Darn, the tin foil in my hat won't work against this! I'm going to have to add some sound-absorbing cotton wool too in order to keep the CIA out of my head!
As ever, the media companies are deploying insupportable statistics. Most of the numbers for 'lost revenue' are coming form multiplying 'estimates' for the number of files shared by the recommended retail price of the shared item, which makes the huge leap of believing that every single download that the RIAA thinks happened represents a lost sale that otherwise would have taken place. This assumption is not only naive but studies have shown that people who download music for free also buy more music. In the UK the government is basing policies on similarly erroneous information bought and paid for by the media companies. In that particular case the 'academic study' got it's numbers for lost revenue from an industry press release...
Researchers Pave Way For Compressor-Free Refrigeration
Actually, we've had usable refrigeration without a compressor for most of the last century. It's the gas absorption refrigerator and they are in RVs, dorm rooms and offices all over the world. In fact most small (as opposed to tiny) fridges don't have a compressor.
It's perfectly possible that they have actually implemented AES, they've just done it wrong. It is not uncommon to use AES in Counter Mode or Galois/Counter Mode, especially in high-throughput hardware implementations. This is reasonably strong providing that the key used for each disc block is different (for example by hashing or even just XORing the block ID with the base key). However, if the key is left the same for every block then you would get exactly the effect observed here, and the resulting solution is very weak indeed.
So, it's perfectly possible that they are not lying at all, they just are not very good at crypto.
Incidentally, 10.5.2 does contain drivers for both the USB Ethernet dongle available for the MacBook Air and also the USB-connected SuperDrive. The ethernet dongle works just fine (plugging it in prompts you to open the System Preferences to configure the new Ethernet port) but the SuperDrive does not. It seems that the SuperDrive device driver gets loaded but chooses not to fire up the rest of the Mass Storage device stack:-(
Private ownership is often proposed by people when they first come across this problem but it is seldom the right solution. It doesn't work well for any mobile resource (the classic example is fishing rights). It doesn't work well for resources who's localised consumption has a direct bearing on neighbours (classic examples are deep wells into the water table and, of course, not letting people demolish just their own condo!). Dividing commons usually leads to sub-optimal utilisation (my sheep and your cows will often graze the whole common more effectively then keeping them separate). A better solution is almost always placing an overall cap on consumption (e.g. regulation) and allowing stake-holders to allocate the resources between themselves either through a democratic process or a market.
Of course the other big problem with your solution, in the context of Tragedy of the Commons as an analogy for the problems of non-compete contracts, is that what you are proposing is indentured servitude.
It seems to me that non-competes are a classic example of what economists refer to as the Tragedy of the commons. For any individual company it makes sense to get your staff to sign a non-compete, to stop them taking elsewhere the knowledge you've paid them to acquire. For a technology cluster as a whole (e.g. Silicon Valley or Route 128) the overall effect is negative due to stagnation in the workforce. The problem is that existing firms don't have an immediate incentive to worry about stagnation in start-ups; they are more concerned about loosing good employees to their competitors.
The Tragedy of the Commons crops up all over the place - the most frequently seen cases are things like over-exploitation of natural resources. Generally there are only two ways to deal with the problem; one is to legislate against the behaviour that is detrimental in the longer term and the other is to convince the players to take a longer term view. What's interesting about this debate is that there are people who do have a longer-term interest as well as some sway over the companies: the venture capital firms that invest in not just one start-up but many start-ups over a period of time. They have an incentive to make the environment the best for all companies to thrive. I hope Bijan Sabet manages to convince a few more of them!
There's a substantial difference between receiving information and tracking people. Do the land-line phone companies "track" the calls you make? Sure, they use it to send you a bill, but most people don't seem to think it's a privacy violation. The author does not, as he claims, have "proof" that Apple track iPhone users, simply that they have the wherewithal to collate information about the services used by people if they could be bothered.
