Comment Re:HTML5 Video (Score 1) 428
Are you comparing to '94 Linux?
Amiga? Macintosh? OS/2?
Where were you in '94?
Comment Re:HTML5 Video (Score 1) 428
It's all nice and all, but if $FOO really wants to win, they have to be technically better. There is no other way.
Counterexamples:
- PC vs. Mac vs. Amiga
- Win32 vs. POSIX
- Intel vs. M68k
- VHS vs. Betamax
- MP3 vs. Vorbis
- X.509 vs. PKI
- PEM vs. OpenPGP
- DES vs. IDEA
- EAX vs. OCB
- SHA256 vs. MD5
- Universal v.Reimerdes
Sometimes the technically-superior option wins, sometimes it does not. Law, marketing, economics and other "soft" factors are sometimes more relevant than the particular technology.
Personally, I want an open infrastructure to win so that the technically-superior applications developed in the future can win, rather than getting killed by patents or whatnot.
Comment Re:Not a bad idea... in fact, an obvious good idea (Score 2, Informative) 258
Any customer with a phone switch or PBX is now in violation of this law.
RTFL. It's very short. Quoting it:
2(d) "False information" means data that misrepresents the identity of the caller to the recipient of a call or to the network itself; however, when a person making an authorized call on behalf of another person inserts the name, telephone number or name and telephone number of the person on whose behalf the call is being made, such information shall not be deemed false information.
and also:
3(1) A person may not enter or cause to be entered false information into a telephone caller identification system with the intent to deceive, defraud or mislead the recipient of a call.
(2) A person may not place a call knowing that false information was entered into the telephone caller identification system with the intent to deceive, defraud or mislead the recipient of the call.
So it's "with intent". I don't see anything wrong with the law as it stands.
Comment Re:Not a bad idea... in fact, an obvious good idea (Score 2, Informative) 258
Think of this feature as a form of NAT for phone lines.
It's more like the "From:" or "Reply-To:" headers of an email message: it indicates where you want follow-ups to go to.
Comment Re:Well I'd need to see the study (Score 1) 278
1) The study was fairly short term. That doesn't tell you anything. All kinds of changes can happen in the short term with a child, and are not meaningful in the long run. You need to evaluate development over a period of years, not over four months. If you look in to the literature on child development you find that many things that taken in a small context that look worrying don't matter in the long run. A child will start talking or reading 6-12 months later than peers, and yet have normal language skills at graduation, for example.
2) It only dealt with kids who got a new toy, not with ones who had it. Even in adults, when we get something new we are more enamored with it and want to spend more time using it. That dies down after a little while. There is no reason to believe that videogames are any different. As such if you believe they are, you need to test that. There needs to be controls with kids that have had videogame systems for long periods of time.
TFA basically says that. Whoever posted this to Slashdot, of course, didn't.
Comment Re:11k Is Too Big? (Score 3, Informative) 582
These days, costs of development and deployment, not runtime memory usage, are the limiting factors in software development.
Comment Re:H.264 (Score 1) 473
Yes, that's the theory. The concern that many people are expressing is that the theory doesn't account for the experimental evidence.
The patent system is supposed to provide a financial incentive for people to assume the risks associated with developing new technology. In the real world, however, there are so many patents that system tends to increase the cost of significant innovation by a large and unpredictable amount. Because of this, it's become far safer to just do the same thing everyone else does than to do something genuinely new. The minefield analogy is very apt.
Like another poster mentioned, it's effectively a probabilistic tax on new innovation used to fund old innovation, where the amount of tax you will owe is impossible to determine beforehand.
Comment What's not science. *shing* THIS is science. (Score 1) 75
This qualifies as a "Slashdot Science Story"? How, exactly? Even the article states:
Japan is no stranger to bizarre phone fads but the popularity of the ringtones is perhaps surprising given the flimsiness of the science behind them.
How about "Anti-HIV properties of... bananas?". And it's written by ERV, not some quack.
Japanese Turning To "Therapeutic Ringtones"
75
indiavision writes "A host of young Japanese are drawn to the allure of 'therapeutic ringtones' — a genre of melodies that promises to ease a range of day-to-day gripes, from chronic insomnia to a rotten hangover. Developed by Matsumi Suzuki, the head of the Japan Ringing Tone Laboratory, an eight-year-old subsidiary of the Japan Acoustic Laboratory, the tones are a hit with housewives as well as teenagers."
Comment Re:Too easy... can't resist... (Score 1) 407
No, it isn't. What else have you used?
Comment Re:This won't stop... (Score 1) 416
I agree with this part of your post:
The probability of contracted autism has been shown to be lower than the probability of catching the disease being vaccinated against, so I'll guard against the higher probability risk.
Comment Re:This won't stop... (Score 1) 416
Also, they may kill other, innocent random people who *did* get vaccinated. Vaccines aren't 100% effective. That's why there's so much talk about herd immunity.
Comment Re:Mixed Feelings (Score 2, Insightful) 145
I always laugh when someone thinks they're going to influence Microsoft, rather than the other way around. Ain't gonna happen.
Comment Re:Crypto is only the Beginning (Score 1) 208
Crypto's not the weak link in security anymore
When I read other people's crypto code, I still find they get it wrong the majority of the time.
Comment Re:Dear software engineers (Score 1) 175
I should add:
- CSS is a bit inflexible, and its attribute names are a bit arbitrary (CSS selectors are good, though). That would have been a valid complaint.
- Making things look good (or work at all) in MSIE is a real pain. That's also a valid complaint.
- Most properly-designed web apps are stateless, except for authentication and maybe a language preference. Everything else should be in your server-side data model, or in your request. If you're writing a web application that keeps a lot of session-specific data, then you're doing it wrong anyway. Session variables in web development are effectively global variables. They can't be bookmarked, they break when people open multiple tabs/windows, and when they timeout unexpectedly, people lose data.
