I agree about the stupidity and unreasonableness of not allowing photographs for some vague security concern or not allowing photos to be shot out in the street but on the other hand what people find comfortable or uncomfortable often has little to do with the ultimate effect. People have preferences for totally random reasons and these include not wanting to have perfectly harmless spiders in their rooms to feeling uncomfortable being photographed or by extension in the presence of visible photographic equipment (automated recordings for security are parsed differently).
If people don't like big cameras in the lobby of their hotel since it makes them feel uncomfortable then the hotel should ban such cameras just like it eliminates spiders from the rooms. The hotel's job is to make it's guests feel comfortable and since it's a private establishment it's totally reasonable for them to ask you not to take pictures in the lobby. Of course you would probably rather stay at a hotel with a different policy but that's what's great about choice.
In short people who feel uncomfortable being photographed should be allowed to have hotels that cater to their preferences.
Speaking as someone who is now pretty experienced at TeX (haven't yet *released* any packages but I've been writing some as I work on my thesis) and knows about the internals I have to say that LaTeX has an absolutely awful design. Sure, it produces pretty output but the macro language is almost as bad as brainfuck or assembly language.
To be fair this wasn't really a design failure on Knuth's part. He specifically wanted to avoid TeX becoming a full fledged programming language and I believe he expected other front ends to produce TeX commands but was eventually convinced to add some programming features to TeX. Combine this with the strong emphasis on compatibility and the restrictions of machines at the time and you get a language whose programming model is based on redefining parts of the language and involves finite numbers of registers and tokens.
Not to mention a number of really annoying limitations like the inability to use more than a dozen or so math fonts in the same document.
Unfortunately TeX works well enough to typeset papers but is too complex to inspire many people to hack the source. Thus there is not a great deal of manpower devoted to producing a successor and no one will buy an incompatible commercial product that won't interoperate with their colleagues.
This isn't to say no one is working on a replacement. LuaTex seems to be the way forward but I just wish it would come along faster. BTW as a stopgap measure perltex is pretty useful.
Alright, so I'm not even someone who does DNS/networking stuff even for a hobby (just a math grad who skimmed the RFCs once or twice) so if I can figure this out from what's up now then any competent bad guy can as well.
Anyway my guess is that it involves a combination of the birthday attack and the request for multiple nonexistant nameservers. That is as the attacker you trick poisontarget.com into trying to resolve the following locations.
AAA.google.com AAB.google.com.... XXX.google.com
Now you forge a single response packet that works for all of these requests and send many different copies with different TXIDs. Thus to succeed you need only hit ONE of the TXIDs used in the real requests.
In these forged responses you also have a forged glue record (as suggested in some of the links) which gives you control of lookups for all of google.com at poisiontarget.com after a single success.
Then again maybe I missed something basic which means this doesn't work.
Ohh and I want to add that this is a horrible way to argue about anything.
We know damn well what both the BSD and GPL licensces allow and don't allow. When we fight about whether the BSD leaves the code under the owner's control or if BSD code is free as in beer or as in speech (horrible analogy, free speech is a protection from governmental restraint) we aren't actually arguing over any facts. Both sides are just trying to grab ahold of appealing rhetoric not make a substantial point.
I mean it's just like the argument over whether a virus is alive. There is no fact at issue just a deciscion about how to use language. Just ignore these stupid issues and define your own terms if you want to communicate.
Maybe people choose a license for these reasons but they shouldn't. Just like IP law in general the best license is the one that leads to the most benefit.
In some cases the GPL will likely be the better choice as it may encourage more derivative works to be released and thus greater overall efficiency via reduced duplication. Indeed, it's hard to believe that as many corporate contributions to open source would have occurred if all the gnu utilities had been BSD licensed.
On the other hand BSD derived works, by allowing inclusion in more projects, can reduce unnecessary duplication of code. There is plenty of BSD licensed utility code out there that has saved huge numbers of man hours through it's inclusion in projects with GPL incompatible licensees that would have simply been rewritten to avoid the GPL in each case in which it was used. Moreover, in some cases the BSD license attracts corporate support that otherwise might not have existed.
