You are saying that this system was invented to aid theives in marketing their stolen goods and that Rabbis are cooperating in the plot?
Dude, the theives don't have the "password". The only one who can provide authentication to the prospective buyer is the Rabbi. The system is for the Rabbi to prove that a "random" scroll is his property.
Look. Here's how it works. I have a 100 year old violin. It has scratches and other unique markings on it. I take a close up picture of those scratches. Now if my violin is stolen and the police call me up to say they've recovered a violin and ask me to ID it I have documents that can show incontrovertably that it is mine.
How does this aid the thief in selling my violin?
How would a prospective buyer know that the violin isn't a repro and the photo ID that the seller shows him of the violin to "authenticate" it aren't simply photos the thief himself took of the repro?
I'm damn sure not going to go along with the thief to tell the prospective buyer, "Yup. That violin's authentic and hot alrighty. I'd pay top dollar if I were you."
More attention should be focused on solving the problem itself than making it easier to apprehend the criminals.
If I can pick it up, I can steal it. The only thing that keeps your TV safe from me while still being of any value to you is that I don't want to steal it.
How do you propose to make money that theives don't want to steal, without making it valuless?
The government of the Netherlands once offered a prize to anyone who could invent a bicycle that couldn't be stolen. No one ever claimed the prize, because the only way you can make it merely difficult to steal is to make it not a bicycle.
Yes, all you have to do to produce a cheap copy to leave lying around to be stolen is spend a year hand lettering it on parchment hundreds of years old.
Then of course there is the issue that Torahs aren't "left lying around." You don't just stick one on the shelf like a King James Bible. If you find one in the authentic location, it's authentic. It's not just a good idea, it's God's law.
The remaining question is, how do you suppose anyone is going to use software to authenticate the scroll if. ..they don't have the reference? And what has that got to do with OSS anyway?
This basically boils down to comparing jpegs. If you give me a peice of paper with a signature on it and I take a picture of it, I can't tell you if the signature is genuine, but at a later date I can tell you if it is the same piece of paper, and I don't even need software at all to do this. Software just makes it easier.
Don't you guys ever get tired of this particular bit of silliness?
So tell me, how many CDs do you need for propriatary software? A quick jog down the aisles of Best Buy infers quite a large number; and at a rather higher cost than for just the blank media.
Aside from the obvious gaffe that others are already taking you to task for, I might point out that the rise of email on ARPANET ran very slightly ahead of microprocessor development.
NEVER_ have I heard the term "hybrid" applied to trains, which are generally called diesel-electric.
Yes you have, in my last post. You are relying on what things are commonly called.
I am relying on what they are as an engineering system.
And, as it happens, any number of hybrid cars could just as properly be called diesel-electrics. In fact, the very first Porsche designed car was a diesel-electric hybrid. It did not have regenerative braking.
. . . it's the public demanding the design of current hybrids.
The public is not demanding hybrids at all. In fact they are pretty much ignoring them and buying conventional gasoline engined cars, because that's what they are comfortable doing.
. ..those commuting in from the valley, glendale, burbank, or even worse Riverside county.
These would not be people who constiture the population of LA then, would they?
And it's no wonder they can't afford to live in LA, seeing as how much of their income is going into their commute.
The NYC metropolitan area is actually just as sprawling as the valley, although it is not commonly thought of as such. It includes half of Long Island, a good chunk of North Jersey, most of southern NY state and south western CT.
I have relatives who commute daily into Manhattten, and I have relatives who live and work in Manhatten. Interestingly is the rich relatives who "cannot afford to live in Manhatten" who commute, and the poor ones who are constrained to live on the island itself, because they cannot afford to live in CT but work in the city.
Most of my rich relatives think everyone commutes into the city as well, because they drive straight from Long Island or Westchester to their midtown workplaces.
They never, ever go to Harlem, which, as it happens, is part of the statistics. The poor neighborhoods count.
Why yes, yes I do. I'm currently working on HP/electric hybrid vehicles myself, eliminating the internal combustion engine entirely from the equation.
It works by recapturing energy that would have been dissipated as heat on the brake pads.
No it does not. It works by combining elements of both combustion and electric motors, hence the term hybrid. Regenerative braking is a feature that may be included in any vehicle which uses an electric motor for propulsion, but is not in any way innate to such a system and many electrics and hybrids do not use regenerative braking.
