CIA/NSA territory.
This sort of surveillance does sound more like what what you would expect out of the CIA -- which is hampered by federal laws limiting them to spying on international communications and foreign nationals -- or the NSA -- which has invested in a huge new facility after admitting that there's just not enough power to come close to breaking a significant amount of encrypted traffic. The big question is why the FBI would jump into something it's never been a major player in before.
Best guess: they're trying to update wiretapping. They've been getting increasingly alarmed and vocal about just how little wiretapping actually buys you now. If you really want to keep something secret, you can just use an https encrypted connection to any one of numerous services that keep no records and have no mechanisms for spying on their users.
They recently floated the idea of requiring backdoors be installed into such service, the way telecom hardware is legally required to support conventional wiretapping. that idea had no real support in technical or public circles. Even if you trust your government, it's much hard to game a system that requires someone to go to a location within the your country and physically connect to equipment owned and operated by a someone else than it is to find an exploit in a protocol that can be prodded by anyone online and which would have to be implement by everyone from Facebook to Club Penguin.
With no widespread support for spying-as-a-service, they're stuck traffic-tapping the hard way: inspect every packet for the start of an HTTPS handshake so you can break the connection, or somehow crack an encrypted stream with incomplete knowledge. They still have no idea how they would reliably accomplish either of these. However they do it, it will probably require new laws to make it feasible. It sounds like the program casts a wide net in an attempt to find something that works, and is trying to keep it quiet because they don't know what solution will rise to the top, or how knowledge gained about the process now could be used to defeat it technically or legally later.
My banking site insists I change my password every few months. It must have a capital letter, it must have a numerical character - and worst of all - it cannot be any of the last 5 passwords I chose.
You could just use a kernel password and tag on a date: MyPass112011, MyPass122011, MyPass0112012,.... That's what most of the bank officers do when they're forced to do that same thing.
I agree with your general sentiment that many of these icons are not particularly outdated so long as you accept the underlying metaphor to begin with. For example, a magnifying glass is probably no more or less used today than it was 60 years ago. It was always a very loose metaphor, referring more to a caricature of Sherlock Holmes than anything else. Bookmarks are also quite easy to grok if you accept the notion of the web as a "book" of independent documents (which even in the 90s seemed weird to me, as places in cyberspace metaphor worked much better for the web than the documents in a sequential book metaphor did, even then).
For some of your specifics, though, I have to disagree. First, there is a definite bias towards items a paper-heavy office. That's fine, but the largest consumers of technology don't work in those anymore. Some are not in offices, and others are in offices where all of their work is through a company system on the computer.
Anything that's based on technology from 60-100 years ago is definitely dated, because they have to pic a single incarnation of the technology that stands out as much as possible from other items. Modern design aesthetic is to smooth corners, hide the pokey bit, and as much as possible reduce every device to a rectangle with a screen (which maybe you can touch).
Polaroids look like Polaroid prints. Most pictures look like Kodak prints (rectangles with a picture covering it completely) and pretty much no one prints their photos anymore. They are stored on their computer instead of in an album, or carried on a phone instead of in a wallet.
Many people receive bills in the form of an email saying either, "it's time to log in to the web site and pay your bill," or, "we have deducted the required amount from the bank account you provided. Thank you for using auto-pay."
Microphones used in bars an stages look something like a metal ice cream cone -- a conical grip and an a wire mesh screen -- not in the studio style, like a mesh hot dog suspended by a forked base.
The voicemail icon is wrong on a couple of different levels, because the answering machines that were replaced by voicemail hadn't used a removable reel-to-reel cassette in a decade. They really had to reach back.
I'm a little surprised how little I've seen so far on how difficult this makes security for browsers. Because most of the TLDs now are country codes such as .uk, and those countries in turn have their own sub-TLDs suck as example.co.uk, browsers keep a list of which TLDS and sub-TLDs are real suffixes. This lets them know that mail.google.com can read/set cookies for google.com, but evil.co.uk can't read/set cookies for all of "co.uk", much less safe.co.uk.
