The current situation with these units is that they are designed to serve many parties' interests and desires, not just the users. And when there's a conflict, the user will probably lose.
It's not a slam-dunk, but I think that in the long haul, the users (at least the ones who care) are going to win on this. You're some day going to have small machines like this which are totally yours; even if the user has to flash it with their own audited copy of Meego or Android. On the tiny consumer electronics, I think people will eventually end up with devices they can trust, if they want to, even if we've suffered so many setbacks over the last few years. In this form, the problem is temporary.
Cars are a lot more interesting. There is already a long-established precedent of goverment-mandated equipment. GPS hardware and cell network hardware really isn't all that expensive, especially in the context of a car's overall pricetag. Take that thought to its conclusion, and what you may end up with, is your own TomTom or other-branded device which doesn't spy on you, but a car that does, and with legal risks if the owner "tampers" with it. And I think overall the public won't resist this. There won't be mainstream projects like CyanogenMod to upgrade your car to serve you as the highest priority. So in the end, Big Brother will end up winning.. when you are in the car. Take your handheld GPS unit camping, though, and Big Brother (as well as any other little brothers who exploit the system; remember what happened to Greece!) will only know where you parked.
The reason this isn't too alarming, is that use of cars almost always happens in public anyway. Hostile embedded electronics aren't the only sensors. If you speed, something may see you, regardless of whose side your car is on. To me, that makes securing our cars not a battle worth fighting. So it all goes back to, "if you don't like the speed limits, complain about them." Privacy advocates have bigger fish to fry than government's (arguably legitimate) desire to catch speeders. I'm not saying this is something to be happy about, just that it's not very important.
The most amazing thing about the white iPhone is that it's news.
Over-hyped stories aren't a new phenomenon, but this one surely has to have set some coverage-to-banality world records, in a way that even Justin Bieber's talent agent wouldn't be able to remotely imagine while getting loaded up on MDMA and writing a marketing-fantasy-novel.
samzenpus, I don't know who you are. For all I know, you're the name of a script that compares keywords in article submissions to Twitter trends. But on the off chance that you're a human, maybe you could tell us why you thought the color of some plastic (not even an article about a technically-challenging(?) manufacturing process, but just the fact that it's for sale) was post-worthy. Really, this isn't rhetorical: why did you post it instead of laughing it off?
I'm not putting down the white iPhone. I can understand why some people might want it; but what's interesting about it?
Why don't all these checkout clerks become lawyers, programmers, senators, or whatever it is that you believe to be important? The answer, of course, is that the market is already full.
I think that's an oversimplification. There are lots of reasons they might take the less glamorous job. Some of those (lawyer, programmer) take some skill or education. You've got a point about the Senator market having limited demand, but that's a special case (and even that market isn't as limited as we make it be).
And one thing I'm sure of, is that the market is never full. It's never even remotely close to full. Granted, I don't have the imagination or ideas to figure out what is still missing (if I did, I would be an entrepreneur instead of an employee), but there are plenty of people who see beyond all the limitations that many of us incorrectly place on ourselves. Saying the market is full reminds me of those amusing quotes like "everything that can be invented has been invented" or "the world market has room for 6 computers." Believe me, there's somebody out there right now who is scrambling to do something new, and his problem is that he only has so many hours in a day, rather than worrying about a "full" market. And when we hear about what he's doing, we're all going to slap our foreheads. (Good grief, who would have ever guessed something as dumb as Twitter could be a business?)
A single farmer with modern equipment can feed hundreds of people. A factory worker making clothes can make hundreds of garments a day. High efficiency means that only a fraction of the population is actually needed to do everything. Only that leaves the rest unemployed and unable to buy anything.
When everyone really believes that, we'll be living the in the Star Trek economy and celebrating unemployment rather than dreading it, because we won't need to buy things. You'll say, "Computer, Earl Grey," and that will be that. At that level of efficiency, the premise behind all current economic systems (resources are scarce) will be violated.
All the "green" causes would be already won. If farming were really as easy as you say, the world could be fed without cutting down forests for farmland or adding fertilizers that end up in the oceans, because the costs of sustainability could be easily born (or rather, the subsidy of externalizing wouldn't be "needed"). The clothing factory could run on nearly-"free" energy and fiber supply. The statements that "nuclear energy is too cheap to bother metering" wouldn't be seen as a joke; it would just be a statement of fact.
