My vetenarian was complaining today that she used to have a system which used Ricochet, a dumb terminal in her truck, and a Xenix server in her office to access horse medical records remotely. This provided a 38Kb/s connection. Since Ricochet went out of business, that's no longer possible. Data over cellular is less available, slower, harder to set up, and more expensive. Yes, you can set up a VPN, and "web enable" the server, but it's more trouble than it is worth.
I've seen couples in Palo Alto coffee houses where both people had laptops up and running. Twice in the last two weeks. They were dating, not having a business meeting or doing homework. Seeing half a dozen people having a meeting in a coffee shop, laptops at the ready, has been going on for a while. But now people are taking all this gear on dates.
One good-looking young couple had in use, between them, two laptops, two cell phones, a Blackberry, and a graphing calculator. Plus at least one iPod.
But no annoying ringtones. They're using the gear, not showing it off.
It's a little more than prediction. Read the history of the Color Association of the United States. "A committee representing the textile
and allied industries, including silk, wool, thread, button, and garment manufacturers, was selected to
choose colors for the following season, have them dyed and issued in the form of an American color card."
Admittedly, they don't have the clout they used to, but neither does the garment industry in NYC.
Then there's the Color Marketing Group, which comes on like the RIAA: "Any unauthorized use or possession
of CMG's copyrighted Color Palettes and/or related information shall be prosecuted to the
fullest extent by Color Marketing Group.!!" Read their 2006 color plan. Consumer electronics will go to a shinier silver next year.
If course it has. IT actually is not too far removed from the fashion industry.
You thought fashion fads just happened? It's much more organized than that. The "in" colors for US fashion are chosen 22 months in advance, by the little-known Color Association of the United States. Color forecasts are issued to subscribers, and the textile mills, dye manufacturers, and clothiers start to gear up for the coming seasons. Because there are some long manufacturing lead times to produce fabrics in huge volume, the style decisions have to be organized.
"Pinks and fuchsia were everywhere in spring 2003; CAUS members knew this in spring of 2001."
Here's the activewear color plan for 2006-2007:
Colors are anchored by light and dark neutrals in addition to the ever important white.
Red will return as a leading bright, in coral and raspberry shades.
- In color combinations, tonalities of one shade look new and dynamic.
Cool colors like Apple Green, Indigo and teals are soothing, and especially attractive when matched with brown-influenced neutrals like Wheat and Terracotta. Finishes such as metallicizing add dimension and interest to color and fabrications.
Color changes in fashion do not happen by accident.
Sony has probably committed a felony. Here's the relevant Texas computer crime law.
33.02. BREACH OF COMPUTER SECURITY.
(a) A person commits an offense if the person knowingly accesses a computer, computer network, or computer system without the effective consent of the owner.
(b) An offense under this section is a Class B misdemeanor
unless in committing the offense the actor knowingly obtains a
benefit, defrauds or harms another, or alters, damages, or deletes
property, in which event the offense is:
(1) a Class A misdemeanor if the aggregate amount
involved is less than $1,500;
(2) a state jail felony if:
(A) the aggregate amount involved is $1,500 or
more but less than $20,000; or
(B) the aggregate amount involved is less than
$1,500 and the defendant has been previously convicted two or more
times of an offense under this chapter;
(3) a felony of the third degree if the aggregate
amount involved is $20,000 or more but less than $100,000;
(4) a felony of the second degree if the aggregate
amount involved is $100,000 or more but less than $200,000; or
(5) a felony of the first degree if the aggregate
amount involved is $200,000 or more.
(c) When benefits are obtained, a victim is defrauded or
harmed, or property is altered, damaged, or deleted in violation of
this section, whether or not in a single incident, the conduct may
be considered as one offense and the value of the benefits obtained
and of the losses incurred because of the fraud, harm, or
alteration, damage, or deletion of property may be aggregated in
determining the grade of the offense.
Now let's look at Sony's actions:
"without effective consent" - yes, after rejection of EULA. Maybe even if EULA accepted. See definitionf consent, under "induced by deception".
"obtains a benefit" - yes.
"benefits may be aggregated" - applies
(for first degree felony) "aggregate amount (of benefit) involved is $200,000 or more" - maybe, based on total sales
Sec. 12.32. FIRST DEGREE FELONY PUNISHMENT.
