Personally I would happly give them 25,000 of my some 100 billion neurons (In my brain alone) if it means that in the future someone who has brain damage can have their brain repaired and have their life go back to normal.
Respect.
I was imagining a future where my brain might be abusively dissociated and the parts used to operate machines. You have generously restored for me a healthy perspective.
Too bad I can't give you any Slashdot karma, so I shall pass on some of the traditional kind.
Some
people will put their code into the public domain
and/or GPL it. Others will seek to patent and
profit from their hard work. To each his own.
Freedom is the ability to choose which path you
decide.
I put my hard work in the public domain and/or GPL it.
Then I am sued for everything I own. What kind of Freedom is that?
Patents such as they are now implemented create an unjust system. Those who pursue patents can accrue profits from their own work and the work of others. The who do not pursue patents can go bankrupt or be blocked from inventing despite working independently and competing fairly.
Yup, it's a dream but some of us are working on making it real: Semiconductor devices made on an individual or small community scale. We're aiming for full-on complex circuits but we'll be very happy when the first transistor works.
One of the stages is indeed a home-made lathe and milling machine, to make some of the vacuum chambers and chemical vessels. Fun stuff:) By the way, thanks Slashdot for pointing me at these books. (This isn't the first article whose comments recommend them).
Is anyone else working on home made silicon? Anyone like the project enough to fund it?:) Go on, you know you want to see Free / Open Source Hardware succeed:-)
I have an HP Deskjet 990CXi. A simple, colour deskjet.
Neither of the two drivers for this printer currently offered by CUPS works properly. One of them prints garbage when it's told to print in colour, but is fine in grayscale. The other driver prints the black ink fine, but the colour ink image is double-size compared with the black. So that's only usable in grayscale as well.
That's with current Gentoo, CUPS, and the standard offering of printer drivers through the printer config GUI, btw.
The drivers that come with Red Hat 9 print ok except for an unnecessarily large top margin where nothing is printed (it's larger then the printer can do, and larger than one but not both of the margins of the Gentoo drivers).
My point is that HP Deskjets don't automatically just work the way your grandmother needs them to, or Linux printing doesn't just work or some combination thereof. There's plenty of room for improvement.
How in the hell did you get a computer if you have no money?
Where I live, computers are given away free to people who cannot afford them. No, it's not government; no, it's not commercial. It's a community project: old computers are collected from those who don't need them any more, repaired and refurbished if necessary, and given to those who do.
Is that how you get your internet service too?
We have a community project to provide free wireless internet service too.
You might be surprised to learn how many people cannot afford to use computers or access the Internet. For many people, the only access to computers or the Internet is via a public library, and that's often impractical to use if you have a full time job.
For such people, the cost of a Windows XP license is out of the question. This is only a problem when they are asked to use some Windows-only software, of course, but that does occur. We like them to use Linux and OpenOffice, but there are occasions when a document doesn't display right in MS Word and not being able to say you used Word to create it puts you at an economic disadvantage.
And just as suddenly running a developer mailing list is no longer possible without outside funding.
That's often put forth as the reason to keep email sending nominally free. However, you could charge only for emails which aren't in your whitelisted senders. When you subscribe to any kind of mailing list, you would also add the list address to your whitelist.
A protocol can be arranged so that the list owner has proof you won't charge for emails from them before they send you list emails, to prevent anyone trying to harvest money from lists. One such protocol is that your MTA asks for payment when it receives a message that isn't whitelisted: list owners would simply not pay, because it means you haven't completed the subscription process.
Essentially, this is doing "opt-in" lists properly. Instead of some spammer claiming that you opted-in, in this system you have technical control over whether you are opted in to any kind of list. For your friends and mailing lists, it doesn't cost them anything, but for spammers sending unsolicited mail, it costs them real money.
I'll leave the technical details to your imagination.
If you're happy for the destination address of a message to be visible, then you don't have to encrypt that part. The router looks at that, and can route the rest of the message without affecting the quantum encryption (e.g. by moving a mirror to reflect the quantum encrypted signal to the destination port).
If you don't want that, then you can use onion source routing. Your message begins with an encrypted sequence which tells the first router where to forward the rest of the message. Only the first router can decrypt it. The next part of the message begins with an encrypted message for the next router, and so on. You have to establish a private key with each router, so that you can tell it how to forward the messages, but no router can ever see the source and destination address together.
If a router is not trustworthy, then it may fail to route your message, and try to read it or send it somewhere else. In that case, the message still cannot be copied, so the destination will still detect the untrustworthy router. (This also means that replay attacks are impossible). In particular, the Feds can't tap the channel in the hopes of using fancy equipment to break the crypto - it's physically impossible for them to copy the messages undetected, even if they do manage to get hold of your private encryption keys.
A weakness of this system is that if all the routers on your path collaborate, then they can determine a relationship between source and destination. They can't read the messages, or even copy them, but the association may be something you wanted to hide. This only happens if the routers collaborate - but they might, if the Feds are tapping every router for address information.
Another weakness is if the channel is lossy, which tends to happen with routed networks because of congestion: too many senders hitting a receiver at once, some messages must be dropped. We use TCP/IP to compensate. With this kind of routed quantum channel, if it's lossy, and you use something like TCP to compensate by retransmitting, then somebody can copy your messages undetected, by causing the messages to be lost. So, you might not want to use TCP.