The IMEI number is there to facilitate identifying mobile devices to the Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN) for the purpose of charging for services. Your IMEI goes out every time you connect to the EDGE network or any GPRS service anywhere in the world, and is (and always has been) logged by the phone company, irrespective of what brand of phone you have. It's always been possible for the phone company, or anyone with the right data sharing relationship with the phone company (e.g. Apple), or the police with a court order, or the CIA/FBI/KBG/MI6, to link this to the IP address assigned to the mobile device, and from there to server logs. People who worry about this shouldn't just be wearing tin-foil hats, they should be putting tin foil around their phones too.
There are a couple of things to note here. Firstly, SDRAM and SRAM behave very differently. Synchronous dynamic RAM can retain charge in the capacitors for quite some time after being powered down and there is very little one can do about it, but the paper discusses static RAM. With static RAM there is a difference between being "powered off" and having the Vcc rail clamped to ground. Active clamping of the power line is much more effective at clearing the RAM than even just disconnecting it from the power supply, for reasons which become obvious when you look at a classic six transistor CMOS RAM circuit. Without clamping, bias will remain for exactly the same reason that SRAM doesn't consume much power; current only flows when the data changes.
As for it being a good RNG; the state of RAM on power-up is probably a lousy "random number generator", but the statistics in the paper suggest it is a fairly good "source of randomness". There's a big difference between bias and unpredictability (think about dice with '1' on five of the sides and '0' on the remaining side). You wouldn't want to use the state without putting it through a compression function first, but it's a much better seed than using clock()!
It's an interesting paper, and as a means of getting randomness for RFID processors it probably works well, but I'm not sure it's that cheap for most purposes. If you're having to build a new circuit to generate randomness then using an op-amp to compare the noise out of a pair of zener diodes is likely to be cheaper. If you already have an audio input you're not using you can keep that really cheap. Of course if you want really good randomness you should use an old smoke detector.
Yes, you need both Procedural and Substantive Unconscionability, but the implication of the statements in the judgement is that (based on prior case law) you already have one of the two in a click-through EULA. In III.C.1.(a) on page 27 it states (citations removed):
"A contract or clause is procedurally unconscionable if it is a contract of adhesion. A contract of adhesion, in turn, is a "standardized contract, which, imposed and drafted by the party of superior bargaining strength, relegates to the subscribing party only the opportunity to adhere to the contract or reject it." Under California law, "the critical factor in procedural unconscionability analysis is the manner in which the contract or the disputed clause was presented and negotiated." "When the weaker party is presented the clause and told to 'take it or leave it' without the opportunity for meaningful negotiation, oppression, and therefore procedural unconscionability, are present."
This implies that Procedural Unconscionability is present in any and all click-through licenses, since they are drawn up by the party with the stronger position and presented in a "take it or leave it" manner. Given that a click-through license is implicitly Procedural Unconscionable any term that is Substantive Unconscionability is unenforceable.
In the real world it is unlikely that this reaction will be 100% efficient...... which equals 29 million tons of waste per year. Who sweeps that off the streets and highways of the nation?
Based on your logic the roads should be awash with billions of gallons on unburned gasoline. The problem is it has a couple serious flaws.
Firstly, your estimates for the efficiency are way off. We're talking about the metabolic processes from inside your muscles, not your digestion. These are not only very efficient but the trace quantities of by-products are soluble compounds. Secondly, you are assuming that these by-products would be released. Since the only expected products are gases there is no reason why the system would be built to release anything but H2 and CO2; if it leaks liquid you've got serious problems anyway.
You are right that there may be by-products but most of these are likely to come from contamination of the starch. This will mean you'll need to have your reactor enzymes changed periodically, but you really are not going to get a little trail on manure behind your car!
I think you're totally missing the point here. The source of the starch will be plant material, which will be the result of photosynthesis. This means that the production process will take out of the atmosphere exactly as much CO2 as will be released when the starch is split up again.
Ultimately this is a "solar powered" system. The energy what goes into the production of the starch comes from sunlight. It also happens to output the energy in a convenient chemical form which has better energy density that current battery technology.