Take your basic diesel/electric locomotive, for instance (hybrids aren't even vaguely "new" technology and go back to the late 1800s in automotive use).
In any case you are falling prey to the narrow focus point of view. You see energy being saved in one area and simply assume that that equates and an overall savings of energy.
What, do you suppose, is the energy cost of creating such a system?
I'm not talking about "gas milage." I'm talking about true, overall savings of energy. Current hybrids do not save energy. They obtain their "savings" by stealing it from some some other point in the chain not immediately obvious to the "consumer" who owns and operates one.
For instance, the manufacture, disposal and recycling of batteries for the electric motor.
Just because an engineering tradeoff has been hidden from your view doesn't mean that it hasn't been made, and may even represent an overall energy loss to give you your feeling of a gain, represented by slightly better gas milage.
One of the reasons hybrids are so expensive is because they are not mass produced in the sense that an Escort is mass produced. ..,
But the main reason is because you, as the consumer, is paying for those energy costs up front, instead of dribbling it out every time you fill the tank.
If somebody were so bold as to actually build a hybrid on a proper foundation (which relies strictly on the electric motors to provide drive, the combustion engine being there merely to turn a generator) things might improve somewhat, but the public does not seem ready to adandon the idea that a combustion engine is necessary somehow to provide drive.
None of the 100,000 exhausts has adequate legal representation. The one power plant has teams of lawyers and all the congressmen they can buy, which is a lot of congressmen since they have a lot of money.
You are assuming the playing field is level. It is not.
I am not aligned with the oil industry. I'm aligned with the electric car and bicycle industry. I have been personally promoting the idea of hybrid cars since the 1970s, although I do not currently own a car at all, because I am "anti" oil industry.
As they exist today electrics and hybrids do not help in reducing overall pollution or save energy, although they could be a great boon to cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo for local reductions. That simply means that the pollution goes where there is less of it now though.
And they're not as much of a boon as bicycles. In LA it is usually sunny and pleasantly warm; and the last time I looked up the statistics 90% of the population lived within 5 miles of work.
It takes 20 minutes to drive to work, and 15 to bicycle. Thank God for modern time saving devices that threaten our lives and effectively bankrupt us pursasing, maintaining, fueling and insuring ourselves against the damage we're going to do with them. What would we do without them?
Because disposing of old appliances and manufacturing new ones saves energy and is good for the environment. ..if you make appliances.
A cynic who looked at the whole thing closely, beginning to end, might just come the conclusion that the whole thing smacks at least as much of trying to get consumers out spending as it does "saving energy."
Hey everybody, get in the car. We're going to drive to the mall shop for Gaia!
I've just tried to fiddle in my Mac. You're right, I don't even come close to fitting in there, let alone have enough room to bow. My AMD box has a lot more room inside, but it's all taken up with cabling and fans. I can hardly hear my fiddle outside the box.
My mom's mac is a PCI machine. I may not be able to fiddle in it, but I can install and change cards. She's running OS8. I'm running OS7 on mine.
Neither one of them gets counted in the market share statistics, although at least my mom's gets counted in web statistics. She's never gotten a virus. Neither has my Mac, but I cheat . ..I've never hooked it up to a net. Pretty much nobody but me, (and you folks look like I can trust you and you won't tell) even knows it exists, yet it has remained part of the installed base for many years.
And I can state catagorically that the installed base of Tandy Color Micros may be small, but it is not zero.
"Quite how the US govt' needs details on a credit card that has not been involved in a monetary transaction is beyond."
Let alone for "tax purposes" by a noncitizen, because those "tax purposes" they are refering to mean your taxes, not theirs.
The US government now likes to monitor the spending habits of people for a priori suspicion of being a drug dealer or member of organized crime (and now, of course, "terrorism"), and in certain situations cash transactions trigger a commercial reporting flag, or even require the citizen to file papers with the federal government just to spend their money.
Using credit cards is one way to avoid the more blatent cash reporting requirements, charge stuff and then pay it off just outside the reporting range, so the government deals with this now by tracking overall spending on credit cards to look for people just trying to handle/spend their money without setting off the federal alarm bells or having to fill out the offensive forms, which makes you look twice as "guilty," because why would you mind the feds looking up your financial rectum if you weren't "hiding" something up there?