Parent post (juhaz) is correct and should be modded up. The grand-parent (horza) has many facts wrong.
People, get your facts straight, please!
The European Parliament voted against software patents. (horza incorrectly said they voted for them). These are the directly elected MEPs, elected recently in fact.
The Council of Ministers, who are sent by national governments, voted for software patents (and worse: even to make interoperability an infringement).
The UK patent office gives mixed messages. The linked-to page is in favour of software patents, not against as horza said, but they say the line between what is pure software and what isn't needs to be clarified. Everyone agrees with this: but there is huge disagreement over where the line should be.
The UK government's representatives are among those who (currently) want to allow patents on pure software if the software can be used in a machine with a technical effect. Although it sounds fluffy, that means any software which does anything. The main principle is that publishing the software alone is infringing, even when it's not being used in an infringing way.
The MEPs want to allow patents only when the software is part of a machine with a technical effect. The machine as a whole is patentable -- not the software in isolation. That means you can publish software freely, and patents only become relevant when you build and manufacture machines (e.g. such as iPods) which use the software. The main principle is that publishing the software isn't infringing, it is only infringing at the point of use in a technical way. They take this position because economic studies indicate this balance is the more effective way to stimulate innovation, and because it's essentially a freedom of speech issue.
This is the difference: Council of Ministers position means a new input control (e.g. new kind of slider) on all GUIs can be patented. MEPs position means new kind of slider cannot be patented on GUIs in general, but if you make a hardware music playing device with such a slider, then that is patentable.
So even the MEPs position doesn't grant complete freedem. However, it does grant freedom if you're only writing software, and hardware manufacturers are the only ones who then have to deal with patents. That is a fair compromise.
Finally, horza said you cannot go to jail for failing to pay a fine in the UK: you can declare bankruptcy instead. Firstly, as if losing your home, and all valuable possessions, and the right to run a business, isn't just as bad! Secondly, you can go to jail, if you're found in Contempt of Court for refusing to pay a fine. Thirdly, the point is that it is a threat: it's the worst thing that can legally happen to you for writing free software. Even if it doesn't usually get that bad, the fact that it's a real threat does harm.
Don't talk rubbish. The bad people in this are representatives of National Governements: they are the Bad Council Ministers. The good people are representatives of the people: elected members of the European Parliament, not beholden to National Government interests.
According to your arguments, then, the European Parliament should be making of beuraucratic, self-interested, and destructive policies which ruin my autonomy as a UK citizen. But that's not true!
The European Parliament wants to guarantee my software and business method freedom. The freedom to write and share my creative work. And they frame it in quite noble and clear language too, so the good intent isn't easily twisted. It means I am free to do the work I want and invent and share all my best ideas, as much or as little as I want. It's my choice, I'm free, so I'm happy.
The UK Government wants to take away my software and business method freedom, making it illegal for me to publish my own code on my own web site and making it even more illegal to sell my own code. If I come up with an improvement to an existing idea, I cannot safely share my improvements in public. I can be sued, and go to jail if I cannot pay massive fines.
So, you still think it's better to eliminate the EU part?
If the UK Government gets its way, through the Council of Bad National Government Ministers, my work becomes effectively illegal and I am less free. It's that simple.
I have no special interest in being a member of the EU. But when the European Parliament would guarantee my freedom, and UK government if it was totally independent would take away my freedom, then I must support the European Parliament on that issue. Wouldn't you?
so, tell me, what difference would there be in him patenting the stuff he does and then licensing them for free(which is what he would want to do) and not patenting at all?
By not patenting at all, other people can alter his inventions and patent those as new inventions - yes, citing his as prior art upon which they improved. Improvements are patentable, even minor ones. Those other people can then restrict the use of those alterations, charging license fees or even blocking all work along that line of improvement.
However, if he patented and licensed for free, then he could prevent other people from taking control of improvements of his inventions: he could force "derived inventions" to be just as free as his own (by analogy with derived works in copyright).
That's a huge difference. It's analagous to the difference between public domain and GPL, and the results might be just as significant. I don't know of anyone who's tried it yet.
You can always be sued. Even when you are completely in the right, and 100% legal, you can be sued. The question is whether there is any danger of you losing, or being caught in an expensive process which you cannot afford.
If the European parliament position becomes law, then no, in theory you cannot lose a lawsuit for just writing excellent software.
If the European Council of Ministers position becomes law, then yes you can be sued - for publishing your excellent software on your own web site, among other things.
The latest Dutch Parliament decision is one positive step towards the first result: where you are relatively safe from lawsuits. However it is not yet enough; more steps of a similar kind from other countries are needed to ensure your safety.
If you have a driver and CUPS+Foomatic+All of that stuff installed, printing under Linux is no trouble at all.
Unfortunately that's not my experience. I'm running Red Hat 9, with CUPS, Foomatic and a fairly bog standard installation.
Setting it up for my HP990cxi was nice and straightforward.
But can you explain why when printing some simple documents from OpenOffice Writer, it doesn't send anything to the printer (the data light doesn't flash), and "lpq" shows that a file is spooled but nothing happens for 15 seconds or so and then it just says "failed - error" or something like that?
What kind of error? What went wrong? No information at all.
Get this: printing the same letter to a PDF file from oowriter, and then printing the file using "lpr", works fine! Btw, there's nothing fancy in the letter, just text and border round a table.
