I'm not sure that you really understand the basics of how companies in a standard market economy work. Companies absolutely have goals. The implicit goal is of course to make profit and they also have other broad visions and mission statements. Here is the Coca Cola Company's mission statement for example. The boards function not to "milk the company for short-term gain" as you describe it but their purpose is the exact opposite - to set up long-term goals for the company and make sure those are maintained. The short term operative work is handled by the CEO.
If the only goal is to "sell more" then someone is seriously fucking stupid because "profit more" is what we really want. Selling more is a means to an end, not an end itself.
To make profit a company needs to sell. If you're a bank you need to sell financial services. If you're a computer store you need to sell computers.
Sorry, I understand what you're saying and why, but you're wrong on so many levels. I'm an experienced programmer/software architect and entrepreneur. Sales is a vital part of a company and I'm sorry that many technical people appreciate that more. They have an incredibly difficult task - selling is not about "telling people what they need", what sales actually do is to create buyers and this is incredibly complex stuff that requires understanding of decision making, the potential customer (their needs, pain and organization) and the technical details of the product or service you offer.
...but this should be an indicator to you that I'm one of your "trusted technical people" that will tell the customer the true PROS and CONS of everything even when it means my company takes a fiscal loss.
A good sales person wouldn't risk loosing credibility by withholding critical information or lying. This is not what sales people do. You need to understand that making a deal is not about presenting the features and non-features of your product/service and waiting for him to say "yes" or "no". Decision making is much, much more complex than that, especially in large deals.
In a well functioning company sales and development work closely together as they both have crucial information that the other department needs. The salespeople usually have in-depth market knowledge like not yet addressed customer pain/requirements that the developers could utilize to improve the product/service and thereby sales. You need to understand that the goal of the company is to sell more and the better the developers understands sales and their situation (the tighter they are connected) the better they can understand the selling process and the potential clients and thereby improve sales. Likewise - if sales can understand the technical details of the product better - they address the needs of the potential clients better in the vision they give them of the solution - increasing sales.
Couldn't this be interpreted as additional evidence for the theory that the moon formed in a collision between earth and another object, in the sense that the moon once where part of earth and some water where transfered during the collision?
Yeah, because the courthouses don't have anything important to do anyway and I bet the justice system love obscure laws where the outcome depends on intent and motivation rather than objective evidence............
Random delays don't work in theory. All you have to do is to get a couple of extra data points and then average them. The result should be pretty accurate. It might be effective in practice though if the number of extra data points is too great.
Ummm.. it tracks if you have given permission for cookie tracking. Doesn't that make it a "tracking cookie"? Isn't all cookies tracking cookies? The only thing web masters have to do is to claim that all their cookies are "necessary for the functioning of the website" and "not tracking cookies". Isn't that a huge loophole?
"Fixed delay" refers to a fixed and delay-padded time frame the whole operation runs in where the total time of the frame is equal or longer than the worst case of any cryptosystem - or for either of them - but preferably longer to account for safety margin and because delay makes brute force harder anyway.
Well the solution should be pretty simple. Just patch OpenSSH and introduce a delay in responding to a challenge thats makes the total time be a sufficiently large chunk to allow any crypto calculation to run in that frame for that machine. They even mention this in TFA. Isn't challenge delay crucial anyway to make dictionary attacks and other brute force attacks significantly harder? This seems like the most waterproof way to solve it since it prevents any timing attack, no matter what crypto system is used (in this case the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm).
Wow, the summary is completely misleading and tells you nothing about the actual news. It reads like they just figured out that they can use multiple frequencies to send additional bands of data. Everybody with a slightest clue about how optical data transmission works knows this already. The news in TFA however is that they have figured out how to encode this data with a single laser instead of one laser per band making it enormously more economic. A car analogy would be if someone had figured out how to make cars fly without wings, and the summary would be "a new vehicle pushes transportation to its limits. by sitting in a container with an engine one can travel much faster than walking." Facepalm.
Your ability to disrupt the network scales exponentially with the amount of computing power and BTC you have. Transactions fees are expensive to honest people but cheap if your goal is to be disruptive - you have to pay less than 1%-0% or so of their transactions and nothing every time you generate your own block - and if you generate your own block you can max out the size. If the system adjusts itself so block generation gets harder honest people have to wait too long or pay too much to make transactions making it inferior to normal currencies. If the system adjust itself so block generation gets easier, dishonest people can fill it with crap so the database quickly becomes inconvenient/unusable. In other words, making transactions will be _slow_ and/or _expensive_, a property it shares with many other P2P technology. There are cases where Bitcoin could be useful - but it's ridiculous to claim that it will ever replace normal currencies. It works in theory. But it's far from practical. Just like Tor.
