Yes. Having invented something, you may not want to do a startup. Often, the technology developed is useful, but not suited for a standalone business, because it's better used as part of something else.
I hold several patents, and put "inventor" on my tax return. One patent was licensed to Autodesk, one was licensed to Havok, and I'm currently going after DARPA for patent infringement on a third. My fourth patent is about to issue, and a fifth one is in examination. In each case, there's a working implementation, but not necessarily a commercial product.
The one that was licensed to Havok is for an approach to game physics engines. I had the first ragdoll physics engine that worked, back in 1997, and I sold it as a high-end animation plug-in for a few years. But the physics engine middleware business looked awful as a business. Mathengine went bust, and Havok lost money for its founders and original investors. (Havok was revived by a second round of investors who bought in cheap and replaced the management team. In the VC community, this is called a "haircut".)
Most of the whining about patents comes from people who've never solved a hard problem. I've never had serious "obviousness" objections from the USPTO. For the ragdoll physics patent, we submitted, among other things, reviews of Trespasser, describing its miserable physics engine, with objects randomly flying off into the air ("This is the worst game I ever played"). That's a clear demonstration of non-obviousness - a big, expensive failure by a major organization to solve the problem. The USPTO accepts that.
The first sentence of the article reads:
"Little or no grammar teaching, cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, all are being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can't write properly."
"Increasingly unacceptable" - that's a modifier on an absolute, which is poor form. The author is trying to express the concept of "larger", with emphasis added. They did not succeed.
"Like" should have been "such as". "Like" excludes the named items, which wasn't the intent.
The comma after "Twitter" ought to be a dash.
Perhaps the Canadian Press needs to employ better editors.
I once met the CEO of Rotary Rocket (remember them? SSTO?) He told me that people started taking him seriously after they built their own vertical assembly building at Mojave.
Rotary Rocket failed because the proposed ultra-light rotary engine didn't work, and the off-the-shelf engine they substituted was too heavy to make it to orbit.
The way this ought to work is that there should be two different sensors in the pedal, and they should be of different types, like one resistive pot and one Hall-effect transducer.
Then, the vehicle electronics should have both a software implementation that checks the two for consistency and monitors engine RPM, and a hardware backup which inhibits fuel flow and spark if either sensor indicates a released gas pedal and engine RPM is above idle and not dropping. (Engine RPM comes from the crankshaft position sensor, and if that fails, spark timing will fail and the engine won't run. So crankshaft position sensor failure isn't an engine runaway risk.) There's some cost to the hardware backup, but it's fewer parts than one window actuator.
Then the software should have a backup function such that if either the brake pedal or the handbrake is active, and speed is above 5MPH, the throttle is treated as being at the released position. That's a no-cost feature.
I knew the people who designed the Ford EEC IV in the 1980s, and they thought like that. They were terrified of a software problem that affected safety. In the EEC IV, the program was masked directly into the CPU chip's ROM, and cannot be changed. (There's a bolted-on ROM unit that has the data tables for each engine model, and you can replace that, but there's no code in it.) It never needed to be; cars with the EEC IV are still running, and there was never a recall for a "firmware update".
The AutoBlog article is lame. You have to watch a terrible video, shot with a hand-held camcorder. The first two minutes should be skipped; it's some idiot blithering, who then turns it over to an "expert" who shows the pedal unit. The pedal unit is hand-held, so you rarely get a really clear image of the thing.
The "expert" claims that a steel pin is binding in a brass bushing. He doesn't know why. There's no discussion of tolerances or lubrication problems, or why a function that critical didn't get a ball bearing. The pedal apparently
moves a magnet near some sensor, but there's no discussion of what kind of sensor, whether there's any redundancy, or
what happens if your steel-toed boots are magnetized.
"Car expert" - ha.
