In your companies case, you are not paying for what you use, you are paying for everything, in a lot of cases up front instead of over time.
You need to buy servers, their resources (memory, storage, backup media, interconnect system, etc), as well as the datacenter itself (power, cooling, arrangement, management, staff maintenance, bandwidth, etc), and then once everything is up and running functionally, you still have paid for all of those things like servers storage bandwidth and power, no matter if you are using 100% or 1% of your system.
In amazons case, you don't. You pay for what you use, as you use it, no more no less. You don't need to pay upfront costs for servers, the infrastructure to support them, and the people to run them. You DO pay for those things, but only a very tiny percentage of, which happens to be the percentage of their resources or skills you use.
At least for the moment, it is much cheaper to buy these resources from amazon, than to pay to build up a datacenter to start with 1 or 2 machines, but be able to scale up to millions. That would have such a huge up front cost that it is not even an option for most small businesses.
There will always be situations where the obvious answer is doing it yourself. This will never change. That does not exclude the fact there are other situations where using cloud time sharing is the better answer.
First off let me say I do agree that supercomputer would need a definition first before things can be defined as a supercomputer. This is a task top500 really should do, though I understand the problems in doing so.
But one thing that has always bothered me about top500, and I realize it is a semantic one, but the name says it all.. *TOP* 500.
In order to choose the top X of any group, the group needs to be at least X in size if not larger. The name itself implies there are more than 500 super computers, and they only list the TOP 500 of those.
That would imply that what would be #501 on the list, while not listed since it does not fall within the top 500, is still in the group supercomputer, since if it was upgraded to be slightly more powerful than #500, than with no action on #500's part, it drops off the list and is no longer a super computer! That is clearly not the case however.
It is also worth noting that the first Cray supercomputer, which no one would argue WAS a supercomputer when it was first made... I have more processing power in my server room right now than that system had at the time. That isn't intended as a brag, only that it is very easy to do these days, and I am far from the only one that is true for. Clearly, the target for supercomputer changes with time.
But even with that said, this would require at least 40 nodes of itself in a cluster to reach near the #500 spot. In a single node configuration, like they are pushing, this is no more a supercomputer than a single blade out of the 6500 blades the #1 system has if you ran it alone as a single node.
I think it is fair to say that it is not a supercomputer, but would be an excellent component of one.
That is, if you survive their entrance. Maybe this will be a good thing, when the DEA starts killing too many innocent people maybe we'll rethink our stupid, insane drug laws.
What is there to rethink? After the raids, there will be no drugs from those peoples homes, so to their thinking the operations were all a success!
At least the penalty for these civilian murders is up to 7 days paid leave instead of just the rest of the day off...
Eliminate the high safety and efficacy bars set by the government, and let the pharma companies police themselves.
As long as it is clearly announced for a product if it has been through, and how much, FDA testing, then that is not a bad idea what so ever.
There are a lot of people happy to get generic prescriptions from overseas, knowing full well there can be quality risks. As long as it is a choice, so those who do not want to assume those risks have the higher priced and actually tested to FDA standards version available to them.
I think there are too many difficulties in how to go about doing that correctly, that it probably will never happen. But there is no real technical reason why it couldn't.
When people say "we might as well eat neighbors|kids|whoever" they are pretty much putting the lives of animals on the level, value-wise, with the lives of humans.
Well you do have a point there. Most humans lives aren't worth NEAR that of an animal!
It's just a waste of the user's disk space to have them keep code for other architectures.
But this plan would put that choice in the hands of the person who owns that disk space. It should be their choice to use this format of binary or to use the current one after all.
Your plan puts the choice in your own hands, which I would guess not many people but yourself care about:)
Everyone is always so quick to tout open source being the place a developer can scratch their own itch, yet so many slashdoters are so violently against anyone doing that.
"Compiling an application is in most cases nothing more complex than typing "./configure && make" and you're good to go."
I personally know this is a lie. Pretty much every time I compiled software it was a bloody mess with me being required to edit config files and settings flags.
*snip*
The moment I met a decent packagemanager(aptitude) was the moment that I understood the advantages of linux software installation. No dependency hell, no nightmarish compiling and simple commands to install software. That's what the average user needs, not technical mumbojumbo.
Since you are already introduced to aptitude, one feature it makes nice is source compiling.
apt-get install package - gives you the binary install apt-get source package - will download the source, which is garenteed to work with nothing more than./configure && make apt-get -b source package - Same as above step, but -b will build it for you, so even less typing.