The 'green' movement aren't going to like this!
on
Driving on Starch
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· Score: 1
The animal-loving end of the Green movement are not going to like this one bit. The process involves killing little fluffy bunnies! No, really, it does!
The paper says that four of the enzymes, glycogen phosphorylase, phosphoglucomutase, triose-phosphate isomerase and aldolase, are all sourced from "rabbit muscle" (see Table 1 on page 4 of the PDF). So, the process may be good for reducing fossil carbon emissions but starch-powered cars are not suitable for vegans!
If you read the paper you'll find that the products of the reaction are hydrogen and CO2. The hydrogen will be turned into water in the fuel cell. Neither CO2 nor H2O will stack up in the streets.
It should be noted that pure starch will need to be extracted from the plant material at some stage before it goes into the car. The residue from this process will likely make good fertiliser for growing more crops.
The thing that is missing in the comparison is how much time was allowed for the students to attempt each of these two problems. Based on my (albeit somewhat dated) knowledge of British maths tests I'd guess that the example given would be the first question on the paper and one would be expected to solve all three parts in one or two minutes. I wouldn't be surprised to have seen the Chinese question on a British paper back in when I did A-levels but it would be towards the end of the paper and given rather longer to solve. Without the context for the questions the comparison is meaningless.
The AppleTV is cheap but it also has a spec too low to be very effective running OSX.
The main problem is going to be the RAM; only 256MB and not upgradable. The Intel Macs seem to use more memory and I often find Safari using more than 256MB of physical memory on its own. Soldering on new TSOP memory chips is something I'd pay quite a bit to avoid having to do...
Aside from the small memory, there a stack of other aspects that are missing or diminished compared to the Mac mini. At the top level, the CPU is 60% of the speed of the entry-level Mac mini and the disk is half the size. There's no audio input at all, the ethernet is 100Mb/s rather than 1Gb/s, no bluetooth, only one USB (so you end up needing an external hub for most activities). Most people will cope with the missing FireWire, not least because with only 256MB of RAM none of the Universal versions of video editing code are going to cope very well.
It's sort of neat that you can run "full" OS X on the AppleTV but given the spec of the machine I think that the utility is somewhat limited. About the only thing it's good for would be as some sort of stand-alone appliance running a single application. Hey, hold on, that's what they designed it for!
... if your solution doesn't infringe leaf nodes in the tree of claims, it doesn't infringe.
That's simply not true. Patent claims are frequently built upon prior claims in the same patent; if a later claim is built on an earlier claim (e.g. in this case where claim 2 cites claim 1) then you need to infringe both parts in order to fall fowl of the later claim. That said, infringing a stand-alone claim (like claim 1 here) is sufficient in itself.
As far as I can tell claim 1 really does hit a standard doubly-linked list; you have the plurality of data items, a primary order of traversal and an auxiliary order (e.g. reverse traversal). There is obvious prior art for this and the claim should be invalid. Claim 2 is therefor also invalid, irrespective of it's novelty, since it cites an invalid claim. Claims 3 and 4 also have obvious prior art.
Personally I think that patents like this are great, since they add substantial support to the argument that the USPTO are, despite their avowed best efforts, incapable of assessing the novelty of software patents, and that they should stop trying.
The biggest drawback of this technology is not that it is in fact a key distribution method rather than an encryption scheme. It is that, as with pretty much all QKD systems, this only works if you have a continuous fibre-optic cable from one end to the other. That might be fine for linking two embassies or two military facilities but it makes it a bit useless for the Internet.
How exactly would the bacteria play a role in this? The radioactivity produces the hydrogen... the bacteria use that hydrogen as a fuel source.
I was envisioning them capturing the single H free radicals that result from the fission of the water and turning them into H2 gas before they had a chance of reacting with something else (e.g. the O or OH left behind in the split). You'd need some way to separate out and stabilise the products before trying to get them to the surface.
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Darn, the tin foil in my hat won't work against this! I'm going to have to add some sound-absorbing cotton wool too in order to keep the CIA out of my head!