Every cost we pay ultimately comes down to peoples' labor for which there is a limited supply. Coal and uranium and the ingredients for making solar cells -- as well as clothing and food -- really arefree, if you totally ignore the human cost of getting these things, cleaning up byproducts, etc.
The problem with unemployment isn't that there isn't anything for people to do; it's with figuring out what to do. I know it's hard; I'll even admit I'm not smart enough to solve it. But nevertheless that is the problem, and every time we automate something (assuming the labor cost of providing that automation is less than the labor it saves) we get a little more wealth and narrow down the "what to do" list.
Can a procedurally generated page be protected by copyright?
Good point. Beats the hell out of me.
I bet Pixar has an opinion.;-) (Yeah, yeah, I know that's not really analogous.) Apple definitely has a certain opinion on the matter, though I think their current strategy is along the lines that you suggest (trademark).
Also, what would this line of attack have to say about things like AdBlock?
AdBlock doesn't redistribute the modified work; it is entirely on behalf of the reader. If MediaCom distributed a browser that pulls these shenanigans, or gave users a proxy to install on user machines instead of running their own customers-can't-opt-out proxy, then they would likely be in the clear.
And what AdBlock does do, isn't for commercial gain.
(Err... that's all traditional copyright-related reasoning. There might be a DMCA angle here, but I haven't worked it out. My hunch is that anything a blocking plugin or proxy does, isn't any more DMCA-illegal than the browser itself is. But that reasoning is probably flawed, else software couldn't be illegal without its underlying hardware being illegal.)
Have you ever heard of the United States Postal Service?
1990's totally-unbelievable fantastic paranoid delusions are ho-hum mainstream knowledge now. If we didn't already have a USPS, and someone were to suggest creating it today, seriously: would you trust it to be your mail provider? I think nearly everyone would just assume the service's real purpose would be to monitor citizens.
USPS was founded during a time when government's reputation was very different.
Not that I am in favor of infinite detention or this whole debacle, really, but who made that rule?
The people who ratified the 5th amendment a couple centuries ago, and all the people since then who have chosen to not repeal it.
GITMO isn't part of the American criminal justice system
That's the complaint about it. There is a very basic and easy-to-understand principle behind the 5th amendment, and it doesn't go away simply because of certain interpretations of what "no person" means. If people think the 5th amendment is a bad idea that they no longer agree with, they should work to repeal it. Ignoring it, though, is just plain lawlessness. Not that I'm particularly lawful either, but this is the fucking government we're talking about. Without law, they're nothing.
The reason is that it is a small contribution of me keeping people at work and not have them replaced by machines.
Eww, replacing people with machines is desirable. It frees up the people to do something more important, instead of a tedious job of threshing grain, carrying buckets of water, digging trenches with shovels, or adding up columns of numbers. (Or writing variations of the same subroutine over and over -- yep, part of the job of a programmer is to replace himself.) The point of technological progress is to make things cheaper (which also often leads to making it practical to make things better) and ultimately, making things cheaper always comes down to not wasting peoples' time on tedious things that could be automated.
And yet, your conclusion is correct anyway. What's fucked up about self-checkout is that it isn't technological progress, because it doesn't replace a person with a machine; it just replaces a person with another person. And the new person (the customer) is less well practiced/skilled at the activity than the old person (checkout clerk). If anything, the expert is so good at the job that they're mentally on auto-pilot anyway, so you could even argue it replaces a (semi-) machine with a person, making it a technological regression. (Ah, the joys of externalizing costs.) It's sort of like they're un-invented the assembly line by selling assemble-it-yourself kits.
You're foolish to think that the same information isn't collected by Android, Blackberry and other phones along with your wireless carrier. It's like believing that Google doesn't track searches and click throughs
People know that when they use Google, Google's servers will use everything they learn from the conversation, to Google's advantage. But Firefox and Safari don't report all searches and clickthroughs to Google; the client itself is either neutral or pro-user (ideally). Likewise, people know that the cell tower network can perceive phones moving around, but this happens without the phone being "in on it" (other than the mere fact that it necessarily keeps in touch with the network). When you look at it that way, it is surprising that the client device itself would be keeping logs for serving other parties (e.g. law enforcement or anyone else who might see a use for it).
