While the world's media outlets are still sending out sensationalist
headlines about the latest asteroid scare, new precovery data discovered
only hours after yesterday's alert has all but eliminated the 2030 impact
scenario pulished last night by the IAU and NASA. According to new
calculations undertaken by the NEODys (Near Earth Objects--Dynamic Site) team in Pisa this morning, the
unidentified object with the designation 2000SG344 will miss the Earth in
September 2030 by at least 3 million miles.
As a result of the new data, there has been a dramatic improvement in
the orbital uncertainty. In fact, the nominal miss distance for this
object is now given as 0.0346 AU on 22 September 2000 (22.89 UT22.19).
What this means is that the object will come no closer to the Earth in
2030 than 3 million miles! In other words, the claim that this object may
hit the Earth in 2030 has now been completely ruled out - less than 34 hours
after the IAU and NASA decided to announce a "significant impact risk" to
the world.
It was unwise of the IAU and NASA to rely on the 1999 one-night stand data by the LINEAR
team. The IAU/NASA impact announcement was premature and
alarmist.
I agree with your comment. Even the newest new
OS--Inferno--is really just about making an OS
even more like Unix than Unix: i.e. everything is a file.
The idea that everything should be "one thing" (in the case of Unix, that one thing being a file) seems right. But why should that one thing be a file? An alternative would be to have an OS where everything is a process. Unix proves that this is feasible, since any file can be turned into a process. To me, using processes would seem to lead to a more elegant formulation. Processes are also much closer to the way programmers think about things than files.
As far as I'm aware, there isn't an OS based on the process paradigm.
The reality is that Sony just posted a net loss of USD 634 million for the first half of the year. The story is here. Some of the loss is due to accounting changes, but Sony's gaming software sales are way down, even in Japan.
Sony has made a huge, risky investment. They need to get a good return on it to survive, and there is nothing evil in this. Or do you just not like business?
Following are some quotes from the FAQs published by the researchers who broke the SDMI.
"We believe their [SDMI's] general security model is inherently vulnerable to a number of attacks no matter how sophisticated their watermarking technologies become. We can never say for certain, but we are confident that we can continue to develop attacks like we have if SDMI updates their technologies."
"The underlying problem that SDMI is trying to solve, that of protecting content from a hostile platform while allowing the platform to "play" the content, is inherent[ly] very difficult, both in theory and in practice. To overhaul their system, SDMI may well have to overhaul their business model."
"We would be deeply impressed if SDMI or anyone else developed a secure system for piracy prevention given the requirements of music listeners."
In other words, they believe that the whole idea behind SDMI is bound to fail technically.
As I understand things, Apache development has a more formal structure, with a committee, whose membership is selected/deselected according to reasonable rules, deciding things. Could a similar structure be set up for Linux?
Linus may be the most wonderful dictator in the world. But in the long term, a formal management structure, such as Apache has, would be beneficial.
I have no first-hand knowledge of how development actually proceeds with either Linux or Apache. Maybe someone who does know would comment?
"Why Professional 1-Bit Sigma-Delta Conversion is a Bad Idea", Stanley P. Lipshitz and John Vanderkooy, University of Waterloo
This is a mathematical proof that SACD (i.e. 1-bit sigma-delta conversion) is the wrong approach. It is better to stick with standard sampling technology--though with a greater sampling frequency and more bits/sample than used by CDs (i.e. DVD-Audio). Lipshitz and Vanderkooy are well-respected applied mathematicians.
The paper is available as AES preprint #5188, but at a charge. There is a brief write up about it in Stereophile at http://www.stereophile.com/shownews.cgi?860, which also discusses some related issues.
The original story is from the Washington Post, and it is available here. (The Reuters story, cited by Slashdot, is just a summary of this.) The Post article makes essentially two points.
First, the terms proposed by AOL/TW are so harsh, that a large majority of ISPs will not access the high-speed network.
Second, the terms probably are non-discriminatory. This means that the terms are the same as AOL/TW has in its current (exclusive) relationship with Road Runner LLC. Hence what AOL/TW is doing is very likely legal. The legality needs to be checked by the FTC, though, which has not yet made an announcement.
This is a CRUCIAL point. Nobody has yet found a way to make watermarks inaudible. Until they succeed, there will not be watermarks. That's what the New Scientist article that you cite makes plain. Some very good people have been working on digital watermarking for over a decade now--remember Sony's Copycode from the 1980s? They have not succeeded.
Conclusion: SDMI is at present technologically infeasible, and it is unlikely to be released in the near future.
