Touchscreens are a nice way to interact with phones and tablets (and phablets), and maybe someday we won't be able to keep our greasy fingers off our 5K desktop and laptop screens either.
Yeah, a big touchscreen looks great on a movie screen. In real life... not so much. There's a very good reason why every interface device that's ever actually been successful can be used, in its entirety, with the hands in a resting position, minimal wrist and elbow movements, and zero shoulder movement.
(And just to head off nitpickers, yes, the Wii remote violates this principle for some games, and yes, it's incredibly successful. Same with certain highly specialized video game controllers, such as the Guitar Hero guitar. These are highly specialized devices, though, that are not used for extended periods, nor for general-purpose device control. The standard usage of the Wii remote involves minimal movement; games where you swing it like a tennis racket are the exception.)
The thing about holding your hands up and moving them around in broad, sweeping gestures is that your arms will get tired surprisingly quickly. Go ahead, try it. Watch Minority Report and watch what they're doing on the screens, then try to do the exact same thing on a wall. See if you can keep it up for even ten minutes. But you can sit at a keyboard-and-mouse all day and not get worn out.
Umm... I didn't say it had no effect on anything. What kind of idiot could grow up in today's world and even be capable of thinking such a thing?!?
What I said is that it utterly and completely failed to fulfill the priests' doom-and-gloom predictions, just as each new technology that the copyright interests say is going to wipe them out ends up doing nothing of the sort.
Until the next one comes around. Obama's worse than Bush Jr. Bush Jr. was worse than Clinton. Clinton was worse than Bush Sr... and so on. Any good reason to think that's going to change when we get the next guy?
...and they liked it just fine that way. In fact, when Gutenberg invented the printing press, and the first thing he did with it was mass-produce a bunch of Bibles, the priests flipped out. "We must stamp out printing, or printing will stamp us out!" they said, showing that the MPAA's reaction to disruptive new technology is far older than the MPAA.
Well, that was over 500 years ago. The Printing Press and the Church are still both around and going strong.
The lawsuit (pdf), which includes a demand for a temporary injunction, seems destined for federal court rather than state court since none of the defendants are in Florida. ... ... ... Unfortunately, Florida only has a ridiculously narrow anti-SLAPP law, meaning that it won't be effective for the three women in question.
OK, color me confused here. Is this running under Florida rules or not?
But even if Level3 and and M-Lab's data confirms part of my suspicions, I can't claim to fully prove it without direct access to transit connection points and a close look at ISP hardware and traffic data -- no matter how many compelling charts I post. Neither can Dan Rayburn, Susan Crawford, or anybody else. Not quite yet.
But you don't need to. We're talking about streaming video over the Internet, right?
Well, the Supreme Court just recently established a new standard of evidence for video on the internet, and if this doesn't "look like a duck" I don't know what does! So the ISPs are guilty as charged. ;)
I've been saying it for years. For-profit medicine, in any form, is inherently a conflict of interest and should not be legal. And the reasons why just continue to pile up.
(And before anyone tries to nitpick this, I'm talking about actual medical practice, stuff that treats the sick and injured and saves lives. Purely voluntary stuff like plastic surgery should obviously not be held to the same standard.)
As The Register notes, earlier this year the Russian government demanded Apple and SAP turn over source code, presumably to check it over for surveillance backdoors.
That's not a bad idea at all, actually. One of the most fundamental laws of cryptography and information security, Kerckhoff's Principle, essentially states that you can't trust any product to be secure if you can't analyze the system. For software, that means getting the source.
Wow, the vitamin A actually reduced night vision? That just makes it even more deliciously ironic if you know the story behind that whole myth.
The idea that carrots improve your vision because they have a lot of vitamin A dates back to WW2. British intelligence didn't want the Germans finding out that they had invented radar, so the leaked some (completely made up) information about how they'd had a scientific breakthrough in a completely unrelated field: nutrition. Apparently feeding their RAF pilots lots of carrots gave them superhuman night vision, which was how they managed to do so well at intercepting German planes at night! And the idea just sort of stuck, even after the truth about radar came out.
Whether this is an indication that Alexander is no more prepared for the freedom of the "real word" than an ex-con who's just spent multiple decades behind bars or an indication that the former director's moral compass has always been just a bit off remains to be seen.
You call a compass that points due east "just a bit off"? Master of understatement here...
He also made a strong argument in favor of progressive taxation. Funny how directly quoting the Father of Capitalism will get you branded as a dirty socialist by "capitalists" these days...
Because that's worked sooooo well for us in the past.