I think Ghostscript failed with that file. I'm guessing, because of the lack of useful error message. (Nothing in/var/log, either). But, if I print to a PS file in oowriter, the file displays fine in Ghostscript. So that doesn't make sense.
I accept that some things are still broken. There's still a long way to before the "Print" button in a word processor works. (sarcasm)
But the useless error message from "lpq" is far from helpful.
-- Jamie
ps. I may as well mention that Ghostscript on Red Hat 9 doesn't print text in the right direction on an envelope. The page orientation is fine, but the text is rotated 90 degrees. One could try to blame OpenOffice, if it weren't for the fact that xpdf displays and prints the same file fine, but it prints with lower resolution. Such brokenness, I hoped we might have got beyond that by now.
(how can injustice lead to justice? It's a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity)
It is not a contradiction to say that injustice leads to justice.
Think about it: justice, that is, intentionally acting in a just way (as opposed to simply observing something and calling it just) arises as a consequence of prior injustice and the intention to not act the same way again.
This isn't a government project spending tax dollars, this is private investment in a future growth industry. If they don't spend the R&D money on this now, they won't grow this new industry in the future and thereby
earn enough money to give to charities.
You don't really understand where earned money comes from, do you? Wealth is indeed created by R&D, but "money to give to charities" is not always positive wealth for charities.
Every dollar earned in the future space exploration industry is a dollar that someone pays to the space exploration industry. Those same dollers could be spent directly on the things charities spend them on.
In other words, if in future the industry earns so much that it pays charities $1 billion per year, according to your description they have earned it, how wonderful, that's $1 billion for the charities. Great advertising.
In reality, that's at minimum $1 billion that the industry's customers have chosen not to give to charities. It will be more, because of the actual real costs of running the industry itself, i.e. profits, salaries, raw materials etc.
From this simplistic description of money flow,
charities are worse off with the industry than without it.
Of course, money does not behave in such a simple way, and the value of the R&D and the consequent industry cannot be measured so easily. Money in itself is meaningless. It's what we do as a consequence of it that is important.
The point is this: your idea that R&D creates industry which earns money and thus creates money to sponsor charitable work is not correct. Some R&D and some industry assists charitable work. Some actively thwarts it, costing charities heavily even when that same industry is giving money to those same charities, if it causes the charities to have to spend more on solving real problems, or causes them to receive less than they would have received otherwise.
Private space exploration does seem likely to be of benefit to us all. It has no immediate negative impacts on the difficulties of poor people including those outside America, and its basic resource consumption is not significant at this time. The technology is obviously good for us all in the long run, provided we get over our tendancy to make weapons out of everything.
Then again, perhaps not, if it means military culture ends up colonising the Moon and Mars (using privately developed technology of course -- think of those juicy "defence" contracts) and uses those resources to further the warrior superiority complex and IP control agenda back on Earth.:)
Seriously, space exploration is good. It'd be a shame if we explored space and didn't bother to address our problems back home, though.
Of course bacteria make active decisions to attack and kill other cells with particular characteristics. You don't need a brain to make decisions like that.
Furthermore, while a single bacterium is not comparable with a human brain (as far as we know), a colony of communicating bacteria is potentially more capable. A brain is a colony of neurons, after all. A brain has more structure than a random assembly of cells, but the same is true of a bacterial colony that's had millions of years to evolve.
Two or more decades ago, that advice worked because most people didn't learn to program until they took a class in it or such. Now days, people destined to be programmers are learning some programming by around age 10
I beg to differ. Two decades ago I learned to program around the age of 10. Classes: none. I didn't have formal education in computing until I was 18.
Languages: 6502 and Z80 assembler, and BBC BASIC. Documentation: a two page table at the back of the BBC manual, and the equivalent in a Torch manual, showing mnemonics, opcodes and timings. A 10 year old was able to guess what most of the mnemonics meant and figure it out from there.
Most of my peers who went on to be seasoned programmers seemed to be doing similar things with other computers. That was the age of 8-bit microcomputers, when people's first language was BASIC and/or assembly language, and lots of people were writing tightly-coded games in their bedrooms, remember?
I agree with the observation that having studied machine language is helpful for understanding pointers, pointer arithmetic, memory layout, references, boxed and unboxed types and such. However, I would say that anyone who properly understands C has adequate understanding of these things too.
If one is going to do programming where pointers would be used (systems programming and lower level applications programming, such as in C)
In high-level Java and Javascript, every non-primitive value is a pointer. Discuss.:-)
No, your method doesn't work because you haven't considered the spectrum of frequencies generated when you encode the data.
The figure you are groping in the dark for is called bandwidth. The signalling rate is proportional to the range of frequencies, not the carrier frequency which is the pure signal you start with.
2.4GHz is the carrier frequency. The carrier frequency does not determine the signalling rate: the bandwidth does. At first it looks like you could encode more data on a 2.4GHz carrier than a 900MHz carrier, but this is only because there's potentially greater bandwidth around 2.4GHz. In practice you cannot use all of that bandwidth.
In your example, if you encode one bit of information on each "peak" of a 2.4GHz signal, and then look at the spectrum of the resulting waveform, you will see that it has energy in the range 0-4.8GHz. That's the minimum - if you switch between different size peaks abruptly at the zero crossings, it will have higher frequencies than 4.8GHz, too. This is something that happens when you take a pure sine wave and modulate it.
