If you read the patent, it's an almost textbook example of a painfully obvious 'invention'. The patent clearly admits that the use of a special transparent 'color' in one image is an old technique for blending two images. Next it admits that using a 1-bit alpha mask is a known technique for combining two images. Then it admits that an 8-bit alpha mask has been used to smoothly blend two images in the compositing process! Finally, it admits the 'invention': Let's use a full color image instead of a grayscale image for the alpha mask! Wow! How do they think of these things! What a genius it takes to think that maybe after first using black and white masks, then greyscale, you might try color!
The real clincher is that they go on to list all of these wonderous things you can do with full color mask. But most of their examples only require a good old fasioned greyscale map! Somebody at Apple pulled a fast one at the patent office. The entire 'Fig 1.' shows an example which doesn't even use Apple's 'invention'! It just uses good old fashioned greyscale alpha masks which Apple lists as prior art! Then two of the claims list anti-aliased text! Does anybody do this with color alpha masks? No font renderer spits out multi-color images! They spit out greyscale which is used to merge the text color/pattern with the background! Once again, they claim their invention is needed to do something which everyone does with the prior art method!
On the plus side, it's such a silly invention it's trivial to work around. Here's an idea: use three different alpha masks! One per channel! I wonder if Apple managed to get a patent on that. Hey, here's another nifty idea! Generate the three alpha masks from the three channels of a color image! I bet Apple never thought of that! Only a genius like me could think of that. What an invention! I'll make millions!
Man, this patent is the worst. Check out Claim 3: A method as in claim 1 further comprising displaying the result image. Whoh Nellie! Your going to display the image! Man, that's adds a whole new level of complexity. Usually, I composite images and then just free the memory. But actually displaying an image you've generated! Man, what incredible insight!
The correct answer is "I don't know", but I can tell you how 802.11b maintains compatability with 802.11. In order to maintain compatability between speeds in 802.11, all packet headers are sent at 1Mbps. That way, all clients can understand the basics that each access point is sending. When an AP is involved, the clients only talk to the AP and never to each other. So, as long as the client can tell the AP to send it's own packets at the right speed, everything is good.
I'm pretty sure all the info needed for a client to participate in the collision avoidance algorithms, in contained in most basic of the packet headers (destination address, length (so it knows how long to keep quiet for), etc.) Clients don't need to be able to understand each other, or even the data portion of all the packets. The slower hosts will just ignore the faster packets, but will watch the headers in order to try and avoid collisions.
I believe that you are both right. There are bands for
both licensed and unlicensed. I belive there are 8(?) unlicensed bands, and 3(?) licensed. I don't have a reference handy, and don't feel like looking it up. Perhaps someone knows the exact numbers? Oh, and this would only apply in the US. Just as with current 802.11b, different countries reserve different numbers of frequencies.
Have you noticed how often members of the press refer to Bush as "Mister Bush" and not "President Bush"? Happens all the time. And it cracks me up every time.
But you are changing the subject. We were talking about globalization, which is largely the theory and practice of international trade treaties and trade-related organizations, such as GATT, NAFTA, FTAA, etc. I'm not talking about trying to go in and forcibly change the Saudi government. I'm talking about using trade treaties to favor the countries which behave in a manner which is in line with our values. Rather than endorsing treaties like GATT and NAFTA which explicitly prohibit the tying of tariffs to things like social policy, we should be doing the opposite. We should be using our considerable leverage in the world market to make the world a better place, not just enrich ourselves and plan on killing anybody who tries to stop us.
I would also disagree that we our promoting our interest in the Middle East. We are promoting the interests of a very small number of legal fictions known as corporations. It is not in the national interest to maintain our current dependence on Saudi Arabia. In no way is it in my interest to have the nations energy supply be dependent on a despotic and corrupt regime with a medieval government. It's foolish and shortsighted for us to continue along the path we are on.
You miss the point
on
Globalization
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· Score: 5, Interesting
You miss the point that even if we 'kill all the terrorists', more of them are created every day. You say they hate us because we're powerful, wealthy, intelligent etc. If that is the case, then there are only a few future paths for the U.S. 1) Continue business as usual, and be prepared to deal with the fact that we will always be hated, and will always be the target of violence. 2) Give up our power, wealth, education, etc and turn ourselves into a third world country. 3) Try to spread our wealth and success to the rest of the world.
Most of the brainwashed American masses think that option (1) is the patriotic option, despite the fact that it puts us in the losing situation of trying to fight the whole world and will probably end up in option (2) in the long run. A true patriot would realize that the only long-term path with any semblance of national security is (3). Note that (3) is not what most corporations think about when they are going overseas. They are most certainly not interested in exporting any of the things which make America a very livable place, such as environmental protections, labor laws, etc. Rather they are looking to avoid all of the pesky government 'intrusions' that try to make them act the least bit responsible or decent. They want the 'right' to pollute as much as they want, pay the lowest possible wages, and run like hell taking all of their capitol as soon as the next country looks like it will accept more pollution and even lower wages. Or as soon as they have extracted all the natural resources. Then people like you wonder why the masses in these countries aren't grateful that we gave them our pollution and paid them slave labor wages and strip mined their country.
