This is extremely important, after hurricane Andrew, there were people who had plenty of food in their cabinets but had nothing to eat because they didn't have can openers.
Oh, come off it. A can is not nearly robust enough to pose a problem for a person who wants to open it but lacking the correct tool.
A can of food can trivially and easily be opened by some sort of sharp chisel plus some blunt object. (nail, screw, hammer, corner of metal whatever) or, less trivial, and with more risk of spilling (parts of) the content by just about anything. I'd wager a bet that I'd be able to open a can of food using nothing more than say the chair on which I'm currently sitting.
A can-opener is *convenient*, but anyone who dies from, or seriously suffers from hunger while in the posession of canned-food clearly has other problems than the lack of an opener.
That would work excellent, for the first 50km or so where the climber is in the atmosphere. Doesn't help with the remaining 99.85% though. In other words, on good days, with steady wind, your "solution" would bring the climber slowly to maybe 50km, max. From there on it still has 35.950km to go from the original 36.000. Not really much help, is it ?
Here's a hint: the engineers from nasa and others who've spent months or years working on this problem aren't idiots. Odds are that it's a good idea to atleast read what they've written before you try to come up with all too many "clever" solutions that wouldn't work, or in this case, not even come within 4 orders of magnitude of working.
The law isn't passed to "compete with MS", infact the law doesn't mention Microsoft in any way shape and form, and nothing in the law prevents the state from buying all software and all it-services from for example Microsoft.
The law says open source software should be choosen, where adequate alternatives exist. Where that isn't the case, exceptions are given and proprietary software can be used. In most cases such exceptions will be for two years, but will be renewed if after two years open alternatives still don't exist.
The reasons are clearly stated in the document and has nothing particularily with Microsoft to do. Among the reasons are:
National security is improved if the state is free to inspect all the software it uses for bugs and/or backdoors.
It aids technological independence in that one have a choise of providers with open software, instead of being tied to a single one with a proprietary system.
It can create more jobs and be developed locally. If an extension or adaption is needed the state is free to buy those services locally, or from whomever they deem most qualified.
The cost is typically lower, or even if not, there's atleast one variable less to keep in mind, the number of licenses. That's one headache less.
As I said: Nothing of this has anything in particular with any one firm to do. It's just pretty objective advantages of a open source system. Obviosly the government in this case felt that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, so they enacted this law. Simple as that.
Sure. But the thing is, if the climber carries all the energy it needs, then it too spends most of the energy lifting the fuel, and only a small part lifting the cargo. A climber that is externally powered has atleast 3 large advantages:
It doesn't waste any of the energy for lifting the fuel. It lifts only itself and the cargo.
It weighs a lot less for the same cargo-capacity, this means you can have more of them on the same strength beanstalk.
Thirdly, a ground-based powerplant can be a lot better than one that needs to sit in the climber, it can be constructed with no concern for compactness or weigth.
On the other hand there are losses in transmitting power to the climber, large ones even, especially as the climber gets further from the ground. Still, current plans seems to indicate externally powered climbers are the way to go. I know of no study that seriously suggests internally powered climbers and actually do the math behind them. Do you ?
If this doohickey can climb 1000 feet it can climb a hundred million, assuming the battery holds out.
The battery won't and can't "hold out". The thing is, current day rockets consist basically of 90% fuel-tanks and fuel, along with maybe 5% engines and 5% cargo. That's how much energy is required to get to orbit. Offcourse most of that energy goes into lifting fuel.
Batteries are atleast 2 orders of magnitude worse in energy/mass than rocket-fuel, and it gets significantly worse by the fact that batteries don't weigth less as they become decharged (a empty fuel-tank is ligther than a full one, nevertheless rockets jettison the empty ones and are multi-stage)
rocket-fuel could do it, with amounts of fuel similar to those consumed by a rocket, but then you hadn't really won much, had you ?
Current plans call for the climbers to be externally powered, perhaps by microwave or laser aimed at them from the ground. The energy delivered will go down as they get higher, but gravity decreases with the square of the distance to the center of earth too, so that works out ok.
Not quite: The experiment establishes a base-line: This is what they can do today. Tomorrow they'll have to do better. The day after tomorrow, even better.
Establishing your starting-point can be a useful exersize even if it, in itself, doesn't acomplish anything new.
Both parts are tricky. The climber is "just engineering" but it does contain rather a lot of it.
