It's kext not ktext, lulz.

Nice vacuousness to your post. The sky is blue.

Had to mount a jailbroken iPhone 3GS (not mine!) the other day, it's not too complicated. Install openssh on the phone and the root password is 'alpine'. There are screenshots here.

Not to diminish your (entirely justified) criticism of the platform, of course. :)

Java, it's like the girl next door.

She ain't pretty, but she'll do what you want.

While something may have been "inevitable", someone does get credit for not only thinking to do it, but actually doing it.

I'll give them credit; it's the patent I object to. Being first to do something shouldn't mean you get a 20-year monopoly on doing it. Not every new product is a new invention.

We knew WPA was broken when it was released. It was inconvenient to wait for better IEEE security standards, so the WPA standardized on what was already implemented (which was still much better than what was out there). Ie, convenience trumps security, because wireless is all about convenience. WPA2 isn't that much better in this regard.

Agreed. A patent troll buys up a bunch of patents then goes out and extorts money from companies that may be infringing on their newly acquired patents. Tivo is defending it's own innovations. It is using the patent service the way it was intended: to allow smaller innovative companies to exist without having their ideas and tech stolen by the big guys.

Good point. Innovative is not the right term. I should have said: new, useful and non-obvious.

Litigation is a very good vehicle for testing the patentability of an invention. Or, at least, it is considerably better than patent prosecution. In the case of litigation, the defendant has significant incentive to search out and put forth the best evidence of obviousness and anticipation.

I often doubt whether judges and juries are very good at analyzing the evidence, but lawyers are left to explain it.

If we allowed more competition,...

It's not merely an issue of allowing more competition. For example, here in California cable TV is not a state-granted monopoly. And yet, you will find close to zero overlapping cable TV regions. Why? Because it makes little economic sense to the operators to do that. One operator, having paid for infrastructure, can lower prices in its region to below what a new competitor could afford, because the new competitor, having to lay down duplicate infrastructure, will be taking it over the barrel on paying for its new infrastructure. So the new operator just shies off from the whole thing. It's really a kind of willful collusion, but there's nothing evil about it. It's just good, obvious business sense.

At best, you can hope for the phone company, the cable company, and maybe some new third leg of wireless operators to form some kind of three way competitive market for delivery services. I don't think this is nearly enough, however, for any thing at all resembling competition. Markets with relatively small numbers of participants tend to engage in huge amounts of tacit collusion. Basically, it's very easy for the various players to watch each other's prices, set similar price points, and become lax about the whole thing. The victim is the consumer.

Real competition occurs in thriving markets where new competitors enter with innovations that lower the fundamental cost basis of their products. This forces competitors to adopt similar innovations or die. This seldom happens in small markets with a static set of competitors, because they're all set in their ways, and know the others are set in their ways. I.e., they can happily never change a thing and GET AWAY WITH IT.

So basically, don't hold your breath on any kind of real competition occurring here. While I'm a big fan of competitive markets, I'm a big cynic on this market. On a bad day, in a bad mood, I think we should just regulate the entire thing.

C//

My question is this: What is the EPA _really_ trying to accomplish with this? Covering CO2 under the Clean Air Act would completely hamstring American businesses, forcing them to severely cut CO2 emissions

This is completely and utterly false. In other words, it isn't true. Case in point: Germany, like many other EU states has implemented a carbon tax to limit CO2 emissions. It's working in that Germany's emissions are now below the Kyoto accord requirements. All this, yet Germany's economy is recovering from their recession, and the recovery is faster than the U.S. recovery is. Lastly, the carbon taxes have all been projected to increase the number of jobs, not "hamstring" businesses like you say:

The positive effects of the ecological tax reform were highlighted by the Federal Environmental Bureau (Umweltbundesamt) in early 200210 when it stated that by the end of that year, its projections showed that ecotaxes would have reduced CO2 emissions by more than 7 million tonnes while at the same time creating almost 60,000 new jobs. Other researchers 11 were even more positive, saying that between 176,000 and 250,000 new jobs would be created. These figures were based on the assumption that the trade unions would moderate their wage demands by linking any increases in gross pay to changes in prices and productivity.

So when you look at the actual evidence, carbon taxes do pretty much precisely exactly the opposite of what you said. Do yourself a favor and stop reading talking points written by Exxon.

Seen this on travel tv, in europe they have little paper clocks you can buy to toss on your dash with the time you parked... easy to tell if you're over the time limit, yippee!!!! a solution for under a million f'in dollars for no reason

Seriously why is parking so retarded expensive, it's the main reason nobody goes downtown!!!!

Oh that and the insanely over psychotic cops we have... maybe it's just where i live

Actually, based on the narration, I believe that the computation involved requires three basic processing steps: (1) detection systems to measure physical properties of the system at any given point in time, such as position, velocity, acceleration, and force; (2) real-time algorithms based on rapid numerical solution of equations to predict future states of the system, with continual updating by comparing predicted state with actual state inferred from step 1; and (3) determination of the appropriate movement in the robotic arm for the necessary outcome.

I think that this is a very difficult thing to program in general because the examples shown are very specific tasks which serve to demonstrate the speed of this type of processing, but we do not see how well arbitrary tasks can be similarly implemented or how accurately.