Yes, you read that subject line correctly. There was an article about this in Scientific American about ten years ago--sorry I don't have the proper reference. Basically, the amount of energy required to build a nuclear power plant is very large (fabricating the materials, transporting them, constructing the plant, etc.), and after you also consider the expected lifetime of the plant and decommissioning and other stuff, it turns out that the net amount of energy generated by nuclear plants is about zero.
This analysis does not consider disposing of spent nuclear fuels. Obviously, that would make things worse, but since we don't know how to dispose of spent fuels, there is no way to know how much energy it costs to dispose of them!
The SciAmer article was based on research published in another journal. That journal apparently had 14 people referee the paper. Obviously the journal was being exceptionally careful.
The nuclear power industry, ever mindful of its profits, naturally tries to be oblivious to all this.
I've sent the following letter to alan@ermine.ox.ac.uk, and CC'd a newspaper.
__________________________________________
Dear Mr. Gay,
This letter concerns OUCS's reaction to the complaints of the Motion Picture Association of America about DeCSS. As I understand it, (i) the MPAA has claimed that DeCSS is used to copy DVDs, (ii) a web site at Oxford University contained a link to a copy of DeCSS, and (iii) OUCS has forced the removal of that site.
There are three points that I hope you will be willing to consider.
First, please look at this simple example of some encrypted information: NbszIbeBMjuumfMbnc. In this case, by shifting each letter one to the left, we can easily decrypt the information: MaryHadALittleLamb. Notice, though, that "NbszIbeBMjuumfMbnc" can be copied (by hand, by computer, by whatever) just as easily as "MaryHadALittleLamb". So encryption does not provide any protection from copying. The information stored on DVDs (i.e. movies) is encrypted, but as with "NbszIbeBMjuumfMbnc", this encryption does not provide protection against copying. DeCSS does essentially one thing: it decrypts the information stored on DVDs. Hence DeCSS does not do anything that that aids in copying DVDs.
Second, you might well ask, "If the above is true, then why is the MPAA so upset?" The answer is that the MPAA does have a use for encryption: to collect extra money, in a way that is not easily visible to the consumer. Because DVDs are encrypted, each DVD player must include some decryption software. Currently, every DVD player uses decryption software that is sourced from the MPAA. The MPAA charges a fee for each copy of this software. Consumers just pay for the DVD player, but (unbeknownst to them) the player manufacturer pays a fee to the MPAA for each player sold. If DeCSS becomes widely used, then the MPAA will no longer collect those fees. The MPAA cannot copyright their own decryption algorithm, because algorithms cannot be copyrighted. So they choose to obfuscate, intimidate, and lie.
Third, this is more than just a "game", as you allege in your message to ox.talk of 2000-05-18. The purpose of DVD encryption is to get extra money from consumers. This may or may not be ethical (I would argue that it is not). But it is surely unethical for the MPAA to allege that their actions are to prevent copying. The purpose of the web site was to protest against such allegations. The actions of OUCS thus amount to disallowing a reasonable, and legal (as you can verify), protest against corporate disingenuity and to accepting the profit-motivated obfuscations, intimidations, and lies of the MPAA. Do you believe that these are reasonable actions?
Sara Chan
__________________________________________
liberalism n. The use of compassionate rhetoric for authoritarian ends.
To be this good, the on-board shuttle group has to be very different -- the antithesis of the up-all-night, pizza-and-roller-hockey software coders who have captured the public imagination. To be this good, the on-board shuttle group has to be very ordinary -- indistinguishable from any focused, disciplined, and methodically managed creative enterprise. (from the main article)
When I meet programmers who think that they are cool and tough, I tell them to read Bravo Two Zero by Andy McNab. It's the true story of an SAS (British army special forces) unit that operated behind the lines during the Gulf War. Here in the UK, the SAS is revered by most guys in the way that Navy SEALS are in the US. The book has a lot to teach about programming.
Many people seem to think that special forces troops are so good that they can just be handed a task, left to get it done, and that they will deal with whatever problems arise. Wrong. According to McNab, the True Motto(tm) of the SAS is "check and plan". For example, before approaching an Iraqi military vehicle, they would rehearse opening the vehicle's door: which way the handle turns, whether the handle has to first be pushed in or pulled out, whether the door swings open or slides back, how much force needs to be used, etc. etc. etc. Every little detail is checked like this. And there are backup plans.
Now read the first sentence of the previous paragraph, but substitute "top software programmers" for "special forces troops". You can see my point. Truly good special forces/programmers/professionals all have some things in common: they are focused, disciplined, and methodical. And they don't feel a need to prove how good they are by taking unnecessary chances.
The main article also notes that programming teams such as those used for the Space Shuttle seem good at drawing in women. This is hardly surprising. Women naturally like men who are justifiably confident about what they do.