As you may have guessed, this doesn't always work out properly. It's kind of a crap shoot with sites that use the country TLD directly, such as nhs.uk. With unlimited and variable TLDs, this implementation becomes even more questionable.
Does anybody know if browsers have gotten smarter about this in the past few years, or are we racing towards one of those security nightmares that forces content companies and standards bodies to actually get their acts together?
The cited section basically talks about widespread French spying on American companies, and then claiming it was all a big conspiracy to make the French look bad once it came to light.
The fact remains that even if the U.S. government were willing to steal information and share it with American companies -- and this is pretty unlikely given that the U.S. doesn't have the sort of cozy, formal overlap of public and private sectors that France, China, or even Great Britain have -- most other countries haven't had anything we want. You have to go back to 1793 Pawtucket to find a good example of the U.S. gaining an edge through industrial espionage.
Don't get me wrong, the U.S. government has shown it's willing to co-op private technology for its own ends. (For example, when it co-opted the patent for Phillip French's Crater Coupler and then used that state secrets privilege to get the dispute tossed out of court.) They just haven't been shown to help private U.S. firms with any of it, or to do it specifically to improve the competitive advantage of a U.S. company.
That said, you'd think people would have heard about this and avoid I-10 like the plague in that part of the state.
Or they could, you know, not bring weed into Texas. It's not like it's hard to find anywhere in America. Sure, there'll be a premium for competing with other tourists, just like with food, lodging, and gas. But does that really make taking it across state lines (on a week you know they're going to step up their presence on highways to deal with all the out-of-towners) seem like a good idea?
Going through old comments. This will probably never be read, but what the hell:
re: equivocating
Forethought + disagreement = shilling. Got it. Not a very sound opinion, but certainly a convenient one.
Regarding the more substantial part of your post on the free market:
A market is free, not free, or somewhat free. Economists aren't thrilled by it, but the fact is that in practice most markets are not completely free. A bigger mistake, however, is to refer to the Market as a singular. There is no market. There are markets. And many of them are not even remotely free.
Most countries do not permit prostitution: sex is effectively free to distribute between people, so long as it's a gift. It's a service you just aren't permitted to sell.
Emissions trading was a hot point in debate in recent years because it introduced a market where none was before. The issue, of course, was that many people thought it was evidence of corrupt politicians letting big industry buy their way out of failure. In fact, a better way to think of it was the government attempting to put a price on something that (up to a limit) had been given away for free: clean air for industry to sully. This was to be an application of market pressures to regulate something that was previously very binary. And, for the harshest toxins, policy experts all made the same recommendation: don't allow such emissions allowances to be traded at all.
The printing of backed currency is reserved to various governments, which is pretty much necessary for those commodious little pieces of paper to have any value. Back when the value was backed by specie, such metals ALSO had to be traded through the government, or else through licensed buyers (a fact most people who fantasize about the gold standard seem to have forgotten).
Food and devices are regulated for safety and fitness for a particular purpose. Labeling, fitness, and safety laws exist to cover gaps in what a consumer can know. A consumer would never choose to buy poisonous food, or faulty cribs, but since they can't know 100% what they're buying, the market distortion is necessary. This returns to what I said about a perfect solution: as consumers approaching perfect information about the products, their processes and compositions, and the alternatives, free markets become optimal solutions for trade. But in the real world, we can never get perfect information, at least not without cost.
Pretty much every product on the market today is subject to some form of regulation, even raw labor. In the real world, a free market is a nice goal, insofar as improvements in consumer awareness allows us to consider a free market to be a better and better approximation of our ideal means of maximizing resource utilization. But the real world has limits, and every industry fudges on the "free market" notion a little, and some industries are complete non-starters because of it.
There you go again. Either the market's free, or it's not free. Yes, it's binary. Either you believe in the invisible hand, and that supply and demand *should* determine worth, and that buyers and sellers are equals, or you don't. Either you believe in truth in marketing, or you want to fiddle with the market's guts until it works the way you want it to.
