I suspect that that before we get a convincing AI that approaches human capabilities, they'll have gotten the size of neural-implantable electrodes down to the point where it's easier to put a human brain in a tank and attach it to interfaces that simulate senses than it is to simulate the brain itself. (Especially given that there is a market and demand for electrodes for other purposes besides brains-in-jars, e.g. artificial vision and hearing).
If you want to consider a BSD and need it to work with Wireless, I highly recommend openbsd (see http://openbsd.org./ They have quite excellent support for wireless NICs.
Ease of use?? Well, if you want a CLI then you should seriously consider BSD. However, if you absolutely must boot from KDE the first time the OS is installed, then stick to Ubuntu. OpenBSD in particular has EXCELLENT man pages. I think it's probably the most complete, well written and up-to-date OSS project documentation I've found anywhere. Bar none.
So... why not have your 64-bit application launch a separate 32-bit process and then communicate via some kind of IPC (socket, pipe, whatever)... I mean... COM did this with 32 and 16-bit libraries back in the day. Sure, it's damned slow, but that's what backward compatability is all about.
If I'm getting the gist of the article correct, it sounds like this guy is just whining because he found a variation of a vulnerability that was being fixed and he didn't get his name posted in the headline as finding the main vulnerability.
So, really, this is just a single guy complaining because he feels like he should have been a headliner but MS felt he was just an extra.
I used to work for a company that had infringed on a seemingly obvious patent. The solution was to arrange a licensing arrangement that included indemnification of our clients against further suit. Fortunately for that company the patent expires in two years.
My point is, this isn't an uncommon arrangement.
These companies provide a valuable service in our economy:
You an inventor build a widget, X. You invest a lot of time and effort into this and, as a sort-of reward/encouragement, you are granted a monopoly on that invention for a period of, say, 20 years. So you spend 2 years trying to sell X and you aren't finding much success. In addition you find yourself kinda hating life because you always wanted to be an inventor, not an X-salesperson. But, you need to pay back that home equity loan you took out to pay for the work you did to invent X, so you don't really have a choice in the matter.
So, one day, you're riding the train back to D.C. from Boston after a particularly tough sales call that didn't pan out. You're a little worn out from the travel and kinda frustrated by the failed meeting. You start talking to the guy next to you in the dining car, telling him about your problems and your situation. As you describe your invention he gets this gleam in his eye.
"You know buddy, your problem is that you don't know how to pitch this thing." At first, you're a little offended that this guy, who doesn't know the first thing about your field, let alone your invention would say this to you. But then you remember all the failed sales meetings and realize he's probably right: you just aren't a sales person.
You're an inventory. If only you could capitalize on your invention and move on to the next one.
"Tell you what, I'll pay you $1million for your patent rights. You can take the cash and pay off that loan and start working your next super invention. I'll take the risk on making X sell. Maybe it doesn't sell, maybe it does. I'll take that risk. You move on. And, hey, maybe you come up with Y and we'll work out another deal."
So you take his card, give it some thought and come back with an offer of $750,000 plus 3% of any future sales he might make. You figure, hey, I still want to make out big if this thing goes sky high.
The point of my little story is that companies such as this one can, potentially, serve to make money by selling your idea. They allow for the transfer of risk as well as the focusing of resources to where they are best allocated.
This is, afterall, basically what all of the Pharma and BioScience companies are.
Where this all starts to fall apart, of course, is when the USPTO fails to make adequate judgements about what inventions and ideas are worthy of monopoly protection. Overly general patents fail to provide any societal benefit. Of course, that's what our legal system is supposed to be there for. Whether it works or not is yet another question.
It's not like anyone is expecting this to happen over night. What's going on now is, actually, that people are trying to determine the VALUE in having widespread wifi across the country.
Perhaps, wifi access in the middle of a corn field doesn't mean anything unless you can be on a phone while you are there.
Once things like this become feasible establishing broader wifi access will make economic sense.
While I think it is valid to debate whether this is a wise move for MS considering that cheap accessories may actually attract more customers to their platform, I think this is definitely within MS right.
Consider: MS spends a fortune marketing the XBOX brand. They spend a lot of money getting people to want the platform. Then, these other companies come along and feed off of that expense. What MS is doing in this case is saying "Hey, if you're going to benefit from using our Brand, then you're going to have to pay up."
What's interesting is that Intel has had a slightly different approach. They actually (at least in the past) subsidized the marketing efforts of the PC manufacturers in exchange for some control over the representational quality and positioning of their (Intel's) brand.
MyYahoo rocks both. With the ability to use a number of good tools (mail monitor, weather, stocks, briefcase, addressbook, calendar, etc.) PLUS MyYahoo has RSS support.
MyYahoo is absolutely awesome.
