If their only concern were defense, then the solution is obvious! PUBLISH. The only difference between publishing your invention and patenting your invention is that you can sue someone for violating your IP rights associated with the patent.
If they publish their invention, it is out there in the wild acting as prior art. If anyone else were to come along and try to sue them over a patent that the plaintiff had been issued after the defendant had published, all they have to do is point to the published article and show the prior art.
Prior art can help disable a patent but it isn't necessarily a slam dunk; prior art may take care of some but not all claims in an enemy patent. And you might have a West Texas jury on your hands. Patents of your own tell potential litigants that you can hit back. Now you can argue that hitting back isn't nice and I would agree but that is the kind of legal system that we have. As Mel on Alice would put it "Sometimes the best defense is a good offense."
Actually Facebook would be good for a scheme long used by intelligence agents. "Hi, My name is Fred." posted at a particular time does not appear to be threatening in any way but could decode to something like "Implement phase 2 of the plan". Done correctly (both direct sender and receiver unknown to each other and the same dropbox never used twice) it is highly resistant to the kind of monitoring the UK wants to do.
Agreed, teachers aren't where the problem is. Right now our elementaries have all been transformed into SAT prep test centers. Sure you may learn an odd thing or two in such places but that is strictly accidental. The main skill being imparted is "how to pass the State test". What Shrubba-Dubya wanted to do was reduce education down to some "metrics" from which we could have "accountability" from schools and teachers but there is no real consensus on what education in the country should be. What I am sure of is that even when "No Child is Left Behind" and gets by that test OK is that he is still going to look undereducated compared to a Japanese or German student.
Though I think you're a tad optimistic about teachers in general. That is a bell curve same as most any other such thing. Most are OK but NOT great. A few are inspirational beacons of learning and about as many regularly scar kids for life.
Well then lets simplify this a bit. The article in question is about American scientific literacy. At least on paper, The US is a technologically advanced Western nation. If we expect the US to stay that way indefinitely then what is the "acceptable minimum of knowledge"? I imagine it would have to be quite high since we expect to draw our future engineering students and applied scientists from our public and private school systems are turning out. Concomitant with that, one would also expect broad competence in mathematics. Perhaps for the US, a working knowledge of three body gravitational problems may be setting the bar a bit high but I hope like hell it goes beyond "The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west." It isn't as though quite a few of our engineering students are "just visiting" from abroad as it is.
When someone says "map of the Earth" to me, I immediately think of a globe and even times I spent spinning globes around under my hand. If you look at the side of the globe with the Pacific on it just right then all you see is a big expanse of water with a lot of tiny islands and some big shorelines scattered around the edges. Even If I stare at the middle of Asia, I really can't do "land with a bit of water around the edges" as impressively. I can't deduce "70%" from that with any speed or reliability but "considerably more than 50%" is quick with nothing more than eyeballs.
With a 256MB machine or better, Puppy does a neat trick. It loads itself entirely into RAM and will let you eject the CD. So you get the use of the CD drive and it is wicked fast on anything made in the last five years.
It can be installed by the Homebrew Channel. The downside of the mplayers port is that they has no memory protection so attempting to play files that they can't play can crash the Wii requiring a hard reset. I've done this a number of times and haven't suffered anything evil like bricking the thing.
Radmind may be your friend for this. I use a Radmind server on Linux machines to push software out to OS X clients. As long as your network has DNS You Can Believe In then you can control by hostname which machines get which software. Many Radmind admins like to use it to control configuration and even do major OS upgrades with it. I'm leery of that only use it to push out the things that live in Applications, their support frameworks in other directories, Internet plugins, and so-forth. I will use it to push out the odd thing or two that can be configured by text file on a Mac.
I can't see really needing it on machines that use RPM or DEB packages. That can be handled by a private repository and simple cron jobs.
As a bonus they aren't anal on the subject which distro you run. My Archive Server and Groupware server run on Debian boxes. It has shared calendaring, conference groups, and all the rest of the groupware goodies. They have well supported clients for OS X and Windows, a web interface, and the thing will speak POP or LDAP if you so choose. It can pull users from an LDAP server or even BE the LDAP server (which I don't recommend).