It would be naive to hope that a few examples and a relatively short post on the internet will change your mind. I try, but I don't hold much hope. I will simply say that this last comment of yours illustrates _exactly_ what I said earlier about the Free Market as an object of religious devotion. The invisible hand does not guarantee you cheap goods, or even long-term stability. It guarantees you that and small discrepancies between wants and means eventually stabilize (though they are of course free to be replaced by _other_ disturbances to the equilibrium). It's an observation about the long run, and nothing more. Saying that that is all ye know of the markets, and all ye need to know is just ridiculous. It's li
Going through old comments. This will probably never be read, but what the hell:
Business method patents are not identical process patents. All sorts of processes are patentable, such as teh processes for distilling chemical components, manufacturing steel, etc. Business method patents are a recent invention arising from a Federal Circuit case, where the judge ruled that pretty much anything can be patented. Amazon attempted to patent the idea of an online "shopping cart": not a specific implementation in code, or even an abstract management system, just the entire notion of "a list metaphorically referred to as a 'shopping cart' of items a person has selected as those he might like to purchase is the near future." These have been written to cover whole business _models_. Including, ironically, a business method patent for patent trolling.
Looking back, I think that my post above would have better served as two separate posts. Had I not been in such a hurry, I probably would have written one post commenting on the similarity between the unwritten rules and basic patent protection, then another later on the difference between software and hardware open source.
Again, my goal is not to belittle the movement or the practices the community is using now. I'm just concerned that the fact that there are fewer protection mechanisms for hardware projects will make licenses more difficult to enforce, and ultimately will make open source hardware projects more difficult to manage and keep in line than their software counterparts.
Fortunately, there are still software protections available for applications requiring controller firmware. That's usually the difficult part of a project to even experienced designers, and the firmware covers a lot of the real knowledge that goes into a working device (proper timing, error checking, signal processing). If an application is trying to avoid costly embedded operating systems, then the tasks become more difficult and there is even more reason to embrace an open source solution rather than try to start from scratch.
If the open source hardware movement wants to become sustainable as more than a hobbyist endeavor -- and bear in mind, that's not strictly necessary, as there are a lot of electronics hobbyist out there -- they should focus on what's useful to developers as much as end users. Open source software is successful mainly because developers leverage the free operating systems, development tools, and packages to minimize R&D time on other products like servers, monitors, and mobile devices. The end user doesn't care about the fact that 90% of their toy is based on FOSS, but the companies that built the toy benefit from it, and so too does the FOSS community.
Coordinate with FOSS developers to get better tools, and for the love of God standardize on and optimize a good suite the way so many standardized on GNU in the early days. (Sadly, most people I know use Eagle, which is a good schematic capture and layout suite, but is only the best free-as-in-beer option. The free-as-in-speech options I've looked at are ages behind.) Embrace and develop a good, stable RTOS that doesn't require a $10,000 per end product fee, and work to ultimately get it certified for safety-critical systems. Grow the tools, the tools will grow business, and businesses will grow the community.
I think what's being proposed is actually a weak form of patent protection.
"So I see you're selling something called 'noTV'. Is that a clone of TV-B-Gone?"
"Yes."
"Did you improve upon it somehow?" (see "Cloning ain't cool")
"Yes."
"Great, then you're doing something useful! How did you improve it?"
"Okay, so that was a lie. It's a direct clone."
"That's not good. You shouldn't do that. At the very least you should pay royalties you work out with the TV-B-Gone team." (see "We pay each other royalties...", "we credit each other, a lot")
"No, thanks."
"Well! Expect a stern look the next time we see you!" (As I said, weak protection.)
If you like the idea of patents, but ultimately want them to be toothless and enforced only by social mechanisms, then these ideas are for you. Which is about the right level of enforcement, given that most of these things can't be protected under patent (not novel) or copyright.
