I think the point of this is that Clear Channel doesn't want people changing away from their stations. So, they came up with a list of songs that might make people stop listening, and then suggested that maybe DJ's don't play those songs. Sounds fair enough, especially for a company who's primary goal is to homogenize a marketplace to prime it for advertisers (rather than just play music).
A giant software company hires a guy to write a module. He works alone, and stores all the source code on his own machine. It takes him a year to do the work.
At the end, he asks for a little raise of, say, one hundred billion dollars. When they laugh at him, he quits, leaving his source code mildly encrypted, sitting on his machine, with a note saying he's filed for copyright on everything he's done. IANAL, but I would think that even though he signed a contract giving up whatever rights, DMCA would override that and protect him.
I guess the general point is that any industry that relies on workers creating intellectual property is now vulnerable to people copyrighting their work (even if it violates their contract), and demanding a ransom.
I'm a little spaced out due to tremendous studying, which is coincidentally on a topic similar to this. My question is, "Didn't they basically just make fast, efficient transducer?" If the answer to that is, "Yeah", then we really don't have that much to get excited about. There's still the ultimate problem of increasing the speed of electrical processing. We've got optical routers, so this new material would basically just be used once the data is ready to be processed. And then it's back to transistor sizing, copper traces, barrier tunneling, and all that wicked stuff that nobody is ready to solve.
The impression I got from the article was that scientists fabricated results to meet the usefullness/novelty/whatever requirement. They probably just massaged a little timing data or something.
The patent wasn't on DNA, but rather on an enzyme that was synthesized by that company to better manipulate DNA. It's a chemical, but it's also a tool. I have the feeling that as nano-tech becomes more practical, this grey area will have to be dealt with. So here are some questions for you::)
how simple does a machine have to get before you can't patent it?
Is a molecule patentable if it's totally synthesized?
For the future: will things like carbon nano-tubes be patentable?
I believe in god. but being a hindu, i doubt my religion is going to be represented in the giant debate that will ensue. it's all good, though. i just want to ask why believing in god is automatically taken to mean the same as believing science should step back from certain things. i for one only have one reservation about the project, and that's the possibility that those 100 unknown genes might all carry the blueprint for "Destroy Robinson Family! Destroy!".
i believe that science is our evolutionary advantage, and that we have to use it to survive. if these scientists can build a tight enough quarantine, i say go for it.
1929: theory that early atmosphere had no oxygen 1952: theory refined to postulate components of early earth (stellar byproducts, mostly) 1953: Stanley Miller reproduced those initial conditions in a container, threw in some boiling water and zapped it with a million volts. After a one weeks, he had a bunch of different amino acids.
Thanks for that article. I feel stupid to say it, but I never made the connection between anonymity and free speech. I guess I was always a latent "if you're not doing anything wrong..."-type.
I think there is a difference between anoynmous material online and in print. There is a barrier to creating a printed pamphlet, and that lends it a certain amount (however small) of credibility. A post to a newsgroup, or even a web site, is cheap enough to produce that anyone with the time can put something up. For that reason, most people devalue anonymous submissions (how many of us set our threshold to 1?) I'm not sure if the difference merits any separate legislation, but I think it is significant.
Basically, it means your CS or Comp Eng program just became a degree in Sun.:)
Seriously, I don't expect this to be a huge problem. In fact, now Sun pretty much has to ensure backward compatibility and a slow rate of change to the language, or they alone will face a worldwide mob of angry designers. I don't think Sun's original goals have changed, and the possibility of relationships with other standards organizations still exists.
On a related note, things like Verilog HDL aren't formally standardized, but the world happily uses them anyway. I'd say keep using Java (though you may not want to throw away your "C++: How To Program").
Some documents are worth money (stamps, cheques, cash). Right now, image manipulation technology exists to alter digital copies of these documents. If perfect-accuracy printing devices also existed, anyone could duplicate these documents, in effect printing money for themselves.