According to Wikipedia, the database size is currently 200 MB. A maximum block is 1 MB according to the bitcoin wiki. A couple of hundred phony blocks would be enough to quadruple the current database size. So there lies the huge scalability problem.
There's one thing that don't make sense to me about bitcoins. The whole system relies on the fact that a huge distributed database stores all transactions ever made. So basically, I can get a smallish botnet of 10000 nodes or so, buy/mine a ~1000 BTC, then proceed to make as many transactions between the nodes in my botnet as I can. If I keep at it long enough the size of the database will become so large that noone could possibly store all that data conveniently - and you need to store all transactions ever made to verify transactions - rendering the whole system useless.
And then I haven't even mentioned the insanity that the whole system relies on the fact that there are more honest nodes than dishonest - so just get more dishonest nodes than honest and you can get all bitcoins in existence.
I'm Swedish and this is 100% accurate, +100 Insightful. The Swedish justice system is a huge embarrassment and completely broken. Hopefully this case will shed some light on it so it can be fixed.
You also forgot to mention two other interesting facts of Claes Borgström, both of which you can find in his Wikipedia article. First of all he was the attorney of Thomas Quick, a case that is one of the biggest scandals in Swedish justice history. Basically Quick was mental and admitted to a whole bunch of murders he never committed and was sentenced guilty without a shred of evidence. Secondly Claes Borgström is an extreme left wing feminist nutjob that thinks men has a "collective guilt" against women and should pay a special tax for being men.
Absolutely agree. The biggest mistake made in the HTTP standard was calling cookies "cookies". The familiar name invites politicians to mistakingly think that they know what their function and purpose is. They should have called it "state exchange identifier" instead and we wouldn't have none of this crap.
Totally second this... Also, I think first defining the "genres" are stupid. If you have (for one era) 3 great games in one genre and 3 mediocre games in one genre you are forced to pick 1 great game and 1 mediocre game instead of 2 great games... Having to choose between "Portal" and "Half-Life 2" is insane.
Yeah, that is one solution. But I don't think I'd work that well. Nvidia already uses this technique with two slightly offset cameras to achieve 3d in games. However even then it's slightly buggy because the graphics engine is usually optimized to skip rendering of surfaces that doesn't intersect the standard-FOV cone - so at the edges you can see how surfaces sometimes disappear. If you turn up the FOV in the HL2 source engine to something like 180 you can see what I mean. You will be able to see behind yourself and too the sides in fish-perspective but big chunks of walls/floors will be missing.
Yeah, I do that too but I don't qualify it as "multi-monitor" gaming. Multi-monitor gaming is spanning the full-screen game over at least 2 screens which I basically what I guess they did in this test.
No, the key to your position, which is why you'll dismiss as trivial any part that disagrees, such as the fact that neither a computer system or a car can be reduced to pure math.
Sure, you can't drive math but you can implement it as software on a computer system, so your analogy is broken.
Yes, that's the basic idea. That's the legislature's job in writing the law. Judges aren't supposed to disregard laws because someone believes they're not beneficial.
The judge simply cannot decide that a new, useful, and nonobvious piece of software that's tied to machine is unpatentable, even if they believe that all patents are harmful to society. If they want to do that, they can step down and run for congress.
A judge interprets the law and judges by it. If you're defining ultimate truth as the law of the state you might make a good lawyer but not a very good philosopher.
No, I'm defining the law of the state as the law of the state, by which the judge is bound. Although here, we're talking federal law. Nonetheless, a judge doesn't get to play a philosopher king and disregard the law in the pursuit of some unrelated policy argument.
I have not suggested this. I was criticizing your position that "patents are beneficial to society" because "no judge has ever bought that argument". I'm sure you can understand that "what's beneficial to society and not" and "the interpretation of law" is two unrelated subjects.
I'd recommend arguments which are not ad populum fallacies if you want to have an interesting discussion.
I'd recommend not confusing a question of the burden of proof in making the extraordinary claim that patents stifle innovation as an argumentum ad populum, if you want to have an interesting discussion. I can claim that I'm immortal, and it's not a logical fallacy for you to question that claim with a high degree of skepticism based on the fact that no one in history has ever been immortal.
