owever, the bar for showing you have reasonable grounds for storing data are relatively low - if you use the IP addresses for tracking down abuse of your system, for example, and you don't keep them excessively long, you're likely to be in the clear in most or all EU countries.
In the ruling this story is about it explicitely mentions that case and dismissed it. You are supposed to first have evidence that shows, that logging of the IP could help. Then you are only allowed to log that specific violating IP and have to even delete the logs as soon as you are done. The court explicitely said no keeping beyond the time needed to service the user. If your service doesn't need the IP (that means if you can not prove that the IP is needed for the service) you are not even allowed to log it at all. At least that is, what that ruling says.
It is a bit complicated. In principle the law states you are not allowed to store privacy related data without a clear cause. Just storing because you can store is not enough. Every citizen has the right to ask what data you store about him and can even ask you to delete it. Failure to do so can result in a law suite and if you store information you don't need for the agreed upon cause you will loose. That has happened to the Ministry of Justice. As German law is not based on precedent it doesn't mean anything for anybody else directly. But it can mean, you are next on the list and will face a similar law suite.
One of the problems is, I don't see, how the IP address is a privacy related data, as a normal webmaster will not be able to connect an IP of an anonymous user with the users identity. This also is only the lowest instance of the court system, but the Ministry has not appealed (for whatever reasons).
I am personally undecided about it, in principle it is correct, why does a website I once visit have to store my IP forever? Also the next target of the group which started the Ministry of Justice case is now going after the BKA (federal police), they put up an information page about an extremist group not much is known about called mg (for "militante gruppe"). Everyone who visits that page is logged and they try to connect your IP with the data they have to identify you. It seems they try to somehow find the "terrorists" that way. Don't laugh, they seem to actually believe that could work.
Even if the scheduling penalties were not significant, it is still not desirable to have a pluggable object oriented scheduler. A normal function call is:
CALL function_address
A call to a virtual function in an OO langauge is usually implemented as:
And why would that be relevant in this case? The kernel is written in C, not an OO language so it would have to be simulated in any case. What I would do is to define the interface as a sequence of jump slots. Then when a scheduler is "instantiated" just drop the new jump commands to the scheduler "methods" there. I don't see any reason why I would ever want to use two instances of the scheduler at the same time. When one is created the other can be destroyed. If I want to use two schedulers I would have to write a scheduler scheduler (and I doubt there is anything to be gained down that path). So what you would have instead of the direct call
CALL function_address
is an indirect call:
CALL [function_address]
where the address and also the location to jump to is very likely in L1-cache as it is used very often.
Sorry, I don't see how you get a magic kernel fault only affecting a very specific cell (the vtable). If something in the kernel starts to write to random memory cells, I would call it "reliable" if the system notices the problem, localizes the problem and solves the problem. I would much rather prefer fail-stop behavior (kernel panic).
At some point, you have to deal with the fact that there is going to be some overhead in dealing with an object-oriented approach. Even if the significance is near 0, the scheduler is pushing operations on the CPU on an incredibly large scale, which might show its ugly face in performance. IMHO, it wouldn't, but I guess Linus knows better than I...
Ahh, the "when in doubt claim OO is expensive" defense. Please tell me, how long does a modern CPU need to take a branch to an address in a well known fixed memory cell which is guaranteed to be in L1-cache? Do you think it is longer than a conditional branch needed to handle the case single core dual core? Is it longer than the combined times needed to additionally handle the case one CPU-chip two CPU-chips? I don't know, I haven't done the measuring, but I have doubts the first is the slowest as the opcode scheduler should be able to handle the first and especially has the advantage of an always taken jump. We are heading in a parallel future, there are scheduling differences between single core/dual core and single CPU/multiple CPU. Why on earth should the scheduler written for the most complicated case (it has to handle cases like one dual core and two triple cores and one quad core efficiently or it is not the best scheduler, no?) be more efficient than a single core scheduler on a machine with only a single core? Or are the benchmarks "tweaked" so the first is the "right" case to benchmark?