(a) An individual adjudged guilty of a felony of the first degree shall be punished by imprisonment in the institutional division for life or for any term of not more than 99 years or less than 5 years.
This paper presents a clear-cut definition of consciousness of humans, consciousness of self in particular. The definition "Consistency of cognition and behavior generates consciousness" explains almost all conscious behaviors of humans. A "consciousness system" was conceived based on this definition and actually constructed with recurrent neural networks. We succeeded in implementing imitation behavior, which we believe is closely related to consciousness, by applying the consciousness system to a robot.
This belongs to the branch of AI informally known as "faking it". There's a long history of work in this area, starting with ELIZA and continuing through a long series of rather lame systems. The latest systems are intended to mimic the behavior of call center employees.
The "FCC line charge" is not a Government charge. It's a fraudulent misrepresentation by the telephone company of one of their own fees. The FCC just sets a cap on that charge. The telco gets the money.
What you're paying for is the ability to connect to a separate long-distance carrier. This charge keeps going up, even though the cost of providing bulk transport keeps going down.
Look at who's writing the Universal Driver Specification. Go to page 5, and look at the affiliations of the authors. There are nine people from SCO, more than from any other organization. SCO doesn't have much of a technical staff left. If they're devoting nine people to this effort, they must forsee some major benefit. There's some hidden agenda in this. Where's the kicker in this? Start looking.
Also worth noting: there's nobody from Microsoft, and nobody from Red Hat. IBM has some people, but IBM is so big they send a few people to any standards effort.
Any legitimate security issue would have gone through the FISA court without problems. Somebody is hiding something they shouldn't have been doing, and it's probably going to be really embarassing when it comes out.
The Supreme Court decided this, almost unanimously, in Lemon vs. Kurtzman, 1971.
"For a law to be constitutional under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the law must have a legitimate secular purpose, must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion, and must not result in an excessive entanglement of government and religion."
That's worked reasonably well for over thirty years.
The Establishment Clause is in the Constitution for very practical reasons. All the founders were familiar with the religious wars that had torn up Europe. Some of them were from sects that had been persecuted. They didn't want their country to go through that. And it worked.
Compare Europe before democracy, or the Islamic world today.
The real puzzlement in this case is why the NSA didn't just go to the FISA court which routinely issues authorization for these sorts of intercepts. It is pretty unlikely that there would have been any issues with getting the authorization.
Probably because, when it comes out who the Administration has been eavesdropping on, it's going to be embarassing. Like Watergate.
This is a very poor design.
Take a look at the mechanism.
When a vehicle drives over it, the full impact lands on the hinges and the drive mechanism for the generator. This thing has to resist huge impacts, especially when a heavy truck comes along.
It also has electrical components and moving parts below road level, where they'll flood and corrode.
How does he get 10KW out of this? That looks like an automotive alternator in the picture. Automotive alternators range from 300W to about 1.5KW, and that looks like one of the smaller ones.
A more reasonable mechanism would be to make a heavy duty rubber mat, like the ones used on railroad crossings, but with internal chambers, like a tire. When a vehicle drives over it, you'd get some compressed air. Put in a check valve, an air tank, and a small air motor driving a generator, and you'd have a rugged little power source. A hydraulic version of the system might produce more power output than a pneumatic one. The bump felt by the vehicle should be easier than that at a railroad crossing. And no big, expensive machined parts that get beaten up by traffic.
Realistically, get a solar panel, like CALTRANS uses to power much of their roadside infrastructure.
When I ordered my own Little Red Book, Amazon.com offered to bundle The Communist Manifesto. But I already have a copy of that. (When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Stanford Bookstore had a sale: "All Communism 80% off").
"Workers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Let the ruling classes tremble..."
I believe it should be possible to have every document, video, mp3 or whatever open at the same time.
That's been tried quite a few times, then abandoned. The Apple Lisa worked that way. Apple Hypercard. Go Computer, the first tablet machine. Some PDAs.
It only works well if there's a unique application for each document type. This implies a closed system. That's the problem.
The Microsoft "Designed for Windows XP" logo program requires that Applications that are designed to work with the Windows XP infrastructure for state separation of data will work correctly under Limited User accounts. So if the application breaks under a limited user, report this to Microsoft logo control. Tell the vendor you did this. This scares some vendors; there's a risk of having their Windows logo pulled.
