This is certainly one of the interesting aspects of currency - that it is essentially worthless without the respect and trust of the marketplace.
Currency used to be 'hard' in the sense that it was actually made of a commodity that had some intrinsic value in the market. Then currency was 'backed' by some commodity with intrinsic value, in that you could exchange your issued currency for a well defined quantity of the commodity in question. Now currency is no longer backed by anything at all, essentially, except the degree to which the issuer is likely to be around and the amount of 'respect' the marketplace has for the currency in question. Specifically, the consumer has to trust that the bank will release his or her funds, or if it does not (cf S&L collapse) the government will make it good (FDIC in the US) and that the ultimate backer (in this case the government) will continue to be well respected by other consumers.
In some ways a secure digital currency could be more strongly backed than current currencies. Take for example eGold, mentioned as a medium of exchange used by the folks profiled in this article. This is a digital currency backed by gold bullion. The currency is only valid because we 'trust' that eGold, inc will actually redeem our eGold certificate for dollars or gold if asked to do so. It is not, however, an anonymous currency. Egold knows exactly who is making transfers to whom, and it is *up to them* to decide to what extent this information is private.
On the other hand, if i were to set up shop as a 'bank' or exchange offering a secure anonymous digital currency, my users would have to be able to trust that i would redeem the currency i issue *in exactly the same way* they have to trust that egold or any conventional bank would redeem their stored assets. Just because the users are anonymous would in no way prevent user outcry if they belive the exchange was handled unfairly since the largest part of your user base would not *require* anonymity especially in the event of an exchange believed to be fraudulent. The benefit of having a cryptographically based medium of exchange is that all parties could *verify* the validity of their currency by cryptographic means without compromising the currency itself. So it becomes quite difficult to perpetrate fraudulent exchanges since all three parties involved in the transaction can check the validity of the currency used.
On the other hand, you would still have to trust that i, as the bank issuing the currency, would honor its redemption. But since *anyone* can check the validity of the currency through published means, even a user who required that their anonymity be protected could complain in a public forum that i am refusing to accept the validity of bills X,Y, and Z despite the fact that they are clearly valid bills *as anyone can tell*.
Designing a secure system like this, is, of course, a non-trivial exercise. But the key is that if you have a system like this, it is more transparent and less prone to fraud perpetrated by the bank or the users than traditional currencies. At heart, however, users *always* have to trust currency issuers - a cryptographic system would just make it easier for users to do so.
Further discussion would likely descend into far too great a level of detail for this forum, but it seems clear to me that in many ways developing a trusted, secure currency based on cryptographic algorithms would make it *easier* for users to trust the entities responsible for issuing currency, rather than less.
Postulate the existence of a cryptographically secure, anonymous peered infrastructure overlay for the internet. Not much of a strech because lots of folks happen to be working on just this sort of technology (I2P, Tor, and many others).
Then postulate the existence of an online currency based on secure cryptographic algorithms. Kind of like a digital bearer bond, if you will. This is a bit more questionable, since most research into digital cash has been directed at ways to make transactions *less* anonymous than actual hard cash transactions. On the other hand, if the aforementioned anonymous peered network exists, you just need a non trivial set of community rated key escrow and transaction settling agents to mediate transactions and currency exchange. It is hard to see how this sort of transaction would work for actual physical goods, but for digital goods (a portion of the market economy that will only increase in size) or anonymous services one can see how anonymous transactions could fairly easily take place. Designing a cryptographically secure anonymous currency is an interesting problem, however.
So, lets assume that you have both an anonymous, secure network, and a variety of well respected anonymous digital currencies. This assumption does not really seem too far fetched to me, although it may be 10 years or so before early versions of secure and anonymous digital currency become sufficiently established.
In any case, the implication here is that some individual (lets call him potential felon X) could complete a completely anonymous transaction with some supplier (potential felon Y) for digital goods and/or services utilizing a secure digital currency issued by an online bank (bank Z). None of the parties in this transaction can know who any of the other parties are.
This raises an interesting point. In this sort of environment, how do you enforce legal standards on the *process* without compromising both the buyer or the seller *independently*? Normal law enforcement proceedure is to compromise one of (X,Y,Z) and use that entity to sweep in the other parties to the transaction, but the problem becomes exponentially more difficult if none of the parties to the transaction connect.
It strikes me that this is an interesting conundrum we will have to deal with as a society in the relatively near term - if you cant track the money, and you cant connect the agents, how do you enforce societal standards of behavior except by catching folks as individuals during or after they commit whatever infraction is in question? This is true for a wide range of transactions (e.g. free speech, terrorist plots, tax evasion, collusion, fraud, identify theft, assassination, political conspiracy, insider trading, music sharing, IP infringement, copyright infringement, etc) some of which we support as a society and some of which we condemn.
The tech is coming, it seems to me that someone ought to be thinking about the implications...
I have been saying for some time that Volkswagen should put together a diesel based hybrid with these sort of characteristics and package it in a new 'VW bus' release with a variety of user friendly (i.e. easily marketable) chassis. Would go well with their successful VW bug redesign and marketing campaign, and dovetail nicely with their expertise in diesel engine technology.
A nice side effect of a diesel based hybrid technology would be that you could easily use your engine as a backup generator for power outages, work sites, camping, or a large variety of other applications. Which applications also happen to be of interest to what i suspect would be thier user demographic.
This would be a pretty easy proposal to put together for them as well. Seems like an obvious strategy to me. Too bad i spend all my time in other industries.;-) Still, i feel someone ought to suggest it to VW, make sure this sort of thing is on their radar at least...
fantasies of turning into Natalie Portman's favorite swan
This fantasy, if true, has to qualify as one of the oddest i have yet to meet on the net. Congratulations. Unless you were talking about turning into her favorite swain that is, in which case your fantasy has become merely pedestrian.;-)
Well, i suggest that if you are looking for something in the 'physics guide to everything' realm you look no further than the three volume series of Feynmans introductory physics lectures, compiled and edited during his tenure at CalTech. If you want an indepth understanding you will have to find a high quality problem repository as well, as these lectures do not provide problem sets.
As an overview of 'everything physics', however, i cannot recommend them highly enough. I also suggest that they would make an interesting companion set to the Penrose text, although i have yet to read it.
An (admittedly irritating) amazon link to the paperback edition.
I have a few ideas regarding patent and trademark law as well, but my real passion and focus is copyright. What's really needed are a few more people with similar interest areas, for a wholesale reform. (I know trademark law, but it's not my thing; I avoid patent law whenever possible)
Of course, I develop my proposals solely in light of what I think would best serve the overall public interest. I don't bother trying to pander to industry groups at all, really, save where I think that their interests happily seem to be aligned in some way with what I'd propose anyway.
Given that it is industry that controls the world's copyright agenda, and virtually no attention is paid to the public interest, I have no expectation of my proposals ever actually accomplishing anything.
Argh, what a cop out!;-) At least share what potentially interesting thoughts you have had regarding copyright law with the rest of us plebians...
I must admit i have thought quite a bit more about potential modifications to existing patent law than i have about copyright or trademark law. Perhaps it is just that i have more experience with patent law than i have with trademark or copyright law, but it seems to me that the underlying motivations for patent and copyright law have not changed since the earliest days.
