The failure of a group of people to communicate well does not constitute "censorship". Censorship is when someone or something selects communications for suppression. But when a room is too noisy for someone to be heard, that's not censorship. Unless a person or a group of people arranges for rooms to be noisy, with the plan to drown out some people.
If the "censorship" is selective only of arbitrary communications, not according to content or meaning, but only according to signal strength or random chance, that's not "censorship". It should be fixed, but calling it "censorship" just makes it harder to deal with actual censorship.
We have loads and loads of actual censorship, especially on the Internet. We should care about stopping censorship. So we shouldn't just call any failure to communicate "censorship", which makes it harder to communicate about censorship or the other interference, and therefore harder to fix either.
So the FCC screws us all for the entire Bush Era. Then, in the last few weeks he can make a press release, Kevin Martin promises FREE WIRELESS INTERNET FOR EVERYONE!!!
Even though he won't have to pay for it, oversee it, or anything. Even though he could have done it while he did have those responsibilities. Even though the cablecos/telcos will kill the plan, but Democrats actually running the FCC who never promised it will get the blame.
And just to prove that the whole stunt is political sabotage BS, he makes sure to promise "porn-free". No word on how that would work - which it wouldn't. And certainly no word on why porn is the #1 priority to protect us from over national airwaves, rather than all the fraud and other national security threats that come with any network, especially free nationwide wireless.
Martin is a fool. Only an experienced Republican hitman like him could actually give FREE WIRELESS INTERNET a bad name, without even giving it to us.
The hard part of using parallel hardware to parallel process is that the parallel jobs rarely line up in simple patterns like the simple configuration of the hardware, which makes it hard to specify in software how to parallelize the jobs on the hardware.
But graphics processing is an exception. Graphics is an obviously parallel job to the rest of the application, with occasional messaging between the two overall jobs between epic bouts of specialized processing within each job. That's why HW graphics acceleration is so successful in exploiting the extra HW, without slowing the main processor to support that basic parallel model.
I worked with a company almost 20 years ago that built parallel (DSP/FPGA) graphics hardware for a hires (16Mpxl/40bit) digital camera, that grew from the team's previous company that made a dual-processor graphics workstation. One 68040 ran the OS and apps, another 68040 ran the graphics, tied together on a proprietary bus (with another bus behind the graphics CPU to the analog display HW). Splitting the graphics at an API across multiple processors is a very good upfront guess at all the different configurations of demand on the HW for different parallelizable tasks.
Processing graphics on a separate core is tempting, because the multiple cores have such high bandwidth / low latency on the same chip. But the other cores are not tailored explicitly for graphics, so aren't as internally performant as are GPUs. Putting a GPU core on an x86 chip would be a win. But another win would be moving the higher level graphics software to the separate x86 core, but leaving the product of that processing mid-level instructions and data for the separate GPU. That 3 part structure would be fairly easy and generic to program, since the processing falls into those neat categories. And because the computing load of each stage is roughly proportional to the power of each core.
What would probably work best would be Windows running DirectX on a separate x86 core from applications and OS, with a bus directly from that core to a separate GPU (PCI-e is probably fine, given enough lanes). Architecting the OS to run on its own core, and applications on their own core(s), probably maps the software to the hardware well generically, then let the mapping overlap when there are fewer cores.
If Windows doesn't do that, Linux still can (you can do it yourself - it's Open Source:). If Windows does split DirectX to a separate core across an API, then perhaps Linux could still get that package running itself. Maybe Microsoft could make some money licensing DirectX binaries with an open API to game (and pro visualization) companies which run Linux, if Microsoft will accept yet another crack in its Windows monopoly. If not, then Linux will split graphics to a separate core, and run circles (triangles, really:) around Windows. One way or another this architecture is a successful way to compete in the increasingly common (even default) environment of multiple cores.
Sarah Palin said that she was a foreign policy expert, especially on Russia, because Russia can be seen "from Alaska". In fact, a deserted coastline of Russia's can be barely seen sometimes from a deserted island in Alaska that Palin has never been to, that no Alaska governor has ever been to. Which is why she's mocked for saying that "she can see Russia from her house", because that's only slightly stupider than what she did say. And Palin said it to try to get into the White House for at least 4 years, not just to get to the next commercial break.
