Apparently a patent only lasts about 17 years. So that's not as bad as a copyright, because if I recall a copyright lasts for around the life of the individual + ~20years(correct me if I'm wrong, one site said about 95 years)
The reason for the difference is that patents are much broader. They basically cover the use of an idea. A copyright just covers the particular expression of that idea.
So if Disney has a copyright on Donald Duck, that doesn't stop Warner Brothers from creating Daffy Duck. It just stops Warner Brothers from using Donald Duck.
If Disney could patent cartoon talking ducks, though, then it WOULD stop Daffy Duck.
The key here is that long copyrights for the most part do not impede the creative work of others. You can express the same idea as an existing copyrighted work--you just have to express it YOUR way, rather than copying the existing way.
All public key systems currently in use depend on doing arithmetic on large integers. Let's start with the classical algorithms for addition/subtraction/multiplication/division.
The addition and subtraction algorithms are O(N) and multiplication/division is O(N^2), where N is the number of digits.
What is a digit? On a 32-bit process, it will probably be 32 bits. On a 64-bit processor, it will probably be 64-bits.
What this means is that operating on large integers, say, 1024 bits, will be twice as fast on the 64-bit process for addition/subtraction and 4 times as fast for multiplication/division.
Most large integer packages use Karatsuba multiplication instead of the classical algorithm. Karatsuba is O(N^1.58). On a 64-bit processor, that is 3 times faster than on a 32-bit processor.
Looking at it from the other direction, if on a 32-bit processor, using a given set of algorithms which are working in base B, you can do public key cryptography using N bits, then just by using the same algorithm, working in base B^2 on a 64-bit processor running at the same basic speed, you can in the same time do public key cryptography using 2N bits.
But your #1 takes place between the snap and the end of the play. Watching the players walk back, and huddle and/or line up for the next play isn't very interesting, tactically or strategically.
This is what PVRs are for: see the ads, skip the game.:-)
Seriously, I noticed last year that if I hit my 30 second skip right when a play ended, it would usually take me right to the snap for the next play. With the 30 seconds of downtime between plays gone, football was actually kind of interesting!
I don't need 20GB of music in my pocket, 1,5GB is more than enough for me
Don't underestimate the convenience. 20 gig is enough for many people to rip and download all of their CDs. They don't have to plan ahead what they want to take with them.
1.5 gig is 10-20 albums, depending on how you rip. I would not like to have to pick what 10 albums I'm going to take to work each day.
Sometimes I listen to something like Pink Floyd or Neil Young, and then feel like more, and might end up listening to 5 albums in a row from that artist. Other times, after one album, I want something totally different next, like Garrison Keillor.
It would be horrible to have to pick in the morning which 10 albums are going to fit in with my mood that day.
The bottleneck on those devices is the USB 2.0 or Firewire interface, so the (lower cost, cooler running, lower power consumption, quieter) 5400rpm drive is actually the better choice
What about for random access of many small files? For that, the limiting factor is likely to be rotational latency of the drive, and 7200 RPM will be better than 5400 RPM.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid. But isnt it entirely possible that 'professional spammers' could set up mail relays under a subnet of highly regarded anti-spam sites?
You are assuming that all ISPs are spammer-friendly, which is not a correct assumption.
Having an occasional spammer isn't enough to get on SPEWS. Failing to take effective measures against the spammers they do get is what gets ISPs on SPEWS.
One spammer buys a few IPs on a block with an ISP, and SPEWS takes out the entire block
ISPs don't get into SPEWS just for having spammers buy a few IPs. They get into SPEWS by not taking reasonable stepts to stop those spammers once they start spamming.
Very true. Advertising on unlimited broadband is merely a nuisance. Full video, multi-MB sized advertising on a metered low-speed connection should be a crime. Why should people have to *pay* to receive corporate advertising?
People don't have to receive corporate advertising. No one is standing there with a gun forcing you to go to web sites that have ads.
The banner and pop-up ad business is interesting. Unlike radio or TV or print ads, it can be tracked much quicker. We do most of our advertising by banners where I work, and it is very scientific.
