You joke, but it's adequate security for the task. The hackers are not the ones walking up to the ATMs and printing out the card data. Oh, no, that's too risky. They hire "mules" to go to the machines and print out these receipts, and bring them back. They are encrypting the card data (with DES) so the mules can't steal it!
In the few houses I've tried, I've found the old phone wire to be well and truly stapled in place, and the wire usually breaks before I get the Cat 5 moving. It's worth a shot because fishing a new wire through a finished, insulated wall is a bitch no matter what, but I wouldn't bet on it being much help.
The schools and degree programs I'm familiar with offer Software Engineering only at the graduate level. I'm sure there must be schools somewhere that offer Bachelor's degrees in S.E., but I'm not familiar with any of them. None that my son was applying at offered it. At the undergrad level, they seem to only offer Computer Engineering or Computer Science. Specializations such as Software Engineering or Computer Security are left as graduate course work.
A CSci degree is indeed about math, relationships, logic, and program structure. You need to know big O notation, and why it's important to know how your lists are searched. You should learn that cohesive modules are good, and tightly coupled modules are bad. Those are the fundamental building blocks of writing code.
A Software Engineering degree is not about the fundamentals. It assumes you already know those. Software Engineering is about taking a systematic approach to producing functional software that quantifiably meets the customer's expectations: estimating, requirements gathering, architecture, design, construction, testing, validating, deploying, maintaining, configuration management, development methodologies, quality, and project tracking and management. (All that fun stuff that gets in the way of actually writing code.)
Frankly, I think the basics of software engineering should be formally taught at the undergrad level instead of being acquired via osmosis as they so often seem to be. At least a course or two on it to help align the students to what life outside academia will be like would be useful.
Actually, some aspects of computer science can be more like science (you know, hypothesize, create experiment and test your hypothesis) than pure math.
This is particularly true in applications (i.e. programming) where this cycle of write code to implement some functionality, compile, run to test if it works, modify code again etc. is how we really work.
That's Software Engineering, not Computer Science.
It's not just misleading use of statistics -- those are easier to identify since they do deal in factual numbers. It's the underlying political agendas that get people to mislead through omission, commission, or outright lying. In the end it's not about whose argument is more correct, and not even who has the "more authoritative authority." It's about whose argument swayed the people in power. We can all sit here at our keyboards whining about how stupid Jack Thompson is, or how evil Comcast is for opposing net neutrality, but in the end it's not about convincing us -- it's about convincing Congress (or Parliament or whatever they have where you live.)
And even though we'd like to think differently about their abilities, Congress is not very different than Joe Sixpack. Sure, they'll stack their offices with competent and smart advisors (we hope) but with the hundreds of bills they have to review, and the fact that a well-reasoned, well-researched letter only puts a checkmark in the "for" column that's equally counted against Cletus' "The TV dun tell me it's bad" means that the philosophical and scientific arguments are ultimately worthless.
The scientific campaigns can be spun in whichever direction they're needed, regardless of their methods, their science, or their outcome. The real lesson is "Do not waste your time and money on science, but spend it only on the advertising campaigns that promote whichever viewpoint puts more money in your pocket." Pay an actor to wear a lab coat when he delivers your message. Have him wear a hard hat and carry a clipboard. Pose him in front of a very large machine, or a pristine meadow. That's where your dollars have their biggest effect.
One part of this I always choke on is the "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" test. The software patents I have been involved with throw stupid, irrelevant descriptions of computers, CPUs, and RAM at the patents to make it look like the software is tied to a machine. But they are about software running on general purpose hardware or operating systems, and not special, purpose-built machines designed to run the process under question. The math could be done by a human -- perhaps slowly, and not as accurately, but it could still be done. A PC is a general purpose machine that can do many things, not just the one thing listed in the patent.
The other test is if it "transforms a particular article into a different state or thing." A number is not an article, so computing a new number (changing it into a different state) doesn't count, and I think that was one of the reasons Bilski was rejected. The Bilski decision cites Diamond v. Diehr, Flook, and Gottschalk v. Benson saying "Specifically, the Court has held that a claim is not a patent-eligible "process" if it claims "laws of nature, natural phenomena, [or] abstract ideas." Bilski, encryption, and just about all software patents are attempts to protect abstract ideas.
