Comment mod mistake (Score 0) 481
is why i'm posting....
Comment Re:Google hardware? (Score 2) 116
Unlike patents with non practicing entities, isn't it a requirement for trademark if I recall correctly?
Pretty much, but not exactly. "Use" or "Intent to Use" (in commerce) are the two basis for trademark, and the latter essentially provides you with 6 months to enter the marketplace. Surprisingly, that actually makes sense, as it lets people protect names as they set out with a business or product, rather than have to wait until after the fact.
Submission + - Palm Accidently Leaks webOS 1.2
El Royo writes: "Today, Palm leaked version 1.2 of the webOS operating system that powers the Palm Pre. According to PreCentral the new version was inadvertently included in a recovery tool Palm makes available. New features include support for the forthcoming App Catalog changes, copy and paste from Web sites, improved e-mail search and faster boot times."
Submission + - Cell phone cost calculator killed in Canada (thestar.com)
inject_hotmail.com writes: Internet and law genius Michael Geist writes about some shinanigans by the cell phone carriers and the Canadian government in his column in The Star. Canadian tax payers funded a "Cell Phone Cost Calculator" so that the average person could theoretically wade through the disjointed and incongruent package offerings just to have to yanked a couple weeks before launch. Michael Geist suggests that the major cell carriers lobbied the appropriate public officials to have the program nixed because it would bite into their profit if the general people could make sense out of pricing and fees. Geist continues "Sensing that [Tony] Clement (Industry Minister) was facing pressure to block the calculator, Canadian consumer groups wrote to the minister, urging him to stick with it.". Moving forward Michael makes a novel suggestion, one that would show an immense level of understanding by the government — "With public dollars having funded the mothballed project, the government should now consider releasing the calculator's source code and enable other groups to pick up where the OCA (Office of Consumer Affairs) left off."
Submission + - SPAM: Air Force, NASA fire off green rocket
coondoggie writes: "NASA and Air Force said today they had successfully launched a 9ft rocket 1,300 feet into the sky powered by aluminum powder and water ice. Aluminum powder and water ice, or ALICE, has the potential to replace some liquid or solid propellants and is being developed by Purdue University and Pennsylvania State University to possibly replace liquid or solid rocket propellants. Aside from the environmental impact ALICE could be manufactured in distant places like the moon or Mars, instead of being transported to distant locations at high cost, researchers said.
[spam URL stripped]"
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Submission + - Why AT&T killed Google Voice
ZuchinniOne writes: "The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article about the likely reasons that AT&T and Apple killed the Google Voice application."
"With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone--office, home or cellular--rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago."
They also go on to discuss why it would be a good thing to "Transition away from "owning" airwaves" and "End municipal exclusivity deals for cable companies" and how all of this would likely strengthen Net Neutrality through a competitive marketplace that anyone could enter.
"With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone--office, home or cellular--rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago."
They also go on to discuss why it would be a good thing to "Transition away from "owning" airwaves" and "End municipal exclusivity deals for cable companies" and how all of this would likely strengthen Net Neutrality through a competitive marketplace that anyone could enter.
Entropy Problems For Linux In the Cloud 179
CalTrumpet writes "Our research group recently spoke at Black Hat USA on the topic of cloud computing security. One of the interesting outcomes of our research was the discovery that the combination of virtualization technologies and public system images results in a problem for random number generation on guest operating systems. This is especially true for Linux, since its PRNG uses only a small set of entropy-gathering events, and virtual Linux images often generate SSH host keys within seconds of their initial boot. The slides are available; the PRNG vulnerability material begins at slide 63."
Submission + - Fermi Paradox = Fewer than 10 ET Civilizations? (technologyreview.com) 5
Al writes: "The Fermi Paradox focuses on the existence of advanced civilisations elsewhere in the galaxy. If these civilisations are out there--and many analyses suggest the galaxy should be teaming with life--why haven't we seen them? Carlos Cotta and Álvaro Morales from the University of Malaga in Spain add an another angle to the discussion about the speed at which a sufficiently advanced civilisation could colonise the galaxy. Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy. Others have calculated that it may be closer to 13 billion years, which may explain ET's absence. Cotta and Morales study how automated probes sent ahead of the colonisation could explore the galaxy. If these probes left evidence of a visit that lasts for 100 million years, then there can be no more than about 10 civilisations out there."