For example, I recall once saying that I thought a feature of one of our ads was obnoxious and would certainly cost us sales. So, my boss said "let's test it", and we went over to the graphics department, I described the changes I wanted, an artist made them in a few minutes in Photoshop, and my boss purchased 25k impressions of the new banner. A couple hours later, we had complete stats on how this banner had done compared to other banners we'd run in the same time on the same sites, and knew by exacly how much my banner was worse than the others.
We constantly tweak our banners, measuring the results. It's very Darwinian.
What this means is that online advertising isn't like, say, TV ads, where if people skip the ads with Tivo, no one is really going to notice, because there is a lot of fuzziness between showing ads TV ads and getting more sales. If people use banner blockers, we'll notice right away, and be able to tell exactly how it is effecting our ads, and that will be reflected very quickly in what we are willing to pay to show banners, which will in turn very quickly be reflected in what the ad companies will pay websites for banner space.
There are a lot of useful sites that will simply go away if too many people start blocking ads.
If I hadn't done anything wrong, I'd stick around to see what's being confiscated. It seems like this guy's first priority was to sound an alarm...
If I was being raided and hadn't done anything wrong, I'd want to get the word out to friends, since whatever mistakenly pointed them toward me is likely to also point toward friends.
Since these raids tend to take everything, including stuff that is obviously not useful as evidence (what kind of evidence are they going to find in power cables, or in pressed music CDs?), I'd want to give my friends a chance to get that kind of stuff out of the house.
Give me 10 minutes warning that the FBI is coming, and I can have a recent backup safely offsite, so when they are gone, and I get a new computer, I can be back up and running fast. Note that this in no way would hurt their investigation. I could also grab things like my external DVD writer, DSL modem, sound card, and stuff like that, so that would be less to replace.
It's definitely a large spam run. These spams use forged "From" addresses, and one of the domains they are forging is owned by my employer, and all mail to non-existent addresses ends up in a mailbox I handle. It's getting 10000 bounce messages per day from these spams.
When I checked on net.admin.net-abuse.sightings, there are several hundred of these reported, and NONE of them use our domain. Checking a few at random, it looks like they are using many many many forged domains, so we are just getting the bounces from a tiny fraction of these these.
I picked DVI because it is digital, and so repeaters should be able to regenerate the signal perfectly. Like you, I'm not sure what the max length for analog computer video is, but digital DVI should only be limited by how much you are willing to spend on repeaters.
While avoiding the $1,400 fee by attempting to relocate the cases out of audible range may initially sound like a great idea, not to mention less expensive, you eliminate the access of the system being readily available
Actually, I've been thinking about this. What do you actually need on your desk?
Monitor
Keyboard
Mouse
Optical drive
For the monitor, DVI can handle a few meters, and there are repeaters that can extend that, at a cost of about $250 per 5 meters. There are also DVI->optical->DVI cables that can handle very long distances.
For keyboard and mouse, USB2 can be up to 30 meters, if you chain some hubs together. Bluetooth might also be a possibility.
I know as a college student that a quiet atmosphere while doing work is valuable
Earplugs, or ear protectors (available at gun shops), will do better in that case, because they will also block noises other than your PC. (Just be careful what you say if you go to a gun shop--I got some strange looks when I walked in and said I was looking for something to deal with a noisy neighbor!). BTW, earplugs and ear protectors stack--they tend to have different noise blocking characteristics, so using both helps.
It is situations where you don't want to block other sounds that an expensive low noise PC makes sense. Two examples come to mind.
First, home theater. If you have a PC as part of a home theater (or simply live in an apartment and the PC of necessisity is in the same room as your home theater), then earplugs won't work.
Second, a home recording studio. Again, space considerations might force the PC to be in the same room as the instruments, and so a low noice PC would be very useful.
The argument for seems to be based entirely on the assumption that we need to colonize Mars as quickly as possible and this is a first step. But why do we need to colonize Mars as quickly as possible?
No, it's based on the assumption that a round trip is too difficult, and that colonizing eliminates the need for a round trip.