As written by multiple posters, yes, you can get benchmark results for schedulers, but what is the correct benchmark? Is it the maximum throughput model you don't want to have as a desktop box or the minimum waiting time for interactive jobs you don't want on a compute server? And if you need numbers to come up with the best security model, count line numbers, it is about as relevant.
No, you haven't instilled a much higher level of terror. Where have you been the last 6 years, elevated security is the norm now, so if it is raised again without reason, who will be surprised. Perhaps there is some vote somewhere or some legislation needs to pass somewhere. Yes, I think we slowly grow used to new measures without much asking why they are enacted.
For terrorism to be successful it needs to be known, that there was an attack and even better a successful one. If all of your plans are found out, it will have the opposite effect. Terrorism by definition isn't about the target but about attention. If you can't get any more attention you will have to change your tactic.
No, I think there is a much more mundane reason. In the past some of the consoles were broken with manipulated save games, the games didn't properly check the data and so opened a hole. I would guess Nintendo didn't want to take that chance and so added an API which sits between the game and the saved data. As the saved data could be verified for being originally written by the game before the game would even get a chance to have a look at it, it means it is much harder to attack code not written by Nintendo to be exploited.
Disclaimer: I have never seen the API of a game console, this is only a wild guess.
It is nice to see, that politicians are the same all over the world. Here in Germany every press conference about that foiled plan is somehow connected with that stupid idea of an "official trojan" while nobody can explain why and how it would have helped.
On the other hand, this article is about a case where a government wants to send spy software to suspected criminals in the homes they can get useful information for a prosecution. I'm not familiar with German law, but if this were the US, it's probably okay for the government to do this.
In Germany it is not clear if it is or not. For the last two years it was allowed by a simple decree without being know publicly. Once it was known, the supreme court simply forbid it as unlawful practice in spring. Since then the law and order politicians decree that criminal prosecution of organized crime and terrorism is not possible without it, as the bad guys can encrypt their data and so it can't be gotten by normal means.
The problem is, that in principle the privacy of the home is protected and the supreme court some years ago already cut back the use of electronic listening devices. E.g. there is no way a bedroom can be bugged, as it is so clearly a private room, that a judge can't allow it to be bugged under current rules.
That basic ruling is now applied to the PC, as for many people the PC is also very much in the core of their lives and is considered private. So if it is, it is off hands for bugging. Searching with a search warrant is obviously still allowed, the same is true of bedrooms.
One of the states has already enacted some law to allow the remote bugging of PCs (basically allowing to crack into a PC remotely, installing key loggers already was allowed if they were installed like a listening device) and there is an outstanding decision about that by the supreme court, but the law and order politicians don't want to wait and instead want to enact the law as soon as possible. The arguments grow ever more ridiculous, from "99.9% of all Germans won't be affected" which means that only about 800,000 people would be affected, to "we only forsee 10 to 15 cases per year" which is in no way binding and it could fast be used for who knows which crimes, those things tend to get expanded to new crimes on a regular basis. The explanations from the head of the state police (both of the forementioned explanations were from him) also obviously is completely clueless what he is talking about.
Ironically details of the one and only cases up to now became public and the attempt was done so foolish, that it is hard to imagine that it will ever work. For the case known the police basically dropped a CD into the mailbox of the suspect which looked like one of those things ISPs sometimes send per mail in the hope he might install it. If that is the kind of criminal they intend to catch, then I seriously doubt that that kind of criminal even knows what "encryption" means.
Exactly, as it makes much more sense, that the correct piece of paper is on the plane. No terrorist piece of paper will ever make it past the normal system, oh, wait, it already did. I don't see what the tickets relevance is towards "terrorists".
And how many times could you have started OO 2.1 for the time it took to compile? By how much were program starts slower while OO 2.1 was compiling? Are you sure you saved time?
