Once upon a time asbestos was a safe, inert material with all sorts of uses. And it was used everywhere. Everyone agreed it was safe.
Then one form of it was found to cause disease. Among the feeding frenzy that resulted: massive claims against manufacturers of asbestos products from the years when *no-one could even have suspected it was harmful*. Which is insane.
WiFi is used everywhere. Everyone agrees it is safe. But that still doesn't mean that someone, somewhere in the future, will find a pernicious effect. Or claim to find one. Sure, it'll be tiny - perhaps it may even be caused by the increased laptop use enabled by WiFi rather than by the radiation itself - but there will be a new feeding frenzy among the lawyers and some manufacturers will be tempted to settle rather than argue the case in front of "is the plaintiff cute enough to win a lottery?" juries. A university that has knowingly flooded the environment of young people with 2.4GHz radiation will be a juicy target. Big enough to have money, too small to be able to defend itself. [The WiFi equipment manufacturer could easily be out of business, as well, leaving the university as the best target].
Quite possibly, the insurers (who in the early-asbestos case were clearly not liable but stupidly chose to settle because they thought it would cost less) will refuse to pay up. So it is far, far safer to ban WiFi than face possible bankruptcy in 30 years' time.
Cellphones are slightly different in that the obvious target is, and will continue to be, the phone companies and the phone manufacturers. Cellphone usage is voluntary, and although in theory you could sue your school for not banning their use, that is unlikely to be a successful course of action.
The patent system helped too. When we developed the world's first commercially available RSA chip the RSA patent didn't apply outside the USA (because the principle had been published in academic papers before the patent was granted) and RSA hardware couldn't be exported to compete with ours (because of USA export restrictions).
I originally submitted this article... myself, I think that Andrew Brown is on to something but his understanding of big corporations and open source is 180 degrees off course. Here's my rebuttal: "How to Improve OpenOffice's Blood Supply" along with a suggestion of how micropayments can improve the sluggish circulation of big FOSS projects.
Did the DRM-ed CDs have the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo on them?
There have been reports that Philips will treat any use of the logo on CDs that don't conform to the Red Book standard as being trademark infringement.
The new religion among IT admins is to ban any software from being installed on users' PCs. So instead of having small fast interactive secure application-specific clients, everything has to go through the browser.
The fact that anything that goes through the browser is vulnerable to any attack launched on the browser - and can potentially expose all the organization's confidential data to whatever browser vulnerability the attackers choose to exploit - is ignored because it would sully the purity of the doctrine.
Someone decides to install an upgraded build of Cardbox. Cardbox is an application program. It doesn't install or update any system DLLs.
There is no reason for a reboot but we often end up having to ask for one anyway. Why? Because something has opened cardbox3.exe, the main Cardbox program file, and is holding it open. No reason for this to happen. Cardbox isn't running so certainly it doesn't need it.
The HANDLE utilities claim that Windows Explorer is holding cardbox3.exe open. Why? What for? No-one knows. As an expert user I am able to crash explorer.exe by hand, then do the installation, then restart explorer.exe again. But you can hardly expect a rational Real User to do that. [And sometimes HANDLE reports that Microsoft Word is the culprit instead of Explorer. Why? What for? No-one knows].
If Windows Vista seriously gets round the problem them I will be grateful and so will my users be. But I don't believe it. I suspect that they won't be able to do more than stick another layer of palliative software on top of the defect.
It's easy to abstract across operating systems as far as file access, networking access, and so on.
But a modern OS draws windows, dialog boxes, buttons,... and each program interacts with a host of other programs via any of a number of methods. Getting the same program to do DDE and OLE on Windows and the equivalents on Mac can mean radically different architectures.
If you are doing a[i] = b[i] the compiler can much more easily find out that a and b are distinct memory locations than if you are doing *p = *q. No, it can't. a[i] can address any location in the whole of memory, depending on the value of 'i'.
This is good news for car owners. If cracking the RFID were impossible, the only reasonable method of theft would be carjacking, which can be hazardous for the victim. Same reason that PINs are better than fingerprints for ATMs.
If you live that close to the Via Appia Antica then you can pop out and look at the tombs at lunchtime (give Cecilia Metella my love) and check the story I heard from a classics don that IV and IX and XL were mediaeval contracted notations for IIII VIIII and XXXX and the ancient Romans never used them. Incidentally, Roman numerals were used in written contracts for quite a long time after we started using Arabic ones for calculation, because it was harder to alter the amounts fraudulently after they'd been written.
This is nothing new: neither the weakness of the crypto nor the non-response by the supplier. In the late 1980s I analysed some commercially available encryption packages and found that their encryption was trivially breakable (here's the paper from Cryptologia about this).
The worst case was a package called Fortress, marketed and endorsed by an international firm of accountants, which was so weak that it barely needed analysis at all. Their response: not a promise to strengthen the algorithm but a cloud of PR and obfuscation. Public relations people were evidently cheaper than programmers with a knowledge of crypto. It seems that they still are.
If no icon will ever be smaller than 128x128, you have a point. Not otherwise.