Furthermore I hated the slowness of the compiling and the invisibility of the gains(speed).
That point you have very correct however, as the gentoo experiment discovered. If a binary is available, it is much more preferable to use that.
With the system being talked about, nothing will change on that end, other than the executable binary being larger.
The difference will be you will only have one debian installer cd instead of one for each architecture. The binaries it installs will run no matter what system you booted it on and install to.
As far as apt goes, this will be one more arch type, probably called 'fat' or something. This means for the most popular distros, maintaining an x86 and ppc and mips CD along with your fat CD is still easier on the maintainers, and provides a method to get x86 only binaries for your PC still if the slightly higher disk space requirements are unacceptable.
So for some people, it does nothing. For some people, it helps a whole lot. I don't see anyone that this could be a downside for, since if it is not what you are looking for, you can still avoid using it.
Now, if it were 'taken down' because "they" wanted to silence it, I recommend to you the quote famously attributed to John Gilmore: "The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."
I don't know if you'd ever get it taken down for non-technical reasons (like The End Of Life As We Know It.)
The way I see it, the answer is in the question itself.
The only way to keep us from connecting our computers to each others at this point would be a bullet in the head of all of us. In which case "What would you do?" is answered.
(Just keep a fan on me in the summer to keep the flies away please)
The entire tone of your post implies you assumed my post was a complaint.
I knew you were on my foe list for a reason, you let a simple incorrect assumption, which appears you purposefully made just to insult me, make all the rest of your arguments incorrect.
I won't bother correcting you, or replying further
Selling games is strictly self-serving also. Apparently, you think its fantastic for companies to be driven by greed, but the customers should be selfless? Same old shit as the banks - capitalise the profit, socialise the loss.
Do you go to work every day for free?
If you are on salary and wish to keep you job, then yes, one ends up working for free quite a bit. More often than not, a 40 hour pay period is compensating me for anywhere from 50% up to 75% of the time I put in.
While I would love to think I am irreplaceable, that fact is that simply is not true, and I know this. It would probably be a huge hassle to replace me, but it is far from impossible to do. So making any effort to 'fix' the situation and actually get compensated for my full time put in would most likely result in making zero dollars/percent, by no longer having a job.
If I limited myself to working what I am compensated for, I will be replaced with someone who is willing to work more time than they are paid for.
No, I am not going to tie that into any piracy argument, but in the USA at least this situation is not uncommon, and as the economy gets worse and companies have less money to spend, they are nearly certainly going to do what it takes to spend less for the same amount of effort from people (IE the greed you argue companies don't have, only people do)
The (only) RC is dropped one week ahead of the final release? That's not really enough time to even get feedback from the test userbase, much less actually do anything about the bugs that might show up. So, are we to assume that the RC is basically just a marketing stunt?
Considering that is not the purpose of a release candidate, of course not.
The term release candidate (RC) refers to a version with potential to be a final product, ready to release unless fatal bugs emerge. In this stage of product stabilization (read QA cycle), all product features have been designed, coded and tested through one or more Beta cycles with no known showstopper-class bug.
RC just means no new code will be added at that point, so no new testing is needed, as all the code/features in it by that point were tested in development/alpha/beta stages. There of course could be bugs in the RC, but that is true of the final release just the same.
These days an RC is used more to get users outside of your normal beta testers to use it, and make sure it works with the basics and didn't majorly break anything else that used to work in previous versions.
Assuming that happens, the RC is basically renamed to release. Commercial software calls it RTM (release to manufacturer) which burns and presses the final CD/DVDs, and for open source that is the day the ISO is copied to the main download mirrors.
Broadband access, of course. I'd imagine that narrowly edged out security, stability, access to medical care, and clean drinking water.
So once you have security, stability, access to medicine, and clean drinking water (as well as housing, plentiful food, and your specific transportation needs met), by your logic you should be denied internet access purely due to the country you live in?
Or do you just mean the entire country you live in is required to have all of those things before anyone can have broadband?
So this science basically involves saying things everyone knows about using big words?
No, science involves proving things people might have thought is true (yet had no proof is true, so can't honestly even claim IS true, as being correct would be only an accident) using normal sized words that you just happen to be on the end of the bell curve which finds them not small enough to understand (and consequently complain about.)
In order to maintain internal consistency, your brain had to make it seem like this is a good idea, and continually offers up excuses for reading Slashdot.