Two millenia (not centuries) and that sum is too low. Who of the two religions has its own state and whose leader has the formal ranking of a head of state?
Curiously being from Europe it truly is a strange reversal. For some years we have been free to travel to all the states which signed the Schengen treaty without showing a passport or being sent through border control or customs. So if I go to Great Brittain, Austria or France (or any of the others) I just cross a line with a sign "You are now entering...". Since the Euro I don't even need to exchange money for most of them.
Somehow we seem to be headed in opposite directions.
Though I also have to say, I am always a bit surprised on the uproar about the ID-card, as German I had to have one since I was 16 years old and when I move have to go to an office to report my new place of residence. I never felt suppressed or followed because of that, but always saw it as having some advantages. We don't use a social security number to be identified (though we have one, but it is not used as ID outside social security questions) and also not a drivers license. Also because you are registered at a place of residence you are automatically signed up for votes.
Since cookies are needed to maintain state / session information, I allow them, but tend to blow them away after my browsing session ends. But I restrict cookies only to the destination server and do not take third party cookies.
I do the same, but it slowly gets harder. First there are the big ad-companies (MS, Yahoo, Google) which also have services you might want to use and then can't really block their cookies. The second thing is the ever increasing amount of cookies. Besides normal cookies is the FF2 super cookie (Dom Storage) and the flash cookies. Also the many script tags used in ads could use some of the techniques used to infect browsers and so manage to make information persistent as long as you keep browsing with the same session (not that I know of someone doing this).
I do expect that they will try to force advertising by integrating content with the advertising in active snap-ins, such as Flash. To the extent they do that, they drop off my radar -- I will never see them nor their associated products.
I don't think so. Something heise.de recently did strikes me as more likely. They sometimes incorporate the text of the ad directly into the source (I guess it is still a test, currently only with their ads for their own stuff). No adserver involved, no load, no URL you could block.
I even think this is much more acceptable, as the site has much more control on which ads to show, no scripts needed to run and the ad-company can't track you (no accesses to their servers). But it sure is a strange thing to see an ad you know you blocked reappear and on checking why adblock didn't catch it finding out, it can't. Also without a clear id or comment I would expect it to be very hard to block (and wouldn't know how to write an UI for something like adblock).
Why are these parallel algorithms not taught in university computer science classes from day 1?
Which algorithms were you taught? I only learnt about some sorting algorithms and tree algorithms, the rest was education on how to decomposit a problem to get to an algorithm, the mathematical basis of numerics, statistics, formal reasoning, automata theory and so on. I don't see, why in CS you would be explicitly taught algorithms. And I did indeed learn to program parallel machines, as that was my area of interest. Granted I was at an university which had built experimental parallel machines for some time, so there was a lot of research in that area going on and professors who knew what they did.
Educational inertia probably makes up a large part of it.
At my university we started with Scheme, a programming language where you can do functional programming and we were taught in our first year how to do that. Still most students had a lot of problems to grasp the concepts. Functional programming is inherently hard in my opinion and I am unsure if the additional effort to program in such a language offsets the cost of a procedural language with explicit parallelization.
An ideal language would provide a way to express that a function has no side effects, allowing map() to farm out different slices of the array to different CPUs.
And would be terrible for performance. Why on earth does everybody assume that fine grained parallelism will ever work? You need a very highly specialized processor to make it work and those have failed a decade ago as the "standard CPUs" just blew them away. Remember the Connection Machine, that was a box with exactly that fine grain of parallelization? It was programmed in C and Fortran with specialized extensions to express parallelism, incidently they live on in the way you program GPUs and the SSE is also another example of even finer grained parallelism.
Fine grained parallelism only works on very small and specific tasks. In general you want high level parallelism with very little communication and very little dependency on each other. As that is another extreme you have to find a compromise, but to assume the compiler can magically extract a real speed up from a bunch of simple for-loops is just completely unrealistic.