That's why 'globalization' is such a hot topic. Corporations talk about a level playing field, but what they are really looking for is a way out of the basic regulations that keep America from being a 3rd world country. The Blame America First Club, as you like to call it, wants globalization to mean exporting our labor and environmental laws, our democratic government, as well as capital investment. Corporations are interested in maximizing profits by avoiding labor and environmental regulations. Usually this means avoiding any true democracy as well, since most people actually like things like being paid a decent wage and having clean water to drink and vote accordingly.
802.11a is great until everyone else moves there too. But it's not all bad. It's not hard to find out what frequency most devices use. And since the range is so short on all of these, it's not hard to do what you want and still have things work. I tend to use 2.4GHz for 802.11b gear. For a cordless phone, 900MHz still works fine. IR works fine for Palm syncing and such. You can't really expect to buy every 2.4GHz toy on the market and get them all working well in one room. But like I said, the range is small, so you can be the 'FCC' of your house and plan accordingly without too much bother.
Yes, the FCC specifies that the device has to expect interference. It does not specify that it has to keep working! I've taken an FHSS connection off the air by trying to do a site survey with 802.11b gear in the same room. I've seen 802.11b gear garble up the image coming out off a 2.4GHz wireless camera. Most 2.4GHz phones will completely overpower 802.11 gear. I've got a 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer, and the amount of radiation spit off from the 2.4GHz phones has conviced me that you do not want one near your head, much less near your WLAN. The FCC in no way specifies that all this stuff has to keep working when they are all in the same room. I think they just have to not permanently break when they get interference. Probably as long as they don't catch on fire, the FCC will approve it.
Actually, 802.11b is a DSSS-only technology. 802.11 specified both a FHSS and DSSS modulation layer running at 2Mbps max. 802.11b is an extension to 802.11 which specifies 5.5Mbps and 11Mbps speeds for the DSSS modulation only. If you can select a channel, as you can for all 802.11b gear, than it is not FHSS. After all, if you are frequency-hopping, it doesn't make much sense to specify a single frequency, does it?
If you are doing much 802.11 work, I highly recommend IEEE 802.11 Handboook A Designer's Companion by Bob O'Hara and Al Petrick. It explains all of this is good detail, while still being easy to read and cheap compared to buying the actual standards from IEEE and trying to read them.
You always hear this arguement. Were any of the people involved in your groups discussions actually lawyers? Did your group have problems accepting the EULA that came with the software you did use? Because that EULA surely disclaimed all warranties.
So I'm wondering, did you have lawyers who advised you that you could win a lawsuit despite the EULA? Or did you all just ignore the fact you made a decision based on your ability to sue, and then promptly agreed to a license which keeps you from suing? I mean, did anyone ever bring up the fact that you can't sue either open source developers or mass market software vendors? Since neither party can be successfully sued if the software misbehaves, you may as well complain that open source software doesn't enable you to fly around like the folks in the WinXP commercials, so you are going to stay away from Linux.
Can you please define exactly what it means for licensing terms to be "non-descriminatory", since the definition has a huge bearing on open source software?
For example which, if any, of the following examples would be non-descriminatory?
A) Fixed per-unit licensing costs. Let's say, for example, $1.00 per unit shipped. While this would be non-descriminatory in some senses, it would also prohibit free software and hence be descriminatory in other ways.
B) Licensing fees only for non-free software. While this method would not descriminate against open source, it could be seen as "descriminating" against closed-source software since they would be the only ones paying licensing fees.
C) Percent-of-price fees. For example, 5% of the price of shipped units. This would seem to be fair since the same licensing terms would apply to everyone, but in practice it would be similar to B) and hence seen as descriminatory.
D) Free for everyone to use. This would seem to be the only license which cannot be viewed as descriminating against someone. On the other hand, I'm fairly certain that this is not what is intended when the W3C uses the term "RAND".
Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated, I'm sure.
The magic word is 'certified'. Linux will never be considered certified because it's open source nature will allow trivial disabling of any security which is included. So, even if Linus et al decide to include the required security protocols in Linux, they would be trivial to remove or circumvent. Most likly, general-purpose computing parts would also not be allowed. All of these technologies will be based upon security-by-obscurity because that is the only avenue available. Look at DVD's if you want to see how these technologies are implemented. As a result, public documentation and open source implementations will not be allowed. If they were, the whole thing would simply be a joke. Once again, see DVD's. Once the CSS algorithm became public knowledge, the protection simply falls apart. All such schemes rely upon obscurity. The proof is simple: the computer ultimately has to have access to the raw data for display purposes. If an end user can get unfettered access to the hardware, they can get unfettered access to the raw data and copy it. Such access will be controlled by restricting the API that an OS is allowed to export. As OS which allows unfettered access via a simple 'insmod', as Linux does, is not likely to be certified. In fact, computers as we know them are not likely to be certifed. A computer as we know it is a general-purpose device. Such general-purpose devices allow far too much access to data to ever meet any satisfactory definition of 'secure'. Your Tivo will be allowed. Your PC, which you could easily run unrestricted Tivo-like software on, will not.
But of course, your point #2 simply reveals you as a simple troll. If the majority accepts the elimination of fair-use, then those of us who complain are criminals? Is that your point? Do you really think that all citizens can be grouped into A) Those who blindly accept any new restrictions place upon them and B) criminals?