Intellectual Property is merely a legal fiction adopted to encourage technological advancement and idea reuse (patents require disclosure for a reason). Especially when writing open source we should understand this and choose licensces based on long term social benefit not inappropriate emotional responses based on bad analogies with physical property ('stealing' code etc..)
In particular we should understand that we all benefit when it costs less for companies to develop programs. Every man hour spent duplicating code that has already been written elsewhere is an hour that wasn't used writing other code or otherwise improving society. Choosing not to let companies use your code just because you don't like the idea of someone making money off your work is the moral equivalent of refusing to be an organ donor because you don't like the idea of someone else using your liver without paying. There is no justification for making someone else do more work with no benefit to anyone. However, on the other side it's no better to release code in an overly permissive fashion when a more restrictive license would yield greater benefit in the long run by encouraging sharing.
Which sort of license will be the most beneficial in which situation is what we should be arguing about not this sort of thing.
I personally think that one of the worst things GNU did was disfavoring the LGPL license since this provided a useful middle ground that yielded the best results in some cases.
Did you actually think about this at all before you posted? If you did maybe you can explain how google applying for a patent on this makes the world a worse place?
It's not like google failing to apply for software patents would make the law go away. It would just let someone else who ws more likely to enforce them get the patents.
I think it's in the advertising part but I might just be missing something.
If that's it I agree this doesn't seem innovative enough on it's own to be protected by a patent but google needs to do this defensively so no one else gets a patent on the idea. At the very least the patent application provides proof of prior art.
"Don't be evil" doesn't mean don't do things that annoy you personally or even annoy slashdot users. It means well don't be EVIL.
Acting to restrict competition by creating incomprehensible and bug ridden file formats and protocols that lock in your customers while discouraging innovation is evil. That would be making money by knowingly making the world a worse place just so you can get money.
On the other hand giving me the OPTION of making money by putting adds on my social networking page for my friends to see just gives me an option. If I don't like the option I don't need to use it. Presumably the only reason this could possibly cause people harm is because their friends choose to use it. But you can't believe that google is evil for letting people place adds for their friends to see without believing your friends are evil for choosing to display the ads. So if google actually does this are you willing to commit to berating any of your friends who choose to display ads for being immoral? If you won't berate your friends for doing it why are you willing to berate google?
It really irks me the way people really enjoy the free services that ads support (like free internet search, TV) yet act as if ads themselves were an unalloyed bad. You can't have one without the other. Now obviously there are both harms and benefits to paying people to put ads on their friend page and it doesn't make google evil if they have a different opinion on how to weigh those against each other than you do.
I think your confusing the individuals choices and intent with the behaviors that are in people's evolutionary interest.
It's certainly true that people's proclivity to form social bonds and help those they've bounded with developed from an evolutionary prid pro quo, indeed, this is likely why we tend to feel betrayed or indignant if we discover our friends aren't returning our favors or don't like us as much as we like them. However, this doesn't entail that as individuals we approach friendship as a transaction.
In other words we don't think, "I made so and so laugh 8 times he owes me a few more laughs." But yes I agree with the conclusion that I don't see the problem with this tech.
Of course friendship isn't a commercial transaction. If I have to pay someone to be my friend or they only hang out with me because of the nice stuff I give them they aren't really my friend.
However, being friends with someone doesn't mean you can't help them get good deals. If I buy a new laptop there's nothing wrong with offering my friends the first chance to buy the old one. If I use dreamhost there is nothing immoral about getting my friends to use my referral code so I get reimbursed when they purchase hosting.
I agree it's immoral to give your friends a paid opinion masquerading as your genuine advice. However, it seems clear in this case that there is no danger of confusion about whether you are making a personal recommendation or just being paid to put an advertisement on your page. I don't see any reason anyone would actually think an ad was your friends genuine advice.