You will have to learn to handle the parallelism. It takes different algorithms and a different way to structure programs. Also you will have to accept that there are things which will not work in parallel. You can parallelize them, but the speed up is just not there to make it useful.
Parallel programming is hard and blaming it on programming languages and claiming another one will solve all problems is just the usual silver bullet. Those languages have been around for ever, functional programming languages can be parallelized automatically. So if they make it so much easier, why aren't they not used? Could it be, that you have to pay for the easy parallelization with something?
It is also only a beginning in Germany, not every prosecutor does the same. But it seems it gets there. The reason for this are the privacy laws, ISPs can not give out the identity behind an IP to just anybody, only a prosecutor or judge can get that information and only in the case of a criminal proceeding. So the lawyers first have to start that process, although they have no intention to go with a criminal case, as it would get dismissed as too minor. What they need is the address and that they get by requesting to see the documents after the address has been acquired.
So they basically use the prosecutors to look up the address, as they have no right to do that and so create a lot of work for prosecutors. There are even automated systems scanning P2P nets and firing off the necessary legal stuff. Some prosecutors got 10000s of those. As none of the criminal proceedings is meant seriously it is basically a lot of wasted time for prosecutors and that is, why they seem to have started to refuse those "cases".
I don't see why you would need the internet for syncing a clock at all. There are much simpler ways, since 1957 a longwave radio signal is broadcast in Germany on the frequency of 77.5kHz with the time of an atomic clock. It is called DCF77 and there are a lot of wristwatches which receive the signal and use it to display the time. I have a wall clock right besides me which does the same, the costs are only very moderately higher than a normal clock.
There are also receivers for PCs so you can quite easily use them as Startum 0 clocks with very good precission.
Except you can still patent after you publish. You have 1 year in the US, and I believe that rule applies to the EU as well. It's actually better to publish ASAP so that you establish your claim before anyone else.
An invention shall be considered to be new if it does not form part of the state of the art.
The state of the art shall be held to comprise everything made available to the public by means of a written or oral description, by use, or in any other way, before the date of filing of the European patent application.
(There are three more articles, but I don't think they are relevant for this discussion)
If the inventor published before applying for a patent he has raised the bar for a patent and the same work can no longer be patented. If I understand right, the US patent law is also heading into that direction.
That is only one third of the story, though. The second was, that you could only do research the NSDAP had interest in. As soon as the decision of a war was reached (so at the moment, when they slimed themself into power), "war important" research was funded abundantly, everything else was getting far less than before. The third part was, that every scientist was checked and if you belonged to the wrong race (in the fucked up sense of the Nazis) you were basically forced to leave.
They developed it in Germany, and patented it in the US. The US patents are where they get their money.
Wrong, they developed MP3 as part of an EU science program (Eureka) and were paid by that. That they still get money from the US patent is probably nice, but not the reason it was developed. So yes, they get money from the patent, but it wasn't the reason it was developed. An earlier attempt to patent a previous version of the audio codec was unsucessfull, so they couldn't be sure that they would be able to patent MP3 either. You can listen to the history of MP3 here
Completely wrong. The money that motivates them ALL comes from US software patents. If the US dissolved software patents, expect development of new (open) video and audio codecs to stop entirely.
Sorry, but my crystal ball is broken, so I won't make any predictions on the future and on "what if". But as the researchers were paid by a science program I doubt most of the people who helped to make it get any of the revenue from the patent.
Consider the h.264 video codec. It cost millions of dollars to develop, and is protected ONLY by software patents. Europe wants to play the prisoner's dilemma to their own advantage.