The purpose of patents is still to encourage the inventor to release 'secret' data to the patent office and hence the world at large in exchange for a well defined period of protection. The issue with patent law for me is mostly the degree to which patents are granted too easily and frequently for inventions which cannot possibly qualify as real inventions as the term was intended. Software patents, process patents, patents which have blatantly obvious prior art, how are these reasonable uses for our intellectual property system?
The original intent of copyright law was to protect the artist themselves - a 20 to 25 year term for copyright makes sense in this context. Anything longer stops making sense, because it is no longer the artist we are protecting, but the heirs or the corporate entities who happen to own copyrights to whatever artistic work is in question.
In any case, we clearly need an overhaul of our intellectual property system, and more specifically the patent and copyright processes themselves. I have less insight into the copyright and trademark issues than the patent ones, but if anything they appear to be more challenging than the issues associated with the patent portion of the United States intellectual property system.
The real point here is that a truly anonymous, cryptographically secure network would prevent the **AA from running the software and figuring out anything other than what they happen to be sharing themselves. They could acquire copies of "Kung Fu Hustle" and "Shrek 2" and whatnot, but they could *by design* not actually tell from whom they received the encrypted packets they used to reconstruct the movies in question, or copies of videos showing abuse of prisoners of war in Liberia, or documentary evidence of human rights abuses in North Korea, or anything else.
Again, it is a question of implementing a truly anonymous cryptographically secure peer to peer network - the algorithms for which are not particulary difficult to discover nor implement once the requirements are well defined.
So the same algorithms could be used to protect an absolutely secret written conversation between you and your girlfriend in Texas, or to absolutely protect communication between the head of the NAACP and a prospective senate candidate. Or, for that matter, to protect communication between an NSA agent and his or her controller.
The key here is that any truly anonymous cryptographically secure network could be used to fight injustice, to encourage injustice, to enforce injustice, or to reveal injustice. Never blame the infrastructure for the uses to which it can be put, because there are always equal arguments on both sides of that discussion for any potential infrastructure component.
Well, lets just say that i have always had a certain sympathy for the trolls, dwarves, hobbits, gnomes, brownies, and sprites of this world. There are far, far, worse things than to live under or on a bridge in a properly designed house.;-)
I think that you're misunderstanding me. I don't think that this is a good law, and I do think that copyright law needs radical reforms. But that doesn't mean I can't read the law as it stands now, and determine how a court will interpret and apply it, which is rather crucial if you're going to get dragged before one. Making passionate, even well-reasoned arguments, as you're doing, won't serve as an effective defense here. You're better off making policy arguments and getting Congress to make the appropriate changes in the law, than in trying to defend yourself, at least by pursuing these lines.
On this, i think we agree. I have no intention of violating any US laws currently on the books, simply because the potential hassle far exceeds the potential return even if the law in question is potentially immoral or unconstitutional. On the other hand, i cannot help but suggest that passing laws of this sort fundamentally weaken the legal system of the United States - laws which are destined to be circumvented by technological advance are very poor laws to implement simply because of the precedent they set, and the degree to which they convince the populace at large that *all* the laws are equally foolish.
After all, if one or more laws makes no sense in the context of current social, cultural, and moral mores, why would a citizen pay any attention to the many other laws on the books that may actually make sense?
In any case, building or designing technologies that make current laws irrelevant is a hobby not so uncommon among technical folks in this social and cultural matrix - and i think that most citizens have perhaps not thought deeply about the degree to which technology can influence our culture, our morality, and our day to day reality.
More to the point however, i have absolutely no idea how we could reform copyright and intellectual property law to address some of the issues we are facing as a result of technological development.
Do you have any ideas as to how copyright and IP law can change to successfully deal with the kinds of technological metamorphosis we have come to take for granted? I hold several patents and have written many more, but still have no idea how to deal with IP and copyright issues in a rational manner...
Incidentally, it sounds to me like you have dangerously few lawyers working for you. You should probably retain more.;)
If this isnt a slippery slope, i dont know what is.;-)
And you can only call your group of lawyers a firm if they all have a very *firm* set of debts owed to you. Otherwise they are more appropriately referred to as a *swarm* or as cpt kangarooski suggests a *horde*.
Frankly, if i retained additional lawyers every time a potentially opposed individual did so, I would be broke, karmically indebted, and most likely dead or at least commercially defunct. The secret to success seems to be that when your opponent acquires a legal team with truly legendary skills, just make sure that the judge owes you more favors than he owes the opposing legal team, and that your lawyer is not quite stupid enough to let him forget it.
Either way, you still end up paying far, far more than what would be reasonable, but at least this way you have the added advantage of laughing at your opponent as he pays his extraordinarily expensive legal team for the privledge of losing to you because you or your lawyer happen to play golf (substitute any other preferred activity like billiards, whoring, drug use, etc) with the judge on a regular basis and then finds he has to pay you the balance of the judgement on top of his (and your) generally exhorbitant legal costs.
This kind of pleasure is one of the things in life it is impossible to overvalue, and at the same time it is impossible to make realistic estimates regarding the degree to which legal interactions in our society are guided by such precepts.;-) Although i must say that federal judges seem to be slightly more refined than state or local jurists - interactions acquire a certain dignity frequently lacking in state and local jurisdictions and a consequental increase in pricing seems to be unavoidable.
The foregoing is purely humor, based on a quirky, misrepresentative, and generally imaginary experience of the American system of jurisprudence, and should be treated as such.
Hey, if you could provide enough evidence to convince me that you had proper, legal title to either the Brooklyn Bridge or the Holland Tunnel, i might take your offer seriously. Some of us have always wanted to live on or under a proper bridge. So much space.... wasted. And lets not even discuss the quality of the views a habitat based on a superfluous bridge could bring to the table...
Some of us are also quite energized by the prospect of listening to well constructed arguments that more or less effectively retort our positions on potentially argumentative issues.
Seriously, please, please, make a real effort to convince me that there is a fundamental, technical difference between providing the capability for truly anonymous free speech and providing the capability for truly anonymous sharing of copyrighted data.
I suggest that the two are technically equivalent, and we cannot really provide the capability to address one without enabling the other.
And I, for one, strongly support the idea that truly anonymous free speech is far more important to a society than the ability to prevent the illicit sharing of copyrighted data.
Do you really, truly disagree? Do you truly think that the founders of our present attempt at a rational system of goverment would disagree? My admittedly biased suspicion is that if we could figure out a way to pose these sorts of questions to our founding forefathers, they would fall out strongly in favor of the capability for truly anonymous free speech regardless of its implications with respect to the increasingly onerous copyright laws that they didnt even support and in fact frequently maligned...
I would love to hear some counter arguments, or at least *some* reasons why i should patent some of the algorithms I have developed to support just this sort of transaction and then proceed to lock those technical capabilities away until those patents expire, rather than donating those patents to open source organizations like the EFF. Heck, at least i could potentially make some money off them if you convince me to keep them away from the public sector because of the chance that they might be misused to support the sharing of potentially copyrighted data...
Technology tends to evolve in the directions that our culture desires. It is clear that our culture desires that there exist some avenue for *truly* anonymous conversation and data transfer. Our laws are quite clear that this desire is one supported by historical and legal precedent, and is moreover almost a fundamental axiom of american society.
Therefore, since the development of a cryptographically secure anonymous network is technically feasible, it is very likely to come into being due to the cultural forces behind its development.