That's the way stuff like this always works. First you monitor, but then find you have to monitor for people avoiding the monitoring, and then monitor for. ..
A priori monitoring is always a not at all or under a microscope sort of deal by its very nature.
There is no further step you can take to nuke your data. You are already under suspicion of being under suspicion.
As you might go berserk and rip up an out of print book worth hundreds of dollars, and yet you don't need a library card at all to have access to it.
Yes, the system is dumb, that is to say the proof of identity concept for mere access to library materials is dumb, not the anonymous library card idea.
Oddly enough, after posting it for years and years I'm getting a bit tired of it myself. If you can get the other posters to come up with something more original in the way of misconceptions I'd be glad to give a more original correction.
As it is I find myself in the postion of Mark Twain when he threatened to quit writing for his paper because he'd said everything before.
His editor told him:
I know, but you have to keep saying it until they get it.
No, it's not. They all do that. Check out any electric car already on the road, or any large scale electric R/C car if it comes to that. No tranny. No need. Maximum torque at 0 rpm.
They also seem to have "invented" a brushless DC motor that we've been using for years and is already available off the shelf. The R/C plane people in particular, where every ounce is critical, love these things. It's the microchip that made them practical by timing the phase shifts.
Slashdot Mirror
You are saying that this system was invented to aid theives in marketing their stolen goods and that Rabbis are cooperating in the plot?
Dude, the theives don't have the "password". The only one who can provide authentication to the prospective buyer is the Rabbi. The system is for the Rabbi to prove that a "random" scroll is his property.
Look. Here's how it works. I have a 100 year old violin. It has scratches and other unique markings on it. I take a close up picture of those scratches. Now if my violin is stolen and the police call me up to say they've recovered a violin and ask me to ID it I have documents that can show incontrovertably that it is mine.
How does this aid the thief in selling my violin?
How would a prospective buyer know that the violin isn't a repro and the photo ID that the seller shows him of the violin to "authenticate" it aren't simply photos the thief himself took of the repro?
I'm damn sure not going to go along with the thief to tell the prospective buyer, "Yup. That violin's authentic and hot alrighty. I'd pay top dollar if I were you."
KFG
More attention should be focused on solving the problem itself than making it easier to apprehend the criminals.
If I can pick it up, I can steal it. The only thing that keeps your TV safe from me while still being of any value to you is that I don't want to steal it.
How do you propose to make money that theives don't want to steal, without making it valuless?
The government of the Netherlands once offered a prize to anyone who could invent a bicycle that couldn't be stolen. No one ever claimed the prize, because the only way you can make it merely difficult to steal is to make it not a bicycle.
Because I can pick it up.
KFG
Yes, all you have to do to produce a cheap copy to leave lying around to be stolen is spend a year hand lettering it on parchment hundreds of years old.
.they don't have the reference? And what has that got to do with OSS anyway?
Then of course there is the issue that Torahs aren't "left lying around." You don't just stick one on the shelf like a King James Bible. If you find one in the authentic location, it's authentic. It's not just a good idea, it's God's law.
The remaining question is, how do you suppose anyone is going to use software to authenticate the scroll if. .
This basically boils down to comparing jpegs. If you give me a peice of paper with a signature on it and I take a picture of it, I can't tell you if the signature is genuine, but at a later date I can tell you if it is the same piece of paper, and I don't even need software at all to do this. Software just makes it easier.
KFG
14 CDs is the cost of OSS now huh?
Don't you guys ever get tired of this particular bit of silliness?
So tell me, how many CDs do you need for propriatary software? A quick jog down the aisles of Best Buy infers quite a large number; and at a rather higher cost than for just the blank media.
KFG
Aside from the obvious gaffe that others are already taking you to task for, I might point out that the rise of email on ARPANET ran very slightly ahead of microprocessor development.
Think about it.
Other than that I'm with you.
KFG
So going without would mean not bothering coming into work at all.
Hey, works for me.
KFG
Yeah? So where is the logical inconsistency in claiming that "everyone's addicted to email" and then giving a demonstration of such?
This story is a "See? I told you so."