Incidentally, the argument against cutting the throttle when the brake is applied is that then people won't be able to do a jackrabbit start by running up the engine with the brakes on, and the 0-60 time will suffer. Really. There's talk of a software fix that will cut the throttle if the brakes are applied above 5MPH or so.
Of course Apple has to lock out the "tinkerers". They'll just screw up the aesthetic.
Look at most open source programs. The icons suck. The fonts suck. The layout sucks. The usability sucks. Few people can get those things right. Open source doesn't have a Susan Kare.
You know what tinkerers will do. "See, if you press here, it pops up a keyboard image and you can use VI commands." Name one open source program that's undergone usability testing.
Now, Apple appears to be more ideologically aligned with the "Big Brother" than the hammer thrower. While it's not quite gotten to the "Information Purification Directives" level yet...
When Apple issues an update that turns a feature off, they've issued an "information purification directive.
He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future. - Orwell
There's some DRM hypocrisy at work in ARS Technica's rework of the original blog article: when I try to print this article, everything prints, including the XKCD comic, *EXCEPT* the graphic pie chart contributed by ARS
The image isn't "copy protected". It's just bad HTML. Among other things, the image has a specified width, but no height. That may confuse the print formatters in some browsers.
IR office networks were popular around 15 years ago. HP used to have a "NetBeame" IR access point product line. (There's one on eBay for $49.) There's Linux support for IRNet. The Infrared Data Association is already promoting gigabit IrDA.
The concept of diffuse IR networking works fine, but it never really caught on. You can usually get a signal with one bounce, typically off the ceiling, but more than one bounce and it tends not to work. You don't get any useful diffraction around obstacles at IR frequencies, so shadows are a problem. If you populate the ceiling with little IR domes, it works fine, and I've seen that done, but it's obsolete technology now.
I've been critical of SETI efforts for this reason. Much SETI effort was focused on looking for "carriers", big constant-frequency RF sources. Broadcast AM, FM, and analog TV (which was AM video, FM audio) have strong carriers, but that was hugely inefficient. About 80% of an analog TV station's power output wasn't conveying any information other than "We're here". As receivers improved, new RF technologies used weaker carriers, then suppressed carriers, and finally, with spread spectrum, dropped the whole concept of carriers. Many modern RF signals appear to be noise unless you understand the encoding. (The same thing happened to modems decades ago; at 300 baud, you heard tones; at 9600 baud and up, it sounded like white noise.)
I once pointed out to a speaker at Stanford promoting some SETI scheme that they couldn't detect any emission that the FCC would now license for a new application. He admitted that was true. For our civilization, there was less than a century of high-powered carriers. That's a narrow window to hit for SETI purposes.
Arguably, though, any sufficiently advanced civilization will monitor all RF passing through their solar system and will be able to detect anything which has a pattern which can be synched up. Although carriers are going away, all signals between distant points need some form of synchronization information. The synch information may be a tiny fraction of the transmitted data, but there has to be something upon which the receiver can lock.
"This is our book reader. It has every book in the New York Public Library. It has every book in Harvard's library. It has every new book as soon as it's published. It has every major newspaper and magazine. And, of course, it's all searchable; we're Google. For one flat rate of $20 per month, you can read it all."
Space flight on chemically-powered rockets works no better than it did 40 years ago. Without some other propulsion system, it can't get better. There's only so much energy per unit weight available. It doesn't get any better than liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen, and that's already been used. Rerunning Apollo is just a money sink.
NASA mostly does tweaks on weight reduction, and that reached the point of diminishing returns some time ago.
Without a better powerplant, there's little hope of progress.
Now, nuclear rockets - that might work. Nuclear rocket engines were tested in the 1950s. They would have to be launched from some very remote location, of course.
Spam filtering isn't very hard, if you see the email for a large number of accounts, as Gmail does. The one characteristic that spam must have is that it's sent in bulk. The commonality across receiving email accounts gives it away.
The only hard part is recognizing the commonality, which is already working rather well. This is just a new technique for recognizing commonality.
