government can do what it wants because nobody cares
Well, your fatalistic comment perpetuates that apathy, which is self-perpetuating.
I lived in SF, where government access was just as open (in the early 1990s). I lived in Albany, NY, in the 1980s, and there was absolutely no access to the government by mere citizens, even under Cuomo "the Great". I lived in New Orleans the first part of this decade, and mere citizen access to N'O/LA government (without a fistful of cash or a cemetery of old boy relatives) was a dream, a joke, a thorough hoax. We'll see whether near extinction has any constructive effect, especially depending on which outsiders (if any) move in, bringing expectations of government with them.
Interactive government is a culture that varies by region. But the underlying rituals, however vestigal, leave all Americans somewhere to start reactivating citizen access, even if it's a long road to a real republican democracy. It's worth doing. And the only one who can do it is "you", whoever "you" are.
FWIW, the government sloth and lethargy is part of the American ideology of limiting government so it can do the least harm to the people, while doing the most work for us. I'd rather have an inefficient government topheavy with accountability than an efficient totalitarianism.
Those of us who work with the government (I advise the NYC City Council's Technology committee) know that governments, born to bureaucracy, have the most chance of actually adhering to policies that prohibit invasive DB linking, when the people get involved to stop aggressive officials with Big Brother dreams. They live by those rules and the audits. If they are designed by both policy and info architects, to actually work with the "machinery" of people who run them.
If you are that fatalistic, and just give up, of course exploiters in government, and the "subcontractors" who love them (and pillaging their data) will track your every move. Only if you do something to engage your democracy will you make it work for you. You are the "dem" in democracy.
Which Windows mobile phones are the easiest to install this stack, which have the most of their features supported by the OS for apps? That can then run (recompiled) existing Linux apps? Mapping a touchscreen, joystick or keypad combo to the mouse, full Bluetooth and other radio control for voice/SMS/MMS/data...
Not just because I want my phone to run the same apps on the same shared data as my desktop. But because the limited phone UI will force new paradigms in using these little mobile devices which will run on my desktop. Linux has been a reworking of Apple/Windows too long. Jumping ahead on the desktop, with an eye on Apple's parallel iPhone evolution, will not only speed development of simpler, more powerful "phones", but also rejuice the networked desktop that's stuck in the 1990s.
Which current, cheap phones are the best targets for trying this new environment?
A decoder that collects cableTV content from the TV network, and sends it to everyone's settop boxes over their Internet connection is the end of segregated TV ads. By 2010, all ads will be product placement, multiplexed with the content rather than time-division. And probably clickable. Along with a new wave of "involuntary" ads and microtargeted spam following you everywhere, calling you, subscribing you to opt-outs...
There is no way that cablecos will actually stop bundling their own profitable (especially when rented) settop boxes with their service. Theis ruling sets the bar high enough that the inevitable cableco weaseling will still ensure that competitors have access to the "last meter".
Unless of course the Republican FCC's last ditch effort before the new Democratic Congress replaces them to deliver the reasonable rule wrapped in a "poison pill" of draconian overreach succeeds. Tie up the "controversial" extreme rule in court for years, then get it thrown out or discarded whenever cablecos either get their Republican lackeys back, or bribe the Democrats to to do it instead.
But in the meantime, July is looking pretty hot. If it takes longer than August for cablecos to get an injunction to stop this ruling, then the genie will be out of the bottle, and the momentum hard to stop. Especially in foreign countries, like China, Korea and Singapore, which would then just kill American tech right when we ourselves got the next, biggest wave rolling.
A court just blew the cableTV proprietary platform bundle wide open: TV decoders are now open to outside vendors/deployers, starting July 1, 2007. That means that complete "cable cards" will become much cheaper, and that really cheap HW will send the raw data to PCs to be decoded in SW, which can be F/OSS.
The cable TV network just became a lot more like an internet, and the Internet just became a lot more like a TV network. For those working on it ourselves, anyway.