It needs to be externally powered (probably by laser or microwave from the ground), it needs to climb *fast* since capacity of the beanstalk is directly proportional to the speed of the climbers. (if the beanstalk can hold 10 climbers and they go 100km/h you can launch one every 2 weeks. If the climbers can do 1000km/h you could launch every 2 days on the same beanstalk.
If you want to use it for space-tourism the climbers must be humongously fast, noone wants to sit in an elevator for a month, not even if the elevator is equipped like a luxus-liner. If you want to climb to orbit in 24 hours you need to climb at 1500km/h. That's not exactly trivial, probably rules out physical contact with the ribbon and nessecitates magnetic levitation or similar.
Oh yeah, and for security-reasons manned climbers probably also need a mechanism for disengaging from the cable and doing some sort of emergency-landing in the event of catastrophic failure of the cable.
The ribbon would stand under modest strain, meaning the lower end would not float freely in the air at ground-level, but instead the counterweigth would be a little bit "too" high so that the lower end of the cable needs to be anchored at the ground.
When you send stuff up, the upper end of the cable gets "braked", looses a little orbital velocity. This will have the result that the cable is no longer vertical, but instead very-near-vertical. Since the cable is under strain, and it's only nearly vertical, that strain will have some forward component, accelerating the cable again.
Essentially, you spin down earth to spin up the cable. Offcourse you'd need to send up a significant portion of the mass of earth to have a significant effect. And the moment you start sending stuff down equally much as up the effect cancels out.
Theoretically, *any* material could be used for a space-elevator, if the strength/mass ratio is lower, you'll just need "more" tapering. The reason why steel won't do is simply that it'd need a ridicolously large tapering, so that if your ribbon is 1mm square at the surface of earth it'd be 1000s if not millions of times thicker at the middle, making it impractical.
single-walled nanotubes are strong enough, in theory, that one could go all the way, with no tapering at all. practical plans operate with tapering in the single-digit area.
But the thing is, even if the rope turns out to be somewhat weaker than anticipated, that doesn't mean the elevator is impossible. Only that the first one will be more expensive. A 100:1 tapering will be more expensive than a 5:1 tapering, no doubt about it, but both are possible and practical.
Did everyone really think you could find a unique 32 character string for every possible combination and size of data out there?
No. Infact, I sincerely hope that noone believed that. That is clearly mathemathically impossible.
Consider a smaller, but otherwise identical, problem:
Find a unique 2-digit identifier for each person in a 300 person group.
When you think about it, that's obviously not possible since there's only 100 different 2-digit identifiers, and 100 different identifiers for 300 people mean that different people *have* to have the same id.
Secure hashes are still possible though, (or atleast we have no proof or indication that they're not), but the definition of "secure" doesn't include "has no collisions", only "collisions are hard to find". In an ideal hash, there's no simpler way of finding colisions than simply hashing random strings until you by chanse find two that have the same hash.
If the hash is 64-bit, this will happen at the latest when you've hashed 2**64+1 strings, and at average when you've hashed around the square root of that.
When we say a hash is "broken" we mean that someone has found a way of generating two different files with the same hash with a complexity lower than that.
Bein that nitpicky, the law never forces you to do *anything*, men with guns, acting on the orders of judges interpreting the law may force you, but the law itself, being nothing more than a conglomeration of letters obviously doesn't have the power to force anyone to do anything.
While correct, this level of nitpickyness is not helpful.
I know that in Norway contracts have been, in a court of law, considered void because they where so long and so complicated that not only could it not be expected for the customer to go trough 17 pages of small-print legalese in order to buy a (I think) mobile-phone, but even if the customer where to do so, it would be in practice impossible for him to make sense of it without several years of law-studies behind him.
Well, yeah. But first: it doesn't contribute constructively to a debate to go around assuming other people are dimwits.
Secondly, which service you get is largely a function of which dealer you use, and not which brand motherboard you buy.
Or are you suggesting that if I buy a BrandA motherboard from say mindfactory.de I'll get excellent service, while with BrandB bougth from the same dealer, I'd get crap service ?
That doesn't fit my experiences. I agree you should be willing to pay a small premium for a dealer you know generally honours his responsibilities without making a lot of trouble. That is, however, orthogonal to which brand you buy.
Secondly, if you read my post you'll notice there can be no "endless shipping and writing" with Norways consumer-protection laws.
If repair is estimated to take, or actually take more than a week, you've got the rigth to an equal replacement-part. This means if dealer promised you a 5 day repair, 8 days ago, you can go there and demand an equal replacement part.
