> My fingerprints are in at least one government database > (for non-criminal reasons). It doesn't bother me. > When I decide to rob banks or kill people, then I'll be worried.
Remember that fingerprints in the database are stored as encoded strings describing the location of some branching points in the ridge patterns. Essentially a hash function.
Note that the data on which the hash is constructed is subject to scaling and rotation of the captured image. Note that selection of the points is hard in some people's patterns (because there may be unusually many branch points.
Now note that we are addding a very large amount of new prints to be processed, of which a much lower proportion will ever be needed than in the previous population of the database. There will be extreme pressure to do this quickly and cheaply with less-skilled operators. This will lead to many false matches.
We already have many cases of false matches leading to arrest of innocent people when fingerprint data is shared between FBI and Interpol (made worse by some differences in technical standards between different police organizations. And because most of the victims of these false positives will not be US voters, fixing the problems will not be a high priority.
If you really believe that mass processing of huge fingerprint databases is feasible with acceptably low error rates, you should advocate that a full set of prints for the FBI database should be taken with every US driver's license application. This would have enormous benefits if every fingerprint found at a crime scene could easily be matched. By raising the chance of solving crimes by an order of magnitude, it would create an enormous incentive for people not to commit crimes. But I don't know anyone who trusts the system enough to want this to be done.
Can I assume that the only reason Word 97 is not mentioned on the list of affected products is because Office 97 is no longer supported? Or would I be justified in saying "Whew, we dodged a big one ere by sticking with trusty old Office 97 in this company?"
Is there a non-MS article somewhere that may answer such questions?
It seems to me that this may be an effective way to finally get people to drop Office 97.
Does your comment reflect any analysis of the risks, or it is a kneejerk assumption that lawyers will wedge themselves into any tiny hole and screw you?
Allowing for one 9-1-1 call will make it possible to report a fire in the room. Any individual emergency is unlikely to require multiple calls. The likelyhood af multiple individual emergencies is also very low.
I can see some legitimacy in an objection to blocking emergency calls that the public may have had an expectation of being able to make. Addressing that should make the device more palatable.
However, I will be quite comfortable with not providing such a call path, and instead proving a recording that says "this location does not allow you to make calls, please go outside or use a hard wired telephone in the lobby".
Note that the - unquestionably legal - installation of grounded shielding material around the room will also prevent all calls.
A good cell phone jammer should not be transmitting a garbage signal to compete with the legitimate coverage. It should be an intelligent base station encouraging the cellphones to register. It would then provide a much stronger signal than the more distant real base stations, which would then be disregarded by the mobiles.
The most significant FCC objection to cellphone jammers is a safety issue related to the inability to make emergency calls. A good cellphone jammer would be connected to a phone line, and would allow the phones to make 9-1-1 emergency calls (one at a time).
And yes, I would very much like to install such a device at my church and a few other places.
"We have a similar system in Switzerland. You pay a small fee at the moment of purchase (included in the price) and in turn receive the right to bring back your e-waste to ANY shop for proper recycling/disposal."
As usual, the Swiss excel in systems design. The rule that you can bring it back to any merchant makes sense, and mirrors what I have heard is the rule for packaging materials: All merchants must take back for recycling anything they sell. So people may actually leave excess packaging materials behind at the point of purchase. This makes a lot of sense, because it motivates the merchants to apply back pressure to manufacturers to reduce packaging.
GE did something infinetely more intelligent a few months ago. The last second of their ad was a set of single frames with interesting information. To see what was there, you had to repeatedly watch the ad until you managed to hit pause at just the right time so you could single-step through the hidden content.
That way, (at least some) TiVo owners ended up spending 15 minutes on a 30-second ad. Now THAT's creative!!
> Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and Nigeria are all substantially more wealthy > than India on a per capita basis.
Get your facts straight, please. According to the CIA factbook:
Argentina: USD 13,100 per capita Thailand: USD 8,300 per capita Brazil: USD 7,600 per capita Nigeria: USD 1,400 per capita
India: USD 2,500 per capita
The desktoplinux.com article is backing down a bit from the headline-grabbing claim that purchase orders have been issued: > [Updated Aug. 1, 2006 -- This story was modified to eliminate the impression > given by the original wording that firm, written, legally binding "orders" > had been placed by any of the four countries listed.]