Furthermore, once such an entity exists, its legal and cultural implications are pretty clear. I do *not* support video or audio piracy, and i do *not* support software piracy, and i most certainly do *not* indulge in either on a personal level, but it is at the same time clear to me that the historical forces in our society that have consistently demanded the right to freedom of speech will result in technical development that will not only support freedom of speech but will make it very, very difficult to control copyright violations without violating some of the core tenets our culture claims to hold dear.
As much as some would prefer to believe differently, in the modern world, the right to anonymous speech is synonymous with the right to share copyrighted information. These two things are technically equivalent, and therefore inseperable.
So i never claimed that my proposal would help stop people committing crimes, i merely claimed that by giving the people the right to truly anonymous speech we would also be enabling a wide variety of currently illegal behavior, and that the two capabilities are technically inseperable.
I think what folks dont realize is that this kind of legislation just forces the issue for those of us who think seriously about cryptographically secure distributed networks.
There is now a demonstrable, real need for networks where *all* activities are double blind encrypted transactions through an arbitrary, configurable number of intermediaries who can *prove* they dont know who is sending them data or what data they are handling.
A network such as this clearly falls under the fair use statues as a way to maintain secure person to person communication and confidential file sharing (ala PGP et al), and if it is constructed in such a way that only request originators and suppliers *can* know what they are using the network for yet still cannot know *who* they are doing it with, it would more than satisfy legal concerns such as providing plausible deniability.
Therefore 'sharers' and 'users' can still be caught but only through fairly onerous chores like monitoring thier personal computers during use to see exactly what they are sharing or downloading. This is much more analogous to conventional law enforcement techniques for doing video surveillance and audio monitoring - an agent basically has to get a warrant *with probable cause* to initiate any of these activities, and it is not clear to me that data transactions deserve any less legal protection.
So, to end this somewhat rant like spiel, it is clear that this kind of legislation may be a net *good* for the community in that it forces us to develop a better peered infrastructure simply to maintain our fair use rights.
Heck, i might have to buckle down and give something back to the open source community and the internet community at large at long last myself.;-)
Now if someone would just pay me and my crew our cost of living expenses for as long as it would take to build a network of this sort, or even better if a non profit foundation or relatively wealthy private benefactor would post a bounty ala the "XPrize" with well defined acceptance criteria for such a network (double blind, multiple stops, no scaling issues, configurable encryption levels, automated discovery, etc) I would be able to convince a serious crew to do this now (and we would even donate the resulting IP to the sponsoring org or the open source community - which now that i think about it would be a nice prize requirement) rather than working on other stuff to get paid and pursuing this sort of thing as a hobby.
Seriously interested parties feel free to contact me at zuz(del)ulo at g(del)mail (del). com. I have been thinking somewhat seriously about the algorithmic side of this for quite some time. On the whole, however, it is pretty clear to me that community forces will force the evolution of something with these characteristics, most likely within the next 24 months or so.
Ok, so i knew immediately who was on the $10 bill. Then i asked 5 of my friends, and they all knew who was on the $10 bill.
Now i am extremely stressed, because either my friends are freaks or your friends are morons - neither of which are particularily appetizing possibilities.
I also find myself unsettled by your assertion that most folks attempt to get through life with maximum efficiency, because if this is true most folks seem to be falling *far* short of this goal.
Now I must insist you somehow relieve this stress to which you have subjected me because it is interfering with my heartfelt desire to get through life with maximum efficiency *and* accuracy...;-)
I would suggest you do not know the general slashdot community as well as you might think. My personal network of friends (most of which who read slashdot with very occasional posts) includes the standard comp sci, ee, physics and math geeks, but also lawyers and doctors of various stripes, business folks, accountants, special education specialists and a wide variety of research scientists in fields ranging from aeronautics to biochemistry to ecology and zoology.
So just because most *posts* on slashdot may be relatively content free, I can almost guarantee that no matter how abtruse or technical the subject matter someone reading will know exactly what you are talking about and may even be one of the experts in the field.
Though it may be true that the average slashdotter may not have a precise understanding of neurophysiological disorders some will, and some will post. It may only be 1% of the posts, but that 1% can have some very specific and helpful input.;-)
Unfortunately, under the hood your brain changes in fairly profound ways in both the short and long terms - the underlying neurophysiology is quite a bit more flexible than most folks realize. Dendritic growth, atrophy of unused sectors, retasking existing sectors toward processing other sensory inputs and outputs or adjusting for damage, there are literally hundreds of examples of ways in which the brain changes fairly seriously as a result of 'normal' functioning.
Now, the link between brain and mind, that is the link between the underlying physical structures and changes in those structures and resulting changes to your identity or what it is 'you' are, is very poorly understood. In fact I would venture to guess that this remains one of the things humans understand *least*. Despite a great deal of effort.
However, you should get comfortable with the fact that both the brain and the mind change in fairly serious ways on a regular and continuing basis.
So it might make more sense to think of your consciousness as like a river. The river remains the same even though the water is different and the details have all changed. As they say, you cannot step in the same river twice, and in the same vein 'you' are only the same 'you' as yesterday or last year in some fairly abstract sense.
As far as your brain being in good working order until your body packs it in, you may not be familiar with senile dementia, alzheimers, and a host of other mental illnesses associated with aging and brain or mind dysfunction. So in general there are no guarantees - your body could give out first, or your brain, or your mind, or all of them could give out together. In fact one of the main things pushing development of these classes of drugs is attempting to ameliorate the mental effects of aging - its all about delayed senescence both physically and mentally, and in many cases the fact that these drugs potentially enhance function in younger patients is a side effect when the goal is really to maintain function during the aging process.
You see, the enhancement market is a small one for many of the reasons you state, but the market for drugs which delay the mental effects of aging is *huge*.
What will you do when you feel your brain aging, especially since it seems your specific sense of self as related above is so clearly tied to how your brain functions? I suspect that you might quickly reevaluate your position on 'natural' brain function when you feel your mind start to go... even if it is 'natural'...
Photons and other particles emitted from the sun, as you say, are essentially vectored perpendicular to the emitting surface. There is no known way to get around this.
However, the spaced based equivalent of a keel in water is gravity. So you would use the gravity wells of different objects in the solar system to revector velocity achieved via solar sail mediated transfer of photonic momentum. Additionally, presumably any functional solar sail system could increase and decrease its cross sectional area thereby increasing or decreasing the induced accelleration.
So i guess to extend your analogy you could indeed use a rudderless boat if the body of water you were sailing on was plagued by a horde of whirlpools and you had some means of doing very minor steering (perhaps something like an ion engine for our putative solar sail based craft).
I mainly just had to pass on that amusing mental picture.;-)
I cannot resist putting up a few more examples of peer to peer networks that there is a great deal of regulatory pressure to *implement* and *improve*.
The first is a fairly pressing one. There is a great deal of pressure on the medical community to implement a peer to peer sharing model for medical information. Currently a horrific number of preventable deaths occur on a year to year basis due to lack of background medical data available to medical personnel - if you require emergency care and do not go to a hospital which has your records they will not neccesarily know what drug regimens you are taking, what allergies you have, what pre-existing conditions you are working with, etc. Insurance companies are trying to provide this information, but once again, building secure peer to peer networks to carry sensitive data is not an easy task especially when there are lots of different 'peers' involved. In this case the peers are insurance companies, government records and organizations (medicare / medicaid), hospitals, private practices, individual doctors, and perhaps most importantly the patients themselves.