The whole phrase "digital rights management" is a BS term if I ever heard one. It's all about use restrictions. They only call them "rights" because it's a nice feel-good term, even though it doesn't describe the technology at all. Just replace "rights" with "restrictions" and the quotes read much more easily and honestly:
This will open a Pandora's box," he said, promoting the idea of "elaborate restrictions." These, he said, could move the concept of buy-once restrictions to time-based restrictions -- "you can make it so the user can, say, only read this book on Tuesday" -- or location-based restrictions.
Are there any good books accessable to a layman which explain Bell's theorem and the associated experiements? I've never understood why people insist that there can't be a hidden variable, when it is far and away the simplest explanation for these phenomenon.
Did I miss the Napster IPO or something? Where are they going to get these huge sums of money to pay off these fines? I mean really. I see Napster agreeing to pay huge amounts of cash out to various people to settle all of the lawsuits. To date, they haven't collected any money from their users. Did they really get that much money from private investors? Are the investors really stupid enough to keep pouring money down this sinkhole? You would have thought that the bottom dropping out of the dot.com business would have brought these guys to their senses, but I guess not. I propose that all future Napster payout stories get filed under the "More Money Than Brains" department.
I agree that different cultures can have "cultural absolutes" that are different and incompatible, but I am talking about human absolutes.
Ah, and pray tell how one distinguishes these "human absolutes" from mere "cultural absolutes"? Because they are the ones that Americans currently believe in? Hmmm? Because they are the ones that you personally believe in? You can't tell! That's the whole point! Some people think it's an absolute evil to eat meat. Some people think eating meat is fine (except maybe on Fridays). Whose right? Whose wrong? There isn't any way to judge. Even if you are right, you will never be able to prove it. And you will never be able to provide a procedure for determining which morals are "absolute" and which are "cultural". Even if such an absolute standard exists, it wouldn't matter because we don't have any way of determining what it is! Or even if it exists!
None of which means that it isn't possible to judge that some morals are "better" or "more important" than others. But to do so means to first define what it is you are judging, and on which criteria. We can judge them on whether or not they help produce a stable society. We can judge them on whether or not they produce a fair society.
I think this whole thread is basically a disagreement over how "absolute" is being applied. Reality Master seems to be using the term "absolute" to refer to right and wrong within the current set of western morals. From this point of view, slavery is absolutely wrong. There are no exceptions within modern American morality that allow slavery. So, within this realm, the morals are absolute.
The other side of the argument is using the term "absolute" when comparing different sets of cultural morals. It's clear that slavery was not an absolute wrong at previous times in American history. Hence, this moral "law" is not absolute because at times it has been true, and at times it has been false. It is this truism which leads to moral relativism.
So whose right? I guess everyone. It's all a matter of context. I don't think anyone here disagrees that a given system of morality can have "absolute" rights and wrongs within it. I also don't think anyone will disagree that different systems of morality often have different and incompatable "absolute" rights and wrongs. It's this last truth which is all that moral relativism is really about.
I'm sorry, but trying to squelch negative speech is not as equally dubious as any clause in the GPL. Do you see a clause in the GPL stating that the software may not be used to produce documents which disparage the FSF or RMS? RMS did write emacs. He could easily add such a clause, but he didn't. In fact, the GPL doesn't really care how you use the software at all. Unlike the M$ license, which places numerous restrictions on how you use the software.
Moreover, the restrictions that the GPL does place are on activites which are simply illegal under the M$ license. The GPL is all about what you have to do to legally redistribute the software. The M$ license simply reiterates that redistribution is illegal and will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
So, tell me, exactly how do you equate these two licenses to be equally odious? In the case of how the software may be used: GPL places no restrictions. M$ places numerous restrictions, inlcuding ones which abrige the users first amendment rights. In the case of redistribution: the GPL fundamentally says that you have to redistribute under the same license that you were granted. M$ simply says it will try to have you thown in jail if you redistribute their software.
They are not even comparable. In fact, they are almost opposites. The M$ EULA exists solely for the purpose of taking away rights which are granted to the user under copyright law. The GPL exists solely for the purpose of granting the user rights which do not exist under copyright law. One gives, the other takes away. They are not equally
The government has already done a lot of research into the area, and pretty much implemented a whole key-escrow system. Nobody used it and as a result it was a flop. To be honest, I don't know how much of the supporting infrastructure was actually deployed.
The basics of Clipper worked like this. The system was based on hardware encryption chips which implemented the protocol. No software versions existed AFAIK for obvious reasons. Each and every chip had a unique ID and "unit key". Each encrypted transmission had a Law Enforcement Access Field (or LEAF) prepended to it. The LEAF consisted primarily of the current session key encrypted with the unit key of the sending chip and it's ID number. I believe the whole LEAF was then encrypted with a single key shared by all chips.
On the law enforcement end, the DoJ was supposed to maintain a database of all the chip ID / unit keys. There was lots of fancy promises made about the security of the database, and how it would be split it two so that two separate agencies would have to cooperate in order to gain access to the database, etc. All very feel good but in the end un-auditable and basically BS since the regulations guaranteed that there would be no penalty for improper access to the keys.
Anyway, the LEAF field in combination with the database allows access to the session key and hence the plaintext of any message.