So sure you shouldn't choose your friends because of monetary compensation you don't have to refuse the benefits from having that friend. I didn't make friends with people in college because they owned cars but that didn't mean I couldn't ride with them when they wanted to get some food or take advantage of it when they offered to help me move.
Yes! I'm glad other people feel this way as well. It's always seemed kinda stupid to me to go out of your way to see (or worse purchase) the 'real' painting when you don't have the skill to tell it apart from a well made fake. I mean if you just want social status or the chance to brag to your friends then fine but most people take themselves to be valuing these works of art because of their artistic value. But if you can't tell if it's the real thing by visual inspection then the fake has just as much artistic value.
However, I would take this point even further. It's not just that a good copy of a van Gogh or forged original Shakespeare folio have just as much artistic value but also that similar paintings done today do as well. It's absurd that we argue over whether certain works were written by shakespeare as if it would make them better plays if they had been and take some undiscovered painting by a classical master to be a great work but dismiss it if we discover it was truly modern.
Frankly, I think the reason that so many old things are considered great works of art (Shakespeare, dutch masters, etc..) is because we confuse artistic contribution and genius with artistic value. If I paint something in the style of the dutch masters or a write a new Shakespearean folio I haven't displayed the artistic genius that the original artist did because I had modern tools and knowledge of the original. My work would also lack the impact and wouldn't require the bravery that the originals did. However, none of that means my work has any less artistic value or offers a worse aesthetic experience.
Art really should work like science does. We should take the best ideas from our predecessors and shamelessly copy them while improving them where we can. We don't go back and read Newton and neither does it make sense to look at the originals for anything but historical purpose. But it seems people really really want to engage in ancestor worship and believe that there is some greater value to these artworks even to the people who like them less than modern works and the power of placebo is HUGE.
It's not like there wasn't any fission before we tested nuclear weapons. After all it's what uranium does naturally and people in europe were experiment with radioactive isotopes for some time before we got to nuclear weapons.
However, an accurate comparison of the ratios of these radioactive isotopes would probably be sufficent to eliminate other types of contamination (using paints that came from near a natural deposit of radioactive minerals). Likely the ratios from nuclear explosions would be different than from probable types of accidental exposure. And if you really want to get fancy you can example the ratios of these elements to their decay products.
Of course this won't stop forgers willing to put in enough effort. Likely one could either create paints/materials out of old materials from before nuclear tests or go the cheap way and 'accidentally' expose your painting to radioactive sources that would create obvious false positives. Then again I'm not sure it's worth any forger's interest to put in that much effort. It's probably safer not to aim a bit lower rather than forge works likely to be subject to this level of scrutiny.
Given the legal differences between various localities what other option do they have than restricting all of our rights to the lowest common denominator. I mean other than geolocation how does ebay avoid WWII german memorabilia or copies of mein kampf in europe? As companies expand to have operations in more places with more and more restrictions they don't have a choice about obeying the local laws but I certainly don't want to have an internet only of stuff that's legal everywhere.
Ohh, I think that's a bit simplistic. What about simply appointing the fed deciscion makers to lifetime positions and offering them $1 million/year in salary. That would probably dilute the ability of large corporations to influence their deciscions the same way the supreme court is LESS influenced by corporations or the public than members of congress.
In fact there are probably lots of ways you could reduce 'corruption' without pursuing your solution. Now there are other reasons you might not want the fed to have power (just because a deciscion isn't corrupt doesn't make it good) but I think you are going a bit far.
Wouldn't the standard need only specify certain amperage minimums the supply would have to produce?
I mean once you've fixed the voltage the devices themselves could throw in a resistor of their choice to get the amperage they want unless the device simply can't meet the demand. Isn't this how house electricity works? There is a high amperage limit at the fuse box for the whole room but no specification for the amps at an individual outlet.
Another reason to standardize on a single voltage is that we could actually eliminate a lot more converters that way and make things much more convenient.
Let's say we (the whole world this time) standardized on a single 16V plug and a standard 3V plug. At first you would still need a converter on the end of the standard cords but eventually we could just create wall sockets for the now standard plugs. Then we could use a single high quality transformer for each building/floor and add wall plugs for these new standards.
