I've heard an interesting angle but have yet to confirm it.
Allegedly the DHHS originally assumed most states would run their own website for such because a lot of the service comparing info is state-centric anyhow.
However, many red states refused to go along out of their usual anti-federal-government stance. This put more burden on the DHHS to handle the red-state traffic and their state-specific logic, and Congress refused to fund the extra resources needed.
If this is the case, then the GOP is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Add to that the pool of Fox reporters constantly clicking "Refresh" on the main page hoping for an error screen to appear so they can screenshot it and make it into a half hour news segment, and yes the load was more than the system was designed for. Given that users have from Oct 1 to Dec 31 to successfully sign up before any consequences of any sort (in this case they are tiny) kick in, the service doesn't need the availability of a stock brokerage or bank in order to be successful. Yet, it's being echoed over and over that the exchange "is a failure" simply to score political points.
HFT has only one purpose nowadays, to suck the $85bil USD in quantitative easing money (QE) that our federal government pumps into the market every month *out* of the market in light speed.
why do you think these guys are worrying about fucking cable lengths?
Except its the FED (a collection of private banks) pumping the money in, and HFT (at other private banks) coming along to suck it out...
It isn't you, its me. I'm leaving you for India, as she is so much more able to fulfil my needs. I truly hope that you will find someone new. Let's be friends. - Uncle Sam.
Oops, just found something scratched on the back of that note (must have happened when it was getting passed):
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama would like to remind you that the United States is not the only country in America.
Packet Sniffing is more of a cheap parlor trick then a good way to collect information.
For the most part our infrastructure has moved from Hubs to Switches so there are a lot less free packets bouncing around the net. Routers have gotten smarter and better so chances are it won't bother sending your packet around the world just just to go to your neighbors.
Route poisoning would like to have a word with you. He is waiting in Room 641A.
Frankly, I dont think the US should use gMail etc for governmental communications either.
The problem I see is that it wasn't discouraged and/or banned earlier. Of COURSE an entity in a different country, with no stated or even implied interest in privacy, is not a good place to conduct your nation's business. Duh! The revelations about Google (and others') cozyness with the NSA should not have been the tipping point.
I guess the word "Turbo" is out of favor these days.
Time for Seagate to make some real hard drives that spin at 20000 RPM
That, or they can keep doing what they already do; make the heads smaller and cram more bits onto each track. Triple the per-track density and you have a drive at 7200rpm that performs like a (completely theoretical) 21,600 rpm drive doing sequential reads. Random reads are for suckers who don't know how to cache.
Being a 30+year observer/survivor of Silicon Valley (and having gone through 3 start-ups) I have to ask - how is this any worse than now that it was during the Dot Com silliness?
For every roughly 10 companies started in the valley - 9 fail. Nothing new about that!
Of small business entrepreneurial ventures, 9 out of 10 will fail, so that's not a revelation or admission of any sort. I think the real crux here is that the rate in the valley is more like 99 out of 100 will fail, and even though that sounds bad it's still not the actual problem; the problem is that the 1 that "makes it" is a bullshit platform like Instagram and the 99 that fail include actual valuable technologies like medical industry interop tools and the like.
As every electrical engineer knows, an AC transmission system is a quadratic-complex system. And in the sense of both the inherent complexity and the complex numbers involved. There is no energy storage in the system (no inertia), has noticeable delays, and it is tightly coupled. Only high redundancy and decoupling can make the system more reliable. But that is costly. Who wants to pay more?
The challenge is balancing the system's ability to self-heal with the system's ability to self-destruct. There is no reason that losing 3 transmission lines (out of a dozen running through the corridor) should have done anything more than taken three lines worth of subscriber capacity offline. If the system "let them go dark" there wouldn't have been a cascading failure. Instead, in an attempt to self heal (something that works great for just one or two lines going down) the system self destructed instead. Identifying where the tipping point is and acting before it is reached is the only real barrier to preventing such a large problem from happening again. Shame it's taken 10 years to really understand the problem.
Could it have anything to do with the growing number of people that don't want to spend $200/mo on a cable subscription, fees, taxes, surcharges, digital tuners, HD subscrpitions/tuners, and DVRs?
Add to that the show is basically about the glorious adventures of a pathological criminal; how are you going to expect your audience to draw a clear line between right and wrong when the protagonist is constantly making/selling drugs, killing people, etc? It's non-sequiteur at its finest.