But I can see why someone who's so politically stuck in Republican media attacks would call the actual large majority who voted for Obama "pro-Obama voters", as if "Obama" is an issue and not just the president-elect. Because I watched you Republican liars say far stupider things than either that moronic Republican poll or that idiotic Republican VP candidate, for years. And it looks like not even getting power smacked out of your hands has taught you anything.
So keep it up. You "anti-Obama" people are doing a solid job showing yourselves irrelevant to running a country. Making Saturday Night Live funny again, even if only briefly, seems just about the right speed for you and your delicate heroes.
What is at work there is cryptography, not just "cryptology. It's actually the generation of encoded symbols, not just any practice connected to the study of hiding information.
The kernel is necessary but not sufficient. To run Linux apps (the point of running the Linux kernel), the iPhone HW devices must have drivers that run against the kernel. The graphics display, the touchscreen, the phone's radio and the storage filesystem all must run Linux drivers for Linux apps to use them.
Maybe, maybe not. "just a refinement process" doesn't mean it's less energy intensive. Shipping oil and gasoline around the world consumes a lot of energy.
If hydrogen gas were distributed by pipeline, the way natural gas is, the distribution would consume much less energy. In fact, if we were talking about natural gas instead of hydrogen, the energy efficiency would be vastly better. Really I like a natural gas economy better than a "hydrogen" economy. Convert as much oil as economical to natural gas directly at the extraction point (or nearby), then pipe it out. But most OPEC countries don't even have sufficient domestic refining capacity, even though that can leave their governments vulnerable to economic warfare, as Iran has lived with for decades (specifically on gasoline).
That's just one example why "if hydrogen was anywhere near as efficient or cost effective it would be offered as an alternative already" isn't really how the world works.
Gasoline engines get only an average of 25-30% efficiency out of the gasoline we fill them with. And it costs a lot of energy to make that gasoline from oil, and to get it out of the ground as oil. So if hydrogen's overall efficiency is 24%, then it's better than gasoline's. And that's without the scale economy gasoline has. So bringing hydrogen up to gasoline's scale is worth expending the extra efficiency from hydrogen to get there.
Unless there's something even more efficient than hydrogen, in which case we should use that. But gasoline isn't it. So we shouldn't be using gasoline: either hydrogen, or whatever's better than both gasoline or hydrogen.
I'm impressed that the 18% number isn't higher. I mean, come on. The bottom 18% of your high school class were "F" students. And that was when someone was regularly feeding them info, telling them how to tell what was going on, regularly testing them. These people are morons. 82% noticing it's HD is pretty impressive.
If an American farmer made a robot slave dressed in clearly traditional Chinese farmer clothes to pull them on a rickshaw, they'd be denounced as a racist.
I therefore denounce this Chinese farmer as a racist for doing exactly that with a White American looking robot.
That's a nice imaginary scenario. But there is not a single case of a WiFi leecher being accused of piracy forming the ISP's liability, or even an ISP's customer with WiFi being accused because some leecher piggybacked their WiFi.
But I actually negotiated with TimeWarner and Verizon in NYC on behalf of a nonprofit housing org trying to "aggregate demand" in low-income neighborhoods with very little broadband penetration. And even some that had no broadband wiring because TimeWarner and Verizon were too busy making easy profits elsewhere in NYC to get around to wiring neighborhoods with profit to be had, just not as much as elsewhere - and it's not like TimeWarner and Verizon's cable laying operations were operating at full capacity, either. Because I have advised the NYC City Council (legislature) Tech committee for years, as broadband coverage has been a top priority, I have seen the actual data of their extra cable laying capacity laying idle.
So I can tell you for a fact that it's because they're not just greedy, they're lazy. They would rather leave the customers without broadband for years, and get around to them later, without threat of anyone else, than let someone resell their service to people not buying it and sell more of it without even doing the marketing or last 100' themselves. In fact, telcos and cablecos around the country have sued counties and cities to stop them from laying their own networks or WiFi to deliver the service, even where those telcos/cablecos aren't bothering to deliver service for years.
Facts. Not some telco/cableco friendly fantasy.
