The original implementation of "Clippy" was based on extensive research in computer-assisted help, and it did a very good job--only showing up when you really needed help, and almost always being right about what you needed help on.
What went wrong is that marketing people decided it did not show up enough, and so Clippy was dumbed way down, so that it would show up much more frequently.
There was a fascinating article a few years ago by the guy whose research project Clippy came from, discussing this and the path from cutting-edge technology to annoying pest that Clippy was forced down.
A little Googling reveals that one of the largest container ships consumes a gallon of fuel every 28 feet, carrying a load of 11000 containers of 1200 cubic feet capacity each. That is going to work out to a fraction of a cent per bulb on a trip from China to Los Angeles or Long Beach.
It's important to note that this sort of collision is not taking advantage of any of the known weaknesses in MD5, rather it's brute force
Wrong. Finding collisions in MD5 by brute force takes around 2^64 attempts (basically, a birthday attack), and is safe from all but those with huge computing resources. The current methods being used for finding collisions are several orders of magnitude faster than that, and only require minutes on a typical PC.
Obvious point being that UO is a 2D game - or is it?
I don't think it matters. Prior art doesn't have to exactly fit the patent. The test is whether or not the invention would be obvious to one skilled in the prior art. Given a 2D game that does everything in the patent except for being 3D, then applying the same techniques to a 3D game would be obvious.
This tactic was a roaring success in the war on drugs. In fact all drug dealers went broke during the first Reagan administration, and now there are no drugs to be had anymore
At the risk of being overly pedantic, most drug dealers are in fact close to broke. The wealth distribution among those in the illegal drug trade is very heavily skewed toward the top. The people out actually being dealers are usually addicts themselves, barely making enough to cover their addiction.
I'd guess that the logic is something along the lines that if fake child porn is readily available, it will lead to more real exploitation of children. E.g., if you have a person with mild pedophilia tendencies, but no access to child porn, his tendencies might stay just that, and no harm will be done. Give him an adequate supply of fake child porn, which he can use to indulge his fantasies, he is far more likely to move on to consuming real child porn, and then perhaps moving on to going after real children in person.
No it isn't. It does use Java for a small number of features that most people rarely use, but nearly everything you do most of the time in it is written in C++.
The home genetic engineering project I would work on, if I were rich enough and smart enough, would be to take some MMORPG, such as WOW, and reify as many creatures from it as I could, and secretly release them into the wild, in enough numbers to establish breeding populations.
Undersea cable breaks happen dozens of times a year. There is a fleet of repair ships constantly at work fixing them. The only thing slightly unusual here is that the same cable got hit more than once. (And even that is not all that uncommon).
This is one of those dumb statistics battles that simply ignores all of the low-power devices out there that are already running Linux. Compare that with WinCE devices and prepare to be dumbfounded by the success of Linux.
Who cares what one's low-powered devices run? For example, my WRT54G router runs Linux. My friend's WRT54G runs VxWorks, because between the time mine was made and the time his was made, the manufacturer switched OSes (so they could cut back on memory, as VxWorks apparently is more efficient). But that's completely transparent to us--we both see the same capabilities and interfaces when we use the devices.
The OS on our WRT54Gs is about as relevant as what brand of capacitors they use--except people don't go around proclaiming the year of Sprague or the year of Rohm.:-).
Default judgment? What good is that if the guy can't find them in the first place? He still won't be able to collect on the default judgment
The suit is over failure to pay off their home loan. Home loans are secured by the home itself. Once the creditor wins in court, he doesn't need to find the debtors in order to collect. He just needs to find the home.
It can be shown that under certain assumptions, a free market leads to optimal production and consumption of goods. Those assumptions hold for goods like, say, bread, where over the long run, the cost of production equals the marginal cost, and where giving the item to one consumer excludes giving to another.
Those assumptions fail for goods like music, where the marginal cost is essentially zero, and one consumer having a song doesn't exclude others from having it.
A free market does not result in optimal production for goods like music. It results in underproduction, and thus underconsumption. This is sometimes called a "market failure".
