Libraries have already barcoded millions of books (and some, though probably quite few, use RFID too), so they've shown they are willing to do a hard job one time if it will considerably lower workload in the future.
One could argue that RFID tags are not succifiently big advantage over barcodes, but that's something that depends on several factors, and may or may not be true depending on the library.
RFID tagging should also be actually easier than barcoding, since it can be anywhere in the book and doesn't need to be somewhere easily readable, doesn't matter if it's in crumbled part of paper, etc...
Barcoding/RFID tagging books is easy, there's no need to have any special "identification boxes" gobbling up valuable shelf space, and you still need to get and barcode those boxes and put all the books into them so it doesn't save you any work either.
Librarians - whether machine or human - are there to help you in case you don't find whatever you're looking for by yourself. Shouldn't stop you from browsing any more than his flesh-and-blood colleagues do.
Automated systems rock, perhaps not this - I doubt it'll work, since both OCR and voice regognition are HARD - but loaning automatons for example, no need to bother librarian when I can just drop a pile of books and my card to RFID reader (yup, they already use it in some libraries) or trough barcode scanner faster. Frees them to serve the folks who need personal service, or to deal with problem situations.
It's not like a piece of paper or email message haves huge amount of processing power, but the content in it can be encrypted just fine.
That is, they, and rfid tags, don't need to be able to muster up one bit of encryption, as long as the writing and reading hardware are able to do that.
That sounds something that's pretty unlikely to be done anyway, since it makes the vending machine physically much more complex (=expensive), rfid or not.
It's quite a bit more difficult to hunt a can from holding area with a robotic arm, even if you can home in towards a tag, than it is to drop one trough the bottom of a column.
None of that info is stored in tags (which would be stupid, for reasons others than security as well), but in store database, so unless you hack it as well and create your pseudo-product there, the "user fedined" tag does not match anything when cross-referenced with database and is automatically flagged invalid, totally useless.
That is nice then, that I am not a US citisen, I do not live in the US, do not travel to the US and have no plans to be bound by the US.
Sorry to ruin your fun, but electromagnetic spectrum is a valuable resource and is strictly enforced in every modern country. Big folks making use of certain areas of spectrum tend to get cranky when you step on their toes, everywhere.
BlaBla... Planes fall from the sky, animals stop having sex and an astroid fries us too. No problem. Its called shielding.
You don't shield something that is supposed to be receiving radiowaves, like the plane, you nail the idiot (that's you) who is sending waves at same frequency but without permission.
Have you guys noticed all of these agencies suddenly not just planning to make craft that can detonate an asteroid
Nope. Might be something to do with the fact that nobody is planning a craft that can detonate an asteroid...
but that are making one right now.
... much less building one. Plenty of folks are indeed designing and building craft designed to ram into a rock, but the only side in those collisions taking damage is the probe. Pure research.
Yea, like right now. I count 3 G7 governments and 1 UN so far over the world.
I count 0 governments with capabilities for building a craft that can "detonate" a km+ asteroid. Unsurprisingly, 0 is also the number actually doing it.
Can somebody tell us when this fat bitch is going to ram a hole through the earth? Just in case my 2012-2014 calculation is off?
I guess the 1/300 change of 1950DA hitting in 2880 has not been withdrawn, but it's kind of early to worry about that baby yet...
Seriously folks. This isn't academic anymore. People that don't spend money on shit for space travel are building these ships to kill an asteroid.
And that's where you get it wrong, considering the very futility you mention, academic is only outcome of these projects. They don't build ships to kill an asteroid, they build ships to kill itself and look how the asteroid reacts to it, just in case we really need to deflect one, sometime in the future.
Having a little bit of knowledge about of what and how it's made sure is nice to have, especially with little advance warning, which is (partly, of course that knowledge also comes handy if we plan to start mining the asteroids or otherwise using them at some point) why were trying to get that knowledge.
And when that eventually happens, nobody will be building a ship to "kill" or blow up an asteroid, because that's about the most stupid thing you could do to one. If you don't blow it very early it's still going to hit you, only in pieces, but still having the same kinetic energy. Modifying the rock to have some kind of propulsion system (slap a rocket into it, put few ion drives or railguns and solar panels there using the asteroid's own matter as reaction mass, send a giant mirror/looking glass to orbit it and focus sunlight so slowly boils rock off, tether it to a solar sail... whatever) is cheaper, easier, and much more likely to work than trying to bomb it.