Meh, you are right of course, but, there is always some tradeoff between convinence and risk. Yes, theoretically the safe bet is to wait for it to enter the block chain, and even safer, to wait for a few confirmations. You know what though, many transactions that people do, are ones where this level of risk is acceptable because the barrier to cheating outweights the benefit for low value transactions.
I mean seriously, how many vendors accept credit cards now? Do you really think the risk involved with dealing with credit card processors is lower than that of accepting bitcoin transactions instantly? Some amount of risk is always acceptable; its just a matter of where you draw that line.
Frankly, I think it should be possible to reasonably mitigate most of those concerns without much change in the system.
Getting a credit card in multiple places at the same time (to make instant transaction fraud practical/profitable) is pretty tricky AND illegal. Getting a bitcoin wallet in the same place at the same time is trivial AND legal. There is also a healthy margin included in credit card fees, specifically to account for fraud. People will not want to switch to a system where fraud was hot-potatoed to the last one holding the invalid bitcoin transaction, no matter how many technical advancements are layered on to make it harder. This makes Bitcoin useless as an in-person instant payment system.
Mind you, not sure where this seabed warming is supposed to come from, with Global cooling (due to lower Solar output. . ..)
And temperatures during the Medieval Optimum were even higher that the peak of the current warming, and no sudden volatilization of Methane Clathrates. . .
Agreed: nothing to see here. ..
An awful low UID for such a silly post... The current warming is indeed beyond the Medieval Optimum by a significant margin, and Solar output is at a pretty high level (we are at the middle of the current output cycle). Are you trying to troll, or are you literally drowning in Kool Aid and this is the best you could type as you choked for air?
The customers of the company I work for do not like it when their blueprints are publicly available. Would you like to have your code and documentation searched by gmail to show ads? (What information do these ads leak to the company that pays for it?) And any "alien" Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo or Google cloud data is up for collection by the NSA. Sounds like a good reason to encrypt at least some of your mail.
Using SMTP to transmit that kind of info in the clear is a bad idea, even if the endpoints are credible. Interception is your biggest risk if you are two known parties trading in proprietary information, and probably doing so to/from fixed geographic locations as well. Why not encrypt the payload to guard against this?
What an encrypted email service does is different, they offer a quasi-anonymous way for people to send/receive email so that they can accept messages from unknown parties and trust that the contents will be a secret (if they arrived without being snooped). A person in Snowden's position is attracted to this because he can trade emails with otherwise uninvolved persons (who wouldn't necessarily be subject to scrutiny by the feds or "evil corp X") and the only real "link" between any of those parties is heavily encrypted on the server (and the provider doesnt even hold the keys) unless a snooper gets really lucky and intercepts enough of them to put the pieces together.
What is your concern with sapphire glass? It should be a big improvement over what is used on phones now.
Sapphire glass is *more* brittle than Gorilla Glass, so if you thought edge-drop screen shatters were a problem before, watch out. You will never be able to scratch the screen, but it will be so sensitive to shock that you will need substantial protection anyway.
Scanning 7pt text at 200dpi with consumer level scanner technology and you're complaining about scan errors. Really?
These 'errors' are substantially worse than ordinary scanner suckitude or lossy-compression legovision: JBIG2's pixel-block matching creates the potential for a block containing one character to be mis-identified and replaced with a block containing a different character.
The replaced character will be exactly as legible as text elsewhere on the page, just entirely incorrect.
If it were just the scan quality being lousy, or somebody turning, say, JPEG compression up to the point of pain, mangled characters would be obviously mangled. Not as good as being legible; but the issue is obvious. In this case, the errors will look as good as the rest of the document.
After actually looking at the images in TFA, it does seem like there is a problem with the way 6/8 and 4/7 are interpreted. However, you can't say that the results aren't quite noisy; I would look at a scan like that with a squinty eye and be super annoyed at the jerk who couldn't just procure the *original* electronic format. Just because the scanner "seems to do ok" on other equally tiny numbers doesn't make it right. Get the goddamn original file.
Anybody else overcome by Alpha Centauri nostaliga at the notion of large, initially hidden, fungus-based communications networks?
Also, given that we've discovered several enormous fungi (I think the largest known spreads across some 2,200 acres), I wonder if this sort of thing is actually much more common than we currently know. Ping would probably suck; but there is a lot of (fungal) fiber in the ground.