Comment Re:But... (Score 1) 229
But can it run on Linux?Dude, you can run linux on a wristwatch. The question is, can it run Vista?
LMAO. Such simple words could not be truer.
Feed The Register: Linux helps damper Novell's losses (theregister.com)
OS sales up 77 per cent year-over-year
Novell narrowed losses in the third quarter, bolstered by the SUSE Linux business beginning to pull more weight.
Feed The Register: Terror-cops get realtime Congestion Charge database link (theregister.com)
Home Office gives dunce-bombers a victory after all
British terror-plods will be given real-time access to the massive camera network operated in London to support the Congestion Charge, it has been reported.
Feed The Register: Sprint boots 1,000 phone customers for talking too much (theregister.com)
So long, annoying people
Sprint-Nextel has terminated the accounts of its 1,000 most-annoying customers. After a recent internal review, the U.S. wireless carrier gave at least 1,000 people the boot because they've been making far too many calls to the company's customer care centers. Of course, the real shocker is that the company has agreed to wave their termination fees.
Embedded Linux Primer 59
s1axter writes "Embedded system development is crucial in this day of high tech specialized appliances and devices. However much of the knowledge of embedded development resides in the heads of engineers who have been doing it for years. The hardware aspect of embedded systems is now available to the smaller startup companies, however many specialized, proprietary operating systems are not. This is where Linux and the book Embedded Linux Primer: A Practical Real-World Approach enters. Embedded Linux Primer is written to introduce engineers and designers to using the Linux operating systems for embedded applications." Read on for s1axter's review.
Submission + - Devices of the Soul
Michael J. Ross and Dan Sisson writes: In our increasingly mechanized world, we repeatedly hear promises that every new digital product, computerized service, or other form of technology, will make our lives easier — bestowing greater leisure, health, and happiness. Yet are any of those promises being fulfilled? Are we not instead becoming slaves to the very "conveniences" that we struggle to master? These weighty questions are addressed by Steve Talbott in his book Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines.
Published by O'Reilly Media in April 2007, under ISBNs 0596526806 and 978-0596526801, Devices of the Soul argues that we are now blindly accepting technology with little or no countervailing efforts or even awareness, and we are paying a terrible toll, both individually and as a society.
From the day a child of the 21st century begins his education, he is confronted with mind-numbing statistics, numbers, and facts via the computer — which he must accept. Perhaps even more important, he must master its "techniques" as the sine qua non tool to be successful in life. This is not a voyage of self-discovery; it is a demand by "the system" that the individual accept a way of viewing the world that invades, conquers, and ultimately controls his life. The child will learn most of what he knows with it, play with it, talk with it, and allow his thinking to be ruled by it — all because it is the magical machine that gives him access to the world's knowledge, e.g., the Internet.
By the time this child makes the transition from high school to college, he will be required to accept a curriculum that too often lacks meaning and content, that fails to allow him to satisfy his own curiosity about the challenges facing humanity, and is, moreover, expensive and will likely lead to indebtedness. There are few alternatives to this gauntlet, especially if one wishes to belong to the 'credentialed society', which determines modern man's measure of success.
But education is only the first stage in the numbing of our consciousness. What follows is built upon this edifice. Our acceptance of machines — ubiquitous in our everyday lives — provides our food, transportation, entertainment, information, and prestige — in sum, everything we need to function in modern society.
Talbott shows how the machines we use create a grand illusion, namely, that by having every technological gadget, we will save time and money, and be able to spend more time with our family and loved ones. However, that leisure time never materializes. The technology costs more, not less. Consequently, we find ourselves in a perpetual struggle to preserve a bare minimum of human emotions and instincts.
The next stage in the individual's life is integration into the mature world of the computerized economy, i.e., when he becomes a "stakeholder." He accepts a world that does away with human values and subordinates him to "market values." Furthermore, he is bound to lose his sense of privacy.