Now, something that does cut into their DVD profit, and that I personally use, and in fact are using right now, is Usenet, to download large nicely encoded episodes.
I doubt that. All the combining and (de)coding hassles especially with many ISP's missing plenty of posts makes usenet a playground for only few determined people, that's not a threat to anyones profits, compared to usually pretty troublefree p2p networks.
Trying to get a sg1 episode from usenet with oe or thunderbird is basically impossible and even with dedicated binary leecher it's much harder than clicking search result in kazaa or emule.
Is walking against red lights also enough justification for you to FBI to come and take away your stuff and make you disappear forever as a terrorist?
Since that seems to be the point you're trying to make, no matter how small the crime, government should use every law that fits at all, no matter how loose the fit and how badly against the spirit if not the letter of law, and all it's power to deal with that "criminal".
FOSS developers couldn't generally care less about "world domination", and "contemptuous towards end-users" is not a very fitting description of a person who is doing all that work for nothing on their free time for those same users, you generally don't give gifts like that to person(s) you hate.
Slashdrones - who may or may not be contemptuous, or may or may not be yelling about world domination - are not FOSS developers.
Hmm... let me think. Oh, yes. How about every game after Doom?
Sure, Quakes had nice engines and were pretty nice multiplayer, but not exactly what you'd call good game single. Doom1 had something in it, Half-Life had something in it, they had atmosphere, feeling. Q1/2/3 had nothing at all.
The problem is, if you do x86-64 port of OS X, how will you keep people with non-Apple AMD64's from running it?
It's absolutely critical to their survival that MacOS is limited to only Apple hardware, which means they will probably never, ever, use x86 base no matter how sweet a CPU is.
Share prices fluctuate for slightest reasons and rumors, sometimes they go up, and sometimes they go down. If people playing inventor don't realize that they are essentially gambling, they're in wrong business.
Of course shares going down should make holders concerned, but being concerned does not equal trying to screw other shareholders by hoping to make a bit of quick cash by some cooked up class action suit.
That would be one hell of a system. Despite all the downplaying, x86 CPU's are on the top end of the speed curve, not bottom and with virtualization being as expensive as it is...
8 CPU SPARC cluster might BARELY be able to simulate one x86 machine of equal clock speed, with a fast simulator.
There are other examptions in DMCA than those two, virus research would probably be under the "Security testing" exception.
This exception permits circumvention of access control measures, and the development of technological means for such circumvention, for the purpose of testing the security of a computer, computer system or computer network, with the authorization of its owner or operator.
Performance is hardly a big deal in something like this, though, when you're just trying to look at how something works. You're probably step-by-stepping trough it anyway.
Not that a virus would take much use of peripheral hardware anyway, and emulating same system is vastly faster than something totally alien like amiga-on-pc.
Everything over certain limits not only only can be, but is automatically copyrighted, so yes, even a code in virus is under copyright.
DMCA has several exceptions, though. Poking at viruses would probably fall under this one:
6. Security testing (section 1201(j)). This exception permits circumvention of access control measures, and the development of technological means for such circumvention, for the purpose of testing the security of a computer, computer system or computer network, with the authorization of its owner or operator.
The sensor network is most important part in any case, early warning is the key, not big budget toys.
Basically, detected early enough needed changes to orbit are absolutely miniscule and are better done with relatively simple methods, like slapping a normal rocket into it, solar sail, or installing ion drive or conveyor belt system and solar panel on board and using object's own mass for propulsion. This kind of slow and "non-violent" orbit manipulation is also bound to be useful if we ever start using the asteroids, not necessarily to steer them away but maybe even bring closer, to stable orbit near Earth for mining or to serve as stations.
Even if a high priority, shooting at rock with big budget "Star Wars" weapons or nuclear missiles is totally pointless, so yes, obviously that kind of things should not be done. So far, nobody seems to be doing those either, this mission for example is pure, quite useful, research and not a precursor for any weapons.
I'd like to see some documentation of your annual frequency for kiloton meteorite impacts.