So when does MythTV make TiVo look like the Web made AOL look?
You sound like someone I don't like. Because it's not the case that everyone's known all along that every musician pees on girls, or that Cincinnatians run murder cults, or that all particles are collective excitations, or any of your nonsensically empty formulas try to ape.
But everyone knows that all neocons argue from a fantasy world of pure ideology to defend oil companies.
And everyone knows that oil companies other than just the one caught red-handed (but still not admitting it) pay to pervert science to deny their liability for climate change.
OK, not everyone. Some people worship oil corporations so devoutly that you still can't see what's in front of your face - like everyone else does.
Everyone else who's not moonbatshit insane like you.
I'm not going to get into a long argument about the benefits of code signing, which has been extensively argued (and established) elsewhere for years. If you don't think it's got any benefit, then what I am saying has no effects. But MS clearly thinks so, and I agree with its arguments, as do many CIOs/CTOs, otherwise MS wouldn't be grabbing for exclusivity in such a technical area. Any benefits would thereby be denied Linux (and other) developers, unless making a deal with MS (right...).
MS was unable to use its Active-X patents against, say, Flash and Java, as far as we know. Maybe they did - MS has cut many deals with Macromedia/Adobe and Sun since then, and we don't know the details. But that's different from "Linux", which doesn't really have an Adobe or Sun - RedHat etc each has its own distro, but it's not "Linux" like Sun is "Java". And just because some other bogus security patent wasn't used successfully in the past, doesn't mean a new one won't be now. And again, MS is evidently betting that way, too.
We paid for all that energy - we don't owe them an extra asskissing, too. Especially since they extracted so much extra profit by lying to us and rigging our governments to subsidize them every which way. And of course all the thousands, millions of lives they've taken already in wars, pollution and other crimes.
I didn't say it's just oil companies to blame. That's your ridiculously simplistic strawman. But you are using that strawman in another logical fallacy to act like we therefore shouldn't blame them. Which, since you seem to think we've got only coal, oil and nuclear options, is no surprise. It's all very consistent. And dead wrong.
But they are not "hominems", "people", in rhetoric. Attacking a corporation for its behavior is not the same as attacking a person for theirs. Especially when the corporate behavior is what we're arguing about. No matter how much liability evasion corporate people might be used to getting, they haven't changed the rules of debate, except perhaps rigged in a courtroom. Which this is not.
No, now you're cherrypicking, where I never did. And merely flatly denying the facts I'm citing to back up my argument.
FWIW, I'll offer you the advice to look at how reforestation is increasing carbon sinks, even under the weak Kyoto credit system.
It was interesting to look up the latest data to back up the conclusion that's been running for years: ethanol is a better fuel for energy, carbon and conversion than the competing candidates.
But if you're not going to offer anything for me to learn from you, just contradiction (especially flawed ones like claiming the volume of diesel means its infrastructure is larger than gasoline), it's not worth it to me anymore. I'll see you in 10 years, behind the wheel of my fuelcell vehicle, while you're still searching for a McDonalds with reasonable used fryer oil prices.
You sound like Scooter Libby's lawyer. We've finally got incontrovertible evidence of one oil company buying science to fight their liability, just like everyone's always known they all do, so we'll finally admit they do it, but we'll absolutely deny they do it. And a website that oil companies (and the spin doctors who love them) have always portrayed as demented or liars, too "liberal" to trust, is now the gold standard that exonerates all those oil companies by encouraging them for finally admitting the beginning of the changes they should have made, and stopped lying about, generations ago.
Maybe in a perfect simulation of a perfect world. But the history backs up the common sense: oil companies pay for science that serves only their agenda, which is to cover up the true costs of their industry to protect their maximum profits at everyone else's expense.