Open source software actually has stronger protection mechanism under copyright (and in some instances such as a Linux kernel, software patents) to make up for the lower barrier of entry for imitators (copiers). At the very least there are licenses that let you stipulate what applications you don't want your software being used for, how you can brand it, whether improvements MUST be fed back into the original project, and what kinds of other software it can interface with, if the author is so inclined to place those restrictions on a work. And ultimately, those agreements have legal teeth.
For hardware of this sort, the barrier to entry is only cost to build and market such hardware, and the protection is very weak. There are some trade secret laws that electronics manufacturers can usually invoke for direct rip-offs before a product hits market, but after it reaches the market tear-downs are legal, and products are easy enough to copy. Most designs boil down to "reading the IC manufacturer's intended application circuit from the datasheet," and that's about it. Very difficult to protect. That's why most cases today (such as Apple vs... well, everyone) involve using software patents to disrupt a competitor.
I expect that the open-source hardware movement will have an increasingly difficult time enforcing these unspoken rules as it gains traction. And none of this touches on problems arising from applying the open source model to hardware, such as whether or not updating an old designs based on EOL'd parts to use newer parts is a new design, a major improvement, or a trivial change.
There's that, and then there's the bit that the whole patent system is a gov't granted monopoly hack intended to skew the workings of the free market. In programmer terms, it's as bad as a goto. There are lots of ways to do what that intends to do without doing it in such an ugly way.
The issue with the patent system is not with the system itself. The issue is with timing, and uniformity.
Patents originally granted relatively short protection periods to allow the creators to recoup certain R&D costs, and to give nacient or niche industries a chance to establish themselves. But the protection times can't be allowed to become large relative to R&D costs. When chemistry and pharmaceuticals were most difficult to research, they got the longest-running protection. I believe they still do. Logically, now that a new product area with drastically lower R&D costs has come around (software and networking) patent protection should be possible, but over a shorter time.
This didn't happen for two reasons. First, a member of the judiciary extended an existing law, essentially doing an end-run around the legislature. The issue of software patent existence and longevity should have been debated in Congress before protection was given. Now that protection has been given by the judiciary, it's hard to strip it away. Second, various international agreement discourage countries from creating new categories of IP. They worry that a country will reap the benefit of NAFTA, ACTA, etc. by agreeing to the treaty, then stripping away inconvenient protections by re-categorizing products through local legislation. So by trying to make the treaty hard to weasel out of, we also tie our own hands.
If we are willing to move back to a system where it's A-OK for the legislature to create new categories of patents (explicitly create software or business method patents, though I am skeptical about the validity of the sceond under any terms) and allow those new categories to have protections appropriate to the pain taken in advancing the art (say, 2-4 years of protection for new software methods), then we would be in a much better position..
Further, you (and many) seem to speak of the free market as a goal and not a means. The Free Market is not a religion. It's a good idea. Under certain conditions, it's a perfect solution. But int he real, limited world, it's an option. It's a widely-used option that works in may areas of society, but not all. And in this context, a situation involving no protection and the alternative of unlimited term, unforgiving, rigid patents could BOTH be called a "free market" so long as the end products are up for sale somewhere. While this is a monumental subject, I will limit myself to saying that both a protection-free solution and a completely rights-driven solution will lead to problems and inefficiencies. Free software works for the majority of end users because it shortens development time for engineers who develop the products the end users REALLY want, not the products bored volunteers give them for free. Patents often work for the end user because it lets the developers actually found companies that make the products end users REALLY want, not just what's already on the market doing half the job. The fact that most major open-source projects today are driven by paid employees of major companies (who in turn also rely on a large number of patents) underscores this. Both methods make development more profitable. Either alone may work, but not as well. And, as with most things, one-sided approach to a complicated issue guarantees failure.
Plenty of vibrant industries don't rely on the patent system at all (eg. the fashion industry). The patent system enriches lawyers, full stop. It doesn't "promote the sciences and useful arts" at all, and seeing how capricious and how easily gamed it is as presently implemented, it should be abandoned.
Your comment about the fashion industry is misguided. The indus
cultural differences _____ how much money we save?