Already Done With WiFi
on
Houses With Tails
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This kind of sharing at the edges is already exactly what people do with WiFi attached to wired broadband. Lots of people use neighbors' broadband when they first move in, before their own wire is installed. Lots of other people too cheap to pay for expensive broadband are piggybacking on their neighbors' WiFi. And plenty of other people's guests just use neighbors' WiFi because it's easier than plugging in with more cables, especially if the broadband adapter doesn't have extra hub ports.
The problem is that the telcos/cablecos prohibit sharing one's broadband account with the neighbors. They insist on monopolizing the delivery of broadband to everyone, even after years of failing to deliver it to lots of people (usually because it's priced too expensive, but often because the telco/cableco has higher profit elsewhere while they ignore wiring whole neighborhoods).
If people weren't prohibited from sharing their broadband connections, they would include more people in the broadband Net. Some people would offer WiFi, others would offer wires. Competition among them (lacking in the telco/cableco duopoly) would force everyone's prices lower.
The telcos/cablecos would hate it. But so what? We all hate them, for many good reasons.
Sure, robots don't have "fear". They will however have plenty of systems for self preservation. They better: I don't want them smashed to bits before they do their most damage, especially at their high cost and the high value of whatever we deploy them to fight for.
But they won't have "compassion", either. And that's not going to be replaced by some synthetic system. Fear is much easier to simulate than compassion. And compassion, even on the battlefield, is part of what sets us apart from even the other animals we've achieved superiority over.
In human soldiers, fear and compassion compete, with compassion stronger. Because compassion is stronger than fear. Again, that's part of what makes us superior to the other animals we've beaten in the competition for "top dog" on this planet.
Replacing human soldiers with robots will mean that a lot more people who aren't necessary to victory will be killed. The robots will let the humans calling the shots from the rear do even more atrocity than we do now. The disconnection between the soldier and the people in their way by automation has always escalated. Robots will bring that disconnect, and its wasteful destruction, to an extreme.
"The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range" by Roger Waters (live performance video) You have a natural tendency To squeeze off a shot You're good fun at parties You wear the right masks You're old but you still Like a laugh in the locker room You can't abide change You're at home on the range You opened your suitcase Behind the old workings To show off the magnum You deafened the canyon A comfort a friend Only upstaged in the end By the Uzi machine gun Does the recoil remind you Remind you of sex Old man what the hell you gonna kill next Old timer who you gonna kill next I looked over Jordan and what did I see Saw a U.S. Marine in a pile of debris I swam in your pools And lay under your palm trees I looked in the eyes of the Indian Who lay on the Federal Building steps And through the range finder over the hill I saw the front line boys popping their pills Sick of the mess they find On their desert stage And the bravery of being out of range Yeah the question is vexed Old man what the hell you gonna kill next Old timer who you gonna kill next Hey bartender over here Two more shots And two more beers Sir turn up the TV sound The war has started on the ground Just love those laser guided bombs They're really great For righting wrongs You hit the target And win the game From bars 3,000 miles away 3,000 miles away We play the game With the bravery of being out of range We zap and maim With the bravery of being out of range We strafe the train With the bravery of being out of range We gain terrain With the bravery of being out of range With the bravery of being out of range We play the game With the bravery of being out of range
Revolvers with one bullet have a 15% chance of killing. AIDS carriers have a 1% or less chance of infecting someone through a single act of genital intercourse.
To defend against a patent being used to interfere with invention, you have to release the patent into the public domain. Doing that eliminates the artificial government monopoly, forever, for everyone.
If you don't do that, if you keep the patent, and license it to select licensees, you are using your patent to interfere with everyone else.
Therefore, there is absolutely no difference between these new patent holders and "patent trolls". Including big IT corps paying their extortion.
Oh, right, it's just a coincidence that Wall Street is getting bailed out, and Wall Street spend huge money on bribes and inserting cronies into government.
Congress is stuffing the loot into sacks. But of course it's Wall Street's piracy operation.
A 15 mW pointer laser in the face of a person waving lights around a darkened theater like that should do the trick. Everyone else will get the message, too, and you have to blind only a minimum of selfish bastards to do it. After a while, society generally will learn the lesson, and the lasers will become merely the stuff of legend.
I shouldn't have to tolerate people's phones ringing in my private property, like my restaurant or my movie theater.