Wang Federal Systems Division took over the SCOMP product line from Honeywell. Then Wang Federal System was sold off as Wang Federal, Inc. (Was this part of the Wang bankrupcty in 1992?) Eventually, what was left was acquired by Getronics, which seems to have eliminated what was left of Wang.
What's actually coming is not 3D, but better search. The current generation of interfaces is about putting stuff in a structure. The next generation is about finding stuff.
Everybody has too much stuff now for the directory tree metaphor. Or the visual surface metaphor. The problem is scaling. 3D doesn't help with the scaling probem
Search is known to scale up very well. The next frontier is smartening up search, first on the local machine, and then in the organizational or affinity group environment.
Google and Microsoft are going to battle over desktop search. (And the Linux community needs to be working on this. "find" and "grep" aren't going to cut it.) But that's where the "desktop" is going.
We'll see 3D hardware used to accelerate the desktop, because it's there.
It's going to used for doing drag, zoom, animation, and overlay in 2 1/2D,
not for a true 3D environment. The Apple desktop already does much of this.
NSA originally had the Orange Book security standards, which ranged from class C1 (Discretionary access protection, i.e. standard UNIX), up to class A1 (formally verified mandatory protection). These were serious security standards, issued in 1985.
Compliance was tough, and testing was by NSA.
But A few systems passed testing. Trusted Xenix made it to level B2. The WANG SCOMP, a special-purpose secure machine, made it to level A1 in 1984. That was the high water mark of operating system security.
Vendors hated this process. First, the vendors didn't control the test process - the National Security Agency's Central Security Service did.
NSA's policy back then was that you got two tries to pass validation. On the first try, the vendor was told of problems found, and given a chance to fix them. The second try was strictly pass/fail, and might include tests that the vendor had never seen. So it was quite possible, and common, for products to flunk and be cut out of procurements.
The Common Criteria process, on the other, hand, is conducted by third party labs paid by the vendor. So they're very "responsive" to the vendor.
The "Common Criteria" are comparable to the class C Orange Book standards. They're very weak. There was heavy lobbying by the computer industry to water down the Orange Book standards, and that lobbying was successful.
The evaluation report for Windows XP is online.
It's worth reading, even though it's long.
The pages take ten to twenty seconds to load because "servedby.netshelter.net" is overloaded. "netshelter.net" is invoking a CGI program for every ad reference, and the Javascript seems to be delaying page rendering until the ads load.
Welcome to "Web 2.0" - now with the performance of 38K dialup.
See E-Ink imaging film for how this stuff works. Basically, there's the backplane of an LCD display with the E-Ink film on the front.
The E-Ink people talk about a new generation with low-cost plastic transistors and flexible substrates, but what they're actually shipping is both expensive and rigid.
The E-Ink/E-Paper crowd is always talking about how they'll have displays that are really cheap, really big, really soon. Yet they're not trying to break into the laptop or TV markets. What's wrong with this picture?
You can buy an E-Ink Prototyping Kit for $3000. This is a sheet of "E-ink" material, with the little balls that rotate, mounted on top of an 6 inch LCD panel, attached to a little computer. Runs Linux, even. This gets you a little black and white display.
Since there's an LCD panel behind it, this can't be cheaper than an LCD panel. It is sunlight-readable, though.
There are some E-Ink point of purchase displays, but they're fixed signs where sections can be turned on and off, much like the special LCD displays that are used in control panels. These are still a few hundred dollars.
Along the same line are the various "E-Ink clocks".
If you want a display that holds its image with power off and is sunlight readable, try Kent Displays. It's not "E-Ink", but it actually works.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I have to spell everything out?
My vetenarian was complaining today that she used to have a system which used Ricochet, a dumb terminal in her truck, and a Xenix server in her office to access horse medical records remotely. This provided a 38Kb/s connection. Since Ricochet went out of business, that's no longer possible. Data over cellular is less available, slower, harder to set up, and more expensive. Yes, you can set up a VPN, and "web enable" the server, but it's more trouble than it is worth.
Father, mother, daughter, desktop computer.
Daughter: "Daddy, the computer stopped working"
TRACK to Daughter walking to computer with Father following.
CUT to computer screen. Screen full of blinking ads and popups. Hint of pornographic content, but not directly on screen.
Daughter: "Can you fix it?"
Father: "I'll try"
Father sits down at computer.
CUT to side view of Father at computer, illuminated by glow from screen.
FADE to side view of Father at computer, looking at screen, intermittent typing.