I have presented some arguments on the issue. You can also read more criticism of patents here if you're interested. It's hardly a claim as extraordinary as "being immortal". Also you don't understand correctly why "ad populum" is a fallacy. The example you gave is not an "ad populum" argument... in that example the people are data points and you correctly come to the conclusion that since none of the countless data points is immortal, It's unlikley that anyone would be. However had the argument been "most people (in history) don't believe immortality is possible" or "it's an established fact in society that immortality is impossible" it would have fit in that category of fallacious arguments.
I disagree with the claim that patents in general would be beneficial to society
And that's essentially the key.
That I disagree with you so you can place me in the "people-who-are-wrong-because-they-don't-agree-with-me-category"?
But they've come up with this ingenious argument to try to equate software to pure algorithms and thus argue all software is unpatentable, no matter how nonobvious or how tightly tied to a machine.
Yes, that's the basic idea.
No judge has ever bought the argument, because it's simply legally wrong.
A judge doesn't care about what's beneficial to society or not. A judge interprets the law and judges by it. If you're defining ultimate truth as the law of the state you might make a good lawyer but not a very good philosopher.
Congress, the constitution, and 220 years of innovation in this country disagree.
I'd recommend arguments which are not ad populum fallacies if you want to have an interesting discussion.
The claim recites a "implementation on a computer system". All software falls in this category so it's not a limiting claim. Also, even if it would, a "computer system" could also be described with pure math. All ideas are really discoveries in ways nature can be utilized. This is the paradox of patents. I disagree with the claim that patents in general would be beneficial to society (and many socioeconomic researches does this as well, there's no consensus on this matter) because process of invention more resembles iterative discovery than revolutionary insight although the invention could have revolutionary consequences. It's an misconception which resembles the absurd cartoon trope where the character suddenly has a light bulb which pops out of his head. But as many other systems in society, if enough powerful people benefit from it, and it's complicated enough so you won't see the defects of it, there won't be any general motivation to change it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that you really understand the basics of how companies in a standard market economy work. Companies absolutely have goals. The implicit goal is of course to make profit and they also have other broad visions and mission statements. Here is the Coca Cola Company's mission statement for example. The boards function not to "milk the company for short-term gain" as you describe it but their purpose is the exact opposite - to set up long-term goals for the company and make sure those are maintained. The short term operative work is handled by the CEO.
If the only goal is to "sell more" then someone is seriously fucking stupid because "profit more" is what we really want. Selling more is a means to an end, not an end itself.
To make profit a company needs to sell. If you're a bank you need to sell financial services. If you're a computer store you need to sell computers.
Sorry, I understand what you're saying and why, but you're wrong on so many levels. I'm an experienced programmer/software architect and entrepreneur. Sales is a vital part of a company and I'm sorry that many technical people appreciate that more. They have an incredibly difficult task - selling is not about "telling people what they need", what sales actually do is to create buyers and this is incredibly complex stuff that requires understanding of decision making, the potential customer (their needs, pain and organization) and the technical details of the product or service you offer.
...but this should be an indicator to you that I'm one of your "trusted technical people" that will tell the customer the true PROS and CONS of everything even when it means my company takes a fiscal loss.
A good sales person wouldn't risk loosing credibility by withholding critical information or lying. This is not what sales people do. You need to understand that making a deal is not about presenting the features and non-features of your product/service and waiting for him to say "yes" or "no". Decision making is much, much more complex than that, especially in large deals.
In a well functioning company sales and development work closely together as they both have crucial information that the other department needs. The salespeople usually have in-depth market knowledge like not yet addressed customer pain/requirements that the developers could utilize to improve the product/service and thereby sales. You need to understand that the goal of the company is to sell more and the better the developers understands sales and their situation (the tighter they are connected) the better they can understand the selling process and the potential clients and thereby improve sales. Likewise - if sales can understand the technical details of the product better - they address the needs of the potential clients better in the vision they give them of the solution - increasing sales.
Couldn't this be interpreted as additional evidence for the theory that the moon formed in a collision between earth and another object, in the sense that the moon once where part of earth and some water where transfered during the collision?
Yeah, because the courthouses don't have anything important to do anyway and I bet the justice system love obscure laws where the outcome depends on intent and motivation rather than objective evidence............