Recognizing spam for a single account is tougher, because you don't get to see the "bulk" property.
You are missing the biggest two developments of the last 50 years because they don't affect you directly. The first is birth control (the pill), which some have argued is the most important invention of the last 1000 years.
Samples in 1957, FDA approval and sale in 1960. 50 years ago.
The second is the green revolution, that lifted a few billion people out of starvation.
True, but by 1958, the US had huge agricultural surpluses with a small fraction of the population involved in farming.
Here's a better solution. This design connects to the cell phone audio output (so you don't have to open the phone) and has a DTMF decoder chip, so you send it tones to make things happen. That at least gives you some protection against random phone calls.
Did you ever believe there was a time when a wiretap was nearly impossible?
It used to be far more difficult. In the electromechanical switching era, there was no built-in support for wiretaps. Somebody had to physically wire into the appropriate cable pair, either near the phone being tapped or in the central office. New York Telephone would only do that if they got a court order, and they'd then bill the law enforcement organization for a private line. When Giuliani was a prosecutor taking down the New York Mafia, there was much grumbling about the million dollar a year phone bill for wiretaps. There was one embarrassing situation when the FBI didn't pay their wiretap bill on time, and the billing software billed the party being wiretappped for their "additional extension".
It was possible to listen in on an line using the Automatic Line Insulation Test equipment, but a typical central office only had two ALIT units, and they had line testing work to do, so tying up one for wiretapping really irked telcos. Sometimes telcos would do that for the FBI, but not for local law enforcement.
Because of this, wiretapping was rare. It was just too much work to be used lightly.
As for call data, the original "pen register" was a physical device hooked to one line which produced dashes on a paper tape for dial pulses. The electromechanical central offices didn't store any data about local calls; only toll calls
produced a billing record. Law enforcement agencies that wanted information about toll calls could only get it for the calling party, in the form of a copy of the phone bill. The data wasn't sorted by receiving party.
Now, it's too easy. All the call data is in indexed databases, and CALEA has huge capacity for recording calls.
I thought that there had been an effort to keep sex offenders away from social networking technology...
That's a real problem. Catholic priests should be monitored to make sure they're not communicating with minors. The Catholic Church, after all, is the only organization to have a slush fund to pay off victims of their pedophiles.
The article has much blithering about "exponential change", probably written by someone who has no idea what that means, or that the exponent might be < 1. Actually, the rate of change in lifestyle for the average person in the developed world is slowing down. And much of the change is negative.
It's useful to think of the Industrial Revolution as starting in 1808. That's the first year someone bought a train ticket and went someplace. Technology prior to that was spotty and didn't have much broad impact. Most people never got more than 50 miles from where they were born, just as in the previous 5000 years or so.
Jump ahead 50 years, to 1858. Railroads were all over France, Germany, Britain, and the eastern US. Telegraph lines were widespread. The first Atlantic cable was just starting to work. Heavy machinery and big factories were producing goods in volume. The world had become much smaller, and there was far more man-made stuff in it. The life of someone who lived from 1808 to 1858 changed enormously during one lifespan.
Jump ahead to 1908. Railroads to everywhere worth going. Electric power. Telephones. Wireless. Cars. The first airplanes. Much more manufacturing. The world of 1908 had early versions of most of the important stuff we have now, yet it was a century ago.
Jump ahead to 1958. Almost everything we have now already existed. Jet aircraft, nuclear power plants, space satellites, transistors, computers, television, Interstate highways, data communications - they were all up and running.
The first IC was proposed in 1958. Antibiotics were available, and DNA had been identified.
Manufacturing was so good that production gluts were common. Agriculture in the developed world was producing so much food that surpluses were a major issue.
Now look at the last 50 years. All the stuff from 1958 works, usually better, but most of what's happened since then is tweaks on 1958 technology. No new big sources of energy. No big progress in space travel in 40 years. Progress has slowed down. Per capita income real for the median American hasn't increased much in 40 years. Corporate leaders don't even talk about "progress" any more; just "change".