The real reason this isn't surprising, is that we currently still accept that phones are intended to work for other parties even when their interests conflict with the users'. Our expectations for a cellphone just aren't the same as for a typical Linux PC. The very fact that you have to "jailbreak" most current smartphones to enjoy even a semblance of freedom and mastery (whereas you don't have to jailbreak your new x86 box) is pretty fucked up.
So what this really goes to show, is that phones are still considered a special case. The "personal computer revolution" is limited in peoples' minds to computers over a certain size. Make it small enough, and it's perversely ok if you're suddenly back in the 1960s stuck with whatever IBM choses to let you have.
Except that there is no long term cost to measuring in U.S. Customary units.
There is a cost every time you have to do a multiplication by a constant other than your number base, and then an additional cost every time that calculation happens to result in an error.
I am older than I care to admit and have lived with Imperial all my life, and still sometimes forget whether the number of ounces that make up the bigger unit of measurement, is 8 or 16 (hint: it's both). Screw up a recipe-scale and ruin a meal, and you pay the cost that night. Metric can't protect me from my stupidity either, but unlike Imperial, it doesn't need to, because even a moron knows that in decimal 7*2 is 14, unlike base 8 or 16 where 7*2 is either 16 or 0C.
Even if I know my constants and don't suck at math, it's always lurking there. If I tell you the stratosphere ends 31 miles up, you might be tempted to convert that to feet since we tend to measure elevation in feet to put it into human perspective. You're going to immediately introduce rounding errors by calling it 30 miles and calling the conversion factor 5000, and maybe that doesn't matter much, but don't be so quick to take pride in your deliberate errors. Then you're going to multiply and even if you're not dumb you still might screw up. Imagine what goes through the metric guy's head when I tell him the stratosphere ends 50 km up. There's just no comparison in terms of the performance.
We have a vociferous minority in this country who have an obsession with making everyone else change the way they do things to satisfy some international concern which is no legitimate concern of an international community.
The "vociferous minority" that you mention is irrelevant. You can totally ignore them and still have a reason to switch. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs of moving out of our local optimum, is open to debate. The fact that we're disadvantaged, though, simply isn't. Metric is better.
Performance is what it comes down to. Now I know you want to..
The only ones who will cheer are those who have been taught a bias in their particular field and those who want the change for some notion of a political victory against the big, bad USA.
..read a bigger agenda into it, and make it an us-vs-them thing in spite of what we selfishly get out of it. Ok, but if it has to be us-vs-them, can't we say Imperial is a Brit legacy thing? This could be USA's final fuckyou to the redcoats. Happy now?
I've got 7 Mbps DSL; that's too slow for decent-quality streaming, even if I totally dedicated all my bandwidth to it (but that itself would be pretty impractical). Even youtube sometimes has to be paused to let it buffer. Ten years from now the situation might be different, and I know some people already have much faster connections today, to apparently much faster servers than whatever youtube is using (?), but for me, streaming is a silly idea right now.
There's also the big problem (again, this might be a short-term thing) of availability. Hulu, Netflix, etc have a lot of stuff, but it's rare for them to have whatever you happen to want. Part of the point of firing the cable company is saying No to the idea of, "We'll decide what you watch." (The other part being, "We'll decide when you watch it, and what you watch it on.", i.e. their position on letting HDHomeRuns or similar equipment catch the stream. They don't want my money? Ok, fine.) Hulu is no better. Netflix does look better, but to a pretty disappointing degree.
Basically, streaming is still very much an infant industry. Maybe it works for some people. Not me.
So the 2011 solution is downloading. You get whatever you want to watch, and at whatever quality you need to fill your girlfriend's $1500 screen, without any regard for your total bandwidth or transient internet conditions. That, supplemented with MythTV for local OTA TV stations, and our lives are successfully wasted staring at the screen, night after night. And if that last part sounded a bit bittersweet, yeah.. it's a little too good, for our own good.
Java has been using chained linked lists in hashtables since 1.2.
They cite Knuth's AoCP in the patent. They're not claiming the hash table is the innovation..
Adding garbage collection to it isn't exactly difficult or innovative.
..but this. Yes, it's totally ridiculous, but that's their "innovation:" garbage collect at the same time that you access. Hey, it's a good idea but hardly a non-obvious one.
