Usually, I would support the trademark owner: IBM owns IBM, and I expect anything with IBM in its name to come from IBM.
This case is worrying, however, because ssh is also the name of the command. The trademark is not only identifying a brand, it is also the thing you type to perform an action. If DEC (or whoever) had patented "dir" they would have made competing OSes less attractive because new OSes would have to invent arbitrary different names for conceptually identical commands. If SSH enforces the trademark, it is only reasonable that they must fight against alternative implementations using the command "ssh".
This would lead to a repeat of the look-and-feel wars of the GUIs, only this time fought over CLIs using trademark law. LnF was about users moving to different platforms/apps and expecting things to work the same. CLI is no different: users expect telnet to do approximately the same thing on all platforms. If command names are choosen to avoid infrigement, we all will lose.
Well, This was reported incorrectly. These aren't amature rockets, they're High Power rockets. The difference is like the one between hackers and crackers. Anyone outside the community can't tell/ doesn't care about the difference.
Well, the amateur rocket community is largely self-regulating. HPR vs amateur is a distinction that allows people to lauch big (100lbs+) rockets under hobbyist rules. This means commercial "hobbyist" motors (up to O class, i.e. 16000 Estee's A engines,) with only minor BATF and FAA involvement. Amateurs also launch rockets in this range, they just have different goals.
High power rockets use commercially available motors that are certified by a governing body. Amature rockets use motors designed by the person launching the rocket and require a lot more knowledge and money (not to mention time) to launch safely. It's a very expensive hobby whereas I could afford to do High Power rocketry while I had my forst job working 8 hours a week at Taco John's
High power rockets generally don't go much higher than this, and amature rockets are much more expensive and involved (high explosives certification, etc.).
Much amateur rocket experimentation is concerned with relatively low powered motors. You try to get data with 1kg motors before you scale up to big stuff. NO rocketeers need high explosives permits (HE doesn't work for rockets.) A low explosives user permit is required... I have one, as do most serious HPR and amateur rocketeers. A LEUP lets you own/use up to 50K pounds of fuel: enough for any orbital shot.
I can't really see a college using amature rockets as a mandatory part of the curriculum.
There are many reasons to go immediately to amateur class rockets: liquid bi-prop and mono-prop rockets have a great bang for the buck; commercial HPR motors have sales restrictions that burden educational institutions; educational institutions get a free waiver from many of the Fire Code regs that affect hobbyists.
A quick run through a rocket sim package (e.g. Rocksim 4.0) shows that an HPR rocket cannot exceed 70k feet or so. Those of us that are thinking about orbit are immediately in the amateur category, but we run our tests in the HPR regime for as long as possible. The cost curve (other than time spent on the phone,) doesn't really jump at the HPR-amateur boundary though.)
Is there something wrong with the idea of competition and having someone win and others lose? After all many of the challenges people face in their lives will be zero-sum
ones - either you win or you lose, and not everyone can come out ahead. Finding a partner is not a positive-sum game for instance, and that's about the most important thing
there is.
Um, finding partners is about the most positive sum game there is. Consider the base case: no one plays... the human race dies out in 80 years. Unless you believe this is the optimal outcome, surely you agree that mate-finding activity has some positive value over the base case.
Even if I personally don't find a mate, I still benefit from the game because the next generation is created as a result of mate-finding. This generation provides me with the option to buy services from paper-boys, then waiters, then doctors. Some may grow up and invent really cool stuff that I benefit from. Others may write great books. We all have a total gain versus not playing the game.
Games are exceptional in that they are generally zero-sum. Almost nothing in life is. Most individual transactions are positive sum, tho a few are disasterously negative sum (mostly acts of desparation or confusion.)
$50/10Terabytes = $5/T =.5cents/G. Current tech gives us.5cents/M, doubling every year or so. Commercialization in 2002 means a claim of an eight year technological leapfrogging.
The specific claimns are:
Better compression (1/8 on text.)
Impressive, but not impossible. This doesn't favor any specific hardware: any tech can use it. So now we are left with 6 years worth of hardware advances.
Claim 2: quad density read/writes on mostly conventional media.
Huh? No details given. Two year leapfrog from magic (coatings/software unchanged.) 4 years left to account for.
Claim 3: 30-fold increase due to new coatings and materials.
A five year advance.
Claim 4: 10T on a credit card sized device
This is an implementation, not an invention. No credit.