As ever, the media companies are deploying insupportable statistics. Most of the numbers for 'lost revenue' are coming form multiplying 'estimates' for the number of files shared by the recommended retail price of the shared item, which makes the huge leap of believing that every single download that the RIAA thinks happened represents a lost sale that otherwise would have taken place. This assumption is not only naive but studies have shown that people who download music for free also buy more music. In the UK the government is basing policies on similarly erroneous information bought and paid for by the media companies. In that particular case the 'academic study' got it's numbers for lost revenue from an industry press release...
I understand that the only problem with 2008.11 is that the WiFi support was written by a dyslexic :-)
Researchers Pave Way For Compressor-Free Refrigeration
Actually, we've had usable refrigeration without a compressor for most of the last century. It's the gas absorption refrigerator and they are in RVs, dorm rooms and offices all over the world. In fact most small (as opposed to tiny) fridges don't have a compressor.
The article notes that no other democratic country has a comprehensive biometric database of all citizens.
But the UK is working on it.
It's perfectly possible that they have actually implemented AES, they've just done it wrong. It is not uncommon to use AES in Counter Mode or Galois/Counter Mode, especially in high-throughput hardware implementations. This is reasonably strong providing that the key used for each disc block is different (for example by hashing or even just XORing the block ID with the base key). However, if the key is left the same for every block then you would get exactly the effect observed here, and the resulting solution is very weak indeed.
So, it's perfectly possible that they are not lying at all, they just are not very good at crypto.
Isn't this just memetics in action?
Incidentally, 10.5.2 does contain drivers for both the USB Ethernet dongle available for the MacBook Air and also the USB-connected SuperDrive. The ethernet dongle works just fine (plugging it in prompts you to open the System Preferences to configure the new Ethernet port) but the SuperDrive does not. It seems that the SuperDrive device driver gets loaded but chooses not to fire up the rest of the Mass Storage device stack :-(
Private ownership is often proposed by people when they first come across this problem but it is seldom the right solution. It doesn't work well for any mobile resource (the classic example is fishing rights). It doesn't work well for resources who's localised consumption has a direct bearing on neighbours (classic examples are deep wells into the water table and, of course, not letting people demolish just their own condo!). Dividing commons usually leads to sub-optimal utilisation (my sheep and your cows will often graze the whole common more effectively then keeping them separate). A better solution is almost always placing an overall cap on consumption (e.g. regulation) and allowing stake-holders to allocate the resources between themselves either through a democratic process or a market.
Of course the other big problem with your solution, in the context of Tragedy of the Commons as an analogy for the problems of non-compete contracts, is that what you are proposing is indentured servitude.
It seems to me that non-competes are a classic example of what economists refer to as the Tragedy of the commons. For any individual company it makes sense to get your staff to sign a non-compete, to stop them taking elsewhere the knowledge you've paid them to acquire. For a technology cluster as a whole (e.g. Silicon Valley or Route 128) the overall effect is negative due to stagnation in the workforce. The problem is that existing firms don't have an immediate incentive to worry about stagnation in start-ups; they are more concerned about loosing good employees to their competitors.
The Tragedy of the Commons crops up all over the place - the most frequently seen cases are things like over-exploitation of natural resources. Generally there are only two ways to deal with the problem; one is to legislate against the behaviour that is detrimental in the longer term and the other is to convince the players to take a longer term view. What's interesting about this debate is that there are people who do have a longer-term interest as well as some sway over the companies: the venture capital firms that invest in not just one start-up but many start-ups over a period of time. They have an incentive to make the environment the best for all companies to thrive. I hope Bijan Sabet manages to convince a few more of them!
There's a substantial difference between receiving information and tracking people. Do the land-line phone companies "track" the calls you make? Sure, they use it to send you a bill, but most people don't seem to think it's a privacy violation. The author does not, as he claims, have "proof" that Apple track iPhone users, simply that they have the wherewithal to collate information about the services used by people if they could be bothered.