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cultural differences IN how much money we save
I accidentally participated in an accidental "social search" of sorts a few years ago. It basically demonstrated that it helps find shallow information quickly, but that you become even more blind to results you may want instead.
Part of an assignment I had was to find a certain number of websites describing the Smith Chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Chart). (I'm still not sure why we were doing this, as it was described pretty thoroughly in the text.) I did one Google search, sifted through about 20 pages of results, found 4 or 5 mediocre ones, bookmarked them and went to dinner. I came back, tried a slightly different search, and found that my previous five were all in the top results. There were a few I hadn't seen, but it surprised me that such a small variation could lead to such a dramatic change when I had had to dig for anything of value before. That's when I realized that variations on "Smith Chart" aren't common searches, and the 15 people in the class had generated a mini-trend. Google's algorithms did what they do, and anything that had been clicked on in the vainest hope that it might not be garbage (like most of the results) floated to the top. Unfortunately, most of those sites were still not great, and now everyone in the class would have the two good ones. If you wanted to find a unique site or a different explanation, digging became progressively harder.
Because of the niche topic, my search became somewhat like a social search: my "friends" (classmates) had all posted sites as relevant (or rather, Google's algorithm did on their behalf after they clicked the links), and I found the same shallow information as them, but now it was harder to break away from those (still poor) results. If you're trying to collect all the information generated by or about a single source -- everything your friend has ever posted or tweeted about their 2011 trip to the Grand Canyon -- then yeah, a social search will get you there faster without doing the filtering yourself. If you're looking for something, anything about a topic no matter who wrote it -- say, a workaround to a UI bug in a web browser, or a notable product that many people could have written about -- you're just going to be putting on blinders.
And sadly, true social networks requires the least effort to search of any network. By definition, you will know someone who knows the info you're looking for. Even if it's not immediately apparent from a wall or twitter feed, you can just ask them. It makes no search to take search technology in that direction. I would much rather have a topic-focused search (If the result for ASP says nothing about computers and a lot about Egypt or herpatology, I don't want it) than a social one.
The larger part is that most of these songs have lyrics and intentions to protest against common GOP policies and political positions. Having the refrain ripped off to further GOP election chances is spitting on the artist and the meaning of the lyrics themselves.
You may have noted that never, in the history of the country, have we cared about the artist or the meaning of lyrics. Yankee Doodle? An insulting song by Europeans about those silly American bumpkins and nabobs. And since Lexington and Concord it's been inseparable from the truly patriotic anthems. The Star Spangle Banner borrowed music from a number of songs before a old British tavern song finally stuck and it eventually became the national anthem. American Woman, Fortunate Son, Born in the USA, and a slew of other protest rock songs are played on campaign trails, at the superbowl, and in over-the-top "America Wins"-themed movies. It is impossible to insult America -- or any institution which perceives itself as fundamentally American -- in song. Everyone just fixates on the fact that, "hey, they're singing about us!"
(As a side note, this is generally due to a massive cultural inferiority complex. American society was looked down on for so long and so hard by Europe that every little bit of news about America was considered a win. Dr. Franklin, the discovery of Dinosaurs, hell, even particularly large moose available for taxidermy. Again and again in American history, you see people screaming, "look at this! See, we have things too! Our nature is even wilder! Our industry is capable!" China seems much the same these days, though it's hard to say if that inferiority complex lies with the people as a whole or just the state media. Naturally, after World War II, when America was the only world power not absolutely crippled economically, we went from being the little brother screaming to be recognized to being a dominant world power, with only the USSR comparable in resources, manpower, and the ability to project power globally. This is probably the worst way for inferiority to be remedied, since you go straight from being ignored to deciding that you really are better off without everyone else. Coupled with a "good fences make good neighbors" protestant ethic, this pretty much guaranteed we as a people would never care what any other country thinks ever again.)
Good or bad the games industry is fed up with used games, and piracy.