Phones should have a radio API for notifying them to switch to vibrate only, and at least send a message to them (without needing to know their phone#) requesting their user switch off their ringer, or switch them off entirely. A really good system would let the user request a "Wake Up" message later to their disclosed phone# (or other address), which would wake their phone enough to show a message reminding the user to reactive the phone, like when the show ends and the audience is leaving.
Failing that, I should have a jammer within my private property lines that prevents phones from calling in or out. If I were polite, the jammer would send a message to all phones in its reach warning them that calls are jammed, perhaps a 5 minute warning if it's an event like a movie starting (not a restaurant, jamming already in progress). Phones would need an API for that message.
What gives the government, the FCC, the power to control low power signals contained entirely within my private property?
No, I just cited the facts. I did not imply that your mod sticking despite your posting in the thread is your fault - I explicitly said, several times, the point of this whole subthread, that the mod system sucks. You inferred that without my implying it.
Just because you've got a hairtrigger for stupid responses doesn't mean I'm reaching for it. As usual, you are an aggressively stupid commenter who doesn't read comments more than superficially before your interior dysfunctions take over your response. As you just admitted in this thread.
Goddamnit, you're even stupider than Slashdot's moderation system.
Like I said. Superficial reading, getting it wrong, then modding wrong.
Even if I had said that the Nino/a effects were the results of global warming, that would merely be wrong, and not a "troll". A troll is a comment designed to add nothing but predictable responses, probably flames, to a debate. Which being wrong about something isn't.
I note that even though you have now posted in this thread, your "Troll" mod is still current, even though posting is supposed to invalidate it. All of which is clear demonstration that Slashdot's mod system sucks.
I'd be a lot less worried about Google keeping my search history as my online identity, if I could just make Google delete my history records by requesting it. I can clear my browser cache at will, but my server-stored Google records are totally out of reach.
Google can keep the aggregate statistics. But I should be able to click and delete their raw records of me. And that procedure should be periodically randomly audited, with severe penalties for contract violation if they don't actually delete my records. If that doesn't work, we need criminal penalties.
Not just Google, either. Any retained records except those protected by some other regulation (like legal, financial or perhaps health records) should be deletable on demand by the subject of the data. Getting Google to "not be evil" in this essential practice would make it a lot easier to get the rest not to be evil, too.
If cops can't secure their WiFi, no one can. These people carry guns, and often use them, and are charged with the most widespread security of all. There's no reason they can't have a HW crypto key in their WiFi camera that matches the one in their car. As for tracking their mobile signal itself, they already have radios and cellphones, and that doesn't seem to get them ambushed, though the crooks have had decades to figure that out.
Slashdot Mirror
The failure of a group of people to communicate well does not constitute "censorship". Censorship is when someone or something selects communications for suppression. But when a room is too noisy for someone to be heard, that's not censorship. Unless a person or a group of people arranges for rooms to be noisy, with the plan to drown out some people.
If the "censorship" is selective only of arbitrary communications, not according to content or meaning, but only according to signal strength or random chance, that's not "censorship". It should be fixed, but calling it "censorship" just makes it harder to deal with actual censorship.
We have loads and loads of actual censorship, especially on the Internet. We should care about stopping censorship. So we shouldn't just call any failure to communicate "censorship", which makes it harder to communicate about censorship or the other interference, and therefore harder to fix either.
So the FCC screws us all for the entire Bush Era. Then, in the last few weeks he can make a press release, Kevin Martin promises FREE WIRELESS INTERNET FOR EVERYONE!!!
Even though he won't have to pay for it, oversee it, or anything. Even though he could have done it while he did have those responsibilities. Even though the cablecos/telcos will kill the plan, but Democrats actually running the FCC who never promised it will get the blame.
And just to prove that the whole stunt is political sabotage BS, he makes sure to promise "porn-free". No word on how that would work - which it wouldn't. And certainly no word on why porn is the #1 priority to protect us from over national airwaves, rather than all the fraud and other national security threats that come with any network, especially free nationwide wireless.
Martin is a fool. Only an experienced Republican hitman like him could actually give FREE WIRELESS INTERNET a bad name, without even giving it to us.
The hard part of using parallel hardware to parallel process is that the parallel jobs rarely line up in simple patterns like the simple configuration of the hardware, which makes it hard to specify in software how to parallelize the jobs on the hardware.