The IMEI number is there to facilitate identifying mobile devices to the Public Land Mobile Network (PLMN) for the purpose of charging for services. Your IMEI goes out every time you connect to the EDGE network or any GPRS service anywhere in the world, and is (and always has been) logged by the phone company, irrespective of what brand of phone you have. It's always been possible for the phone company, or anyone with the right data sharing relationship with the phone company (e.g. Apple), or the police with a court order, or the CIA/FBI/KBG/MI6, to link this to the IP address assigned to the mobile device, and from there to server logs. People who worry about this shouldn't just be wearing tin-foil hats, they should be putting tin foil around their phones too.
There are a couple of things to note here. Firstly, SDRAM and SRAM behave very differently. Synchronous dynamic RAM can retain charge in the capacitors for quite some time after being powered down and there is very little one can do about it, but the paper discusses static RAM. With static RAM there is a difference between being "powered off" and having the Vcc rail clamped to ground. Active clamping of the power line is much more effective at clearing the RAM than even just disconnecting it from the power supply, for reasons which become obvious when you look at a classic six transistor CMOS RAM circuit. Without clamping, bias will remain for exactly the same reason that SRAM doesn't consume much power; current only flows when the data changes.
As for it being a good RNG; the state of RAM on power-up is probably a lousy "random number generator", but the statistics in the paper suggest it is a fairly good "source of randomness". There's a big difference between bias and unpredictability (think about dice with '1' on five of the sides and '0' on the remaining side). You wouldn't want to use the state without putting it through a compression function first, but it's a much better seed than using clock()!
It's an interesting paper, and as a means of getting randomness for RFID processors it probably works well, but I'm not sure it's that cheap for most purposes. If you're having to build a new circuit to generate randomness then using an op-amp to compare the noise out of a pair of zener diodes is likely to be cheaper. If you already have an audio input you're not using you can keep that really cheap. Of course if you want really good randomness you should use an old smoke detector.
Yes, you need both Procedural and Substantive Unconscionability, but the implication of the statements in the judgement is that (based on prior case law) you already have one of the two in a click-through EULA. In III.C.1.(a) on page 27 it states (citations removed):
"A contract or clause is procedurally unconscionable if it is a contract of adhesion. A contract of adhesion, in turn, is a "standardized contract, which, imposed and drafted by the party of superior bargaining strength, relegates to the subscribing party only the opportunity to adhere to the contract or reject it." Under California law, "the critical factor in procedural unconscionability analysis is the manner in which the contract or the disputed clause was presented and negotiated." "When the weaker party is presented the clause and told to 'take it or leave it' without the opportunity for meaningful negotiation, oppression, and therefore procedural unconscionability, are present."
This implies that Procedural Unconscionability is present in any and all click-through licenses, since they are drawn up by the party with the stronger position and presented in a "take it or leave it" manner. Given that a click-through license is implicitly Procedural Unconscionable any term that is Substantive Unconscionability is unenforceable.
In the real world it is unlikely that this reaction will be 100% efficient... ... which equals 29 million tons of waste per year.
Who sweeps that off the streets and highways of the nation?
Based on your logic the roads should be awash with billions of gallons on unburned gasoline. The problem is it has a couple serious flaws.
Firstly, your estimates for the efficiency are way off. We're talking about the metabolic processes from inside your muscles, not your digestion. These are not only very efficient but the trace quantities of by-products are soluble compounds. Secondly, you are assuming that these by-products would be released. Since the only expected products are gases there is no reason why the system would be built to release anything but H2 and CO2; if it leaks liquid you've got serious problems anyway.
You are right that there may be by-products but most of these are likely to come from contamination of the starch. This will mean you'll need to have your reactor enzymes changed periodically, but you really are not going to get a little trail on manure behind your car!
I think you're totally missing the point here. The source of the starch will be plant material, which will be the result of photosynthesis. This means that the production process will take out of the atmosphere exactly as much CO2 as will be released when the starch is split up again.
Ultimately this is a "solar powered" system. The energy what goes into the production of the starch comes from sunlight. It also happens to output the energy in a convenient chemical form which has better energy density that current battery technology.