There is probably much less to this than meets the eye.
I am willing to believe that Argentina, Brazil and Thailand will eventually follow through. I am much more sceptical about Nigeria. (On the other hand, Nigeria's population is about 130 million; there may be a large enough middle class that it could make use of 1 million computers.)
WiMax is pretty well standardized from the perspective of protocols and modulations, but unlike WiFi which is developed for use in unlicensed bands, WiMax is primarily intended for use by network operators who will have licensed bands. (There will be some gear available for use in the 5.8GHz unlicensed band, but that is a small fraction of the market.
In North America, the main deployments are expected to be in the 2.5GHz "wireless cable" bands, which are mostly licensed to Sprint, the IFTS (educational TV bands) mostly licensed to Catholic Archdioceses but now authorized for subleasing) and a band around 3.5GHz. Various bands around 3.2, 3.5 and 3.6GHz is also where other parts of the world are expected to deploy these services.
If you are a large provider, like Sprint, you had better get field trials underway by now, or your licenses may be in danger of expiring. And you will be negotiating with a handful of equipment manufacturers for a wholesale deal on equipment working on your licensed frequencies.
If you are a small ISP, you will probably have to look to the unlicensed 5.8GHz, and talk to Alvarion. I have not looked much at who else has equipment for that band. Be aware that the higher frequencies do not travel as far as 2.4GHz, so you may in fact be better off with high-end WiFi kit built from the ground up for outdoor use.
If you are a user, you need to shop around for a service provider, and let them worry about the right equipment.
(I work for a small wireless equipment house that makes low-bandwidth wireless systems for very long range, especially targeted to underdeveloped areas of the world. http://www.afar.net/)
I have not been visit Miz Liberty, so I don't know their specific list of prohibitions, but I was recently at another "tourist site" where the prohibited list included cameras and cellphones. If the list is comprehensive enough that everyone has to use the lockers, then it reduces to "if you are dead set against having your fingerprints recorded, then don't visit".
It used to be assumed that research done at publicly funded universities must serve the public interest, and therefore all research results were destined to pass into the public domain.
Then some graduate students discovered that you could make money on patenting your thesis work. Shortly after that, the universities decided that they own the intellectual property rights to much of that work.
Then some corporations decided that they would be willing to fund university research in return for exclusive rights to the research results. This has now gotten to where some corporations prohibit publication of the trade secrets developed through research they sponsored, sometimes despite (a) the corporation having taken a tax deduction for the money they granted to the school and (b) in some cases only part of the funding came from the company.
I applaud any attempts to restore the public release of university research, and GPL of CS coursework seems like a good step in that direction.
The quoted guidelines appear to be quite GPL compatible. Asking the university lawyers seems like a bad idea. I have never found lawyers to give useful, clear answers to intellectual rights questions. Instead they tend to want to cover the university's buttocks with lots of paper and create unneccesary restrictions.
In which nation would you prefer to have spent time in before WWII?
Any of the Scandinavian countries ? UK ? France ?
The US was not the best place to spend the depression years, although Roosevelt did apply the best solutions he knew of and in a timely manner, too. (The US social security system was a copy of the one that was established in Denmark a year earlier.) But for all of that, the depression did not lift until the all-out deficit spending of the war effort. However, the (western part of the) US was arguably the best place to be in the 50s and 60s.
But every society is a set of trade-offs. Even freedoms are a trade-off. I would like to see a little more "freedom from poverty" and "freedom from crime" than I find in the US today.
... research and markets suggested that 80 percent of the people on earth will never make any kind of phone call in their life!
I think this is outdated. I read somewhere a statement that half the worlds population has never made a phone call. (This was cited as evidence that there is plenty of room for the market to keep growing.) If true, this would indicate that half have already made at least one call, and right now we are increasing that number at a fabulous rate.
Where would one find good date for this information?
Based on my interactions with people doing technology work in less develeoped areas, I would say that the major barriers to an Internet business are:
Economical. The customer base with the ability to pay what it costs to provide the services is a very shallow layer of the population, consiting mostly of a few government officials, a few wealthy individuals and a few expatriate aid experts who want some home comforts. The government tends to be reluctant and suspicious to rely on a private service provider who could be seen as either a foreign opportunist or a beneficiary of nepotism that might upset foreign aid donors. The aid organizations are often the most likely sponsors who may subsidize the service both as a means of delivering technical information as part of their mission and as a personal service for their staff. However, this tends to preclude any truly commercial service from being viable.