Several. Google around a bit, for relatively recent examples search for 26-kiloton explosion over mediterranean in 2002, or 100k one over greenland 1996. Of course sources of those stories are generally satellites of various early warning programs, that - for obvious reasons - are best equipped to detect such detonations, so in your conspiracy theory they're probably just fabricated by weapon manufacturers.
Then I'd like you to realize that even those purported impacts don't statistically threaten the Earth.
Of course they don't. I never claimed they do, did I? Nothing - except humans, perhaps - threatens Earth, until Sol goes red giant.
we're living proof of the safety of our environment.
Considering that our genetics clearly show a population bottleneck of just few thousand breeding inviduals ~70k years ago we're living proof of relative unsafety of our environment.
Even the largest and most lethal pandemics in history - when we were much less equipped to fight against them than now - haven't done anything near as destructive as that single (quite certainly volcanic) natural catastrophe. Smallpox and black death for example have killed untold millions and inflicted enormous amounts of personal suffering, but never threatened the whole. Natural bugs just don't do that, it's not in interest of a parasite to kill all hosts, we co-evolve and achieve a balance.
We're talking about the relative priority of extinction scale events, unlikely in the next 1000 years. During which time we should be busy dealing with epidemic and pollution problems.
We obviously should continue to deal with pollution and epidemics, but since they are not capable of inflicting exctinction upon us either, I don't agree that it's something we need to focus ALL resources upon while forgetting everything else.
the way Mozilla dealt with that problem was, in hindsight, not the best solution. Let's learn from the mistake and move on, instead of pretending everything went perfectly.
Perhaps it was not, but there hardly ever are perfect solutions.
I don't think full whitelisting is one either. For the same reason, of the potentially unlimited number of registered protocol handlers, most will be something users want to have.
Perhaps a combination could work, whitelisted are allowed trough, non-listed pop up a warning (and perhaps allow it to be added into either list) and blacklisted are silently ignored?
Slashdot Mirror
Libraries have already barcoded millions of books (and some, though probably quite few, use RFID too), so they've shown they are willing to do a hard job one time if it will considerably lower workload in the future.
One could argue that RFID tags are not succifiently big advantage over barcodes, but that's something that depends on several factors, and may or may not be true depending on the library.
RFID tagging should also be actually easier than barcoding, since it can be anywhere in the book and doesn't need to be somewhere easily readable, doesn't matter if it's in crumbled part of paper, etc...
What's the point?
Barcoding/RFID tagging books is easy, there's no need to have any special "identification boxes" gobbling up valuable shelf space, and you still need to get and barcode those boxes and put all the books into them so it doesn't save you any work either.
Librarians - whether machine or human - are there to help you in case you don't find whatever you're looking for by yourself. Shouldn't stop you from browsing any more than his flesh-and-blood colleagues do.
Automated systems rock, perhaps not this - I doubt it'll work, since both OCR and voice regognition are HARD - but loaning automatons for example, no need to bother librarian when I can just drop a pile of books and my card to RFID reader (yup, they already use it in some libraries) or trough barcode scanner faster. Frees them to serve the folks who need personal service, or to deal with problem situations.
It's not like a piece of paper or email message haves huge amount of processing power, but the content in it can be encrypted just fine.
That is, they, and rfid tags, don't need to be able to muster up one bit of encryption, as long as the writing and reading hardware are able to do that.
That sounds something that's pretty unlikely to be done anyway, since it makes the vending machine physically much more complex (=expensive), rfid or not.
It's quite a bit more difficult to hunt a can from holding area with a robotic arm, even if you can home in towards a tag, than it is to drop one trough the bottom of a column.
Quite impossible.
None of that info is stored in tags (which would be stupid, for reasons others than security as well), but in store database, so unless you hack it as well and create your pseudo-product there, the "user fedined" tag does not match anything when cross-referenced with database and is automatically flagged invalid, totally useless.
That is nice then, that I am not a US citisen, I do not live in the US, do not travel to the US and have no plans to be bound by the US.
Sorry to ruin your fun, but electromagnetic spectrum is a valuable resource and is strictly enforced in every modern country. Big folks making use of certain areas of spectrum tend to get cranky when you step on their toes, everywhere.
BlaBla... Planes fall from the sky, animals stop having sex and an astroid fries us too. No problem. Its called shielding.
You don't shield something that is supposed to be receiving radiowaves, like the plane, you nail the idiot (that's you) who is sending waves at same frequency but without permission.