Would cash be worth anything if anyone could just download a fifty and print it out? The only way to preserve the value of things like cash is to make sure that no one can duplicate it. One solution is to add noise to every image produced by a printer or copier. If companies responsibly manipulate that noise to encode a serial number, I don't object. After all, all of my phone communications have serial numbers attached to them.
I just found a story here that says Comet will soon introduce a new download to its site. They say it will allow the user to replace their UID with a "meaningless, non-unique number". They will also seek Trust.E certification.
The president, Jamie Rosen, said he was quite surprised with all the fuss since no user information was solicited.
Hopefully, it would show up on your installed applications list ("Add/remove applications" on the Control Panel). It didn't show up on mine, so I had to use regedit to find and erase every key associated with it. I just did a search on "comet", and when I was done I erased comet.dll from my system32 directory. The next time I went to Comedy Central, it asked if I wanted to install it and told me that Comet was quite safe and benign. This time I knew better.
PS: You might also want to search for impression.log, and then examine every file with a similar creation date.
If this turns out to be a single source for all information, what determines its correctness?
What if companies use that information to restrict my freedom?
I don't think that either of these issues will be addressed as long as the company's (and government's) senior executives feel that they still have their privacy. So the solution I suggest is to collect and publish as much information about all of them as possible. If we open-source their lives, I'm sure they'll come out as better people for it.
A reporter suddenly decides to spend five days on the net, and has a rough go of it.
When I moved to a new city, the first five days were absolute hell. I had no apartment, no food, few friends, and no idea where anything was. When this man moved online, he had pretty much the same thing. If he had stayed on long enough to settle in, things probably would've gotten better (not that I'm saying anyone could live a healthy life online right now). Apparently, he hadn't even discovered the net's greatest asset: cheap and abundant pornography.
Despite taking it almost for granted that planets existed outside our solar system, and having a rough understanding of the measurements that had previously confirmed planetary existence, I find myself saying "Well, now we really know that these planets exist."
Is this just the standard layman seeing-is-believing reaction, or do scientists know have firm belief in something that they once doubted? Personally, I would be a little scared if those British astronomers were unsure of the existence of that planet until the moment they "saw" reflected light.
An unrelated question: can they use the same technique to search for moons of that planet?
If we believe that Microsoft must fall because it (never innovates|makes shit for products|rapes users|introduces security holes) then what is all the fuss?
I for one believe that Microsoft would eventually fall through natural selection. But that doesn't mean we should let them make billions illegaly (if they are indeed conducting illegal activities) until the industry changes on its own.
The case is proceeding to determine whether Microsoft took advantage of their position in the system, and whether consumers suffered harm as a result. There's no mention of whether the harm will be repaired on its own -- even if it is, the fact is MS hurt people in its attempts to dominate the marketplace. For that, they should be punished.
It's not just about correcting a problem; the justice system does make provisions for deterrence, and in this case, retribution.
I think the point is that sims put a person in a very realistic representation of a battle situation. to succeed in the game, you have to learn how to kill your opponent in a cold, precise manner without any emotional involvement. Hot-headed flying will get you toasted. So, if I were the sort of person who thought video game content had a direct affect on childrens' behaviour, I would expect them to learn that fighting and killing is a rational solution to a problem. I would expect them to be made into wartime soldiers.
FPS's still have an unreal, comic quality to them. Usually, the fun levels have you seriously outnumbered by men or monsters with ultra-powerful weapons. Success involves going absolutely ballistic on everything that moves, and there's an emotional release involved. By playing these games, you might learn more killing skills but the emotional drive to kill is spent.
I'm pretty sure there are already rules governing some of this. I read recently (on a/. post?) that falsifying certain kinds of information violates the Convention. The worst possibilities, like enemy forces actually fabricating orders to troops, couldn't be regulated because they don't pose a mass civilian threat (as do nuclear and biological weapons).
I think cyberwarfare is no different than bombing airfields or supply routes; it's an indirect attack based on the enemy's reliance on an unprotected channel.