How well did the eight-man SAS unit perform? They were surrounded by Iraqis, who had armored vehicles. Three were killed. The other five retreated: over 85 km (>2 marathons) in one night with 100 kg (220 lb) of equipment each. About 250 Iraqis were killed along the way, and thousands more were terrorized.
I do know there are engineers there [at Microsoft] who are committed to supporting standards. Not only because I've met some of them through my work with WaSP, but also because - in the case of IE5/Mac - they've actually pulled it off. Remember, Microsoft (along with Netscape, Sun, invited experts, etc.) helped come up with these standards in the first place. Why would you design blueprints and then not follow them when you build the house?
Here's an example that answers this question. Some decades ago, the main computers companies--IBM and the "BUNCH" (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, and Honeywell)--got together to develop a standard binary encoding for characters. The result was ASCII. The BUNCH fully adopted it. IBM then went off and used their own encoding, EBCDIC. IBM did this because they were bigger than the BUNCH, and they wanted to make the BUNCH's life difficult. And until PC's became common, this had some success.
In those days, IBM was the big bad bully. Today, it is Microsoft....
The G8 (group of eight countries with large industrial economies) conference on safety and confidence in cyberspace shows that, in the wake of THELOVEBUG, there is real concern by governments over cyber-security. This has led to strong criticism of America's UCITA in particular. To quote from the BBC story: "Governments are searching for ways to stop cyber-criminals at the same time as the US is adopting laws that will make it easier for malicious hackers to remotely disable software". UCITA encourages software makers to put backdoors into programs so the software can be remotely disabled. (Clipit is just another backdoor.)
Even French President Chirac, who wields a lot in the EU generally, has come out against UCITA. Given the EU reaction to Echelon, it's possible (though I'd guess not probable) that there will be EU laws banning software that contains deliberately-written backdoors.
There are two "theories of relativity" (both due to Einstein). The first, known as "special relativity", is essentially classical Newtonian mechanics with m (mass) replaced by m0/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) in all the equations (m0 is rest mass, v is velocity, and c is the speed of light). As well as being an elegant theory, special relativity also has substantial supporting experimental evidence.
The other theory of relativity is known as "general relativity". This is essentially special relativity, but with space being curved, rather than flat. The curvature is induced by gravitation. General relativity is not universally accepted among cosmologists and theoretically physicists, because the experimental evidence for it is lacking. So Cramer's column is nothing new.
Why do you say that taking on debt will "clobber current shareholders"?
Also, Amazon does not lose money on every sale. Their book division is now profitable. They lose money on other things (CDs, DVDs, etc.). This is consistent with Amazon's stated strategy: to gain as much market share as possible early on, even if it results in short-term losses, so as to get good profitability in the long run. In valuing Amazon so highly, the stock market it just saying that they believe that Amazon's strategy will be successful.
Shiller's book is not concerned with proving that the stock market is overvalued. Rather, Shiller explains how the market came to reach levels that he assumes are overvalued. There are, though, reasonable arguments against this assumption. Following are two examples.
* Over the long run, stocks are not much riskier than bonds. Yet historically, bonds have paid much lower yields (or rates of return) than stocks. Why? Stupidity (by long-term investors). Higher stock prices imply lower stock yields; so nowadays stocks and bonds have similar yields. Hence stock yields (and thus prices) have simply moved to levels at which they are fair relative to bonds. (The bond market is ten times bigger than the stock market, and is not generally believed to be severely misvalued.)
* Computers and the Internet are leading to the development of a "new economy" that is much more efficient than the old economy. Hence company profits will tend to be bigger; thus stock prices should be higher, on average. In fact, no one really disputes this; the only question is "by how much?" Yet Shiller does not really address this question; instead, he weakly points out that people have assumed before that there was a big change in economic/business efficiency and have been wrong. Yes, the optimists were wrong in the past; this, however, does not mean that they are wrong now.
None of this proves that the stock market is now correctly valued: there are counter-arguments to the above. Shiller's assumption that stocks are too high might be right--but Shiller does not make a good case for it.
Some of those other-country TLDs--.nu,.to, whatever-- may be very good for some people. I for one registered a.cx domain (see webpage and email adress above) because i liked the price (i haven't found anything comparable in.com,.net or.org areas) and have been very happy with it so far. But other than.cx, i don't really know what country TLDs are open. There is no list i am aware of that lists all the TLDs along with who you register that TLD with, how much they charge, are people outside of that country legally allowed to register domains there, are there any odd legal rules (i. e. is it possible that you could have your domain name revoked at will), or even WHERE those domains are registered. Where do you register a.my domain? (malasia, right? no?) Because damned if i know. It isn't nic.my.