The h.264 is licensed by the MPEG LA. The list of the organizations receiving the payments:
DAEWOO Electronics Corporation; Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute; France Télécom, société anonyme*; Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung e.V.; Fujitsu Limited; Hitachi, Ltd.; Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.; LG Electronics Inc.; LSI Logic Corporation; Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.; Microsoft Corporation; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; NTT DoCoMo, Inc.; Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation; Robert Bosch GmbH; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; Scientific-Atlanta Vancouver Company; Sedna Patent Services, LLC; Sharp Corporation; Siemens AG; Sony Corporation; The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York; Toshiba Corporation; and Victor Company of Japan, Ltd
The countries are South Korea twice, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, South Korea, US, Japan, US, Japan (three times), Germany, South Korea, Canada, US, Japan, Germany, Japan, US, Japan (twice).
Sorry to burst your bubble, but h.264 was pretty much an international effort. If you cared to check you would have seen, that the working group for h.264 was headed by four people, two from the US, two from Germany.
Those who think the technology will just develop itself, whether there are any incentives or not, are unbelievably naive.
Bullshit. MP3 was developed by Frauenhofer in Germany, where they could not expect to get it patented. Quite some of the parts of the MPEG group of standards was developed in the EU where they can not be protected by patents. Obviously patents can't be an all important condition for development.
Even if i was running the most unsecure version of java, I choose what code runs on them.
According to the AusCERT report the bug is in the image parsing code. So if your Servlet somehow accesses images being uploaded or residing on a third party server, it is vulnerable.
In that case, the attacker might be able to run any executable on your server.
Slashdot Mirror
In the ruling this story is about it explicitely mentions that case and dismissed it. You are supposed to first have evidence that shows, that logging of the IP could help. Then you are only allowed to log that specific violating IP and have to even delete the logs as soon as you are done. The court explicitely said no keeping beyond the time needed to service the user. If your service doesn't need the IP (that means if you can not prove that the IP is needed for the service) you are not even allowed to log it at all. At least that is, what that ruling says.
It is a bit complicated. In principle the law states you are not allowed to store privacy related data without a clear cause. Just storing because you can store is not enough. Every citizen has the right to ask what data you store about him and can even ask you to delete it. Failure to do so can result in a law suite and if you store information you don't need for the agreed upon cause you will loose. That has happened to the Ministry of Justice. As German law is not based on precedent it doesn't mean anything for anybody else directly. But it can mean, you are next on the list and will face a similar law suite.
One of the problems is, I don't see, how the IP address is a privacy related data, as a normal webmaster will not be able to connect an IP of an anonymous user with the users identity. This also is only the lowest instance of the court system, but the Ministry has not appealed (for whatever reasons).
I am personally undecided about it, in principle it is correct, why does a website I once visit have to store my IP forever? Also the next target of the group which started the Ministry of Justice case is now going after the BKA (federal police), they put up an information page about an extremist group not much is known about called mg (for "militante gruppe"). Everyone who visits that page is logged and they try to connect your IP with the data they have to identify you. It seems they try to somehow find the "terrorists" that way. Don't laugh, they seem to actually believe that could work.
And why would that be relevant in this case? The kernel is written in C, not an OO language so it would have to be simulated in any case. What I would do is to define the interface as a sequence of jump slots. Then when a scheduler is "instantiated" just drop the new jump commands to the scheduler "methods" there. I don't see any reason why I would ever want to use two instances of the scheduler at the same time. When one is created the other can be destroyed. If I want to use two schedulers I would have to write a scheduler scheduler (and I doubt there is anything to be gained down that path). So what you would have instead of the direct call
is an indirect call: where the address and also the location to jump to is very likely in L1-cache as it is used very often.Sorry, I don't see how you get a magic kernel fault only affecting a very specific cell (the vtable). If something in the kernel starts to write to random memory cells, I would call it "reliable" if the system notices the problem, localizes the problem and solves the problem. I would much rather prefer fail-stop behavior (kernel panic).