Credit goes to the wasps: they are the ones that adapted to use the scent of the aphid-repellent to identify a new food source. I think the potential in the fungus is a bit overrated, but hey what's cool is cool.
If your protocol can't cope with someone snooping on the traffic without beeing compromised, it should probably not be used...
It took Wi-Fi a long long _long_ time to come to this rather obvious conclusion, so excuse me if i have trouble putting my faith in a new, monolithic, patent-encumbered system just because it doesn't suffer from the exact same vulnerabilities NFC does. Dollars to donuts there will be many nefarious uses for those flashes of light. (maybe involving dollars *and* donuts? hmmm)
If it is light flashes, what's to prevent someone from snooping it from afar? Convenient technology often means insecure technology. Weird to develop a product just because one of the major phone vendors don't support a protocol. Seems like that vendor should add that feature to their phones, rather than re-invent a new protocol.
They don't seem to be too concerned with the other limitation: the communication is strictly one-way, from the POS to the handset, and the handset then has to find it's way back to the payment system (via wifi or mobile). This is the reverse of how NFC payments typically work and will require a much different architecture. Stores already have barcode scanners at every POS, and with a little software they can easily interact with non-NFC smartphones that display loyalty info on the screen. This is the big reason NFC isn't really taking off; loyalty cards are already replaced by apps (no extra hardware needed) and not too many people are comfortable handing all their credit cards over to a payment system in the cloud. And of course, it's all thoroughly patented so how much do you think ByteLight is going to charge per POS? This is a (patented) solution looking for a (profitable) problem, nothing more. It's the modern CueCat.
We will rebuild, but this time there will be an eternal digital record such that our children might look back and see what we went though to earn their quality of life, and hopefully they will not take their wealth for granted the way our parents did.
It will be conveniently sorted by "pro labor" news outlets and "pro business" news outlets; when it comes time to do this over each side will just pick the version of history they prefer and stick with it. Kind of like how things work today...
Nope. More roads doesn't push people out. More roads let people buy cheaper land. The problem is land price, not roads. If downtown houses were as large and cheap as those 40 miles away, then nobody would sprawl. Fix the housing availability, and you fix traffic. But no, we get the anti-road nazis demanding bad traffic to punish those who choose cars, and no solution to someone who wants a 3-bedroom house with a yard large enough for a trampoline in a good school zone. Just make them change their minds by crippling the schools and transportation system until they live 5 to a room near work as the only way to survive.
God bless the 3rd world we call the USA.
Desirable land is desirable... Get used to it, there is no "fix" for every one downtown wanting a huge house on half an acre. Have you noticed how rarely it is that new land is produced? And how often it is that new greedy d-bags are produced? You can hopefully infer that this will be happening from now until forever.
I'm already happy I bought a Google Edition phone then and not having to wait for the damn handset and/or telco assholes to get off their butts to issue a fix.
Except... wait for it...
OEMs (Samsung, LG, HTC, etc) have already patched this, and have already gotten code past the carriers. And Google? Every Nexus device STILL HAS THIS HOLE. Fragmentation is not the issue, mobile security is just fucking hard.
Can you imagine how far back computing would be if we were all stuck with using bubble sort because all the other sorting algorithms were patented? Sure the quicksort patent would have been long expired by now, being developed in 1960, but it would have set us back quite a bit to not be able to use the more efficient sorting algorithms.
wat? The post you replied to pointed out that you should _not_ be able to patent algorithms... error, retry from start.
The big boys build weaponry to keep each other in check, and to eliminate all the smaller boys.
Works nicely for them all.
Don't know why they'd rock the boat.
This, thread over. It "would be cool" as Joel points out, if the patent gorillas did their own policing via Ask Patents but it will never happen, they are in a profitable standoff now, why would they ever want to trade it for an unprofitable one?
Come up with a way to force peer review with proper incentives (maybe for every one you submit you must read and sign off on three more, and the more you shoot down the higher on the list yours goes for priority granting if it passes) and you might have a system that starts to work in a quasi-normal way.
The NSA Now Spies on 25% of North American Internet Traffic
Lol, jk, it's more.
You have that backward, headline _should_ read "NSA now has ready access to 25% of North American internet traffic without even needing their own servers"
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard an interesting angle but have yet to confirm it.
Allegedly the DHHS originally assumed most states would run their own website for such because a lot of the service comparing info is state-centric anyhow.