Pfft, I don't need excuses. I can stop reading Slashdot any time I want!
Motorola released kernel source for this phone that was missing the SD card driver because the negative outcome of being sued by the SD card association for violating the SD card NDA/license (which may well have meant Motorola being unable to use the SD card spec in future products) was deemed by the lawyers to be MUCH bigger than the negative outcome of not releasing the SD card driver code.
I never understood how a such a decision could be reached.
On one hand, they could choose the situation where they release the SD driver and get sued by the SD association. At that point they can't legally use SD technology, but can still release their phone!
On the other hand, violating the GPL, sure they will be allowed to use SD technology in the future, just not ship any product. A phone without firmware still can't use the SD card, nor do anything else, including boot! When you are legally barred from distributing your firmware (GPL was revoked in this decision), then it is still not possible to use the SD slot, since the driver requires a kernel to load it to work which they can't distribute.
I can't see how a non-booting phone with a non-working SD slot is a better option than a working phone with a non-working SD slot.
This sounds like a stupid problem, but in reality it is really tough to delete something and be certain that you've got it all.
I really can't believe I'm saying this, but this sounds like a technical problem that really does need a legal solution.
You are quite right regarding how difficult it can be to delete every copy of a piece of data, on the technical side.
Instead of all of that, it might be easier to enact an actual law saying a recording of a conversation is only legally valid for that time. Or at the least, have both. Then if one side fails you, the other hopefully will help pick up the slack.
No calls recorded before that time would be admissible in court, releasing calls recorded before that time would result in fines and/or further punishment, and if someone attempts to use a recording in court that is older than allowed, the entire trial is up for being dismissed. I'm sure I am missing other problems that still need addressed, but you get the idea.
I realize a technical solution would be best, as one can not assume a law will always be in place, always followed, and never changed or twisted around based on the current politics of the time. However as we have seen, even technical measures can be easily bypassed if it fits someones political agenda to do so, with the convenient excuse of "I don't know how those computer things work, we had no clue it was doing that!"
Having both in place would make it easier on the technical side to not constantly worry if every copy is destroyed. If the telco can easily have a datestamp pop up, and it is beyond the retention date, they should have every legal point on their side to tell the law enforcement or court requesting the recording that it does not exist (even if that isn't the truth technically)
The technical policy must remain however, to help ensure people don't try to find a way to skirt the law.
In the US legal system, there have been times where one side of the case knows without a doubt that they are not allowed to present a piece of illegally obtained evidence to the jury, but does so anyway, with the hopes that the jury will form an emotional opinion on that evidence before the judge instructs them to ignore it. I would assume that is one of the more important aspects that a pure legal solution can not solve, so will still need the data destroyed in the end.
While they are light on details, the article implies this is a long term storage system (IE a flash chip replacement)
One would think creating RAM with a similar density would be possible as well.
I've used a super computer that had 74 TB of main memory, but clearly is something one can not afford nor fit in the home, to put it mildly. In a few years, will we have 1tb dimms at home? That would be sweet.
Even lacking that, a 1tb flash-like chip (not as in technology, but as in purpose/use) is still a huge improvement.
Let's just hope it doesn't go the way of the 100tb optical discs that are 'going into production within a year' for the last 10 years.
On a happier note, just imagine the reactions the RIAA/MPAA lawyers would have to such a thing existing! "Now all of your 'IP' fits on a nine finger-nail-sized set!"
What exactly does that mean? If you have patents on some technology, but then release a device that implements them with code that's GPL V2 licensed? Does it mean that anyone can now use those patents royalty free as long as they use the gpl'd code? Or does it somehow invalidate them? Would GPL V3 change the situation appreciably?
First off, I don't believe that is the case here. At first glance it appears these patents are hardware based, not software. But I could be quite wrong.
Second, assuming the situation you describe IS the case (Or to be applied to any where else that it is the case), the patents do not become GPLed or anything of the like.
BUT, the GPL (I know v3, but am unsure on v2) has a clause stating that you Can patent your code, but the second you actually sue anyone over it, your GPL license is instantly revoked.
This means if you download a piece of GPL software, make some changes to it, give those changes back like the license requires, and then patent your changes, all is well. Once you enforce your patent with a lawsuit, the GPL license for the software you downloaded and modified is revoked. You no longer can legally distribute it as a whole at all. You are only allowed to distribute the changes you wrote, not the end product.