Ahh, the "when in doubt claim OO is expensive" defense. Please tell me, how long does a modern CPU need to take a branch to an address in a well known fixed memory cell which is guaranteed to be in L1-cache? Do you think it is longer than a conditional branch needed to handle the case single core dual core? Is it longer than the combined times needed to additionally handle the case one CPU-chip two CPU-chips? I don't know, I haven't done the measuring, but I have doubts the first is the slowest as the opcode scheduler should be able to handle the first and especially has the advantage of an always taken jump. We are heading in a parallel future, there are scheduling differences between single core/dual core and single CPU/multiple CPU. Why on earth should the scheduler written for the most complicated case (it has to handle cases like one dual core and two triple cores and one quad core efficiently or it is not the best scheduler, no?) be more efficient than a single core scheduler on a machine with only a single core? Or are the benchmarks "tweaked" so the first is the "right" case to benchmark?
As written by multiple posters, yes, you can get benchmark results for schedulers, but what is the correct benchmark? Is it the maximum throughput model you don't want to have as a desktop box or the minimum waiting time for interactive jobs you don't want on a compute server? And if you need numbers to come up with the best security model, count line numbers, it is about as relevant.
No, you haven't instilled a much higher level of terror. Where have you been the last 6 years, elevated security is the norm now, so if it is raised again without reason, who will be surprised. Perhaps there is some vote somewhere or some legislation needs to pass somewhere. Yes, I think we slowly grow used to new measures without much asking why they are enacted.
For terrorism to be successful it needs to be known, that there was an attack and even better a successful one. If all of your plans are found out, it will have the opposite effect. Terrorism by definition isn't about the target but about attention. If you can't get any more attention you will have to change your tactic.
No, I think there is a much more mundane reason. In the past some of the consoles were broken with manipulated save games, the games didn't properly check the data and so opened a hole. I would guess Nintendo didn't want to take that chance and so added an API which sits between the game and the saved data. As the saved data could be verified for being originally written by the game before the game would even get a chance to have a look at it, it means it is much harder to attack code not written by Nintendo to be exploited.
Disclaimer: I have never seen the API of a game console, this is only a wild guess.
It is nice to see, that politicians are the same all over the world. Here in Germany every press conference about that foiled plan is somehow connected with that stupid idea of an "official trojan" while nobody can explain why and how it would have helped.
That's easy. As long as they are busy with each other they can't do as much harm as usually.
In Germany it is not clear if it is or not. For the last two years it was allowed by a simple decree without being know publicly. Once it was known, the supreme court simply forbid it as unlawful practice in spring. Since then the law and order politicians decree that criminal prosecution of organized crime and terrorism is not possible without it, as the bad guys can encrypt their data and so it can't be gotten by normal means.
The problem is, that in principle the privacy of the home is protected and the supreme court some years ago already cut back the use of electronic listening devices. E.g. there is no way a bedroom can be bugged, as it is so clearly a private room, that a judge can't allow it to be bugged under current rules.
That basic ruling is now applied to the PC, as for many people the PC is also very much in the core of their lives and is considered private. So if it is, it is off hands for bugging. Searching with a search warrant is obviously still allowed, the same is true of bedrooms.
One of the states has already enacted some law to allow the remote bugging of PCs (basically allowing to crack into a PC remotely, installing key loggers already was allowed if they were installed like a listening device) and there is an outstanding decision about that by the supreme court, but the law and order politicians don't want to wait and instead want to enact the law as soon as possible. The arguments grow ever more ridiculous, from "99.9% of all Germans won't be affected" which means that only about 800,000 people would be affected, to "we only forsee 10 to 15 cases per year" which is in no way binding and it could fast be used for who knows which crimes, those things tend to get expanded to new crimes on a regular basis. The explanations from the head of the state police (both of the forementioned explanations were from him) also obviously is completely clueless what he is talking about.