Now, if I could get them to let me upload my own CSS or client-side XSLT so that I could format it my own way, or if they allowed people to upload themes and then review and post them (to prevent ad blocking, etc.) there'd be no competition--period.
When was the last time you heard an average person complain about the CPI??
Average people don't vote against a president because of the published CPI. I would imagine that if you asked US voters what the acronym stood for you'd get a positive response rate of under 1%.
Typical people care about the actual prices they pay at the pump, at the checkout counter and the ball game.
Just because the government changes how it estimates those things doesn't change the actual prices.
If anything, producing a lower reading of inflation doesn't help politicians, it hurts them. If they don't have as accurate a reading of CPI as possible then they won't be able to accurately judge how hard the voting population has it. They would misjudge a critical factor in voter sentiment and potentially lose a race.
The people who really care about CPI as a factor in their investments know enough about the number, how it is estimated and how it is to be used that such a silly conspiracy would be pointless. Everybody else is more worried about how much they had to pay for their eggs compared to how much they just got paid.
If you are going to buy several billion dollars of US Government Bonds you are going to sure as hell make sure you know what you are getting yourself into.
Why would a group of banks seek to hide inflation? Inflation is their biggest nightmare. Higher inflation leads to higher interest rates. If the delta between interest rates and inflation is smaller then banks will have weaker profits. So, understating inflation would hurt them financially. Wouldn't it be in their best interest to have a, well, inflated inflation number (if we are going with the conspiracy theory)?
I would imagine that the *volatility* of the inflation number is more of a concern than the actual level of inflation when you are dealing with numbers like those in the US. People are more worried about change than they are about inflation well under 5%. Inflation here is still incredibly low. Also, GDP is still well above inflation.
Furthermore, look at the yields on long bonds. If inflation were high then investors would be pushing for higher long-term yields. That just not happening.
Do recall, it was only two or three years ago that the Fed was worried about the potential for *deflation*, or a *negative* CPI.
They call themselves a "leading provider" on their website. However, TFA claims they only had a volume of $15Billion... which amounts to almost nil in the world of creditcard transactions. Consider: Visa alone cleared about $3 TRILLION in volume.
My guess: these guys have a life span of about a week.
Merchants ultimately pay for these transactions. The argument that these costs are reflected in consumer prices is sketchy. Inflation is currently quite low and there is incredible price pressure on most companies. The demand curve is inelastic, meaning that costs like this generally impact merchants more than it impacts consumers. If a diner gets hit with a lot of charge backs it's more likely to stop accepting cards than it is to raise prices. Don't believe me? Ask your local Diner owner how competitive the market is. It hurts corporate profits, and is bad for the economy in general, but it doesn't affect consumers in terms of prices (if anything it hurts them by reducing selection and increasing transaction costs--eg. you have to carry cash and not a card).
The card networks would be smart to drop these guys because of the publicity and sheer stupidity of the company. My guess is that that has already happened. The merchants that use Card Systems should stop using them because they've just exposed them to a lot of fraud.
Consumers? Keep enjoying your 0-liability clauses--and check your statements!
ISPs should have, as part of their usage agreement, the right to block hosts that are the sources of these worms. If you don't have your SMTP server locked down, they should shut off port 80 access until you fix it--perhaps always serving up a page that says "you are disabled until you call 1-800-moron for instructions on how to fix this problem".
If ISPs are so concerned about wasted bandwidth usage then they would make people care.
That sounds silly, but think about it... How much is spent on "personal firewalls" and "anti-virus" software every year by people who could simply run over to WindowsUpdate and get what probably constitutes the single most important security tool of all (bug fixes) for free?
ps... I'm not saying firewalls aren't important security tools, but when it comes to at-home desktops, bugs are the real issue... and viruses are just exploiting bugs that haven't been patched yet.
Ok, sure, so maybe cities won't outright ban other providers, but isn't it kinda unfair that the competition has to pay taxes in order to subsidize the municiple offering? Wouldn't it be better for companies to take those taxes and turn them into lower prices? Wouldn't it be better if the low-income families could pick and choose between providers rather than being forced to use a municipal provider?
Anyhow. Verizon is hardly a monopoly.
Sure, several years ago you could say that you could only get local phone service from them (in certain areas). Funny thing is, I can get local phone service (not VoIP) from at least one other company around here. Throw in VoIP and now things begin to sizzle.
Just wait until wi-max starts rolling out, then see what happens to all these "monopolies"... oh wait! they won't be able to compete because the municipal government will have a wireless net access monopoly..
Slashdot Mirror
They weigh about as much as the tangent bike frames.
Well... okay, I was halfway through Otherland and now it's a total waste to finish.
;-)
Thanks...
Dude! I read that book, too!
What was it called?
Yes, the qmail author is a weird academic code wizard douchebag so I will definitely use qmail!
The only beer ordered by name? Er... Lager?
What crappy marketing.
That said, I did manage to buy a Sun server for a case of it once...