Another example of a large preexisting peer to peer network is the credit reporting infrastructure. The peers in this case are the various credit agencies, banks and other lenders, creditors, and the individuals being profiled. Once again, it is clear to see that the existing technology suffers from some serious difficulties because it is not an easy problem to solve.
Once again, to restrict the discussion on peer to peer networks to the small corner case of anonymous peer to peer file sharing seems fairly ridiculous considering the much larger scope of the problem.
Ok, now i really will get off my soapbox, i promise.
I do not understand how this is even a reasonable question. There are far more *non infringing* uses for peer to peer networks than *infringing* ones.
To enumerate a few:
1) Distributed source versioning (several open source projects working on this) 2) Collaborative work environments (ala MS Exchange, Lotus Notes (not saying good environments), etc etc ad nauseum) 3) Social networks ala Friendster that allow data exchange 4) peered IRC/IM networks 5) Distributed peered backup / data archival networks (a personal favorite) 6) Distributed database applications 7) DNS 8) Distributed load sharing applications (ala bit torrent and others - automated mirroring stuff fits in here) 9) Grid computing applications ala SETI etc
I could go on and on. The reason *most* applications are not peer to peer is that these sort of networks are the most difficult to build algorithms around and to model. Remember the early conflict between 'distributed' database applications and 'relational' databases? The reason the relational class of databases won in the end was that no one could build a properly functional distributed database protocol. Parallel operations are almost always more complex than sequential ones.
*Any* server network is simply a peer to peer network with a restricted set of peers and limited functionality. All networks are essentially special cases of the general case we can refer to as peer to peer networks!
To continue, the *internet* is essentially a special purpose peer to peer network - so my question is why distinguish the very specialized class of peer to peer networks designed to do anonymous file sharing from all the other very real and non infringing purposes we use or will likely use peered computing for?
Clearly this separation is a ploy by organizations interested in regulating a very specific use of peer to peer networks that has been *bought* hook line and sinker by those of us in the opposition.
Letting your opponents define the terms under which you argue is always a loosing proposition. Dont let special interest groups redefine 'peer to peer' networks so easily!
Besides, this is going to be a moot question at some point soon - there are enough interested parties trying to design and build fully anonymous and encrypted peer to peer protocols (some functional prototype projects exist and provide varying degrees of protection) that my suspicion is that we will have at least one cryptographically secure anonymous network protocol within the next 18-24 months.
Strangely, this is a phenomenon i have noticed with experts in many different fields who *really* understand what they are doing. They really do have an internal model of what is happening that essentially boils down to this sort of simplicity.
In fact, the correlation is so strong that I am suspicious of folks who *cannot* boil an arbitrarily complex interaction into an easily understood metaphor.
The other big thing to remember about contracting is that you have to charge enough to live - the best rule of thumb for me (handed down from a truly old hand at the contracting business) has been to take my hourly salary as an employee and multiply it by a factor of 2.5x - 3x to get my hourly rate as a contractor. This takes into account medical, retirement planning issues, corporate overhead, and hot and cold job cycles.
Sounds like a lot early on, but you quickly realize how much of that pay differential is essential to maintaining a comparable quality of life.
Keep really good time sheets, and be sure to document all of the work you do. Very different from being a full time employee, since frequently the client will never see you doing any work at all. Good hourly and daily logs really go a long way to show you and your client what you are doing to earn your keep. This is in addition to coming through with the contract deliverables in a timely fashion, of course.;-)
Another thing to realize is that if you are a successful contractor, you are almost certainly going to get offers for full time employment from satisfied clients. Think long and hard ahead of time about if you are interested in full time employment, and if so which clients you would be willing to work for and which you would not. Figure out how to tactfully decline prospective employment offers you are not interested in.
Know when to cut your losses with a specific client. Some clients are more trouble than they are worth, and often young contractors carry poor clients for far too long before cutting them loose. It is hard to let a paying client go, but freqently in the long term a problem client will cost far more in emotional distress and work disruptions than they are bringing in financially. Figure out how to cut problem clients out gracefully.
Get someone competent to handle billing. I cannot overstate the importance of this. You might be lucky enough to have a part time bookkeeper who will be willing to handle this for you. Do *not* assume that you are going to be as good at this as you are at doing what you are paid to do. You most likely will not be. heh.
Unfortunately, you are most likely going to have to learn most of these things the hard way...
Just because the vast majority of cameras out there are crappy analog stuff does not mean that there are not high quality cameras available. I routinely store large quantities of high quality digital surveillance video from cameras that have high enough resolution to read your licence plate clearly at 25 ft in low light conditions and enough frames per second to catch at least one usable frame of any vehicle passing through.
Las Vegas has the most well defined standards for legally admissable surveillance footage, and for them 3-5 frames per second is acceptable. We routinely use and store locally 10-18 frames per second. The metric generally goes something like this:
real time feed: 10-30+ fps local disk storage: 5-18 fps local internet feed: 5-10 fps with 1-2 sec latency remote internet feed: 3-5 fps with 5-10 sec latency remote disk archive: 3-5 fps
Since the high quality stuff is digital and you have multiple frames of relevant data you can also do some fairly interesting processing to enhance image quality by interpolation. And some other nice tricks, some of which work in real time. And once you have digital video on disk there are lots of other interesting things you can do. Which is all i can really say about that.;-)
In any case, the automated video surveillance stuff is improving quite quickly these days.
Ok, a few pointers - unfortunately the ones I am familiar with offhand are fairly academic languages. And now that I look for them, it appears that other languages do not provide the same sort of lists of 'training problems'.
Therefore, a great way to learn a language that would also help others would be to take the k language idiom list and build a similar one implementing the problems in whatever language you are trying to learn. Maybe even post the resulting idiom lists for various languages on sourceforge... Heck, if someone starts a project, I might even contribute solutions for a couple of languages.;-)
Some of the older languages have what they used to call 'finger exercises' or 'idiom lists' which are basically a long lists of small algorithms you can implement to get a very deep feel for a new language. I know idiom lists exist for APL, k, perl, and similar things likely exist for whichever language you are interested in learning.
It might be helpful if you were to mention which particular language you were currently trying to master, however.;-)
Yes, it is a problem. Any metal covering whose apertures are smaller than the wavelength of the radiation in question blocks that signal. This is true of any conductive material and any EM radiation. This kind of construction is referred to as a "Faraday Cage", is used to minimize interference in all sorts of applications (like the metal liner in your XBox and other consumer electronic devices). This sort of thing is also used in practice by petty crooks who block sticker and RFID tags by dropping them into foil lined bags or pockets.;-)
2) price lowest barebones case that comes *with* mobo, power supply, CPU
3) add hdd and one memory stick (as well as CD player if needed), do not add MS operating system, aftermarket software, video card, sound card, or other overpriced extras
4) pay between $120 and $150 with free shipping
5) recieve components and assemble your ultra low price computer (~2 year out of date)
6) ????
7) profit or something similar
Not quite at that $100 price point, but pretty close these days, and even closer if you are willing to pick slightly less recent CPU, mobo, and memory. And no, i am not an employee or in any way affiliated with these or other barebone PC manufacturers.;-)
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This is certainly one of the interesting aspects of currency - that it is essentially worthless without the respect and trust of the marketplace.