Eventually you might be able to skip packing your power converters entirely and count on the hotel having the correct power standard. Even better you wouldn't need to worry about different electric plugs so much in foreign countries.
Now I'm all for standardizing connectors when it's possible to also standardize voltage and other power charachteristics but frankly this just seems like a really bad idea.
For starters each green plug power source is likely to be larger and bulkier than a power supply that operates at a single set of charachteristics. Given that the devices that require these power supplies are usually mobile that means it just got heavier to lug your mobile phone charger on vacation. Now you might hope that in total you would save on power supplies because you could share one power source between multiple devices. But if you only bring one power supply on your trip that means you can't leave your laptop charging in your hotel room/friend's house while taking your cell phone charger with for the day.
In short flexibility will require we still own a power supply for each device not to mention the point made in the article that each vendor is still going to want to ship a power source with their item. It seems to me a better idea is to standardize on a few power profiles and connectors instead so we can simply use more power supplies interchangeably without making them support multiple voltages.
In particular it seems best if we standardized on one connector (like the great apple magnetic one) for laptop type devices and the settled on powering the small devices through the USB standard like the iphone and other cell phones. Not only does your power cable now double as a data cable but we've saved on all the excess effort that would have gone into making smart power sources offering multiple voltages.
IP is not property because it conflicts with the basic justifications for property. The idea behind property in the first place was that just as you couldn't come along and deprive someone of their life you couldn't deprive them of the work of their hands or other goods they had improved with their effort.
Using IP doesn't deprive the originator the right to use their idea.
Now we want to adopt a pragmatic solution to encourage people to innovate and share ideas but that is about pragmatic incentives not property rights.
So isntead of bothering with the trouble of setting off a bomb just spray a bunch of people with a little bit of chemical. If your compatriots do so at other major airports you can probably shut down the whole system for a good while.
Well aside from performance art or a great trick one reasonable explanation is that they have some kind of inside tip that they can't reveal, i.e., signed NDAs, or were just told by people that 'something' would come out.
I think the easy way to check if this is just random fucking around or knowledge of a new product launch (which one would think would happen at more than one store) is to check out how much money the people in line have. If they are dirt poor college students they may not being buying much.
Yah, I suspect that apple is really trying to avoid the situation where someone takes the development kit and disassembles it in some manner to reveal internal secrets (e.g. how to unlock various features of the iphone). Including this language in their licence covers their ass so they can demand any company who discovers such information not distribute it.
I have great respect for the FSF and the goals they are trying to accomplish but when I see claims like, "But the result still would not qualify as free software, since no one could alter your source code and run the modified result on their phone," it irks me.
More accurately it would not meet the FSF's definition of free software. I would call freely released source code that I could load into the iphone simulator (or with $99 an iphone itself) free software. But whether or not you agree with my usage of the term isn't the point. 'Free software' is a term like 'free country.' It's part of the language and no one entity can dictate it's meaning just because it thinks that is what the term should mean.
To be clear I have no dispute with the FSF. Just as various activist groups might offer their own definitions of free countries that differ so too is it reasonable for the FSF to offer their own definition of free software and to try to convince us it is the correct one. However, journalistic pieces like the one at linux.com shouldn't assume that the FSF can define by fiat what words in our language mean. Instead they should tell us that this would not qualify as free software under the FSF definition.
I'm always amused by the idea of going and seeing scientific exhibits in person. Especially if you have no technical knowledge of them. I mean it's not like it really should be any better than just reading about it on wikipedia or the discovery channel but nevertheless I often find it rewarding.
So I've done a bit of thinking about this and my conclusion is that it's a combination of placebo effect and the presence of knowledgeable scientists who are good public speakers. In other words we could tell you any 5 things and so long as you really believed us it would make those worth seeing. True, it's not quite that simple. Some things simply provide more to stare at than others, but that's a large part of the effect.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree about the stupidity and unreasonableness of not allowing photographs for some vague security concern or not allowing photos to be shot out in the street but on the other hand what people find comfortable or uncomfortable often has little to do with the ultimate effect. People have preferences for totally random reasons and these include not wanting to have perfectly harmless spiders in their rooms to feeling uncomfortable being photographed or by extension in the presence of visible photographic equipment (automated recordings for security are parsed differently).