A list of all IANA TLDs, together with (variable-quality) contact information for each, is available here. And yes, this includes Malaysia (.my).
The British Library is digitising its works, subject to various restrictions such as copyright. The BL is a great institution, and is broadly the equivalent of the Library of Congress in the UK.
One of the reasons for digitising is to preserve old volumes. Wider access for people is another stated reason.
No one has ever been able to write a compiler for APL. The "compiler" that you cite can do a number of optimizations, but it is called a "compiler" only by marketing people. I'm not up-to-date on LISP implementations, but suspect that the same is true there. You're right, though, that some of those APL optimizations live on within supercomputers.
Maybe my point about monolingual programming environments wasn't clear (since I was trying to avoid being moderated as flamebait). The example with Perl illustrates this best. I don't think that Perl should exist (really). Rather, I think that Perl's existence is due to deficiencies in the C/Unix programming environment. And using C++ makes no difference. You still end up with a trilingual programming environment (C++/Perl/Unix), rather than a monolingual one. This is adding complexity to resolve the problems: I believe that makes things worse.
Monolingual programming environments require less programmer training and ultimately lead to reduced software complexity. This is an important point--whether you agree with my views on their overall desirability or not--and it is a point that most people don't consider nowadays.
This might be a bit off-topic, but I thought it would be worth elaborating on Dr. Pollack's comments about APL and LISP--and how they relate to things today.
APL and LISP are Very High Level "applicative/functional" programming languages. They are too high level to be translated into machine language (with current technology). For this reason, they are interpreted--as is done with Java; hence they tend to execute relatively slowly.
Whether or not the world would be a better place with more extensive use of languages such as APL and LISP is moot. The point that should be made (I believe) is that (i) there is a lot to be learned from the experiences with APL and LISP and (ii) those experiences seem to be overlooked nowadays.
I could give many examples to illustrate this point. Most such, though, have already been stated many times in the academic literature. For example, J. Backus (referred to by Dr. Pollack), in his 1977 Turing Award lecture, outlined the advantages of applicative languages. And K. E. Iverson (inventor APL), in his 1979 Turing Award lecture, outlined how high level languages can be a "tool of thought", i.e. an aid to programmers' thinking. (Turing Award lectures are published annually in the Communications of the ACM.)
In fact, though, APL and LISP are not just programming languages. Each is a programming environment (which includes a language). Users of LISP, for example, have what appears to be a LISP machine--i.e. a virtual LISP computer. This machine does everything. From the users' perspective, there isn't a separate operating system. This means that the user only needs to learn about one thing: LISP.
The contrast with more common programming environments is large. For example, a C (or C++) programmer also typically learns some Unix. C and Unix, though, are entirely separate things. And they don't really mix (e.g. a C program that executes Unix commands). Which is why Perl was created. Which adds a third layer of complexity to the programming environment. Which raises the skill level required for programmers and the complexity of software.
I think that this is wrong--that the correct approach is to (re)design things so that the programming environment is "monolingual". Java might be considered as something in this direction.
Although APL and LISP have been around for decades, the recognition of the benefits provided by monolingual programming environments generally seems to be more recent. Some early work is by J. Heering & P. Klint, "Towards Monolingual Programming Environments", ACM TOPLAS, 7: 183-213 [1985].
I found it interesting that someone researching what might be tomorrow's most important and advanced technology appears almost a bit nostaligic for old largely-forgotten programming environments. Maybe he had a reason.
Tom Petty (& The Heartbreakers) was on David Letterman a while ago. Petty said that they had put some music on the web for free, and that they then received an "elbow in the ribs" from their record company--and had to take it off. There might be a LOT of musicians who want to give away free music. The record companies won't let them: the companies would lose money and power.
Amazon is loosing money hand over fist. With every transaction they loose more money.
The first sentence is true: Amazon announced record losses in the fourth quarter of 1999. The second sentence, however, is apparently false: Amazon claims that it is now making money on books alone; the losses come from expanding into other products (CDs, videos, etc.).
On a related topic.... Note that Amazon's profiting on books just might justify the view that losses taken to build market share can turn into profits later on.
In answer to the main question in the news items, my favorite desktop-replacement laptop is a Twinhead. It doesn't have the best specs or the best price. What it does have is a patented heat-dissipation technology that means the fan hardly ever goes on--I used one for about half a year before doing something that needed a fan.
Twinhead's are thus extremely quiet. For anyone using a laptop in a quiet environment, it's worth considering. Most models also have both FD and CD integrated, which I find useful. Does anyone know of other fanless laptops?
Research was conducted on laser turntables in the 1970s. They cannot work well. Following is a brief summary of why.