There are two ways to address this. One way, which is what we do in our current system, is to artificially, by force of law, give music the necessary attributes to make it like bread. That's the theoretical economic justification for copyright law. That fixes the underproduction problem.
But there is still underconsumption, because the market price is higher than the marginal cost of production. That also leads to resource misallocation, as consumers are spending more for music than they "should" be spending, and so spending less on other things.
The good point, though, of the "intellectual property" approach, is that it leaves the decision of WHAT music to produce up to market forces.
The other way to address the market failure in music is to treat it as a public good. Consumers get to consume it for free (well, free in the same sense that a public park is free...we pay for it, but it comes out of our taxes, and we pay the same whether we use it a little or a lot), and the government pays musicians to produce it.
The usual big philosophical objection to this is that we then have the government deciding which musicians to pay to produce music. That doesn't sound very appealing, so to make the "public good" approach work, you need to design some kind of mechanism where who gets paid and how much they get paid is determined by some kind of objective method, probably based on tracking downloads or how many times a song is played or something like that, and splitting the money according to that. Then, the government just has to decide the overall music budget each year--which is still giving them a lot of control over music.
If we want to solve the music production/consumption problem rationally, as an economic problem of allocation of resources, then those are pretty much the only real ways to solve the problem. Either solution is fine with me. The "intellectual property" approach seems more elegant, but only works well if piracy is rare. My big concern with the "public goods" approach is how to handle allocating the money, but since under such a system, music could be openly traded on the net, and people would have no reason to hide, it would be possible to sufficiently sample music downloads to get a good idea of how popular any given song is. I'm not sure how the total music budget could reasonably be set, though.
What do you mean 'sadly'? It's good it works that way. Otherwise, anyone guilty in any civil case could simply not respond and escape liability.
Maybe because Zune Pass is a great deal?
on
Obama's "ZuneGate"
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· Score: 5, Interesting
iTunes Store: millions of songs. Download and keep any song for $1.
Zune Pass: millions of songs. For a flat rate of $15/month, download as many as you want, for use on up to three Zunes and three computers. Each month, you get to designate 10 of these as permanent. If you cancel your subscription, you keep the ones you designated as permanent, and the rest go away.
I have two iPods and an iPhone, and I'm sorely tempted to get a Zune for Zune Pass. That's a fantastic deal.
Not particularly, no. I don't really mind the government maintaining a DNA database
...
I mean, what is the government going to do with my DNA? Clone me? Invade my privacy by finding out what diseases I'm vulnerable to?
How about convict you of crimes you didn't do? Here's how it goes down.
Some criminal who is not you, and whose DNA is not on file, commits a crime, and carelessly leaves behind some DNA.
Police get the DNA, and run it against the DNA database, looking for a match. Yours matches. And yes, this can happen. I'll cover why below.
You are charged with the crime. The jury is mightily impressed with the DNA evidence, and your lack of an alibi. Welcome to jail!
It is a popular misconception that DNA tests uniquely identify people. That would be true (ignoring twins...) if they compared at enough positions. However, such tests are expensive. So what they actually do is compare at a few positions.
This is not enough to uniquely identify you. It is enough to narrow the possibilities down to, in a good case, a handful of people. When that is combined with non-DNA evidence, it is almost certain.
For instance, suppose you've got a woman raped, robbed, and murdered. Through traditional police methods, you find out that she was seen shortly before the crime arguing with her ex-boyfriend who was stalking her, and that she had a pizza delivered where the delivery man turned out to be a paroled serial rapist, and finally, a burglar had been known to be working the neighborhood at the time of the crime, and he had some of her jewelry when he was caught a few days later (but claims he found it on the ground and was never in her house).
Do a DNA test on those three suspects and get a match on one, and you've got your criminal. Sure, there might be a dozen (or even hundreds or thousands, depending on the test you do) people in the world that match, but the chances that someone would have been identified as a suspect through non-DNA traditional police methods AND be one of those dozens (or hundreds...) are low.