However, many red states refused to go along out of their usual anti-federal-government stance. This put more burden on the DHHS to handle the red-state traffic and their state-specific logic, and Congress refused to fund the extra resources needed.
If this is the case, then the GOP is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Add to that the pool of Fox reporters constantly clicking "Refresh" on the main page hoping for an error screen to appear so they can screenshot it and make it into a half hour news segment, and yes the load was more than the system was designed for. Given that users have from Oct 1 to Dec 31 to successfully sign up before any consequences of any sort (in this case they are tiny) kick in, the service doesn't need the availability of a stock brokerage or bank in order to be successful. Yet, it's being echoed over and over that the exchange "is a failure" simply to score political points.
oh this is an easy one...
HFT has only one purpose nowadays, to suck the $85bil USD in quantitative easing money (QE) that our federal government pumps into the market every month *out* of the market in light speed.
why do you think these guys are worrying about fucking cable lengths?
Except its the FED (a collection of private banks) pumping the money in, and HFT (at other private banks) coming along to suck it out...
I repeat, One Time Pad.
I loled. Golf clap.
It isn't you, its me. I'm leaving you for India, as she is so much more able to fulfil my needs. I truly hope that you will find someone new. Let's be friends. - Uncle Sam.
Oops, just found something scratched on the back of that note (must have happened when it was getting passed):
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama would like to remind you that the United States is not the only country in America.
Packet Sniffing is more of a cheap parlor trick then a good way to collect information.
For the most part our infrastructure has moved from Hubs to Switches so there are a lot less free packets bouncing around the net. Routers have gotten smarter and better so chances are it won't bother sending your packet around the world just just to go to your neighbors.
Route poisoning would like to have a word with you. He is waiting in Room 641A.
Frankly, I dont think the US should use gMail etc for governmental communications either.
The problem I see is that it wasn't discouraged and/or banned earlier. Of COURSE an entity in a different country, with no stated or even implied interest in privacy, is not a good place to conduct your nation's business. Duh! The revelations about Google (and others') cozyness with the NSA should not have been the tipping point.
I guess the word "Turbo" is out of favor these days.
Time for Seagate to make some real hard drives that spin at 20000 RPM
That, or they can keep doing what they already do; make the heads smaller and cram more bits onto each track. Triple the per-track density and you have a drive at 7200rpm that performs like a (completely theoretical) 21,600 rpm drive doing sequential reads. Random reads are for suckers who don't know how to cache.
Being a 30+year observer/survivor of Silicon Valley (and having gone through 3 start-ups) I have to ask - how is this any worse than now that it was during the Dot Com silliness?
For every roughly 10 companies started in the valley - 9 fail. Nothing new about that!
Of small business entrepreneurial ventures, 9 out of 10 will fail, so that's not a revelation or admission of any sort. I think the real crux here is that the rate in the valley is more like 99 out of 100 will fail, and even though that sounds bad it's still not the actual problem; the problem is that the 1 that "makes it" is a bullshit platform like Instagram and the 99 that fail include actual valuable technologies like medical industry interop tools and the like.
As every electrical engineer knows, an AC transmission system is a quadratic-complex system. And in the sense of both the inherent complexity and the complex numbers involved. There is no energy storage in the system (no inertia), has noticeable delays, and it is tightly coupled. Only high redundancy and decoupling can make the system more reliable. But that is costly. Who wants to pay more?
The challenge is balancing the system's ability to self-heal with the system's ability to self-destruct. There is no reason that losing 3 transmission lines (out of a dozen running through the corridor) should have done anything more than taken three lines worth of subscriber capacity offline. If the system "let them go dark" there wouldn't have been a cascading failure. Instead, in an attempt to self heal (something that works great for just one or two lines going down) the system self destructed instead. Identifying where the tipping point is and acting before it is reached is the only real barrier to preventing such a large problem from happening again. Shame it's taken 10 years to really understand the problem.
Could it have anything to do with the growing number of people that don't want to spend $200/mo on a cable subscription, fees, taxes, surcharges, digital tuners, HD subscrpitions/tuners, and DVRs?
Add to that the show is basically about the glorious adventures of a pathological criminal; how are you going to expect your audience to draw a clear line between right and wrong when the protagonist is constantly making/selling drugs, killing people, etc? It's non-sequiteur at its finest.