Currency used to be 'hard' in the sense that it was actually made of a commodity that had some intrinsic value in the market. Then currency was 'backed' by some commodity with intrinsic value, in that you could exchange your issued currency for a well defined quantity of the commodity in question. Now currency is no longer backed by anything at all, essentially, except the degree to which the issuer is likely to be around and the amount of 'respect' the marketplace has for the currency in question. Specifically, the consumer has to trust that the bank will release his or her funds, or if it does not (cf S&L collapse) the government will make it good (FDIC in the US) and that the ultimate backer (in this case the government) will continue to be well respected by other consumers.
In some ways a secure digital currency could be more strongly backed than current currencies. Take for example eGold, mentioned as a medium of exchange used by the folks profiled in this article. This is a digital currency backed by gold bullion. The currency is only valid because we 'trust' that eGold, inc will actually redeem our eGold certificate for dollars or gold if asked to do so. It is not, however, an anonymous currency. Egold knows exactly who is making transfers to whom, and it is *up to them* to decide to what extent this information is private.
On the other hand, if i were to set up shop as a 'bank' or exchange offering a secure anonymous digital currency, my users would have to be able to trust that i would redeem the currency i issue *in exactly the same way* they have to trust that egold or any conventional bank would redeem their stored assets. Just because the users are anonymous would in no way prevent user outcry if they belive the exchange was handled unfairly since the largest part of your user base would not *require* anonymity especially in the event of an exchange believed to be fraudulent. The benefit of having a cryptographically based medium of exchange is that all parties could *verify* the validity of their currency by cryptographic means without compromising the currency itself. So it becomes quite difficult to perpetrate fraudulent exchanges since all three parties involved in the transaction can check the validity of the currency used.
On the other hand, you would still have to trust that i, as the bank issuing the currency, would honor its redemption. But since *anyone* can check the validity of the currency through published means, even a user who required that their anonymity be protected could complain in a public forum that i am refusing to accept the validity of bills X,Y, and Z despite the fact that they are clearly valid bills *as anyone can tell*.
Designing a secure system like this, is, of course, a non-trivial exercise. But the key is that if you have a system like this, it is more transparent and less prone to fraud perpetrated by the bank or the users than traditional currencies. At heart, however, users *always* have to trust currency issuers - a cryptographic system would just make it easier for users to do so.
Further discussion would likely descend into far too great a level of detail for this forum, but it seems clear to me that in many ways developing a trusted, secure currency based on cryptographic algorithms would make it *easier* for users to trust the entities responsible for issuing currency, rather than less.
Let me be the devils advocate here for a moment.
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Postulate the existence of a cryptographically secure, anonymous peered infrastructure overlay for the internet. Not much of a strech because lots of folks happen to be working on just this sort of technology (I2P, Tor, and many others).
Then postulate the existence of an online currency based on secure cryptographic algorithms. Kind of like a digital bearer bond, if you will. This is a bit more questionable, since most research into digital cash has been directed at ways to make transactions *less* anonymous than actual hard cash transactions. On the other hand, if the aforementioned anonymous peered network exists, you just need a non trivial set of community rated key escrow and transaction settling agents to mediate transactions and currency exchange. It is hard to see how this sort of transaction would work for actual physical goods, but for digital goods (a portion of the market economy that will only increase in size) or anonymous services one can see how anonymous transactions could fairly easily take place. Designing a cryptographically secure anonymous currency is an interesting problem, however.
So, lets assume that you have both an anonymous, secure network, and a variety of well respected anonymous digital currencies. This assumption does not really seem too far fetched to me, although it may be 10 years or so before early versions of secure and anonymous digital currency become sufficiently established.
In any case, the implication here is that some individual (lets call him potential felon X) could complete a completely anonymous transaction with some supplier (potential felon Y) for digital goods and/or services utilizing a secure digital currency issued by an online bank (bank Z). None of the parties in this transaction can know who any of the other parties are.
This raises an interesting point. In this sort of environment, how do you enforce legal standards on the *process* without compromising both the buyer or the seller *independently*? Normal law enforcement proceedure is to compromise one of (X,Y,Z) and use that entity to sweep in the other parties to the transaction, but the problem becomes exponentially more difficult if none of the parties to the transaction connect.
It strikes me that this is an interesting conundrum we will have to deal with as a society in the relatively near term - if you cant track the money, and you cant connect the agents, how do you enforce societal standards of behavior except by catching folks as individuals during or after they commit whatever infraction is in question? This is true for a wide range of transactions (e.g. free speech, terrorist plots, tax evasion, collusion, fraud, identify theft, assassination, political conspiracy, insider trading, music sharing, IP infringement, copyright infringement, etc) some of which we support as a society and some of which we condemn.
The tech is coming, it seems to me that someone ought to be thinking about the implications
I have been saying for some time that Volkswagen should put together a diesel based hybrid with these sort of characteristics and package it in a new 'VW bus' release with a variety of user friendly (i.e. easily marketable) chassis. Would go well with their successful VW bug redesign and marketing campaign, and dovetail nicely with their expertise in diesel engine technology.
;-) Still, i feel someone ought to suggest it to VW, make sure this sort of thing is on their radar at least ...
A nice side effect of a diesel based hybrid technology would be that you could easily use your engine as a backup generator for power outages, work sites, camping, or a large variety of other applications. Which applications also happen to be of interest to what i suspect would be thier user demographic.
This would be a pretty easy proposal to put together for them as well. Seems like an obvious strategy to me. Too bad i spend all my time in other industries.
fantasies of turning into Natalie Portman's favorite swan
;-)
This fantasy, if true, has to qualify as one of the oddest i have yet to meet on the net. Congratulations. Unless you were talking about turning into her favorite swain that is, in which case your fantasy has become merely pedestrian.
Well, i suggest that if you are looking for something in the 'physics guide to everything' realm you look no further than the three volume series of Feynmans introductory physics lectures, compiled and edited during his tenure at CalTech. If you want an indepth understanding you will have to find a high quality problem repository as well, as these lectures do not provide problem sets.
As an overview of 'everything physics', however, i cannot recommend them highly enough. I also suggest that they would make an interesting companion set to the Penrose text, although i have yet to read it.
An (admittedly irritating) amazon link to the paperback edition.
I have a few ideas regarding patent and trademark law as well, but my real passion and focus is copyright. What's really needed are a few more people with similar interest areas, for a wholesale reform. (I know trademark law, but it's not my thing; I avoid patent law whenever possible)
;-) At least share what potentially interesting thoughts you have had regarding copyright law with the rest of us plebians ...
Of course, I develop my proposals solely in light of what I think would best serve the overall public interest. I don't bother trying to pander to industry groups at all, really, save where I think that their interests happily seem to be aligned in some way with what I'd propose anyway.
Given that it is industry that controls the world's copyright agenda, and virtually no attention is paid to the public interest, I have no expectation of my proposals ever actually accomplishing anything.
Argh, what a cop out!
I must admit i have thought quite a bit more about potential modifications to existing patent law than i have about copyright or trademark law. Perhaps it is just that i have more experience with patent law than i have with trademark or copyright law, but it seems to me that the underlying motivations for patent and copyright law have not changed since the earliest days.
The purpose of patents is still to encourage the inventor to release 'secret' data to the patent office and hence the world at large in exchange for a well defined period of protection. The issue with patent law for me is mostly the degree to which patents are granted too easily and frequently for inventions which cannot possibly qualify as real inventions as the term was intended. Software patents, process patents, patents which have blatantly obvious prior art, how are these reasonable uses for our intellectual property system?