The way Diehr is written is that the algorithm is protected only as a part of all the claims taken together: they could patent using the Arrhenius equation as a step of curing rubber only in conjunction with all of the other steps. But Diehr qualifies in that it transforms a particular article into another state (raw rubber into cured rubber.) Bilski is trying to transform risky investments into less-risky investments, and that was rejected by the court because "risk" didn't qualify as a tangible article. Are blinking pixels on a screen a more "tangible article"? Can you really claim that blinking them one way is patentable if there are a trillion other ways of blinking them to achieve the same results?
That motion looks really well researched and backed with a lot of precedent. And if the judge shuts down MediaSentry, well then there are a whole lot of settlements that might get resettled!
With that much space, you could deliver an HD version of Miracle on 37th Street NW, or a claymation version of Owen the Red-Nosed Reindeer with your family's faces on the characters.
we'd be better off making our own communication networks. (or if we meet aliens with one already built, ask them very nicely if we can use it and promise not to use it for torrents)
You think they're worried about our torrents? I don't doubt that the first thing SETI discovers is going to be some kind of alien pr0n. If human history is any indication of what aliens will transmit, the first message will be a "testing, testing, is this thing on?" followed by a few years of "here is a moving picture of a modern phantabulous steam engine", followed by "hey, babe, take it off!" And then all practical evolution of the content will cease.
What I don't like is that since the pulsars have no frame of reference, or method of synchronization, we couldn't use them blind. Let's say I stepped into a wormhole here on earth, and came out on some SciFi planet. Or let's say I pushed my spacecraft beyond the speed of light, which might very well prevent me from receiving the pulses. When I start listening again, how would I know "which pulse" I was hearing? I wouldn't, because the pulses aren't uniquely tagged.
Sure, I could take an old fashioned rocket and just keep count as I flew along, but that would get monotonous. I want my "instant on GPS" to go with my faster-than-light travel, dammit.
Actually, pedantic would be to point out that your analysis of that statement is incorrect. You can indeed work out your position on Earth from only three GPS satellites. Consider that when you compute the spheres around each of three satellites you are left with two possible intersections. One of those intersections is going to be very close to 6378 km from the center of the earth, and one is not. The Earth's surface acts as the fourth sphere, providing a single solution to "where am I?"
But.. but.. improving humanity genetically = eugenism = nazi = evil! It's inherent, you can't even screen foetuses for genetic defects without bringing dystopian technofascism into power.
I think you skipped the "Nazis riding dinosaurs" in there, but otherwise that's obviously exactly what would happen.
Yes, it's easy to open, but you'd know whether someone tried to tamper with it.
Try spraying the envelope with refrigerant. The paper becomes translucent when wetted and you can sometimes read what's inside, and then it dries without a trace (unlike wetting it with water, which swells up the paper fibers leaving the telltale signs of tampering.)
Learned this one from a history of the U.S. Black Chamber.
Now that I'm viewing it, it looks pretty straight-forward. I was kind of expecting a more two-dimensional approach, perhaps interconnected lines that would refocus me on a different path or view of the network. I could imagine having the main timeline change focus from primary topic to primary topic. Not that this isn't usable as is, but I was trying to follow my interests, rather than the interests of the article author. And I can see where the "author's viewpoint" attribute might be more important for a schoolteacher.
I've noticed that I can't easily follow a particular trail: for example, you have blue triangles representing Venona decrypts, but clicking the blue triangle is ineffective. I can't just click on a blue triangle and see all the Venona decrypts. (Yes, I later found the "legend" icon after returning to the site a few times.) I can go to the legend and use that as the filter, but that's not intuitive.
I also found that when using the filter to display just Venona related items, I still had to zoom in before I could find them. There's no reason to go to such great lengths to hide information. Alternately, you could put a second slider that shows you more or less detail, rather than strictly more or less time.
If you wanted to get all Appley about this, perhaps a longer click, a double click, or a right click menu on a topic could make that topic glow, or rise in importance.
Oh, and the legend box doesn't have a "close (X)" button, and I suspect others don't as well. Consistency of the gadgets is going to be expected by your users.
Three clicks on a single story item gave me three identical copies of the box to close.
The number on the slider is meaningless. It's not "months" or "years", it's just a random number I don't need or want to see. You have a date range displayed above the slider (1960-1963 or whatever) but it's not clickable. You have a go-to beneath it, which is nice, but I clicked the 1960 hoping to drag the displayed range back to 1949-1963.