It follows that almost everyone willingly accepts that advancement in life and career increasingly requires having electronic conversations with machines — and eventually robots — that will never ask us what our personal assumptions and/or values are, and have no intentions of doing so. In short, our resistance to the machine fades. It is "far easier to assign the intelligence solely to the machine than to seek out those tortured pathways" to the human urges within us. Society itself, not just the individual, says Talbott, "is unsurprisingly assuming the character of our technology."
The outcome is grim: "Historically, there appears to be an element of tragedy in all this. We stumble along in ignorance and, by the time we realize the subtle ways our actions have caught up with us, the damage and loss are already irrevocable." (p. 31).
Technology expresses itself in numbers and computations divorced from human values. Efficiency is nearly the sole criterion by which modern corporations make decisions, and it is no accident that these two ideas, human values versus efficiency, are mutually exclusive. In objecting to the mess we humans have created, Talbott notes: "If you want human values, if you want qualitative distinctions, then your theoretical constructs must retain those values and distinctions every step of the way. The minute you allow them to collapse into number alone, you have no way to get back from there to the qualitative world." (p. 252).
Despite these tragic overtones, he argues that we can and must return to that qualitative world where we can realize our deepest human qualities. We can retain our humanity in connection to the natural world, despite using tools skillfully, as exemplified by the wily trickster Odysseus, as well as Tomo, a member of the Waorani Indians in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador who demonstrated phenomenal knowledge of his world.
His prescription for humanity's emergence from this present Dark Age also includes developing a strong sense of history. We must realize how other humans expressed their individuality, and realized their hopes and dreams. Despite the fact that Americans generally have little appreciation for or cognizance of history, there may come a time when reading history may be the only place to find models of human behavior that went against the technophilic grain.
Interspersed throughout his analysis, Talbott offers suggestions to arrest this headlong rush into a mechanized future. They tend to be general in nature, such as urging us to seek a sense of "place," and to engage in conversations with our fellow men (and even our machines) to remind them of our human needs. Echoing Edward Abbey, who attempted to alert us to the environmental disasters of the 1960's with books like The Monkey Wrench Gang, Talbott writes, "This may at times require us to throw a wrench into the machinery in order to serve the worthy human intentions behind it." (p. 261).
Despite Talbott's skills as a writer, the book, sadly, has some substantial flaws. Two of the most obvious are the overly long digressions into the stories of Jacques Lusseyran and Martha Beck, which admittedly are fascinating, but delay the presentation of more topical material. Furthermore, they suggest that Talbott is misidentifying the emotional power of those stories as proof of his arguments, and thus committing the common error of anecdotal evidence. Even worse, they border on romanticizing blindness and Down syndrome, respectively.
He also fails to address a major factor in our growing discontent with the Information Age: the nonstop ratcheting up of our expectations, driven largely by marketing on the seller side, and a lack of philosophic questioning on the consumer side.
A common pattern in the book is a deep criticism of any given aspect or consequence of technology, to the extent that Talbott appears to be arguing that we should do away with it completely. But he often then wraps up his analysis by briefly contradicting the earlier implication, and stating that he does not believe the phenomenon at issue should be eradicated. This schizophrenic reasoning mixes bold, blanket criticisms with assurances to the contrary. Yet one may argue that, with so much of current social discourse failing to question technology, its critics must never err with overly cautious warnings.
There are other problems in his analysis: He invests much hope in what he terms "conversation," "meaning," and "value" — not clearly specified, and yet spoken of highly. He fears machine intelligence (and perhaps rightly so), and doubts its viability, but fails to understand its potential for emergence. Even though a former computer programmer, he does not seem to understand the value of abstraction, and the possibility that it can be used beneficially, without being considered the only source of important knowledge. Lastly, it is odd that he does not cite the pioneering work of a well-known predecessor, Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society.
Nonetheless, the issues that Talbott raises are of critical importance — so much so that they make his lapses of logic that much more maddening. Because so much is at stake, our efforts at analyzing, understanding, and solving these problems, must be proportionally energetic and effective. Technophiles may dismiss his entire effort based upon the book's weaknesses, and consequently miss out on the valuable gist of his viewpoint. Similarly, impatient readers in our age of limited attention spans, might not make it through the aforesaid tangents, and likewise miss out.