Meh, you are right of course, but, there is always some tradeoff between convinence and risk. Yes, theoretically the safe bet is to wait for it to enter the block chain, and even safer, to wait for a few confirmations. You know what though, many transactions that people do, are ones where this level of risk is acceptable because the barrier to cheating outweights the benefit for low value transactions.
I mean seriously, how many vendors accept credit cards now? Do you really think the risk involved with dealing with credit card processors is lower than that of accepting bitcoin transactions instantly? Some amount of risk is always acceptable; its just a matter of where you draw that line.
Frankly, I think it should be possible to reasonably mitigate most of those concerns without much change in the system.
Getting a credit card in multiple places at the same time (to make instant transaction fraud practical/profitable) is pretty tricky AND illegal. Getting a bitcoin wallet in the same place at the same time is trivial AND legal. There is also a healthy margin included in credit card fees, specifically to account for fraud. People will not want to switch to a system where fraud was hot-potatoed to the last one holding the invalid bitcoin transaction, no matter how many technical advancements are layered on to make it harder. This makes Bitcoin useless as an in-person instant payment system.
Mind you, not sure where this seabed warming is supposed to come from, with Global cooling (due to lower Solar output. . . .)
And temperatures during the Medieval Optimum were even higher that the peak of the current warming, and no sudden volatilization of Methane Clathrates. . .
Agreed: nothing to see here. . .
An awful low UID for such a silly post... The current warming is indeed beyond the Medieval Optimum by a significant margin, and Solar output is at a pretty high level (we are at the middle of the current output cycle). Are you trying to troll, or are you literally drowning in Kool Aid and this is the best you could type as you choked for air?
The customers of the company I work for do not like it when their blueprints are publicly available. Would you like to have your code and documentation searched by gmail to show ads? (What information do these ads leak to the company that pays for it?)
And any "alien" Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo or Google cloud data is up for collection by the NSA. Sounds like a good reason to encrypt at least some of your mail.
Using SMTP to transmit that kind of info in the clear is a bad idea, even if the endpoints are credible. Interception is your biggest risk if you are two known parties trading in proprietary information, and probably doing so to/from fixed geographic locations as well. Why not encrypt the payload to guard against this?
What an encrypted email service does is different, they offer a quasi-anonymous way for people to send/receive email so that they can accept messages from unknown parties and trust that the contents will be a secret (if they arrived without being snooped). A person in Snowden's position is attracted to this because he can trade emails with otherwise uninvolved persons (who wouldn't necessarily be subject to scrutiny by the feds or "evil corp X") and the only real "link" between any of those parties is heavily encrypted on the server (and the provider doesnt even hold the keys) unless a snooper gets really lucky and intercepts enough of them to put the pieces together.
What is your concern with sapphire glass? It should be a big improvement over what is used on phones now.
Sapphire glass is *more* brittle than Gorilla Glass, so if you thought edge-drop screen shatters were a problem before, watch out. You will never be able to scratch the screen, but it will be so sensitive to shock that you will need substantial protection anyway.
They'd need to be careful. A female playing the Doctor would risk being objectified. Then it would be Doctor Whom.
Slow clap for a joke involving who vs whom. Wish I had a million modpoints for you, good chap.
Scanning 7pt text at 200dpi with consumer level scanner technology and you're complaining about scan errors. Really?
These 'errors' are substantially worse than ordinary scanner suckitude or lossy-compression legovision: JBIG2's pixel-block matching creates the potential for a block containing one character to be mis-identified and replaced with a block containing a different character.
The replaced character will be exactly as legible as text elsewhere on the page, just entirely incorrect.
If it were just the scan quality being lousy, or somebody turning, say, JPEG compression up to the point of pain, mangled characters would be obviously mangled. Not as good as being legible; but the issue is obvious. In this case, the errors will look as good as the rest of the document.
After actually looking at the images in TFA, it does seem like there is a problem with the way 6/8 and 4/7 are interpreted. However, you can't say that the results aren't quite noisy; I would look at a scan like that with a squinty eye and be super annoyed at the jerk who couldn't just procure the *original* electronic format. Just because the scanner "seems to do ok" on other equally tiny numbers doesn't make it right. Get the goddamn original file.
Anybody else overcome by Alpha Centauri nostaliga at the notion of large, initially hidden, fungus-based communications networks?