Have you guys noticed all of these agencies suddenly not just planning to make craft that can detonate an asteroid
... much less building one. Plenty of folks are indeed designing and building craft designed to ram into a rock, but the only side in those collisions taking damage is the probe. Pure research.
Nope. Might be something to do with the fact that nobody is planning a craft that can detonate an asteroid...
but that are making one right now.
Yea, like right now. I count 3 G7 governments and 1 UN so far over the world.
I count 0 governments with capabilities for building a craft that can "detonate" a km+ asteroid. Unsurprisingly, 0 is also the number actually doing it.
Can somebody tell us when this fat bitch is going to ram a hole through the earth? Just in case my 2012-2014 calculation is off?
I guess the 1/300 change of 1950DA hitting in 2880 has not been withdrawn, but it's kind of early to worry about that baby yet...
Seriously folks. This isn't academic anymore. People that don't spend money on shit for space travel are building these ships to kill an asteroid.
And that's where you get it wrong, considering the very futility you mention, academic is only outcome of these projects. They don't build ships to kill an asteroid, they build ships to kill itself and look how the asteroid reacts to it, just in case we really need to deflect one, sometime in the future.
Having a little bit of knowledge about of what and how it's made sure is nice to have, especially with little advance warning, which is (partly, of course that knowledge also comes handy if we plan to start mining the asteroids or otherwise using them at some point) why were trying to get that knowledge.
And when that eventually happens, nobody will be building a ship to "kill" or blow up an asteroid, because that's about the most stupid thing you could do to one. If you don't blow it very early it's still going to hit you, only in pieces, but still having the same kinetic energy. Modifying the rock to have some kind of propulsion system (slap a rocket into it, put few ion drives or railguns and solar panels there using the asteroid's own matter as reaction mass, send a giant mirror/looking glass to orbit it and focus sunlight so slowly boils rock off, tether it to a solar sail... whatever) is cheaper, easier, and much more likely to work than trying to bomb it.
Now, something that does cut into their DVD profit, and that I personally use, and in fact are using right now, is Usenet, to download large nicely encoded episodes.
I doubt that. All the combining and (de)coding hassles especially with many ISP's missing plenty of posts makes usenet a playground for only few determined people, that's not a threat to anyones profits, compared to usually pretty troublefree p2p networks.
Trying to get a sg1 episode from usenet with oe or thunderbird is basically impossible and even with dedicated binary leecher it's much harder than clicking search result in kazaa or emule.
Is walking against red lights also enough justification for you to FBI to come and take away your stuff and make you disappear forever as a terrorist?
Since that seems to be the point you're trying to make, no matter how small the crime, government should use every law that fits at all, no matter how loose the fit and how badly against the spirit if not the letter of law, and all it's power to deal with that "criminal".
Bollocks.
FOSS developers couldn't generally care less about "world domination", and "contemptuous towards end-users" is not a very fitting description of a person who is doing all that work for nothing on their free time for those same users, you generally don't give gifts like that to person(s) you hate.
Slashdrones - who may or may not be contemptuous, or may or may not be yelling about world domination - are not FOSS developers.
Oh, get off it. Has id ever made a bad game?
Hmm... let me think. Oh, yes. How about every game after Doom?
Sure, Quakes had nice engines and were pretty nice multiplayer, but not exactly what you'd call good game single. Doom1 had something in it, Half-Life had something in it, they had atmosphere, feeling. Q1/2/3 had nothing at all.
Since they state "1.5GHz P4 or equivalent", that would be 1500+.
The problem is, if you do x86-64 port of OS X, how will you keep people with non-Apple AMD64's from running it?
It's absolutely critical to their survival that MacOS is limited to only Apple hardware, which means they will probably never, ever, use x86 base no matter how sweet a CPU is.
Share prices fluctuate for slightest reasons and rumors, sometimes they go up, and sometimes they go down. If people playing inventor don't realize that they are essentially gambling, they're in wrong business.
Of course shares going down should make holders concerned, but being concerned does not equal trying to screw other shareholders by hoping to make a bit of quick cash by some cooked up class action suit.
That would be one hell of a system. Despite all the downplaying, x86 CPU's are on the top end of the speed curve, not bottom and with virtualization being as expensive as it is...