It's too bad that microkernel's cannot help with this problem....
Oh wait...
If you want to consider a BSD and need it to work with Wireless, I highly recommend openbsd (see http://openbsd.org./ They have quite excellent support for wireless NICs.
Ease of use?? Well, if you want a CLI then you should seriously consider BSD. However, if you absolutely must boot from KDE the first time the OS is installed, then stick to Ubuntu. OpenBSD in particular has EXCELLENT man pages. I think it's probably the most complete, well written and up-to-date OSS project documentation I've found anywhere. Bar none.
So... why not have your 64-bit application launch a separate 32-bit process and then communicate via some kind of IPC (socket, pipe, whatever)... I mean... COM did this with 32 and 16-bit libraries back in the day. Sure, it's damned slow, but that's what backward compatability is all about.
If I'm getting the gist of the article correct, it sounds like this guy is just whining because he found a variation of a vulnerability that was being fixed and he didn't get his name posted in the headline as finding the main vulnerability.
So, really, this is just a single guy complaining because he feels like he should have been a headliner but MS felt he was just an extra.
I used to work for a company that had infringed on a seemingly obvious patent. The solution was to arrange a licensing arrangement that included indemnification of our clients against further suit. Fortunately for that company the patent expires in two years.
My point is, this isn't an uncommon arrangement.
These companies provide a valuable service in our economy:
You an inventor build a widget, X. You invest a lot of time and effort into this and, as a sort-of reward/encouragement, you are granted a monopoly on that invention for a period of, say, 20 years. So you spend 2 years trying to sell X and you aren't finding much success. In addition you find yourself kinda hating life because you always wanted to be an inventor, not an X-salesperson. But, you need to pay back that home equity loan you took out to pay for the work you did to invent X, so you don't really have a choice in the matter.
So, one day, you're riding the train back to D.C. from Boston after a particularly tough sales call that didn't pan out. You're a little worn out from the travel and kinda frustrated by the failed meeting. You start talking to the guy next to you in the dining car, telling him about your problems and your situation. As you describe your invention he gets this gleam in his eye.
"You know buddy, your problem is that you don't know how to pitch this thing." At first, you're a little offended that this guy, who doesn't know the first thing about your field, let alone your invention would say this to you. But then you remember all the failed sales meetings and realize he's probably right: you just aren't a sales person.
You're an inventory. If only you could capitalize on your invention and move on to the next one.
"Tell you what, I'll pay you $1million for your patent rights. You can take the cash and pay off that loan and start working your next super invention. I'll take the risk on making X sell. Maybe it doesn't sell, maybe it does. I'll take that risk. You move on. And, hey, maybe you come up with Y and we'll work out another deal."
So you take his card, give it some thought and come back with an offer of $750,000 plus 3% of any future sales he might make. You figure, hey, I still want to make out big if this thing goes sky high.
The point of my little story is that companies such as this one can, potentially, serve to make money by selling your idea. They allow for the transfer of risk as well as the focusing of resources to where they are best allocated.
This is, afterall, basically what all of the Pharma and BioScience companies are.
Where this all starts to fall apart, of course, is when the USPTO fails to make adequate judgements about what inventions and ideas are worthy of monopoly protection. Overly general patents fail to provide any societal benefit. Of course, that's what our legal system is supposed to be there for. Whether it works or not is yet another question.
It's not like anyone is expecting this to happen over night. What's going on now is, actually, that people are trying to determine the VALUE in having widespread wifi across the country.
Perhaps, wifi access in the middle of a corn field doesn't mean anything unless you can be on a phone while you are there.
Once things like this become feasible establishing broader wifi access will make economic sense.
How would you decide whose house should be flattened, whose river flooded?
Let mother nature do her choosing on her own.
Being a geek/nerd/dork does NOT preclude taking showers, brushing teethe, getting haircuts OR getting laid.
Sounds like that one hit too close to home...
While I think it is valid to debate whether this is a wise move for MS considering that cheap accessories may actually attract more customers to their platform, I think this is definitely within MS right.
Consider: MS spends a fortune marketing the XBOX brand. They spend a lot of money getting people to want the platform. Then, these other companies come along and feed off of that expense. What MS is doing in this case is saying "Hey, if you're going to benefit from using our Brand, then you're going to have to pay up."
What's interesting is that Intel has had a slightly different approach. They actually (at least in the past) subsidized the marketing efforts of the PC manufacturers in exchange for some control over the representational quality and positioning of their (Intel's) brand.
Okay... immediate reaction is over... This site is pretty cool.
Obviously, the performance needs some work. However, the HTML and JS is pretty awesome.
I may have just found my replacement for MyYahoo.
MyYahoo rocks both. With the ability to use a number of good tools (mail monitor, weather, stocks, briefcase, addressbook, calendar, etc.) PLUS MyYahoo has RSS support.