Sure he can refuse this, in that case your best option is to a) buy a new motherboard somewhere else b) file a small-claims case on the dealer and c) make sure that neither you, nor anyone you know ever use that dealer again.
Small claims take about 3 months, costs around $100 (which you'll get back from the dealer) and it's a total slam-dunk in a situation like this, most dealers will fold, even if they're complete assholes, the moment it's clear theyve got no choise.
The *only* way you could actually lose would be for the dealer to go bankrupt *after* you deliver your motherboard and (voluntarily!) accept a repair, and before paying you or delivering the replacement.
That's a real (if small) risk. But I don't see how you can avoid this risk by bying a different brand motherboard.
Maybe to Americans. In a lot of other civilized countries the consumer protection laws are good enough that warranties are completely irrelvant.
Let's take Norway as an example. You have trough law 2 years warranty, 5 years on capital goods that are meant to last significantly more than 2 years. Probably motherboards would fall under this category, but even if not, 2 years is decent for electronics.
If something happens in this period, excluding normal wear and consumer misuse, you have the rigth to a cost-free repair or a new replacement, at *your* option. (that's rigth, you don't have to accept the repiar but are free to demand a replacement part.) Furthermore if you do choose to accept the repair, you've got the rigth to cost-free borrow a similar item for the duration of the repair, if the repair is estimated to, or in actuality takes more than 1 week.
Warranties larger than this are not really needed.
Btw, there are exceptions to the rule that the customer can choose if he accepts repair or want the item replaced, namely when the costs are unacceptable, as in a large multiple of the repair-costs.
For example, if you buy a car, and after 5 months the clock stops working, you won't be able to demand the dealer replaces your "broken" car with a new one. In this case you'd have to accept the repair (with a borrowed-car for the duration if it takes more than a week, which it shouldn't in this case)
Sure, many artists are slaves. But they generally choose to sign the slavery-contract of their own free will. They have to accept the responsibility for doing so themselves.
If you signed a contract that says sony can do whatever the hell they like with your music without asking you, then it's still your responsibility that bad stuff happens with your music.
Even if you're not a superstar, it seems pretty stupid to me to sign a contract wherein the publisher gets to, unilaterally, decide what formats and thus to wich people your music will be available.
More sensible would be a contract for a enumerated list of formats, along with an exclusive for future formats (i.e. to make say a SACD the recording-company needs the approval of the artist, but the artist cannot let a different company make the SACD)
I'm aware that many musicians sign slave-contracts, but they do so of their own free will, to claim that they cannot possibly act differently is running away from responsibility.
Most of what he writes makes sense and is true, but he is a little bit overeager to put the blame on someone else:
It is also unfortunate when bands such as ourselves, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, etc... (just a few of the new releases with copy protection) are the target of this criticism, when there is no possible way to avoid this new industry policy.
This is bull. The artists are the original copyrigth-holder for their work. They choose to license it for publication by some record-company, or not. They are free to set whatever demands they want for this publication. (with the risk that if their demands are too stiff, the record-company will say: "no deal")
Especially famous, well-selling artists have considerable leverage. If say Madonna (more realistically, her manager or whomever representing her) walks into a record-company and say she'd like to publish her new record with them, but one of the conditions is that it be released in standard CD-format, that the company would refuse to negotiate a contract.
Artists do have a way of influencing record-companies. It may not be easy, and it may be that not all artists have a lot of negotiation-leverage all the time. But to claim, as he does here, that they have "no possible way" to influence things, is bullshit.
How ironic that without their takedown notice, I never would've seen your site.
This is not only ironic, but pretty darn common. Personally I absolutely love it. It means that the age-old "threaten-people-who-say-stuff-we-dont-like" trick is backfiring hugely.
The backfiring happens because these days, quite often people will *know* that you're threathening, and that knowledge makes them curious.
There's a Fatwa against Rushdie for writing "Satanic verses", hmmm, wonder what's in there that makes those muslims so fuirous.....
The Scientologists go absolute apeshit over the content of this www.xenu.com site, hmm, I wonder what info is there that they think the world absolutely cannot be allowed to see.....
Thing is, this works even with very small children, it's basic psychology. Tell a 8-year old thats going to the library that he can borrow any book he wants, except at no circumstances whatsoever must he even go near any books written by Shakespear.
I'll bet, the kid will, in a short time, know a lot more about Shakespear and his works than he would had you simply said nothing about him whatsoever.