The only downside is that the server requirements for their upcoming version are going to be nothing short of obscene.
Device entries can have permissions set on them and even the newer systems for autoconfiguring peripherals can have specific rules written for them or only add devices for specific users. If you want absolutely nothing to happen when a strange device is plugged in, that can be arranged.
Almost every BIOS I've seen in the past four years has a key you can press to do just that. Each separate drive does have to have it's own bootloader. Booting off a different partition on the same drive isn't a job for the BIOS IMHO. That is what bootloaders are for.
For instance, perhaps you're a rights-holder who wants to say "you cannot use this content to help kill people" to prevent the military from using it, or whatever).
Contract law isn't a candy store. I may want to stipulate that one sign over his arm, leg, and first born child but very few courts on this planet will enforce it. And there HAVE been licenses that forbid military use or government use but those are institutions that at least under some circumstances CAN disregard contract, copyright, or even patent law. This disregard is either extended by legislative fiat or they just do it and dare you to come enforce it.
So yes, there are wishes a rights holder may have that he can't enforce with either contract or copyright law. And in keeping with DRM, there are wishes a rights holder may have that won't be enforced by the laws of physics and mathematics either.
You're being facetious but any government is a subject of interest for foreign intelligence services. The Russians for one spy on Canada not because they're necessarily super interested in Canada but because they can glean information about the US or anybody else the Canadians deal with. It must also be said tech like this would afford more protection against the US intelligence services than the Russians. All intelligence serices employ both electronic eavesdropping and myriad forms of "humint" (human intelligence) but the Russians rely more heavily on things that their sources may not even realize they're divulging while the US seems more enamored of signals interception and tapping cables in odd places.
It could be a good compromise on the limitations of both. This could be used to transmit one-time pads in bursts and the pads could then be used over unsecured channels. As it stands, such pads have to be delivered or picked up by hand.
22 electrodes in a cochlear implant would correspond roughly to a 22-bar spectrum analyzer. If each electrode gives a weaker or stronger signal in relation to audio intensity and only responds to a certain frequency range due to it's location in the cochlea then that is going have a bigger payoff than the same number of electrodes on an artifical retina where each electrode corresponds roughly to a grayscale pixel and said pixels aren't necessarily arranged in a neat grid.
It doesn't surprise me that 22 electrodes suffices for a workable sense of hearing but only provides a very rudimentary sight.
This is true but it isn't yet lashed to Direct3D for Windows guests nor it OGL supported for Linux guests. This means that OGL programs can be run on Windows but Direct3D programs will still use software rendering. At least for now.
I have a better way to do that. Have a small FAT16 partition on the card with an installer for another filesystem driver. "install.exe" doesn't need any sort of extended filename support.
Alternatively, do some some USB drives intended for backup do. Mount as a USB cd-rom and have the installer on that.
Well it also gets down to what directly affects you and what you care personally about. If one is a FOSS developer or user than MS suing a manufacturer who uses LInux with a really crappy patent is going to provoke outrage. We toil in this particular vineyard so MS' transgressions are going to be particularly noticed.
Only if iTunes and friends is content with that. I have little doubt that installing any Apple apps for Win will still require an obnoxiously loud QuickTime install. At best, that installer might get a little smaller. It sounds to me like MS just rolled their own QuickTime Alternative.
I'm not seeing how MS is handling this as terribly unreasonable but my workplace is skipping Vista entirely and we're going to wait a little while for Win7 to accrue at least a few months worth of hotfixes. You are pretty much right, Win7 is just Vista Second Edition and if I were a Vista user then it would gall me to have to pay for it. 98SE should have been a free upgrade for 98 users as well. But in going from XP to Win7 and only on new hardware at that, it seems to me a reasonable upgrade for a reasonable fee.
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If their only concern were defense, then the solution is obvious! PUBLISH. The only difference between publishing your invention and patenting your invention is that you can sue someone for violating your IP rights associated with the patent.
If they publish their invention, it is out there in the wild acting as prior art. If anyone else were to come along and try to sue them over a patent that the plaintiff had been issued after the defendant had published, all they have to do is point to the published article and show the prior art.