The whole scheme has so many problems it's not even funny. Not the least of which are: the whole protocol has to be keep top secret. If you know how to generate a legitimate LEAF field, you know how to generate a bogus LEAF field too. An AT&T researcher published a paper about how to get two Clipper chips to talk to each other with bogus LEAF fields. It took a fair amount of trying to get random LEAF's which had valid checksums, but it was quite doable. Presumably, they won't repeat that mistake. Software implementations are pretty much verboten, since they are far too easy to reverse engineer or tamper with. If you are trying to mandate back-doored encryption, you would pretty much just mandate that all encryption be performed using NSA designed and approved chips manufactured by a secure contractor.
As to what stops you from sending random data, one need only imagine the governments response when they detect that you are sending random data. Such random data would be presumed to be illegally encrypted data, and you would be arrested as such. It's quite possible that you would be freed once you had shown that the data was random. In the mean time, your face would be plastered on the front page of the paper as a "suspected terrorist". You might expect to be held without bail due to the extreme danger a suspected terrorist poses to society. The draconian penalties involved will serve to keep people in check, not any technical ability. Look at the penalties handed down for DMCA violations. Then compare the severity of pirating a movie versus flying an airliner into a building. Finally, scale the DMCA penalties accordingly. You can imagine the outcome.
Your missing the point. Normal users don't need to accept the GPL. All the things that a user wants to do are allowed by copyright law, so the GPL isn't even an issue.
Where it kicks in is if somebody want to redistribute the original works or a derivative. Since distributing copies of copyrighted work is illegal, a license is needed from the copyright holder. Normally, you would have to contact the copyright holder and negotiate terms. In the case of GPL'd software, a license is provided with the software. If you agree to that license, then you can distribute the software. Without agreeing to the license, you are breaking the law by distributing the software.
That's why the GPL has never been to court, and most likely never will. If you argue that you didn't accept the terms of the GPL, you would be confessing to breaking copyright law! If you claimed that you didn't accept the license, I'm sure the FSF would be happy to let that assertion stand in court.
"Counsel, didn't your client agree to the terms of the GPL?"
"No sir, your honor. My client never accepted the license, and in fact never even read the included LICENSE file. Instead, he commited criminal and civil copyright violations by distributing copyrighted software without a license!".
We did not give any assistance to the Taliban this year. Here is a link to info from the State department. It explicitly says that none of the money is going to the Taliban. It is being given to the UN and other NGO's, and consists almost entirely of bags of wheat.
Now, I'm not arguing that we haven't supported some really bad governments in the past. I would even argue that quite a few of the governments getting military aid today shouldn't be (Columbia and Israel to name two). But, giving wheat to the UN to distribute to starving Afghans is not the same as supporting the Taliban. Robert Scheer should be ashamed of himself for just plain lying in that article. And you should check your facts.
Actually, I think the WHYs of this action are irrelevant. We need to be looking at all of our foreign policies to try and determine if they are formenting this type of hatred. Historically, America has conducted it's foreign policy with almost no thought to the safety of our homeland. It has simply been treated as impervious. Now it has been shown all too clearly that that is not the case. Don't think for a moment that this little fact has not been noticed by every single adversary the US has.
We can't wait for an adversary to kill a few thousand American's before we decide there is a problem. We need to be proactive and consider whether or not our policies are breeding this type of hatred before Americans die. Take Columbia for example. We're now commited to sending billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Columbian government and military. Now, the FARC revolutionaries are not a nice group of people. But neither is the Columbian military. Perhaps we need to reconsider our aid package to them. Realistically, what the the risks and the benefits? Perhaps we could attach some meaningful human rights strings to the package to force the Columbian government to behave in a less oppressive manner and help force it to the negotiating table. We have a long history of supporting extremely oppressive regimes in the name of questionable causes (Somoza, Pinochet, The Shah, etc.) As long as we support oppresive regimes, we are running the risk that the oppressed are going to attack us.
Take Columbia again. What benefit are we getting from helping Columbia fight it's civil war that justifies risking an attack by FARC on Americans? I sure can't see any. On the other hand, our current dependance on Middle Eastern oil is an unfortunate fact. It very well may be worth the risk of future attacks to keep the oil flowing. But if that's the case, then it would seem obvious that reducing America's dependance on oil should be a top national security objective. Yet the Bush administration's current energy policies project dramatic increases in our reliance on foreign oil. Supporting public transportation, alternative energy sources, and increased efficiency seem like clear steps to increasing our national security. You don't have to be a tree-hugger to realize that trying to avoid future WTC-type attacks is a good idea.
Of course, all of my points are open to debate. What's amazing is the complete and total silence on any of these topics in the mass media. I have heard not a single mention at any point of how our foreign policy increases or decreases the liklihood of attack. Not a bit. At least here on Slashdot we are discussing the truly relevant issues.
Really, conservation of energy supports the idea of the turbine cooling the building. Or at least the air passing thru the turbine. The turbine is outputting energy in the form of electricity. Where did that energy come from? Primarily the kinetic energy of the wind. Since heat is pretty much a specialized type of kinetic energy, it's not hard to imagine that the turbine would extract some amount of heat from the air.