Three advances give us -1 years of technological leapfrogging: so the manufacturing process in 2002 should be about twice as expensive as current disk drive fab. All the major storage firms are demostrating lab models with ultra-high bit/cm numbers. Now a minor university team has made major simulataneous advances in compression, r/w density, coatings/materials, packaging, and, above all, commercialization.
Ok, so it's revolutionary. It's great, etc. Now explain why that's the case! The web pages didn't even provide the classic "Hello World" example, to say nothing of deep examples that provide posssible solutions to real-world problems.
This is worse than TopMind's "All code is tables" diatribe that was highlighted on/. last month. At least TM provided specific complaints and possible solutions. This "new paradigm" is all fluff and no substance.
Yes, all programming languages suck. We agree. Programming is hard: it is conversion of pure ideas into concrete reality. Now show us why your system is better. What does it solve? Why should we use it? How does it help us see the deep meaning in other peoples' code?
It is the fact that the system is not susceptible to disturbances or unauthorized listeners which makes MB communications attractive for military communication systems, where it has been in operation for years.
Not susceptible to unauthorized listeners? Huh?!
It's just standard broadcast.
The rest of the page talks about a mixed-mode (line-of-sight + meteor burst) operation. I bet they never implement the meteor burst aspect: it's just a hook for customers and investors. Ordinary phone technology would do as well or better.
You will not find good code by seeking it. Write your programs: use Open Source, third party libraries, and misdocumented APIs.
Bend as a reed in the wind. The novice curses unknown authors. The expert smiles and writes his code.
Code is poetry. Do not impressed by bombast, vocabulary, clever phrasing, rhyme, allusion. Beautiful code is distilled idea: language, syntax, style, comments, format, philosophy are mere surface quality.
If you attain enlightenment, you peers will laud you with praise. One day, you will meet one of the masters whose work led you to Satori. You won't have much to discuss, because you both understand the deep meaning of code.
The problems in CA stem from political action. California chose to deregulate the wholesale market, without deregulating the retail market. Thus, consumers had no incentive
to conserve when supplies got tight, while the utilities had to keep buying power to meet demand, however high the prices got. That was only the second mistake. They didn't
understand the economics of these markets yet, and did some rather stupid things with zonal pricing which aggravated the problem. William Hogan has an interesting paper on
his website, in particular this one.
We should also bear in mind that the US has three electricity markets: retail, wholesale, and transmission.
Retail is insane: must deliver means that a commodity trading at $25/MWh can spike to its cap of $15000/MWh or so in many areas. Many consumers would sell an option to lose power for a few hours in any month in exchange for a big discount on their bill throughout the year.
Wholesale is far more rational: producers can hedge in the oil markets, sell calls to profit from holding expensive-to-generate plants, etc.
Transmission is a chaos of regulation: intrastate vs interstate regulations, tranches of tranmission rights, and a current infrastructure that has not adapted to competition. Many states would be better off building big transfer facilities to transfer power between their neighbors than increasing their internal generating capabilities. Two years ago, electricity spot went NEGATIVE in parts of the US because transmission was happily moving power between low-profit areas while the midwest sweltered in a heat wave.
If the CC#'s or passwords belong to other people, how can you claim ownership?
Ownership is not a recognized concept in speech. There is copyright, but that does not apply in this scenario. You may own your car, but I can post information about it without legal problems.
Short answer: there are specific legal definitions of what constitutes free speech. Posting someone else's personal information isn't one of them. Go look them up before posting again.
There are very few restrictions on speech:
Can't yell fire in a movie theatre:
I.e. where speech is used in lieu of a prohibited action (pulling the fire alarm falsely,) it is not protected.
Libel and slander.
These are subject to civil remedies... the hurt party may seek redress after the fact. The speech itself is very rarely restrained.
Fighting words.
If I yell obscenities in your face, designed to start a fight, I'll be arrested for distrubing the peace or similar: my speech is only restricted as a side effect.
Inciting people to directly commit crimes.
I can't rile up a mob and encourage them to immediately lynch a specific person. I CAN publish a pamphlet encouraging it.
Advocating overthrowing the government by violent means.
This one's banned.
The courts HAVE held that my free speech rights include discussing security device weaknesses (locks, and how to pick them.) If I know your root password, I CAN post it (e.g. Your site is using the default admin password, your unpatched app has the "netscapersareweenies" or "locksmith" problems.) My free speech isn't abridged because of your carelessness.