The problem is deeper. The problem is assuming that a number associated with you and given to dozens, if not hundreds of different institutions during your life is a secret, and thus for example consider knowledge of the SSN a way of authenthicating people.
What can be the security implications for storing things like name, date of birth, sex, present address, etc. for all citizens?
There are quite a few concerns. Nevertheless quite a few countries has systems like this. All the Scandinavian countries for example. Here everyone gets a unique identity-number at birth (your birthdate plus a 5-digit uniqifier) this is explicitly *NOT* a secret or half-secret like the braindead US SSN.
There's a state-register that has this number linked to name, adress marital status and date of birth (nothing more). The advantage is that you only have to report moving to one register, not like say in Germany at moving you have to separately report your new adress to like half a dozen different stately organisations, each with their own register.
Having many separate registers cause a high risk of error or discrepancy. Many people forget or "forget" to inform some of the registers of a new adress, a marriage, a new child or whatever.
It also causes a fucking enormous papermill and bureaucrazy, which is inefficient. For example, here are the procedure for reporting a new child born in a hospital, by married parents, in Norway and Germany:
Norway:
Show up at the birth-station, bringing some sort of ID for the woman.
After the birth, sign the form they have for you. Optionally fill in your account-number to get the stately child-money directly transfered to your account. (if you don't do this you get checks in the mail instead)
Germany (simplified!!!):
Show up at the birth-station bringing some sort of ID for the woman.
After the birth, sign the 3 forms they show you, keep one, let them take care of the 2 others.
From "standesamt" get 2 copies of your marriage-certificate" (yes, you need to do this even if it's the same dept as the next step)
With the 2, go to "Standesamt", get 5 birth-certificates for your child.
Deliver birth-certificate 1 to the "einwohnermeldeamt", also marriage-certificate 1. Get "meldebescheinigung in [i-cant-remember] how many copies.
Send birth-certificate 2 to your health-insurer.
Send birth-certificate 3 to the church, if you're a member (if not you can drop this step.)
Go to Arbeidsamt and apply for "kindergeld", you'll need half a dozen papers for this in addition to the meldebescheinigung and birth-certificate, mostly stuff like your work-contract and/or income-statement from last year, the same for your partner offcourse.
Wait a few weeks until you get the kindergeld.
Go to jugendamt and apply for "erziehungsgeld", you can't do this before you've got the "kindergeld" because you need the status of that application as one of around half a dozen papers for this step.
This sounds incredible, but really, I'm positive I forgot a step or two on the german side.
Anyone tell me this is effective. Even if they do have concerns about the various departments sharing info, how about atleast allowing it on explicit permission. The form in the hospital could have a checkbox giving this permission to those that checked it.
Other procedures are similarily burthersome. When I moved here and got a stay and work permit, aswell as marrying, this lead to no less than *5* different copies of my passport being stored by various (noncommunicating) governmental agencies, all housed in the same building. That's beyond ridiculous.
That's not what they mean when they say "no single person or agency will be able to access all contents of a file"
What they mean is that for example, the school-district will only be allowed to access the school-relevant part of the file on a certain student. The police only the police-relevant part and so on.
The "red flags" are an exception to this. Meaning that even though the school-district can not read your criminal record or whatever else info is on a child in the police-part of the file, they *can* see that the police has raised a red flag about the child.
Secondly, allow me to confront me on the popular American bullshit you spout, presumably without even thinking about it. When a child is at stake, the risks are *not* automatically "even higher". Children are human beings, like the rest of us no more, and no less worth.
It's bullshit now, just as it was back then. If a relatively simple additional part like this one could actually increase mileage significantly, then the car-manufacturers would actually use it.
Maybe not in the US, but here in Europe, with current fuel-prices hovering around 6$/gallon (not a typo --six-- dollars) I can promise you some people are more than "sligthly" interested in better fuel-economy.
Apart from that, there's too many claims that are simple nonsensical no matter how you turn and twist it, and no matter what technology you're talking of. For example:
Claims to improve mpg by *atleast* 5, without any qualifiers as to type of vehicle. For a large and heavy vehicle like a heavy SUV that would require an improvement of like 50%, not bloody likely.
Also claims to improve acceleration 0-60 by a *minimum* of 3 seconds. I guess this means if you've got a lamborghini that can do it in 4 seconds without this thing, it'll do it in 1 second *with* the thing. And that's the claimed minimum improvement. Fit the thing to a F1-car and it'll be going 60 *before* it's started.