Random delays don't work in theory. All you have to do is to get a couple of extra data points and then average them. The result should be pretty accurate. It might be effective in practice though if the number of extra data points is too great.
+1000 insightful
Ummm.. it tracks if you have given permission for cookie tracking. Doesn't that make it a "tracking cookie"? Isn't all cookies tracking cookies? The only thing web masters have to do is to claim that all their cookies are "necessary for the functioning of the website" and "not tracking cookies". Isn't that a huge loophole?
"Fixed delay" refers to a fixed and delay-padded time frame the whole operation runs in where the total time of the frame is equal or longer than the worst case of any cryptosystem - or for either of them - but preferably longer to account for safety margin and because delay makes brute force harder anyway.
Well the solution should be pretty simple. Just patch OpenSSH and introduce a delay in responding to a challenge thats makes the total time be a sufficiently large chunk to allow any crypto calculation to run in that frame for that machine. They even mention this in TFA. Isn't challenge delay crucial anyway to make dictionary attacks and other brute force attacks significantly harder? This seems like the most waterproof way to solve it since it prevents any timing attack, no matter what crypto system is used (in this case the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm).
He wrote that on purpose. It's a meme.
Wow, the summary is completely misleading and tells you nothing about the actual news. It reads like they just figured out that they can use multiple frequencies to send additional bands of data. Everybody with a slightest clue about how optical data transmission works knows this already. The news in TFA however is that they have figured out how to encode this data with a single laser instead of one laser per band making it enormously more economic. A car analogy would be if someone had figured out how to make cars fly without wings, and the summary would be "a new vehicle pushes transportation to its limits. by sitting in a container with an engine one can travel much faster than walking." Facepalm.
Your ability to disrupt the network scales exponentially with the amount of computing power and BTC you have. Transactions fees are expensive to honest people but cheap if your goal is to be disruptive - you have to pay less than 1%-0% or so of their transactions and nothing every time you generate your own block - and if you generate your own block you can max out the size. If the system adjusts itself so block generation gets harder honest people have to wait too long or pay too much to make transactions making it inferior to normal currencies. If the system adjust itself so block generation gets easier, dishonest people can fill it with crap so the database quickly becomes inconvenient/unusable. In other words, making transactions will be _slow_ and/or _expensive_, a property it shares with many other P2P technology. There are cases where Bitcoin could be useful - but it's ridiculous to claim that it will ever replace normal currencies. It works in theory. But it's far from practical. Just like Tor.
According to Wikipedia, the database size is currently 200 MB. A maximum block is 1 MB according to the bitcoin wiki. A couple of hundred phony blocks would be enough to quadruple the current database size. So there lies the huge scalability problem.
There's one thing that don't make sense to me about bitcoins. The whole system relies on the fact that a huge distributed database stores all transactions ever made. So basically, I can get a smallish botnet of 10000 nodes or so, buy/mine a ~1000 BTC, then proceed to make as many transactions between the nodes in my botnet as I can. If I keep at it long enough the size of the database will become so large that noone could possibly store all that data conveniently - and you need to store all transactions ever made to verify transactions - rendering the whole system useless.
And then I haven't even mentioned the insanity that the whole system relies on the fact that there are more honest nodes than dishonest - so just get more dishonest nodes than honest and you can get all bitcoins in existence.
I'm Swedish and this is 100% accurate, +100 Insightful. The Swedish justice system is a huge embarrassment and completely broken. Hopefully this case will shed some light on it so it can be fixed.
You also forgot to mention two other interesting facts of Claes Borgström, both of which you can find in his Wikipedia article. First of all he was the attorney of Thomas Quick, a case that is one of the biggest scandals in Swedish justice history. Basically Quick was mental and admitted to a whole bunch of murders he never committed and was sentenced guilty without a shred of evidence. Secondly Claes Borgström is an extreme left wing feminist nutjob that thinks men has a "collective guilt" against women and should pay a special tax for being men.
+100 funny
Absolutely agree. The biggest mistake made in the HTTP standard was calling cookies "cookies". The familiar name invites politicians to mistakingly think that they know what their function and purpose is. They should have called it "state exchange identifier" instead and we wouldn't have none of this crap.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/678/ See row "5 years".
Totally second this... Also, I think first defining the "genres" are stupid. If you have (for one era) 3 great games in one genre and 3 mediocre games in one genre you are forced to pick 1 great game and 1 mediocre game instead of 2 great games... Having to choose between "Portal" and "Half-Life 2" is insane.