I'm sure you don't want to outright steal from Google, but I like their time slider arrangement on their financial pages, like this one: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT Note how when you get the mouse in the lower pane, the "width" grabbers appear, allowing you to stretch the range to whatever you need? Intuitive, isn't it?
Good luck. I like the overall graphic layout, your tool is very pretty. It's just that it works like a v0.98(beta) and needs a bit more polish in the functional areas.
Ah, that did it, thank you. It didn't occur to me that it was displaying that warning as a result of JavaScript. And I have NoScript set up to permit base second level domains, but didn't think to enable timeglider.com.
Treason is to act against your own countrymen in the service of another country. But is that really what it boils down to when you prevent more deaths through dissemination of state secrets? Is it really an offense worthy of death to act according to your own morality?
Ignoring the trolling bits that follow and applying your questions to the Rosenberg's case, I'd say that they are still responsible for future deaths that may not have occurred yet. If a rogue state uses a Russian warhead that was developed in part from information stolen by the Rosenbergs, I would think they're at least partly responsible since they were on the critical path of the device's design.
And you can't say that "Russia would have developed The Bomb anyway" because that didn't happen, and we don't know if it would have. We only know what did happen, and that is the Rosenberg's information was vital to the Soviet bomb making effort.
There is also no evidence to suggest that by "sharing" the bomb with the Soviet Union that any deaths were prevented. The United States never killed again with an atomic bomb, and you can't say that's due to the USSR maintaining warhead parity. You might argue that the U.S. would have risen to become the single world-dominating order without an opponent to keep them in check, but it seems that was able to happen (briefly) even with the USSR having nuclear capabilities.
Finally, as for it being a capital crime, I think it should have been life in prison instead. I personally think death is the easier punishment. A long, healthy life in prison with no chance of parole would be worse (it keeps you away from the 72 virgins for that much longer.)
(using Timeglider â" a web-based, flash powered, software for creating timelines)... The use of Timeglider makes understanding the complex nature of the case, and the newly available documentation more manageable."
Yes we get the picture
Actually, I don't get the picture. It wants me to install some new version of Flash to get the picture, and I don't want to.
So if there are 1,000,000,000 nanorods to a rod, and there are 502.92 cm to a rod, there must be 1,988,387 nanorods in a cm. But since a nanorod is only a unit of length and doesn't give a width or depth, we can't really figure out how many nanorods to the cubic cm.
The fact that you laughably talk about WindowsCE and 'Open Source GNU' even leads me to believe that you're a bit of a shill who's still trying to peddle that 'Open standards and not open source' crap that Microsoft in particular has been trying to get over. Sorry, but open source guarantees open standards because everyone is going to know how your stuff works anyway.
You're making crap up. I never said anything about closed source. The patterns OPOS so successfully established were indeed open source. They are used to proxy the closed-source proprietary device drivers.
I've been using OPOS for 14 years. None of the hardware scanner makers, Symbol, Norand, Welch-Allyn or PSC created it. They were perfectly happy to have vendor lock-in where we could only replace one Symbol scanner with another Symbol scanner. Instead, competitors in the retail software business, PSI, ICL, Fujitsu, IBM and NCR all helped create it.
What that means to me is that the software vendors turned scanner hardware into a commodity item. I can go to any of the hardware vendors and ask "Do you have OPOS service objects for your scanners?" If the answer is "no", we take our money and walk away, which is why the answer has always been "yes" for the last 8 years.
The OPOS interface standard is also simple enough and documented well enough that anyone who can write a device driver can implement a service object for an unsupported device. A big part of the success is that it's divided into two parts: a Common Control layer and a vendor-provided Service Object layer. The hardware vendors just have to provide the Service Objects, and the POS software vendors have to consume the Common Control objects. And the OPOS Common Control layer is indeed open. Anyone can download the source. All the proprietary stuff is hidden away, either in the retail software or in the device drivers. It was also so successful that the retailers running Java and Linux based POS introduced their own flavor, JPOS. Curiously enough, Microsoft's.Net version of it, POS for.Net, hasn't been nearly as well received by the retailers.
If the industry is powerful enough (retail is big) they can make things happen in their own domain that will force hardware suppliers to a standard of the industry's choosing. It won't happen overnight, but it can be done. History has shown it to be wildly successful in retail. And I believe that city governments could also eventually evolve a set of common interfaces or services. They're big enough, there are an awful lot of them, and they're already surprisingly well organized through Leagues of Cities and other organizations. All it would take would be for some technologically advanced cities in a large state (the valley cities in California are likely candidates) to adopt a set of standards for some of their services, and for those to spread through the rest of the state. From there, they could spread nationally.