Look at our recent history. Remember Bush Sr.? "Read my lips, no new taxes." And then he broke that promise, and the voters threw him out and replaced him with a guy who was just the opposite: a (relatively) young, hip, saxophone-playing cool dude who oh-by-the-way turned out to be a sexual predator.
So 8 years of one-scandal-after-another later, the American people were sick of Bill Clinton, so we went and elected a guy who was just the opposite. With the way he ended up getting caricatured later on in his presidency, it's easy to forget that Dubya originally ran on very explicitly being the anti-Clinton and "restoring dignity to the White House." Yeah.
And after 8 years of doing his best to destroy what little dignity remained to the office of President after Clinton, the American people were sick of him and we went and elected someone who essentially ran on exactly the same platform as Dubya did: Hope And Change. Obama positioned himself as the guy who was just the opposite, and it worked... and look what it got us.
Every president has been worse than the one before him for, at the very least, 4 presidencies now. But if this continues, and we elect our next president because of who he's not again, instead of who he is, then things will just continue to get worse. Remember the definition of insanity popularly attributed to Albert Einstein: continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results.
While surveillance may not be a top voting issue these days, many inside DC seem to be underestimating just how important it is to many people.
Well yeah. How often do they actually make issues that are important to most people into voting issues?
Think back two years. In the run-up to the 2012 elections, there was one political issue that got people throughout the country and throughout the world really fired up. Not just "I'm going to talk about this" levels, but to the point where they actually went out and took action. Calling lawmakers in record numbers, overwhelming Congressional switchboards, etc. And Techdirt was right in the middle of it, so anyone who's been following this site for that long should remember what it was: opposition to SOPA.
Considering that the Obama administration in general, and Vice President Joe Biden in particular, have been strongly cheerleading every horrible copyright abuse proposal that's come along since 2008, when I heard that every Republican candidate had spoken out in opposition to SOPA, I thought "OK, it's all over now. Obama's on the way out."
Of course, we all know what happened, or more specifically, what didn't happen. In a stunning miscalculation, somehow the Romney campaign utterly failed to make opposition to copyright abuse any part of their platform after that brief mention of support back in the primaries. And so nobody captured the votes of the one massive bloc of Americans who actually had a political issue that they cared deeply about... and we got stuck with the status quo.
Not really. To look at the code, you need to have the code available. Software is very unique from a copyright perspective in this aspect.
If you read a book, you have everything that makes up the book right there in front of you. You can study it and analyze it if you want, and learn from the literary techniques used by the author. Same thing with a song. There are entire university courses on analyzing writing and songwriting/composing techniques, and they use actual existing writing and music... because they can.
But with software, what you see is not what the author created. The author created source code, which is a set of instructions to a compiler, a specialized program whose job it is to build a working program in machine code. (That's simplifying things a bit, but to anyone who's not into pretty deep computer science theory, that's an accurate enough description.)
The difference between the finished product, that game scholars can look at, and the code--the actual creative work--is as significant as the difference between a blueprint and the building built from it! And yet copyright law, unfortunately, does not acknowledge this. It behaves as if the final program is a creative work worthy of protection, and the source code doesn't even exist. For any software that is not open-source, this means that unless you have some privileged position with the authors of the work, you have no good way to analyze it. (And yes, again, technically I'm oversimplifying things. There are tools that can "decompile" finished programs into some sort of source code. But without exception, they suck and are useless for 99% of tasks that you would actually want source code for.)
Imagine a world in which the only scholars able to analyze Hemingway's work were those employed by Hemingway, Inc., and only those who worked for TwainCorp could explore the writings of Mark Twain, and so forth. Comparative side-by-side analysis would of course be impossible, because their literary techniques are closely held trade secrets, and you can't go from Hemingway, Inc. to TwainCorp or vice-versa and take any copies with you.
Just imagine what the state of literature would be like in such a world. It would be... well... about as bad as software development is in our world.
By contrast, something Brandon Sanderson once said has always stuck with me. Sanderson is a bestselling fantasy author, known for (among other things) being selected to finish Robert Jordan's epic The Wheel of TIme after Jordan died. It must have taken quite the leap of faith to put him in charge of such an ambitious project; at the time of Robert Jordan's death, Brandon Sanderson had only three published novels to his name. But he managed to finish the series, and most fans agree he did a great job at it.
In between all that, he kept writing his own original work, cranking out book after book, including starting a massive epic of his own. Someone asked him once how he manages it all, and he said "I think the big advantage I have, that Robert Jordan never had, is that I was able to study the work of Robert Jordan."
Just imagine if software developers had that same advantage, and actually could "look at, y'know, the code."