If people don't like big cameras in the lobby of their hotel since it makes them feel uncomfortable then the hotel should ban such cameras just like it eliminates spiders from the rooms. The hotel's job is to make it's guests feel comfortable and since it's a private establishment it's totally reasonable for them to ask you not to take pictures in the lobby. Of course you would probably rather stay at a hotel with a different policy but that's what's great about choice.
In short people who feel uncomfortable being photographed should be allowed to have hotels that cater to their preferences.
Speaking as someone who is now pretty experienced at TeX (haven't yet *released* any packages but I've been writing some as I work on my thesis) and knows about the internals I have to say that LaTeX has an absolutely awful design. Sure, it produces pretty output but the macro language is almost as bad as brainfuck or assembly language.
To be fair this wasn't really a design failure on Knuth's part. He specifically wanted to avoid TeX becoming a full fledged programming language and I believe he expected other front ends to produce TeX commands but was eventually convinced to add some programming features to TeX. Combine this with the strong emphasis on compatibility and the restrictions of machines at the time and you get a language whose programming model is based on redefining parts of the language and involves finite numbers of registers and tokens.
Not to mention a number of really annoying limitations like the inability to use more than a dozen or so math fonts in the same document.
Unfortunately TeX works well enough to typeset papers but is too complex to inspire many people to hack the source. Thus there is not a great deal of manpower devoted to producing a successor and no one will buy an incompatible commercial product that won't interoperate with their colleagues.
This isn't to say no one is working on a replacement. LuaTex seems to be the way forward but I just wish it would come along faster. BTW as a stopgap measure perltex is pretty useful.
Alright, so I'm not even someone who does DNS/networking stuff even for a hobby (just a math grad who skimmed the RFCs once or twice) so if I can figure this out from what's up now then any competent bad guy can as well.
Anyway my guess is that it involves a combination of the birthday attack and the request for multiple nonexistant nameservers. That is as the attacker you trick poisontarget.com into trying to resolve the following locations.
AAA.google.com ....
AAB.google.com
XXX.google.com
Now you forge a single response packet that works for all of these requests and send many different copies with different TXIDs. Thus to succeed you need only hit ONE of the TXIDs used in the real requests.
In these forged responses you also have a forged glue record (as suggested in some of the links) which gives you control of lookups for all of google.com at poisiontarget.com after a single success.
Then again maybe I missed something basic which means this doesn't work.
Ohh and I want to add that this is a horrible way to argue about anything.
We know damn well what both the BSD and GPL licensces allow and don't allow. When we fight about whether the BSD leaves the code under the owner's control or if BSD code is free as in beer or as in speech (horrible analogy, free speech is a protection from governmental restraint) we aren't actually arguing over any facts. Both sides are just trying to grab ahold of appealing rhetoric not make a substantial point.
I mean it's just like the argument over whether a virus is alive. There is no fact at issue just a deciscion about how to use language. Just ignore these stupid issues and define your own terms if you want to communicate.
Maybe people choose a license for these reasons but they shouldn't. Just like IP law in general the best license is the one that leads to the most benefit.
In some cases the GPL will likely be the better choice as it may encourage more derivative works to be released and thus greater overall efficiency via reduced duplication. Indeed, it's hard to believe that as many corporate contributions to open source would have occurred if all the gnu utilities had been BSD licensed.
On the other hand BSD derived works, by allowing inclusion in more projects, can reduce unnecessary duplication of code. There is plenty of BSD licensed utility code out there that has saved huge numbers of man hours through it's inclusion in projects with GPL incompatible licensees that would have simply been rewritten to avoid the GPL in each case in which it was used. Moreover, in some cases the BSD license attracts corporate support that otherwise might not have existed.
