I think we should have a court decision or law that states that copyrights will not be enforced by the courts when technical means, such as the DVD CSS, have been used to infringe the fair use rights of purchasers. Otherwise, publishers will use access controls to rewrite the copyright laws, without an act of Congress. Why should publishers be able to ignore the parts of the law that they don't like? The recent discussion of electronic books illustrated the disregard some publishers have for fair use.
Why would we want interactivity when the average reader is semi-literate and ignorant?
Publishers perform a valuable service. If you have ever looked through a "slush pile" of incoming manuscripts, you will thank God that someone else is stuck with the job of finding the gems in the steaming heaps of manure. Even with a good manuscript, it usually needs editing, proofreading and revision before it is ready for publication. Then there is typesetting and book design. These are jobs for skilled professionals, not the mob.
If I pick up a computer book published by Addison-Wesley or Prentice-Hall, there is a high probability that it is a good book, unlike the crap that many other publishers shovel out the door. I've never understood why the chain stores carry shelves full of "5 pounds of useless paper on Visual C++ for Blithering Idiots" while not carrying any of the Stroustrup books.
Medscape out of all the medical websites deserves most to be able to raise money.
Deserves to be able to raise money?
Why should anyone invest a nickel in Medscape if they don't have a realistic plan for making money and providing their shareholders with an attractive return on investment.
I thought that the original purpose of the stock market was to allow companies to raise capital for expansion by selling stock to the public. Sometimes it seems more like a legalized form of gambling with little relevance to reality.
It is far more secure than any current closed-source operating system.
I like OpenBSD but your assertion is bogus. There are closed-source operating systems that are very secure, Multics, MLS versions of UNIX, SCOMP, MVS. See the list here and look for operating systems with A or B class security ratings.
The IEEE and ACM are two organizations that get involved in public policy matters. The IEEE has the Computer Society for people interested in computer hardware and software.
The 68000/68010 had 16-bit internal data paths and three 16-bit ALUs. Motorola advertised it as a 16/32-bit processor. The 32-bit features were done with microcode. The 68020 was the first fully 32-bit member of the 680x0 family.
When I talked to some of the old timers who worked on Apollo, they always mentioned that the budget was much higher in those days. There was enough money to design and build high-quality equipment, and to document and test it thoroughly. There were also many more people. More than enough people to get the job done in a complete and professional manner. It also allowed for specialization. You could be the expert on left-handed widgets, after having worked with them for years. There were many more permanently funded positions that didn't disappear as soon as a task was completed. In later years this would be called "fat" and "overhead", which was true to a certain extent, but cutting the fat also cut quality and reliability. Later budget cuts put most of the people out on the street and slashed the wages of those who remained. Television news stories on aerospace engineers driving cabs served to scare away many bright students. Today's NASA is just a thin shell of civil service contract monitors overseeing an unstable, shrinking and underfunded collection of contractors.
Check out William Kahan's web page for some good information on floating point arithmetic. Kahan was a consultant to Intel for the design of the 8087 FPU.
Enter iridium. The telephone version of the internet. Individuals now with the power, for the first time, to bypass local controls and place calls directly, to anyone, anywhere on the planet, without paying local 'access fees', without being tracked, without being monitored.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Iridium is an instrument of freedom and individual privacy. The reality is that Iridium greased the political skids for its system by making deals with many governments and government controlled telecommunications companies to set up local Iridium gateways where traffic could be monitored by police and intelligence agencies. It was rather clever, coopting possible opposition by giving interconnect franchises to governments who would otherwise have felt threatened by the system.
There was FAT-12, used on floppy disks and small hard disks. FAT-16 was for larger disks. The number is the bit size of the entry in the FAT table.
Re:UNIX, the OS of the past, present, and future
on
The End of Unix?
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· Score: 2
1. UNIX kills at networking
Always has, always will.
UNIX didn't have good network support until BSD UNIX. I used to run V7 UNIX on a PDP-11, the only networking that it supported was UUCP.
2. UNIX has superior reliability
Therefore, UNIX was coded for rock-solid stability.