Ironically details of the one and only cases up to now became public and the attempt was done so foolish, that it is hard to imagine that it will ever work. For the case known the police basically dropped a CD into the mailbox of the suspect which looked like one of those things ISPs sometimes send per mail in the hope he might install it. If that is the kind of criminal they intend to catch, then I seriously doubt that that kind of criminal even knows what "encryption" means.
Exactly, as it makes much more sense, that the correct piece of paper is on the plane. No terrorist piece of paper will ever make it past the normal system, oh, wait, it already did. I don't see what the tickets relevance is towards "terrorists".
Sure, because Microsoft was totally surprised by the ECMA suggesting OOXML to become an ISO standard...
And how many times could you have started OO 2.1 for the time it took to compile? By how much were program starts slower while OO 2.1 was compiling? Are you sure you saved time?
Two millenia (not centuries) and that sum is too low. Who of the two religions has its own state and whose leader has the formal ranking of a head of state?
Curiously being from Europe it truly is a strange reversal. For some years we have been free to travel to all the states which signed the Schengen treaty without showing a passport or being sent through border control or customs. So if I go to Great Brittain, Austria or France (or any of the others) I just cross a line with a sign "You are now entering ...". Since the Euro I don't even need to exchange money for most of them.
Somehow we seem to be headed in opposite directions.
Though I also have to say, I am always a bit surprised on the uproar about the ID-card, as German I had to have one since I was 16 years old and when I move have to go to an office to report my new place of residence. I never felt suppressed or followed because of that, but always saw it as having some advantages. We don't use a social security number to be identified (though we have one, but it is not used as ID outside social security questions) and also not a drivers license. Also because you are registered at a place of residence you are automatically signed up for votes.
I do the same, but it slowly gets harder. First there are the big ad-companies (MS, Yahoo, Google) which also have services you might want to use and then can't really block their cookies. The second thing is the ever increasing amount of cookies. Besides normal cookies is the FF2 super cookie (Dom Storage) and the flash cookies. Also the many script tags used in ads could use some of the techniques used to infect browsers and so manage to make information persistent as long as you keep browsing with the same session (not that I know of someone doing this).
I don't think so. Something heise.de recently did strikes me as more likely. They sometimes incorporate the text of the ad directly into the source (I guess it is still a test, currently only with their ads for their own stuff). No adserver involved, no load, no URL you could block.
I even think this is much more acceptable, as the site has much more control on which ads to show, no scripts needed to run and the ad-company can't track you (no accesses to their servers). But it sure is a strange thing to see an ad you know you blocked reappear and on checking why adblock didn't catch it finding out, it can't. Also without a clear id or comment I would expect it to be very hard to block (and wouldn't know how to write an UI for something like adblock).
Which algorithms were you taught? I only learnt about some sorting algorithms and tree algorithms, the rest was education on how to decomposit a problem to get to an algorithm, the mathematical basis of numerics, statistics, formal reasoning, automata theory and so on. I don't see, why in CS you would be explicitly taught algorithms. And I did indeed learn to program parallel machines, as that was my area of interest. Granted I was at an university which had built experimental parallel machines for some time, so there was a lot of research in that area going on and professors who knew what they did.
At my university we started with Scheme, a programming language where you can do functional programming and we were taught in our first year how to do that. Still most students had a lot of problems to grasp the concepts. Functional programming is inherently hard in my opinion and I am unsure if the additional effort to program in such a language offsets the cost of a procedural language with explicit parallelization.
And would be terrible for performance. Why on earth does everybody assume that fine grained parallelism will ever work? You need a very highly specialized processor to make it work and those have failed a decade ago as the "standard CPUs" just blew them away. Remember the Connection Machine, that was a box with exactly that fine grain of parallelization? It was programmed in C and Fortran with specialized extensions to express parallelism, incidently they live on in the way you program GPUs and the SSE is also another example of even finer grained parallelism.
Fine grained parallelism only works on very small and specific tasks. In general you want high level parallelism with very little communication and very little dependency on each other. As that is another extreme you have to find a compromise, but to assume the compiler can magically extract a real speed up from a bunch of simple for-loops is just completely unrealistic.