If you transmit that, you'll interfere with other radios over that whole frequency range. That method of encoding data produces a signal which affects radios tuned to any frequency in the rather wide range. We say this kind of signal has a wide band.
In practice you cannot transmit that signal, because no antenna is capable of it. If you try, at the receiver you will see a highly distorted form of the signal.
Wi-Fi devices operating in the 2.4GHz band actually have about 14 channels to choose from: the channels are based on carrier frequencies only 5MHz apart. To avoid interference, this means a Wi-Fi device may use only 5MHz of bandwidth as an absolute maximum for one channel. The data is packed in a clever way into multiple "bits per peak", in such a way that the transmitted energy spectrum is confined to a narrow band clustered around the carrier frequency. (The encoding is also designed to be robust against distortion in the atmosphere and electronics, and so the receiver can compensate for reflections from buildings and moving objects.)
The TV UHF band is interesting, because the 400-700MHz band offers a wider bandwidth than is presently available for Wi-Fi communications. It also has different propagation characteristics through the atmosphere and buildings. I'm not sure how those affect the potential applications.
And when it comes time for tenure review, they don't ask you how much source code you released. No, all that matters is how many journals you published in.
Perhaps they should.
Tenure review is meant to assess an acedemic's contribution. Why not include the amount of quality code published in that assessment?
Putting it another way: why do we not publish code as well as explanations in the journals? Why isn't source code peer reviewed as part of the publishing and grant giving process?
The artists are not getting a dime from the money you send to the Russians.
I disagree with your prejudicial statement.
The article says that the Russians are paying to license this music, and your payment to the site funds that payment. That license fee goes to the artists' association, specifically to fund artists, engineers etc. in the same way that radio airtime fees are supposed to fund those involved in making the music.
Because of the price differential between countries, perhaps only a very small sum or none makes its way to U.S.-based artists. It is hard to know without seeing the figures. U.S.-based music would surely not be licensed at all in Russia if the RIAA didn't make something from doing that.
U.S.-based artists are not the only ones in the world, though. I bet there are plenty of Eastern European artists (among others) for whom Russian licensing fees represent substantial income.
I can believe most of those, but when is the last time you saw a pregnant woman in a crowd rolling a cop car over? Smashing parking meters, setting fires or looting stores and houses?
The police use projectile and chemical weapons at non-violent protests too. That is wrong, of course, but it happens. It is a lapse in the professionality of the police.
Experienced people can often tell when the police are about to turn violent, for example if you see one smacking his/her hand with their baton like they're in the mood for hitting, or there's a sudden build up of personnel, these are signs of action pending from the police side. It isn't always possible to tell, as they sometimes perform surprise attacks.
However, most people who engage in non-violent protest are not very experienced, and are surprised by the level of attack and are unprepared if they are unlucky enough to be attacked. Sometimes its as simple as sitting in road in a circle holding hands and singing, when suddendly someone is hit by a baton round or plastic-coated bullet, or a CS gas cannister lands between someone's legs. (Those things cause 3rd degree burns, by the way. Never touch one.).
Any time they want to disperse crowds. It's true they're used more often during a riot, but even a bunch of people walking away from a private meeting get targetted sometimes. (I'm thinking of Miami last year). That is not appropriate use of police force.
Obviously it is wise for a pregnant women to stay away from any kind of protest, because of the potential danger. Many will. But some women care strongly about causes, and think that chanting songs and carrying placards is something that they should continue to do.
There is also a problem with weapons being used for evictions and dispersing parties. When such a police action is anticipated, the most vulnerable people can stay away. But they cannot always be anticipated, especially if the police are performing a surprise raid to search for immigrants (who, surprise surprise, are occasionally pregnant).
In my opinion, the problem is not the use of weapons per se, but that police, in their own imperfect way, have a documented and consistent tendancy to use them inappropriately and dangerously, well outside the parameters they are theoretically intended for.
Judicial oversight does not tend to punish these failings: lack of justice for police brutality is legendary worldwide, and so they continue. It is everywhere, like it's a built-in human tendancy, but nonetheless that does not excuse each officer's responsibility for their actions, especially when an officer steps beyond the bounds of professional behaviour. They are supposed to be professional maintainers of law as well as order, which means their behaviour should be held to a higher standard than untrained people, and if they cannot attain that standard they should not be in that role.
Software built in India or China will not be legal in the US if they don't adhere to these ridiculous software patents.
That's not a problem.
Software will be made in India, China and elsewhere, and web sites based there will sell their software over the Internet to US customers, despite the infringement of US patents. US home customers are sure to buy and use it, even when businesses daren't.
Ironically, the shareholders will be based in the US for a while longer. Looks like you guys are funding your own replacements!:)
This will extend to programmable consumer hardware too. For example, patent-infringing mobile phones from China face obstacles to being sold in the US (except on the black market), but firmware upgrades which add new features can easily be sold over the 'net.
There are two ways for the US to retain its market strength. One is to cut down on its own patents and reduce the economic friction they cause; the other is to extend the friction to other countries. The latter strategy seems to have the upper hand right now, and is one reason for the push toward global patent treaties. Fingers crossed.
I thought the information was accurate and relevant to the parent post, which discusses the lethality of non-lethal weapons, although arguably offtopic from the original article.
A moderation of Off-Topic would have made sense. Troll makes no sense to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Respect.