MyYahoo is absolutely awesome.
Now, if I could get them to let me upload my own CSS or client-side XSLT so that I could format it my own way, or if they allowed people to upload themes and then review and post them (to prevent ad blocking, etc.) there'd be no competition--period.
I'd be willing to pay a small fee for that.
When was the last time you heard an average person complain about the CPI??
Average people don't vote against a president because of the published CPI. I would imagine that if you asked US voters what the acronym stood for you'd get a positive response rate of under 1%.
Typical people care about the actual prices they pay at the pump, at the checkout counter and the ball game.
Just because the government changes how it estimates those things doesn't change the actual prices.
If anything, producing a lower reading of inflation doesn't help politicians, it hurts them. If they don't have as accurate a reading of CPI as possible then they won't be able to accurately judge how hard the voting population has it. They would misjudge a critical factor in voter sentiment and potentially lose a race.
The people who really care about CPI as a factor in their investments know enough about the number, how it is estimated and how it is to be used that such a silly conspiracy would be pointless. Everybody else is more worried about how much they had to pay for their eggs compared to how much they just got paid.
If you are going to buy several billion dollars of US Government Bonds you are going to sure as hell make sure you know what you are getting yourself into.
Why would a group of banks seek to hide inflation? Inflation is their biggest nightmare. Higher inflation leads to higher interest rates. If the delta between interest rates and inflation is smaller then banks will have weaker profits. So, understating inflation would hurt them financially. Wouldn't it be in their best interest to have a, well, inflated inflation number (if we are going with the conspiracy theory)?
I would imagine that the *volatility* of the inflation number is more of a concern than the actual level of inflation when you are dealing with numbers like those in the US. People are more worried about change than they are about inflation well under 5%. Inflation here is still incredibly low. Also, GDP is still well above inflation.
Furthermore, look at the yields on long bonds. If inflation were high then investors would be pushing for higher long-term yields. That just not happening.
Do recall, it was only two or three years ago that the Fed was worried about the potential for *deflation*, or a *negative* CPI.
They call themselves a "leading provider" on their website. However, TFA claims they only had a volume of $15Billion... which amounts to almost nil in the world of creditcard transactions. Consider: Visa alone cleared about $3 TRILLION in volume.
My guess: these guys have a life span of about a week.
Merchants ultimately pay for these transactions. The argument that these costs are reflected in consumer prices is sketchy. Inflation is currently quite low and there is incredible price pressure on most companies. The demand curve is inelastic, meaning that costs like this generally impact merchants more than it impacts consumers. If a diner gets hit with a lot of charge backs it's more likely to stop accepting cards than it is to raise prices. Don't believe me? Ask your local Diner owner how competitive the market is. It hurts corporate profits, and is bad for the economy in general, but it doesn't affect consumers in terms of prices (if anything it hurts them by reducing selection and increasing transaction costs--eg. you have to carry cash and not a card).
The card networks would be smart to drop these guys because of the publicity and sheer stupidity of the company. My guess is that that has already happened. The merchants that use Card Systems should stop using them because they've just exposed them to a lot of fraud.
Consumers? Keep enjoying your 0-liability clauses--and check your statements!
ISPs should have, as part of their usage agreement, the right to block hosts that are the sources of these worms. If you don't have your SMTP server locked down, they should shut off port 80 access until you fix it--perhaps always serving up a page that says "you are disabled until you call 1-800-moron for instructions on how to fix this problem".
If ISPs are so concerned about wasted bandwidth usage then they would make people care.
That sounds silly, but think about it... How much is spent on "personal firewalls" and "anti-virus" software every year by people who could simply run over to WindowsUpdate and get what probably constitutes the single most important security tool of all (bug fixes) for free?
ps... I'm not saying firewalls aren't important security tools, but when it comes to at-home desktops, bugs are the real issue... and viruses are just exploiting bugs that haven't been patched yet.
And a municipal utility is a what? A monopoly?
Ok, sure, so maybe cities won't outright ban other providers, but isn't it kinda unfair that the competition has to pay taxes in order to subsidize the municiple offering? Wouldn't it be better for companies to take those taxes and turn them into lower prices? Wouldn't it be better if the low-income families could pick and choose between providers rather than being forced to use a municipal provider?
Anyhow. Verizon is hardly a monopoly.
Sure, several years ago you could say that you could only get local phone service from them (in certain areas). Funny thing is, I can get local phone service (not VoIP) from at least one other company around here. Throw in VoIP and now things begin to sizzle.
Just wait until wi-max starts rolling out, then see what happens to all these "monopolies"... oh wait! they won't be able to compete because the municipal government will have a wireless net access monopoly..
Can't wait to read those interviews.
Check out the latest crypt-o-gram. Schneir gets into this.
What, then, is a political party?
Couldn't have said it any better...