You don't need a science-degree to see that any product that a) doesn't actually exist and b) are marketed with such claims is nothing other than bullshit.
How exactly are you going to produce electoral reform when most of the apparatus needed to reform it is completely dominated by two parties who have no motivation to allow a 3rd party to gain viability.
This is precisely the problem with American (and an increasing number of other countries) politics today.
The power is concentrated on to few hands, and the laws and election-systems are tilted so as to make it hard-to-impossible for new hands to gain a portion of that power.
Now, one could change the laws and the election-system, but that would have to be done by those *currently* in power. What motivation do they have to change laws in such a way that they themselves loose power ?
It can be any load, it's just used for inertia. The device simply suspends the load on springs so it can slide an inch or so up and down the frame. Then energy is extracted from this movement. Very modest amounts of energy, I should add, around 7 watts.
For most applications this is a nonstarter: if it's daytime, solar would work better (since it'd work at rests too) and for many operations at nigth, simply carrying a battery is easier, because you want say your nigth-vision goggles to keep working even if you leave the backpack behind for some job.
It's marketing-speak. It has only a superficial resemblence to english. Basically, someone knowing english will *think* they understand it, but they actually won't because a majority of the words have been changed to have a different meaning, or just as frequently, no meaning at all.
Free does not mean you'll be able to get it without giving the seller money.
Improved means "changed".
Trusted means: Includes technology to control you, because we sure as hell don't trust our customers.
Secure means: You'll only be able to do things we want you to do. You'll still get viruses though.
Sometimes marketing-speak instead resort to sentences with no actual content whatsoever, but that are designed to sound as if they're actually saying something:
Only select ingredients means yeah, we selected ingredients, i.e. we didn't put in every ingredient available in the world. (name a product that *isn't* produced from "select ingredients")
Tested by [insert-authority-here] sounds good, until you consider that they don't tell you the *result* of that test. Could be it's been tested and found horrible.
Verified by the Vitamine-institute in Switzerland problem is, no such institution exists, it's just a name we freely invented.
Now less sugar yes, less than earlier. Earlier our choclate-spread was 83% sugar, now it's only 81%. This will make a difference to someone, somewhere, we're sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come off it. A can is not nearly robust enough to pose a problem for a person who wants to open it but lacking the correct tool.
A can of food can trivially and easily be opened by some sort of sharp chisel plus some blunt object. (nail, screw, hammer, corner of metal whatever) or, less trivial, and with more risk of spilling (parts of) the content by just about anything. I'd wager a bet that I'd be able to open a can of food using nothing more than say the chair on which I'm currently sitting.
A can-opener is *convenient*, but anyone who dies from, or seriously suffers from hunger while in the posession of canned-food clearly has other problems than the lack of an opener.
Here's a hint: the engineers from nasa and others who've spent months or years working on this problem aren't idiots. Odds are that it's a good idea to atleast read what they've written before you try to come up with all too many "clever" solutions that wouldn't work, or in this case, not even come within 4 orders of magnitude of working.
The law isn't passed to "compete with MS", infact the law doesn't mention Microsoft in any way shape and form, and nothing in the law prevents the state from buying all software and all it-services from for example Microsoft.
The law says open source software should be choosen, where adequate alternatives exist. Where that isn't the case, exceptions are given and proprietary software can be used. In most cases such exceptions will be for two years, but will be renewed if after two years open alternatives still don't exist.
The reasons are clearly stated in the document and has nothing particularily with Microsoft to do. Among the reasons are:
As I said: Nothing of this has anything in particular with any one firm to do. It's just pretty objective advantages of a open source system. Obviosly the government in this case felt that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, so they enacted this law. Simple as that.
It doesn't waste any of the energy for lifting the fuel. It lifts only itself and the cargo.
It weighs a lot less for the same cargo-capacity, this means you can have more of them on the same strength beanstalk.
Thirdly, a ground-based powerplant can be a lot better than one that needs to sit in the climber, it can be constructed with no concern for compactness or weigth.
On the other hand there are losses in transmitting power to the climber, large ones even, especially as the climber gets further from the ground. Still, current plans seems to indicate externally powered climbers are the way to go. I know of no study that seriously suggests internally powered climbers and actually do the math behind them. Do you ?
The battery won't and can't "hold out". The thing is, current day rockets consist basically of 90% fuel-tanks and fuel, along with maybe 5% engines and 5% cargo. That's how much energy is required to get to orbit. Offcourse most of that energy goes into lifting fuel.