I was imagining a future where my brain might be abusively dissociated and the parts used to operate machines. You have generously restored for me a healthy perspective.
Too bad I can't give you any Slashdot karma, so I shall pass on some of the traditional kind.
Blessings,
-- Jamie
I put my hard work in the public domain and/or GPL it.
Then I am sued for everything I own. What kind of Freedom is that?
Patents such as they are now implemented create an unjust system. Those who pursue patents can accrue profits from their own work and the work of others. The who do not pursue patents can go bankrupt or be blocked from inventing despite working independently and competing fairly.
-- Jamie
Mm, nothing like a dating site that hooks you up with couples. Nice and kinky! :)
-- Jamie
Yup, it's a dream but some of us are working on making it real: Semiconductor devices made on an individual or small community scale. We're aiming for full-on complex circuits but we'll be very happy when the first transistor works.
One of the stages is indeed a home-made lathe and milling machine, to make some of the vacuum chambers and chemical vessels. Fun stuff :) By the way, thanks Slashdot for pointing me at these books. (This isn't the first article whose comments recommend them).
Is anyone else working on home made silicon? Anyone like the project enough to fund it? :) Go on, you know you want to see Free / Open Source Hardware succeed :-)
-- Jamie
I have an HP Deskjet 990CXi. A simple, colour deskjet.
Neither of the two drivers for this printer currently offered by CUPS works properly. One of them prints garbage when it's told to print in colour, but is fine in grayscale. The other driver prints the black ink fine, but the colour ink image is double-size compared with the black. So that's only usable in grayscale as well.
That's with current Gentoo, CUPS, and the standard offering of printer drivers through the printer config GUI, btw.
The drivers that come with Red Hat 9 print ok except for an unnecessarily large top margin where nothing is printed (it's larger then the printer can do, and larger than one but not both of the margins of the Gentoo drivers).
My point is that HP Deskjets don't automatically just work the way your grandmother needs them to, or Linux printing doesn't just work or some combination thereof. There's plenty of room for improvement.
-- Jamie
How in the hell did you get a computer if you have no money?
Where I live, computers are given away free to people who cannot afford them. No, it's not government; no, it's not commercial. It's a community project: old computers are collected from those who don't need them any more, repaired and refurbished if necessary, and given to those who do.
Is that how you get your internet service too?
We have a community project to provide free wireless internet service too.
You might be surprised to learn how many people cannot afford to use computers or access the Internet. For many people, the only access to computers or the Internet is via a public library, and that's often impractical to use if you have a full time job.
For such people, the cost of a Windows XP license is out of the question. This is only a problem when they are asked to use some Windows-only software, of course, but that does occur. We like them to use Linux and OpenOffice, but there are occasions when a document doesn't display right in MS Word and not being able to say you used Word to create it puts you at an economic disadvantage.
-- Jamie
And just as suddenly running a developer mailing list is no longer possible without outside funding.
That's often put forth as the reason to keep email sending nominally free. However, you could charge only for emails which aren't in your whitelisted senders. When you subscribe to any kind of mailing list, you would also add the list address to your whitelist.
A protocol can be arranged so that the list owner has proof you won't charge for emails from them before they send you list emails, to prevent anyone trying to harvest money from lists. One such protocol is that your MTA asks for payment when it receives a message that isn't whitelisted: list owners would simply not pay, because it means you haven't completed the subscription process.
Essentially, this is doing "opt-in" lists properly. Instead of some spammer claiming that you opted-in, in this system you have technical control over whether you are opted in to any kind of list. For your friends and mailing lists, it doesn't cost them anything, but for spammers sending unsolicited mail, it costs them real money.
I'll leave the technical details to your imagination.
-- Jamie
Yes, it is theoretically possible.
If you're happy for the destination address of a message to be visible, then you don't have to encrypt that part. The router looks at that, and can route the rest of the message without affecting the quantum encryption (e.g. by moving a mirror to reflect the quantum encrypted signal to the destination port).
If you don't want that, then you can use onion source routing. Your message begins with an encrypted sequence which tells the first router where to forward the rest of the message. Only the first router can decrypt it. The next part of the message begins with an encrypted message for the next router, and so on. You have to establish a private key with each router, so that you can tell it how to forward the messages, but no router can ever see the source and destination address together.
If a router is not trustworthy, then it may fail to route your message, and try to read it or send it somewhere else. In that case, the message still cannot be copied, so the destination will still detect the untrustworthy router. (This also means that replay attacks are impossible). In particular, the Feds can't tap the channel in the hopes of using fancy equipment to break the crypto - it's physically impossible for them to copy the messages undetected, even if they do manage to get hold of your private encryption keys.
A weakness of this system is that if all the routers on your path collaborate, then they can determine a relationship between source and destination. They can't read the messages, or even copy them, but the association may be something you wanted to hide. This only happens if the routers collaborate - but they might, if the Feds are tapping every router for address information.
Another weakness is if the channel is lossy, which tends to happen with routed networks because of congestion: too many senders hitting a receiver at once, some messages must be dropped. We use TCP/IP to compensate. With this kind of routed quantum channel, if it's lossy, and you use something like TCP to compensate by retransmitting, then somebody can copy your messages undetected, by causing the messages to be lost. So, you might not want to use TCP.
-- Jamie
you try something like TCP/IP over this channelParent post (juhaz) is correct and should be modded up.
The grand-parent (horza) has many facts wrong.