Think of it this way. For a manned round trip, we need to deliver the following to Mars:
Astronauts
Technology to allow them to survive until the next favorable conditions for a return trip
Technology to do an interplanetary manned trip from Mars to Earth
That third one is hard. Consider how hard doing Earth to Mars will be, and we've got all of Mankind's technology at our disposal for that.
For a colonizing trip, we have to do this:
Send Astronauts
Send technology to allow them to survive until the next support package can arrive
Unmanned packages every couple of years to restock and expand the colony
All the travel is Earth to Mars in the colony scenario.
Debian. Stable is too old. What I like about Redhat on our servers is that it is up-to-date enough that when I want to use something, it is there.
Slackware. Looks promising. Only noticed two annoyances on my brief test so far. First, it doesn't set up each user in their own group. Second, it uses LILO rather than GRUB.
Have to investigate the user per group thing, see if it would break much to switch a Slackware installation over to that. For booting, I tried installing GRUB, and something wasn't happy--haven't had time to investigate that yet.
Gentoo. Didn't have time to go through all the install steps, so have to come back to this one. It seemed to me I was doing a lot of things that would be common to many people installing it, leaving me wondering why the heck I'm having to waste my time. A good install should only make me do things or specify things concerning the ways my setup is going to be different from other people's.
SuSE. Not a contender until YaST is released under a free license.
Mandrake. I've never been impressed by them in the past, and so haven't really looked into them since their financial troubles. Still, probably worth another look.
when VHS movies were first available for sale, they were like $80. 20 years later, they are now about $5.
When DVDs were first available for sale, they were about $50. Five years later, they are now about $15.
when CDs were first available for sale, they were about $18.99. 20 years later, they are... $18.99
Video tapes and DVDs were priced taking into account the rental market. Often the $80 tape was released first, and then a few months later was followed by the cheap tape, the idea being that the video rental stores would want to buy right away, even at $80, and then after rentals died off, consumers would buy the cheap tape.
This does not apply to CDs for the simple reason that there isn't a CD rental market.
Actually, there are more iPods out there than all the other portable compressed-audio players combined, so "most" players will play AAC
Incorrect--you've confused dollar sales with unit sales. Apple has about 30% of the units, but because iPods on average cost more than other players, they have more than half of the dollar value of the market.
I'm so tired of the WMA format. It's like a god damned virus. Just the other day I was explaining the concept of a CD MP3 player to someone I know and when he showed me his digital music collection, it was all in WMA
Well, considering that most CD MP3 players can play WMA, how is this a problem him?
I am not meaning to sound redundant, but isn't AAC an actual standard while WMA is propietary to XP?
They are both proprietary formats. AAC is owned by Dolby, WMA by Microsoft. You want to make an encoder or decoder for either, you need to get out the checkbook and write a big check (bigger for AAC than WMA).
AAC is available on Mac and Windows. WMA is available on Mac and Windows.
As far as quality goes, in pretty much every blind ABX study published, they come out about the same. WMA is usually slightly ahead, but not enough to be statistically significant.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason for the difference is that patents are much broader. They basically cover the use of an idea. A copyright just covers the particular expression of that idea.
So if Disney has a copyright on Donald Duck, that doesn't stop Warner Brothers from creating Daffy Duck. It just stops Warner Brothers from using Donald Duck.
If Disney could patent cartoon talking ducks, though, then it WOULD stop Daffy Duck.
The key here is that long copyrights for the most part do not impede the creative work of others. You can express the same idea as an existing copyrighted work--you just have to express it YOUR way, rather than copying the existing way.
All public key systems currently in use depend on doing arithmetic on large integers. Let's start with the classical algorithms for addition/subtraction/multiplication/division.
The addition and subtraction algorithms are O(N) and multiplication/division is O(N^2), where N is the number of digits.
What is a digit? On a 32-bit process, it will probably be 32 bits. On a 64-bit processor, it will probably be 64-bits.
What this means is that operating on large integers, say, 1024 bits, will be twice as fast on the 64-bit process for addition/subtraction and 4 times as fast for multiplication/division.