I didn't mean to suggest that I would hire a person on the basis of their answer to this question.
I see the hiring process as follows: the candidate and the company try to find a good match (a place that fits with the candidate's current skills, and also provides an opportunity for her to advance into whatever role she wishes.) Most candidates will NOT be hired, and thus it is important not to humiliate, grill-and-dump, or otherwise trash the interviewees. These people may be your future clients, vendors, or even co-workers. Specifically, no one should ever feel that they were "tripped up" by a single question or unknown fact.
Thus, I start easy: if the candidate aces the machine examination question, we move onto topics like compute-farm management, spreadsheet design, and global networked databases. If the candidate starts thrashing, but says her strengths lie more in Perl, we'll talk about algorithmic complexity, and data structures. The next interviewer will be a Perl expert, and will judge Perl skills.
I want candidates to show their best, so I try to makes questions easy, but each question provides a chance for an expert to strut their stuff. If you come in for a sysadmin job, and find, after a few hours, that you are filling a whiteboard with code for L2-cache optimal matrix multiplication, you are probably going to get offered a job, and one that's quite a bit better than the one the headhunter said you were interviewing for!
1900-1950 saw a lot of things trickle into the middle class: cheaper entertainment, better communications, faster travel. None of these were revolutionary, just evolutionary. The process has continues to this day: now almost anyone in the US can watch TV, talk to the person they wish to talk to, get where they want to go. The benefits reach more and more people as time goes on. For example, in 1950, only the very rich could decide to go to England tomorrow. Today, most people can afford it.
1800-1900 saw an explosion in mass produced commodity items (tools, fabrics, food, etc.) 1900-1950 saw an explosion in luxury items (transportation, entertainment, communcation.) Over time, items only available to the upper classes become available to everyone (E.g. clothing in America is now given away for free to anyone needing it!)
In 1950-2000, the biggest thing that has become available to more than just the rich is, I think, freedom and self-determination. 1900-150 saw two world wars, with numerous people living under colonial rule. 1800-1900 was even worse: many bloody wars, vast chunks of the world under colonial rule (in many cases virtual national slavery.) Today, democracy is spreading to more and more nations, dictatorships are falling like flies, colonialism is dead. The last totalitarian governments seem to be collapsing under their own weight.
The 1950-2000 state of the art is making it easier and easier to expose injustice, human rights violations, etc. It is making it easier for people to express their outrage. It is making it easier for their governments to take action to promote worldwide fairness and law without massive loss of life. It is making it easier for those living in situations they don't like to just get up and leave.
It's a mistake to judge progress by looking for jet-packs, personal helicopters, and 3-D home theaters. Instead, look at that low-caste Indian emigree working alongside you: 50 years ago, he would be stuck in small town doing menial labor, rather than hacking code as a peer and friend.
I went to their site and took the practice quiz... any decent Linux user should be able to get the certification.
About 15% of the questions were poorly worded (nasty double negatives, insufficent information) or just plain wrong. About 50% were trivial, leaving 35% that could be quickly answered if you had a command prompt or a browser running.
If I were interviewing a candidate, I'd prefer to just telnet to a machine, sit him down at my keyboard, and ask:
What type of machine is this, and what OS is it running?
How much local disk space does it have?
What's its primary role?
I'll trust her answers more than any certification.
In my day, we used bang-paths: foovax!kgbvax!decvax!user. We would put at least four bang-paths in our sigs... this was studly. You want to email? find decvax, ucbvax, or some other big host, and just paste the paths to get the routing.
Trivia: the first Usenet troll post was probably circa 1982: Tom Karzes posted a long message to the food group. He requested/advocated recipes for dormice, organs, and long pork. Many replied.
Ok, you are troll: open source, meth-labs, and Microsoft all in one short post.
It doesn't matter how many people "abuse" encryption, anymore than it matters how many people "abuse" free speech. We (in the USA) have a right to anonymous speech, and the right to free association. We don't need to register what we say with the government. We don't need to register lists of people with whom we associate. If you don't like this, change the constitution.
Quite right - this is a poor acticle. He basically pulls the 72fps number out of the air (maybe because that is his monitor's max refresh rate?)
Any article that takes about maximum preceptible update rates without describing how the test was done is going to be poor science. E.g. showing film at higher and higher fps tends not to work because film-makers are attuned to shooting scenes designed to be viewed at low fps rates. Films tend, by design, to have a single area of focus in each shot.