In other words, the proper way to use DNA testing is to use it in a Bayesian fashion with other evidence to seal the deal.
Without safeguards in place to prevent misuse of the database (such as using it to pick suspects in lieu of finding suspects the old fashioned way), an incomplete DNA database is a major risk to your rights, if your DNA is included.
If you can't find a lawyer who will spend the time to answer your question, you'll want to read the law, i.e. the Copyright Code, 17 United States Code
It would probably be better for him to read Canada's copyright law, since he appears to be at a Canadian university.
EEE PC has sold more than 4 million, most of them GNU/Linux, and that makes about 0.5% of the world market on it's own. My SWAG is that there's about 10 GNU/Linux desktops for every EEE PC sold
The president of ASUS says sales have been 70% XP, 30% Linux.
Even the people who develop the audio API's say there are too many of them. (Partly because each time someone concludes there are too many of them, instead of doing something to unify them, they develop a new one that is supposed to replace them all and doesn't).
And the kernel ABI is unstable. That's acknowledged by the kernel developers, many of whom consider it a feature.
Employers have a tendency to list in their ads their dream candidate, which is often far more restrictive than what they are actually willing to accept.
Sometimes this can be pretty funny. I saw a place once advertising in the LA Times for people with 5+ years of experience with Unix System V. The problem was that at the time, System V had only been available outside of AT&T for under a year. The only people with 5+ years of System V experience were its developers, at AT&T. Even if they were looking for jobs, they probably weren't looking in the LA Times.
I had a period once where I was out of work for something like six months. Right at the start, I saw a job that I seemed to be a good match for, except they said a Master's degree was a requirement, and I only have a Bachelor's. So I did not apply.
Six months later, they were still looking, and the head hunter I was then using sent my resume. Guess what? I got the job, and performed spectacularly. If the company had advertised more realistic requirements, they would have had me six months earlier, and without having to pay several thousand dollars to the head hunter.
Don't put a stumbling block in front of a blind person--just because a person with full sight could avoid it doesn't make it OK. You all learned it in Sunday School
Or, as the California Supreme Court ruled in 1855, in a case in which a drunk person fell into a hole in the sidewalk:
"A drunken man is as much entitled to a safe street as a sober one, and much more in need of it." Robinson v. Pioche, Bayerque & Co., 5 Cal. 460 (1855)
Not a lawyer, but I did go about 99% of the way through law school. My school had a writing requirement, and I was going to write a paper on legal issues of usenet. However, I just couldn't think of anything to say! (This is not as stupid as it sounds--it was 1995, and there simply had not been much interaction between usenet and the law back then).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how the source code being readily available for download from the site of its developer (Freescale) counts as being "leaked".
The original implementation of "Clippy" was based on extensive research in computer-assisted help, and it did a very good job--only showing up when you really needed help, and almost always being right about what you needed help on.
What went wrong is that marketing people decided it did not show up enough, and so Clippy was dumbed way down, so that it would show up much more frequently.
There was a fascinating article a few years ago by the guy whose research project Clippy came from, discussing this and the path from cutting-edge technology to annoying pest that Clippy was forced down.
A little Googling reveals that one of the largest container ships consumes a gallon of fuel every 28 feet, carrying a load of 11000 containers of 1200 cubic feet capacity each. That is going to work out to a fraction of a cent per bulb on a trip from China to Los Angeles or Long Beach.
Wrong. Finding collisions in MD5 by brute force takes around 2^64 attempts (basically, a birthday attack), and is safe from all but those with huge computing resources. The current methods being used for finding collisions are several orders of magnitude faster than that, and only require minutes on a typical PC.
I don't think it matters. Prior art doesn't have to exactly fit the patent. The test is whether or not the invention would be obvious to one skilled in the prior art. Given a 2D game that does everything in the patent except for being 3D, then applying the same techniques to a 3D game would be obvious.