There is absolutely a lesson there: it can be done despite patents, and despite powerful industries that historically used hardware lock-in to guarantee future sales. And open source helps.
Of course it can be done with proprietary gear. That's what the proxy or bridge patterns are for: commonize the interfaces so that Fred's Electric Controllers and Barney's Electric Controllers both have a common ElectricController interface.
Retail did that 15 years ago with the Unified POS device standards. Every barcode scanner out there has a different interface: different commands to turn it on and off, different electrical requirements, etc., but every scanner ultimately does the same task - it reads a barcode. So 15 years ago the retail industry said "we're sick of this" and developed a de facto standard that became UPOS. All a vendor has to do is wrap their device driver in a little proxy layer so it meets the common UPOS interface standard, and any cash register can use it (yes, UPOS today is limited to Windows and Java implementations.)
It doesn't matter if it's a Microsoft WindowsCE electric controller or an Open Source GNU electric controller. As long as the cities arrive at a common interface spec for what a core electric controller does, this can work.
I like your solution. Google can provide the information (that's what they do best anyway), and if a lawsuit comes out they can say "Don't sue us. We told you when you bought KLEENEX as an ad-word that Kleenex(TM) is a registered trademark of Kimberly-Clark Worldwide, Inc."
This would also make sense for more "common" words. I might have an apple orchard called John's Apples, and want to buy APPLE as a keyword. AAPL may own the the word as part of their trademark, but guards it only in the computer area. I can make my own estimate as to whether or not they will sue me for it.
Google could even monetize this by selling "infringement guardian alert services". If I were Kimberly-Clark, I could register with them to let me know if someone bought an ad-word for KLEENEX. That service might help take the sting out of the revenue shrinkage they'll experience once competitors stop taking out ad-words on each other.
Slashdot Mirror
You joke, but it's adequate security for the task. The hackers are not the ones walking up to the ATMs and printing out the card data. Oh, no, that's too risky. They hire "mules" to go to the machines and print out these receipts, and bring them back. They are encrypting the card data (with DES) so the mules can't steal it!
OMFG! That's just lose-lose all the way around! Didn't your brother make the electrician fix it?
In the few houses I've tried, I've found the old phone wire to be well and truly stapled in place, and the wire usually breaks before I get the Cat 5 moving. It's worth a shot because fishing a new wire through a finished, insulated wall is a bitch no matter what, but I wouldn't bet on it being much help.
You get tree-fiddy, but that damn Loch Ness monster come an' he take it!
The schools and degree programs I'm familiar with offer Software Engineering only at the graduate level. I'm sure there must be schools somewhere that offer Bachelor's degrees in S.E., but I'm not familiar with any of them. None that my son was applying at offered it. At the undergrad level, they seem to only offer Computer Engineering or Computer Science. Specializations such as Software Engineering or Computer Security are left as graduate course work.
A CSci degree is indeed about math, relationships, logic, and program structure. You need to know big O notation, and why it's important to know how your lists are searched. You should learn that cohesive modules are good, and tightly coupled modules are bad. Those are the fundamental building blocks of writing code.
A Software Engineering degree is not about the fundamentals. It assumes you already know those. Software Engineering is about taking a systematic approach to producing functional software that quantifiably meets the customer's expectations: estimating, requirements gathering, architecture, design, construction, testing, validating, deploying, maintaining, configuration management, development methodologies, quality, and project tracking and management. (All that fun stuff that gets in the way of actually writing code.)
Frankly, I think the basics of software engineering should be formally taught at the undergrad level instead of being acquired via osmosis as they so often seem to be. At least a course or two on it to help align the students to what life outside academia will be like would be useful.
Actually, some aspects of computer science can be more like science (you know, hypothesize, create experiment and test your hypothesis) than pure math.
This is particularly true in applications (i.e. programming) where this cycle of write code to implement some functionality, compile, run to test if it works, modify code again etc. is how we really work.
That's Software Engineering, not Computer Science.