To really see what the eye wants in terms of fps, you have to give it tough tests, e.g. track the ten mosquitoes buzzing around your head, focus on the closest threat for long enough to squat it. Or alternatively, track six enemy fighters in your flight-sim, judge each one's orientation and heading, and focus on the most valuable target while making quick glances at the others. In situations like this, people improve at the task when given higher frame rates (up to, and beyond 150Hz!) Lower frame rates cause progressively more jerky saccades (the rapid eye movements between points of focus) because the eye has trouble making at exact jump to the new point of attention (it gets in the ball park, and then tends to undershoot and overcorrect for the target because the expected point of interest isn't rock solid.)
Yes, they are alive and kicking... just search for "laser ring gyro."
The problem is that they are kind of bulky (e.g. most commerical models are 4" plus per side.)
Other solid state solutions include piezzo-electric Coriolis-effect gyros (much more drift, but less space,) various micro-machined gyros (check out Litton's Aerospace page,) and magneto-resistive technologies (orient yourself via the Earth's magnetic field.)
I agree with you that it is not too hard to drive well in controlled conditions. As I see it, the problem is to drive expertly.
Driving at 30 mph (e.g. in a Hans Moravec vehicle) allows you to ignore the real issues of F1 racing: skids and slides, engine overpressure, overheated brake response, body torque effects, lift and drag forces, etc. Races are won and lost because the drivers are pushing to the very edge of performance.
The interactions of these non-linear effects is what makes simulation hard... you really can't train an AI to optimize times unless you have gigantic datasets from which to produce good models. Watch tapes of Indy 500 races: cars break traction and do 360 spins AND RECOVER! If your AI hasn't done that 20 times (in the real world, with a 180mph effective wind,) it probably wouldn't recover.
This is so far beyond anything you could train an AI to do within three years that it's not even funny.
Consider chess: you have a vast archive of previous games, a relatively simple domain, the ability to test millions of boards a second, almost free live testing, and almost no financial penalty for mistakes. Contrast F1 racing: no archive, complex domain, almost no simulation ability, real testing costs $1000/hr, the mistake penalty is $100,000.
This is either hopelessly naive or a scam: after three years, you might get an AI around the track at 100MPH. Judging from the website, it's a scam: they talk about all the great value of the webhits and PR, ask for sponsors, etc. There is almost no info on the AI approach, etc.
The comments about this posting have been quite varied. Why not a classic interview? It might actually yield more interesting answers than the standard "explain why your CueCat doesn't suck" type interviews.
I don't mean this as flamebait, I honestly think it would be more enlightening to me and the average techo-nerd.
Ah, but surely the artist is commenting on "the most vivid secnes in history." The intense images that capture the horror/shock/imagination of the American (and world) public do so by reducing a complex situation to a single emotional picture. E.g. JFK sprawled in his limo as his agonized wife looks on; the classic Vietnam execution picture of killer, sidearm and the victim knowing he is about to die in a street execution; and the painmask of the women at Kent State standing over a slain student (picture later edited in reprint to remove the pole behind her for increased asthetics.)
The media looks for simple, intense images because they sell. The public defines complex issues in terms of these simple images (white cops beating a black man, a black man defending a helpless white man, an asian staring down a tank, etc.)
By portraying these images as screenshots from the Sims, the emotional aspect is largely removed. The viewer must ask himself if this is just a quirky (yet interesting) interaction in the bigger ongoing game, or if it is actually an important element of the game?
Can you just keep on playing after the minor setback of your preacher getting killed? Does the happy Sound of Music scene make up for it? Do you want to continue playing, or do you want to complain that the game is stupid and unfair?
Watermarks are an inherently flawed proposition. They will never work because they are the direct opposite of compression (i.e. compression attempts to remove unimportant information, and watermarks are, by definition, unimportant information.) By important information, I mean the actual audio.
Watermarks are only useful for one thing: tracking the original source of a piece of information.
If the goal is to nail the original poster of a copyright work, watermarking will fail: as compression technology improves, watermarking information will automatically be stripped out as it is non-important information.
If the goal is to allow buyers to time, space, and media shift a copyright work, it will also fail: users will buy players that don't require the music to be encoded with some realbits+watermarkbits = bigprime scheme. Even the DMCA doesn't force hardware manufacturers to use protection technologies.