I'm not an expert in the field, and I can imagine the opposite happening too. The turbine would take kinetic energy out of the air and convert it to both heat in the air and energy in the turbine. But neither case would violate the conservation of energy.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the patent, it's an almost textbook example of a painfully obvious 'invention'. The patent clearly admits that the use of a special transparent 'color' in one image is an old technique for blending two images. Next it admits that using a 1-bit alpha mask is a known technique for combining two images. Then it admits that an 8-bit alpha mask has been used to smoothly blend two images in the compositing process! Finally, it admits the 'invention': Let's use a full color image instead of a grayscale image for the alpha mask! Wow! How do they think of these things! What a genius it takes to think that maybe after first using black and white masks, then greyscale, you might try color!
The real clincher is that they go on to list all of these wonderous things you can do with full color mask. But most of their examples only require a good old fasioned greyscale map! Somebody at Apple pulled a fast one at the patent office. The entire 'Fig 1.' shows an example which doesn't even use Apple's 'invention'! It just uses good old fashioned greyscale alpha masks which Apple lists as prior art! Then two of the claims list anti-aliased text! Does anybody do this with color alpha masks? No font renderer spits out multi-color images! They spit out greyscale which is used to merge the text color/pattern with the background! Once again, they claim their invention is needed to do something which everyone does with the prior art method!
On the plus side, it's such a silly invention it's trivial to work around. Here's an idea: use three different alpha masks! One per channel! I wonder if Apple managed to get a patent on that. Hey, here's another nifty idea! Generate the three alpha masks from the three channels of a color image! I bet Apple never thought of that! Only a genius like me could think of that. What an invention! I'll make millions!
Man, this patent is the worst. Check out Claim 3: A method as in claim 1 further comprising displaying the result image. Whoh Nellie! Your going to display the image! Man, that's adds a whole new level of complexity. Usually, I composite images and then just free the memory. But actually displaying an image you've generated! Man, what incredible insight!
The correct answer is "I don't know", but I can tell you how 802.11b maintains compatability with 802.11. In order to maintain compatability between speeds in 802.11, all packet headers are sent at 1Mbps. That way, all clients can understand the basics that each access point is sending. When an AP is involved, the clients only talk to the AP and never to each other. So, as long as the client can tell the AP to send it's own packets at the right speed, everything is good.
I'm pretty sure all the info needed for a client to participate in the collision avoidance algorithms, in contained in most basic of the packet headers (destination address, length (so it knows how long to keep quiet for), etc.) Clients don't need to be able to understand each other, or even the data portion of all the packets. The slower hosts will just ignore the faster packets, but will watch the headers in order to try and avoid collisions.
I believe that you are both right. There are bands for
both licensed and unlicensed. I belive there are 8(?) unlicensed bands, and 3(?) licensed. I don't have a reference handy, and don't feel like looking it up. Perhaps someone knows the exact numbers? Oh, and this would only apply in the US. Just as with current 802.11b, different countries reserve different numbers of frequencies.
Have you noticed how often members of the press refer to Bush as "Mister Bush" and not "President Bush"? Happens all the time. And it cracks me up every time.
But you are changing the subject. We were talking about globalization, which is largely the theory and practice of international trade treaties and trade-related organizations, such as GATT, NAFTA, FTAA, etc. I'm not talking about trying to go in and forcibly change the Saudi government. I'm talking about using trade treaties to favor the countries which behave in a manner which is in line with our values. Rather than endorsing treaties like GATT and NAFTA which explicitly prohibit the tying of tariffs to things like social policy, we should be doing the opposite. We should be using our considerable leverage in the world market to make the world a better place, not just enrich ourselves and plan on killing anybody who tries to stop us.
I would also disagree that we our promoting our interest in the Middle East. We are promoting the interests of a very small number of legal fictions known as corporations. It is not in the national interest to maintain our current dependence on Saudi Arabia. In no way is it in my interest to have the nations energy supply be dependent on a despotic and corrupt regime with a medieval government. It's foolish and shortsighted for us to continue along the path we are on.
You miss the point that even if we 'kill all the terrorists', more of them are created every day. You say they hate us because we're powerful, wealthy, intelligent etc. If that is the case, then there are only a few future paths for the U.S. 1) Continue business as usual, and be prepared to deal with the fact that we will always be hated, and will always be the target of violence. 2) Give up our power, wealth, education, etc and turn ourselves into a third world country. 3) Try to spread our wealth and success to the rest of the world.
Most of the brainwashed American masses think that option (1) is the patriotic option, despite the fact that it puts us in the losing situation of trying to fight the whole world and will probably end up in option (2) in the long run. A true patriot would realize that the only long-term path with any semblance of national security is (3). Note that (3) is not what most corporations think about when they are going overseas. They are most certainly not interested in exporting any of the things which make America a very livable place, such as environmental protections, labor laws, etc. Rather they are looking to avoid all of the pesky government 'intrusions' that try to make them act the least bit responsible or decent. They want the 'right' to pollute as much as they want, pay the lowest possible wages, and run like hell taking all of their capitol as soon as the next country looks like it will accept more pollution and even lower wages. Or as soon as they have extracted all the natural resources. Then people like you wonder why the masses in these countries aren't grateful that we gave them our pollution and paid them slave labor wages and strip mined their country.
That's why 'globalization' is such a hot topic. Corporations talk about a level playing field, but what they are really looking for is a way out of the basic regulations that keep America from being a 3rd world country. The Blame America First Club, as you like to call it, wants globalization to mean exporting our labor and environmental laws, our democratic government, as well as capital investment. Corporations are interested in maximizing profits by avoiding labor and environmental regulations. Usually this means avoiding any true democracy as well, since most people actually like things like being paid a decent wage and having clean water to drink and vote accordingly.