The issues that he discusses should be raised more often and more loudly, with broader acceptance and expansion of the debate and its importance. Otherwise, we will continue our robotic march deeper into a future that is controlled more by soulless devices, and less by skeptical humans. If we fail completely to change course, we may be saddled with a life that is intolerable to the human spirit.
Devices of the Soul is an insightful, disturbing, imperfect, eloquent, and important contribution to what may ultimately become the most critical debate in the intensifying conflict between humans and our technological creations: Humans may survive, but will our humanity?
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, freelance writer, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter. Dan Sisson is an adjunct professor at Eastern Washington University, where he has taught technology courses for the past eight years; he is an authority on Thomas Jefferson, is author of The American Revolution of 1800, and is currently building and living in a replica of Monticello.
Published by O'Reilly Media in April 2007, under ISBNs 0596526806 and 978-0596526801, Devices of the Soul argues that we are now blindly accepting technology with little or no countervailing efforts or even awareness, and we are paying a terrible toll, both individually and as a society.
From the day a child of the 21st century begins his education, he is confronted with mind-numbing statistics, numbers, and facts via the computer — which he must accept. Perhaps even more important, he must master its "techniques" as the sine qua non tool to be successful in life. This is not a voyage of self-discovery; it is a demand by "the system" that the individual accept a way of viewing the world that invades, conquers, and ultimately controls his life. The child will learn most of what he knows with it, play with it, talk with it, and allow his thinking to be ruled by it — all because it is the magical machine that gives him access to the world's knowledge, e.g., the Internet.
By the time this child makes the transition from high school to college, he will be required to accept a curriculum that too often lacks meaning and content, that fails to allow him to satisfy his own curiosity about the challenges facing humanity, and is, moreover, expensive and will likely lead to indebtedness. There are few alternatives to this gauntlet, especially if one wishes to belong to the 'credentialed society', which determines modern man's measure of success.
But education is only the first stage in the numbing of our consciousness. What follows is built upon this edifice. Our acceptance of machines — ubiquitous in our everyday lives — provides our food, transportation, entertainment, information, and prestige — in sum, everything we need to function in modern society.
Talbott shows how the machines we use create a grand illusion, namely, that by having every technological gadget, we will save time and money, and be able to spend more time with our family and loved ones. However, that leisure time never materializes. The technology costs more, not less. Consequently, we find ourselves in a perpetual struggle to preserve a bare minimum of human emotions and instincts.
The next stage in the individual's life is integration into the mature world of the computerized economy, i.e., when he becomes a "stakeholder." He accepts a world that does away with human values and subordinates him to "market values." Furthermore, he is bound to lose his sense of privacy.
It follows that almost everyone willingly accepts that advancement in life and career increasingly requires having electronic conversations with machines — and eventually robots — that will never ask us what our personal assumptions and/or values are, and have no intentions of doing so. In short, our resistance to the machine fades. It is "far easier to assign the intelligence solely to the machine than to seek out those tortured pathways" to the human urges within us. Society itself, not just the individual, says Talbott, "is unsurprisingly assuming the character of our technology."
The outcome is grim: "Historically, there appears to be an element of tragedy in all this. We stumble along in ignorance and, by the time we realize the subtle ways our actions have caught up with us, the damage and loss are already irrevocable." (p. 31).
Technology expresses itself in numbers and computations divorced from human values. Efficiency is nearly the sole criterion by which modern corporations make decisions, and it is no accident that these two ideas, human values versus efficiency, are mutually exclusive. In objecting to the mess we humans have created, Talbott notes: "If you want human values, if you want qualitative distinctions, then your theoretical constructs must retain those values and distinctions every step of the way. The minute you allow them to collapse into number alone, you have no way to get back from there to the qualitative world." (p. 252).
Despite these tragic overtones, he argues that we can and must return to that qualitative world where we can realize our deepest human qualities. We can retain our humanity in connection to the natural world, despite using tools skillfully, as exemplified by the wily trickster Odysseus, as well as Tomo, a member of the Waorani Indians in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador who demonstrated phenomenal knowledge of his world.