Good or bad, the game industry is fed up with customers. And customers with them. That's why big production teams are worked like slaves to roll out a huge, overpriced game that higher-ups pray will make a splash in the first week before people find out how little of the money was spent on playability. Meanwhile, the people who took a week to re-skinned a tried-and-true trajectory game to be about birds angry at pigs are raking it in.
Game companies can't figure out how to make money because they haven't realized that main principle of 21st century media: That is makes no sense to imitate movie studios if you are not a movie studio, especially as movie studios have demonstrated that they have no clue what they're doing.
Digital and film media have never been comfortable with the fact that someday they will be just like paper publishing: competing like gladiators over razor-thin margins and the attention of an audience that has no loyalty and frankly doesn't give a damn about development costs. The industry expect customers to always care about names like Nintendo and Sony, even though they couldn't tell tell you if the last book they read was from Del Ray, Dover, or Random House. They expect people to shell out $50 bucks for the latest shooter from a no-name studio when the highest public estimation the of a director, actor, or writer is, "oh, I love his stuff; once the price gets below $10, I may check that out." They are in for a rude awakening.
Presumably not punishing google ads(ducks)
Google ads aren't generally splashed over the entire top of the intial screen loaded page.
So in other words, Google is implementing a change in it's search search service that adversely affects the customers of competitors to its advertising service. And since Google ads don't demonstrate the behavior being punished, their ads will never cause a customer's search ranking to drop. Also, who's to say what behavior Google Search will find "annoying to the user" next week.
Yeah, the FTC will be just fine with this.
Back when apps were first becoming a craze, with the slogan "there's an app for that," my immediate reaction was "there's a website for that." In fact, most apps are split down the middle between games you could play in flash, or things you could figure out from a Google query.
Now that they charge for the apps, my opinion hasn't changed. They've added value in terms of a streamlined interface, but not enough for me to care. Certainly not enough for me to pay a dollar. If you bookmark a common query, you can probably get results equally quickly.
The trouble here is that the threshold for "celebrity" is becoming alarmingly low. The idea that you choose cede a certain amount of privacy when you choose to become highly visible -- and make no mistake, this is ALSO a very new notion in human history -- doesn't really make sense as cameras become omnipresent, and all media is instantly shared. Tagging is really just a mechanism for allowing that sharing, but the sharing plus the tidal wave of recordings is what marks a change.
You can use the "chosen celebrity" argument when you claim you have no sympathy for the privacy woes of, say, Demi Moore. But what about Rebecca Black? Jessi Slaughter? If a webcam and two minutes of 4chan's attention is all you need to become an internet celebrity or pariah, isn't that setting the bar pretty damn low?
In this case, Vint Cerf is a celebrity. To someone. Pretty much everyone can be called "a celebrity to someone" if you talk about a narrow enough circle of interests. Andy Warhol used to talk about everyone's 15 minutes. These days people like to talk about the 1000 True Fans that better networking allows. It all boils down to a lowered barrier between invisible private life and highly visible public life. Untagging yourself is never an option at this level. You're trying to do work to cancel the work of many more people (fans and friends), using many services, some of which you may not know about, all believing that they are the very least acting harmlessly. In this case, Cerf has basically just been good at his job, and outspoken in promoting History's Next Great Thing that he was lucky enough to be around for. Does that really justify publicizing every part of his public life? If so, what does that say for competent, ambitious workers of the future? Are the options really "get comfortable on camera or don't participate in society"?
Pretty much all privacy cases involving governments devolve into the arguments that to be able to spy is to spy (whether spying is actively being done right now or not). In civil cases, it comes down to whether the aggrieved had a reasonable expectation of privacy, "reasonable" being established by an average person from the greater community. In an existential way, it must be a bit terrifying to one of his generation that an entire younger generation has grown comfortable with, and actually embraces a level of self-surveillance the Stasi wouldn't even be able to dream of.
As usual, IANAL, but...