In any case dude, you are neglecting the fact that saying, "I could quit if I wanted to," is one of the signs of addiction.
Addicts don't make up their minds. Their addictions do.
KFG
Oh I don't know. If I get to pick who I socially lubricate I can see certain advantages in it.
KFG
So what was the intent anyway?
You left sarcasm off your list.
KFG
NEVER_ have I heard the term "hybrid" applied to trains, which are generally called diesel-electric.
Yes you have, in my last post. You are relying on what things are commonly called.
I am relying on what they are as an engineering system.
And, as it happens, any number of hybrid cars could just as properly be called diesel-electrics. In fact, the very first Porsche designed car was a diesel-electric hybrid. It did not have regenerative braking.
. . . it's the public demanding the design of current hybrids.
The public is not demanding hybrids at all. In fact they are pretty much ignoring them and buying conventional gasoline engined cars, because that's what they are comfortable doing.
KFG
. . .those commuting in from the valley, glendale, burbank, or even worse Riverside county.
These would not be people who constiture the population of LA then, would they?
And it's no wonder they can't afford to live in LA, seeing as how much of their income is going into their commute.
The NYC metropolitan area is actually just as sprawling as the valley, although it is not commonly thought of as such. It includes half of Long Island, a good chunk of North Jersey, most of southern NY state and south western CT.
I have relatives who commute daily into Manhattten, and I have relatives who live and work in Manhatten. Interestingly is the rich relatives who "cannot afford to live in Manhatten" who commute, and the poor ones who are constrained to live on the island itself, because they cannot afford to live in CT but work in the city.
Most of my rich relatives think everyone commutes into the city as well, because they drive straight from Long Island or Westchester to their midtown workplaces.
They never, ever go to Harlem, which, as it happens, is part of the statistics. The poor neighborhoods count.
KFG
Do you know how a hybrid works?
.,
Why yes, yes I do. I'm currently working on HP/electric hybrid vehicles myself, eliminating the internal combustion engine entirely from the equation.
It works by recapturing energy that would have been dissipated as heat on the brake pads.
No it does not. It works by combining elements of both combustion and electric motors, hence the term hybrid. Regenerative braking is a feature that may be included in any vehicle which uses an electric motor for propulsion, but is not in any way innate to such a system and many electrics and hybrids do not use regenerative braking.
Take your basic diesel/electric locomotive, for instance (hybrids aren't even vaguely "new" technology and go back to the late 1800s in automotive use).
In any case you are falling prey to the narrow focus point of view. You see energy being saved in one area and simply assume that that equates and an overall savings of energy.
What, do you suppose, is the energy cost of creating such a system?
I'm not talking about "gas milage." I'm talking about true, overall savings of energy. Current hybrids do not save energy. They obtain their "savings" by stealing it from some some other point in the chain not immediately obvious to the "consumer" who owns and operates one.
For instance, the manufacture, disposal and recycling of batteries for the electric motor.
Just because an engineering tradeoff has been hidden from your view doesn't mean that it hasn't been made, and may even represent an overall energy loss to give you your feeling of a gain, represented by slightly better gas milage.
One of the reasons hybrids are so expensive is because they are not mass produced in the sense that an Escort is mass produced. .
But the main reason is because you, as the consumer, is paying for those energy costs up front, instead of dribbling it out every time you fill the tank.
If somebody were so bold as to actually build a hybrid on a proper foundation (which relies strictly on the electric motors to provide drive, the combustion engine being there merely to turn a generator) things might improve somewhat, but the public does not seem ready to adandon the idea that a combustion engine is necessary somehow to provide drive.
KFG
None of the 100,000 exhausts has adequate legal representation. The one power plant has teams of lawyers and all the congressmen they can buy, which is a lot of congressmen since they have a lot of money.
You are assuming the playing field is level. It is not.
KFG
I am not aligned with the oil industry. I'm aligned with the electric car and bicycle industry. I have been personally promoting the idea of hybrid cars since the 1970s, although I do not currently own a car at all, because I am "anti" oil industry.
As they exist today electrics and hybrids do not help in reducing overall pollution or save energy, although they could be a great boon to cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo for local reductions. That simply means that the pollution goes where there is less of it now though.