A great deal of work goes into crafting small icons that convey exactly the right visual information. All manner of interesting optical illusions come into play when you are doing 16x16 or 32x32 or 48x48. For example: colour doesn't stay in one pixel but "spreads" to neighbouring ones; a line drawn through a 1-pixel-in-4 checkerboard pattern [ie. line 1: XOXOXO line 2: OOOOOO] changes colour depending on its position relative to the pattern...
If it had really been true, the "all you need is vector graphics" argument would have made font design really easy. No need for all that skilled work adding hints to make OpenType/TrueType fonts work at small sizes.
Being able to drive is a right not a privilege. We grant to the state the ability to regulate who shall be permitted to exercise that right, solely because the benefits that we receive from that concession are worth it - for example, we will know that our lives are in the hands of drivers who are more competent and less criminal than would otherwise be the case.
If major climate change is underway then let's use our resources to deal with the consequences instead of crippling ourselves in a futile attempt to avert the inevitable.
I've always been held back from using RSS by the fact that there is no way to syndicate the "page of the day". For example, as I write this, it is Thursday in Europe and Australia but Wednesday in California and points west. Whatever time of day the feed is retrieved, it's going to be wrong for someone.
Do I have to create 28 separate feeds, one for each timezone, or has someone come up with a better solution?
A patent is a contract between an inventor and society. The inventor agrees to disclose all the information that would enable anyone "skilled in the art" to reproduce what he has done. Society agrees to give him a monopoly. That's why "obviousness" and "prior art" is so important: society doesn't want to interfere in the market and get something worthless in return. Science fiction writers can't in general get patents on their ideas because they don't tell a suitably trained engineer how to create oil-lens binoculars. Although it isn't always techies that create patents: the Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr invented spread spectrum technology.
This design was turned up as "prior art" when I was drawing up my own patent for moire-based time indication. It was sufficiently offtopic not to be relevant, but it was rather a nice idea so it's good to see it being implemented. It also sets a useful pricepoint for my own design... Yes, it would be cool to display the date but there are a couple of problems.
When you're considering time, the sun moves round and round (forever westwards), so one position corresponds to one time, but when you're looking at dates, it oscillates (between north and south), so any date indication will be ambiguous between November and January, October and February, September and March...
Near the solstices the noon sun moves very very slowly, so the degree of amplification of motion required would be enormous and you'd run into diffraction problems.
Slashdot Mirror
If Linux had a user interface, every Windows developer would be porting to it.
Once upon a time asbestos was a safe, inert material with all sorts of uses. And it was used everywhere. Everyone agreed it was safe.
Then one form of it was found to cause disease. Among the feeding frenzy that resulted: massive claims against manufacturers of asbestos products from the years when *no-one could even have suspected it was harmful*. Which is insane.
WiFi is used everywhere. Everyone agrees it is safe. But that still doesn't mean that someone, somewhere in the future, will find a pernicious effect. Or claim to find one. Sure, it'll be tiny - perhaps it may even be caused by the increased laptop use enabled by WiFi rather than by the radiation itself - but there will be a new feeding frenzy among the lawyers and some manufacturers will be tempted to settle rather than argue the case in front of "is the plaintiff cute enough to win a lottery?" juries. A university that has knowingly flooded the environment of young people with 2.4GHz radiation will be a juicy target. Big enough to have money, too small to be able to defend itself. [The WiFi equipment manufacturer could easily be out of business, as well, leaving the university as the best target].
Quite possibly, the insurers (who in the early-asbestos case were clearly not liable but stupidly chose to settle because they thought it would cost less) will refuse to pay up. So it is far, far safer to ban WiFi than face possible bankruptcy in 30 years' time.
Cellphones are slightly different in that the obvious target is, and will continue to be, the phone companies and the phone manufacturers. Cellphone usage is voluntary, and although in theory you could sue your school for not banning their use, that is unlikely to be a successful course of action.
And mandatory spelling checks.
If Google did this then you could store a month's worth of old conversations and search for words within them.
On Google's servers, of course.
The patent system helped too. When we developed the world's first commercially available RSA chip the RSA patent didn't apply outside the USA (because the principle had been published in academic papers before the patent was granted) and RSA hardware couldn't be exported to compete with ours (because of USA export restrictions).
I originally submitted this article... myself, I think that Andrew Brown is on to something but his understanding of big corporations and open source is 180 degrees off course. Here's my rebuttal: "How to Improve OpenOffice's Blood Supply" along with a suggestion of how micropayments can improve the sluggish circulation of big FOSS projects.
Did the DRM-ed CDs have the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" logo on them?
There have been reports that Philips will treat any use of the logo on CDs that don't conform to the Red Book standard as being trademark infringement.
The Times article says that the construction of English 10x10 word squares has been a problem since the time of the ancient Greeks.
Certainly people can't have made much progress on it for 2 millennia or so, until English had evolved and modern English spelling had been invented.
Tabloid format, tabloid thinking.
The new religion among IT admins is to ban any software from being installed on users' PCs. So instead of having small fast interactive secure application-specific clients, everything has to go through the browser.