No. It looks like it describes something utterly obvious done to a hash table, though.
Let's say you have a hash table, where you resolve hash collisions by having a linked list of everything that shares that hash value. Whenever you traverse that linked list, whether you're adding another entry, or searching for one of the items on that list, or whatever, since you have to traverse the list anyway, you could examine each entry on the list and possibly throw it away if it's something that you think you'll never use. Like, say, if it's an expired cache entry.
If I'm reading this patent right, that idea patented.
Seriously. And that's outrageous. If stuff this obvious is patentable, then programmers simply have no chance at all. You would have to hire a lawyer to work a week for every hour that a programmer works. It's just bloody fucking insane.
Wow, I never thought about that. Interesting. So the idea is: if (while defending) you get the evidence excluded, then it becomes evidence to use in a counter-attack.
I'm skeptical that it can really work, though, or we would have seen historical examples. If a cop comes into your house and takes some things illegally, once these get excluded, I've never heard of them being successfully prosecuted for plain old theft. Or kidnapping. But theft and kidnapping are exactly what cops do -- if their actions are not lawfully authorized. The whole point of government is to have an entity that is empowered to do things that would otherwise be illegal. In cases where it turns out they weren't really authorized, I don't think I ever hear of them being prosecuted under the laws that outlaw those things.
Dirty Harry is mad that a scumbag got off on a technicality; he isn't scared that his illegal search somehow turned into a burglary charge against him. Why would DCMA be any different?
Imperial is a local optimum. A 100% metric system may be easier than a 100% imperial system, but a 100% imperial system is way easier than a 90% metric + 10% imperial system. You can't get there from here, without paying a heavy price in the short term, and if there's one thing Americans are good at (USA! #1!), it's avoiding short-term costs without thinking about long-term costs/benefits.
It doesn't matter. If a system has holes, it has holes. The holes' supposedly-benign purpose or any policies about when to abuse the holes and when to abstain from doing that, isn't relevant.
I'm pretty sure something just like this happened 14 years ago. Like Y2K, the magnitude of the catastrophe was blown way out of proportion, making it relatively underwhelming when it finally happened.
Folks, these things happen. Don't make a big deal out of it. And while hordes of robot killers sound scary at first, then you realize MSIE can't even size a box correctly, Flash player somehow locks out ALSA's ability (or is it OSS? which one am I using and which one am I emulating?) to make noise until I close the browser, and what a slow MacOS-spinning-beachball-from-hell Firefox's sqlite is when using NFS-connected files. They're computers. They're stupid. They suck. We can handle it.
Sure, you don't get paid, but at least you get the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that comes from seeing someone else's stock price rise.
Ok, so you won't be allowed to directly query the data yourself after you give it to them, but at least you'll know that it might come up on your page, along with their ads, if you embed their javascript.
Interestingly enough, some experts say terrorists are much more likely to avoid confrontations with authorities, saying an al-Qaeda training manual instructs members to blend in."
Ah, but I know that you know that I know, so my cell is instructed to not blend in!
Why do you think keeping data on your own computers makes it more secure?
Because SUCK is not a rigid requirement of my own computers, handed down by some PHB without regard for what the poor bastard engineer guys think about it. I don't have any conflicts where I need to put other parties' interests above the user (me).
For example, I don't ever even think about going to extra trouble to make my computers less secure, in order to make them "CALEA compliant." I don't ever even think about implementing a denial-of-service attack against myself, just because someone in billing says my account is overdue. I don't ever even think about making sure my intranet sites bring in all kinds of weird extra javascript for Google Analytics or Comscore tracking.
These things don't mean that a user's own computers will be better than a commercial service provider's, but the user is going into the situation with a tremendous comparative advantage.
Alas, the last time we talked about this, I don't think there was a Slashdot yet, so I can't link to it so that you can go through all the detailed arguments. But I do remember the outcome.
Anyway, to sum it up, the consensus seemed to be that the 80386 will be useful on servers, but yes, it would be totally wasted on individual users.
It seems to me that a world where species DON'T go extinct (thanks to our efforts) would disrupt the natural processes of evolution. Our guilt complex could create a very unnatural world.
What's so great about evolution or living in a natural world? Like gravity, evolution merely is. Are you suggesting it's some kind of ideal to strive for or preserve?
