Hello! I have Type I Usher myself and my vision tanked when I was 27 (~8 years ago). I'm a writer, so I can't give you much programming advice but I've been through the gamut in terms of technology and life changes. I'm happy to share what has and hasn't worked for me. My email is in my profile.
I do want to say one thing, though: It absolutely sucks at first but you'll adapt. One day at a time.
Yep. Individual character development isn't Liu's strongest suit. His characters are mostly just allegories to prove a point. (Wenje - bitterness, Luo Ji - logic, etc.) But Liu is brilliant in his deception of mass psychology--the various ways in which large groups react to hopelessness.
Interestingly, I see a lot of parallels between Liu and Thomas Hardy. They both wrote sweeping tales that use individuals to represent abstract ideas. So, it's not just an Eastern thing.
Deafblind person here. Braille isn't a nice to have for me. It's a must-have. We Deafblind are certainly a rare species , and unfortunately, usually forgotten. I learned Braille "later" in life when my sight nosedived at age 27. Best decision I've ever made.
A few thoughts about the low Braille literacy levels. First of all, most visually impaired children are not completely blind, and this is especially true with progressive eye conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa (which I have as part of Usher syndrome, which presents with hearing and viision losses). Magnification and color technology has enabled people who can't read 12-point fonts to read now. For instance, I'm close to completely blind in one eye, and have somethign like 20/300 in the other ... and I can use built-in features to zoom in/invert colors to read visually. So, "visually impaired" =/= completely blind.
Also, you must use Braille every day to develop neural pathways to process it quickly. It only took me 2 weeks to learn the code. It took me much, much longer to internalize it--to the point when I can jsut put my fingers on it and get it. For people who can still see, especially if they see enough to benefit handsomely form magnification technology, it's hard to feel motivated.
There are a lot of other issues that I won't get into. But what I can say is that blind people can get away without learnign Braille, sure, but they won't be able to excel at certain things.
For instance, Braille is still the only thing that gives blind people a spatial appreciation for language. Language is more than words. It comes in paragraphs, has puncuation, et cetera. If a blind person wnats to truly master their language, they must learn Braille. They can get buy without it, sure, but ... they won't excel at it.
On the pratical side, you need to know braille to label things. This is why I advocate for at least a functional knowledge of Braille. If you have a labeler, you can label wine bottles and cans that feel identical. This is where audio-only approach fails.
There's a lot more I could say on the topic, but I'll stop here. Just putting this out there: I wish people would stop sayign that text-to-speech technology has obviated Braille. There are Deafblind people out ther, too, and Braille will always have a place for those who want to excel at writing and reading.
This may be a stupid question, but how do you read from the computer as a deafblind person? Is there some sort of device that converts the text to braille?
Not a stupid question at all. I use an assortment of accessibility tools. I can still read visually thanks to my absurdly large screen and equally absurdly large text in inverted colors. I can also hear (low-resolution sound quality) through a cochlear implant, so i use VoiceOver to navigate. To read more long-form text such as books, articles, etc. I use a refreshable Braille display.
Basically, I use a bit of everything because no one accessibility tool meets all of my needs. Better than nothing, I guess.
I should clarify something about deafblindness. Very, very rarely is a deafblind person totally deaf and blind. Usually they have some residual hearing or sight, and I fall into that camp.
Thanks for the reply. I've learned something today.
I have an almost completely blind friend who mainly relies on audio and braille so I wondered how that carried over.
I was thinking that driverless cars would be a boon for people who cannot drive (for whatever reason -- visual or otherwise).
I do wonder, however, if laws will require driverless cars to have a person who is able to drive. (For legal or liability reasons in case of an equipment failure.) I do hope that doesn't happen, but it's possible.
Actually once it's been proven that robots drive much better than humans (which is not very difficult), people will want to probably outlaw human driving.
I wasn't really thinking about driving skills, but about equipment failure. There will always be a risk of equipment failure for automated machinery. Also, there's a risk of human error in the code governing driving.
One possible workaround is to have several people at some centralized location monitor driverless car performance. A monitorer could override the car and drive the car remotely in the event of equipment failure or bugs in the code.
You say that like it's a sure thing. As excited as I am about the potential, I think it's still to be determined how well robots drive in real world environments, alongside humans, at scale.
Unfortunately, I suspect the law could very well require a licensed human driver in the vehicle for just that reason. I would hope that this would change over time, though, as the technology improved and became more proven, because there is great potential in this for people who are unable to drive for whatever medical reason.
Maybe there could be some lesser qualification, between being a licensed driver and just an untrained passenger. After all, if you could simply pull over to the side of the road safely, that's about all that would be required in most instances.
Public transit-only travel is workable in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. as well. Although in Philadelphia, you would have to take the buses quite often to compensate for the gaps in the subway system.
It may be the fact that the airplane is in the air that makes the difference. Being 20,000 feet in the air is quite different than cruising along on the highway in a bus.