Pointing out real bias is not "ad hominem". Corporations are not "hominems". Diluting the obvious interest conflict demonstrated in oil companies buying scientists to write against the IPCC report is work for the oil companies. And pitting the extreme, unaccountable oil companies' self interest against the factual analysis of the IPCC report is pretending to "balance" the facts against propaganda.
Let's not game the system any more, now that the seriousness of the threat is finally being widely analyzed and reported after generations of lies, coverups and propaganda all serving the oil companies at the expense of everyone else.
Mostly we disagree because the total energy system is extremely complex among the different choices. Especially when considered in the context of existing infrastructure and current pollution. Which have their own unacceptable costs, even measured only in energy, especially counting the energy cost to cope with environmental collapse. But my analyses show ethanol to be the best bet, with some exceptions in the huge complex of niches that define how we consume fuel.
"Close" energy content depends what we mean by "close". The relative energy contents are gasoline: 42.7Mj:Kg; biodiesel: 37.8Mj:Kg; petrodiesel: 42.5Mj:Kg ethanol: 26.8Mj:Kg. Ethanol has 63% the energy content of gasoline, 63% of petrodiesel. Biodiesel is 89% of gasoline, 88% of petrodiesel. Ethanol is 71% of biodiesel. However, ethanol burns more completely than does bio/diesel or gasoline, more energy efficiently in the total process (including manufacturing the fuel). That makes their net energy budget even closer. The differences are outweighed by the rest of the system's inefficiencies.
Meanwhile, the carbon content is directly relevant, even when dealing with a "closed system" of bioproduction. Because we need more than just reduced emissions: we need net carbon decrease from our current overall pollution production. Reducing the carbon emissions while replacing petrofuel products like fertilizer and pesticide with ecological biomass strikes a triple whammy on current emissions and energy budgets. The carbon contents of various fuels were too tedious to compile for the sake of this argument, but also considering the "carbon equivalence" of different emissions, the biofuels' lower Greenhouse damage multiples are much greater than the petrofuels' energy efficiency.
Many fewer cars use diesel to replace with biodiesel than gasoline to replace with ethanol. The delivery infrastructure for diesel is also much less deployed. Biodiesel does have a place in this complex calculus, because diesel engines last dozens, perhaps hundreds of years, so replacing them has a higher energy cost than the inevitable replacement of gasoline engines with newer technology. This is especially true in diesel-fueled stationary power plants. But that's a fraction of gasoline use, especially in new markets like India and China. Where new tech is driving the production as much as new money to spend (usually both in the same hands).
I don't know how you can call fuelcells just a government subsidy scam when they already offer greater energy efficiency. Fuelcells are already operating at 60% energy efficiency, while gasoline internal combustion is still about 20% efficiency - their tech maturity suggests they're going to stay that inefficient. Fuelcells, just getting started with industrial R&D money, will gain to at least 80% within the next 10 years, while all our fuel options are still available to use in the infrastructure conversions. And since fuelcells perform better with ethanol than with gasoline, the relatively small advantage in gasoline energy content is completely wiped out in the multiple of extraction efficiency.
I suggested methanol because its higher toxicity is offset by its much lower emissions than even ethanol. These fuels are all toxic, so some form of handling is necessary, and some cost of damage inevitable. We generally don't handle any of the petrofuels properly - millions of Kg are spilled just at the pump nozzle every year. If we handled them all properly, the difference in handling the more toxic methanol would be small, especially in light of its advantages in emissions, which is ultimately the most toxic when it destroys our environment.
The most notable characteristic of the sea is that it is constant, eternal, but always changes. Waves, tides, floods, storms, breezes, everything about the sea is always in constant change. It's a metaphor for change. And since smells are little pieces of the thing dissolving directly in the flesh of our brains, the smell changes all the time, too.
Different seas. Different tides. Different seasons. Different weather. Very different smells. I've lived on Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf and Great Lakes. I've visited the Eastern and Western shores of them, the eastern reach of the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, Mediterranean, North, Irish, Marmara and other seas. They've all got different, distinctive smells, which themselves vary.