8 CPU SPARC cluster might BARELY be able to simulate one x86 machine of equal clock speed, with a fast simulator.
There are other examptions in DMCA than those two, virus research would probably be under the "Security testing" exception.
This exception permits circumvention of access control measures, and the development of technological means for such circumvention, for the purpose of testing the security of a computer, computer system or computer network, with the authorization of its owner or operator.
Performance is hardly a big deal in something like this, though, when you're just trying to look at how something works. You're probably step-by-stepping trough it anyway.
Not that a virus would take much use of peripheral hardware anyway, and emulating same system is vastly faster than something totally alien like amiga-on-pc.
Everything over certain limits not only only can be, but is automatically copyrighted, so yes, even a code in virus is under copyright.
DMCA has several exceptions, though. Poking at viruses would probably fall under this one:
6. Security testing (section 1201(j)). This exception permits circumvention
of access control measures, and the development of technological
means for such circumvention, for the purpose of testing the security
of a computer, computer system or computer network, with the
authorization of its owner or operator.
The sensor network is most important part in any case, early warning is the key, not big budget toys.
Basically, detected early enough needed changes to orbit are absolutely miniscule and are better done with relatively simple methods, like slapping a normal rocket into it, solar sail, or installing ion drive or conveyor belt system and solar panel on board and using object's own mass for propulsion. This kind of slow and "non-violent" orbit manipulation is also bound to be useful if we ever start using the asteroids, not necessarily to steer them away but maybe even bring closer, to stable orbit near Earth for mining or to serve as stations.
Even if a high priority, shooting at rock with big budget "Star Wars" weapons or nuclear missiles is totally pointless, so yes, obviously that kind of things should not be done. So far, nobody seems to be doing those either, this mission for example is pure, quite useful, research and not a precursor for any weapons.
I'd like to see some documentation of your annual frequency for kiloton meteorite impacts.
Several. Google around a bit, for relatively recent examples search for 26-kiloton explosion over mediterranean in 2002, or 100k one over greenland 1996. Of course sources of those stories are generally satellites of various early warning programs, that - for obvious reasons - are best equipped to detect such detonations, so in your conspiracy theory they're probably just fabricated by weapon manufacturers.
Then I'd like you to realize that even those purported impacts don't statistically threaten the Earth.
Of course they don't. I never claimed they do, did I? Nothing - except humans, perhaps - threatens Earth, until Sol goes red giant.
we're living proof of the safety of our environment.
Considering that our genetics clearly show a population bottleneck of just few thousand breeding inviduals ~70k years ago we're living proof of relative unsafety of our environment.
Even the largest and most lethal pandemics in history - when we were much less equipped to fight against them than now - haven't done anything near as destructive as that single (quite certainly volcanic) natural catastrophe.
Smallpox and black death for example have killed untold millions and inflicted enormous amounts of personal suffering, but never threatened the whole. Natural bugs just don't do that, it's not in interest of a parasite to kill all hosts, we co-evolve and achieve a balance.
We're talking about the relative priority of extinction scale events, unlikely in the next 1000 years. During which time we should be busy dealing with epidemic and pollution problems.
We obviously should continue to deal with pollution and epidemics, but since they are not capable of inflicting exctinction upon us either, I don't agree that it's something we need to focus ALL resources upon while forgetting everything else.
Well, that is certainly true, IF you find it early enough.
Spotting objects on collision course may be something that you get better at by practising, but it's still hardly the only factor in it.
the way Mozilla dealt with that problem was, in hindsight, not the best solution. Let's learn from the mistake and move on, instead of pretending everything went perfectly.
Perhaps it was not, but there hardly ever are perfect solutions.
I don't think full whitelisting is one either. For the same reason, of the potentially unlimited number of registered protocol handlers, most will be something users want to have.
Perhaps a combination could work, whitelisted are allowed trough, non-listed pop up a warning (and perhaps allow it to be added into either list) and blacklisted are silently ignored?
No, perh has not had it, and still does not.
Those are not compilers, they just bundle the interpreter and needed libraries into package.
I applaud you, sir.
Bloodthirst of many folks sickens me, especially here, you wouldn't expect to find most barbaric rednecks among techies.
How the values of americans (and sorry for generalization) can be so perverted and just plain WRONG I can't even begin to comprehend.