At the risk of being overly pedantic, most drug dealers are in fact close to broke. The wealth distribution among those in the illegal drug trade is very heavily skewed toward the top. The people out actually being dealers are usually addicts themselves, barely making enough to cover their addiction.
I'd guess that the logic is something along the lines that if fake child porn is readily available, it will lead to more real exploitation of children. E.g., if you have a person with mild pedophilia tendencies, but no access to child porn, his tendencies might stay just that, and no harm will be done. Give him an adequate supply of fake child porn, which he can use to indulge his fantasies, he is far more likely to move on to consuming real child porn, and then perhaps moving on to going after real children in person.
No it isn't. It does use Java for a small number of features that most people rarely use, but nearly everything you do most of the time in it is written in C++.
The home genetic engineering project I would work on, if I were rich enough and smart enough, would be to take some MMORPG, such as WOW, and reify as many creatures from it as I could, and secretly release them into the wild, in enough numbers to establish breeding populations.
Undersea cable breaks happen dozens of times a year. There is a fleet of repair ships constantly at work fixing them. The only thing slightly unusual here is that the same cable got hit more than once. (And even that is not all that uncommon).
Who cares what one's low-powered devices run? For example, my WRT54G router runs Linux. My friend's WRT54G runs VxWorks, because between the time mine was made and the time his was made, the manufacturer switched OSes (so they could cut back on memory, as VxWorks apparently is more efficient). But that's completely transparent to us--we both see the same capabilities and interfaces when we use the devices.
The OS on our WRT54Gs is about as relevant as what brand of capacitors they use--except people don't go around proclaiming the year of Sprague or the year of Rohm. :-).
You wrote:
The suit is over failure to pay off their home loan. Home loans are secured by the home itself. Once the creditor wins in court, he doesn't need to find the debtors in order to collect. He just needs to find the home.
RTFA. (Hint: home loan).
It can be shown that under certain assumptions, a free market leads to optimal production and consumption of goods. Those assumptions hold for goods like, say, bread, where over the long run, the cost of production equals the marginal cost, and where giving the item to one consumer excludes giving to another.
Those assumptions fail for goods like music, where the marginal cost is essentially zero, and one consumer having a song doesn't exclude others from having it.
A free market does not result in optimal production for goods like music. It results in underproduction, and thus underconsumption. This is sometimes called a "market failure".
There are two ways to address this. One way, which is what we do in our current system, is to artificially, by force of law, give music the necessary attributes to make it like bread. That's the theoretical economic justification for copyright law. That fixes the underproduction problem.
But there is still underconsumption, because the market price is higher than the marginal cost of production. That also leads to resource misallocation, as consumers are spending more for music than they "should" be spending, and so spending less on other things.
The good point, though, of the "intellectual property" approach, is that it leaves the decision of WHAT music to produce up to market forces.
The other way to address the market failure in music is to treat it as a public good. Consumers get to consume it for free (well, free in the same sense that a public park is free...we pay for it, but it comes out of our taxes, and we pay the same whether we use it a little or a lot), and the government pays musicians to produce it.
The usual big philosophical objection to this is that we then have the government deciding which musicians to pay to produce music. That doesn't sound very appealing, so to make the "public good" approach work, you need to design some kind of mechanism where who gets paid and how much they get paid is determined by some kind of objective method, probably based on tracking downloads or how many times a song is played or something like that, and splitting the money according to that. Then, the government just has to decide the overall music budget each year--which is still giving them a lot of control over music.
If we want to solve the music production/consumption problem rationally, as an economic problem of allocation of resources, then those are pretty much the only real ways to solve the problem. Either solution is fine with me. The "intellectual property" approach seems more elegant, but only works well if piracy is rare. My big concern with the "public goods" approach is how to handle allocating the money, but since under such a system, music could be openly traded on the net, and people would have no reason to hide, it would be possible to sufficiently sample music downloads to get a good idea of how popular any given song is. I'm not sure how the total music budget could reasonably be set, though.
No, he is not. He's using an old, well-tested, well-studied algorithm, generally believed among cryptographers to be more secure than RSA.