It's not just misleading use of statistics -- those are easier to identify since they do deal in factual numbers. It's the underlying political agendas that get people to mislead through omission, commission, or outright lying. In the end it's not about whose argument is more correct, and not even who has the "more authoritative authority." It's about whose argument swayed the people in power. We can all sit here at our keyboards whining about how stupid Jack Thompson is, or how evil Comcast is for opposing net neutrality, but in the end it's not about convincing us -- it's about convincing Congress (or Parliament or whatever they have where you live.)
And even though we'd like to think differently about their abilities, Congress is not very different than Joe Sixpack. Sure, they'll stack their offices with competent and smart advisors (we hope) but with the hundreds of bills they have to review, and the fact that a well-reasoned, well-researched letter only puts a checkmark in the "for" column that's equally counted against Cletus' "The TV dun tell me it's bad" means that the philosophical and scientific arguments are ultimately worthless.
The scientific campaigns can be spun in whichever direction they're needed, regardless of their methods, their science, or their outcome. The real lesson is "Do not waste your time and money on science, but spend it only on the advertising campaigns that promote whichever viewpoint puts more money in your pocket." Pay an actor to wear a lab coat when he delivers your message. Have him wear a hard hat and carry a clipboard. Pose him in front of a very large machine, or a pristine meadow. That's where your dollars have their biggest effect.
Me too!
One part of this I always choke on is the "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" test. The software patents I have been involved with throw stupid, irrelevant descriptions of computers, CPUs, and RAM at the patents to make it look like the software is tied to a machine. But they are about software running on general purpose hardware or operating systems, and not special, purpose-built machines designed to run the process under question. The math could be done by a human -- perhaps slowly, and not as accurately, but it could still be done. A PC is a general purpose machine that can do many things, not just the one thing listed in the patent.
The other test is if it "transforms a particular article into a different state or thing." A number is not an article, so computing a new number (changing it into a different state) doesn't count, and I think that was one of the reasons Bilski was rejected. The Bilski decision cites Diamond v. Diehr, Flook, and Gottschalk v. Benson saying "Specifically, the Court has held that a claim is not a patent-eligible "process" if it claims "laws of nature, natural phenomena, [or] abstract ideas." Bilski, encryption, and just about all software patents are attempts to protect abstract ideas.
The way Diehr is written is that the algorithm is protected only as a part of all the claims taken together: they could patent using the Arrhenius equation as a step of curing rubber only in conjunction with all of the other steps. But Diehr qualifies in that it transforms a particular article into another state (raw rubber into cured rubber.) Bilski is trying to transform risky investments into less-risky investments, and that was rejected by the court because "risk" didn't qualify as a tangible article. Are blinking pixels on a screen a more "tangible article"? Can you really claim that blinking them one way is patentable if there are a trillion other ways of blinking them to achieve the same results?
That motion looks really well researched and backed with a lot of precedent. And if the judge shuts down MediaSentry, well then there are a whole lot of settlements that might get resettled!
With that much space, you could deliver an HD version of Miracle on 37th Street NW, or a claymation version of Owen the Red-Nosed Reindeer with your family's faces on the characters.
we'd be better off making our own communication networks. (or if we meet aliens with one already built, ask them very nicely if we can use it and promise not to use it for torrents)
You think they're worried about our torrents? I don't doubt that the first thing SETI discovers is going to be some kind of alien pr0n. If human history is any indication of what aliens will transmit, the first message will be a "testing, testing, is this thing on?" followed by a few years of "here is a moving picture of a modern phantabulous steam engine", followed by "hey, babe, take it off!" And then all practical evolution of the content will cease.
What I don't like is that since the pulsars have no frame of reference, or method of synchronization, we couldn't use them blind. Let's say I stepped into a wormhole here on earth, and came out on some SciFi planet. Or let's say I pushed my spacecraft beyond the speed of light, which might very well prevent me from receiving the pulses. When I start listening again, how would I know "which pulse" I was hearing? I wouldn't, because the pulses aren't uniquely tagged.
Sure, I could take an old fashioned rocket and just keep count as I flew along, but that would get monotonous. I want my "instant on GPS" to go with my faster-than-light travel, dammit.
Actually, pedantic would be to point out that your analysis of that statement is incorrect. You can indeed work out your position on Earth from only three GPS satellites. Consider that when you compute the spheres around each of three satellites you are left with two possible intersections. One of those intersections is going to be very close to 6378 km from the center of the earth, and one is not. The Earth's surface acts as the fourth sphere, providing a single solution to "where am I?"