You will have to learn to handle the parallelism. It takes different algorithms and a different way to structure programs. Also you will have to accept that there are things which will not work in parallel. You can parallelize them, but the speed up is just not there to make it useful.
Parallel programming is hard and blaming it on programming languages and claiming another one will solve all problems is just the usual silver bullet. Those languages have been around for ever, functional programming languages can be parallelized automatically. So if they make it so much easier, why aren't they not used? Could it be, that you have to pay for the easy parallelization with something?
It is also only a beginning in Germany, not every prosecutor does the same. But it seems it gets there. The reason for this are the privacy laws, ISPs can not give out the identity behind an IP to just anybody, only a prosecutor or judge can get that information and only in the case of a criminal proceeding. So the lawyers first have to start that process, although they have no intention to go with a criminal case, as it would get dismissed as too minor. What they need is the address and that they get by requesting to see the documents after the address has been acquired.
So they basically use the prosecutors to look up the address, as they have no right to do that and so create a lot of work for prosecutors. There are even automated systems scanning P2P nets and firing off the necessary legal stuff. Some prosecutors got 10000s of those. As none of the criminal proceedings is meant seriously it is basically a lot of wasted time for prosecutors and that is, why they seem to have started to refuse those "cases".
I don't see why you would need the internet for syncing a clock at all. There are much simpler ways, since 1957 a longwave radio signal is broadcast in Germany on the frequency of 77.5kHz with the time of an atomic clock. It is called DCF77 and there are a lot of wristwatches which receive the signal and use it to display the time. I have a wall clock right besides me which does the same, the costs are only very moderately higher than a normal clock.
There are also receivers for PCs so you can quite easily use them as Startum 0 clocks with very good precission.
No, that is not correct for the EU. Article 54 of the European Patent Convention says this:
(There are three more articles, but I don't think they are relevant for this discussion)
If the inventor published before applying for a patent he has raised the bar for a patent and the same work can no longer be patented. If I understand right, the US patent law is also heading into that direction.
That is only one third of the story, though. The second was, that you could only do research the NSDAP had interest in. As soon as the decision of a war was reached (so at the moment, when they slimed themself into power), "war important" research was funded abundantly, everything else was getting far less than before. The third part was, that every scientist was checked and if you belonged to the wrong race (in the fucked up sense of the Nazis) you were basically forced to leave.
Wrong, they developed MP3 as part of an EU science program (Eureka) and were paid by that. That they still get money from the US patent is probably nice, but not the reason it was developed. So yes, they get money from the patent, but it wasn't the reason it was developed. An earlier attempt to patent a previous version of the audio codec was unsucessfull, so they couldn't be sure that they would be able to patent MP3 either. You can listen to the history of MP3 here
Sorry, but my crystal ball is broken, so I won't make any predictions on the future and on "what if". But as the researchers were paid by a science program I doubt most of the people who helped to make it get any of the revenue from the patent.
The h.264 is licensed by the MPEG LA. The list of the organizations receiving the payments:
The countries are South Korea twice, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, South Korea, US, Japan, US, Japan (three times), Germany, South Korea, Canada, US, Japan, Germany, Japan, US, Japan (twice).
Sorry to burst your bubble, but h.264 was pretty much an international effort. If you cared to check you would have seen, that the working group for h.264 was headed by four people, two from the US, two from Germany.
Bullshit. MP3 was developed by Frauenhofer in Germany, where they could not expect to get it patented. Quite some of the parts of the MPEG group of standards was developed in the EU where they can not be protected by patents. Obviously patents can't be an all important condition for development.
According to the AusCERT report the bug is in the image parsing code. So if your Servlet somehow accesses images being uploaded or residing on a third party server, it is vulnerable.
In that case, the attacker might be able to run any executable on your server.