No, presumed innocent. The story says she is innocent, apparently based solely on the fact she is sick and so couldn't possibly be downloading music!?
What do you mean 'sadly'? It's good it works that way. Otherwise, anyone guilty in any civil case could simply not respond and escape liability.
iTunes Store: millions of songs. Download and keep any song for $1.
Zune Pass: millions of songs. For a flat rate of $15/month, download as many as you want, for use on up to three Zunes and three computers. Each month, you get to designate 10 of these as permanent. If you cancel your subscription, you keep the ones you designated as permanent, and the rest go away.
I have two iPods and an iPhone, and I'm sorely tempted to get a Zune for Zune Pass. That's a fantastic deal.
...
How about convict you of crimes you didn't do? Here's how it goes down.
It is a popular misconception that DNA tests uniquely identify people. That would be true (ignoring twins...) if they compared at enough positions. However, such tests are expensive. So what they actually do is compare at a few positions.
This is not enough to uniquely identify you. It is enough to narrow the possibilities down to, in a good case, a handful of people. When that is combined with non-DNA evidence, it is almost certain.
For instance, suppose you've got a woman raped, robbed, and murdered. Through traditional police methods, you find out that she was seen shortly before the crime arguing with her ex-boyfriend who was stalking her, and that she had a pizza delivered where the delivery man turned out to be a paroled serial rapist, and finally, a burglar had been known to be working the neighborhood at the time of the crime, and he had some of her jewelry when he was caught a few days later (but claims he found it on the ground and was never in her house).
Do a DNA test on those three suspects and get a match on one, and you've got your criminal. Sure, there might be a dozen (or even hundreds or thousands, depending on the test you do) people in the world that match, but the chances that someone would have been identified as a suspect through non-DNA traditional police methods AND be one of those dozens (or hundreds...) are low.
In other words, the proper way to use DNA testing is to use it in a Bayesian fashion with other evidence to seal the deal.
Without safeguards in place to prevent misuse of the database (such as using it to pick suspects in lieu of finding suspects the old fashioned way), an incomplete DNA database is a major risk to your rights, if your DNA is included.
It would probably be better for him to read Canada's copyright law, since he appears to be at a Canadian university.
The president of ASUS says sales have been 70% XP, 30% Linux.
Even the people who develop the audio API's say there are too many of them. (Partly because each time someone concludes there are too many of them, instead of doing something to unify them, they develop a new one that is supposed to replace them all and doesn't).
And the kernel ABI is unstable. That's acknowledged by the kernel developers, many of whom consider it a feature.
Employers have a tendency to list in their ads their dream candidate, which is often far more restrictive than what they are actually willing to accept.
Sometimes this can be pretty funny. I saw a place once advertising in the LA Times for people with 5+ years of experience with Unix System V. The problem was that at the time, System V had only been available outside of AT&T for under a year. The only people with 5+ years of System V experience were its developers, at AT&T. Even if they were looking for jobs, they probably weren't looking in the LA Times.
I had a period once where I was out of work for something like six months. Right at the start, I saw a job that I seemed to be a good match for, except they said a Master's degree was a requirement, and I only have a Bachelor's. So I did not apply.
Six months later, they were still looking, and the head hunter I was then using sent my resume. Guess what? I got the job, and performed spectacularly. If the company had advertised more realistic requirements, they would have had me six months earlier, and without having to pay several thousand dollars to the head hunter.
Or, as the California Supreme Court ruled in 1855, in a case in which a drunk person fell into a hole in the sidewalk:
"A drunken man is as much entitled to a safe street as a sober one, and much more in need of it." Robinson v. Pioche, Bayerque & Co., 5 Cal. 460 (1855)
.
Not a lawyer, but I did go about 99% of the way through law school. My school had a writing requirement, and I was going to write a paper on legal issues of usenet. However, I just couldn't think of anything to say! (This is not as stupid as it sounds--it was 1995, and there simply had not been much interaction between usenet and the law back then).