Assuming Nokia has a software patent, and it is on their changes to some GPL based software, they just lost all rights to distribute it, and if they haven't already stopped shipping their product, are violating copyright law.
Actually, I recently looked into the costs and effort involved with creating a work themed monopoly game, as a schwag offering type of thing, so have the numbers still handy.
For $1.95 per pack of monopoly money, you get: "Each pack includes approximately 30 pieces each of: 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, and BONUS 1,000!"
Taking 30 of each denomination except 1000, then add the 1000 bill, each pack comes out to $21,580
So, to break a million dollars, you need 47 packs of money, which gives you $1,014,260, and will cost $91.65 in real money (Not including tax or shipping.)
They also do say 'approximately' which might be an issue, but the 46.333 packs you need must be rounded up to 47 anyway, so you have a bit extra left over to make up any difference.
So lets just round everything off and say it takes $100 in real money to get one million in monopoly money. Now it's just a matter of metric conversion.
100 million of play money? $100,000 in real money.
Wow, you are right, even without the expense of the rest of the game, I would be very impressed at such an amount!
Careful with that, there are numerous patents to that effect. You wouldn't want to be suggesting IP theft, now, would you?
Of course not! We don't steal IP here. In fact, that sheet of paper with their IP on it (the patent) will forever remain safely tucked away on file at the patent office, safe from all thieves.
We are however suggesting to ignore the fact that patent exists, and use that knowledge anyway.
Even if you want to be anti-capitalist and follow patent law, it is easy enough to use only the methods provided by IBMs expired patents and thus not run a fowl of any laws.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a pretty big difference however.
In your companies case, you are not paying for what you use, you are paying for everything, in a lot of cases up front instead of over time.
You need to buy servers, their resources (memory, storage, backup media, interconnect system, etc), as well as the datacenter itself (power, cooling, arrangement, management, staff maintenance, bandwidth, etc), and then once everything is up and running functionally, you still have paid for all of those things like servers storage bandwidth and power, no matter if you are using 100% or 1% of your system.
In amazons case, you don't. You pay for what you use, as you use it, no more no less.
You don't need to pay upfront costs for servers, the infrastructure to support them, and the people to run them. You DO pay for those things, but only a very tiny percentage of, which happens to be the percentage of their resources or skills you use.
At least for the moment, it is much cheaper to buy these resources from amazon, than to pay to build up a datacenter to start with 1 or 2 machines, but be able to scale up to millions. That would have such a huge up front cost that it is not even an option for most small businesses.
There will always be situations where the obvious answer is doing it yourself. This will never change.
That does not exclude the fact there are other situations where using cloud time sharing is the better answer.
First off let me say I do agree that supercomputer would need a definition first before things can be defined as a supercomputer. This is a task top500 really should do, though I understand the problems in doing so.
But one thing that has always bothered me about top500, and I realize it is a semantic one, but the name says it all.. *TOP* 500.
In order to choose the top X of any group, the group needs to be at least X in size if not larger.
The name itself implies there are more than 500 super computers, and they only list the TOP 500 of those.
That would imply that what would be #501 on the list, while not listed since it does not fall within the top 500, is still in the group supercomputer, since if it was upgraded to be slightly more powerful than #500, than with no action on #500's part, it drops off the list and is no longer a super computer! That is clearly not the case however.
It is also worth noting that the first Cray supercomputer, which no one would argue WAS a supercomputer when it was first made... I have more processing power in my server room right now than that system had at the time. That isn't intended as a brag, only that it is very easy to do these days, and I am far from the only one that is true for. Clearly, the target for supercomputer changes with time.
But even with that said, this would require at least 40 nodes of itself in a cluster to reach near the #500 spot. In a single node configuration, like they are pushing, this is no more a supercomputer than a single blade out of the 6500 blades the #1 system has if you ran it alone as a single node.
I think it is fair to say that it is not a supercomputer, but would be an excellent component of one.
That is, if you survive their entrance. Maybe this will be a good thing, when the DEA starts killing too many innocent people maybe we'll rethink our stupid, insane drug laws.
What is there to rethink? After the raids, there will be no drugs from those peoples homes, so to their thinking the operations were all a success!
At least the penalty for these civilian murders is up to 7 days paid leave instead of just the rest of the day off...
Geocities really did make it easy to get a web page online, and is arguably, still one of the easiest ways for *anybody* to get information out there.