But.. but.. improving humanity genetically = eugenism = nazi = evil! It's inherent, you can't even screen foetuses for genetic defects without bringing dystopian technofascism into power.
I think you skipped the "Nazis riding dinosaurs" in there, but otherwise that's obviously exactly what would happen.
Yes, it's easy to open, but you'd know whether someone tried to tamper with it.
Try spraying the envelope with refrigerant. The paper becomes translucent when wetted and you can sometimes read what's inside, and then it dries without a trace (unlike wetting it with water, which swells up the paper fibers leaving the telltale signs of tampering.)
Learned this one from a history of the U.S. Black Chamber.
Now that I'm viewing it, it looks pretty straight-forward. I was kind of expecting a more two-dimensional approach, perhaps interconnected lines that would refocus me on a different path or view of the network. I could imagine having the main timeline change focus from primary topic to primary topic. Not that this isn't usable as is, but I was trying to follow my interests, rather than the interests of the article author. And I can see where the "author's viewpoint" attribute might be more important for a schoolteacher.
I've noticed that I can't easily follow a particular trail: for example, you have blue triangles representing Venona decrypts, but clicking the blue triangle is ineffective. I can't just click on a blue triangle and see all the Venona decrypts. (Yes, I later found the "legend" icon after returning to the site a few times.) I can go to the legend and use that as the filter, but that's not intuitive.
I also found that when using the filter to display just Venona related items, I still had to zoom in before I could find them. There's no reason to go to such great lengths to hide information. Alternately, you could put a second slider that shows you more or less detail, rather than strictly more or less time.
If you wanted to get all Appley about this, perhaps a longer click, a double click, or a right click menu on a topic could make that topic glow, or rise in importance.
Oh, and the legend box doesn't have a "close (X)" button, and I suspect others don't as well. Consistency of the gadgets is going to be expected by your users.
Three clicks on a single story item gave me three identical copies of the box to close.
The number on the slider is meaningless. It's not "months" or "years", it's just a random number I don't need or want to see. You have a date range displayed above the slider (1960-1963 or whatever) but it's not clickable. You have a go-to beneath it, which is nice, but I clicked the 1960 hoping to drag the displayed range back to 1949-1963.
I'm sure you don't want to outright steal from Google, but I like their time slider arrangement on their financial pages, like this one: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT Note how when you get the mouse in the lower pane, the "width" grabbers appear, allowing you to stretch the range to whatever you need? Intuitive, isn't it?
Good luck. I like the overall graphic layout, your tool is very pretty. It's just that it works like a v0.98(beta) and needs a bit more polish in the functional areas.
Ah, that did it, thank you. It didn't occur to me that it was displaying that warning as a result of JavaScript. And I have NoScript set up to permit base second level domains, but didn't think to enable timeglider.com.
Treason is to act against your own countrymen in the service of another country. But is that really what it boils down to when you prevent more deaths through dissemination of state secrets? Is it really an offense worthy of death to act according to your own morality?
Ignoring the trolling bits that follow and applying your questions to the Rosenberg's case, I'd say that they are still responsible for future deaths that may not have occurred yet. If a rogue state uses a Russian warhead that was developed in part from information stolen by the Rosenbergs, I would think they're at least partly responsible since they were on the critical path of the device's design.
And you can't say that "Russia would have developed The Bomb anyway" because that didn't happen, and we don't know if it would have. We only know what did happen, and that is the Rosenberg's information was vital to the Soviet bomb making effort.
There is also no evidence to suggest that by "sharing" the bomb with the Soviet Union that any deaths were prevented. The United States never killed again with an atomic bomb, and you can't say that's due to the USSR maintaining warhead parity. You might argue that the U.S. would have risen to become the single world-dominating order without an opponent to keep them in check, but it seems that was able to happen (briefly) even with the USSR having nuclear capabilities.
Finally, as for it being a capital crime, I think it should have been life in prison instead. I personally think death is the easier punishment. A long, healthy life in prison with no chance of parole would be worse (it keeps you away from the 72 virgins for that much longer.)
(using Timeglider â" a web-based, flash powered, software for creating timelines) ... The use of Timeglider makes understanding the complex nature of the case, and the newly available documentation more manageable."
Yes we get the picture
Actually, I don't get the picture. It wants me to install some new version of Flash to get the picture, and I don't want to.