Intellectual Property is merely a legal fiction adopted to encourage technological advancement and idea reuse (patents require disclosure for a reason). Especially when writing open source we should understand this and choose licensces based on long term social benefit not inappropriate emotional responses based on bad analogies with physical property ('stealing' code etc..)
In particular we should understand that we all benefit when it costs less for companies to develop programs. Every man hour spent duplicating code that has already been written elsewhere is an hour that wasn't used writing other code or otherwise improving society. Choosing not to let companies use your code just because you don't like the idea of someone making money off your work is the moral equivalent of refusing to be an organ donor because you don't like the idea of someone else using your liver without paying. There is no justification for making someone else do more work with no benefit to anyone. However, on the other side it's no better to release code in an overly permissive fashion when a more restrictive license would yield greater benefit in the long run by encouraging sharing.
Which sort of license will be the most beneficial in which situation is what we should be arguing about not this sort of thing.
I personally think that one of the worst things GNU did was disfavoring the LGPL license since this provided a useful middle ground that yielded the best results in some cases.
Did you actually think about this at all before you posted? If you did maybe you can explain how google applying for a patent on this makes the world a worse place?
It's not like google failing to apply for software patents would make the law go away. It would just let someone else who ws more likely to enforce them get the patents.
I think it's in the advertising part but I might just be missing something.
If that's it I agree this doesn't seem innovative enough on it's own to be protected by a patent but google needs to do this defensively so no one else gets a patent on the idea. At the very least the patent application provides proof of prior art.
And this is evil how?
"Don't be evil" doesn't mean don't do things that annoy you personally or even annoy slashdot users. It means well don't be EVIL.
Acting to restrict competition by creating incomprehensible and bug ridden file formats and protocols that lock in your customers while discouraging innovation is evil. That would be making money by knowingly making the world a worse place just so you can get money.
On the other hand giving me the OPTION of making money by putting adds on my social networking page for my friends to see just gives me an option. If I don't like the option I don't need to use it. Presumably the only reason this could possibly cause people harm is because their friends choose to use it. But you can't believe that google is evil for letting people place adds for their friends to see without believing your friends are evil for choosing to display the ads. So if google actually does this are you willing to commit to berating any of your friends who choose to display ads for being immoral? If you won't berate your friends for doing it why are you willing to berate google?
It really irks me the way people really enjoy the free services that ads support (like free internet search, TV) yet act as if ads themselves were an unalloyed bad. You can't have one without the other. Now obviously there are both harms and benefits to paying people to put ads on their friend page and it doesn't make google evil if they have a different opinion on how to weigh those against each other than you do.
I think your confusing the individuals choices and intent with the behaviors that are in people's evolutionary interest.
It's certainly true that people's proclivity to form social bonds and help those they've bounded with developed from an evolutionary prid pro quo, indeed, this is likely why we tend to feel betrayed or indignant if we discover our friends aren't returning our favors or don't like us as much as we like them. However, this doesn't entail that as individuals we approach friendship as a transaction.
In other words we don't think, "I made so and so laugh 8 times he owes me a few more laughs." But yes I agree with the conclusion that I don't see the problem with this tech.
Of course friendship isn't a commercial transaction. If I have to pay someone to be my friend or they only hang out with me because of the nice stuff I give them they aren't really my friend.
However, being friends with someone doesn't mean you can't help them get good deals. If I buy a new laptop there's nothing wrong with offering my friends the first chance to buy the old one. If I use dreamhost there is nothing immoral about getting my friends to use my referral code so I get reimbursed when they purchase hosting.
I agree it's immoral to give your friends a paid opinion masquerading as your genuine advice. However, it seems clear in this case that there is no danger of confusion about whether you are making a personal recommendation or just being paid to put an advertisement on your page. I don't see any reason anyone would actually think an ad was your friends genuine advice.
So sure you shouldn't choose your friends because of monetary compensation you don't have to refuse the benefits from having that friend. I didn't make friends with people in college because they owned cars but that didn't mean I couldn't ride with them when they wanted to get some food or take advantage of it when they offered to help me move.