The original intent of copyright law was to protect the artist themselves - a 20 to 25 year term for copyright makes sense in this context. Anything longer stops making sense, because it is no longer the artist we are protecting, but the heirs or the corporate entities who happen to own copyrights to whatever artistic work is in question.
In any case, we clearly need an overhaul of our intellectual property system, and more specifically the patent and copyright processes themselves. I have less insight into the copyright and trademark issues than the patent ones, but if anything they appear to be more challenging than the issues associated with the patent portion of the United States intellectual property system.
The real point here is that a truly anonymous, cryptographically secure network would prevent the **AA from running the software and figuring out anything other than what they happen to be sharing themselves. They could acquire copies of "Kung Fu Hustle" and "Shrek 2" and whatnot, but they could *by design* not actually tell from whom they received the encrypted packets they used to reconstruct the movies in question, or copies of videos showing abuse of prisoners of war in Liberia, or documentary evidence of human rights abuses in North Korea, or anything else.
Again, it is a question of implementing a truly anonymous cryptographically secure peer to peer network - the algorithms for which are not particulary difficult to discover nor implement once the requirements are well defined.
So the same algorithms could be used to protect an absolutely secret written conversation between you and your girlfriend in Texas, or to absolutely protect communication between the head of the NAACP and a prospective senate candidate. Or, for that matter, to protect communication between an NSA agent and his or her controller.
The key here is that any truly anonymous cryptographically secure network could be used to fight injustice, to encourage injustice, to enforce injustice, or to reveal injustice. Never blame the infrastructure for the uses to which it can be put, because there are always equal arguments on both sides of that discussion for any potential infrastructure component.
Well, lets just say that i have always had a certain sympathy for the trolls, dwarves, hobbits, gnomes, brownies, and sprites of this world. There are far, far, worse things than to live under or on a bridge in a properly designed house. ;-)
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I think that you're misunderstanding me. I don't think that this is a good law, and I do think that copyright law needs radical reforms. But that doesn't mean I can't read the law as it stands now, and determine how a court will interpret and apply it, which is rather crucial if you're going to get dragged before one. Making passionate, even well-reasoned arguments, as you're doing, won't serve as an effective defense here. You're better off making policy arguments and getting Congress to make the appropriate changes in the law, than in trying to defend yourself, at least by pursuing these lines.
On this, i think we agree. I have no intention of violating any US laws currently on the books, simply because the potential hassle far exceeds the potential return even if the law in question is potentially immoral or unconstitutional. On the other hand, i cannot help but suggest that passing laws of this sort fundamentally weaken the legal system of the United States - laws which are destined to be circumvented by technological advance are very poor laws to implement simply because of the precedent they set, and the degree to which they convince the populace at large that *all* the laws are equally foolish.
After all, if one or more laws makes no sense in the context of current social, cultural, and moral mores, why would a citizen pay any attention to the many other laws on the books that may actually make sense?
In any case, building or designing technologies that make current laws irrelevant is a hobby not so uncommon among technical folks in this social and cultural matrix - and i think that most citizens have perhaps not thought deeply about the degree to which technology can influence our culture, our morality, and our day to day reality.
More to the point however, i have absolutely no idea how we could reform copyright and intellectual property law to address some of the issues we are facing as a result of technological development.
Do you have any ideas as to how copyright and IP law can change to successfully deal with the kinds of technological metamorphosis we have come to take for granted? I hold several patents and have written many more, but still have no idea how to deal with IP and copyright issues in a rational manner
Incidentally, it sounds to me like you have dangerously few lawyers working for you. You should probably retain more. ;)
;-)
;-) Although i must say that federal judges seem to be slightly more refined than state or local jurists - interactions acquire a certain dignity frequently lacking in state and local jurisdictions and a consequental increase in pricing seems to be unavoidable.
If this isnt a slippery slope, i dont know what is.
And you can only call your group of lawyers a firm if they all have a very *firm* set of debts owed to you. Otherwise they are more appropriately referred to as a *swarm* or as cpt kangarooski suggests a *horde*.
Frankly, if i retained additional lawyers every time a potentially opposed individual did so, I would be broke, karmically indebted, and most likely dead or at least commercially defunct. The secret to success seems to be that when your opponent acquires a legal team with truly legendary skills, just make sure that the judge owes you more favors than he owes the opposing legal team, and that your lawyer is not quite stupid enough to let him forget it.
Either way, you still end up paying far, far more than what would be reasonable, but at least this way you have the added advantage of laughing at your opponent as he pays his extraordinarily expensive legal team for the privledge of losing to you because you or your lawyer happen to play golf (substitute any other preferred activity like billiards, whoring, drug use, etc) with the judge on a regular basis and then finds he has to pay you the balance of the judgement on top of his (and your) generally exhorbitant legal costs.
This kind of pleasure is one of the things in life it is impossible to overvalue, and at the same time it is impossible to make realistic estimates regarding the degree to which legal interactions in our society are guided by such precepts.
The foregoing is purely humor, based on a quirky, misrepresentative, and generally imaginary experience of the American system of jurisprudence, and should be treated as such.
Hey, if you could provide enough evidence to convince me that you had proper, legal title to either the Brooklyn Bridge or the Holland Tunnel, i might take your offer seriously. Some of us have always wanted to live on or under a proper bridge. So much space .... wasted. And lets not even discuss the quality of the views a habitat based on a superfluous bridge could bring to the table ...
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Some of us are also quite energized by the prospect of listening to well constructed arguments that more or less effectively retort our positions on potentially argumentative issues.
Seriously, please, please, make a real effort to convince me that there is a fundamental, technical difference between providing the capability for truly anonymous free speech and providing the capability for truly anonymous sharing of copyrighted data.
I suggest that the two are technically equivalent, and we cannot really provide the capability to address one without enabling the other.
And I, for one, strongly support the idea that truly anonymous free speech is far more important to a society than the ability to prevent the illicit sharing of copyrighted data.
Do you really, truly disagree? Do you truly think that the founders of our present attempt at a rational system of goverment would disagree? My admittedly biased suspicion is that if we could figure out a way to pose these sorts of questions to our founding forefathers, they would fall out strongly in favor of the capability for truly anonymous free speech regardless of its implications with respect to the increasingly onerous copyright laws that they didnt even support and in fact frequently maligned
I would love to hear some counter arguments, or at least *some* reasons why i should patent some of the algorithms I have developed to support just this sort of transaction and then proceed to lock those technical capabilities away until those patents expire, rather than donating those patents to open source organizations like the EFF. Heck, at least i could potentially make some money off them if you convince me to keep them away from the public sector because of the chance that they might be misused to support the sharing of potentially copyrighted data
My point is pretty clear, i think.
Technology tends to evolve in the directions that our culture desires. It is clear that our culture desires that there exist some avenue for *truly* anonymous conversation and data transfer. Our laws are quite clear that this desire is one supported by historical and legal precedent, and is moreover almost a fundamental axiom of american society.
Therefore, since the development of a cryptographically secure anonymous network is technically feasible, it is very likely to come into being due to the cultural forces behind its development.