The next 50 years are going to be about running out of stuff. Oil, copper, neodymium, and tantalum are already getting scarce. Substitutes all use more energy and money. A century ago, raw materials were available near where they were used. The easy to get at resources have already been extracted. It looks like it's all downhill from here.
Which is why SF has lost its optimism. Popular SF today is either space opera or about vampires. Or it's about a realistic, but grim, near future. SF is now just entertainment; it has no major cultural function, other than perhaps preparing us for the future society of scarcity.
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel." - Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Emir of Dubai.
Some famous artist once exhibited a metal cube about 1m on a side. He was based in New York, and one day, driving through New Jersey, he saw a sign that said "You design it, we fabricate it". So he called them and ordered a 1m cube of solid steel. It was explained to him how much this would weigh. So he settled for a cube of sheet metal on a frame. The cube was duly fabricated and drop-shipped to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
That was in the 1970s, when it was at least an original idea. As late as the 1990s, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was showing a Plexiglas cube held together with tape. That was embarrassing. (When SFMOMA started, all the money went into their building, and the permanent collection was awful. It's since improved, but it's still far behind NY and LA.)
As Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out, you can have very simple geometric forms, but the materials and finishes must be very well chosen.
I'm actually a lot more interested in the vertical stripes than the horizontal ones. It looks like at certain times, every country in the world sends a packet.
Yes, I noticed that. The edges on the stripes are so sharp that I suspect a bug in the analysis or graphing program. Either he's being attacked intermittently by an widespread, tightly synchronized botnet, or the breakdown by country is bogus. I'll bet he has some bug like getting the bytes of an IP address backwards, so when he gets a traffic spike, it looks like it comes from all over the world.
With his crap visualization program, you can't tell. His "3D" visualization of a 2D graph would be more useful if you
could zoom in.
Those guys need to unionize. They need The Animation Guild, Local 839, IATSE. The Animation Guild represents Hollywood cartoonists at Cartoon Network, Fox, Disney, ILM, MGM, Universal, Warner, etc. Here's their current standard contract. They get the traditional time and a half for overtime after 8 hours or five days, double time after 6 days.
That's what prevents "crunches". The film industry has "crunches", but they cost the production money, so considerable effort is made by producers to avoid them.
The jobs performed by Animation Guild and IATSE members are very similar to those of many game developers, especially on the art side.
The best time to organize is during a "crunch". Management isn't in a good position to face a strike.
What's striking is how few different spams there are. When one of the major spammers is shut down, spam drops noticeably worldwide. Statistics like "the top N spammmers account for NN% of the spam" could be helpful. In terms of cost, the top few spammers probably have more impact than Al-Queda.
Maybe we could get major spammers classified as enemies of the United States, so the CIA could go after them.
Couldn't the WHOIS service, by hosting spammers, be held liable for criminal conspiracy or aiding and abetting?
That's come up. The owner of a domain is the name in the registrant field. If the name there is some "privacy service", they are the owner of the domain, and the nominal "owner" is just renting it under some contractual arrangement. As with renting, this usually works out OK, but when there's trouble, the real ownership matters.
This was a big issue with RegisterFly, the troubled and now defunct domain registrar. People who had "private domains" with RegisterFly had a terrible time getting them back, because they couldn't establish ownership.
There's also some legal exposure for privacy services. While domain registrars, as such, have immunity from lawsuits under the Anti-Cybersquatting Protection Act, privacy services do not. Nor do companies that perform both services. The Court in SolidHost vs. NameCheap wrote: "Although NameCheap is an ICANN-accredited registrar, it did not act in that capacity in this case".
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Having invented something, you may not want to do a startup. Often, the technology developed is useful, but not suited for a standalone business, because it's better used as part of something else.