The fact that anything that goes through the browser is vulnerable to any attack launched on the browser - and can potentially expose all the organization's confidential data to whatever browser vulnerability the attackers choose to exploit - is ignored because it would sully the purity of the doctrine.
Someone decides to install an upgraded build of Cardbox. Cardbox is an application program. It doesn't install or update any system DLLs.
There is no reason for a reboot but we often end up having to ask for one anyway. Why? Because something has opened cardbox3.exe, the main Cardbox program file, and is holding it open. No reason for this to happen. Cardbox isn't running so certainly it doesn't need it.
The HANDLE utilities claim that Windows Explorer is holding cardbox3.exe open. Why? What for? No-one knows. As an expert user I am able to crash explorer.exe by hand, then do the installation, then restart explorer.exe again. But you can hardly expect a rational Real User to do that. [And sometimes HANDLE reports that Microsoft Word is the culprit instead of Explorer. Why? What for? No-one knows].
If Windows Vista seriously gets round the problem them I will be grateful and so will my users be. But I don't believe it. I suspect that they won't be able to do more than stick another layer of palliative software on top of the defect.
It's easy to abstract across operating systems as far as file access, networking access, and so on.
But a modern OS draws windows, dialog boxes, buttons,... and each program interacts with a host of other programs via any of a number of methods. Getting the same program to do DDE and OLE on Windows and the equivalents on Mac can mean radically different architectures.
If you are doing a[i] = b[i] the compiler can much more easily find out that a and b are distinct memory locations than if you are doing *p = *q.
No, it can't. a[i] can address any location in the whole of memory, depending on the value of 'i'.
The original posting doesn't seem to make much sense. Is a serials the same as a series, or what?
This is good news for car owners. If cracking the RFID were impossible, the only reasonable method of theft would be carjacking, which can be hazardous for the victim.
Same reason that PINs are better than fingerprints for ATMs.
If you live that close to the Via Appia Antica then you can pop out and look at the tombs at lunchtime (give Cecilia Metella my love) and check the story I heard from a classics don that IV and IX and XL were mediaeval contracted notations for IIII VIIII and XXXX and the ancient Romans never used them.
Incidentally, Roman numerals were used in written contracts for quite a long time after we started using Arabic ones for calculation, because it was harder to alter the amounts fraudulently after they'd been written.
The worst case was a package called Fortress, marketed and endorsed by an international firm of accountants, which was so weak that it barely needed analysis at all. Their response: not a promise to strengthen the algorithm but a cloud of PR and obfuscation. Public relations people were evidently cheaper than programmers with a knowledge of crypto. It seems that they still are.
A paper summarizing the whole story is here: The Comedy of Commercial Encryption Software.
If no icon will ever be smaller than 128x128, you have a point. Not otherwise.
A great deal of work goes into crafting small icons that convey exactly the right visual information. All manner of interesting optical illusions come into play when you are doing 16x16 or 32x32 or 48x48. For example: colour doesn't stay in one pixel but "spreads" to neighbouring ones; a line drawn through a 1-pixel-in-4 checkerboard pattern [ie. line 1: XOXOXO line 2: OOOOOO] changes colour depending on its position relative to the pattern...
If it had really been true, the "all you need is vector graphics" argument would have made font design really easy. No need for all that skilled work adding hints to make OpenType/TrueType fonts work at small sizes.
Or simply allow customers to repudiate any credit card charges that they can prove came from purchases made as a result of spam?
In that case the c/c companies would have a hefty financial interest in not providing services to spam-users.
Being able to drive is a right not a privilege. We grant to the state the ability to regulate who shall be permitted to exercise that right, solely because the benefits that we receive from that concession are worth it - for example, we will know that our lives are in the hands of drivers who are more competent and less criminal than would otherwise be the case.
Why do you think politicians worldwide are so desperate to bring in electronic voting?
Irresponsible voting is the worst treason a citizen can commit - the sooner it is detected and punished the better.
Also - more simply - the self-emptying involved in creating anything at all (esp. anything free-willed).
If major climate change is underway then let's use our resources to deal with the consequences instead of crippling ourselves in a futile attempt to avert the inevitable.
I've always been held back from using RSS by the fact that there is no way to syndicate the "page of the day". For example, as I write this, it is Thursday in Europe and Australia but Wednesday in California and points west. Whatever time of day the feed is retrieved, it's going to be wrong for someone.
Do I have to create 28 separate feeds, one for each timezone, or has someone come up with a better solution?
A patent is a contract between an inventor and society. The inventor agrees to disclose all the information that would enable anyone "skilled in the art" to reproduce what he has done. Society agrees to give him a monopoly. That's why "obviousness" and "prior art" is so important: society doesn't want to interfere in the market and get something worthless in return.
Science fiction writers can't in general get patents on their ideas because they don't tell a suitably trained engineer how to create oil-lens binoculars.
Although it isn't always techies that create patents: the Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr invented spread spectrum technology.
Yes, it would be cool to display the date but there are a couple of problems.