When scientists can bottle that, an everchanging ocean of sea smells, they've really got something. Until then, they've just got some dirty water.
Kinda. Can you use those APIs to create your own rankings of the searches inside Google's indexed results, or do the custom apps still get results ranked by Google's secret formula?
That's why sharing the configs is so important. Wired magazine, for example, could share several different configs in an article about how they produce different results. And part of the SEO game would be promoting the configs best suited to feature your site. But the straitjacket would be slipped for those who care to live free.
Google should expose at least part of their ranking formula as a dead-simple GUI to control parameters to Google users. That way we can control our own "Google" rankings according to our own agendas. People could share their params with friends so we don't have to figure out what to do to be trustworthy, just which of our friends' searching techniques we trust. Just like in the real world.
Doing so would go a long way towards making it less necessary to trust Google. Eventually we would be best served by a totally open ranking client that searches multiple competing backend indices. But if Google handed us "trust web" to do it ourselves, they'd probably preempt that inevitable infomediation that would also disconnect them from the users, and thereby from their highest value relationship.
I dunno, all kinds of critical bugs that could stop people from deploying Windows in their offices for over a decade and a half haven't even really slowed it down. Look at how buggy/ineffective/insecure was Windows 3.1, the watershed, or Win95, or even 2000. But people everywhere use it, and put up with its bugs. Because they think it's good enough.
Disappointment is as much an expectations game as it is a delivery game. Linux culture, composed of lots of self-motivated "DIY" enthusiasts, created and improved Linux because it didn't quite do what we wanted. Which is great, but it can create impossibly high expectations that most people don't share. And which gets in the way of the "good enough" standard that most people live by.
I think they're doing noise cancellation on the mic. But your point about MS DRM possibly preventing them from decoding between the network and the speaker, because that conflicts with the MS "end to end DRM" model, is probably right on. Or, at least, if they can decode before the speaker for "preemptive speech recognition", that's a major hole in their multimedia DRM "between the ends".
Either way, they can't do both. And "biting itself in the ass" is a great way to describe the loop MS is now caught in. Monopolists never learn that you can't have it all: where would you put it?
Yes, but if Microsoft patents it then Linux can't benefit from it.
In general, patenting security, especially such broadly-effective security as OS security, is very bad for the environment, though it can benefit the patent holder. Imagine if MS had the patent on key and combination locks...
The other reply has got it right. Just make Vista recognize the speech Vista is emitting as audio, and compare those recognized symbols to the recognized speech symbols coming through the microphone. It would be easy to tell that the same symbols are coming out the speakers as coming in the mic. In fact that should also increase the recognition of the speech actually originating in the room.
Of course I have, but it's very unusual (despite Slashdotters' geeky preferences). And most of those computer rooms have admins who can control the audio and security, even if they're just the kind of savvy user with multiple computers for their own use.
Mostly this will attack single users of single computers in their homes and offices. That threat can be mitigated in the single OS instance. There are other threats like the one you imply, but that's no reason not to fix the biggest one that is easier to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
I lived in SF, where government access was just as open (in the early 1990s). I lived in Albany, NY, in the 1980s, and there was absolutely no access to the government by mere citizens, even under Cuomo "the Great". I lived in New Orleans the first part of this decade, and mere citizen access to N'O/LA government (without a fistful of cash or a cemetery of old boy relatives) was a dream, a joke, a thorough hoax. We'll see whether near extinction has any constructive effect, especially depending on which outsiders (if any) move in, bringing expectations of government with them.
Interactive government is a culture that varies by region. But the underlying rituals, however vestigal, leave all Americans somewhere to start reactivating citizen access, even if it's a long road to a real republican democracy. It's worth doing. And the only one who can do it is "you", whoever "you" are.
George Bush is a champion of states' rights. His Republican Party stands for keeping Uncle Sam out of most private info, and out of your bedroom.