I hold several patents, and put "inventor" on my tax return. One patent was licensed to Autodesk, one was licensed to Havok, and I'm currently going after DARPA for patent infringement on a third. My fourth patent is about to issue, and a fifth one is in examination. In each case, there's a working implementation, but not necessarily a commercial product.
The one that was licensed to Havok is for an approach to game physics engines. I had the first ragdoll physics engine that worked, back in 1997, and I sold it as a high-end animation plug-in for a few years. But the physics engine middleware business looked awful as a business. Mathengine went bust, and Havok lost money for its founders and original investors. (Havok was revived by a second round of investors who bought in cheap and replaced the management team. In the VC community, this is called a "haircut".)
Most of the whining about patents comes from people who've never solved a hard problem. I've never had serious "obviousness" objections from the USPTO. For the ragdoll physics patent, we submitted, among other things, reviews of Trespasser, describing its miserable physics engine, with objects randomly flying off into the air ("This is the worst game I ever played"). That's a clear demonstration of non-obviousness - a big, expensive failure by a major organization to solve the problem. The USPTO accepts that.
The first sentence of the article reads: "Little or no grammar teaching, cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, all are being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can't write properly."
"Increasingly unacceptable" - that's a modifier on an absolute, which is poor form. The author is trying to express the concept of "larger", with emphasis added. They did not succeed.
"Like" should have been "such as". "Like" excludes the named items, which wasn't the intent.
The comma after "Twitter" ought to be a dash.
Perhaps the Canadian Press needs to employ better editors.
I once met the CEO of Rotary Rocket (remember them? SSTO?) He told me that people started taking him seriously after they built their own vertical assembly building at Mojave.
Rotary Rocket failed because the proposed ultra-light rotary engine didn't work, and the off-the-shelf engine they substituted was too heavy to make it to orbit.
The way this ought to work is that there should be two different sensors in the pedal, and they should be of different types, like one resistive pot and one Hall-effect transducer.
Then, the vehicle electronics should have both a software implementation that checks the two for consistency and monitors engine RPM, and a hardware backup which inhibits fuel flow and spark if either sensor indicates a released gas pedal and engine RPM is above idle and not dropping. (Engine RPM comes from the crankshaft position sensor, and if that fails, spark timing will fail and the engine won't run. So crankshaft position sensor failure isn't an engine runaway risk.) There's some cost to the hardware backup, but it's fewer parts than one window actuator.
Then the software should have a backup function such that if either the brake pedal or the handbrake is active, and speed is above 5MPH, the throttle is treated as being at the released position. That's a no-cost feature.
I knew the people who designed the Ford EEC IV in the 1980s, and they thought like that. They were terrified of a software problem that affected safety. In the EEC IV, the program was masked directly into the CPU chip's ROM, and cannot be changed. (There's a bolted-on ROM unit that has the data tables for each engine model, and you can replace that, but there's no code in it.) It never needed to be; cars with the EEC IV are still running, and there was never a recall for a "firmware update".
The AutoBlog article is lame. You have to watch a terrible video, shot with a hand-held camcorder. The first two minutes should be skipped; it's some idiot blithering, who then turns it over to an "expert" who shows the pedal unit. The pedal unit is hand-held, so you rarely get a really clear image of the thing.
The "expert" claims that a steel pin is binding in a brass bushing. He doesn't know why. There's no discussion of tolerances or lubrication problems, or why a function that critical didn't get a ball bearing. The pedal apparently moves a magnet near some sensor, but there's no discussion of what kind of sensor, whether there's any redundancy, or what happens if your steel-toed boots are magnetized.
"Car expert" - ha.
Incidentally, the argument against cutting the throttle when the brake is applied is that then people won't be able to do a jackrabbit start by running up the engine with the brakes on, and the 0-60 time will suffer. Really. There's talk of a software fix that will cut the throttle if the brakes are applied above 5MPH or so.
Of course Apple has to lock out the "tinkerers". They'll just screw up the aesthetic.