Everything comes down to the question: What do you want? Unless you happen to like like catching smallpox, starving, falling down and skinning your knee, or sleeping in the rain -- or yes, if you like losing species whose DNA codes potentially useful proteins or species that are just plain pleasingly cute -- mother nature doesn't "want" what you want. I'm not saying be either her friend or her foe; I'm saying it's silly to want to respect her "wishes." She doesn't respect your wishes. That bitch is cold.
Fuck evolution. Evolution is something you need to understand and perhaps use, but it's not something to love.
Not that I disagree with you at all that we can't or shouldn't expend the effort to save every species. But damn, using "it's a natural process" as a reason for deciding a certain way -- ICK!
What do you get for the kernel that has everything?
Another filesystem, optimized for whatever pattern of use is happening at some particular mountpoint, like Reiser did for maildirs. You can't ever have too many filesystems. Screw the generalists; there will never be one best filesystem, and this is one way Linux shines and beats everything else out there.
Slashdot Mirror
The current situation with these units is that they are designed to serve many parties' interests and desires, not just the users. And when there's a conflict, the user will probably lose.
It's not a slam-dunk, but I think that in the long haul, the users (at least the ones who care) are going to win on this. You're some day going to have small machines like this which are totally yours; even if the user has to flash it with their own audited copy of Meego or Android. On the tiny consumer electronics, I think people will eventually end up with devices they can trust, if they want to, even if we've suffered so many setbacks over the last few years. In this form, the problem is temporary.
Cars are a lot more interesting. There is already a long-established precedent of goverment-mandated equipment. GPS hardware and cell network hardware really isn't all that expensive, especially in the context of a car's overall pricetag. Take that thought to its conclusion, and what you may end up with, is your own TomTom or other-branded device which doesn't spy on you, but a car that does, and with legal risks if the owner "tampers" with it. And I think overall the public won't resist this. There won't be mainstream projects like CyanogenMod to upgrade your car to serve you as the highest priority. So in the end, Big Brother will end up winning .. when you are in the car. Take your handheld GPS unit camping, though, and Big Brother (as well as any other little brothers who exploit the system; remember what happened to Greece!) will only know where you parked.
The reason this isn't too alarming, is that use of cars almost always happens in public anyway. Hostile embedded electronics aren't the only sensors. If you speed, something may see you, regardless of whose side your car is on. To me, that makes securing our cars not a battle worth fighting. So it all goes back to, "if you don't like the speed limits, complain about them." Privacy advocates have bigger fish to fry than government's (arguably legitimate) desire to catch speeders. I'm not saying this is something to be happy about, just that it's not very important.
The most amazing thing about the white iPhone is that it's news.
Over-hyped stories aren't a new phenomenon, but this one surely has to have set some coverage-to-banality world records, in a way that even Justin Bieber's talent agent wouldn't be able to remotely imagine while getting loaded up on MDMA and writing a marketing-fantasy-novel.
samzenpus, I don't know who you are. For all I know, you're the name of a script that compares keywords in article submissions to Twitter trends. But on the off chance that you're a human, maybe you could tell us why you thought the color of some plastic (not even an article about a technically-challenging(?) manufacturing process, but just the fact that it's for sale) was post-worthy. Really, this isn't rhetorical: why did you post it instead of laughing it off?
I'm not putting down the white iPhone. I can understand why some people might want it; but what's interesting about it?
I don't know.
I think that's an oversimplification. There are lots of reasons they might take the less glamorous job. Some of those (lawyer, programmer) take some skill or education. You've got a point about the Senator market having limited demand, but that's a special case (and even that market isn't as limited as we make it be).
And one thing I'm sure of, is that the market is never full. It's never even remotely close to full. Granted, I don't have the imagination or ideas to figure out what is still missing (if I did, I would be an entrepreneur instead of an employee), but there are plenty of people who see beyond all the limitations that many of us incorrectly place on ourselves. Saying the market is full reminds me of those amusing quotes like "everything that can be invented has been invented" or "the world market has room for 6 computers." Believe me, there's somebody out there right now who is scrambling to do something new, and his problem is that he only has so many hours in a day, rather than worrying about a "full" market. And when we hear about what he's doing, we're all going to slap our foreheads. (Good grief, who would have ever guessed something as dumb as Twitter could be a business?)