That being said, I wonder what the driverless cars would do for the blind/visually-impaired. It could be quite liberating for them. They wouldn't have to live near public transit/take jobs with public transit access. Neat.
Well, I don't know about law guru, but I did go to law school. Take that for what its worth.
I'm not an issues and appeals lawyer, but here's what I know about appeals. Appeals are only for questions of law, never for questions of facts. And the question of law must be unsettled (otherwise, why would SCOTUS take the case?) SCOTUS probably took this case to clarify the defendant's burden of proof regarding invalidity defenses.
Now, this particular case was about the standard of proof for invalidity defenses (and jury instructions). The trial court told the jury that MS had to defend against invalidity claim by clear and convincing evidence. Microsoft thought that was the wrong standard. SCOTUS said that the lower court was right.
So, since the lower courts applied the right standard, this is the end of the line. The verdict against MS will stand.
tl;dr: appeals (cetorari_ to SCOTUS) focuses on unsolved or ambiguous questions of law, not factual issues. (Mixed questions of fact and law is a whole 'nother story...you don't want to know).
Is SCOTUS restricted to just the questions raised to them, or can they make their holding on another question that wasn't raised? For example, could they have said in this case, yes, the lower court applied the right standard for evidence, but the patent itself is nonstatutory following the Flook precedent?
P.S. Law school qualifies as guru for any questions I'm likely to ask.
SCOTUS is indeed limited to the question raised during the appeals process. Even if SCOTUS thought "geez this patent sucks," they can't do anything.
Why not? Well, for better or worse, the American judicial system puts a lot of weight on trial courts and juries' ability to assess facts. The appeals system was set up in such a way to prevent higher courts from actually deciding the case. If SCTOUS had found that the lower courts applied the wrong rule of evidence (burden of proof here), then the case would have gone back to trial and retried (isn't that crazy?).
And trust me, law school doesn't quality everyone as a guru. I have some experience with appeals, but I'm far from an issue & appeals lawyer (they're pros at this). So, take my words with a grain of salt.
I think this case does make things marginally better. Before you jump all over me, look at the holding.
The Court said that it will maintain the CCE standard for invalidity defenses, not plaintiffs' claims of invalidity. It's a fine point, but important one neverhtless.
You see, CCE has been the standard for plaintiffs alleging patent invalidity since 1982. It's right in the statute. http://openjurist.org/title-35/us-code/section-282/presumpti... . The problem was that Microsoft was trying to reduce the burden of proof for the defense.
A weaker burden for defenses is very very bad. That means, even if a plaintiff shows, by substantial evidence, that a patent is invalid, a defendant can just give the minimal amount of defense...and the defendant will win.
If you look at the holding, the Court just says that all invalidity defenses must be established by "clear and convincing evidence" (higher than preponderance of evidence but lower than beyond a reasonable doubt.)
It has been well-established that patent validity is a basic assumption. So, a plaintiff must prove patent invalidity by clear and convincing evidence. The issue here is once the plaintiff establishes patent invalidity, how much evidence does the defendant need to give to rebut the assumption of invalidity. The Court said that the higher standard of proof, not the lower standard of proof.
Maybe I'm being thickheaded here, but I don't see how that's terrible at all. In fact, it makes things equal. Once the plaintiff shows patent invalidity, it shouldn't be that easy for a defendant to rebut the assumption of invalidity.
Except for the fact that the PTO isn't an adversarial system. It would be different if prior to you getting a patent you had to go to court against companies who think you shouldn't have it.
And now that you have a patent and sue somebody, this other person may be able to put together some evidence that shows the patent is invalid, but they must climb a very high bar now.
In this case MS had prior art in a past i4i product that appeared to have the functionality that i4i had patented. i4i says it was different, but the source code had been destroyed. Had this challenge been brought up during the original patent examination, they could have pressed i4i to prove that this didn't infringe. But once i4i has the patent now MS must prove that it does, w/o the source code.
The plaintiffs trying to invalidate the patents have always had to climb a steep hill. My point is that this case doesn't change that. If you look at the statute and precedent, the plaintiffs always had to establish invalidity by clear and convincing evidence. (The appropiateness of that is a question for Congress, not the Court because the statute is clear on this point.)
So, this case just makes things equal between the plaintiffs and defendants. Once the plaintiffs do overcome the admittedly-high obstacle of proving invalidity, the defendant can't just put up a weak defense and get away with it. That's good!
Your problem with the patent system is completely valid, but the Supreme Court can't change law (or is not supposed to). Congress is the one who is responsible for this quagmire, not the Court.
The whole patent system is broken, and this case improves things by a nanogram (is that a word?)./
I don't disagree. And after reading the SCOTUS opinions, I think their reasoning was sound. Still disappointing in some sense, but it does read like the right decision.
Time to petition congress. It does feel like we're near an inflection point.
I just think that Congress needs to be reeducated about the different needs of today's technology industry versus the old-days of steel mills. It won't be easy, but I'm confident it will happen someday.
I do want to say one thing, though: It absolutely sucks at first but you'll adapt. One day at a time.