Look at most open source programs. The icons suck. The fonts suck. The layout sucks. The usability sucks. Few people can get those things right. Open source doesn't have a Susan Kare.
You know what tinkerers will do. "See, if you press here, it pops up a keyboard image and you can use VI commands." Name one open source program that's undergone usability testing.
Now, Apple appears to be more ideologically aligned with the "Big Brother" than the hammer thrower. While it's not quite gotten to the "Information Purification Directives" level yet ...
When Apple issues an update that turns a feature off, they've issued an "information purification directive.
He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future. - Orwell
The linked page has 24 lines of useful text. It also has 10 ads, and at least 50 links of marginal value.
In other words, it's spam.
There's some DRM hypocrisy at work in ARS Technica's rework of the original blog article: when I try to print this article, everything prints, including the XKCD comic, *EXCEPT* the graphic pie chart contributed by ARS
The image isn't "copy protected". It's just bad HTML. Among other things, the image has a specified width, but no height. That may confuse the print formatters in some browsers.
IR office networks were popular around 15 years ago. HP used to have a "NetBeame" IR access point product line. (There's one on eBay for $49.) There's Linux support for IRNet. The Infrared Data Association is already promoting gigabit IrDA.
The concept of diffuse IR networking works fine, but it never really caught on. You can usually get a signal with one bounce, typically off the ceiling, but more than one bounce and it tends not to work. You don't get any useful diffraction around obstacles at IR frequencies, so shadows are a problem. If you populate the ceiling with little IR domes, it works fine, and I've seen that done, but it's obsolete technology now.
I've been critical of SETI efforts for this reason. Much SETI effort was focused on looking for "carriers", big constant-frequency RF sources. Broadcast AM, FM, and analog TV (which was AM video, FM audio) have strong carriers, but that was hugely inefficient. About 80% of an analog TV station's power output wasn't conveying any information other than "We're here". As receivers improved, new RF technologies used weaker carriers, then suppressed carriers, and finally, with spread spectrum, dropped the whole concept of carriers. Many modern RF signals appear to be noise unless you understand the encoding. (The same thing happened to modems decades ago; at 300 baud, you heard tones; at 9600 baud and up, it sounded like white noise.)
I once pointed out to a speaker at Stanford promoting some SETI scheme that they couldn't detect any emission that the FCC would now license for a new application. He admitted that was true. For our civilization, there was less than a century of high-powered carriers. That's a narrow window to hit for SETI purposes.
Arguably, though, any sufficiently advanced civilization will monitor all RF passing through their solar system and will be able to detect anything which has a pattern which can be synched up. Although carriers are going away, all signals between distant points need some form of synchronization information. The synch information may be a tiny fraction of the transmitted data, but there has to be something upon which the receiver can lock.
This should be Google's pitch:
"This is our book reader. It has every book in the New York Public Library. It has every book in Harvard's library. It has every new book as soon as it's published. It has every major newspaper and magazine. And, of course, it's all searchable; we're Google. For one flat rate of $20 per month, you can read it all."
There are now too many locked-down mostly-read devices, and there's going to be a shakeout. Pick the wrong one and you're going to be screwed.
There's a table of what reads what.
This incompatibility isn't going to last. The market will support one or two incompatible standards. Not five or ten.
Good move. It's time to pull the plug.
Space flight on chemically-powered rockets works no better than it did 40 years ago. Without some other propulsion system, it can't get better. There's only so much energy per unit weight available. It doesn't get any better than liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen, and that's already been used. Rerunning Apollo is just a money sink.
NASA mostly does tweaks on weight reduction, and that reached the point of diminishing returns some time ago. Without a better powerplant, there's little hope of progress.
Now, nuclear rockets - that might work. Nuclear rocket engines were tested in the 1950s. They would have to be launched from some very remote location, of course.