Prior art can help disable a patent but it isn't necessarily a slam dunk; prior art may take care of some but not all claims in an enemy patent. And you might have a West Texas jury on your hands. Patents of your own tell potential litigants that you can hit back. Now you can argue that hitting back isn't nice and I would agree but that is the kind of legal system that we have. As Mel on Alice would put it "Sometimes the best defense is a good offense."
Actually Facebook would be good for a scheme long used by intelligence agents. "Hi, My name is Fred." posted at a particular time does not appear to be threatening in any way but could decode to something like "Implement phase 2 of the plan". Done correctly (both direct sender and receiver unknown to each other and the same dropbox never used twice) it is highly resistant to the kind of monitoring the UK wants to do.
Agreed, teachers aren't where the problem is. Right now our elementaries have all been transformed into SAT prep test centers. Sure you may learn an odd thing or two in such places but that is strictly accidental. The main skill being imparted is "how to pass the State test". What Shrubba-Dubya wanted to do was reduce education down to some "metrics" from which we could have "accountability" from schools and teachers but there is no real consensus on what education in the country should be. What I am sure of is that even when "No Child is Left Behind" and gets by that test OK is that he is still going to look undereducated compared to a Japanese or German student.
Though I think you're a tad optimistic about teachers in general. That is a bell curve same as most any other such thing. Most are OK but NOT great. A few are inspirational beacons of learning and about as many regularly scar kids for life.
Well then lets simplify this a bit. The article in question is about American scientific literacy. At least on paper, The US is a technologically advanced Western nation. If we expect the US to stay that way indefinitely then what is the "acceptable minimum of knowledge"? I imagine it would have to be quite high since we expect to draw our future engineering students and applied scientists from our public and private school systems are turning out. Concomitant with that, one would also expect broad competence in mathematics. Perhaps for the US, a working knowledge of three body gravitational problems may be setting the bar a bit high but I hope like hell it goes beyond "The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west." It isn't as though quite a few of our engineering students are "just visiting" from abroad as it is.
When someone says "map of the Earth" to me, I immediately think of a globe and even times I spent spinning globes around under my hand. If you look at the side of the globe with the Pacific on it just right then all you see is a big expanse of water with a lot of tiny islands and some big shorelines scattered around the edges. Even If I stare at the middle of Asia, I really can't do "land with a bit of water around the edges" as impressively. I can't deduce "70%" from that with any speed or reliability but "considerably more than 50%" is quick with nothing more than eyeballs.
With a 256MB machine or better, Puppy does a neat trick. It loads itself entirely into RAM and will let you eject the CD. So you get the use of the CD drive and it is wicked fast on anything made in the last five years.
Actually MS has built an engine from scratch before. IE for the Mac used it's own engine and it was quite good in it's day.
The Will has several ports of mplayer available. The version called MPlayer CE is the most actively developed.
http://www.wiibrew.org/wiki/MPlayer_CE
It can be installed by the Homebrew Channel. The downside of the mplayers port is that they has no memory protection so attempting to play files that they can't play can crash the Wii requiring a hard reset. I've done this a number of times and haven't suffered anything evil like bricking the thing.
Radmind may be your friend for this. I use a Radmind server on Linux machines to push software out to OS X clients. As long as your network has DNS You Can Believe In then you can control by hostname which machines get which software. Many Radmind admins like to use it to control configuration and even do major OS upgrades with it. I'm leery of that only use it to push out the things that live in Applications, their support frameworks in other directories, Internet plugins, and so-forth. I will use it to push out the odd thing or two that can be configured by text file on a Mac.
I can't see really needing it on machines that use RPM or DEB packages. That can be handled by a private repository and simple cron jobs.
It isn't FOSS but FirstClass is very well supported on Linux and my deployment of it has been dead reliable.
http://www.centrinity.com/
As a bonus they aren't anal on the subject which distro you run. My Archive Server and Groupware server run on Debian boxes. It has shared calendaring, conference groups, and all the rest of the groupware goodies. They have well supported clients for OS X and Windows, a web interface, and the thing will speak POP or LDAP if you so choose. It can pull users from an LDAP server or even BE the LDAP server (which I don't recommend).
The only downside is that the server requirements for their upcoming version are going to be nothing short of obscene.