When
802.11a is great until everyone else moves there too. But it's not all bad. It's not hard to find out what frequency most devices use. And since the range is so short on all of these, it's not hard to do what you want and still have things work. I tend to use 2.4GHz for 802.11b gear. For a cordless phone, 900MHz still works fine. IR works fine for Palm syncing and such. You can't really expect to buy every 2.4GHz toy on the market and get them all working well in one room. But like I said, the range is small, so you can be the 'FCC' of your house and plan accordingly without too much bother.
Yes, the FCC specifies that the device has to expect interference. It does not specify that it has to keep working! I've taken an FHSS connection off the air by trying to do a site survey with 802.11b gear in the same room. I've seen 802.11b gear garble up the image coming out off a 2.4GHz wireless camera. Most 2.4GHz phones will completely overpower 802.11 gear. I've got a 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer, and the amount of radiation spit off from the 2.4GHz phones has conviced me that you do not want one near your head, much less near your WLAN. The FCC in no way specifies that all this stuff has to keep working when they are all in the same room. I think they just have to not permanently break when they get interference. Probably as long as they don't catch on fire, the FCC will approve it.
Actually, 802.11b is a DSSS-only technology. 802.11 specified both a FHSS and DSSS modulation layer running at 2Mbps max. 802.11b is an extension to 802.11 which specifies 5.5Mbps and 11Mbps speeds for the DSSS modulation only. If you can select a channel, as you can for all 802.11b gear, than it is not FHSS. After all, if you are frequency-hopping, it doesn't make much sense to specify a single frequency, does it?
If you are doing much 802.11 work, I highly recommend IEEE 802.11 Handboook A Designer's Companion by Bob O'Hara and Al Petrick. It explains all of this is good detail, while still being easy to read and cheap compared to buying the actual standards from IEEE and trying to read them.
You always hear this arguement. Were any of the people involved in your groups discussions actually lawyers? Did your group have problems accepting the EULA that came with the software you did use? Because that EULA surely disclaimed all warranties.
So I'm wondering, did you have lawyers who advised you that you could win a lawsuit despite the EULA? Or did you all just ignore the fact you made a decision based on your ability to sue, and then promptly agreed to a license which keeps you from suing? I mean, did anyone ever bring up the fact that you can't sue either open source developers or mass market software vendors? Since neither party can be successfully sued if the software misbehaves, you may as well complain that open source software doesn't enable you to fly around like the folks in the WinXP commercials, so you are going to stay away from Linux.
Larry's part is easy:
SQL> CREATE TABLE identification_table (
Name text,
Address text,
SSN text,
Politicial_Affiliation text,
Credit_Rating text,
Criminal bool
);
Of course, the job of filling and maintaining the
database might take a bit longer.
Can you please define exactly what it means for licensing terms to be "non-descriminatory", since the definition has a huge bearing on open source software?
For example which, if any, of the following examples would be non-descriminatory?
A) Fixed per-unit licensing costs. Let's say, for example, $1.00 per unit shipped. While this would be non-descriminatory in some senses, it would also prohibit free software and hence be descriminatory in other ways.
B) Licensing fees only for non-free software. While this method would not descriminate against open source, it could be seen as "descriminating" against closed-source software since they would be the only ones paying licensing fees.
C) Percent-of-price fees. For example, 5% of the price of shipped units. This would seem to be fair since the same licensing terms would apply to everyone, but in practice it would be similar to B) and hence seen as descriminatory.
D) Free for everyone to use. This would seem to be the only license which cannot be viewed as descriminating against someone. On the other hand, I'm fairly certain that this is not what is intended when the W3C uses the term "RAND".
Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated, I'm sure.
The magic word is 'certified'. Linux will never be considered certified because it's open source nature will allow trivial disabling of any security which is included. So, even if Linus et al decide to include the required security protocols in Linux, they would be trivial to remove or circumvent. Most likly, general-purpose computing parts would also not be allowed. All of these technologies will be based upon security-by-obscurity because that is the only avenue available. Look at DVD's if you want to see how these technologies are implemented. As a result, public documentation and open source implementations will not be allowed. If they were, the whole thing would simply be a joke. Once again, see DVD's. Once the CSS algorithm became public knowledge, the protection simply falls apart. All such schemes rely upon obscurity. The proof is simple: the computer ultimately has to have access to the raw data for display purposes. If an end user can get unfettered access to the hardware, they can get unfettered access to the raw data and copy it. Such access will be controlled by restricting the API that an OS is allowed to export. As OS which allows unfettered access via a simple 'insmod', as Linux does, is not likely to be certified. In fact, computers as we know them are not likely to be certifed. A computer as we know it is a general-purpose device. Such general-purpose devices allow far too much access to data to ever meet any satisfactory definition of 'secure'. Your Tivo will be allowed. Your PC, which you could easily run unrestricted Tivo-like software on, will not.
But of course, your point #2 simply reveals you as a simple troll. If the majority accepts the elimination of fair-use, then those of us who complain are criminals? Is that your point? Do you really think that all citizens can be grouped into A) Those who blindly accept any new restrictions place upon them and B) criminals?