Yes! I'm glad other people feel this way as well. It's always seemed kinda stupid to me to go out of your way to see (or worse purchase) the 'real' painting when you don't have the skill to tell it apart from a well made fake. I mean if you just want social status or the chance to brag to your friends then fine but most people take themselves to be valuing these works of art because of their artistic value. But if you can't tell if it's the real thing by visual inspection then the fake has just as much artistic value.
However, I would take this point even further. It's not just that a good copy of a van Gogh or forged original Shakespeare folio have just as much artistic value but also that similar paintings done today do as well. It's absurd that we argue over whether certain works were written by shakespeare as if it would make them better plays if they had been and take some undiscovered painting by a classical master to be a great work but dismiss it if we discover it was truly modern.
Frankly, I think the reason that so many old things are considered great works of art (Shakespeare, dutch masters, etc..) is because we confuse artistic contribution and genius with artistic value. If I paint something in the style of the dutch masters or a write a new Shakespearean folio I haven't displayed the artistic genius that the original artist did because I had modern tools and knowledge of the original. My work would also lack the impact and wouldn't require the bravery that the originals did. However, none of that means my work has any less artistic value or offers a worse aesthetic experience.
Art really should work like science does. We should take the best ideas from our predecessors and shamelessly copy them while improving them where we can. We don't go back and read Newton and neither does it make sense to look at the originals for anything but historical purpose. But it seems people really really want to engage in ancestor worship and believe that there is some greater value to these artworks even to the people who like them less than modern works and the power of placebo is HUGE.
It's not like there wasn't any fission before we tested nuclear weapons. After all it's what uranium does naturally and people in europe were experiment with radioactive isotopes for some time before we got to nuclear weapons.
However, an accurate comparison of the ratios of these radioactive isotopes would probably be sufficent to eliminate other types of contamination (using paints that came from near a natural deposit of radioactive minerals). Likely the ratios from nuclear explosions would be different than from probable types of accidental exposure. And if you really want to get fancy you can example the ratios of these elements to their decay products.
Of course this won't stop forgers willing to put in enough effort. Likely one could either create paints/materials out of old materials from before nuclear tests or go the cheap way and 'accidentally' expose your painting to radioactive sources that would create obvious false positives. Then again I'm not sure it's worth any forger's interest to put in that much effort. It's probably safer not to aim a bit lower rather than forge works likely to be subject to this level of scrutiny.
Good idea though.
Given the legal differences between various localities what other option do they have than restricting all of our rights to the lowest common denominator. I mean other than geolocation how does ebay avoid WWII german memorabilia or copies of mein kampf in europe? As companies expand to have operations in more places with more and more restrictions they don't have a choice about obeying the local laws but I certainly don't want to have an internet only of stuff that's legal everywhere.
It's way better than the standard coax cables that eventually break my computer when someone trips over the cord.
Ohh, I think that's a bit simplistic. What about simply appointing the fed deciscion makers to lifetime positions and offering them $1 million/year in salary. That would probably dilute the ability of large corporations to influence their deciscions the same way the supreme court is LESS influenced by corporations or the public than members of congress.
In fact there are probably lots of ways you could reduce 'corruption' without pursuing your solution. Now there are other reasons you might not want the fed to have power (just because a deciscion isn't corrupt doesn't make it good) but I think you are going a bit far.
Wouldn't the standard need only specify certain amperage minimums the supply would have to produce?
I mean once you've fixed the voltage the devices themselves could throw in a resistor of their choice to get the amperage they want unless the device simply can't meet the demand. Isn't this how house electricity works? There is a high amperage limit at the fuse box for the whole room but no specification for the amps at an individual outlet.
Another reason to standardize on a single voltage is that we could actually eliminate a lot more converters that way and make things much more convenient.
Let's say we (the whole world this time) standardized on a single 16V plug and a standard 3V plug. At first you would still need a converter on the end of the standard cords but eventually we could just create wall sockets for the now standard plugs. Then we could use a single high quality transformer for each building/floor and add wall plugs for these new standards.