Watermarking only works if a) the end user devices are all SDMI compliant, b) the end user devices refuse to play anything but compliant audio, and c) no one bothers to break positive watermarking (i.e. if no watermark, you don't play.)
Point b is possible but not likely.
Point c will happen rapidly if point b comes to pass.
BigCo gives a Bob, an employee, stock options at $5, the current price. Bob is not taxed for this, and BigCo doesn't put the transaction on its balance sheet, because there was no real value traded. BigCo gave Bob the ability to buy shares at $5, which is what he could buy them in the market for, anyway. Hence, no
income for Bob, no loss for BigCo.
This is the fundamental problem with the way that options are currently treated under US tax law. The options obviously have value (otherwise Bob would not care about them,) and therefore there is an immediate cost (i.e. loss) for BigCo.
The options' value can be computed at the time they are granted. While the restrictions on the options may make Black-Scholes pricing infeasible, the price is still determinable based on a) the strike/spot of the options, b) the volatility of the stock, c) interest rates, and d) time to expiration of the option.
If the tax system was rational, Bob would pay taxes each year on the gain in the value of his options, and BigCo would show a corresponding loss equal to this gain. Shareholders would therefore always have an honest picture of BigCo's liabilties and real earnings.
Unfortunately, such a scheme would tend to bankrupt employees of successful companies: Bob would be unable to pay his tax bill because his earnings are in the form of option price gains that he cannot realize.
To make the system equitable, BigCo must either allow Bob to sell enough of his options to meet the tax liability on the remaining options, or alternatively, give him a restricted loan to cover the tax liability. Either of these produce the effect of giving an accurate picture of BigCo's finanacies to the shareholders, and at the same time allowing BigCo to reward Bob for long-term work and loyalty.
Slashdot Mirror
This case is worrying, however, because ssh is also the name of the command. The trademark is not only identifying a brand, it is also the thing you type to perform an action. If DEC (or whoever) had patented "dir" they would have made competing OSes less attractive because new OSes would have to invent arbitrary different names for conceptually identical commands. If SSH enforces the trademark, it is only reasonable that they must fight against alternative implementations using the command "ssh".
This would lead to a repeat of the look-and-feel wars of the GUIs, only this time fought over CLIs using trademark law. LnF was about users moving to different platforms/apps and expecting things to work the same. CLI is no different: users expect telnet to do approximately the same thing on all platforms. If command names are choosen to avoid infrigement, we all will lose.
Well, the amateur rocket community is largely self-regulating. HPR vs amateur is a distinction that allows people to lauch big (100lbs+) rockets under hobbyist rules. This means commercial "hobbyist" motors (up to O class, i.e. 16000 Estee's A engines,) with only minor BATF and FAA involvement. Amateurs also launch rockets in this range, they just have different goals.
High power rockets use commercially available motors that are certified by a governing body. Amature rockets use motors designed by the person launching the rocket and require a lot more knowledge and money (not to mention time) to launch safely. It's a very expensive hobby whereas I could afford to do High Power rocketry while I had my forst job working 8 hours a week at Taco John's High power rockets generally don't go much higher than this, and amature rockets are much more expensive and involved (high explosives certification, etc.).
Much amateur rocket experimentation is concerned with relatively low powered motors. You try to get data with 1kg motors before you scale up to big stuff. NO rocketeers need high explosives permits (HE doesn't work for rockets.) A low explosives user permit is required... I have one, as do most serious HPR and amateur rocketeers. A LEUP lets you own/use up to 50K pounds of fuel: enough for any orbital shot.
I can't really see a college using amature rockets as a mandatory part of the curriculum.
There are many reasons to go immediately to amateur class rockets: liquid bi-prop and mono-prop rockets have a great bang for the buck; commercial HPR motors have sales restrictions that burden educational institutions; educational institutions get a free waiver from many of the Fire Code regs that affect hobbyists.
A quick run through a rocket sim package (e.g. Rocksim 4.0) shows that an HPR rocket cannot exceed 70k feet or so. Those of us that are thinking about orbit are immediately in the amateur category, but we run our tests in the HPR regime for as long as possible. The cost curve (other than time spent on the phone,) doesn't really jump at the HPR-amateur boundary though.)
Well, at least it wasn't the goatse.cx link.