Daughter (offscreen): "Is it fixed yet".
Father: No, not yet.
FADE to side view of Father at computer, head in hands.
Daughter (offscreen) "I need the computer to do my homework".
Father (annoyed): "I'm working on it".
Mother: (offscreen): "Honey, is this going to take long"? ...
One good-looking young couple had in use, between them, two laptops, two cell phones, a Blackberry, and a graphing calculator. Plus at least one iPod. But no annoying ringtones. They're using the gear, not showing it off.
Admittedly, they don't have the clout they used to, but neither does the garment industry in NYC.
Then there's the Color Marketing Group, which comes on like the RIAA: "Any unauthorized use or possession of CMG's copyrighted Color Palettes and/or related information shall be prosecuted to the fullest extent by Color Marketing Group.!!" Read their 2006 color plan. Consumer electronics will go to a shinier silver next year.
You thought fashion fads just happened? It's much more organized than that. The "in" colors for US fashion are chosen 22 months in advance, by the little-known Color Association of the United States. Color forecasts are issued to subscribers, and the textile mills, dye manufacturers, and clothiers start to gear up for the coming seasons. Because there are some long manufacturing lead times to produce fabrics in huge volume, the style decisions have to be organized.
"Pinks and fuchsia were everywhere in spring 2003; CAUS members knew this in spring of 2001."
Here's the activewear color plan for 2006-2007:
Color changes in fashion do not happen by accident.
33.02. BREACH OF COMPUTER SECURITY.
(a) A person commits an offense if the person knowingly accesses a computer, computer network, or computer system without the effective consent of the owner.
(b) An offense under this section is a Class B misdemeanor unless in committing the offense the actor knowingly obtains a benefit, defrauds or harms another, or alters, damages, or deletes property, in which event the offense is:
(1) a Class A misdemeanor if the aggregate amount involved is less than $1,500;
(2) a state jail felony if:
(A) the aggregate amount involved is $1,500 or more but less than $20,000; or
(B) the aggregate amount involved is less than $1,500 and the defendant has been previously convicted two or more times of an offense under this chapter;
(3) a felony of the third degree if the aggregate amount involved is $20,000 or more but less than $100,000;
(4) a felony of the second degree if the aggregate amount involved is $100,000 or more but less than $200,000; or
(5) a felony of the first degree if the aggregate amount involved is $200,000 or more.
(c) When benefits are obtained, a victim is defrauded or harmed, or property is altered, damaged, or deleted in violation of this section, whether or not in a single incident, the conduct may be considered as one offense and the value of the benefits obtained and of the losses incurred because of the fraud, harm, or alteration, damage, or deletion of property may be aggregated in determining the grade of the offense.
Now let's look at Sony's actions:
"without effective consent" - yes, after rejection of EULA. Maybe even if EULA accepted. See definitionf consent, under "induced by deception".
"obtains a benefit" - yes.
"benefits may be aggregated" - applies
(for first degree felony) "aggregate amount (of benefit) involved is $200,000 or more" - maybe, based on total sales
Sec. 12.32. FIRST DEGREE FELONY PUNISHMENT.
(a) An individual adjudged guilty of a felony of the first degree shall be punished by imprisonment in the institutional division for life or for any term of not more than 99 years or less than 5 years.
Any questions?
Abstract:
This paper presents a clear-cut definition of consciousness of humans, consciousness of self in particular. The definition "Consistency of cognition and behavior generates consciousness" explains almost all conscious behaviors of humans. A "consciousness system" was conceived based on this definition and actually constructed with recurrent neural networks. We succeeded in implementing imitation behavior, which we believe is closely related to consciousness, by applying the consciousness system to a robot.
This belongs to the branch of AI informally known as "faking it". There's a long history of work in this area, starting with ELIZA and continuing through a long series of rather lame systems. The latest systems are intended to mimic the behavior of call center employees.
Sadly, this isn't a joke.
The original article had a link to the wrong "UDI" spec. That's been fixed, after some previous comments on it being wrong.
What you're paying for is the ability to connect to a separate long-distance carrier. This charge keeps going up, even though the cost of providing bulk transport keeps going down.
Also worth noting: there's nobody from Microsoft, and nobody from Red Hat. IBM has some people, but IBM is so big they send a few people to any standards effort.