Eventually you might be able to skip packing your power converters entirely and count on the hotel having the correct power standard. Even better you wouldn't need to worry about different electric plugs so much in foreign countries.
Now I'm all for standardizing connectors when it's possible to also standardize voltage and other power charachteristics but frankly this just seems like a really bad idea.
For starters each green plug power source is likely to be larger and bulkier than a power supply that operates at a single set of charachteristics. Given that the devices that require these power supplies are usually mobile that means it just got heavier to lug your mobile phone charger on vacation. Now you might hope that in total you would save on power supplies because you could share one power source between multiple devices. But if you only bring one power supply on your trip that means you can't leave your laptop charging in your hotel room/friend's house while taking your cell phone charger with for the day.
In short flexibility will require we still own a power supply for each device not to mention the point made in the article that each vendor is still going to want to ship a power source with their item. It seems to me a better idea is to standardize on a few power profiles and connectors instead so we can simply use more power supplies interchangeably without making them support multiple voltages.
In particular it seems best if we standardized on one connector (like the great apple magnetic one) for laptop type devices and the settled on powering the small devices through the USB standard like the iphone and other cell phones. Not only does your power cable now double as a data cable but we've saved on all the excess effort that would have gone into making smart power sources offering multiple voltages.
IP is not property because it conflicts with the basic justifications for property. The idea behind property in the first place was that just as you couldn't come along and deprive someone of their life you couldn't deprive them of the work of their hands or other goods they had improved with their effort.
Using IP doesn't deprive the originator the right to use their idea.
Now we want to adopt a pragmatic solution to encourage people to innovate and share ideas but that is about pragmatic incentives not property rights.
So isntead of bothering with the trouble of setting off a bomb just spray a bunch of people with a little bit of chemical. If your compatriots do so at other major airports you can probably shut down the whole system for a good while.
Well aside from performance art or a great trick one reasonable explanation is that they have some kind of inside tip that they can't reveal, i.e., signed NDAs, or were just told by people that 'something' would come out.
I think the easy way to check if this is just random fucking around or knowledge of a new product launch (which one would think would happen at more than one store) is to check out how much money the people in line have. If they are dirt poor college students they may not being buying much.
Why not screw triangulation and just install enough readers around the house to locate it by which reader response?
Yah, I suspect that apple is really trying to avoid the situation where someone takes the development kit and disassembles it in some manner to reveal internal secrets (e.g. how to unlock various features of the iphone). Including this language in their licence covers their ass so they can demand any company who discovers such information not distribute it.
I have great respect for the FSF and the goals they are trying to accomplish but when I see claims like, "But the result still would not qualify as free software, since no one could alter your source code and run the modified result on their phone," it irks me.
More accurately it would not meet the FSF's definition of free software. I would call freely released source code that I could load into the iphone simulator (or with $99 an iphone itself) free software. But whether or not you agree with my usage of the term isn't the point. 'Free software' is a term like 'free country.' It's part of the language and no one entity can dictate it's meaning just because it thinks that is what the term should mean.
To be clear I have no dispute with the FSF. Just as various activist groups might offer their own definitions of free countries that differ so too is it reasonable for the FSF to offer their own definition of free software and to try to convince us it is the correct one. However, journalistic pieces like the one at linux.com shouldn't assume that the FSF can define by fiat what words in our language mean. Instead they should tell us that this would not qualify as free software under the FSF definition.
I'm always amused by the idea of going and seeing scientific exhibits in person. Especially if you have no technical knowledge of them. I mean it's not like it really should be any better than just reading about it on wikipedia or the discovery channel but nevertheless I often find it rewarding.
So I've done a bit of thinking about this and my conclusion is that it's a combination of placebo effect and the presence of knowledgeable scientists who are good public speakers. In other words we could tell you any 5 things and so long as you really believed us it would make those worth seeing. True, it's not quite that simple. Some things simply provide more to stare at than others, but that's a large part of the effect.