When everyone really believes that, we'll be living the in the Star Trek economy and celebrating unemployment rather than dreading it, because we won't need to buy things. You'll say, "Computer, Earl Grey," and that will be that. At that level of efficiency, the premise behind all current economic systems (resources are scarce) will be violated.
All the "green" causes would be already won. If farming were really as easy as you say, the world could be fed without cutting down forests for farmland or adding fertilizers that end up in the oceans, because the costs of sustainability could be easily born (or rather, the subsidy of externalizing wouldn't be "needed"). The clothing factory could run on nearly-"free" energy and fiber supply. The statements that "nuclear energy is too cheap to bother metering" wouldn't be seen as a joke; it would just be a statement of fact.
Every cost we pay ultimately comes down to peoples' labor for which there is a limited supply. Coal and uranium and the ingredients for making solar cells -- as well as clothing and food -- really are free, if you totally ignore the human cost of getting these things, cleaning up byproducts, etc.
The problem with unemployment isn't that there isn't anything for people to do; it's with figuring out what to do. I know it's hard; I'll even admit I'm not smart enough to solve it. But nevertheless that is the problem, and every time we automate something (assuming the labor cost of providing that automation is less than the labor it saves) we get a little more wealth and narrow down the "what to do" list.
Good point. Beats the hell out of me.
I bet Pixar has an opinion. ;-) (Yeah, yeah, I know that's not really analogous.) Apple definitely has a certain opinion on the matter, though I think their current strategy is along the lines that you suggest (trademark).
AdBlock doesn't redistribute the modified work; it is entirely on behalf of the reader. If MediaCom distributed a browser that pulls these shenanigans, or gave users a proxy to install on user machines instead of running their own customers-can't-opt-out proxy, then they would likely be in the clear.
And what AdBlock does do, isn't for commercial gain.
(Err... that's all traditional copyright-related reasoning. There might be a DMCA angle here, but I haven't worked it out. My hunch is that anything a blocking plugin or proxy does, isn't any more DMCA-illegal than the browser itself is. But that reasoning is probably flawed, else software couldn't be illegal without its underlying hardware being illegal.)
1990's totally-unbelievable fantastic paranoid delusions are ho-hum mainstream knowledge now. If we didn't already have a USPS, and someone were to suggest creating it today, seriously: would you trust it to be your mail provider? I think nearly everyone would just assume the service's real purpose would be to monitor citizens.
USPS was founded during a time when government's reputation was very different.
"But the truth is, H.264 is just too late. MPEG2 is already everywhere..."
The people who ratified the 5th amendment a couple centuries ago, and all the people since then who have chosen to not repeal it.
That's the complaint about it. There is a very basic and easy-to-understand principle behind the 5th amendment, and it doesn't go away simply because of certain interpretations of what "no person" means. If people think the 5th amendment is a bad idea that they no longer agree with, they should work to repeal it. Ignoring it, though, is just plain lawlessness. Not that I'm particularly lawful either, but this is the fucking government we're talking about. Without law, they're nothing.
Eww, replacing people with machines is desirable. It frees up the people to do something more important, instead of a tedious job of threshing grain, carrying buckets of water, digging trenches with shovels, or adding up columns of numbers. (Or writing variations of the same subroutine over and over -- yep, part of the job of a programmer is to replace himself.) The point of technological progress is to make things cheaper (which also often leads to making it practical to make things better) and ultimately, making things cheaper always comes down to not wasting peoples' time on tedious things that could be automated.
And yet, your conclusion is correct anyway. What's fucked up about self-checkout is that it isn't technological progress, because it doesn't replace a person with a machine; it just replaces a person with another person. And the new person (the customer) is less well practiced/skilled at the activity than the old person (checkout clerk). If anything, the expert is so good at the job that they're mentally on auto-pilot anyway, so you could even argue it replaces a (semi-) machine with a person, making it a technological regression. (Ah, the joys of externalizing costs.) It's sort of like they're un-invented the assembly line by selling assemble-it-yourself kits.
People know that when they use Google, Google's servers will use everything they learn from the conversation, to Google's advantage. But Firefox and Safari don't report all searches and clickthroughs to Google; the client itself is either neutral or pro-user (ideally). Likewise, people know that the cell tower network can perceive phones moving around, but this happens without the phone being "in on it" (other than the mere fact that it necessarily keeps in touch with the network). When you look at it that way, it is surprising that the client device itself would be keeping logs for serving other parties (e.g. law enforcement or anyone else who might see a use for it).