Batteries are atleast 2 orders of magnitude worse in energy/mass than rocket-fuel, and it gets significantly worse by the fact that batteries don't weigth less as they become decharged (a empty fuel-tank is ligther than a full one, nevertheless rockets jettison the empty ones and are multi-stage)
rocket-fuel could do it, with amounts of fuel similar to those consumed by a rocket, but then you hadn't really won much, had you ?
Current plans call for the climbers to be externally powered, perhaps by microwave or laser aimed at them from the ground. The energy delivered will go down as they get higher, but gravity decreases with the square of the distance to the center of earth too, so that works out ok.
Establishing your starting-point can be a useful exersize even if it, in itself, doesn't acomplish anything new.
It needs to be externally powered (probably by laser or microwave from the ground), it needs to climb *fast* since capacity of the beanstalk is directly proportional to the speed of the climbers. (if the beanstalk can hold 10 climbers and they go 100km/h you can launch one every 2 weeks. If the climbers can do 1000km/h you could launch every 2 days on the same beanstalk.
If you want to use it for space-tourism the climbers must be humongously fast, noone wants to sit in an elevator for a month, not even if the elevator is equipped like a luxus-liner. If you want to climb to orbit in 24 hours you need to climb at 1500km/h. That's not exactly trivial, probably rules out physical contact with the ribbon and nessecitates magnetic levitation or similar.
Oh yeah, and for security-reasons manned climbers probably also need a mechanism for disengaging from the cable and doing some sort of emergency-landing in the event of catastrophic failure of the cable.
When you send stuff up, the upper end of the cable gets "braked", looses a little orbital velocity. This will have the result that the cable is no longer vertical, but instead very-near-vertical. Since the cable is under strain, and it's only nearly vertical, that strain will have some forward component, accelerating the cable again.
Essentially, you spin down earth to spin up the cable. Offcourse you'd need to send up a significant portion of the mass of earth to have a significant effect. And the moment you start sending stuff down equally much as up the effect cancels out.
Theoretically, *any* material could be used for a space-elevator, if the strength/mass ratio is lower, you'll just need "more" tapering. The reason why steel won't do is simply that it'd need a ridicolously large tapering, so that if your ribbon is 1mm square at the surface of earth it'd be 1000s if not millions of times thicker at the middle, making it impractical.
single-walled nanotubes are strong enough, in theory, that one could go all the way, with no tapering at all. practical plans operate with tapering in the single-digit area.
But the thing is, even if the rope turns out to be somewhat weaker than anticipated, that doesn't mean the elevator is impossible. Only that the first one will be more expensive. A 100:1 tapering will be more expensive than a 5:1 tapering, no doubt about it, but both are possible and practical.
No. Infact, I sincerely hope that noone believed that. That is clearly mathemathically impossible.
Consider a smaller, but otherwise identical, problem:
Find a unique 2-digit identifier for each person in a 300 person group.
When you think about it, that's obviously not possible since there's only 100 different 2-digit identifiers, and 100 different identifiers for 300 people mean that different people *have* to have the same id.
Secure hashes are still possible though, (or atleast we have no proof or indication that they're not), but the definition of "secure" doesn't include "has no collisions", only "collisions are hard to find". In an ideal hash, there's no simpler way of finding colisions than simply hashing random strings until you by chanse find two that have the same hash.
If the hash is 64-bit, this will happen at the latest when you've hashed 2**64+1 strings, and at average when you've hashed around the square root of that.
When we say a hash is "broken" we mean that someone has found a way of generating two different files with the same hash with a complexity lower than that.
While correct, this level of nitpickyness is not helpful.
I know that in Norway contracts have been, in a court of law, considered void because they where so long and so complicated that not only could it not be expected for the customer to go trough 17 pages of small-print legalese in order to buy a (I think) mobile-phone, but even if the customer where to do so, it would be in practice impossible for him to make sense of it without several years of law-studies behind him.
Secondly, which service you get is largely a function of which dealer you use, and not which brand motherboard you buy.
Or are you suggesting that if I buy a BrandA motherboard from say mindfactory.de I'll get excellent service, while with BrandB bougth from the same dealer, I'd get crap service ?
That doesn't fit my experiences. I agree you should be willing to pay a small premium for a dealer you know generally honours his responsibilities without making a lot of trouble. That is, however, orthogonal to which brand you buy.