On the post: DailyDirt: Beyond Simple Mice And Touchscreens
Someone's been watching too much Minority Report
Yeah, a big touchscreen looks great on a movie screen. In real life... not so much. There's a very good reason why every interface device that's ever actually been successful can be used, in its entirety, with the hands in a resting position, minimal wrist and elbow movements, and zero shoulder movement.
(And just to head off nitpickers, yes, the Wii remote violates this principle for some games, and yes, it's incredibly successful. Same with certain highly specialized video game controllers, such as the Guitar Hero guitar. These are highly specialized devices, though, that are not used for extended periods, nor for general-purpose device control. The standard usage of the Wii remote involves minimal movement; games where you swing it like a tennis racket are the exception.)
The thing about holding your hands up and moving them around in broad, sweeping gestures is that your arms will get tired surprisingly quickly. Go ahead, try it. Watch Minority Report and watch what they're doing on the screens, then try to do the exact same thing on a wall. See if you can keep it up for even ten minutes. But you can sit at a keyboard-and-mouse all day and not get worn out.
On the post: County Prosecutor Looking To Arrest Housing Official After Agency Demands $16,000 To Fulfill FOIA Request
Negligent?
"How do you plead?"
"Not guilty, your honor. The statute specifies the standard of guilt as negligence, and my acts were completely willful."
"The court finds the defendant not guilty." *gavel whack* "Court is adjourned."
On the post: Demonizing Strong Encryption: Welcome To The Crypto Wars 2.0
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Who the hell are they?
What I said is that it utterly and completely failed to fulfill the priests' doom-and-gloom predictions, just as each new technology that the copyright interests say is going to wipe them out ends up doing nothing of the sort.
On the post: Surprise: President Obama Calls For Real Net Neutrality
Re: Re: Re: I'm shocked. And stunned.
On the post: Demonizing Strong Encryption: Welcome To The Crypto Wars 2.0
Re: Re: Re: Who the hell are they?
Well, that was over 500 years ago. The Printing Press and the Church are still both around and going strong.
On the post: Roca Labs Sues Witness Who Came Forward In Its Lawsuit Against PissedConsumer
OK, color me confused here. Is this running under Florida rules or not?
On the post: Are Apple, Google, Microsoft And Mozilla Helping Governments Carry Out Man-In-The-Middle Attacks?
Re:
On the post: Without Greater Transparency And Meaningful Net Neutrality Rules, The Netflix Interconnection War Will Get Much, Much Uglier
But you don't need to. We're talking about streaming video over the Internet, right?
Well, the Supreme Court just recently established a new standard of evidence for video on the internet, and if this doesn't "look like a duck" I don't know what does! So the ISPs are guilty as charged. ;)
On the post: Russian Law Demanding User Data Remain On Russian Soil Could Turn Into A Ban On Apple Products
Re: Re:
On the post: Now It's Canada's Turn To Decide On The Patentability Of Genes
(And before anyone tries to nitpick this, I'm talking about actual medical practice, stuff that treats the sick and injured and saves lives. Purely voluntary stuff like plastic surgery should obviously not be held to the same standard.)
On the post: Russian Law Demanding User Data Remain On Russian Soil Could Turn Into A Ban On Apple Products
That's not a bad idea at all, actually. One of the most fundamental laws of cryptography and information security, Kerckhoff's Principle, essentially states that you can't trust any product to be secure if you can't analyze the system. For software, that means getting the source.
On the post: Verizon May Soon Get to Enjoy a Lawsuit Over Its Sneaky Use of Perma-Cookies
Security consultant Ken White
On the post: DailyDirt: Crowdfunding Science!
The idea that carrots improve your vision because they have a lot of vitamin A dates back to WW2. British intelligence didn't want the Germans finding out that they had invented radar, so the leaked some (completely made up) information about how they'd had a scientific breakthrough in a completely unrelated field: nutrition. Apparently feeding their RAF pilots lots of carrots gave them superhuman night vision, which was how they managed to do so well at intercepting German planes at night! And the idea just sort of stuck, even after the truth about radar came out.
On the post: Keith Alexander's Investments While At The NSA Included A Data Storage Provider For AT&T
You call a compass that points due east "just a bit off"? Master of understatement here...
On the post: Guy Accused Of Operating Silk Road 2.0 Arrested In SF... Just Like The Last One
Re: Re: Elon Musk and tesla connections
On the post: Now In Charge Of Congress, GOP Plans To Give Up Its Own Constitutional Powers To The Obama Administration
Re: Re: Re: Re: And this is why I don't vote
On the post: Now In Charge Of Congress, GOP Plans To Give Up Its Own Constitutional Powers To The Obama Administration
Re: Re: Re: Re: And this is why I don't vote
Look at our recent history. Remember Bush Sr.? "Read my lips, no new taxes." And then he broke that promise, and the voters threw him out and replaced him with a guy who was just the opposite: a (relatively) young, hip, saxophone-playing cool dude who oh-by-the-way turned out to be a sexual predator.