Well, I wouldn't say *still* ;}
If you wanna get technical, MSFT means Microsoft.
Only on the stock market, which again is not technical but financial.
Eliminate the high safety and efficacy bars set by the government, and let the pharma companies police themselves.
As long as it is clearly announced for a product if it has been through, and how much, FDA testing, then that is not a bad idea what so ever.
There are a lot of people happy to get generic prescriptions from overseas, knowing full well there can be quality risks. As long as it is a choice, so those who do not want to assume those risks have the higher priced and actually tested to FDA standards version available to them.
I think there are too many difficulties in how to go about doing that correctly, that it probably will never happen. But there is no real technical reason why it couldn't.
Multiple Sclerosis [wikipedia.org] is a serious disease and most orgainisations that support MS sufferers are probably tax exempt.
In a technical/computer context, MS never ever means Multiple Sclerosis. Multiple Sclerosis means Multiple Sclerosis. MS means Microsoft.
Unless you want to swap your geek card for your doctor card and move over to slashmed.md :P
When people say "we might as well eat neighbors|kids|whoever" they are pretty much putting the lives of animals on the level, value-wise, with the lives of humans.
Well you do have a point there.
Most humans lives aren't worth NEAR that of an animal!
It's just a waste of the user's disk space to have them keep code for other architectures.
But this plan would put that choice in the hands of the person who owns that disk space. It should be their choice to use this format of binary or to use the current one after all.
Your plan puts the choice in your own hands, which I would guess not many people but yourself care about :)
Everyone is always so quick to tout open source being the place a developer can scratch their own itch, yet so many slashdoters are so violently against anyone doing that.
"Compiling an application is in most cases nothing more complex than typing "./configure && make" and you're good to go."
I personally know this is a lie. Pretty much every time I compiled software it was a bloody mess with me being required to edit config files and settings flags.
*snip*
The moment I met a decent packagemanager(aptitude) was the moment that I understood the advantages of linux software installation. No dependency hell, no nightmarish compiling and simple commands to install software. That's what the average user needs, not technical mumbojumbo.
Since you are already introduced to aptitude, one feature it makes nice is source compiling.
apt-get install package - gives you the binary install ./configure && make
apt-get source package - will download the source, which is garenteed to work with nothing more than
apt-get -b source package - Same as above step, but -b will build it for you, so even less typing.
Furthermore I hated the slowness of the compiling and the invisibility of the gains(speed).
That point you have very correct however, as the gentoo experiment discovered.
If a binary is available, it is much more preferable to use that.
With the system being talked about, nothing will change on that end, other than the executable binary being larger.
The difference will be you will only have one debian installer cd instead of one for each architecture.
The binaries it installs will run no matter what system you booted it on and install to.
As far as apt goes, this will be one more arch type, probably called 'fat' or something.
This means for the most popular distros, maintaining an x86 and ppc and mips CD along with your fat CD is still easier on the maintainers, and provides a method to get x86 only binaries for your PC still if the slightly higher disk space requirements are unacceptable.
So for some people, it does nothing. For some people, it helps a whole lot. I don't see anyone that this could be a downside for, since if it is not what you are looking for, you can still avoid using it.
Now, if it were 'taken down' because "they" wanted to silence it, I recommend to you the quote famously attributed to John Gilmore: "The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."
I don't know if you'd ever get it taken down for non-technical reasons (like The End Of Life As We Know It.)
The way I see it, the answer is in the question itself.
The only way to keep us from connecting our computers to each others at this point would be a bullet in the head of all of us.
In which case "What would you do?" is answered.
(Just keep a fan on me in the summer to keep the flies away please)
The entire tone of your post implies you assumed my post was a complaint.
I knew you were on my foe list for a reason, you let a simple incorrect assumption, which appears you purposefully made just to insult me, make all the rest of your arguments incorrect.
I won't bother correcting you, or replying further
Selling games is strictly self-serving also. Apparently, you think its fantastic for companies to be driven by greed, but the customers should be selfless? Same old shit as the banks - capitalise the profit, socialise the loss.
Do you go to work every day for free?
If you are on salary and wish to keep you job, then yes, one ends up working for free quite a bit.
More often than not, a 40 hour pay period is compensating me for anywhere from 50% up to 75% of the time I put in.
While I would love to think I am irreplaceable, that fact is that simply is not true, and I know this.
It would probably be a huge hassle to replace me, but it is far from impossible to do.