Technological: There is generally no usable infrastructure. The most viable service these days would probably be a wireless local delivery network tied to a 64 kbps VSAT uplink.
Compared to these obstacles, the cultural issues you mention seem like a minor issue, at least until the economics raise the possibility of actually serving the masses; and by then the changed economics will almost certainly have changed the cultural assumptions anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
> My fingerprints are in at least one government database
> (for non-criminal reasons). It doesn't bother me.
> When I decide to rob banks or kill people, then I'll be worried.
Remember that fingerprints in the database are stored as encoded strings describing the location of some branching points in the ridge patterns. Essentially a hash function.
Note that the data on which the hash is constructed is subject to scaling and rotation of the captured image. Note that selection of the points is hard in some people's patterns (because there may be unusually many branch points.
Now note that we are addding a very large amount of new prints to be processed, of which a much lower proportion will ever be needed than in the previous population of the database. There will be extreme pressure to do this quickly and cheaply with less-skilled operators. This will lead to many false matches.
We already have many cases of false matches leading to arrest of innocent people when fingerprint data is shared between FBI and Interpol (made worse by some differences in technical standards between different police organizations. And because most of the victims of these false positives will not be US voters, fixing the problems will not be a high priority.
If you really believe that mass processing of huge fingerprint databases is feasible with acceptably low error rates, you should advocate that a full set of prints for the FBI database should be taken with every US driver's license application. This would have enormous benefits if every fingerprint found at a crime scene could easily be matched. By raising the chance of solving crimes by an order of magnitude, it would create an enormous incentive for people not to commit crimes. But I don't know anyone who trusts the system enough to want this to be done.
I think that the only reason Word 97 is not listed as affected is because it is no longer supported.
Can I assume that the only reason Word 97 is not mentioned on the list of affected products is because Office 97 is no longer supported? Or would I be justified in saying "Whew, we dodged a big one ere by sticking with trusty old Office 97 in this company?"
Is there a non-MS article somewhere that may answer such questions?
It seems to me that this may be an effective way to finally get people to drop Office 97.
Does your comment reflect any analysis of the risks, or it is a kneejerk assumption that lawyers will wedge themselves into any tiny hole and screw you?
Allowing for one 9-1-1 call will make it possible to report a fire in the room. Any individual emergency is unlikely to require multiple calls. The likelyhood af multiple individual emergencies is also very low.
I can see some legitimacy in an objection to blocking emergency calls that the public may have had an expectation of being able to make. Addressing that should make the device more palatable.
However, I will be quite comfortable with not providing such a call path, and instead proving a recording that says "this location does not allow you to make calls, please go outside or use a hard wired telephone in the lobby".
Note that the - unquestionably legal - installation of grounded shielding material around the room will also prevent all calls.
A good cell phone jammer should not be transmitting a garbage signal to compete with the legitimate coverage. It should be an intelligent base station encouraging the cellphones to register. It would then provide a much stronger signal than the more distant real base stations, which would then be disregarded by the mobiles.
The most significant FCC objection to cellphone jammers is a safety issue related to the inability to make emergency calls. A good cellphone jammer would be connected to a phone line, and would allow the phones to make 9-1-1 emergency calls (one at a time).
And yes, I would very much like to install such a device at my church and a few other places.
As usual, the Swiss excel in systems design. The rule that you can bring it back to any merchant makes sense, and mirrors what I have heard is the rule for packaging materials: All merchants must take back for recycling anything they sell. So people may actually leave excess packaging materials behind at the point of purchase. This makes a lot of sense, because it motivates the merchants to apply back pressure to manufacturers to reduce packaging.
"recycling must be made free, and by free, I mean paid for by taxes
(as long as it's not a property tax, sales tax increase, or income
tax increase)."
Don't those exceptions mostly cover the field, thus ruling out actually collecting the tax you say you want?
Here in California, we collect a special e-waste fee at the point of sale, i.e. it is a narrowly targeted sales tax.