The trouble is, you now CAN copyright databases. It's been made explicit in EU law, but I think it's still defensible under US law. The idea is that the organization of facts is copyrightable (take for example, encyclopedias, atlases, etc.). The trouble is, copyright transcends specific media, while a database separated from a specific medium is a mundane collection of facts. The argument here is that Olson's TZ database just cribbed Thomas Shanks' atlas.
This seems like it's troll action. They're not going to be able to get anything of value out of Olson, so they probably want to get a judgment against him as leverage for payments from companies that uses the timezone database through Linux. On the other hand, those companies would be insane not to just bankroll Olson's defense. It's seems like a pretty weak case in a gray area, so it could go either way. Since Olson has announced his desire to retire from the project, I guess this was a "now or never" opportunity for the trolls.
As a side note, the infowars portion of the suit has begun. The reference to Shanks on the "Tz database" page was added as close to the top as could be managed by user JulDes on Sept. 3, which seems to be the day the account was created. As of May 2006, "Thomas Shanks" on Wikipedia redirected to Irish footballer Tommy Shanks. As of One month ago, it now instead has information on the otherwise unknown author of the American Atlas, 1978, ACS publications. The editing account, "TZ Master" seems to have been created expressly for the purpose 5 minutes earlier.
The data actually makes a lot of sense: Windows 7 gave user's the ability to pin program icons to the taskbar even when they're not running. So now your most frequently used programs don't need to be in the start menu or on the desktop to quickly get to them. I would imagine start menu usage would fall dramatically once the programs you use 90% of the time are pinned to the task bar.
I find the new start screen to be an odd solution to this problem. For that matter, I find it odd to thing of the drop as a "problem".
First, IANAL
It is true that you can get a patent without a working prototype. The act of thinking of something is the invention, not the act of building it. If your device actually does work, you can either build it yourself or license others to do so, and profit. If it doesn't work, then when someone comes along who CAN make it work, they'll probably have a different enough invention that they can get their own patent. Your previous patent will probably fall under prior art, but that doesn't matter too much. And no, if they have their own patent, you don't get to sue them. (well, unless you're claiming that the patent was incorrectly awarded that is.)
Before, you could challenge a patent on the basis that you actually invented something first, even though the party currently holding the patent filed first. At that point, the court would have to determine who truly invented the device or process first, usually by considering evidence such as notes, lab books, or private correspondence. Bell had to do this at one point when his telephone patent was challenged, and apocryphally came down to the question of who really understood what it meant for an "undulating" (AC) current to carry a signal. Gould, on the other hand, successfully challenged for the patent to the laser, and received the patent just in time to reap the rewards.
Pretty much every other nation on Earth is first-to-file. That means the first person to get the paperwork through wins. Thought of it first? Then you should have patented. It's easier and cheaper on the bureaucracy, so it's no surprise. There is an argument that, now that we're moving to first-to-file, the garage inventor now has no recourse against the large corporations with armies of lawyers. The people in favor say that was always true, practically speaking, and that the procedural change will save the People loads of money in court costs. However, they forget that this further incentivizes all companies to file early and file often. It will probably increase the load for the already over-worked patent office, and the quality of patents will probably go down.
First, let me say that all colleges and universities have slightly different curricula, so mileage may vary. But...
Computer Engineerin/Science is probably not going to teach you control systems. It will teach you how to understand the problems and trade-offs of software design, and how to employ higher-level patterns to quickly solve common problems optimally. That will probably not be used in controlling a feedback system with a microcontroller, or in controlling a large scale plant. Automatic control generally falls into Electrical Engineering, though it will also be a large part of more specialized degrees if they are offered by your school: chemical engineering (emphasis on plants and processing), petroleum engineering (again, emphasis on plants), process engineering (duh), and automotive engineering.
I would take a healthy dose of engineering economics. The auto industry is motivated by having very good system redundandy under harsh conditions with minimal cost. I know, that's theoretically every engineer's job, but the conditions here really are harsh, the redundancy is mandatary, and the margins are tight. Also, consider your willingness to travel, and what other fields (aeronautics?) your degree could be useful in once complete. Tough market out there.