So making any effort to 'fix' the situation and actually get compensated for my full time put in would most likely result in making zero dollars/percent, by no longer having a job.
If I limited myself to working what I am compensated for, I will be replaced with someone who is willing to work more time than they are paid for.
No, I am not going to tie that into any piracy argument, but in the USA at least this situation is not uncommon, and as the economy gets worse and companies have less money to spend, they are nearly certainly going to do what it takes to spend less for the same amount of effort from people (IE the greed you argue companies don't have, only people do)
The (only) RC is dropped one week ahead of the final release? That's not really enough time to even get feedback from the test userbase, much less actually do anything about the bugs that might show up. So, are we to assume that the RC is basically just a marketing stunt?
Considering that is not the purpose of a release candidate, of course not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle
The term release candidate (RC) refers to a version with potential to be a final product, ready to release unless fatal bugs emerge. In this stage of product stabilization (read QA cycle), all product features have been designed, coded and tested through one or more Beta cycles with no known showstopper-class bug.
RC just means no new code will be added at that point, so no new testing is needed, as all the code/features in it by that point were tested in development/alpha/beta stages.
There of course could be bugs in the RC, but that is true of the final release just the same.
These days an RC is used more to get users outside of your normal beta testers to use it, and make sure it works with the basics and didn't majorly break anything else that used to work in previous versions.
Assuming that happens, the RC is basically renamed to release.
Commercial software calls it RTM (release to manufacturer) which burns and presses the final CD/DVDs, and for open source that is the day the ISO is copied to the main download mirrors.
Patent trolling, usually nasty, evil and sleazy, is quite alright if it's Apple that is doing it...!
Well, there is always the slim tiny chance they will use it to stop anyone from any advertising in an OS!
(No I will not pay to replace your keyboard)
Broadband access, of course. I'd imagine that narrowly edged out security, stability, access to medical care, and clean drinking water.
So once you have security, stability, access to medicine, and clean drinking water (as well as housing, plentiful food, and your specific transportation needs met), by your logic you should be denied internet access purely due to the country you live in?
Or do you just mean the entire country you live in is required to have all of those things before anyone can have broadband?
Just curious is all
So this science basically involves saying things everyone knows about using big words?
No, science involves proving things people might have thought is true (yet had no proof is true, so can't honestly even claim IS true, as being correct would be only an accident) using normal sized words that you just happen to be on the end of the bell curve which finds them not small enough to understand (and consequently complain about.)
In order to maintain internal consistency, your brain had to make it seem like this is a good idea, and continually offers up excuses for reading Slashdot.
Pfft, I don't need excuses. I can stop reading Slashdot any time I want!
Motorola released kernel source for this phone that was missing the SD card driver because the negative outcome of being sued by the SD card association for violating the SD card NDA/license (which may well have meant Motorola being unable to use the SD card spec in future products) was deemed by the lawyers to be MUCH bigger than the negative outcome of not releasing the SD card driver code.
I never understood how a such a decision could be reached.
On one hand, they could choose the situation where they release the SD driver and get sued by the SD association.
At that point they can't legally use SD technology, but can still release their phone!
On the other hand, violating the GPL, sure they will be allowed to use SD technology in the future, just not ship any product.
A phone without firmware still can't use the SD card, nor do anything else, including boot!
When you are legally barred from distributing your firmware (GPL was revoked in this decision), then it is still not possible to use the SD slot, since the driver requires a kernel to load it to work which they can't distribute.
I can't see how a non-booting phone with a non-working SD slot is a better option than a working phone with a non-working SD slot.
lawyers *rolls eyes*
This sounds like a stupid problem, but in reality it is really tough to delete something and be certain that you've got it all.
I really can't believe I'm saying this, but this sounds like a technical problem that really does need a legal solution.
You are quite right regarding how difficult it can be to delete every copy of a piece of data, on the technical side.
Instead of all of that, it might be easier to enact an actual law saying a recording of a conversation is only legally valid for that time. Or at the least, have both. Then if one side fails you, the other hopefully will help pick up the slack.
No calls recorded before that time would be admissible in court, releasing calls recorded before that time would result in fines and/or further punishment, and if someone attempts to use a recording in court that is older than allowed, the entire trial is up for being dismissed.
I'm sure I am missing other problems that still need addressed, but you get the idea.
I realize a technical solution would be best, as one can not assume a law will always be in place, always followed, and never changed or twisted around based on the current politics of the time.
