bcaulf

Exactly! If physical security were like crypto, we could all afford to have the security of a head of state. People who want high security rely on effective specific countermeasures, not just law enforcement generally. Law enforcement helps your security but it is not the whole answer.

Strong crypto is an amazing thing, allowing anyone to achieve privacy that cannot be broken by eavesdropping. That is true today the same as it was before the latest NSA news broke. With such a tool available, it is crazy not to use it. The cost and difficulty are small and the protection is robust against any eavesdropper, not just the US gov't.

But Autocar also do comparisons that don't really mean much, like a track race between an SUV and a trackday special. The rolling start race with the Aston isn't meant to signify anything other than the real world result of the huge torque in an all electric. When the Model S ships in the UK their review will be a must read. This is just a little fun.

But engaging the press in a press release war creates the wrong image for the company. Who will hear about it? Viewers of Top Gear and the NY Times. And they won't be likely to guess their beloved news source is in the wrong. You can't win that kind of fight and he should have known better than to try. I can't believe it has been good for Tesla on balance.

No mention of machine language or assembly; no mention of functional or declarative style languages like Prolog, SQL, SetL; no mention of major languages like PL/1, Basic, Ada, Algol; no mention of a compiler or interpreter; one line on Lisp, banishing it to 1959; no mention of any theoretical underpinnings like Turing machines, Lambda calculus, computability.

I couldn't understand why anyone would put so much effort into making it look pretty and so little into making it communicate until I got to the end and learned it is just an advertisement for a security auditing program. They are really only concerned with current popular programming languages because that is what their prospective customers are using.

"You'd have to be a real idiot to skate to where the puck used to be"

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  .wsj.com

You do need to be more careful with moisture and dropping damage than with a book. (Buy the warranty.) But if you get non-DRM content or remove the DRM, you can give a copy away, which I love.

I do still buy used books when the book is unavailable but in a few years I expect that will not often be the case.

The breakthrough e-book, Kindle, is similar. If you follow the brightly lit path, you'll start buying books. But there is a balance and users who want to avoid DRM content altogether are free to do so. Most of my news subscriptions are free of charge RSS and scrapes via the open source e-book manager Calibre.

The Kindle DRM, like all the e-book DRM out there, is weak and can be removed easily by readily available scripts. The current stream of commercially available e-books is being stripped of DRM and made available continuously.

So, the available readers are open for sharing.

E-books are tiny, mostly less than 2 MB uncompressed. It will always be easy to transfer lots of books quickly over any decent network link. Because the content is text, it is never going to become out of date and need to be re-ripped at a higher sampling rate. The analog hole, which is very real and relevant for all forms of media, is massive for books since the content can be OCR'ed or even retyped with relative ease.

So, current and future e-books are not protected effectively against copying.

I don't think the no-book-lending scenario has any chance of happening.

It sounds like you are happy to sacrifice Hollywood movies. Fine. But there are so many other creative activities that do require some form of copyright or patent protection and enforcement in order to generate revenue. Do you really think we would still have professional studio musicians and recording engineers, journalists, fiction writers, critics, copy editors, if all copying were legal? Do you want to ditch all of that and be left with only amateur work? Or maybe we can have extensive product placement in all creative works, so there's some revenue source.

Linux and Wikipedia are amazing but I don't think their model applies to everything.

Individual copying of music has been popular since home taping became available from the early 60's on. My friends and I had lots of home recorded compact cassettes in the 80s. The youth of that day felt perfectly entitled to tape whatever they wanted. The coming of CD's meant that the first generation tape was perfect with no additional hiss.

Digital copying became popular as soon as home CD-R came along. I remember being amazed when $1.50 blank CD-Rs and $500 burners came along in the mid 90s. I soon had a pile of bit for bit perfect copies. No generational loss, nothing missing but the cover art.

Even if the internet or peer-to-peer had never come into use, there would today be a huge casual piracy scene based on MP3s, FLACs, portable hard drives and burned discs. If the publishing industry somehow manages to stuff the P2P genie back in the bottle, that's where we'll end up.

Go outside and fill up a memory card while you systematically work through the settings. After you get the hang of exposure you can start in on the different settings for metering, autofocus, manual focus, jpeg processing, black and white, motor drive, use of flash, different lenses, not to mention composition choices, interacting with the subject, use of filters, creative panning or rotating. Real photography is more fun than tweaking sliders on a flash app.

Franz Allegro CL is a further development of Maclisp, developed during Project MAC at MIT. ZetaLisp was also a direct development of Maclisp. I'm guessing this shared ancestry helped in the software porting and made Franz the natural choice for the N-Graphics. But the press release just blows a lot of smoke about the speed and scalability of Franz.