When a record lacquer is cut, it does not result in a very good replica of the input signal; this is because the lacquer is elastic and thus stretches and distorts during cutting. In addition to this, cutting the lacquer builds stresses into the lacquer subsurface.
Both the surface distortions and the subsurface stresses are transferred from the lacquer to the record during pressing. A laser tracking a record will read the surface distortions as part of the music signal. A laser will also completely miss the subsurface stresses. These subsurface stresses hold significant information. Thus a laser will miss some information, and the information that it does retrieve will be distorted.
A conventional stylus playing a record can do a better job than a laser for two reasons. First, the pressure of a stylus on an elastic (vinyl) record causes the surface to stretch and distort in a way that largely compensates for the distortions that were cut into the record lacquer. Second, the stylus sinks some way into the groove and is thus able to retrieve information stored in the subsurface.
The same laser-turntable scam was tried around 1990--then known as the "Finial" turntable. In listening tests its performance proved mediocre: investors lost much (all?) of their money. You should stay away from this one as well.
Another good recent example concerns the extinction of the dinosaurs. In the 1970s, Luis Alvarez claimed that this was caused by a cosmic impact: so much dust was injected into the atmosphere, by the impact, that it blocked out the sun and forced a severe extended "winter" that killed off lots of things.
There were, however, some problems. First, the dinosaurs didn't die off in a few years; they became extinct over a period of millions of years. Second, there was never any palaeoecological evidence of such a "winter" found. Thus, although there definitely was a large impact around the time of the dinosaur extinction, the hypothesis that it's dust caused the extinction could not realistically have been true. Moreover, there's an alternative hypothesis: massive extended flood-basalt volcanism from the Deccan Traps, in India.
Alvarez, however, was a Nobel prize winner. He used the power that gave him to discredit anyone who questioned him. He launched major attacks in the media. And he pressured the chairpeople of academic departments to fire departmental researchers who tried to show the flaws in the hypothesis. Some careers were severely damaged. Read all about it, and the science, here.
The impact crater was eventually found, in Yucatan, Mexico. Research has shown, however, that the amount of dust injected into the atmosphere, by the impact, was far too small to have forced cosmic winter. With Alavarez dead, there is now at least some reasoned debate. Recent work by Sharpton at the U of Alaska speculates that the impact might have vaporized enough rock to make the atmosphere very acidic--and that this might have led to long-term ecological changes that forced dinosaur extinction. (This research was presented at last month's meeting of the American Geophysical Union; abstracts available online via http://www.agu.org/meetings/waisfm00.html.)
Maybe, in the end, it will turn out that Alvarez was right. Or maybe not. For the integrity of the scientific process, though, it makes no difference. A powerful scientist used his political power to squash any scientific debate.
__________________________________ "... the microkernel approach was essentially a dishonest approach aimed at
receiving more dollars for research. I don't necessarily think these
researchers were knowingly dishonest. Perhaps they were simply stupid. Or
deluded." --Linus Torvalds on kernel research by Computer Scientists (in
Open Sources)
Slashdot Mirror
Taking into account new precovery data of the object taken by the Catalina Sky Survey on 17 May 1999 (see http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/ K00 /K00V15.html), the NEODys team has
calculated that the 2030 impact scenario is no longer real (see http://ne wto n.dm.unipi.it/cgi-bin/neodys/neoibo?objects:2000SG 344;main .)
As a result of the new data, there has been a dramatic improvement in the orbital uncertainty. In fact, the nominal miss distance for this object is now given as 0.0346 AU on 22 September 2000 (22.89 UT22.19). What this means is that the object will come no closer to the Earth in 2030 than 3 million miles! In other words, the claim that this object may hit the Earth in 2030 has now been completely ruled out - less than 34 hours after the IAU and NASA decided to announce a "significant impact risk" to the world.
It was unwise of the IAU and NASA to rely on the 1999 one-night stand data by the LINEAR team. The IAU/NASA impact announcement was premature and alarmist.
(Thanks to B. J. Peiser for the above.)
The idea that everything should be "one thing" (in the case of Unix, that one thing being a file) seems right. But why should that one thing be a file? An alternative would be to have an OS where everything is a process. Unix proves that this is feasible, since any file can be turned into a process. To me, using processes would seem to lead to a more elegant formulation. Processes are also much closer to the way programmers think about things than files.
As far as I'm aware, there isn't an OS based on the process paradigm.
Sony has made a huge, risky investment. They need to get a good return on it to survive, and there is nothing evil in this. Or do you just not like business?
In other words, they believe that the whole idea behind SDMI is bound to fail technically.
Linus may be the most wonderful dictator in the world. But in the long term, a formal management structure, such as Apache has, would be beneficial.