However as we have seen, even technical measures can be easily bypassed if it fits someones political agenda to do so, with the convenient excuse of "I don't know how those computer things work, we had no clue it was doing that!"
Having both in place would make it easier on the technical side to not constantly worry if every copy is destroyed.
If the telco can easily have a datestamp pop up, and it is beyond the retention date, they should have every legal point on their side to tell the law enforcement or court requesting the recording that it does not exist (even if that isn't the truth technically)
The technical policy must remain however, to help ensure people don't try to find a way to skirt the law.
In the US legal system, there have been times where one side of the case knows without a doubt that they are not allowed to present a piece of illegally obtained evidence to the jury, but does so anyway, with the hopes that the jury will form an emotional opinion on that evidence before the judge instructs them to ignore it.
I would assume that is one of the more important aspects that a pure legal solution can not solve, so will still need the data destroyed in the end.
While they are light on details, the article implies this is a long term storage system (IE a flash chip replacement)
One would think creating RAM with a similar density would be possible as well.
I've used a super computer that had 74 TB of main memory, but clearly is something one can not afford nor fit in the home, to put it mildly. In a few years, will we have 1tb dimms at home? That would be sweet.
Even lacking that, a 1tb flash-like chip (not as in technology, but as in purpose/use) is still a huge improvement.
Let's just hope it doesn't go the way of the 100tb optical discs that are 'going into production within a year' for the last 10 years.
On a happier note, just imagine the reactions the RIAA/MPAA lawyers would have to such a thing existing!
"Now all of your 'IP' fits on a nine finger-nail-sized set!"
Hey you, you don't get to make posts until you learn to read.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law
What exactly does that mean? If you have patents on some technology, but then release a device that implements them with code that's GPL V2 licensed? Does it mean that anyone can now use those patents royalty free as long as they use the gpl'd code? Or does it somehow invalidate them? Would GPL V3 change the situation appreciably?
First off, I don't believe that is the case here. At first glance it appears these patents are hardware based, not software. But I could be quite wrong.
Second, assuming the situation you describe IS the case (Or to be applied to any where else that it is the case), the patents do not become GPLed or anything of the like.
BUT, the GPL (I know v3, but am unsure on v2) has a clause stating that you Can patent your code, but the second you actually sue anyone over it, your GPL license is instantly revoked.
This means if you download a piece of GPL software, make some changes to it, give those changes back like the license requires, and then patent your changes, all is well. Once you enforce your patent with a lawsuit, the GPL license for the software you downloaded and modified is revoked. You no longer can legally distribute it as a whole at all. You are only allowed to distribute the changes you wrote, not the end product.
Assuming Nokia has a software patent, and it is on their changes to some GPL based software, they just lost all rights to distribute it, and if they haven't already stopped shipping their product, are violating copyright law.
Actually, I recently looked into the costs and effort involved with creating a work themed monopoly game, as a schwag offering type of thing, so have the numbers still handy.
http://www.boardgamedesign.com/pages/go_shopping/money.htm
(That is a direct link, broken out of their frames. I'd suggest opening the main/root URL if you want to browse their site.)
For $1.95 per pack of monopoly money, you get:
"Each pack includes approximately 30 pieces each of: 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, and BONUS 1,000!"
Taking 30 of each denomination except 1000, then add the 1000 bill, each pack comes out to $21,580
So, to break a million dollars, you need 47 packs of money, which gives you $1,014,260, and will cost $91.65 in real money (Not including tax or shipping.)
They also do say 'approximately' which might be an issue, but the 46.333 packs you need must be rounded up to 47 anyway, so you have a bit extra left over to make up any difference.
So lets just round everything off and say it takes $100 in real money to get one million in monopoly money. Now it's just a matter of metric conversion.
100 million of play money? $100,000 in real money.
Wow, you are right, even without the expense of the rest of the game, I would be very impressed at such an amount!
Careful with that, there are numerous patents to that effect. You wouldn't want to be suggesting IP theft, now, would you?
Of course not! We don't steal IP here. In fact, that sheet of paper with their IP on it (the patent) will forever remain safely tucked away on file at the patent office, safe from all thieves.
We are however suggesting to ignore the fact that patent exists, and use that knowledge anyway.
Even if you want to be anti-capitalist and follow patent law, it is easy enough to use only the methods provided by IBMs expired patents and thus not run a fowl of any laws.