The animal-loving end of the Green movement are not going to like this one bit. The process involves killing little fluffy bunnies! No, really, it does!
The paper says that four of the enzymes, glycogen phosphorylase, phosphoglucomutase, triose-phosphate isomerase and aldolase, are all sourced from "rabbit muscle" (see Table 1 on page 4 of the PDF). So, the process may be good for reducing fossil carbon emissions but starch-powered cars are not suitable for vegans!
If you read the paper you'll find that the products of the reaction are hydrogen and CO2. The hydrogen will be turned into water in the fuel cell. Neither CO2 nor H2O will stack up in the streets.
It should be noted that pure starch will need to be extracted from the plant material at some stage before it goes into the car. The residue from this process will likely make good fertiliser for growing more crops.
The thing that is missing in the comparison is how much time was allowed for the students to attempt each of these two problems. Based on my (albeit somewhat dated) knowledge of British maths tests I'd guess that the example given would be the first question on the paper and one would be expected to solve all three parts in one or two minutes. I wouldn't be surprised to have seen the Chinese question on a British paper back in when I did A-levels but it would be towards the end of the paper and given rather longer to solve. Without the context for the questions the comparison is meaningless.
The AppleTV is cheap but it also has a spec too low to be very effective running OSX.
The main problem is going to be the RAM; only 256MB and not upgradable. The Intel Macs seem to use more memory and I often find Safari using more than 256MB of physical memory on its own. Soldering on new TSOP memory chips is something I'd pay quite a bit to avoid having to do...
Aside from the small memory, there a stack of other aspects that are missing or diminished compared to the Mac mini. At the top level, the CPU is 60% of the speed of the entry-level Mac mini and the disk is half the size. There's no audio input at all, the ethernet is 100Mb/s rather than 1Gb/s, no bluetooth, only one USB (so you end up needing an external hub for most activities). Most people will cope with the missing FireWire, not least because with only 256MB of RAM none of the Universal versions of video editing code are going to cope very well.
It's sort of neat that you can run "full" OS X on the AppleTV but given the spec of the machine I think that the utility is somewhat limited. About the only thing it's good for would be as some sort of stand-alone appliance running a single application. Hey, hold on, that's what they designed it for!
... if your solution doesn't infringe leaf nodes in the tree of claims, it doesn't infringe.
That's simply not true. Patent claims are frequently built upon prior claims in the same patent; if a later claim is built on an earlier claim (e.g. in this case where claim 2 cites claim 1) then you need to infringe both parts in order to fall fowl of the later claim. That said, infringing a stand-alone claim (like claim 1 here) is sufficient in itself.
As far as I can tell claim 1 really does hit a standard doubly-linked list; you have the plurality of data items, a primary order of traversal and an auxiliary order (e.g. reverse traversal). There is obvious prior art for this and the claim should be invalid. Claim 2 is therefor also invalid, irrespective of it's novelty, since it cites an invalid claim. Claims 3 and 4 also have obvious prior art.
Personally I think that patents like this are great, since they add substantial support to the argument that the USPTO are, despite their avowed best efforts, incapable of assessing the novelty of software patents, and that they should stop trying.
The biggest drawback of this technology is not that it is in fact a key distribution method rather than an encryption scheme. It is that, as with pretty much all QKD systems, this only works if you have a continuous fibre-optic cable from one end to the other. That might be fine for linking two embassies or two military facilities but it makes it a bit useless for the Internet.
Not only is it old news in the rest of the world, it's old news on Slashdot too!
How exactly would the bacteria play a role in this? The radioactivity produces the hydrogen... the bacteria use that hydrogen as a fuel source.
I was envisioning them capturing the single H free radicals that result from the fission of the water and turning them into H2 gas before they had a chance of reacting with something else (e.g. the O or OH left behind in the split). You'd need some way to separate out and stabilise the products before trying to get them to the surface.
It may not be totally green...
OK, before someone else says it, it's not green at all because living without sunlight it has no chlorophyll!