And they're not as much of a boon as bicycles. In LA it is usually sunny and pleasantly warm; and the last time I looked up the statistics 90% of the population lived within 5 miles of work.
It takes 20 minutes to drive to work, and 15 to bicycle. Thank God for modern time saving devices that threaten our lives and effectively bankrupt us pursasing, maintaining, fueling and insuring ourselves against the damage we're going to do with them. What would we do without them?
KFG
Because disposing of old appliances and manufacturing new ones saves energy and is good for the environment. . .if you make appliances.
A cynic who looked at the whole thing closely, beginning to end, might just come the conclusion that the whole thing smacks at least as much of trying to get consumers out spending as it does "saving energy."
Hey everybody, get in the car. We're going to drive to the mall shop for Gaia!
KFG
I've just tried to fiddle in my Mac. You're right, I don't even come close to fitting in there, let alone have enough room to bow. My AMD box has a lot more room inside, but it's all taken up with cabling and fans. I can hardly hear my fiddle outside the box.
.I've never hooked it up to a net. Pretty much nobody but me, (and you folks look like I can trust you and you won't tell) even knows it exists, yet it has remained part of the installed base for many years.
My mom's mac is a PCI machine. I may not be able to fiddle in it, but I can install and change cards. She's running OS8. I'm running OS7 on mine.
Neither one of them gets counted in the market share statistics, although at least my mom's gets counted in web statistics. She's never gotten a virus. Neither has my Mac, but I cheat . .
And I can state catagorically that the installed base of Tandy Color Micros may be small, but it is not zero.
Can't even kazoo in that puppy.
KFG
I am looking forward to the day when, like on the moon, I see the Stars and Stripes planted in the Martian soil.
As am I, and I'm sure the Indians we hire to put it there will feel a sense of pride in their accomplishment.
KFG
It's hangin' out with the brave little toaster.
KFG
"Quite how the US govt' needs details on a credit card that has not been involved in a monetary transaction is beyond."
.
Let alone for "tax purposes" by a noncitizen, because those "tax purposes" they are refering to mean your taxes, not theirs.
The US government now likes to monitor the spending habits of people for a priori suspicion of being a drug dealer or member of organized crime (and now, of course, "terrorism"), and in certain situations cash transactions trigger a commercial reporting flag, or even require the citizen to file papers with the federal government just to spend their money.
Using credit cards is one way to avoid the more blatent cash reporting requirements, charge stuff and then pay it off just outside the reporting range, so the government deals with this now by tracking overall spending on credit cards to look for people just trying to handle/spend their money without setting off the federal alarm bells or having to fill out the offensive forms, which makes you look twice as "guilty," because why would you mind the feds looking up your financial rectum if you weren't "hiding" something up there?
That's the way stuff like this always works. First you monitor, but then find you have to monitor for people avoiding the monitoring, and then monitor for. .
A priori monitoring is always a not at all or under a microscope sort of deal by its very nature.
There is no further step you can take to nuke your data. You are already under suspicion of being under suspicion.
KFG
As you might go berserk and rip up an out of print book worth hundreds of dollars, and yet you don't need a library card at all to have access to it.
Yes, the system is dumb, that is to say the proof of identity concept for mere access to library materials is dumb, not the anonymous library card idea.
KFG
Unless im mistaken, you would have to have the balance of a PC. . .
Because you are taking the PC home with you?
KFG
And rather than make two small piles of garbage. . .
Sing it with me the next time it comes around on the guitar.
KFG
Oddly enough, after posting it for years and years I'm getting a bit tired of it myself. If you can get the other posters to come up with something more original in the way of misconceptions I'd be glad to give a more original correction.
As it is I find myself in the postion of Mark Twain when he threatened to quit writing for his paper because he'd said everything before.
His editor told him:
I know, but you have to keep saying it until they get it.
KFG
No, it's not. They all do that. Check out any electric car already on the road, or any large scale electric R/C car if it comes to that. No tranny. No need. Maximum torque at 0 rpm.
They also seem to have "invented" a brushless DC motor that we've been using for years and is already available off the shelf. The R/C plane people in particular, where every ounce is critical, love these things. It's the microchip that made them practical by timing the phase shifts.
KFG
And now, with a bacterial printing press, they can read it. Just what we need, literate bacteria.
KFG