Most large integer packages use Karatsuba multiplication instead of the classical algorithm. Karatsuba is O(N^1.58). On a 64-bit processor, that is 3 times faster than on a 32-bit processor.
Looking at it from the other direction, if on a 32-bit processor, using a given set of algorithms which are working in base B, you can do public key cryptography using N bits, then just by using the same algorithm, working in base B^2 on a 64-bit processor running at the same basic speed, you can in the same time do public key cryptography using 2N bits.
But your #1 takes place between the snap and the end of the play. Watching the players walk back, and huddle and/or line up for the next play isn't very interesting, tactically or strategically.
Seriously, I noticed last year that if I hit my 30 second skip right when a play ended, it would usually take me right to the snap for the next play. With the 30 seconds of downtime between plays gone, football was actually kind of interesting!
Intel P4 and Xeon beat 4 of the 5 you name on SPEC.
Don't underestimate the convenience. 20 gig is enough for many people to rip and download all of their CDs. They don't have to plan ahead what they want to take with them.
1.5 gig is 10-20 albums, depending on how you rip. I would not like to have to pick what 10 albums I'm going to take to work each day.
Sometimes I listen to something like Pink Floyd or Neil Young, and then feel like more, and might end up listening to 5 albums in a row from that artist. Other times, after one album, I want something totally different next, like Garrison Keillor.
It would be horrible to have to pick in the morning which 10 albums are going to fit in with my mood that day.
What about for random access of many small files? For that, the limiting factor is likely to be rotational latency of the drive, and 7200 RPM will be better than 5400 RPM.
You are assuming that all ISPs are spammer-friendly, which is not a correct assumption.
Having an occasional spammer isn't enough to get on SPEWS. Failing to take effective measures against the spammers they do get is what gets ISPs on SPEWS.
ISPs don't get into SPEWS just for having spammers buy a few IPs. They get into SPEWS by not taking reasonable stepts to stop those spammers once they start spamming.
My tasteful, non-obnoxious banner did worse by a fair amount.
People don't have to receive corporate advertising. No one is standing there with a gun forcing you to go to web sites that have ads.
For example, I recall once saying that I thought a feature of one of our ads was obnoxious and would certainly cost us sales. So, my boss said "let's test it", and we went over to the graphics department, I described the changes I wanted, an artist made them in a few minutes in Photoshop, and my boss purchased 25k impressions of the new banner. A couple hours later, we had complete stats on how this banner had done compared to other banners we'd run in the same time on the same sites, and knew by exacly how much my banner was worse than the others.
We constantly tweak our banners, measuring the results. It's very Darwinian.
What this means is that online advertising isn't like, say, TV ads, where if people skip the ads with Tivo, no one is really going to notice, because there is a lot of fuzziness between showing ads TV ads and getting more sales. If people use banner blockers, we'll notice right away, and be able to tell exactly how it is effecting our ads, and that will be reflected very quickly in what we are willing to pay to show banners, which will in turn very quickly be reflected in what the ad companies will pay websites for banner space.
There are a lot of useful sites that will simply go away if too many people start blocking ads.
If I was being raided and hadn't done anything wrong, I'd want to get the word out to friends, since whatever mistakenly pointed them toward me is likely to also point toward friends.
Since these raids tend to take everything, including stuff that is obviously not useful as evidence (what kind of evidence are they going to find in power cables, or in pressed music CDs?), I'd want to give my friends a chance to get that kind of stuff out of the house.
Give me 10 minutes warning that the FBI is coming, and I can have a recent backup safely offsite, so when they are gone, and I get a new computer, I can be back up and running fast. Note that this in no way would hurt their investigation. I could also grab things like my external DVD writer, DSL modem, sound card, and stuff like that, so that would be less to replace.
When I checked on net.admin.net-abuse.sightings, there are several hundred of these reported, and NONE of them use our domain. Checking a few at random, it looks like they are using many many many forged domains, so we are just getting the bounces from a tiny fraction of these these.
I picked DVI because it is digital, and so repeaters should be able to regenerate the signal perfectly. Like you, I'm not sure what the max length for analog computer video is, but digital DVI should only be limited by how much you are willing to spend on repeaters.