Furthermore, once such an entity exists, its legal and cultural implications are pretty clear. I do *not* support video or audio piracy, and i do *not* support software piracy, and i most certainly do *not* indulge in either on a personal level, but it is at the same time clear to me that the historical forces in our society that have consistently demanded the right to freedom of speech will result in technical development that will not only support freedom of speech but will make it very, very difficult to control copyright violations without violating some of the core tenets our culture claims to hold dear.
As much as some would prefer to believe differently, in the modern world, the right to anonymous speech is synonymous with the right to share copyrighted information. These two things are technically equivalent, and therefore inseperable.
So i never claimed that my proposal would help stop people committing crimes, i merely claimed that by giving the people the right to truly anonymous speech we would also be enabling a wide variety of currently illegal behavior, and that the two capabilities are technically inseperable.
Your thoughts in response are more than welcome.
I think what folks dont realize is that this kind of legislation just forces the issue for those of us who think seriously about cryptographically secure distributed networks.
;-)
There is now a demonstrable, real need for networks where *all* activities are double blind encrypted transactions through an arbitrary, configurable number of intermediaries who can *prove* they dont know who is sending them data or what data they are handling.
A network such as this clearly falls under the fair use statues as a way to maintain secure person to person communication and confidential file sharing (ala PGP et al), and if it is constructed in such a way that only request originators and suppliers *can* know what they are using the network for yet still cannot know *who* they are doing it with, it would more than satisfy legal concerns such as providing plausible deniability.
Therefore 'sharers' and 'users' can still be caught but only through fairly onerous chores like monitoring thier personal computers during use to see exactly what they are sharing or downloading. This is much more analogous to conventional law enforcement techniques for doing video surveillance and audio monitoring - an agent basically has to get a warrant *with probable cause* to initiate any of these activities, and it is not clear to me that data transactions deserve any less legal protection.
So, to end this somewhat rant like spiel, it is clear that this kind of legislation may be a net *good* for the community in that it forces us to develop a better peered infrastructure simply to maintain our fair use rights.
Heck, i might have to buckle down and give something back to the open source community and the internet community at large at long last myself.
Now if someone would just pay me and my crew our cost of living expenses for as long as it would take to build a network of this sort, or even better if a non profit foundation or relatively wealthy private benefactor would post a bounty ala the "XPrize" with well defined acceptance criteria for such a network (double blind, multiple stops, no scaling issues, configurable encryption levels, automated discovery, etc) I would be able to convince a serious crew to do this now (and we would even donate the resulting IP to the sponsoring org or the open source community - which now that i think about it would be a nice prize requirement) rather than working on other stuff to get paid and pursuing this sort of thing as a hobby.
Seriously interested parties feel free to contact me at zuz(del)ulo at g(del)mail (del). com. I have been thinking somewhat seriously about the algorithmic side of this for quite some time. On the whole, however, it is pretty clear to me that community forces will force the evolution of something with these characteristics, most likely within the next 24 months or so.
Ok, so i knew immediately who was on the $10 bill. Then i asked 5 of my friends, and they all knew who was on the $10 bill.
... ;-)
Now i am extremely stressed, because either my friends are freaks or your friends are morons - neither of which are particularily appetizing possibilities.
I also find myself unsettled by your assertion that most folks attempt to get through life with maximum efficiency, because if this is true most folks seem to be falling *far* short of this goal.
Now I must insist you somehow relieve this stress to which you have subjected me because it is interfering with my heartfelt desire to get through life with maximum efficiency *and* accuracy
I would suggest you do not know the general slashdot community as well as you might think. My personal network of friends (most of which who read slashdot with very occasional posts) includes the standard comp sci, ee, physics and math geeks, but also lawyers and doctors of various stripes, business folks, accountants, special education specialists and a wide variety of research scientists in fields ranging from aeronautics to biochemistry to ecology and zoology.
;-)
So just because most *posts* on slashdot may be relatively content free, I can almost guarantee that no matter how abtruse or technical the subject matter someone reading will know exactly what you are talking about and may even be one of the experts in the field.
Though it may be true that the average slashdotter may not have a precise understanding of neurophysiological disorders some will, and some will post. It may only be 1% of the posts, but that 1% can have some very specific and helpful input.
Unfortunately, under the hood your brain changes in fairly profound ways in both the short and long terms - the underlying neurophysiology is quite a bit more flexible than most folks realize. Dendritic growth, atrophy of unused sectors, retasking existing sectors toward processing other sensory inputs and outputs or adjusting for damage, there are literally hundreds of examples of ways in which the brain changes fairly seriously as a result of 'normal' functioning.
... even if it is 'natural' ...
Now, the link between brain and mind, that is the link between the underlying physical structures and changes in those structures and resulting changes to your identity or what it is 'you' are, is very poorly understood. In fact I would venture to guess that this remains one of the things humans understand *least*. Despite a great deal of effort.
However, you should get comfortable with the fact that both the brain and the mind change in fairly serious ways on a regular and continuing basis.
So it might make more sense to think of your consciousness as like a river. The river remains the same even though the water is different and the details have all changed. As they say, you cannot step in the same river twice, and in the same vein 'you' are only the same 'you' as yesterday or last year in some fairly abstract sense.
As far as your brain being in good working order until your body packs it in, you may not be familiar with senile dementia, alzheimers, and a host of other mental illnesses associated with aging and brain or mind dysfunction. So in general there are no guarantees - your body could give out first, or your brain, or your mind, or all of them could give out together. In fact one of the main things pushing development of these classes of drugs is attempting to ameliorate the mental effects of aging - its all about delayed senescence both physically and mentally, and in many cases the fact that these drugs potentially enhance function in younger patients is a side effect when the goal is really to maintain function during the aging process.
You see, the enhancement market is a small one for many of the reasons you state, but the market for drugs which delay the mental effects of aging is *huge*.
What will you do when you feel your brain aging, especially since it seems your specific sense of self as related above is so clearly tied to how your brain functions? I suspect that you might quickly reevaluate your position on 'natural' brain function when you feel your mind start to go
Photons and other particles emitted from the sun, as you say, are essentially vectored perpendicular to the emitting surface. There is no known way to get around this.
;-)
However, the spaced based equivalent of a keel in water is gravity. So you would use the gravity wells of different objects in the solar system to revector velocity achieved via solar sail mediated transfer of photonic momentum. Additionally, presumably any functional solar sail system could increase and decrease its cross sectional area thereby increasing or decreasing the induced accelleration.
So i guess to extend your analogy you could indeed use a rudderless boat if the body of water you were sailing on was plagued by a horde of whirlpools and you had some means of doing very minor steering (perhaps something like an ion engine for our putative solar sail based craft).
I mainly just had to pass on that amusing mental picture.
I cannot resist putting up a few more examples of peer to peer networks that there is a great deal of regulatory pressure to *implement* and *improve*.
The first is a fairly pressing one. There is a great deal of pressure on the medical community to implement a peer to peer sharing model for medical information. Currently a horrific number of preventable deaths occur on a year to year basis due to lack of background medical data available to medical personnel - if you require emergency care and do not go to a hospital which has your records they will not neccesarily know what drug regimens you are taking, what allergies you have, what pre-existing conditions you are working with, etc. Insurance companies are trying to provide this information, but once again, building secure peer to peer networks to carry sensitive data is not an easy task especially when there are lots of different 'peers' involved. In this case the peers are insurance companies, government records and organizations (medicare / medicaid), hospitals, private practices, individual doctors, and perhaps most importantly the patients themselves.