I have no first-hand knowledge of how development actually proceeds with either Linux or Apache. Maybe someone who does know would comment?
This is a mathematical proof that SACD (i.e. 1-bit sigma-delta conversion) is the wrong approach. It is better to stick with standard sampling technology--though with a greater sampling frequency and more bits/sample than used by CDs (i.e. DVD-Audio). Lipshitz and Vanderkooy are well-respected applied mathematicians.
The paper is available as AES preprint #5188, but at a charge. There is a brief write up about it in Stereophile at http://www.stereophile.com/shownews.cgi?860, which also discusses some related issues.
See also comment #211.
First, the terms proposed by AOL/TW are so harsh, that a large majority of ISPs will not access the high-speed network.
Second, the terms probably are non-discriminatory. This means that the terms are the same as AOL/TW has in its current (exclusive) relationship with Road Runner LLC. Hence what AOL/TW is doing is very likely legal. The legality needs to be checked by the FTC, though, which has not yet made an announcement.
Conclusion: SDMI is at present technologically infeasible, and it is unlikely to be released in the near future.
This analysis does not consider disposing of spent nuclear fuels. Obviously, that would make things worse, but since we don't know how to dispose of spent fuels, there is no way to know how much energy it costs to dispose of them!
The SciAmer article was based on research published in another journal. That journal apparently had 14 people referee the paper. Obviously the journal was being exceptionally careful.
The nuclear power industry, ever mindful of its profits, naturally tries to be oblivious to all this.
I've sent the following letter to alan@ermine.ox.ac.uk, and CC'd a newspaper.
__________________________________________
Dear Mr. Gay,
This letter concerns OUCS's reaction to the complaints of the Motion Picture Association of America about DeCSS. As I understand it, (i) the MPAA has claimed that DeCSS is used to copy DVDs, (ii) a web site at Oxford University contained a link to a copy of DeCSS, and (iii) OUCS has forced the removal of that site.
There are three points that I hope you will be willing to consider.
First, please look at this simple example of some encrypted information: NbszIbeBMjuumfMbnc. In this case, by shifting each letter one to the left, we can easily decrypt the information: MaryHadALittleLamb. Notice, though, that "NbszIbeBMjuumfMbnc" can be copied (by hand, by computer, by whatever) just as easily as "MaryHadALittleLamb". So encryption does not provide any protection from copying. The information stored on DVDs (i.e. movies) is encrypted, but as with "NbszIbeBMjuumfMbnc", this encryption does not provide protection against copying. DeCSS does essentially one thing: it decrypts the information stored on DVDs. Hence DeCSS does not do anything that that aids in copying DVDs.
Second, you might well ask, "If the above is true, then why is the MPAA so upset?" The answer is that the MPAA does have a use for encryption: to collect extra money, in a way that is not easily visible to the consumer. Because DVDs are encrypted, each DVD player must include some decryption software. Currently, every DVD player uses decryption software that is sourced from the MPAA. The MPAA charges a fee for each copy of this software. Consumers just pay for the DVD player, but (unbeknownst to them) the player manufacturer pays a fee to the MPAA for each player sold. If DeCSS becomes widely used, then the MPAA will no longer collect those fees. The MPAA cannot copyright their own decryption algorithm, because algorithms cannot be copyrighted. So they choose to obfuscate, intimidate, and lie.
Third, this is more than just a "game", as you allege in your message to ox.talk of 2000-05-18. The purpose of DVD encryption is to get extra money from consumers. This may or may not be ethical (I would argue that it is not). But it is surely unethical for the MPAA to allege that their actions are to prevent copying. The purpose of the web site was to protest against such allegations. The actions of OUCS thus amount to disallowing a reasonable, and legal (as you can verify), protest against corporate disingenuity and to accepting the profit-motivated obfuscations, intimidations, and lies of the MPAA. Do you believe that these are reasonable actions?
Sara Chan
__________________________________________
liberalism n. The use of compassionate rhetoric for authoritarian ends.
When I meet programmers who think that they are cool and tough, I tell them to read Bravo Two Zero by Andy McNab. It's the true story of an SAS (British army special forces) unit that operated behind the lines during the Gulf War. Here in the UK, the SAS is revered by most guys in the way that Navy SEALS are in the US. The book has a lot to teach about programming.
Many people seem to think that special forces troops are so good that they can just be handed a task, left to get it done, and that they will deal with whatever problems arise. Wrong. According to McNab, the True Motto(tm) of the SAS is "check and plan". For example, before approaching an Iraqi military vehicle, they would rehearse opening the vehicle's door: which way the handle turns, whether the handle has to first be pushed in or pulled out, whether the door swings open or slides back, how much force needs to be used, etc. etc. etc. Every little detail is checked like this. And there are backup plans.