But graphics processing is an exception. Graphics is an obviously parallel job to the rest of the application, with occasional messaging between the two overall jobs between epic bouts of specialized processing within each job. That's why HW graphics acceleration is so successful in exploiting the extra HW, without slowing the main processor to support that basic parallel model.
I worked with a company almost 20 years ago that built parallel (DSP/FPGA) graphics hardware for a hires (16Mpxl/40bit) digital camera, that grew from the team's previous company that made a dual-processor graphics workstation. One 68040 ran the OS and apps, another 68040 ran the graphics, tied together on a proprietary bus (with another bus behind the graphics CPU to the analog display HW). Splitting the graphics at an API across multiple processors is a very good upfront guess at all the different configurations of demand on the HW for different parallelizable tasks.
Processing graphics on a separate core is tempting, because the multiple cores have such high bandwidth / low latency on the same chip. But the other cores are not tailored explicitly for graphics, so aren't as internally performant as are GPUs. Putting a GPU core on an x86 chip would be a win. But another win would be moving the higher level graphics software to the separate x86 core, but leaving the product of that processing mid-level instructions and data for the separate GPU. That 3 part structure would be fairly easy and generic to program, since the processing falls into those neat categories. And because the computing load of each stage is roughly proportional to the power of each core.
What would probably work best would be Windows running DirectX on a separate x86 core from applications and OS, with a bus directly from that core to a separate GPU (PCI-e is probably fine, given enough lanes). Architecting the OS to run on its own core, and applications on their own core(s), probably maps the software to the hardware well generically, then let the mapping overlap when there are fewer cores.
If Windows doesn't do that, Linux still can (you can do it yourself - it's Open Source :). If Windows does split DirectX to a separate core across an API, then perhaps Linux could still get that package running itself. Maybe Microsoft could make some money licensing DirectX binaries with an open API to game (and pro visualization) companies which run Linux, if Microsoft will accept yet another crack in its Windows monopoly. If not, then Linux will split graphics to a separate core, and run circles (triangles, really :) around Windows. One way or another this architecture is a successful way to compete in the increasingly common (even default) environment of multiple cores.
No, that statistic comes from a completely discredited and blatantly made-up poll made up to create and promote a movie attacking Obama.
Sarah Palin said that she was a foreign policy expert, especially on Russia, because Russia can be seen "from Alaska". In fact, a deserted coastline of Russia's can be barely seen sometimes from a deserted island in Alaska that Palin has never been to, that no Alaska governor has ever been to. Which is why she's mocked for saying that "she can see Russia from her house", because that's only slightly stupider than what she did say. And Palin said it to try to get into the White House for at least 4 years, not just to get to the next commercial break.
But I can see why someone who's so politically stuck in Republican media attacks would call the actual large majority who voted for Obama "pro-Obama voters", as if "Obama" is an issue and not just the president-elect. Because I watched you Republican liars say far stupider things than either that moronic Republican poll or that idiotic Republican VP candidate, for years. And it looks like not even getting power smacked out of your hands has taught you anything.
So keep it up. You "anti-Obama" people are doing a solid job showing yourselves irrelevant to running a country. Making Saturday Night Live funny again, even if only briefly, seems just about the right speed for you and your delicate heroes.
What is at work there is cryptography , not just "cryptology. It's actually the generation of encoded symbols, not just any practice connected to the study of hiding information.
The kernel is necessary but not sufficient. To run Linux apps (the point of running the Linux kernel), the iPhone HW devices must have drivers that run against the kernel. The graphics display, the touchscreen, the phone's radio and the storage filesystem all must run Linux drivers for Linux apps to use them.
Maybe, maybe not. "just a refinement process" doesn't mean it's less energy intensive. Shipping oil and gasoline around the world consumes a lot of energy.
If hydrogen gas were distributed by pipeline, the way natural gas is, the distribution would consume much less energy. In fact, if we were talking about natural gas instead of hydrogen, the energy efficiency would be vastly better. Really I like a natural gas economy better than a "hydrogen" economy. Convert as much oil as economical to natural gas directly at the extraction point (or nearby), then pipe it out. But most OPEC countries don't even have sufficient domestic refining capacity, even though that can leave their governments vulnerable to economic warfare, as Iran has lived with for decades (specifically on gasoline).