Attacks on civilian space are horrible, but they're also a part of war. In real life, civilian targets are bombed all the time, without any sort of regulation by the UN or anyone else. If that can persist, how could anyone regulate cyber-attacks?
I am definitely not a lawyer. Can someone help me understand how a patent like this gets granted? I always thought there were people hired by the patent office to examine each document and search for things like prior art, obviousness, stupidity, etc. Lately, it seems like there's a big NT server that just adds APPROVED to the beginning of application bigger than 100 words. Someone should patent that server and rake in the royalties.
According to this BBC article, Sega Japan was raided because of allegations of price fixing. They say Sega is pressuring resellers to not mark down the price of Dreamcast.
It looks like the company is due for some kind of change, anyway.
When you say tragic, I have the feeling you're talking more about Greek Tragic than Plane-Crash tragic. But I can't see how a view can exhibit that kind of tragedy. Unless the view is destroyed because it has a tragic flaw.
Obviously, some advances cause more harm than good; others benefit humanit enormously. And with every advance, sacrifices are made. How can every scientific achievment or innovation be summarized into one view about "technology"? That is, in effect, assigning the same level of goodness to the atomic bomb as to the polio vaccine. Given that, I'd say any view of technology is tragic.
I would be careful about using these as emergency phones. I would think that to cut costs, transmit power would be decreased. Your range might not stretch too far from the tower.
I just hope this doesn't wind up raising the cost of a regular phone.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point of this is that Clear Channel doesn't want people changing away from their stations. So, they came up with a list of songs that might make people stop listening, and then suggested that maybe DJ's don't play those songs. Sounds fair enough, especially for a company who's primary goal is to homogenize a marketplace to prime it for advertisers (rather than just play music).
A giant software company hires a guy to write a module. He works alone, and stores all the source code on his own machine. It takes him a year to do the work.
At the end, he asks for a little raise of, say, one hundred billion dollars. When they laugh at him, he quits, leaving his source code mildly encrypted, sitting on his machine, with a note saying he's filed for copyright on everything he's done.
IANAL, but I would think that even though he signed a contract giving up whatever rights, DMCA would override that and protect him.
I guess the general point is that any industry that relies on workers creating intellectual property is now vulnerable to people copyrighting their work (even if it violates their contract), and demanding a ransom.
I'm a little spaced out due to tremendous studying, which is coincidentally on a topic similar to this. My question is, "Didn't they basically just make fast, efficient transducer?" If the answer to that is, "Yeah", then we really don't have that much to get excited about.
There's still the ultimate problem of increasing the speed of electrical processing. We've got optical routers, so this new material would basically just be used once the data is ready to be processed. And then it's back to transistor sizing, copper traces, barrier tunneling, and all that wicked stuff that nobody is ready to solve.
The patent wasn't on DNA, but rather on an enzyme that was synthesized by that company to better manipulate DNA. It's a chemical, but it's also a tool. I have the feeling that as nano-tech becomes more practical, this grey area will have to be dealt with. So here are some questions for you: :)
how simple does a machine have to get before you can't patent it?
Is a molecule patentable if it's totally synthesized?
For the future: will things like carbon nano-tubes be patentable?
i believe that science is our evolutionary advantage, and that we have to use it to survive. if these scientists can build a tight enough quarantine, i say go for it.
To summarize:
1929: theory that early atmosphere had no oxygen
1952: theory refined to postulate components of early earth (stellar byproducts, mostly)
1953: Stanley Miller reproduced those initial conditions in a container, threw in some boiling water and zapped it with a million volts. After a one weeks, he had a bunch of different amino acids.
I think there is a difference between anoynmous material online and in print. There is a barrier to creating a printed pamphlet, and that lends it a certain amount (however small) of credibility. A post to a newsgroup, or even a web site, is cheap enough to produce that anyone with the time can put something up. For that reason, most people devalue anonymous submissions (how many of us set our threshold to 1?) I'm not sure if the difference merits any separate legislation, but I think it is significant.