Secondly, if you read my post you'll notice there can be no "endless shipping and writing" with Norways consumer-protection laws.
If repair is estimated to take, or actually take more than a week, you've got the rigth to an equal replacement-part. This means if dealer promised you a 5 day repair, 8 days ago, you can go there and demand an equal replacement part.
Sure he can refuse this, in that case your best option is to a) buy a new motherboard somewhere else b) file a small-claims case on the dealer and c) make sure that neither you, nor anyone you know ever use that dealer again.
Small claims take about 3 months, costs around $100 (which you'll get back from the dealer) and it's a total slam-dunk in a situation like this, most dealers will fold, even if they're complete assholes, the moment it's clear theyve got no choise.
The *only* way you could actually lose would be for the dealer to go bankrupt *after* you deliver your motherboard and (voluntarily!) accept a repair, and before paying you or delivering the replacement.
That's a real (if small) risk. But I don't see how you can avoid this risk by bying a different brand motherboard.
Maybe to Americans. In a lot of other civilized countries the consumer protection laws are good enough that warranties are completely irrelvant.
Let's take Norway as an example. You have trough law 2 years warranty, 5 years on capital goods that are meant to last significantly more than 2 years. Probably motherboards would fall under this category, but even if not, 2 years is decent for electronics.
If something happens in this period, excluding normal wear and consumer misuse, you have the rigth to a cost-free repair or a new replacement, at *your* option. (that's rigth, you don't have to accept the repiar but are free to demand a replacement part.) Furthermore if you do choose to accept the repair, you've got the rigth to cost-free borrow a similar item for the duration of the repair, if the repair is estimated to, or in actuality takes more than 1 week.
Warranties larger than this are not really needed.
Btw, there are exceptions to the rule that the customer can choose if he accepts repair or want the item replaced, namely when the costs are unacceptable, as in a large multiple of the repair-costs.
For example, if you buy a car, and after 5 months the clock stops working, you won't be able to demand the dealer replaces your "broken" car with a new one. In this case you'd have to accept the repair (with a borrowed-car for the duration if it takes more than a week, which it shouldn't in this case)
Sure, many artists are slaves. But they generally choose to sign the slavery-contract of their own free will. They have to accept the responsibility for doing so themselves.
If you signed a contract that says sony can do whatever the hell they like with your music without asking you, then it's still your responsibility that bad stuff happens with your music.
More sensible would be a contract for a enumerated list of formats, along with an exclusive for future formats (i.e. to make say a SACD the recording-company needs the approval of the artist, but the artist cannot let a different company make the SACD)
I'm aware that many musicians sign slave-contracts, but they do so of their own free will, to claim that they cannot possibly act differently is running away from responsibility.
It is also unfortunate when bands such as ourselves, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, etc... (just a few of the new releases with copy protection) are the target of this criticism, when there is no possible way to avoid this new industry policy.
This is bull. The artists are the original copyrigth-holder for their work. They choose to license it for publication by some record-company, or not. They are free to set whatever demands they want for this publication. (with the risk that if their demands are too stiff, the record-company will say: "no deal")
Especially famous, well-selling artists have considerable leverage. If say Madonna (more realistically, her manager or whomever representing her) walks into a record-company and say she'd like to publish her new record with them, but one of the conditions is that it be released in standard CD-format, that the company would refuse to negotiate a contract.
Artists do have a way of influencing record-companies. It may not be easy, and it may be that not all artists have a lot of negotiation-leverage all the time. But to claim, as he does here, that they have "no possible way" to influence things, is bullshit.
This is not only ironic, but pretty darn common. Personally I absolutely love it. It means that the age-old "threaten-people-who-say-stuff-we-dont-like" trick is backfiring hugely.
The backfiring happens because these days, quite often people will *know* that you're threathening, and that knowledge makes them curious.
There's a Fatwa against Rushdie for writing "Satanic verses", hmmm, wonder what's in there that makes those muslims so fuirous.....
The Scientologists go absolute apeshit over the content of this www.xenu.com site, hmm, I wonder what info is there that they think the world absolutely cannot be allowed to see.....
Thing is, this works even with very small children, it's basic psychology. Tell a 8-year old thats going to the library that he can borrow any book he wants, except at no circumstances whatsoever must he even go near any books written by Shakespear.
I'll bet, the kid will, in a short time, know a lot more about Shakespear and his works than he would had you simply said nothing about him whatsoever.
