Looks like the National Federation for the Blind can drop their lawsuit now. The new Kindle offers voice prompts to read the menu items to you. I hope they now sue the publishers that are having Amazon remove the text to speech options for certain books because they think you need to buy a CD if you want to have a book read aloud.
Often when someone says a particular programming language is bad, they are referring more to the common practice associated with that language than the language itself. Many times they are really complaining about their own poor programming habits more than the specific language. Sometimes these habits are shared by the entire culture built around a particular language.
Perl is a good example of this. People complain about how difficult it is to read and then proceed to write awful unreadable code. Perl can be very readable, but its terseness makes it easy for people to write huge lines of code that do 10 or 11 different things. You can do the same thing in Java, but most people try to avoid a single line that is 500 characters long because it is a pain to scroll back and forth sideways to read the code.
Sometimes the lack of a particular restriant can inspire horrible code.
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According to this article from the NY Times, a recent court ruling says that it is legal to decrypt DVD’s in order to use their content for educational uses. It also says that it is legal to jail break your iPhone in order to install software outside of the Apple store.
Dear Sony: When my three year old daughter and I sit down to watch a documentary about fish, your Bluray player shouldn’t force us to watch movie trailers of scary things she doesn’t need to see. I paid for the movie. I paid for the player. Why won’t you let me decide what I should watch?