Any legitimate security issue would have gone through the FISA court without problems. Somebody is hiding something they shouldn't have been doing, and it's probably going to be really embarassing when it comes out.
"For a law to be constitutional under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the law must have a legitimate secular purpose, must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion, and must not result in an excessive entanglement of government and religion."
That's worked reasonably well for over thirty years.
The Establishment Clause is in the Constitution for very practical reasons. All the founders were familiar with the religious wars that had torn up Europe. Some of them were from sects that had been persecuted. They didn't want their country to go through that. And it worked.
Compare Europe before democracy, or the Islamic world today.
Probably because, when it comes out who the Administration has been eavesdropping on, it's going to be embarassing. Like Watergate.
That's a measure of who wants to program.
How does he get 10KW out of this? That looks like an automotive alternator in the picture. Automotive alternators range from 300W to about 1.5KW, and that looks like one of the smaller ones.
A more reasonable mechanism would be to make a heavy duty rubber mat, like the ones used on railroad crossings, but with internal chambers, like a tire. When a vehicle drives over it, you'd get some compressed air. Put in a check valve, an air tank, and a small air motor driving a generator, and you'd have a rugged little power source. A hydraulic version of the system might produce more power output than a pneumatic one. The bump felt by the vehicle should be easier than that at a railroad crossing. And no big, expensive machined parts that get beaten up by traffic.
Realistically, get a solar panel, like CALTRANS uses to power much of their roadside infrastructure.
"Workers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Let the ruling classes tremble..."
That's been tried quite a few times, then abandoned. The Apple Lisa worked that way. Apple Hypercard. Go Computer, the first tablet machine. Some PDAs. It only works well if there's a unique application for each document type. This implies a closed system. That's the problem.
The Microsoft "Designed for Windows XP" logo program requires that Applications that are designed to work with the Windows XP infrastructure for state separation of data will work correctly under Limited User accounts. So if the application breaks under a limited user, report this to Microsoft logo control. Tell the vendor you did this. This scares some vendors; there's a risk of having their Windows logo pulled.
Wang Federal Systems Division took over the SCOMP product line from Honeywell. Then Wang Federal System was sold off as Wang Federal, Inc. (Was this part of the Wang bankrupcty in 1992?) Eventually, what was left was acquired by Getronics, which seems to have eliminated what was left of Wang.
Search is known to scale up very well. The next frontier is smartening up search, first on the local machine, and then in the organizational or affinity group environment.
Google and Microsoft are going to battle over desktop search. (And the Linux community needs to be working on this. "find" and "grep" aren't going to cut it.) But that's where the "desktop" is going.
We'll see 3D hardware used to accelerate the desktop, because it's there. It's going to used for doing drag, zoom, animation, and overlay in 2 1/2D, not for a true 3D environment. The Apple desktop already does much of this.
Vendors hated this process. First, the vendors didn't control the test process - the National Security Agency's Central Security Service did. NSA's policy back then was that you got two tries to pass validation. On the first try, the vendor was told of problems found, and given a chance to fix them. The second try was strictly pass/fail, and might include tests that the vendor had never seen. So it was quite possible, and common, for products to flunk and be cut out of procurements.
The Common Criteria process, on the other, hand, is conducted by third party labs paid by the vendor. So they're very "responsive" to the vendor.
The "Common Criteria" are comparable to the class C Orange Book standards. They're very weak. There was heavy lobbying by the computer industry to water down the Orange Book standards, and that lobbying was successful.
The evaluation report for Windows XP is online. It's worth reading, even though it's long.
Welcome to "Web 2.0" - now with the performance of 38K dialup.
The E-Ink people talk about a new generation with low-cost plastic transistors and flexible substrates, but what they're actually shipping is both expensive and rigid.
You can buy an E-Ink Prototyping Kit for $3000. This is a sheet of "E-ink" material, with the little balls that rotate, mounted on top of an 6 inch LCD panel, attached to a little computer. Runs Linux, even. This gets you a little black and white display. Since there's an LCD panel behind it, this can't be cheaper than an LCD panel. It is sunlight-readable, though.
There are some E-Ink point of purchase displays, but they're fixed signs where sections can be turned on and off, much like the special LCD displays that are used in control panels. These are still a few hundred dollars. Along the same line are the various "E-Ink clocks".
If you want a display that holds its image with power off and is sunlight readable, try Kent Displays. It's not "E-Ink", but it actually works.