Seriously, I don't expect this to be a huge problem. In fact, now Sun pretty much has to ensure backward compatibility and a slow rate of change to the language, or they alone will face a worldwide mob of angry designers. I don't think Sun's original goals have changed, and the possibility of relationships with other standards organizations still exists.
On a related note, things like Verilog HDL aren't formally standardized, but the world happily uses them anyway. I'd say keep using Java (though you may not want to throw away your "C++: How To Program").
Would cash be worth anything if anyone could just download a fifty and print it out? The only way to preserve the value of things like cash is to make sure that no one can duplicate it. One solution is to add noise to every image produced by a printer or copier. If companies responsibly manipulate that noise to encode a serial number, I don't object. After all, all of my phone communications have serial numbers attached to them.
One other thing: you can also download an uninstaller (if you still trust them) at their web site. It's here.
The president, Jamie Rosen, said he was quite surprised with all the fuss since no user information was solicited.
PS: You might also want to search for impression.log, and then examine every file with a similar creation date.
If this turns out to be a single source for all information, what determines its correctness?
What if companies use that information to restrict my freedom?
I don't think that either of these issues will be addressed as long as the company's (and government's) senior executives feel that they still have their privacy. So the solution I suggest is to collect and publish as much information about all of them as possible. If we open-source their lives, I'm sure they'll come out as better people for it.
When I moved to a new city, the first five days were absolute hell. I had no apartment, no food, few friends, and no idea where anything was. When this man moved online, he had pretty much the same thing. If he had stayed on long enough to settle in, things probably would've gotten better (not that I'm saying anyone could live a healthy life online right now). Apparently, he hadn't even discovered the net's greatest asset: cheap and abundant pornography.
Is this just the standard layman seeing-is-believing reaction, or do scientists know have firm belief in something that they once doubted? Personally, I would be a little scared if those British astronomers were unsure of the existence of that planet until the moment they "saw" reflected light.
An unrelated question: can they use the same technique to search for moons of that planet?
The case is proceeding to determine whether Microsoft took advantage of their position in the system, and whether consumers suffered harm as a result. There's no mention of whether the harm will be repaired on its own -- even if it is, the fact is MS hurt people in its attempts to dominate the marketplace. For that, they should be punished.
It's not just about correcting a problem; the justice system does make provisions for deterrence, and in this case, retribution.
FPS's still have an unreal, comic quality to them. Usually, the fun levels have you seriously outnumbered by men or monsters with ultra-powerful weapons. Success involves going absolutely ballistic on everything that moves, and there's an emotional release involved. By playing these games, you might learn more killing skills but the emotional drive to kill is spent.
As for sound quality, vinyl doesn't have as high a frequency range as CD, but MP3 worsens the problem by aliasing in some cases.
I think cyberwarfare is no different than bombing airfields or supply routes; it's an indirect attack based on the enemy's reliance on an unprotected channel.
Attacks on civilian space are horrible, but they're also a part of war. In real life, civilian targets are bombed all the time, without any sort of regulation by the UN or anyone else. If that can persist, how could anyone regulate cyber-attacks?
I am definitely not a lawyer. Can someone help me understand how a patent like this gets granted? I always thought there were people hired by the patent office to examine each document and search for things like prior art, obviousness, stupidity, etc. Lately, it seems like there's a big NT server that just adds APPROVED to the beginning of application bigger than 100 words. Someone should patent that server and rake in the royalties.
It looks like the company is due for some kind of change, anyway.
Obviously, some advances cause more harm than good; others benefit humanit enormously. And with every advance, sacrifices are made. How can every scientific achievment or innovation be summarized into one view about "technology"? That is, in effect, assigning the same level of goodness to the atomic bomb as to the polio vaccine. Given that, I'd say any view of technology is tragic.
I just hope this doesn't wind up raising the cost of a regular phone.