Now read the first sentence of the previous paragraph, but substitute "top software programmers" for "special forces troops". You can see my point. Truly good special forces/programmers/professionals all have some things in common: they are focused, disciplined, and methodical. And they don't feel a need to prove how good they are by taking unnecessary chances.
The main article also notes that programming teams such as those used for the Space Shuttle seem good at drawing in women. This is hardly surprising. Women naturally like men who are justifiably confident about what they do.
How well did the eight-man SAS unit perform? They were surrounded by Iraqis, who had armored vehicles. Three were killed. The other five retreated: over 85 km (>2 marathons) in one night with 100 kg (220 lb) of equipment each. About 250 Iraqis were killed along the way, and thousands more were terrorized.
Sara Chan
Here's an example that answers this question. Some decades ago, the main computers companies--IBM and the "BUNCH" (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, and Honeywell)--got together to develop a standard binary encoding for characters. The result was ASCII. The BUNCH fully adopted it. IBM then went off and used their own encoding, EBCDIC. IBM did this because they were bigger than the BUNCH, and they wanted to make the BUNCH's life difficult. And until PC's became common, this had some success.
In those days, IBM was the big bad bully. Today, it is Microsoft....
Even French President Chirac, who wields a lot in the EU generally, has come out against UCITA. Given the EU reaction to Echelon, it's possible (though I'd guess not probable) that there will be EU laws banning software that contains deliberately-written backdoors.
The other theory of relativity is known as "general relativity". This is essentially special relativity, but with space being curved, rather than flat. The curvature is induced by gravitation. General relativity is not universally accepted among cosmologists and theoretically physicists, because the experimental evidence for it is lacking. So Cramer's column is nothing new.
Also, Amazon does not lose money on every sale. Their book division is now profitable. They lose money on other things (CDs, DVDs, etc.). This is consistent with Amazon's stated strategy: to gain as much market share as possible early on, even if it results in short-term losses, so as to get good profitability in the long run. In valuing Amazon so highly, the stock market it just saying that they believe that Amazon's strategy will be successful.
* Over the long run, stocks are not much riskier than bonds. Yet historically, bonds have paid much lower yields (or rates of return) than stocks. Why? Stupidity (by long-term investors). Higher stock prices imply lower stock yields; so nowadays stocks and bonds have similar yields. Hence stock yields (and thus prices) have simply moved to levels at which they are fair relative to bonds. (The bond market is ten times bigger than the stock market, and is not generally believed to be severely misvalued.)
* Computers and the Internet are leading to the development of a "new economy" that is much more efficient than the old economy. Hence company profits will tend to be bigger; thus stock prices should be higher, on average. In fact, no one really disputes this; the only question is "by how much?" Yet Shiller does not really address this question; instead, he weakly points out that people have assumed before that there was a big change in economic/business efficiency and have been wrong. Yes, the optimists were wrong in the past; this, however, does not mean that they are wrong now.
None of this proves that the stock market is now correctly valued: there are counter-arguments to the above. Shiller's assumption that stocks are too high might be right--but Shiller does not make a good case for it.
A list of all IANA TLDs, together with (variable-quality) contact information for each, is available here. And yes, this includes Malaysia (.my).
One of the reasons for digitising is to preserve old volumes. Wider access for people is another stated reason.
Maybe my point about monolingual programming environments wasn't clear (since I was trying to avoid being moderated as flamebait). The example with Perl illustrates this best. I don't think that Perl should exist (really). Rather, I think that Perl's existence is due to deficiencies in the C/Unix programming environment. And using C++ makes no difference. You still end up with a trilingual programming environment (C++/Perl/Unix), rather than a monolingual one. This is adding complexity to resolve the problems: I believe that makes things worse.
Monolingual programming environments require less programmer training and ultimately lead to reduced software complexity. This is an important point--whether you agree with my views on their overall desirability or not--and it is a point that most people don't consider nowadays.
APL and LISP are Very High Level "applicative/functional" programming languages. They are too high level to be translated into machine language (with current technology). For this reason, they are interpreted--as is done with Java; hence they tend to execute relatively slowly.
Whether or not the world would be a better place with more extensive use of languages such as APL and LISP is moot. The point that should be made (I believe) is that (i) there is a lot to be learned from the experiences with APL and LISP and (ii) those experiences seem to be overlooked nowadays.
I could give many examples to illustrate this point. Most such, though, have already been stated many times in the academic literature. For example, J. Backus (referred to by Dr. Pollack), in his 1977 Turing Award lecture, outlined the advantages of applicative languages. And K. E. Iverson (inventor APL), in his 1979 Turing Award lecture, outlined how high level languages can be a "tool of thought", i.e. an aid to programmers' thinking. (Turing Award lectures are published annually in the Communications of the ACM.)