Don't make me laugh. UNIX was written at a research laboratory as a research project. Error recovery in the UNIX kernel was limited to calling panic(). Running out of memory or disk space did bad things to the stability of the system. The file system tended to self-destruct if power failed or the system crashed. UNIX applications often didn't check for errors. If they did check for errors, they didn't attempt to recover, they just called exit(). Kernel device drivers assumed that the hardware was in perfect operating order. DEC used to burn in VAX systems with UNIX because it was such a good system hardware diagnostic. Any flakey hardware would crash the system. VMS would run just fine on many systems with multiple hardware problems and glitches.
Superior Uptime- Name one non-Unix based OS that can beat a unix based OS for number of hours of uptime.
MVS, VMS. That's two.
There are others, such as the OS on Tandem NonStop systems.
Re:Preferred Popular Pi
on
Happy Pi Day!
·
· Score: 2
My favorite has always been 355/113, it's a reasonably good approximation and it's easy to remember. Take the first three odd integers, duplicate the digits, cut in half and divide.
Constitution of the United States of America Article 1, Section 8
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The primary goal of the copyright and patent laws was the promotion of progress in science and the arts, not the enrichment of authors, inventors and publishers. Government granted monopolies on "intellectual property" were just a means to an end, not the end itself.
How should we promote this goal in the information age, where the cost of production is fixed and the cost of distribution is rapidly approaching zero? With the current system, the behaviour that maximizes profit for authors and publishers is not the one that maximizes the social utility of the author's work. From society's point of view, free access to books, music and software by all citizens, rich or poor, would be optimal. The problem is how to fairly compensate authors and publishers for the time, costs and risks of producing "intellectual property" when distribution is no longer strongly tied to compensation. Could compensation be publicly funded based on social utility? How should the social utility of a work be determined?
So, by analogy, if you're so lax as to leave your bike unsecured, I should be entitled to steal it?
No, the bicycle is a physical object and stealing it would deprive you of its use.
What if you live on top of a hill overlooking a town. Phone service being too expensive, you use semaphore flags to communicate with your friend who lives in the town. Should it be illegal for other townspeople to look at the top of the hill? Or maybe we should ban telescopes and binoculars?
I wonder if they have tried using thermal batteries. These will put out huge amounts of power over a short period of time. The military likes to use them to power the electrical systems in missiles. They have an integral pyrotechnic heat source that brings them up to a high internal temperature (over 350C) to melt the electrolyte.
I have to disagree. If someone broadcasts sensitive information and it gets intercepted, I wouldn't call that theft. If the information is sensitive, it should be encrypted and/or routed over hard line. Although the cellular telephone and satellite TV industries would disagree with me, I believe that everyone has the right to receive, demodulate and decrypt any radio frequency signal that passes through their airspace. All digital phones (GSM, TDMA, CDMA) should be using strong encryption to protect the privacy of the user.
There is a federal law against American corporations bribing foreign officials. The company I work for gives annual business ethics briefings to all of its employees and they are told that bribery is unethical, illegal and a cause for immediate dismissal.
Industrial espionage has been a top priority of the KGB/GRU/FSB since World War II. I've seen counter-intelligence reports that say it now gets more resources than ever before. China also places a heavy emphasis on industrial espionage.
Systems where only "interested" voters vote are heavily subject to what I call "issue stacking". That is, if a certain small minority of people are motivated to vote, they can dictate policy to the entire group.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
If 60% of the population is weakly in favor of X and 30% of the population is strongly opposed to X, does the passage of X serve the public interest? The current system increases the influence of those who are motivated enough about an issue to get up off their ass and vote.
The NRA is a good example of this. Even though gun control may be popular is some opinion polls, depending on how the questions are worded, the NRA has millions of members who feel very strongly about the issue. There are more than a few ex-Senators and ex-Representatives who lost their seats due to their support for gun control. The gun control advocacy groups are much smaller, raise less money and are heavily dependent on a small group of wealthy supporters. Supporters of gun control are much less likely than gun control opponents to base their decision on whether or not to vote for a candidate on the candidate's position on gun control. This is natural. If there was a ballot referendum to exterminate all cats, there would be a lot of upset cat owners showing up at the polling places, ready to lynch any candidate who endorsed cat control.