GE did something infinetely more intelligent a few months ago.
The last second of their ad was a set of single frames with interesting information. To see what was there, you had to repeatedly watch the ad until you managed to hit pause at just the right time so you could single-step through the hidden content.
That way, (at least some) TiVo owners ended up spending 15 minutes on a 30-second ad. Now THAT's creative!!
> Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, and Nigeria are all substantially more wealthy
> than India on a per capita basis.
Get your facts straight, please. According to the CIA factbook:
Argentina: USD 13,100 per capita
Thailand: USD 8,300 per capita
Brazil: USD 7,600 per capita
Nigeria: USD 1,400 per capita
India: USD 2,500 per capita
The desktoplinux.com article is backing down a bit from the headline-grabbing claim that purchase orders have been issued:
> [Updated Aug. 1, 2006 -- This story was modified to eliminate the impression
> given by the original wording that firm, written, legally binding "orders"
> had been placed by any of the four countries listed.]
There is probably much less to this than meets the eye.
I am willing to believe that Argentina, Brazil and Thailand will eventually follow through. I am much more sceptical about Nigeria. (On the other hand, Nigeria's population is about 130 million; there may be a large enough middle class that it could make use of 1 million computers.)
WiMax is pretty well standardized from the perspective of protocols and modulations, but unlike WiFi which is developed for use in unlicensed bands, WiMax is primarily intended for use by network operators who will have licensed bands. (There will be some gear available for use in the 5.8GHz unlicensed band, but that is a small fraction of the market.
In North America, the main deployments are expected to be in the 2.5GHz "wireless cable" bands, which are mostly licensed to Sprint, the IFTS (educational TV bands) mostly licensed to Catholic Archdioceses but now authorized for subleasing) and a band around 3.5GHz. Various bands around 3.2, 3.5 and 3.6GHz is also where other parts of the world are expected to deploy these services.
If you are a large provider, like Sprint, you had better get field trials underway by now, or your licenses may be in danger of expiring. And you will be negotiating with a handful of equipment manufacturers for a wholesale deal on equipment working on your licensed frequencies.
If you are a small ISP, you will probably have to look to the unlicensed 5.8GHz, and talk to Alvarion. I have not looked much at who else has equipment for that band. Be aware that the higher frequencies do not travel as far as 2.4GHz, so you may in fact be better off with high-end WiFi kit built from the ground up for outdoor use.
If you are a user, you need to shop around for a service provider, and let them worry about the right equipment.
(I work for a small wireless equipment house that makes low-bandwidth wireless systems for very long range, especially targeted to underdeveloped areas of the world. http://www.afar.net/)
I have not been visit Miz Liberty, so I don't know their specific list of prohibitions, but I was recently at another "tourist site" where the prohibited list included cameras and cellphones. If the list is comprehensive enough that everyone has to use the lockers, then it reduces to "if you are dead set against having your fingerprints recorded, then don't visit".
I applaud any attempts to restore the public release of university research, and GPL of CS coursework seems like a good step in that direction. The quoted guidelines appear to be quite GPL compatible. Asking the university lawyers seems like a bad idea. I have never found lawyers to give useful, clear answers to intellectual rights questions. Instead they tend to want to cover the university's buttocks with lots of paper and create unneccesary restrictions.
Any of the Scandinavian countries ? UK ? France ? The US was not the best place to spend the depression years, although Roosevelt did apply the best solutions he knew of and in a timely manner, too. (The US social security system was a copy of the one that was established in Denmark a year earlier.) But for all of that, the depression did not lift until the all-out deficit spending of the war effort. However, the (western part of the) US was arguably the best place to be in the 50s and 60s.
But every society is a set of trade-offs. Even freedoms are a trade-off. I would like to see a little more "freedom from poverty" and "freedom from crime" than I find in the US today.
I think this is outdated. I read somewhere a statement that half the worlds population has never made a phone call. (This was cited as evidence that there is plenty of room for the market to keep growing.) If true, this would indicate that half have already made at least one call, and right now we are increasing that number at a fabulous rate.
Where would one find good date for this information?
Compared to these obstacles, the cultural issues you mention seem like a minor issue, at least until the economics raise the possibility of actually serving the masses; and by then the changed economics will almost certainly have changed the cultural assumptions anyway.