In fact, though, APL and LISP are not just programming languages. Each is a programming environment (which includes a language). Users of LISP, for example, have what appears to be a LISP machine--i.e. a virtual LISP computer. This machine does everything. From the users' perspective, there isn't a separate operating system. This means that the user only needs to learn about one thing: LISP.
The contrast with more common programming environments is large. For example, a C (or C++) programmer also typically learns some Unix. C and Unix, though, are entirely separate things. And they don't really mix (e.g. a C program that executes Unix commands). Which is why Perl was created. Which adds a third layer of complexity to the programming environment. Which raises the skill level required for programmers and the complexity of software.
I think that this is wrong--that the correct approach is to (re)design things so that the programming environment is "monolingual". Java might be considered as something in this direction.
Although APL and LISP have been around for decades, the recognition of the benefits provided by monolingual programming environments generally seems to be more recent. Some early work is by J. Heering & P. Klint, "Towards Monolingual Programming Environments", ACM TOPLAS, 7: 183-213 [1985].
I found it interesting that someone researching what might be tomorrow's most important and advanced technology appears almost a bit nostaligic for old largely-forgotten programming environments. Maybe he had a reason.
Once again, the web is a force for freedom.
The first sentence is true: Amazon announced record losses in the fourth quarter of 1999. The second sentence, however, is apparently false: Amazon claims that it is now making money on books alone; the losses come from expanding into other products (CDs, videos, etc.).
On a related topic.... Note that Amazon's profiting on books just might justify the view that losses taken to build market share can turn into profits later on.
Twinhead's are thus extremely quiet. For anyone using a laptop in a quiet environment, it's worth considering. Most models also have both FD and CD integrated, which I find useful. Does anyone know of other fanless laptops?
When a record lacquer is cut, it does not result in a very good replica of the input signal; this is because the lacquer is elastic and thus stretches and distorts during cutting. In addition to this, cutting the lacquer builds stresses into the lacquer subsurface.
Both the surface distortions and the subsurface stresses are transferred from the lacquer to the record during pressing. A laser tracking a record will read the surface distortions as part of the music signal. A laser will also completely miss the subsurface stresses. These subsurface stresses hold significant information. Thus a laser will miss some information, and the information that it does retrieve will be distorted.
A conventional stylus playing a record can do a better job than a laser for two reasons. First, the pressure of a stylus on an elastic (vinyl) record causes the surface to stretch and distort in a way that largely compensates for the distortions that were cut into the record lacquer. Second, the stylus sinks some way into the groove and is thus able to retrieve information stored in the subsurface.
The same laser-turntable scam was tried around 1990--then known as the "Finial" turntable. In listening tests its performance proved mediocre: investors lost much (all?) of their money. You should stay away from this one as well.
There were, however, some problems. First, the dinosaurs didn't die off in a few years; they became extinct over a period of millions of years. Second, there was never any palaeoecological evidence of such a "winter" found. Thus, although there definitely was a large impact around the time of the dinosaur extinction, the hypothesis that it's dust caused the extinction could not realistically have been true. Moreover, there's an alternative hypothesis: massive extended flood-basalt volcanism from the Deccan Traps, in India.
Alvarez, however, was a Nobel prize winner. He used the power that gave him to discredit anyone who questioned him. He launched major attacks in the media. And he pressured the chairpeople of academic departments to fire departmental researchers who tried to show the flaws in the hypothesis. Some careers were severely damaged. Read all about it, and the science, here.
The impact crater was eventually found, in Yucatan, Mexico. Research has shown, however, that the amount of dust injected into the atmosphere, by the impact, was far too small to have forced cosmic winter. With Alavarez dead, there is now at least some reasoned debate. Recent work by Sharpton at the U of Alaska speculates that the impact might have vaporized enough rock to make the atmosphere very acidic--and that this might have led to long-term ecological changes that forced dinosaur extinction. (This research was presented at last month's meeting of the American Geophysical Union; abstracts available online via http://www.agu.org/meetings/waisfm00.html.)
Maybe, in the end, it will turn out that Alvarez was right. Or maybe not. For the integrity of the scientific process, though, it makes no difference. A powerful scientist used his political power to squash any scientific debate.
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"... the microkernel approach was essentially a dishonest approach aimed at receiving more dollars for research. I don't necessarily think these researchers were knowingly dishonest. Perhaps they were simply stupid. Or deluded." --Linus Torvalds on kernel research by Computer Scientists (in Open Sources)