Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 16th Jan 2012 19:33 UTC
Big news from Capitol Hill in Washington DC today: House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa has said that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has been "shelved" in the House of Representatives, meaning it has been put on indefinite hold until a consensus about the act can be reached. Sadly, SOPA's counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) will still be pushed forward, meaning we must remain vigilant. Despite all of this, Wikipedia has announced it will join the blackout coming Wednesday.
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RE[4]: The negative attention was from the whitehouse too
by lucas_maximus on Mon 16th Jan 2012 22:54
in reply to "RE[3]: The negative attention was from the whitehouse too"
Member since:2009-08-18
RE[4]: The negative attention was from the whitehouse too
by sbergman27 on Mon 16th Jan 2012 23:02
in reply to "RE[3]: The negative attention was from the whitehouse too"
Member since:2005-07-24
Posting a statement like this in The Netherlands would be pointless - it would be chalked up as a sign of weakness on the side of the administration.
In case you haven't noticed, the US is not The Netherlands. My stay in your country was brief and many years ago. And it came at a bad time for me, personally. I was distracted. But even so, the differences were still glaringly obvious.
Thom, we're still arguing over creationism vs Evolution, here in the US. Creationism vs the Consensus Cosmology. The educational competence of our public school graduates is steadily falling through a hole in the floor, as documented by uniform, standardized testing, while our upper education continues to do well.
We're a nation of contrasts. And the bad tends to outnumber the good, by a substantial margin, viewed on a per capita basis. And yet we all have exactly the same vote. Meanwhile, politics is the art of finding the point at which your constituency is divided more or less 50/50, and pushing your own political agenda items right to the point that you think you might just be on the 50+ side of the 50/50 balance. (Sure, corporate interests and lobbies complicate the matter.)
You really cannot expect the straight-forward strategies, which might work in your country, to be as successful here.
Sad to say, but it's true. This may be why I interpret the White House statement in a different way than do you.
Sincerely,
Steve from Oklahoma
Edited 2012-01-16 23:06 UTC
RE[5]: The negative attention was from the whitehouse too
by Thom_Holwerda on Mon 16th Jan 2012 23:25
in reply to "RE[4]: The negative attention was from the whitehouse too"
Member since:2005-06-29
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
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Member since:
2005-06-29
While I see your point, I actually mean one and the same thing: the statement is empty because it's so utterly vague and lacks any decent definitions or 'hard' words - thus making it completely meaningless. Had the statement included a "...like SOPA" or "...like current proposals in the House and Senate", the statement would actually have teeth.
Another option would be for the statement to specifically define what is acceptable, and what isn't, according to Obama. Not doing either of these two makes it an empty statement. Posting a statement like this in The Netherlands would be pointless - it would be chalked up as a sign of weakness on the side of the administration.
It's not that complicated. There's a boatload of negative publicity going on right now, and several US senators and other supporters of the bill were backpedaling - never a good sign if you want a legislation pushed through. The White House statement, in my view, had far less influence - its lack of teeth would have made it possible for Obama to sign this law without losing any political face, i.e., he wouldn't violate the statement in the slightest if he did sign the law.