Don't you normally have numbered sheets where you have to put your vote on? That would be exactly the same. But there are laws which forbid to cross-reference them to get personal voting data.
Where I used to live, they used paper ballots with serial numbers. The serial number was written in your voter registration records. The part of the ballot with the serial number was detached before the ballot was put in the ballot box.
If I had my way, nobody would be eligible to vote until they had passed a literacy and civics test, similar to the requirements for becoming a naturalized citizen. I am opposed to idiots of any race/gender having the right to vote.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we should have a court decision or law that states that copyrights will not be enforced by the courts when technical means, such as the DVD CSS, have been used to infringe the fair use rights of purchasers. Otherwise, publishers will use access controls to rewrite the copyright laws, without an act of Congress. Why should publishers be able to ignore the parts of the law that they don't like? The recent discussion of electronic books illustrated the disregard some publishers have for fair use.
Publishers perform a valuable service. If you have ever looked through a "slush pile" of incoming manuscripts, you will thank God that someone else is stuck with the job of finding the gems in the steaming heaps of manure. Even with a good manuscript, it usually needs editing, proofreading and revision before it is ready for publication. Then there is typesetting and book design. These are jobs for skilled professionals, not the mob.
If I pick up a computer book published by Addison-Wesley or Prentice-Hall, there is a high probability that it is a good book, unlike the crap that many other publishers shovel out the door. I've never understood why the chain stores carry shelves full of "5 pounds of useless paper on Visual C++ for Blithering Idiots" while not carrying any of the Stroustrup books.
Deserves to be able to raise money?
Why should anyone invest a nickel in Medscape if they don't have a realistic plan for making money and providing their shareholders with an attractive return on investment.
I thought that the original purpose of the stock market was to allow companies to raise capital for expansion by selling stock to the public. Sometimes it seems more like a legalized form of gambling with little relevance to reality.
I like OpenBSD but your assertion is bogus. There are closed-source operating systems that are very secure, Multics, MLS versions of UNIX, SCOMP, MVS. See the list here and look for operating systems with A or B class security ratings.
The IEEE and ACM are two organizations that get involved in public policy matters. The IEEE has the Computer Society for people interested in computer hardware and software.
The 68000/68010 had 16-bit internal data paths and three 16-bit ALUs. Motorola advertised it as a 16/32-bit processor. The 32-bit features were done with microcode. The 68020 was the first fully 32-bit member of the 680x0 family.
I've read papers that argue that compression will no longer make economic sense as bandwidth becomes really cheap.
The speed of light in fiber is about 69% of the speed of light in a vacuum, roughly 100 ms to travel 20,000 km.
When I talked to some of the old timers who worked on Apollo, they always mentioned that the budget was much higher in those days. There was enough money to design and build high-quality equipment, and to document and test it thoroughly. There were also many more people. More than enough people to get the job done in a complete and professional manner. It also allowed for specialization. You could be the expert on left-handed widgets, after having worked with them for years. There were many more permanently funded positions that didn't disappear as soon as a task was completed. In later years this would be called "fat" and "overhead", which was true to a certain extent, but cutting the fat also cut quality and reliability. Later budget cuts put most of the people out on the street and slashed the wages of those who remained. Television news stories on aerospace engineers driving cabs served to scare away many bright students. Today's NASA is just a thin shell of civil service contract monitors overseeing an unstable, shrinking and underfunded collection of contractors.
Check out William Kahan's web page for some good information on floating point arithmetic. Kahan was a consultant to Intel for the design of the 8087 FPU.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Iridium is an instrument of freedom and individual privacy. The reality is that Iridium greased the political skids for its system by making deals with many governments and government controlled telecommunications companies to set up local Iridium gateways where traffic could be monitored by police and intelligence agencies. It was rather clever, coopting possible opposition by giving interconnect franchises to governments who would otherwise have felt threatened by the system.
There was FAT-12, used on floppy disks and small hard disks. FAT-16 was for larger disks. The number is the bit size of the entry in the FAT table.
Always has, always will.
UNIX didn't have good network support until BSD UNIX. I used to run V7 UNIX on a PDP-11, the only networking that it supported was UUCP.
2. UNIX has superior reliability
Therefore, UNIX was coded for rock-solid stability.