The problem is deeper. The problem is assuming that a number associated with you and given to dozens, if not hundreds of different institutions during your life is a secret, and thus for example consider knowledge of the SSN a way of authenthicating people.
There are quite a few concerns. Nevertheless quite a few countries has systems like this. All the Scandinavian countries for example. Here everyone gets a unique identity-number at birth (your birthdate plus a 5-digit uniqifier) this is explicitly *NOT* a secret or half-secret like the braindead US SSN.
There's a state-register that has this number linked to name, adress marital status and date of birth (nothing more). The advantage is that you only have to report moving to one register, not like say in Germany at moving you have to separately report your new adress to like half a dozen different stately organisations, each with their own register.
Having many separate registers cause a high risk of error or discrepancy. Many people forget or "forget" to inform some of the registers of a new adress, a marriage, a new child or whatever.
It also causes a fucking enormous papermill and bureaucrazy, which is inefficient. For example, here are the procedure for reporting a new child born in a hospital, by married parents, in Norway and Germany:
Norway:
Germany (simplified!!!):
This sounds incredible, but really, I'm positive I forgot a step or two on the german side.
Anyone tell me this is effective. Even if they do have concerns about the various departments sharing info, how about atleast allowing it on explicit permission. The form in the hospital could have a checkbox giving this permission to those that checked it.
Other procedures are similarily burthersome. When I moved here and got a stay and work permit, aswell as marrying, this lead to no less than *5* different copies of my passport being stored by various (noncommunicating) governmental agencies, all housed in the same building. That's beyond ridiculous.
What they mean is that for example, the school-district will only be allowed to access the school-relevant part of the file on a certain student. The police only the police-relevant part and so on.
The "red flags" are an exception to this. Meaning that even though the school-district can not read your criminal record or whatever else info is on a child in the police-part of the file, they *can* see that the police has raised a red flag about the child.
Secondly, allow me to confront me on the popular American bullshit you spout, presumably without even thinking about it. When a child is at stake, the risks are *not* automatically "even higher". Children are human beings, like the rest of us no more, and no less worth.
Maybe not in the US, but here in Europe, with current fuel-prices hovering around 6$/gallon (not a typo --six-- dollars) I can promise you some people are more than "sligthly" interested in better fuel-economy.
Apart from that, there's too many claims that are simple nonsensical no matter how you turn and twist it, and no matter what technology you're talking of. For example:
- Claims to improve mpg by *atleast* 5, without any qualifiers as to type of vehicle. For a large and heavy vehicle like a heavy SUV that would require an improvement of like 50%, not bloody likely.
- Also claims to improve acceleration 0-60 by a *minimum* of 3 seconds. I guess this means if you've got a lamborghini that can do it in 4 seconds without this thing, it'll do it in 1 second *with* the thing. And that's the claimed minimum improvement. Fit the thing to a F1-car and it'll be going 60 *before* it's started.
You don't need a science-degree to see that any product that a) doesn't actually exist and b) are marketed with such claims is nothing other than bullshit.This is precisely the problem with American (and an increasing number of other countries) politics today.
The power is concentrated on to few hands, and the laws and election-systems are tilted so as to make it hard-to-impossible for new hands to gain a portion of that power.
Now, one could change the laws and the election-system, but that would have to be done by those *currently* in power. What motivation do they have to change laws in such a way that they themselves loose power ?
For most applications this is a nonstarter: if it's daytime, solar would work better (since it'd work at rests too) and for many operations at nigth, simply carrying a battery is easier, because you want say your nigth-vision goggles to keep working even if you leave the backpack behind for some job.
Free does not mean you'll be able to get it without giving the seller money.
Improved means "changed".
Trusted means: Includes technology to control you, because we sure as hell don't trust our customers.
Secure means: You'll only be able to do things we want you to do. You'll still get viruses though.
Sometimes marketing-speak instead resort to sentences with no actual content whatsoever, but that are designed to sound as if they're actually saying something:
Only select ingredients means yeah, we selected ingredients, i.e. we didn't put in every ingredient available in the world. (name a product that *isn't* produced from "select ingredients")
Tested by [insert-authority-here] sounds good, until you consider that they don't tell you the *result* of that test. Could be it's been tested and found horrible.
Verified by the Vitamine-institute in Switzerland problem is, no such institution exists, it's just a name we freely invented.
Now less sugar yes, less than earlier. Earlier our choclate-spread was 83% sugar, now it's only 81%. This will make a difference to someone, somewhere, we're sure.