The whole phrase "digital rights management" is a BS term if I ever heard one. It's all about use restrictions. They only call them "rights" because it's a nice feel-good term, even though it doesn't describe the technology at all. Just replace "rights" with "restrictions" and the quotes read much more easily and honestly:
This will open a Pandora's box," he said, promoting the idea of "elaborate restrictions." These, he said, could move the concept of buy-once restrictions to time-based restrictions -- "you can make it so the user can, say, only read this book on Tuesday" -- or location-based restrictions.
Are there any good books accessable to a layman which explain Bell's theorem and the associated experiements? I've never understood why people insist that there can't be a hidden variable, when it is far and away the simplest explanation for these phenomenon.
Did I miss the Napster IPO or something? Where are they going to get these huge sums of money to pay off these fines? I mean really. I see Napster agreeing to pay huge amounts of cash out to various people to settle all of the lawsuits. To date, they haven't collected any money from their users. Did they really get that much money from private investors? Are the investors really stupid enough to keep pouring money down this sinkhole? You would have thought that the bottom dropping out of the dot.com business would have brought these guys to their senses, but I guess not. I propose that all future Napster payout stories get filed under the "More Money Than Brains" department.
I agree that different cultures can have "cultural absolutes" that are different and incompatible, but I am talking about human absolutes.
Ah, and pray tell how one distinguishes these "human absolutes" from mere "cultural absolutes"? Because they are the ones that Americans currently believe in? Hmmm? Because they are the ones that you personally believe in? You can't tell! That's the whole point! Some people think it's an absolute evil to eat meat. Some people think eating meat is fine (except maybe on Fridays). Whose right? Whose wrong? There isn't any way to judge. Even if you are right, you will never be able to prove it. And you will never be able to provide a procedure for determining which morals are "absolute" and which are "cultural". Even if such an absolute standard exists, it wouldn't matter because we don't have any way of determining what it is! Or even if it exists!
None of which means that it isn't possible to judge that some morals are "better" or "more important" than others. But to do so means to first define what it is you are judging, and on which criteria. We can judge them on whether or not they help produce a stable society. We can judge them on whether or not they produce a fair society.
I think this whole thread is basically a disagreement over how "absolute" is being applied. Reality Master seems to be using the term "absolute" to refer to right and wrong within the current set of western morals. From this point of view, slavery is absolutely wrong. There are no exceptions within modern American morality that allow slavery. So, within this realm, the morals are absolute.
The other side of the argument is using the term "absolute" when comparing different sets of cultural morals. It's clear that slavery was not an absolute wrong at previous times in American history. Hence, this moral "law" is not absolute because at times it has been true, and at times it has been false. It is this truism which leads to moral relativism.
So whose right? I guess everyone. It's all a matter of context. I don't think anyone here disagrees that a given system of morality can have "absolute" rights and wrongs within it. I also don't think anyone will disagree that different systems of morality often have different and incompatable "absolute" rights and wrongs. It's this last truth which is all that moral relativism is really about.
I'm sorry, but trying to squelch negative speech is not as equally dubious as any clause in the GPL. Do you see a clause in the GPL stating that the software may not be used to produce documents which disparage the FSF or RMS? RMS did write emacs. He could easily add such a clause, but he didn't. In fact, the GPL doesn't really care how you use the software at all. Unlike the M$ license, which places numerous restrictions on how you use the software.
Moreover, the restrictions that the GPL does place are on activites which are simply illegal under the M$ license. The GPL is all about what you have to do to legally redistribute the software. The M$ license simply reiterates that redistribution is illegal and will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
So, tell me, exactly how do you equate these two licenses to be equally odious? In the case of how the software may be used: GPL places no restrictions. M$ places numerous restrictions, inlcuding ones which abrige the users first amendment rights. In the case of redistribution: the GPL fundamentally says that you have to redistribute under the same license that you were granted. M$ simply says it will try to have you thown in jail if you redistribute their software.
They are not even comparable. In fact, they are almost opposites. The M$ EULA exists solely for the purpose of taking away rights which are granted to the user under copyright law. The GPL exists solely for the purpose of granting the user rights which do not exist under copyright law. One gives, the other takes away. They are not equally
The government has already done a lot of research into the area, and pretty much implemented a whole key-escrow system. Nobody used it and as a result it was a flop. To be honest, I don't know how much of the supporting infrastructure was actually deployed.
The basics of Clipper worked like this. The system was based on hardware encryption chips which implemented the protocol. No software versions existed AFAIK for obvious reasons. Each and every chip had a unique ID and "unit key". Each encrypted transmission had a Law Enforcement Access Field (or LEAF) prepended to it. The LEAF consisted primarily of the current session key encrypted with the unit key of the sending chip and it's ID number. I believe the whole LEAF was then encrypted with a single key shared by all chips.
On the law enforcement end, the DoJ was supposed to maintain a database of all the chip ID / unit keys. There was lots of fancy promises made about the security of the database, and how it would be split it two so that two separate agencies would have to cooperate in order to gain access to the database, etc. All very feel good but in the end un-auditable and basically BS since the regulations guaranteed that there would be no penalty for improper access to the keys.
Anyway, the LEAF field in combination with the database allows access to the session key and hence the plaintext of any message.