That's just one example why "if hydrogen was anywhere near as efficient or cost effective it would be offered as an alternative already" isn't really how the world works.
Gasoline engines get only an average of 25-30% efficiency out of the gasoline we fill them with. And it costs a lot of energy to make that gasoline from oil, and to get it out of the ground as oil. So if hydrogen's overall efficiency is 24%, then it's better than gasoline's. And that's without the scale economy gasoline has. So bringing hydrogen up to gasoline's scale is worth expending the extra efficiency from hydrogen to get there.
Unless there's something even more efficient than hydrogen, in which case we should use that. But gasoline isn't it. So we shouldn't be using gasoline: either hydrogen, or whatever's better than both gasoline or hydrogen.
That's a cowboy hat. Chinese hats are squat cones.
I'm impressed that the 18% number isn't higher. I mean, come on. The bottom 18% of your high school class were "F" students. And that was when someone was regularly feeding them info, telling them how to tell what was going on, regularly testing them. These people are morons. 82% noticing it's HD is pretty impressive.
If an American farmer made a robot slave dressed in clearly traditional Chinese farmer clothes to pull them on a rickshaw, they'd be denounced as a racist.
I therefore denounce this Chinese farmer as a racist for doing exactly that with a White American looking robot.
That's a nice imaginary scenario. But there is not a single case of a WiFi leecher being accused of piracy forming the ISP's liability, or even an ISP's customer with WiFi being accused because some leecher piggybacked their WiFi.
But I actually negotiated with TimeWarner and Verizon in NYC on behalf of a nonprofit housing org trying to "aggregate demand" in low-income neighborhoods with very little broadband penetration. And even some that had no broadband wiring because TimeWarner and Verizon were too busy making easy profits elsewhere in NYC to get around to wiring neighborhoods with profit to be had, just not as much as elsewhere - and it's not like TimeWarner and Verizon's cable laying operations were operating at full capacity, either. Because I have advised the NYC City Council (legislature) Tech committee for years, as broadband coverage has been a top priority, I have seen the actual data of their extra cable laying capacity laying idle.
So I can tell you for a fact that it's because they're not just greedy, they're lazy. They would rather leave the customers without broadband for years, and get around to them later, without threat of anyone else, than let someone resell their service to people not buying it and sell more of it without even doing the marketing or last 100' themselves. In fact, telcos and cablecos around the country have sued counties and cities to stop them from laying their own networks or WiFi to deliver the service, even where those telcos/cablecos aren't bothering to deliver service for years.
Facts. Not some telco/cableco friendly fantasy.
This kind of sharing at the edges is already exactly what people do with WiFi attached to wired broadband. Lots of people use neighbors' broadband when they first move in, before their own wire is installed. Lots of other people too cheap to pay for expensive broadband are piggybacking on their neighbors' WiFi. And plenty of other people's guests just use neighbors' WiFi because it's easier than plugging in with more cables, especially if the broadband adapter doesn't have extra hub ports.
The problem is that the telcos/cablecos prohibit sharing one's broadband account with the neighbors. They insist on monopolizing the delivery of broadband to everyone, even after years of failing to deliver it to lots of people (usually because it's priced too expensive, but often because the telco/cableco has higher profit elsewhere while they ignore wiring whole neighborhoods).
If people weren't prohibited from sharing their broadband connections, they would include more people in the broadband Net. Some people would offer WiFi, others would offer wires. Competition among them (lacking in the telco/cableco duopoly) would force everyone's prices lower.
The telcos/cablecos would hate it. But so what? We all hate them, for many good reasons.
Sure, robots don't have "fear". They will however have plenty of systems for self preservation. They better: I don't want them smashed to bits before they do their most damage, especially at their high cost and the high value of whatever we deploy them to fight for.
But they won't have "compassion", either. And that's not going to be replaced by some synthetic system. Fear is much easier to simulate than compassion. And compassion, even on the battlefield, is part of what sets us apart from even the other animals we've achieved superiority over.
In human soldiers, fear and compassion compete, with compassion stronger. Because compassion is stronger than fear. Again, that's part of what makes us superior to the other animals we've beaten in the competition for "top dog" on this planet.