Yeah, that is one solution. But I don't think I'd work that well. Nvidia already uses this technique with two slightly offset cameras to achieve 3d in games. However even then it's slightly buggy because the graphics engine is usually optimized to skip rendering of surfaces that doesn't intersect the standard-FOV cone - so at the edges you can see how surfaces sometimes disappear. If you turn up the FOV in the HL2 source engine to something like 180 you can see what I mean. You will be able to see behind yourself and too the sides in fish-perspective but big chunks of walls/floors will be missing.
which is basically*
Yeah, I do that too but I don't qualify it as "multi-monitor" gaming. Multi-monitor gaming is spanning the full-screen game over at least 2 screens which I basically what I guess they did in this test.
I bet the hoards of people that uses multiple monitors when gaming will be happy that they made this research..
No, the key to your position, which is why you'll dismiss as trivial any part that disagrees, such as the fact that neither a computer system or a car can be reduced to pure math.
Sure, you can't drive math but you can implement it as software on a computer system, so your analogy is broken.
Yes, that's the basic idea. That's the legislature's job in writing the law. Judges aren't supposed to disregard laws because someone believes they're not beneficial. The judge simply cannot decide that a new, useful, and nonobvious piece of software that's tied to machine is unpatentable, even if they believe that all patents are harmful to society. If they want to do that, they can step down and run for congress.
A judge interprets the law and judges by it. If you're defining ultimate truth as the law of the state you might make a good lawyer but not a very good philosopher.
No, I'm defining the law of the state as the law of the state, by which the judge is bound. Although here, we're talking federal law. Nonetheless, a judge doesn't get to play a philosopher king and disregard the law in the pursuit of some unrelated policy argument.
I have not suggested this. I was criticizing your position that "patents are beneficial to society" because "no judge has ever bought that argument". I'm sure you can understand that "what's beneficial to society and not" and "the interpretation of law" is two unrelated subjects.
I'd recommend arguments which are not ad populum fallacies if you want to have an interesting discussion.
I'd recommend not confusing a question of the burden of proof in making the extraordinary claim that patents stifle innovation as an argumentum ad populum, if you want to have an interesting discussion. I can claim that I'm immortal, and it's not a logical fallacy for you to question that claim with a high degree of skepticism based on the fact that no one in history has ever been immortal.
I have presented some arguments on the issue. You can also read more criticism of patents here if you're interested. It's hardly a claim as extraordinary as "being immortal". Also you don't understand correctly why "ad populum" is a fallacy. The example you gave is not an "ad populum" argument... in that example the people are data points and you correctly come to the conclusion that since none of the countless data points is immortal, It's unlikley that anyone would be. However had the argument been "most people (in history) don't believe immortality is possible" or "it's an established fact in society that immortality is impossible" it would have fit in that category of fallacious arguments.
I disagree with the claim that patents in general would be beneficial to society
And that's essentially the key.
That I disagree with you so you can place me in the "people-who-are-wrong-because-they-don't-agree-with-me-category"?
But they've come up with this ingenious argument to try to equate software to pure algorithms and thus argue all software is unpatentable, no matter how nonobvious or how tightly tied to a machine.
Yes, that's the basic idea.
No judge has ever bought the argument, because it's simply legally wrong.
A judge doesn't care about what's beneficial to society or not. A judge interprets the law and judges by it. If you're defining ultimate truth as the law of the state you might make a good lawyer but not a very good philosopher.
Congress, the constitution, and 220 years of innovation in this country disagree.
I'd recommend arguments which are not ad populum fallacies if you want to have an interesting discussion.
The claim recites a "implementation on a computer system". All software falls in this category so it's not a limiting claim. Also, even if it would, a "computer system" could also be described with pure math. All ideas are really discoveries in ways nature can be utilized. This is the paradox of patents. I disagree with the claim that patents in general would be beneficial to society (and many socioeconomic researches does this as well, there's no consensus on this matter) because process of invention more resembles iterative discovery than revolutionary insight although the invention could have revolutionary consequences. It's an misconception which resembles the absurd cartoon trope where the character suddenly has a light bulb which pops out of his head. But as many other systems in society, if enough powerful people benefit from it, and it's complicated enough so you won't see the defects of it, there won't be any general motivation to change it.