Don't make me laugh. UNIX was written at a research laboratory as a research project. Error recovery in the UNIX kernel was limited to calling panic(). Running out of memory or disk space did bad things to the stability of the system. The file system tended to self-destruct if power failed or the system crashed. UNIX applications often didn't check for errors. If they did check for errors, they didn't attempt to recover, they just called exit(). Kernel device drivers assumed that the hardware was in perfect operating order. DEC used to burn in VAX systems with UNIX because it was such a good system hardware diagnostic. Any flakey hardware would crash the system. VMS would run just fine on many systems with multiple hardware problems and glitches.
MVS, VMS. That's two.
There are others, such as the OS on Tandem NonStop systems.
My favorite has always been 355/113, it's a reasonably good approximation and it's easy to remember. Take the first three odd integers, duplicate the digits, cut in half and divide.
Article 1, Section 8
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The primary goal of the copyright and patent laws was the promotion of progress in science and the arts, not the enrichment of authors, inventors and publishers. Government granted monopolies on "intellectual property" were just a means to an end, not the end itself.
How should we promote this goal in the information age, where the cost of production is fixed and the cost of distribution is rapidly approaching zero? With the current system, the behaviour that maximizes profit for authors and publishers is not the one that maximizes the social utility of the author's work. From society's point of view, free access to books, music and software by all citizens, rich or poor, would be optimal. The problem is how to fairly compensate authors and publishers for the time, costs and risks of producing "intellectual property" when distribution is no longer strongly tied to compensation. Could compensation be publicly funded based on social utility? How should the social utility of a work be determined?
No, the bicycle is a physical object and stealing it would deprive you of its use.
What if you live on top of a hill overlooking a town. Phone service being too expensive, you use semaphore flags to communicate with your friend who lives in the town. Should it be illegal for other townspeople to look at the top of the hill? Or maybe we should ban telescopes and binoculars?
I wonder if they have tried using thermal batteries. These will put out huge amounts of power over a short period of time. The military likes to use them to power the electrical systems in missiles. They have an integral pyrotechnic heat source that brings them up to a high internal temperature (over 350C) to melt the electrolyte.
I have to disagree. If someone broadcasts sensitive information and it gets intercepted, I wouldn't call that theft. If the information is sensitive, it should be encrypted and/or routed over hard line. Although the cellular telephone and satellite TV industries would disagree with me, I believe that everyone has the right to receive, demodulate and decrypt any radio frequency signal that passes through their airspace. All digital phones (GSM, TDMA, CDMA) should be using strong encryption to protect the privacy of the user.
There is a federal law against American corporations bribing foreign officials. The company I work for gives annual business ethics briefings to all of its employees and they are told that bribery is unethical, illegal and a cause for immediate dismissal.
Industrial espionage has been a top priority of the KGB/GRU/FSB since World War II. I've seen counter-intelligence reports that say it now gets more resources than ever before. China also places a heavy emphasis on industrial espionage.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
If 60% of the population is weakly in favor of X and 30% of the population is strongly opposed to X, does the passage of X serve the public interest? The current system increases the influence of those who are motivated enough about an issue to get up off their ass and vote.
The NRA is a good example of this. Even though gun control may be popular is some opinion polls, depending on how the questions are worded, the NRA has millions of members who feel very strongly about the issue. There are more than a few ex-Senators and ex-Representatives who lost their seats due to their support for gun control. The gun control advocacy groups are much smaller, raise less money and are heavily dependent on a small group of wealthy supporters. Supporters of gun control are much less likely than gun control opponents to base their decision on whether or not to vote for a candidate on the candidate's position on gun control. This is natural. If there was a ballot referendum to exterminate all cats, there would be a lot of upset cat owners showing up at the polling places, ready to lynch any candidate who endorsed cat control.
Where I used to live, they used paper ballots with serial numbers. The serial number was written in your voter registration records. The part of the ballot with the serial number was detached before the ballot was put in the ballot box.
If I had my way, nobody would be eligible to vote until they had passed a literacy and civics test, similar to the requirements for becoming a naturalized citizen. I am opposed to idiots of any race/gender having the right to vote.