His prescription for humanity's emergence from this present Dark Age also includes developing a strong sense of history. We must realize how other humans expressed their individuality, and realized their hopes and dreams. Despite the fact that Americans generally have little appreciation for or cognizance of history, there may come a time when reading history may be the only place to find models of human behavior that went against the technophilic grain.
Interspersed throughout his analysis, Talbott offers suggestions to arrest this headlong rush into a mechanized future. They tend to be general in nature, such as urging us to seek a sense of "place," and to engage in conversations with our fellow men (and even our machines) to remind them of our human needs. Echoing Edward Abbey, who attempted to alert us to the environmental disasters of the 1960's with books like The Monkey Wrench Gang, Talbott writes, "This may at times require us to throw a wrench into the machinery in order to serve the worthy human intentions behind it." (p. 261).
Despite Talbott's skills as a writer, the book, sadly, has some substantial flaws. Two of the most obvious are the overly long digressions into the stories of Jacques Lusseyran and Martha Beck, which admittedly are fascinating, but delay the presentation of more topical material. Furthermore, they suggest that Talbott is misidentifying the emotional power of those stories as proof of his arguments, and thus committing the common error of anecdotal evidence. Even worse, they border on romanticizing blindness and Down syndrome, respectively.
He also fails to address a major factor in our growing discontent with the Information Age: the nonstop ratcheting up of our expectations, driven largely by marketing on the seller side, and a lack of philosophic questioning on the consumer side.
A common pattern in the book is a deep criticism of any given aspect or consequence of technology, to the extent that Talbott appears to be arguing that we should do away with it completely. But he often then wraps up his analysis by briefly contradicting the earlier implication, and stating that he does not believe the phenomenon at issue should be eradicated. This schizophrenic reasoning mixes bold, blanket criticisms with assurances to the contrary. Yet one may argue that, with so much of current social discourse failing to question technology, its critics must never err with overly cautious warnings.
There are other problems in his analysis: He invests much hope in what he terms "conversation," "meaning," and "value" — not clearly specified, and yet spoken of highly. He fears machine intelligence (and perhaps rightly so), and doubts its viability, but fails to understand its potential for emergence. Even though a former computer programmer, he does not seem to understand the value of abstraction, and the possibility that it can be used beneficially, without being considered the only source of important knowledge. Lastly, it is odd that he does not cite the pioneering work of a well-known predecessor, Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society.
Nonetheless, the issues that Talbott raises are of critical importance — so much so that they make his lapses of logic that much more maddening. Because so much is at stake, our efforts at analyzing, understanding, and solving these problems, must be proportionally energetic and effective. Technophiles may dismiss his entire effort based upon the book's weaknesses, and consequently miss out on the valuable gist of his viewpoint. Similarly, impatient readers in our age of limited attention spans, might not make it through the aforesaid tangents, and likewise miss out.
The issues that he discusses should be raised more often and more loudly, with broader acceptance and expansion of the debate and its importance. Otherwise, we will continue our robotic march deeper into a future that is controlled more by soulless devices, and less by skeptical humans. If we fail completely to change course, we may be saddled with a life that is intolerable to the human spirit.
Devices of the Soul is an insightful, disturbing, imperfect, eloquent, and important contribution to what may ultimately become the most critical debate in the intensifying conflict between humans and our technological creations: Humans may survive, but will our humanity?
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, freelance writer, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter. Dan Sisson is an adjunct professor at Eastern Washington University, where he has taught technology courses for the past eight years; he is an authority on Thomas Jefferson, is author of The American Revolution of 1800, and is currently building and living in a replica of Monticello.
Practical Ruby Gems 101
TimHunter writes "I was skeptical when I first saw the title of David Berube's new book, Practical Ruby Gems, from Apress. Do Ruby programmers really need a book devoted entirely to add-on libraries? Most Ruby programmers already know about the RubyGems package management system, and most already have their set of favorite gems. About a third of the way through the book I grudgingly admitted that Rubyists might be able to use this book. After all, even long-time Ruby programmers are unlikely to know about all the gems covered in this book. So then I had a new question. Would I find something in this book that made me say 'I didn't know you can do that with Ruby!'" Read on for the rest of Tim's review.
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Going the speed of light is bad for your age.