Um, finding partners is about the most positive sum game there is. Consider the base case: no one plays... the human race dies out in 80 years. Unless you believe this is the optimal outcome, surely you agree that mate-finding activity has some positive value over the base case.
Even if I personally don't find a mate, I still benefit from the game because the next generation is created as a result of mate-finding. This generation provides me with the option to buy services from paper-boys, then waiters, then doctors. Some may grow up and invent really cool stuff that I benefit from. Others may write great books. We all have a total gain versus not playing the game.
Games are exceptional in that they are generally zero-sum. Almost nothing in life is. Most individual transactions are positive sum, tho a few are disasterously negative sum (mostly acts of desparation or confusion.)
The specific claimns are:
- Better compression (1/8 on text.)
- Impressive, but not impossible. This doesn't favor any specific hardware: any tech can use it. So now we are left with 6 years worth of hardware advances.
- Claim 2: quad density read/writes on mostly conventional media.
- Huh? No details given. Two year leapfrog from magic (coatings/software unchanged.) 4 years left to account for.
- Claim 3: 30-fold increase due to new coatings and materials.
- A five year advance.
- Claim 4: 10T on a credit card sized device
- This is an implementation, not an invention. No credit.
Three advances give us -1 years of technological leapfrogging: so the manufacturing process in 2002 should be about twice as expensive as current disk drive fab. All the major storage firms are demostrating lab models with ultra-high bit/cm numbers. Now a minor university team has made major simulataneous advances in compression, r/w density, coatings/materials, packaging, and, above all, commercialization.Excuse me while I snort beer through my nose.
This is worse than TopMind's "All code is tables" diatribe that was highlighted on /. last month. At least TM provided specific complaints and possible solutions. This "new paradigm" is all fluff and no substance.
Yes, all programming languages suck. We agree. Programming is hard: it is conversion of pure ideas into concrete reality. Now show us why your system is better. What does it solve? Why should we use it? How does it help us see the deep meaning in other peoples' code?
Not susceptible to unauthorized listeners? Huh?! It's just standard broadcast.
The rest of the page talks about a mixed-mode (line-of-sight + meteor burst) operation. I bet they never implement the meteor burst aspect: it's just a hook for customers and investors. Ordinary phone technology would do as well or better.
Bend as a reed in the wind. The novice curses unknown authors. The expert smiles and writes his code.
Code is poetry. Do not impressed by bombast, vocabulary, clever phrasing, rhyme, allusion. Beautiful code is distilled idea: language, syntax, style, comments, format, philosophy are mere surface quality.
If you attain enlightenment, you peers will laud you with praise. One day, you will meet one of the masters whose work led you to Satori. You won't have much to discuss, because you both understand the deep meaning of code.
The problems in CA stem from political action. California chose to deregulate the wholesale market, without deregulating the retail market. Thus, consumers had no incentive to conserve when supplies got tight, while the utilities had to keep buying power to meet demand, however high the prices got. That was only the second mistake. They didn't understand the economics of these markets yet, and did some rather stupid things with zonal pricing which aggravated the problem. William Hogan has an interesting paper on his website, in particular this one.
We should also bear in mind that the US has three electricity markets: retail, wholesale, and transmission.
Retail is insane: must deliver means that a commodity trading at $25/MWh can spike to its cap of $15000/MWh or so in many areas. Many consumers would sell an option to lose power for a few hours in any month in exchange for a big discount on their bill throughout the year.
Wholesale is far more rational: producers can hedge in the oil markets, sell calls to profit from holding expensive-to-generate plants, etc.
Transmission is a chaos of regulation: intrastate vs interstate regulations, tranches of tranmission rights, and a current infrastructure that has not adapted to competition. Many states would be better off building big transfer facilities to transfer power between their neighbors than increasing their internal generating capabilities. Two years ago, electricity spot went NEGATIVE in parts of the US because transmission was happily moving power between low-profit areas while the midwest sweltered in a heat wave.
If the CC#'s or passwords belong to other people, how can you claim ownership?
Ownership is not a recognized concept in speech. There is copyright, but that does not apply in this scenario. You may own your car, but I can post information about it without legal problems.
Short answer: there are specific legal definitions of what constitutes free speech. Posting someone else's personal information isn't one of them. Go look them up before posting again.
There are very few restrictions on speech:
The courts HAVE held that my free speech rights include discussing security device weaknesses (locks, and how to pick them.) If I know your root password, I CAN post it (e.g. Your site is using the default admin password, your unpatched app has the "netscapersareweenies" or "locksmith" problems.) My free speech isn't abridged because of your carelessness.