So the prediction is for bigger satellites, and more tacos! Who can argue with a forecast that?
So if there are 1,000,000,000 nanorods to a rod, and there are 502.92 cm to a rod, there must be 1,988,387 nanorods in a cm. But since a nanorod is only a unit of length and doesn't give a width or depth, we can't really figure out how many nanorods to the cubic cm.
The fact that you laughably talk about WindowsCE and 'Open Source GNU' even leads me to believe that you're a bit of a shill who's still trying to peddle that 'Open standards and not open source' crap that Microsoft in particular has been trying to get over. Sorry, but open source guarantees open standards because everyone is going to know how your stuff works anyway.
You're making crap up. I never said anything about closed source. The patterns OPOS so successfully established were indeed open source. They are used to proxy the closed-source proprietary device drivers.
I've been using OPOS for 14 years. None of the hardware scanner makers, Symbol, Norand, Welch-Allyn or PSC created it. They were perfectly happy to have vendor lock-in where we could only replace one Symbol scanner with another Symbol scanner. Instead, competitors in the retail software business, PSI, ICL, Fujitsu, IBM and NCR all helped create it.
What that means to me is that the software vendors turned scanner hardware into a commodity item. I can go to any of the hardware vendors and ask "Do you have OPOS service objects for your scanners?" If the answer is "no", we take our money and walk away, which is why the answer has always been "yes" for the last 8 years.
The OPOS interface standard is also simple enough and documented well enough that anyone who can write a device driver can implement a service object for an unsupported device. A big part of the success is that it's divided into two parts: a Common Control layer and a vendor-provided Service Object layer. The hardware vendors just have to provide the Service Objects, and the POS software vendors have to consume the Common Control objects. And the OPOS Common Control layer is indeed open. Anyone can download the source. All the proprietary stuff is hidden away, either in the retail software or in the device drivers. It was also so successful that the retailers running Java and Linux based POS introduced their own flavor, JPOS. Curiously enough, Microsoft's .Net version of it, POS for .Net, hasn't been nearly as well received by the retailers.
If the industry is powerful enough (retail is big) they can make things happen in their own domain that will force hardware suppliers to a standard of the industry's choosing. It won't happen overnight, but it can be done. History has shown it to be wildly successful in retail. And I believe that city governments could also eventually evolve a set of common interfaces or services. They're big enough, there are an awful lot of them, and they're already surprisingly well organized through Leagues of Cities and other organizations. All it would take would be for some technologically advanced cities in a large state (the valley cities in California are likely candidates) to adopt a set of standards for some of their services, and for those to spread through the rest of the state. From there, they could spread nationally.
There is absolutely a lesson there: it can be done despite patents, and despite powerful industries that historically used hardware lock-in to guarantee future sales. And open source helps.
Of course it can be done with proprietary gear. That's what the proxy or bridge patterns are for: commonize the interfaces so that Fred's Electric Controllers and Barney's Electric Controllers both have a common ElectricController interface.
Retail did that 15 years ago with the Unified POS device standards. Every barcode scanner out there has a different interface: different commands to turn it on and off, different electrical requirements, etc., but every scanner ultimately does the same task - it reads a barcode. So 15 years ago the retail industry said "we're sick of this" and developed a de facto standard that became UPOS. All a vendor has to do is wrap their device driver in a little proxy layer so it meets the common UPOS interface standard, and any cash register can use it (yes, UPOS today is limited to Windows and Java implementations.)
It doesn't matter if it's a Microsoft WindowsCE electric controller or an Open Source GNU electric controller. As long as the cities arrive at a common interface spec for what a core electric controller does, this can work.
I like your solution. Google can provide the information (that's what they do best anyway), and if a lawsuit comes out they can say "Don't sue us. We told you when you bought KLEENEX as an ad-word that Kleenex(TM) is a registered trademark of Kimberly-Clark Worldwide, Inc."
This would also make sense for more "common" words. I might have an apple orchard called John's Apples, and want to buy APPLE as a keyword. AAPL may own the the word as part of their trademark, but guards it only in the computer area. I can make my own estimate as to whether or not they will sue me for it.
Google could even monetize this by selling "infringement guardian alert services". If I were Kimberly-Clark, I could register with them to let me know if someone bought an ad-word for KLEENEX. That service might help take the sting out of the revenue shrinkage they'll experience once competitors stop taking out ad-words on each other.