The whole scheme has so many problems it's not even funny. Not the least of which are: the whole protocol has to be keep top secret. If you know how to generate a legitimate LEAF field, you know how to generate a bogus LEAF field too. An AT&T researcher published a paper about how to get two Clipper chips to talk to each other with bogus LEAF fields. It took a fair amount of trying to get random LEAF's which had valid checksums, but it was quite doable. Presumably, they won't repeat that mistake. Software implementations are pretty much verboten, since they are far too easy to reverse engineer or tamper with. If you are trying to mandate back-doored encryption, you would pretty much just mandate that all encryption be performed using NSA designed and approved chips manufactured by a secure contractor.
As to what stops you from sending random data, one need only imagine the governments response when they detect that you are sending random data. Such random data would be presumed to be illegally encrypted data, and you would be arrested as such. It's quite possible that you would be freed once you had shown that the data was random. In the mean time, your face would be plastered on the front page of the paper as a "suspected terrorist". You might expect to be held without bail due to the extreme danger a suspected terrorist poses to society. The draconian penalties involved will serve to keep people in check, not any technical ability. Look at the penalties handed down for DMCA violations. Then compare the severity of pirating a movie versus flying an airliner into a building. Finally, scale the DMCA penalties accordingly. You can imagine the outcome.
Your missing the point. Normal users don't need to accept the GPL. All the things that a user wants to do are allowed by copyright law, so the GPL isn't even an issue.
Where it kicks in is if somebody want to redistribute the original works or a derivative. Since distributing copies of copyrighted work is illegal, a license is needed from the copyright holder. Normally, you would have to contact the copyright holder and negotiate terms. In the case of GPL'd software, a license is provided with the software. If you agree to that license, then you can distribute the software. Without agreeing to the license, you are breaking the law by distributing the software.
That's why the GPL has never been to court, and most likely never will. If you argue that you didn't accept the terms of the GPL, you would be confessing to breaking copyright law! If you claimed that you didn't accept the license, I'm sure the FSF would be happy to let that assertion stand in court.
"Counsel, didn't your client agree to the terms of the GPL?"
"No sir, your honor. My client never accepted the license, and in fact never even read the included LICENSE file. Instead, he commited criminal and civil copyright violations by distributing copyrighted software without a license!".
Not a good way to get repeat business.
Here is the correct link:
State Department Press Release
We did not give any assistance to the Taliban this year. Here is a link to info from the State department. It explicitly says that none of the money is going to the Taliban. It is being given to the UN and other NGO's, and consists almost entirely of bags of wheat.
Now, I'm not arguing that we haven't supported some really bad governments in the past. I would even argue that quite a few of the governments getting military aid today shouldn't be (Columbia and Israel to name two). But, giving wheat to the UN to distribute to starving Afghans is not the same as supporting the Taliban. Robert Scheer should be ashamed of himself for just plain lying in that article. And you should check your facts.
Actually, I think the WHYs of this action are irrelevant. We need to be looking at all of our foreign policies to try and determine if they are formenting this type of hatred. Historically, America has conducted it's foreign policy with almost no thought to the safety of our homeland. It has simply been treated as impervious. Now it has been shown all too clearly that that is not the case. Don't think for a moment that this little fact has not been noticed by every single adversary the US has.
We can't wait for an adversary to kill a few thousand American's before we decide there is a problem. We need to be proactive and consider whether or not our policies are breeding this type of hatred before Americans die. Take Columbia for example. We're now commited to sending billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Columbian government and military. Now, the FARC revolutionaries are not a nice group of people. But neither is the Columbian military. Perhaps we need to reconsider our aid package to them. Realistically, what the the risks and the benefits? Perhaps we could attach some meaningful human rights strings to the package to force the Columbian government to behave in a less oppressive manner and help force it to the negotiating table. We have a long history of supporting extremely oppressive regimes in the name of questionable causes (Somoza, Pinochet, The Shah, etc.) As long as we support oppresive regimes, we are running the risk that the oppressed are going to attack us.
Take Columbia again. What benefit are we getting from helping Columbia fight it's civil war that justifies risking an attack by FARC on Americans? I sure can't see any. On the other hand, our current dependance on Middle Eastern oil is an unfortunate fact. It very well may be worth the risk of future attacks to keep the oil flowing. But if that's the case, then it would seem obvious that reducing America's dependance on oil should be a top national security objective. Yet the Bush administration's current energy policies project dramatic increases in our reliance on foreign oil. Supporting public transportation, alternative energy sources, and increased efficiency seem like clear steps to increasing our national security. You don't have to be a tree-hugger to realize that trying to avoid future WTC-type attacks is a good idea.
Of course, all of my points are open to debate. What's amazing is the complete and total silence on any of these topics in the mass media. I have heard not a single mention at any point of how our foreign policy increases or decreases the liklihood of attack. Not a bit. At least here on Slashdot we are discussing the truly relevant issues.
Really, conservation of energy supports the idea of the turbine cooling the building. Or at least the air passing thru the turbine. The turbine is outputting energy in the form of electricity. Where did that energy come from? Primarily the kinetic energy of the wind. Since heat is pretty much a specialized type of kinetic energy, it's not hard to imagine that the turbine would extract some amount of heat from the air.
I'm not an expert in the field, and I can imagine the opposite happening too. The turbine would take kinetic energy out of the air and convert it to both heat in the air and energy in the turbine. But neither case would violate the conservation of energy.