Replacing human soldiers with robots will mean that a lot more people who aren't necessary to victory will be killed. The robots will let the humans calling the shots from the rear do even more atrocity than we do now. The disconnection between the soldier and the people in their way by automation has always escalated. Robots will bring that disconnect, and its wasteful destruction, to an extreme.
That happened here, too. But you can still get the lasers. The ban is the legend.
Revolvers with one bullet have a 15% chance of killing. AIDS carriers have a 1% or less chance of infecting someone through a single act of genital intercourse.
To defend against a patent being used to interfere with invention, you have to release the patent into the public domain. Doing that eliminates the artificial government monopoly, forever, for everyone.
If you don't do that, if you keep the patent, and license it to select licensees, you are using your patent to interfere with everyone else.
Therefore, there is absolutely no difference between these new patent holders and "patent trolls". Including big IT corps paying their extortion.
Oh, right, it's just a coincidence that Wall Street is getting bailed out, and Wall Street spend huge money on bribes and inserting cronies into government.
Congress is stuffing the loot into sacks. But of course it's Wall Street's piracy operation.
How come Wall Street doesn't have the biggest cluster? It's talking about robbing $7.4 TRILLION in booty from Americans now, with no end in sight.
A 15 mW pointer laser in the face of a person waving lights around a darkened theater like that should do the trick. Everyone else will get the message, too, and you have to blind only a minimum of selfish bastards to do it. After a while, society generally will learn the lesson, and the lasers will become merely the stuff of legend.
I shouldn't have to tolerate people's phones ringing in my private property, like my restaurant or my movie theater.
Phones should have a radio API for notifying them to switch to vibrate only, and at least send a message to them (without needing to know their phone#) requesting their user switch off their ringer, or switch them off entirely. A really good system would let the user request a "Wake Up" message later to their disclosed phone# (or other address), which would wake their phone enough to show a message reminding the user to reactive the phone, like when the show ends and the audience is leaving.
Failing that, I should have a jammer within my private property lines that prevents phones from calling in or out. If I were polite, the jammer would send a message to all phones in its reach warning them that calls are jammed, perhaps a 5 minute warning if it's an event like a movie starting (not a restaurant, jamming already in progress). Phones would need an API for that message.
What gives the government, the FCC, the power to control low power signals contained entirely within my private property?
No, I just cited the facts. I did not imply that your mod sticking despite your posting in the thread is your fault - I explicitly said, several times, the point of this whole subthread, that the mod system sucks. You inferred that without my implying it.
Just because you've got a hairtrigger for stupid responses doesn't mean I'm reaching for it. As usual, you are an aggressively stupid commenter who doesn't read comments more than superficially before your interior dysfunctions take over your response. As you just admitted in this thread.
Goddamnit, you're even stupider than Slashdot's moderation system.
Like I said. Superficial reading, getting it wrong, then modding wrong.
Even if I had said that the Nino/a effects were the results of global warming, that would merely be wrong, and not a "troll". A troll is a comment designed to add nothing but predictable responses, probably flames, to a debate. Which being wrong about something isn't.
I note that even though you have now posted in this thread, your "Troll" mod is still current, even though posting is supposed to invalidate it. All of which is clear demonstration that Slashdot's mod system sucks.
I'd be a lot less worried about Google keeping my search history as my online identity, if I could just make Google delete my history records by requesting it. I can clear my browser cache at will, but my server-stored Google records are totally out of reach.
Google can keep the aggregate statistics. But I should be able to click and delete their raw records of me. And that procedure should be periodically randomly audited, with severe penalties for contract violation if they don't actually delete my records. If that doesn't work, we need criminal penalties.
Not just Google, either. Any retained records except those protected by some other regulation (like legal, financial or perhaps health records) should be deletable on demand by the subject of the data. Getting Google to "not be evil" in this essential practice would make it a lot easier to get the rest not to be evil, too.
If cops can't secure their WiFi, no one can. These people carry guns, and often use them, and are charged with the most widespread security of all. There's no reason they can't have a HW crypto key in their WiFi camera that matches the one in their car. As for tracking their mobile signal itself, they already have radios and cellphones, and that doesn't seem to get them ambushed, though the crooks have had decades to figure that out.