Actually, I've been thinking about this. What do you actually need on your desk?
- Monitor
- Keyboard
- Mouse
- Optical drive
For the monitor, DVI can handle a few meters, and there are repeaters that can extend that, at a cost of about $250 per 5 meters. There are also DVI->optical->DVI cables that can handle very long distances.For keyboard and mouse, USB2 can be up to 30 meters, if you chain some hubs together. Bluetooth might also be a possibility.
For optical drive, USB2 would work.
This seems reasonably feasible.
Earplugs, or ear protectors (available at gun shops), will do better in that case, because they will also block noises other than your PC. (Just be careful what you say if you go to a gun shop--I got some strange looks when I walked in and said I was looking for something to deal with a noisy neighbor!). BTW, earplugs and ear protectors stack--they tend to have different noise blocking characteristics, so using both helps.
It is situations where you don't want to block other sounds that an expensive low noise PC makes sense. Two examples come to mind.
First, home theater. If you have a PC as part of a home theater (or simply live in an apartment and the PC of necessisity is in the same room as your home theater), then earplugs won't work.
Second, a home recording studio. Again, space considerations might force the PC to be in the same room as the instruments, and so a low noice PC would be very useful.
Hmmm...one $1400 hookerbot, or 1400 $1 hookerbots?
No, it's based on the assumption that a round trip is too difficult, and that colonizing eliminates the need for a round trip.
Think of it this way. For a manned round trip, we need to deliver the following to Mars:
- Astronauts
- Technology to allow them to survive until the next favorable conditions for a return trip
- Technology to do an interplanetary manned trip from Mars to Earth
That third one is hard. Consider how hard doing Earth to Mars will be, and we've got all of Mankind's technology at our disposal for that.For a colonizing trip, we have to do this:
- Send Astronauts
- Send technology to allow them to survive until the next support package can arrive
- Unmanned packages every couple of years to restock and expand the colony
All the travel is Earth to Mars in the colony scenario.Slackware. Looks promising. Only noticed two annoyances on my brief test so far. First, it doesn't set up each user in their own group. Second, it uses LILO rather than GRUB.
Have to investigate the user per group thing, see if it would break much to switch a Slackware installation over to that. For booting, I tried installing GRUB, and something wasn't happy--haven't had time to investigate that yet.
Gentoo. Didn't have time to go through all the install steps, so have to come back to this one. It seemed to me I was doing a lot of things that would be common to many people installing it, leaving me wondering why the heck I'm having to waste my time. A good install should only make me do things or specify things concerning the ways my setup is going to be different from other people's.
SuSE. Not a contender until YaST is released under a free license.
Mandrake. I've never been impressed by them in the past, and so haven't really looked into them since their financial troubles. Still, probably worth another look.
Windows Media Player 9 with support for DRM is available from Microsoft for OS X. Does the Napster stuff not work under it?
when VHS movies were first available for sale, they were like $80. 20 years later, they are now about $5.
When DVDs were first available for sale, they were about $50. Five years later, they are now about $15.
when CDs were first available for sale, they were about $18.99. 20 years later, they are... $18.99
Video tapes and DVDs were priced taking into account the rental market. Often the $80 tape was released first, and then a few months later was followed by the cheap tape, the idea being that the video rental stores would want to buy right away, even at $80, and then after rentals died off, consumers would buy the cheap tape.
This does not apply to CDs for the simple reason that there isn't a CD rental market.
Incorrect--you've confused dollar sales with unit sales. Apple has about 30% of the units, but because iPods on average cost more than other players, they have more than half of the dollar value of the market.
Well, considering that most CD MP3 players can play WMA, how is this a problem him?
They are both proprietary formats. AAC is owned by Dolby, WMA by Microsoft. You want to make an encoder or decoder for either, you need to get out the checkbook and write a big check (bigger for AAC than WMA).
AAC is available on Mac and Windows. WMA is available on Mac and Windows.
As far as quality goes, in pretty much every blind ABX study published, they come out about the same. WMA is usually slightly ahead, but not enough to be statistically significant.