The easiest way to see this is to recognize that if it were a program that expressed anything else, such as how to factor prime numbers
Aargh! That hurts.
I see the hiring process as follows: the candidate and the company try to find a good match (a place that fits with the candidate's current skills, and also provides an opportunity for her to advance into whatever role she wishes.) Most candidates will NOT be hired, and thus it is important not to humiliate, grill-and-dump, or otherwise trash the interviewees. These people may be your future clients, vendors, or even co-workers. Specifically, no one should ever feel that they were "tripped up" by a single question or unknown fact.
Thus, I start easy: if the candidate aces the machine examination question, we move onto topics like compute-farm management, spreadsheet design, and global networked databases. If the candidate starts thrashing, but says her strengths lie more in Perl, we'll talk about algorithmic complexity, and data structures. The next interviewer will be a Perl expert, and will judge Perl skills.
I want candidates to show their best, so I try to makes questions easy, but each question provides a chance for an expert to strut their stuff. If you come in for a sysadmin job, and find, after a few hours, that you are filling a whiteboard with code for L2-cache optimal matrix multiplication, you are probably going to get offered a job, and one that's quite a bit better than the one the headhunter said you were interviewing for!
1800-1900 saw an explosion in mass produced commodity items (tools, fabrics, food, etc.) 1900-1950 saw an explosion in luxury items (transportation, entertainment, communcation.) Over time, items only available to the upper classes become available to everyone (E.g. clothing in America is now given away for free to anyone needing it!)
In 1950-2000, the biggest thing that has become available to more than just the rich is, I think, freedom and self-determination. 1900-150 saw two world wars, with numerous people living under colonial rule. 1800-1900 was even worse: many bloody wars, vast chunks of the world under colonial rule (in many cases virtual national slavery.) Today, democracy is spreading to more and more nations, dictatorships are falling like flies, colonialism is dead. The last totalitarian governments seem to be collapsing under their own weight.
The 1950-2000 state of the art is making it easier and easier to expose injustice, human rights violations, etc. It is making it easier for people to express their outrage. It is making it easier for their governments to take action to promote worldwide fairness and law without massive loss of life. It is making it easier for those living in situations they don't like to just get up and leave.
It's a mistake to judge progress by looking for jet-packs, personal helicopters, and 3-D home theaters. Instead, look at that low-caste Indian emigree working alongside you: 50 years ago, he would be stuck in small town doing menial labor, rather than hacking code as a peer and friend.
About 15% of the questions were poorly worded (nasty double negatives, insufficent information) or just plain wrong. About 50% were trivial, leaving 35% that could be quickly answered if you had a command prompt or a browser running.
If I were interviewing a candidate, I'd prefer to just telnet to a machine, sit him down at my keyboard, and ask:
- What type of machine is this, and what OS is it running?
- How much local disk space does it have?
- What's its primary role?
I'll trust her answers more than any certification.In my day, we used bang-paths: foovax!kgbvax!decvax!user. We would put at least four bang-paths in our sigs... this was studly. You want to email? find decvax, ucbvax, or some other big host, and just paste the paths to get the routing.
Trivia: the first Usenet troll post was probably circa 1982: Tom Karzes posted a long message to the food group. He requested/advocated recipes for dormice, organs, and long pork. Many replied.
Aarg! when I can actually read "45540135" and lex it as a valid English word, I know I've been reading Slashdot for too long!
It doesn't matter how many people "abuse" encryption, anymore than it matters how many people "abuse" free speech. We (in the USA) have a right to anonymous speech, and the right to free association. We don't need to register what we say with the government. We don't need to register lists of people with whom we associate. If you don't like this, change the constitution.
Any article that takes about maximum preceptible update rates without describing how the test was done is going to be poor science. E.g. showing film at higher and higher fps tends not to work because film-makers are attuned to shooting scenes designed to be viewed at low fps rates. Films tend, by design, to have a single area of focus in each shot.