Another example of a large preexisting peer to peer network is the credit reporting infrastructure. The peers in this case are the various credit agencies, banks and other lenders, creditors, and the individuals being profiled. Once again, it is clear to see that the existing technology suffers from some serious difficulties because it is not an easy problem to solve.
Once again, to restrict the discussion on peer to peer networks to the small corner case of anonymous peer to peer file sharing seems fairly ridiculous considering the much larger scope of the problem.
Ok, now i really will get off my soapbox, i promise.
I do not understand how this is even a reasonable question. There are far more *non infringing* uses for peer to peer networks than *infringing* ones.
;-)
To enumerate a few:
1) Distributed source versioning (several open source projects working on this)
2) Collaborative work environments (ala MS Exchange, Lotus Notes (not saying good environments), etc etc ad nauseum)
3) Social networks ala Friendster that allow data exchange
4) peered IRC/IM networks
5) Distributed peered backup / data archival networks (a personal favorite)
6) Distributed database applications
7) DNS
8) Distributed load sharing applications (ala bit torrent and others - automated mirroring stuff fits in here)
9) Grid computing applications ala SETI etc
I could go on and on. The reason *most* applications are not peer to peer is that these sort of networks are the most difficult to build algorithms around and to model. Remember the early conflict between 'distributed' database applications and 'relational' databases? The reason the relational class of databases won in the end was that no one could build a properly functional distributed database protocol. Parallel operations are almost always more complex than sequential ones.
*Any* server network is simply a peer to peer network with a restricted set of peers and limited functionality. All networks are essentially special cases of the general case we can refer to as peer to peer networks!
To continue, the *internet* is essentially a special purpose peer to peer network - so my question is why distinguish the very specialized class of peer to peer networks designed to do anonymous file sharing from all the other very real and non infringing purposes we use or will likely use peered computing for?
Clearly this separation is a ploy by organizations interested in regulating a very specific use of peer to peer networks that has been *bought* hook line and sinker by those of us in the opposition.
Letting your opponents define the terms under which you argue is always a loosing proposition. Dont let special interest groups redefine 'peer to peer' networks so easily!
Besides, this is going to be a moot question at some point soon - there are enough interested parties trying to design and build fully anonymous and encrypted peer to peer protocols (some functional prototype projects exist and provide varying degrees of protection) that my suspicion is that we will have at least one cryptographically secure anonymous network protocol within the next 18-24 months.
I could go on and on, but I will refrain.
Strangely, this is a phenomenon i have noticed with experts in many different fields who *really* understand what they are doing. They really do have an internal model of what is happening that essentially boils down to this sort of simplicity.
In fact, the correlation is so strong that I am suspicious of folks who *cannot* boil an arbitrarily complex interaction into an easily understood metaphor.
Jargon does in no way denote true understanding.
The other big thing to remember about contracting is that you have to charge enough to live - the best rule of thumb for me (handed down from a truly old hand at the contracting business) has been to take my hourly salary as an employee and multiply it by a factor of 2.5x - 3x to get my hourly rate as a contractor. This takes into account medical, retirement planning issues, corporate overhead, and hot and cold job cycles.
;-)
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Sounds like a lot early on, but you quickly realize how much of that pay differential is essential to maintaining a comparable quality of life.
Keep really good time sheets, and be sure to document all of the work you do. Very different from being a full time employee, since frequently the client will never see you doing any work at all. Good hourly and daily logs really go a long way to show you and your client what you are doing to earn your keep. This is in addition to coming through with the contract deliverables in a timely fashion, of course.
Another thing to realize is that if you are a successful contractor, you are almost certainly going to get offers for full time employment from satisfied clients. Think long and hard ahead of time about if you are interested in full time employment, and if so which clients you would be willing to work for and which you would not. Figure out how to tactfully decline prospective employment offers you are not interested in.
Know when to cut your losses with a specific client. Some clients are more trouble than they are worth, and often young contractors carry poor clients for far too long before cutting them loose. It is hard to let a paying client go, but freqently in the long term a problem client will cost far more in emotional distress and work disruptions than they are bringing in financially. Figure out how to cut problem clients out gracefully.
Get someone competent to handle billing. I cannot overstate the importance of this. You might be lucky enough to have a part time bookkeeper who will be willing to handle this for you. Do *not* assume that you are going to be as good at this as you are at doing what you are paid to do. You most likely will not be. heh.
Unfortunately, you are most likely going to have to learn most of these things the hard way
Just because the vast majority of cameras out there are crappy analog stuff does not mean that there are not high quality cameras available. I routinely store large quantities of high quality digital surveillance video from cameras that have high enough resolution to read your licence plate clearly at 25 ft in low light conditions and enough frames per second to catch at least one usable frame of any vehicle passing through.
;-)
Las Vegas has the most well defined standards for legally admissable surveillance footage, and for them 3-5 frames per second is acceptable. We routinely use and store locally 10-18 frames per second. The metric generally goes something like this:
real time feed: 10-30+ fps
local disk storage: 5-18 fps
local internet feed: 5-10 fps with 1-2 sec latency
remote internet feed: 3-5 fps with 5-10 sec latency
remote disk archive: 3-5 fps
Since the high quality stuff is digital and you have multiple frames of relevant data you can also do some fairly interesting processing to enhance image quality by interpolation. And some other nice tricks, some of which work in real time. And once you have digital video on disk there are lots of other interesting things you can do. Which is all i can really say about that.
In any case, the automated video surveillance stuff is improving quite quickly these days.
Ok, a few pointers - unfortunately the ones I am familiar with offhand are fairly academic languages. And now that I look for them, it appears that other languages do not provide the same sort of lists of 'training problems'.
;-)
Therefore, a great way to learn a language that would also help others would be to take the k language idiom list and build a similar one implementing the problems in whatever language you are trying to learn. Maybe even post the resulting idiom lists for various languages on sourceforge... Heck, if someone starts a project, I might even contribute solutions for a couple of languages.
APL idiom library link
K language idiom list in MS word format
Some of the older languages have what they used to call 'finger exercises' or 'idiom lists' which are basically a long lists of small algorithms you can implement to get a very deep feel for a new language. I know idiom lists exist for APL, k, perl, and similar things likely exist for whichever language you are interested in learning.
;-)
It might be helpful if you were to mention which particular language you were currently trying to master, however.
Yes, it is a problem. Any metal covering whose apertures are smaller than the wavelength of the radiation in question blocks that signal. This is true of any conductive material and any EM radiation. This kind of construction is referred to as a "Faraday Cage", is used to minimize interference in all sorts of applications (like the metal liner in your XBox and other consumer electronic devices). This sort of thing is also used in practice by petty crooks who block sticker and RFID tags by dropping them into foil lined bags or pockets. ;-)
1) Go to budget barebone PC manufacturer like
;-)
www.ikonpc.com
or
www.tigerdirect.com
among many others
2) price lowest barebones case that comes *with* mobo, power supply, CPU
3) add hdd and one memory stick (as well as CD player if needed), do not add MS operating system, aftermarket software, video card, sound card, or other overpriced extras
4) pay between $120 and $150 with free shipping
5) recieve components and assemble your ultra low price computer (~2 year out of date)
6) ????
7) profit or something similar
Not quite at that $100 price point, but pretty close these days, and even closer if you are willing to pick slightly less recent CPU, mobo, and memory. And no, i am not an employee or in any way affiliated with these or other barebone PC manufacturers.