So 8 years of one-scandal-after-another later, the American people were sick of Bill Clinton, so we went and elected a guy who was just the opposite. With the way he ended up getting caricatured later on in his presidency, it's easy to forget that Dubya originally ran on very explicitly being the anti-Clinton and "restoring dignity to the White House." Yeah.
And after 8 years of doing his best to destroy what little dignity remained to the office of President after Clinton, the American people were sick of him and we went and elected someone who essentially ran on exactly the same platform as Dubya did: Hope And Change. Obama positioned himself as the guy who was just the opposite, and it worked... and look what it got us.
Every president has been worse than the one before him for, at the very least, 4 presidencies now. But if this continues, and we elect our next president because of who he's not again, instead of who he is, then things will just continue to get worse. Remember the definition of insanity popularly attributed to Albert Einstein: continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results.
On the post: DailyDirt: Looking Fashionable In New Spacesuit Designs
On the post: Hillary Clinton Still Refuses To Make Her Views Clear On Surveillance, And That's A Problem
Well yeah. How often do they actually make issues that are important to most people into voting issues?
Think back two years. In the run-up to the 2012 elections, there was one political issue that got people throughout the country and throughout the world really fired up. Not just "I'm going to talk about this" levels, but to the point where they actually went out and took action. Calling lawmakers in record numbers, overwhelming Congressional switchboards, etc. And Techdirt was right in the middle of it, so anyone who's been following this site for that long should remember what it was: opposition to SOPA.
Considering that the Obama administration in general, and Vice President Joe Biden in particular, have been strongly cheerleading every horrible copyright abuse proposal that's come along since 2008, when I heard that every Republican candidate had spoken out in opposition to SOPA, I thought "OK, it's all over now. Obama's on the way out."
Of course, we all know what happened, or more specifically, what didn't happen. In a stunning miscalculation, somehow the Romney campaign utterly failed to make opposition to copyright abuse any part of their platform after that brief mention of support back in the primaries. And so nobody captured the votes of the one massive bloc of Americans who actually had a political issue that they cared deeply about... and we got stuck with the status quo.
On the post: Latest EFF DMCA Exemption Requests Include The Right to Tinker With and Maintain Unsupported Video Games
Re: Re:
If you read a book, you have everything that makes up the book right there in front of you. You can study it and analyze it if you want, and learn from the literary techniques used by the author. Same thing with a song. There are entire university courses on analyzing writing and songwriting/composing techniques, and they use actual existing writing and music... because they can.
But with software, what you see is not what the author created. The author created source code, which is a set of instructions to a compiler, a specialized program whose job it is to build a working program in machine code. (That's simplifying things a bit, but to anyone who's not into pretty deep computer science theory, that's an accurate enough description.)
The difference between the finished product, that game scholars can look at, and the code--the actual creative work--is as significant as the difference between a blueprint and the building built from it! And yet copyright law, unfortunately, does not acknowledge this. It behaves as if the final program is a creative work worthy of protection, and the source code doesn't even exist. For any software that is not open-source, this means that unless you have some privileged position with the authors of the work, you have no good way to analyze it. (And yes, again, technically I'm oversimplifying things. There are tools that can "decompile" finished programs into some sort of source code. But without exception, they suck and are useless for 99% of tasks that you would actually want source code for.)
Imagine a world in which the only scholars able to analyze Hemingway's work were those employed by Hemingway, Inc., and only those who worked for TwainCorp could explore the writings of Mark Twain, and so forth. Comparative side-by-side analysis would of course be impossible, because their literary techniques are closely held trade secrets, and you can't go from Hemingway, Inc. to TwainCorp or vice-versa and take any copies with you.
Just imagine what the state of literature would be like in such a world. It would be... well... about as bad as software development is in our world.
By contrast, something Brandon Sanderson once said has always stuck with me. Sanderson is a bestselling fantasy author, known for (among other things) being selected to finish Robert Jordan's epic The Wheel of TIme after Jordan died. It must have taken quite the leap of faith to put him in charge of such an ambitious project; at the time of Robert Jordan's death, Brandon Sanderson had only three published novels to his name. But he managed to finish the series, and most fans agree he did a great job at it.
In between all that, he kept writing his own original work, cranking out book after book, including starting a massive epic of his own. Someone asked him once how he manages it all, and he said "I think the big advantage I have, that Robert Jordan never had, is that I was able to study the work of Robert Jordan."
Just imagine if software developers had that same advantage, and actually could "look at, y'know, the code."
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