Device entries can have permissions set on them and even the newer systems for autoconfiguring peripherals can have specific rules written for them or only add devices for specific users. If you want absolutely nothing to happen when a strange device is plugged in, that can be arranged.
Home directories can also reside on a partition mounted with noexec and access to any script interpreters on the system controlled with perms/acls.
It is if automated. The parent poster gave an outline of a eBook rip-o-matic that one could set in motion prior to going on vacation say.
Almost every BIOS I've seen in the past four years has a key you can press to do just that. Each separate drive does have to have it's own bootloader. Booting off a different partition on the same drive isn't a job for the BIOS IMHO. That is what bootloaders are for.
For instance, perhaps you're a rights-holder who wants to say "you cannot use this content to help kill people" to prevent the military from using it, or whatever).
Contract law isn't a candy store. I may want to stipulate that one sign over his arm, leg, and first born child but very few courts on this planet will enforce it. And there HAVE been licenses that forbid military use or government use but those are institutions that at least under some circumstances CAN disregard contract, copyright, or even patent law. This disregard is either extended by legislative fiat or they just do it and dare you to come enforce it.
So yes, there are wishes a rights holder may have that he can't enforce with either contract or copyright law. And in keeping with DRM, there are wishes a rights holder may have that won't be enforced by the laws of physics and mathematics either.
You're being facetious but any government is a subject of interest for foreign intelligence services. The Russians for one spy on Canada not because they're necessarily super interested in Canada but because they can glean information about the US or anybody else the Canadians deal with. It must also be said tech like this would afford more protection against the US intelligence services than the Russians. All intelligence serices employ both electronic eavesdropping and myriad forms of "humint" (human intelligence) but the Russians rely more heavily on things that their sources may not even realize they're divulging while the US seems more enamored of signals interception and tapping cables in odd places.
It could be a good compromise on the limitations of both. This could be used to transmit one-time pads in bursts and the pads could then be used over unsecured channels. As it stands, such pads have to be delivered or picked up by hand.
22 electrodes in a cochlear implant would correspond roughly to a 22-bar spectrum analyzer. If each electrode gives a weaker or stronger signal in relation to audio intensity and only responds to a certain frequency range due to it's location in the cochlea then that is going have a bigger payoff than the same number of electrodes on an artifical retina where each electrode corresponds roughly to a grayscale pixel and said pixels aren't necessarily arranged in a neat grid.
It doesn't surprise me that 22 electrodes suffices for a workable sense of hearing but only provides a very rudimentary sight.
This is true but it isn't yet lashed to Direct3D for Windows guests nor it OGL supported for Linux guests. This means that OGL programs can be run on Windows but Direct3D programs will still use software rendering. At least for now.
I'm not sure that would help. All of the patent trolls would simply re-incorporate in East Texas.
I have a better way to do that. Have a small FAT16 partition on the card with an installer for another filesystem driver. "install.exe" doesn't need any sort of extended filename support.
Alternatively, do some some USB drives intended for backup do. Mount as a USB cd-rom and have the installer on that.
Well it also gets down to what directly affects you and what you care personally about. If one is a FOSS developer or user than MS suing a manufacturer who uses LInux with a really crappy patent is going to provoke outrage. We toil in this particular vineyard so MS' transgressions are going to be particularly noticed.
Only if iTunes and friends is content with that. I have little doubt that installing any Apple apps for Win will still require an obnoxiously loud QuickTime install. At best, that installer might get a little smaller. It sounds to me like MS just rolled their own QuickTime Alternative.
I'm not seeing how MS is handling this as terribly unreasonable but my workplace is skipping Vista entirely and we're going to wait a little while for Win7 to accrue at least a few months worth of hotfixes. You are pretty much right, Win7 is just Vista Second Edition and if I were a Vista user then it would gall me to have to pay for it. 98SE should have been a free upgrade for 98 users as well. But in going from XP to Win7 and only on new hardware at that, it seems to me a reasonable upgrade for a reasonable fee.
DDoS extortion (yes, european banks have paid botnet owners' extortion demands to avoid getting DoSd.)
You'd think large banks would be more able to "follow the money" better than most victims and swing the clout to do something about it once they have.