The real reason this isn't surprising, is that we currently still accept that phones are intended to work for other parties even when their interests conflict with the users'. Our expectations for a cellphone just aren't the same as for a typical Linux PC. The very fact that you have to "jailbreak" most current smartphones to enjoy even a semblance of freedom and mastery (whereas you don't have to jailbreak your new x86 box) is pretty fucked up.
So what this really goes to show, is that phones are still considered a special case. The "personal computer revolution" is limited in peoples' minds to computers over a certain size. Make it small enough, and it's perversely ok if you're suddenly back in the 1960s stuck with whatever IBM choses to let you have.
There is a cost every time you have to do a multiplication by a constant other than your number base, and then an additional cost every time that calculation happens to result in an error.
I am older than I care to admit and have lived with Imperial all my life, and still sometimes forget whether the number of ounces that make up the bigger unit of measurement, is 8 or 16 (hint: it's both). Screw up a recipe-scale and ruin a meal, and you pay the cost that night. Metric can't protect me from my stupidity either, but unlike Imperial, it doesn't need to, because even a moron knows that in decimal 7*2 is 14, unlike base 8 or 16 where 7*2 is either 16 or 0C.
Even if I know my constants and don't suck at math, it's always lurking there. If I tell you the stratosphere ends 31 miles up, you might be tempted to convert that to feet since we tend to measure elevation in feet to put it into human perspective. You're going to immediately introduce rounding errors by calling it 30 miles and calling the conversion factor 5000, and maybe that doesn't matter much, but don't be so quick to take pride in your deliberate errors. Then you're going to multiply and even if you're not dumb you still might screw up. Imagine what goes through the metric guy's head when I tell him the stratosphere ends 50 km up. There's just no comparison in terms of the performance.
The "vociferous minority" that you mention is irrelevant. You can totally ignore them and still have a reason to switch. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs of moving out of our local optimum, is open to debate. The fact that we're disadvantaged, though, simply isn't. Metric is better.
Performance is what it comes down to. Now I know you want to..
I've got 7 Mbps DSL; that's too slow for decent-quality streaming, even if I totally dedicated all my bandwidth to it (but that itself would be pretty impractical). Even youtube sometimes has to be paused to let it buffer. Ten years from now the situation might be different, and I know some people already have much faster connections today, to apparently much faster servers than whatever youtube is using (?), but for me, streaming is a silly idea right now.
There's also the big problem (again, this might be a short-term thing) of availability. Hulu, Netflix, etc have a lot of stuff, but it's rare for them to have whatever you happen to want. Part of the point of firing the cable company is saying No to the idea of, "We'll decide what you watch." (The other part being, "We'll decide when you watch it, and what you watch it on.", i.e. their position on letting HDHomeRuns or similar equipment catch the stream. They don't want my money? Ok, fine.) Hulu is no better. Netflix does look better, but to a pretty disappointing degree.
Basically, streaming is still very much an infant industry. Maybe it works for some people. Not me.
So the 2011 solution is downloading. You get whatever you want to watch, and at whatever quality you need to fill your girlfriend's $1500 screen, without any regard for your total bandwidth or transient internet conditions. That, supplemented with MythTV for local OTA TV stations, and our lives are successfully wasted staring at the screen, night after night. And if that last part sounded a bit bittersweet, yeah .. it's a little too good, for our own good.
They cite Knuth's AoCP in the patent. They're not claiming the hash table is the innovation..
No. It looks like it describes something utterly obvious done to a hash table, though.
Let's say you have a hash table, where you resolve hash collisions by having a linked list of everything that shares that hash value. Whenever you traverse that linked list, whether you're adding another entry, or searching for one of the items on that list, or whatever, since you have to traverse the list anyway, you could examine each entry on the list and possibly throw it away if it's something that you think you'll never use. Like, say, if it's an expired cache entry.
If I'm reading this patent right, that idea patented.
Seriously. And that's outrageous. If stuff this obvious is patentable, then programmers simply have no chance at all. You would have to hire a lawyer to work a week for every hour that a programmer works. It's just bloody fucking insane.