People, get your facts straight, please!
The European Parliament voted against software patents. (horza incorrectly said they voted for them). These are the directly elected MEPs, elected recently in fact.
The Council of Ministers, who are sent by national governments, voted for software patents (and worse: even to make interoperability an infringement).
The UK patent office gives mixed messages. The linked-to page is in favour of software patents, not against as horza said, but they say the line between what is pure software and what isn't needs to be clarified. Everyone agrees with this: but there is huge disagreement over where the line should be.
The UK government's representatives are among those who (currently) want to allow patents on pure software if the software can be used in a machine with a technical effect. Although it sounds fluffy, that means any software which does anything. The main principle is that publishing the software alone is infringing, even when it's not being used in an infringing way.
The MEPs want to allow patents only when the software is part of a machine with a technical effect. The machine as a whole is patentable -- not the software in isolation. That means you can publish software freely, and patents only become relevant when you build and manufacture machines (e.g. such as iPods) which use the software. The main principle is that publishing the software isn't infringing, it is only infringing at the point of use in a technical way. They take this position because economic studies indicate this balance is the more effective way to stimulate innovation, and because it's essentially a freedom of speech issue.
This is the difference: Council of Ministers position means a new input control (e.g. new kind of slider) on all GUIs can be patented. MEPs position means new kind of slider cannot be patented on GUIs in general, but if you make a hardware music playing device with such a slider, then that is patentable.
So even the MEPs position doesn't grant complete freedem. However, it does grant freedom if you're only writing software, and hardware manufacturers are the only ones who then have to deal with patents. That is a fair compromise.
Finally, horza said you cannot go to jail for failing to pay a fine in the UK: you can declare bankruptcy instead. Firstly, as if losing your home, and all valuable possessions, and the right to run a business, isn't just as bad! Secondly, you can go to jail, if you're found in Contempt of Court for refusing to pay a fine. Thirdly, the point is that it is a threat: it's the worst thing that can legally happen to you for writing free software. Even if it doesn't usually get that bad, the fact that it's a real threat does harm.
-- Jamie
Don't talk rubbish. The bad people in this are representatives of National Governements: they are the Bad Council Ministers. The good people are representatives of the people: elected members of the European Parliament, not beholden to National Government interests.
According to your arguments, then, the European Parliament should be making of beuraucratic, self-interested, and destructive policies which ruin my autonomy as a UK citizen. But that's not true!
The European Parliament wants to guarantee my software and business method freedom. The freedom to write and share my creative work. And they frame it in quite noble and clear language too, so the good intent isn't easily twisted. It means I am free to do the work I want and invent and share all my best ideas, as much or as little as I want. It's my choice, I'm free, so I'm happy.
The UK Government wants to take away my software and business method freedom, making it illegal for me to publish my own code on my own web site and making it even more illegal to sell my own code. If I come up with an improvement to an existing idea, I cannot safely share my improvements in public. I can be sued, and go to jail if I cannot pay massive fines.
So, you still think it's better to eliminate the EU part?
If the UK Government gets its way, through the Council of Bad National Government Ministers, my work becomes effectively illegal and I am less free. It's that simple.
I have no special interest in being a member of the EU. But when the European Parliament would guarantee my freedom, and UK government if it was totally independent would take away my freedom, then I must support the European Parliament on that issue. Wouldn't you?
-- Jamie
By not patenting at all, other people can alter his inventions and patent those as new inventions - yes, citing his as prior art upon which they improved. Improvements are patentable, even minor ones. Those other people can then restrict the use of those alterations, charging license fees or even blocking all work along that line of improvement.
However, if he patented and licensed for free, then he could prevent other people from taking control of improvements of his inventions: he could force "derived inventions" to be just as free as his own (by analogy with derived works in copyright).
That's a huge difference. It's analagous to the difference between public domain and GPL, and the results might be just as significant. I don't know of anyone who's tried it yet.
-- Jamie
You can always be sued. Even when you are completely in the right, and 100% legal, you can be sued. The question is whether there is any danger of you losing, or being caught in an expensive process which you cannot afford.
If the European parliament position becomes law, then no, in theory you cannot lose a lawsuit for just writing excellent software.
If the European Council of Ministers position becomes law, then yes you can be sued - for publishing your excellent software on your own web site, among other things.
The latest Dutch Parliament decision is one positive step towards the first result: where you are relatively safe from lawsuits. However it is not yet enough; more steps of a similar kind from other countries are needed to ensure your safety.
-- Jamie
Unfortunately that's not my experience. I'm running Red Hat 9, with CUPS, Foomatic and a fairly bog standard installation.
Setting it up for my HP990cxi was nice and straightforward.
But can you explain why when printing some simple documents from OpenOffice Writer, it doesn't send anything to the printer (the data light doesn't flash), and "lpq" shows that a file is spooled but nothing happens for 15 seconds or so and then it just says "failed - error" or something like that?
What kind of error? What went wrong? No information at all.
Get this: printing the same letter to a PDF file from oowriter, and then printing the file using "lpr", works fine! Btw, there's nothing fancy in the letter, just text and border round a table.
I think Ghostscript failed with that file. I'm guessing, because of the lack of useful error message. (Nothing in /var/log, either). But, if I print to a PS file in oowriter, the file displays fine in Ghostscript. So that doesn't make sense.