Spam filtering isn't very hard, if you see the email for a large number of accounts, as Gmail does. The one characteristic that spam must have is that it's sent in bulk. The commonality across receiving email accounts gives it away. The only hard part is recognizing the commonality, which is already working rather well. This is just a new technique for recognizing commonality.
Recognizing spam for a single account is tougher, because you don't get to see the "bulk" property.
You are missing the biggest two developments of the last 50 years because they don't affect you directly. The first is birth control (the pill), which some have argued is the most important invention of the last 1000 years.
Samples in 1957, FDA approval and sale in 1960. 50 years ago.
The second is the green revolution, that lifted a few billion people out of starvation.
True, but by 1958, the US had huge agricultural surpluses with a small fraction of the population involved in farming.
Here's a better solution. This design connects to the cell phone audio output (so you don't have to open the phone) and has a DTMF decoder chip, so you send it tones to make things happen. That at least gives you some protection against random phone calls.
Did you ever believe there was a time when a wiretap was nearly impossible?
It used to be far more difficult. In the electromechanical switching era, there was no built-in support for wiretaps. Somebody had to physically wire into the appropriate cable pair, either near the phone being tapped or in the central office. New York Telephone would only do that if they got a court order, and they'd then bill the law enforcement organization for a private line. When Giuliani was a prosecutor taking down the New York Mafia, there was much grumbling about the million dollar a year phone bill for wiretaps. There was one embarrassing situation when the FBI didn't pay their wiretap bill on time, and the billing software billed the party being wiretappped for their "additional extension".
It was possible to listen in on an line using the Automatic Line Insulation Test equipment, but a typical central office only had two ALIT units, and they had line testing work to do, so tying up one for wiretapping really irked telcos. Sometimes telcos would do that for the FBI, but not for local law enforcement.
Because of this, wiretapping was rare. It was just too much work to be used lightly.
As for call data, the original "pen register" was a physical device hooked to one line which produced dashes on a paper tape for dial pulses. The electromechanical central offices didn't store any data about local calls; only toll calls produced a billing record. Law enforcement agencies that wanted information about toll calls could only get it for the calling party, in the form of a copy of the phone bill. The data wasn't sorted by receiving party.
Now, it's too easy. All the call data is in indexed databases, and CALEA has huge capacity for recording calls.
I thought that there had been an effort to keep sex offenders away from social networking technology...
That's a real problem. Catholic priests should be monitored to make sure they're not communicating with minors. The Catholic Church, after all, is the only organization to have a slush fund to pay off victims of their pedophiles.
The article has much blithering about "exponential change", probably written by someone who has no idea what that means, or that the exponent might be < 1. Actually, the rate of change in lifestyle for the average person in the developed world is slowing down. And much of the change is negative.
It's useful to think of the Industrial Revolution as starting in 1808. That's the first year someone bought a train ticket and went someplace. Technology prior to that was spotty and didn't have much broad impact. Most people never got more than 50 miles from where they were born, just as in the previous 5000 years or so.
Jump ahead 50 years, to 1858. Railroads were all over France, Germany, Britain, and the eastern US. Telegraph lines were widespread. The first Atlantic cable was just starting to work. Heavy machinery and big factories were producing goods in volume. The world had become much smaller, and there was far more man-made stuff in it. The life of someone who lived from 1808 to 1858 changed enormously during one lifespan.
Jump ahead to 1908. Railroads to everywhere worth going. Electric power. Telephones. Wireless. Cars. The first airplanes. Much more manufacturing. The world of 1908 had early versions of most of the important stuff we have now, yet it was a century ago.
Jump ahead to 1958. Almost everything we have now already existed. Jet aircraft, nuclear power plants, space satellites, transistors, computers, television, Interstate highways, data communications - they were all up and running. The first IC was proposed in 1958. Antibiotics were available, and DNA had been identified. Manufacturing was so good that production gluts were common. Agriculture in the developed world was producing so much food that surpluses were a major issue.