Wow, I never thought about that. Interesting. So the idea is: if (while defending) you get the evidence excluded, then it becomes evidence to use in a counter-attack.
I'm skeptical that it can really work, though, or we would have seen historical examples. If a cop comes into your house and takes some things illegally, once these get excluded, I've never heard of them being successfully prosecuted for plain old theft. Or kidnapping. But theft and kidnapping are exactly what cops do -- if their actions are not lawfully authorized. The whole point of government is to have an entity that is empowered to do things that would otherwise be illegal. In cases where it turns out they weren't really authorized, I don't think I ever hear of them being prosecuted under the laws that outlaw those things.
Dirty Harry is mad that a scumbag got off on a technicality; he isn't scared that his illegal search somehow turned into a burglary charge against him. Why would DCMA be any different?
Imperial is a local optimum. A 100% metric system may be easier than a 100% imperial system, but a 100% imperial system is way easier than a 90% metric + 10% imperial system. You can't get there from here, without paying a heavy price in the short term, and if there's one thing Americans are good at (USA! #1!), it's avoiding short-term costs without thinking about long-term costs/benefits.
It doesn't matter. If a system has holes, it has holes. The holes' supposedly-benign purpose or any policies about when to abuse the holes and when to abstain from doing that, isn't relevant.
Hmm.. but it doesn't exempt whoever manufactures the device or sells it to law enforcement...
1201(e) exempts law enforcement.
I'm pretty sure something just like this happened 14 years ago. Like Y2K, the magnitude of the catastrophe was blown way out of proportion, making it relatively underwhelming when it finally happened.
Folks, these things happen. Don't make a big deal out of it. And while hordes of robot killers sound scary at first, then you realize MSIE can't even size a box correctly, Flash player somehow locks out ALSA's ability (or is it OSS? which one am I using and which one am I emulating?) to make noise until I close the browser, and what a slow MacOS-spinning-beachball-from-hell Firefox's sqlite is when using NFS-connected files. They're computers. They're stupid. They suck. We can handle it.
Sure, you don't get paid, but at least you get the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that comes from seeing someone else's stock price rise.
Ok, so you won't be allowed to directly query the data yourself after you give it to them, but at least you'll know that it might come up on your page, along with their ads, if you embed their javascript.
Ah, but I know that you know that I know, so my cell is instructed to not blend in!
Because SUCK is not a rigid requirement of my own computers, handed down by some PHB without regard for what the poor bastard engineer guys think about it. I don't have any conflicts where I need to put other parties' interests above the user (me).
For example, I don't ever even think about going to extra trouble to make my computers less secure, in order to make them "CALEA compliant." I don't ever even think about implementing a denial-of-service attack against myself, just because someone in billing says my account is overdue. I don't ever even think about making sure my intranet sites bring in all kinds of weird extra javascript for Google Analytics or Comscore tracking.
These things don't mean that a user's own computers will be better than a commercial service provider's, but the user is going into the situation with a tremendous comparative advantage.
Alas, the last time we talked about this, I don't think there was a Slashdot yet, so I can't link to it so that you can go through all the detailed arguments. But I do remember the outcome.
Anyway, to sum it up, the consensus seemed to be that the 80386 will be useful on servers, but yes, it would be totally wasted on individual users.
What's so great about evolution or living in a natural world? Like gravity, evolution merely is. Are you suggesting it's some kind of ideal to strive for or preserve?
Everything comes down to the question: What do you want? Unless you happen to like like catching smallpox, starving, falling down and skinning your knee, or sleeping in the rain -- or yes, if you like losing species whose DNA codes potentially useful proteins or species that are just plain pleasingly cute -- mother nature doesn't "want" what you want. I'm not saying be either her friend or her foe; I'm saying it's silly to want to respect her "wishes." She doesn't respect your wishes. That bitch is cold.
Fuck evolution. Evolution is something you need to understand and perhaps use, but it's not something to love.
Not that I disagree with you at all that we can't or shouldn't expend the effort to save every species. But damn, using "it's a natural process" as a reason for deciding a certain way -- ICK!
Another filesystem, optimized for whatever pattern of use is happening at some particular mountpoint, like Reiser did for maildirs. You can't ever have too many filesystems. Screw the generalists; there will never be one best filesystem, and this is one way Linux shines and beats everything else out there.