I accept that some things are still broken. There's still a long way to before the "Print" button in a word processor works. (sarcasm)
But the useless error message from "lpq" is far from helpful.
-- Jamie
ps. I may as well mention that Ghostscript on Red Hat 9 doesn't print text in the right direction on an envelope. The page orientation is fine, but the text is rotated 90 degrees. One could try to blame OpenOffice, if it weren't for the fact that xpdf displays and prints the same file fine, but it prints with lower resolution. Such brokenness, I hoped we might have got beyond that by now.
It is not a contradiction to say that injustice leads to justice.
Think about it: justice, that is, intentionally acting in a just way (as opposed to simply observing something and calling it just) arises as a consequence of prior injustice and the intention to not act the same way again.
-- Jamie
You don't really understand where earned money comes from, do you? Wealth is indeed created by R&D, but "money to give to charities" is not always positive wealth for charities.
Every dollar earned in the future space exploration industry is a dollar that someone pays to the space exploration industry. Those same dollers could be spent directly on the things charities spend them on.
In other words, if in future the industry earns so much that it pays charities $1 billion per year, according to your description they have earned it, how wonderful, that's $1 billion for the charities. Great advertising.
In reality, that's at minimum $1 billion that the industry's customers have chosen not to give to charities. It will be more, because of the actual real costs of running the industry itself, i.e. profits, salaries, raw materials etc.
From this simplistic description of money flow, charities are worse off with the industry than without it.
Of course, money does not behave in such a simple way, and the value of the R&D and the consequent industry cannot be measured so easily. Money in itself is meaningless. It's what we do as a consequence of it that is important.
The point is this: your idea that R&D creates industry which earns money and thus creates money to sponsor charitable work is not correct. Some R&D and some industry assists charitable work. Some actively thwarts it, costing charities heavily even when that same industry is giving money to those same charities, if it causes the charities to have to spend more on solving real problems, or causes them to receive less than they would have received otherwise.
Private space exploration does seem likely to be of benefit to us all. It has no immediate negative impacts on the difficulties of poor people including those outside America, and its basic resource consumption is not significant at this time. The technology is obviously good for us all in the long run, provided we get over our tendancy to make weapons out of everything.
Then again, perhaps not, if it means military culture ends up colonising the Moon and Mars (using privately developed technology of course -- think of those juicy "defence" contracts) and uses those resources to further the warrior superiority complex and IP control agenda back on Earth. :)
Seriously, space exploration is good. It'd be a shame if we explored space and didn't bother to address our problems back home, though.
-- Jamie
Of course bacteria make active decisions to attack and kill other cells with particular characteristics. You don't need a brain to make decisions like that.
Furthermore, while a single bacterium is not comparable with a human brain (as far as we know), a colony of communicating bacteria is potentially more capable. A brain is a colony of neurons, after all. A brain has more structure than a random assembly of cells, but the same is true of a bacterial colony that's had millions of years to evolve.
-- Jamie
I beg to differ. Two decades ago I learned to program around the age of 10. Classes: none. I didn't have formal education in computing until I was 18. Languages: 6502 and Z80 assembler, and BBC BASIC. Documentation: a two page table at the back of the BBC manual, and the equivalent in a Torch manual, showing mnemonics, opcodes and timings. A 10 year old was able to guess what most of the mnemonics meant and figure it out from there.
Most of my peers who went on to be seasoned programmers seemed to be doing similar things with other computers. That was the age of 8-bit microcomputers, when people's first language was BASIC and/or assembly language, and lots of people were writing tightly-coded games in their bedrooms, remember?
I agree with the observation that having studied machine language is helpful for understanding pointers, pointer arithmetic, memory layout, references, boxed and unboxed types and such. However, I would say that anyone who properly understands C has adequate understanding of these things too.
In high-level Java and Javascript, every non-primitive value is a pointer. Discuss. :-)
-- Jamie
Lots of musicians make their own instruments. Examples:
"Andrea Neumann has custom made her own instrument, the innenklavier (inside-piano)..."
"I heard a guy playing on the street the other day and this guy was so funky; he was a very cool musician. He made his own instrument and it was so interesting."
"He [Steve Roach] studied these traditional techniques and made his own instrument with aboriginal didgeridoo master David Hudson."
"Most taiko groups in North America still make their own drums ..."
"They make their own drums from what must be 50 acres of their own forest land, and they replenish the forest by replanting more trees." (Due To Javascript, click on Airto's Stories and then With The Kodo Drummers)
"Aboriginal people still make their own drums to this day, and spend a lot of time forming each one perfectly."
Enjoy,
-- Jamie
No, your method doesn't work because you haven't considered the spectrum of frequencies generated when you encode the data.
The figure you are groping in the dark for is called bandwidth. The signalling rate is proportional to the range of frequencies, not the carrier frequency which is the pure signal you start with.
2.4GHz is the carrier frequency. The carrier frequency does not determine the signalling rate: the bandwidth does. At first it looks like you could encode more data on a 2.4GHz carrier than a 900MHz carrier, but this is only because there's potentially greater bandwidth around 2.4GHz. In practice you cannot use all of that bandwidth.
In your example, if you encode one bit of information on each "peak" of a 2.4GHz signal, and then look at the spectrum of the resulting waveform, you will see that it has energy in the range 0-4.8GHz. That's the minimum - if you switch between different size peaks abruptly at the zero crossings, it will have higher frequencies than 4.8GHz, too. This is something that happens when you take a pure sine wave and modulate it.