Now look at the last 50 years. All the stuff from 1958 works, usually better, but most of what's happened since then is tweaks on 1958 technology. No new big sources of energy. No big progress in space travel in 40 years. Progress has slowed down. Per capita income real for the median American hasn't increased much in 40 years. Corporate leaders don't even talk about "progress" any more; just "change".
The next 50 years are going to be about running out of stuff. Oil, copper, neodymium, and tantalum are already getting scarce. Substitutes all use more energy and money. A century ago, raw materials were available near where they were used. The easy to get at resources have already been extracted. It looks like it's all downhill from here.
Which is why SF has lost its optimism. Popular SF today is either space opera or about vampires. Or it's about a realistic, but grim, near future. SF is now just entertainment; it has no major cultural function, other than perhaps preparing us for the future society of scarcity.
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel." - Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Emir of Dubai.
Some famous artist once exhibited a metal cube about 1m on a side. He was based in New York, and one day, driving through New Jersey, he saw a sign that said "You design it, we fabricate it". So he called them and ordered a 1m cube of solid steel. It was explained to him how much this would weigh. So he settled for a cube of sheet metal on a frame. The cube was duly fabricated and drop-shipped to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
That was in the 1970s, when it was at least an original idea. As late as the 1990s, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was showing a Plexiglas cube held together with tape. That was embarrassing. (When SFMOMA started, all the money went into their building, and the permanent collection was awful. It's since improved, but it's still far behind NY and LA.)
As Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out, you can have very simple geometric forms, but the materials and finishes must be very well chosen.
I'm actually a lot more interested in the vertical stripes than the horizontal ones. It looks like at certain times, every country in the world sends a packet.
Yes, I noticed that. The edges on the stripes are so sharp that I suspect a bug in the analysis or graphing program. Either he's being attacked intermittently by an widespread, tightly synchronized botnet, or the breakdown by country is bogus. I'll bet he has some bug like getting the bytes of an IP address backwards, so when he gets a traffic spike, it looks like it comes from all over the world. With his crap visualization program, you can't tell. His "3D" visualization of a 2D graph would be more useful if you could zoom in.
Those guys need to unionize. They need The Animation Guild, Local 839, IATSE. The Animation Guild represents Hollywood cartoonists at Cartoon Network, Fox, Disney, ILM, MGM, Universal, Warner, etc. Here's their current standard contract. They get the traditional time and a half for overtime after 8 hours or five days, double time after 6 days.
That's what prevents "crunches". The film industry has "crunches", but they cost the production money, so considerable effort is made by producers to avoid them.
The jobs performed by Animation Guild and IATSE members are very similar to those of many game developers, especially on the art side.
The best time to organize is during a "crunch". Management isn't in a good position to face a strike.
What's striking is how few different spams there are. When one of the major spammers is shut down, spam drops noticeably worldwide. Statistics like "the top N spammmers account for NN% of the spam" could be helpful. In terms of cost, the top few spammers probably have more impact than Al-Queda.
Maybe we could get major spammers classified as enemies of the United States, so the CIA could go after them.
Couldn't the WHOIS service, by hosting spammers, be held liable for criminal conspiracy or aiding and abetting?
That's come up. The owner of a domain is the name in the registrant field. If the name there is some "privacy service", they are the owner of the domain, and the nominal "owner" is just renting it under some contractual arrangement. As with renting, this usually works out OK, but when there's trouble, the real ownership matters.
This was a big issue with RegisterFly, the troubled and now defunct domain registrar. People who had "private domains" with RegisterFly had a terrible time getting them back, because they couldn't establish ownership.
There's also some legal exposure for privacy services. While domain registrars, as such, have immunity from lawsuits under the Anti-Cybersquatting Protection Act, privacy services do not. Nor do companies that perform both services. The Court in SolidHost vs. NameCheap wrote: "Although NameCheap is an ICANN-accredited registrar, it did not act in that capacity in this case".