Also, given that we've discovered several enormous fungi (I think the largest known spreads across some 2,200 acres), I wonder if this sort of thing is actually much more common than we currently know. Ping would probably suck; but there is a lot of (fungal) fiber in the ground.
Credit goes to the wasps: they are the ones that adapted to use the scent of the aphid-repellent to identify a new food source. I think the potential in the fungus is a bit overrated, but hey what's cool is cool.
If your protocol can't cope with someone snooping on the traffic without beeing compromised, it should probably not be used...
It took Wi-Fi a long long _long_ time to come to this rather obvious conclusion, so excuse me if i have trouble putting my faith in a new, monolithic, patent-encumbered system just because it doesn't suffer from the exact same vulnerabilities NFC does. Dollars to donuts there will be many nefarious uses for those flashes of light. (maybe involving dollars *and* donuts? hmmm)
If it is light flashes, what's to prevent someone from snooping it from afar? Convenient technology often means insecure technology. Weird to develop a product just because one of the major phone vendors don't support a protocol. Seems like that vendor should add that feature to their phones, rather than re-invent a new protocol.
They don't seem to be too concerned with the other limitation: the communication is strictly one-way, from the POS to the handset, and the handset then has to find it's way back to the payment system (via wifi or mobile). This is the reverse of how NFC payments typically work and will require a much different architecture. Stores already have barcode scanners at every POS, and with a little software they can easily interact with non-NFC smartphones that display loyalty info on the screen. This is the big reason NFC isn't really taking off; loyalty cards are already replaced by apps (no extra hardware needed) and not too many people are comfortable handing all their credit cards over to a payment system in the cloud. And of course, it's all thoroughly patented so how much do you think ByteLight is going to charge per POS? This is a (patented) solution looking for a (profitable) problem, nothing more. It's the modern CueCat.
We will rebuild, but this time there will be an eternal digital record such that our children might look back and see what we went though to earn their quality of life, and hopefully they will not take their wealth for granted the way our parents did.
It will be conveniently sorted by "pro labor" news outlets and "pro business" news outlets; when it comes time to do this over each side will just pick the version of history they prefer and stick with it. Kind of like how things work today...
Nope. More roads doesn't push people out. More roads let people buy cheaper land. The problem is land price, not roads. If downtown houses were as large and cheap as those 40 miles away, then nobody would sprawl. Fix the housing availability, and you fix traffic. But no, we get the anti-road nazis demanding bad traffic to punish those who choose cars, and no solution to someone who wants a 3-bedroom house with a yard large enough for a trampoline in a good school zone. Just make them change their minds by crippling the schools and transportation system until they live 5 to a room near work as the only way to survive.
God bless the 3rd world we call the USA.
Desirable land is desirable... Get used to it, there is no "fix" for every one downtown wanting a huge house on half an acre. Have you noticed how rarely it is that new land is produced? And how often it is that new greedy d-bags are produced? You can hopefully infer that this will be happening from now until forever.
I'm already happy I bought a Google Edition phone then and not having to wait for the damn handset and/or telco assholes to get off their butts to issue a fix.
Except... wait for it...
OEMs (Samsung, LG, HTC, etc) have already patched this, and have already gotten code past the carriers. And Google? Every Nexus device STILL HAS THIS HOLE. Fragmentation is not the issue, mobile security is just fucking hard.
Can you imagine how far back computing would be if we were all stuck with using bubble sort because all the other sorting algorithms were patented? Sure the quicksort patent would have been long expired by now, being developed in 1960, but it would have set us back quite a bit to not be able to use the more efficient sorting algorithms.
wat? The post you replied to pointed out that you should _not_ be able to patent algorithms... error, retry from start.
The big boys build weaponry to keep each other in check, and to eliminate all the smaller boys.
Works nicely for them all.
Don't know why they'd rock the boat.
This, thread over. It "would be cool" as Joel points out, if the patent gorillas did their own policing via Ask Patents but it will never happen, they are in a profitable standoff now, why would they ever want to trade it for an unprofitable one?
Come up with a way to force peer review with proper incentives (maybe for every one you submit you must read and sign off on three more, and the more you shoot down the higher on the list yours goes for priority granting if it passes) and you might have a system that starts to work in a quasi-normal way.
The NSA Now Spies on 25% of North American Internet Traffic
Lol, jk, it's more.
You have that backward, headline _should_ read "NSA now has ready access to 25% of North American internet traffic without even needing their own servers"
or maybe "Another win for the cloud"?