If you transmit that, you'll interfere with other radios over that whole frequency range. That method of encoding data produces a signal which affects radios tuned to any frequency in the rather wide range. We say this kind of signal has a wide band.
In practice you cannot transmit that signal, because no antenna is capable of it. If you try, at the receiver you will see a highly distorted form of the signal.
Wi-Fi devices operating in the 2.4GHz band actually have about 14 channels to choose from: the channels are based on carrier frequencies only 5MHz apart. To avoid interference, this means a Wi-Fi device may use only 5MHz of bandwidth as an absolute maximum for one channel. The data is packed in a clever way into multiple "bits per peak", in such a way that the transmitted energy spectrum is confined to a narrow band clustered around the carrier frequency. (The encoding is also designed to be robust against distortion in the atmosphere and electronics, and so the receiver can compensate for reflections from buildings and moving objects.)
The TV UHF band is interesting, because the 400-700MHz band offers a wider bandwidth than is presently available for Wi-Fi communications. It also has different propagation characteristics through the atmosphere and buildings. I'm not sure how those affect the potential applications.
Enjoy,
-- Jamie
Perhaps they should.
Tenure review is meant to assess an acedemic's contribution. Why not include the amount of quality code published in that assessment?
Putting it another way: why do we not publish code as well as explanations in the journals? Why isn't source code peer reviewed as part of the publishing and grant giving process?
-- Jamie
I disagree with your prejudicial statement.
The article says that the Russians are paying to license this music, and your payment to the site funds that payment. That license fee goes to the artists' association, specifically to fund artists, engineers etc. in the same way that radio airtime fees are supposed to fund those involved in making the music.
Because of the price differential between countries, perhaps only a very small sum or none makes its way to U.S.-based artists. It is hard to know without seeing the figures. U.S.-based music would surely not be licensed at all in Russia if the RIAA didn't make something from doing that.
U.S.-based artists are not the only ones in the world, though. I bet there are plenty of Eastern European artists (among others) for whom Russian licensing fees represent substantial income.
-- Jamie
I can believe most of those, but when is the last time you saw a pregnant woman in a crowd rolling a cop car over? Smashing parking meters, setting fires or looting stores and houses?
The police use projectile and chemical weapons at non-violent protests too. That is wrong, of course, but it happens. It is a lapse in the professionality of the police.
Experienced people can often tell when the police are about to turn violent, for example if you see one smacking his/her hand with their baton like they're in the mood for hitting, or there's a sudden build up of personnel, these are signs of action pending from the police side. It isn't always possible to tell, as they sometimes perform surprise attacks.
However, most people who engage in non-violent protest are not very experienced, and are surprised by the level of attack and are unprepared if they are unlucky enough to be attacked. Sometimes its as simple as sitting in road in a circle holding hands and singing, when suddendly someone is hit by a baton round or plastic-coated bullet, or a CS gas cannister lands between someone's legs. (Those things cause 3rd degree burns, by the way. Never touch one.).
Any time they want to disperse crowds. It's true they're used more often during a riot, but even a bunch of people walking away from a private meeting get targetted sometimes. (I'm thinking of Miami last year). That is not appropriate use of police force.
Obviously it is wise for a pregnant women to stay away from any kind of protest, because of the potential danger. Many will. But some women care strongly about causes, and think that chanting songs and carrying placards is something that they should continue to do.
There is also a problem with weapons being used for evictions and dispersing parties. When such a police action is anticipated, the most vulnerable people can stay away. But they cannot always be anticipated, especially if the police are performing a surprise raid to search for immigrants (who, surprise surprise, are occasionally pregnant).
In my opinion, the problem is not the use of weapons per se, but that police, in their own imperfect way, have a documented and consistent tendancy to use them inappropriately and dangerously, well outside the parameters they are theoretically intended for.
Judicial oversight does not tend to punish these failings: lack of justice for police brutality is legendary worldwide, and so they continue. It is everywhere, like it's a built-in human tendancy, but nonetheless that does not excuse each officer's responsibility for their actions, especially when an officer steps beyond the bounds of professional behaviour. They are supposed to be professional maintainers of law as well as order, which means their behaviour should be held to a higher standard than untrained people, and if they cannot attain that standard they should not be in that role.
-- Jamie
Software built in India or China will not be legal in the US if they don't adhere to these ridiculous software patents.
That's not a problem.
Software will be made in India, China and elsewhere, and web sites based there will sell their software over the Internet to US customers, despite the infringement of US patents. US home customers are sure to buy and use it, even when businesses daren't.
Ironically, the shareholders will be based in the US for a while longer. Looks like you guys are funding your own replacements! :)
This will extend to programmable consumer hardware too. For example, patent-infringing mobile phones from China face obstacles to being sold in the US (except on the black market), but firmware upgrades which add new features can easily be sold over the 'net.
There are two ways for the US to retain its market strength. One is to cut down on its own patents and reduce the economic friction they cause; the other is to extend the friction to other countries. The latter strategy seems to have the upper hand right now, and is one reason for the push toward global patent treaties. Fingers crossed.
-- Jamie
Troll?
I thought the information was accurate and relevant to the parent post, which discusses the lethality of non-lethal weapons, although arguably offtopic from the original article.
A moderation of Off-Topic would have made sense. Troll makes no sense to me.
-- Jamie