Make no mistake: this is very impressive performance, because it is basically a huge step forward in machine vision and real-time robotic control. On some level, the mathematics has always been there, but only in as much as the basic mathematics of binary arithmetic has been used to develop programming languages. There's a lot more going on behind the scenes that extends beyond a mere physical description of the system in question, because for such an approach to be possible in the general sense, the robot doesn't know things like the precise distribution of the mass in the object being manipulated, or all the frictional forces involved. It's not operating under a sort of Laplacian notion wherein if one knew the precise state of all parameters of the system, one can simply solve the required physical equations and predict the future state at any arbitrary point in time, because (a) chaos guarantees the instability of such nonlinear systems, and (b) it wouldn't be possible to measure all such parameters with sufficient precision.

What is really going on is perhaps best explained in human terms: the programming is doing a lot of what humans do--we observe the state with our visual and tactile senses, and our brains receive these continual updates and decide what to do next. This processing is already extremely fast in a biological context, but with these machines, it is made at least an order of magnitude faster. The next step is to simulate a sort of adaptive intelligence to allow the handling of a wider class of scenarios than the ones shown in the video.

The content as a work belongs to the writer. The information contained within it does not. I can summarize a 1000-word email from you as "You slept with John's wife", completely violating your [incorrectly] expected privacy without violating your copyright.

What did you think of Mass Effect?

Mass Effect is a kind of weird thing for me. On one hand... it's really good. It's got a good story, basically all the dialog is decent at worst, and there are a couple plot revelations that are just extraordinary. There's one that is pretty damn bone-chilling. On the other hand, there are a few things that are a bit aggravating. Most of these are somewhat sort of "technical" issues, and if they were changed basically wouldn't change the game itself at all.

For me, there are a few unfortunate glitches... one one of the missions the ground isn't rendered properly so it's very hard to figure out where to drive without going off of a cliff, and the last half of a mission has lots of sound glitches (e.g. cut scenes without most of the sound tracks, occasional dropped dialog).

I also agree with most of what the Penny Arcade people had to say about it, though I do think the first comic is the least relevant. The first time I played, I had a rather hard time on the harder battles for a while, even on the easiest difficulty setting. Then things clicked and I figured out how things worked, and it got much easier; I'm playing it on hardcore now (the 4th of 5 settings; the 5th isn't unlocked yet), and it's really in the same ballpark as the early parts on casual since the game is harder but I am better.

The PA people didn't make a strip about it, but Tycho discusses it in the third news post in that series: the inventory management system is terrible. It sucks. It's the sort of thing that makes me think that BioWare should take some lessons on playtesting from Valve or something, because I can't imagine that they playtested the current design, properly solicited feedback from the users, and didn't find out how bad it is. The biggest problem is that your inventory can hold 150 items, but there's no internal organization; it's just a list in the order you picked things up. There are nice categories ("pistols", "sniper rifles", "grenade upgrades", ...) but they don't show up in the list. You can have two things of the same item that show up in multiple places in the list. A very simple change that would have made this far less frustrating is to set up a hierarchy by genre and a sub-heirarchy by the manufacturer/model. (There are items like "Kessler I", "Kessler II", etc. where a "Kessler II" pistol is strictly better than a "Kessler I" pistol, but incomparable to the "Edge II" pistol. So group all the Kesslers together.) There are other problems too.

Finally, there are just a bunch of misc. annoyances. If you're in a dialog scene, you can't even get to a menu to, say, exit the game. You can't skip cut scenes (even ones that are very repetitive, like going through a mass relay); this goes along with Penny Arcade's elevator strip. There are fights in the game where you have dialog, then a fight, and it will "helpfully" save before the dialog instead of after, so if you die a bunch of times you have to go through the dialog again. At a minute or two a piece just from that, I probably could have saved 10 or 15 minutes earlier today at the end of the mission where you pick up Liara.

I would say don't take an overall negative impression from this review; definitely don't do so based on the volume of text I devoted to complaining. I'm just much better at talking about what I don't like about something than I am at talking about things that I do like. And there is plenty in that latter category. I might summarize it as the following: Mass Effect is a great game when you're done playing it, but only decent while you are actually playing it. This is similar to and inspired slightly by something Tycho wrote: "by the time you are done playing, you remember the emotional topography of the game much more than the technical one". Maybe not worth the $50 launch price or whatever it was, but definitely worth the $20 now.

What ending did you and your friend take?

We both did Paragon (basically independently; he was playing it first, and I would have done that anyway). I thought about going Renegade for the replay, but... it just doesn't fit me. I think it'd feel way too awkward. I'm too much of a goody-two-shoes. ;-)

Also, did the Paragon and Renegade meters have any affect on the gameplay?

I'm actually not quite 100% sure what effect it has. I know it effects the dialog options and the choices you have available there (both immediately and further down the road). There is one place where I think there are separate side quests you can get for the two tracks, and one other place where taking one of the paths restricts what you can do. (Basically for that short part you have to use grenades only for that track to take out enemies, no guns.)

There may be other differences too, but I don't know them.

(BTW, go ahead and mod me offtopic. This post definitely merits it, and it's not like I'm hurting for karma.)

I was serious that is not a troll, nice one mods.