To really see what the eye wants in terms of fps, you have to give it tough tests, e.g. track the ten mosquitoes buzzing around your head, focus on the closest threat for long enough to squat it. Or alternatively, track six enemy fighters in your flight-sim, judge each one's orientation and heading, and focus on the most valuable target while making quick glances at the others. In situations like this, people improve at the task when given higher frame rates (up to, and beyond 150Hz!) Lower frame rates cause progressively more jerky saccades (the rapid eye movements between points of focus) because the eye has trouble making at exact jump to the new point of attention (it gets in the ball park, and then tends to undershoot and overcorrect for the target because the expected point of interest isn't rock solid.)
The problem is that they are kind of bulky (e.g. most commerical models are 4" plus per side.)
Other solid state solutions include piezzo-electric Coriolis-effect gyros (much more drift, but less space,) various micro-machined gyros (check out Litton's Aerospace page,) and magneto-resistive technologies (orient yourself via the Earth's magnetic field.)
Driving at 30 mph (e.g. in a Hans Moravec vehicle) allows you to ignore the real issues of F1 racing: skids and slides, engine overpressure, overheated brake response, body torque effects, lift and drag forces, etc. Races are won and lost because the drivers are pushing to the very edge of performance.
The interactions of these non-linear effects is what makes simulation hard... you really can't train an AI to optimize times unless you have gigantic datasets from which to produce good models. Watch tapes of Indy 500 races: cars break traction and do 360 spins AND RECOVER! If your AI hasn't done that 20 times (in the real world, with a 180mph effective wind,) it probably wouldn't recover.
Consider chess: you have a vast archive of previous games, a relatively simple domain, the ability to test millions of boards a second, almost free live testing, and almost no financial penalty for mistakes. Contrast F1 racing: no archive, complex domain, almost no simulation ability, real testing costs $1000/hr, the mistake penalty is $100,000.
This is either hopelessly naive or a scam: after three years, you might get an AI around the track at 100MPH. Judging from the website, it's a scam: they talk about all the great value of the webhits and PR, ask for sponsors, etc. There is almost no info on the AI approach, etc.
Looks like nothing but a money sink to me.
I don't mean this as flamebait, I honestly think it would be more enlightening to me and the average techo-nerd.
The media looks for simple, intense images because they sell. The public defines complex issues in terms of these simple images (white cops beating a black man, a black man defending a helpless white man, an asian staring down a tank, etc.)
By portraying these images as screenshots from the Sims, the emotional aspect is largely removed. The viewer must ask himself if this is just a quirky (yet interesting) interaction in the bigger ongoing game, or if it is actually an important element of the game?
Can you just keep on playing after the minor setback of your preacher getting killed? Does the happy Sound of Music scene make up for it? Do you want to continue playing, or do you want to complain that the game is stupid and unfair?
Watermarks are only useful for one thing: tracking the original source of a piece of information.
If the goal is to nail the original poster of a copyright work, watermarking will fail: as compression technology improves, watermarking information will automatically be stripped out as it is non-important information.
If the goal is to allow buyers to time, space, and media shift a copyright work, it will also fail: users will buy players that don't require the music to be encoded with some realbits+watermarkbits = bigprime scheme. Even the DMCA doesn't force hardware manufacturers to use protection technologies.
Watermarking only works if a) the end user devices are all SDMI compliant, b) the end user devices refuse to play anything but compliant audio, and c) no one bothers to break positive watermarking (i.e. if no watermark, you don't play.)
Point b is possible but not likely. Point c will happen rapidly if point b comes to pass.
This is the fundamental problem with the way that options are currently treated under US tax law. The options obviously have value (otherwise Bob would not care about them,) and therefore there is an immediate cost (i.e. loss) for BigCo.
The options' value can be computed at the time they are granted. While the restrictions on the options may make Black-Scholes pricing infeasible, the price is still determinable based on a) the strike/spot of the options, b) the volatility of the stock, c) interest rates, and d) time to expiration of the option.
If the tax system was rational, Bob would pay taxes each year on the gain in the value of his options, and BigCo would show a corresponding loss equal to this gain. Shareholders would therefore always have an honest picture of BigCo's liabilties and real earnings.
Unfortunately, such a scheme would tend to bankrupt employees of successful companies: Bob would be unable to pay his tax bill because his earnings are in the form of option price gains that he cannot realize.
To make the system equitable, BigCo must either allow Bob to sell enough of his options to meet the tax liability on the remaining options, or alternatively, give him a restricted loan to cover the tax liability. Either of these produce the effect of giving an accurate picture of BigCo's finanacies to the shareholders, and at the same time allowing BigCo to reward Bob for long-term work and loyalty.