FWIW, the government sloth and lethargy is part of the American ideology of limiting government so it can do the least harm to the people, while doing the most work for us. I'd rather have an inefficient government topheavy with accountability than an efficient totalitarianism.
Those of us who work with the government (I advise the NYC City Council's Technology committee) know that governments, born to bureaucracy, have the most chance of actually adhering to policies that prohibit invasive DB linking, when the people get involved to stop aggressive officials with Big Brother dreams. They live by those rules and the audits. If they are designed by both policy and info architects, to actually work with the "machinery" of people who run them.
If you are that fatalistic, and just give up, of course exploiters in government, and the "subcontractors" who love them (and pillaging their data) will track your every move. Only if you do something to engage your democracy will you make it work for you. You are the "dem" in democracy.
Which Windows mobile phones are the easiest to install this stack, which have the most of their features supported by the OS for apps? That can then run (recompiled) existing Linux apps? Mapping a touchscreen, joystick or keypad combo to the mouse, full Bluetooth and other radio control for voice/SMS/MMS/data...
Not just because I want my phone to run the same apps on the same shared data as my desktop. But because the limited phone UI will force new paradigms in using these little mobile devices which will run on my desktop. Linux has been a reworking of Apple/Windows too long. Jumping ahead on the desktop, with an eye on Apple's parallel iPhone evolution, will not only speed development of simpler, more powerful "phones", but also rejuice the networked desktop that's stuck in the 1990s.
Which current, cheap phones are the best targets for trying this new environment?
A decoder that collects cableTV content from the TV network, and sends it to everyone's settop boxes over their Internet connection is the end of segregated TV ads. By 2010, all ads will be product placement, multiplexed with the content rather than time-division. And probably clickable. Along with a new wave of "involuntary" ads and microtargeted spam following you everywhere, calling you, subscribing you to opt-outs...
There is no way that cablecos will actually stop bundling their own profitable (especially when rented) settop boxes with their service. Theis ruling sets the bar high enough that the inevitable cableco weaseling will still ensure that competitors have access to the "last meter".
Unless of course the Republican FCC's last ditch effort before the new Democratic Congress replaces them to deliver the reasonable rule wrapped in a "poison pill" of draconian overreach succeeds. Tie up the "controversial" extreme rule in court for years, then get it thrown out or discarded whenever cablecos either get their Republican lackeys back, or bribe the Democrats to to do it instead.
But in the meantime, July is looking pretty hot. If it takes longer than August for cablecos to get an injunction to stop this ruling, then the genie will be out of the bottle, and the momentum hard to stop. Especially in foreign countries, like China, Korea and Singapore, which would then just kill American tech right when we ourselves got the next, biggest wave rolling.
A court just blew the cableTV proprietary platform bundle wide open: TV decoders are now open to outside vendors/deployers, starting July 1, 2007. That means that complete "cable cards" will become much cheaper, and that really cheap HW will send the raw data to PCs to be decoded in SW, which can be F/OSS.
The cable TV network just became a lot more like an internet, and the Internet just became a lot more like a TV network. For those working on it ourselves, anyway.
So when does MythTV make TiVo look like the Web made AOL look?
You sound like someone I don't like. Because it's not the case that everyone's known all along that every musician pees on girls, or that Cincinnatians run murder cults, or that all particles are collective excitations, or any of your nonsensically empty formulas try to ape.
But everyone knows that all neocons argue from a fantasy world of pure ideology to defend oil companies.
And everyone knows that oil companies other than just the one caught red-handed (but still not admitting it) pay to pervert science to deny their liability for climate change.
OK, not everyone. Some people worship oil corporations so devoutly that you still can't see what's in front of your face - like everyone else does.
Everyone else who's not moonbatshit insane like you.
I'm not going to get into a long argument about the benefits of code signing, which has been extensively argued (and established) elsewhere for years. If you don't think it's got any benefit, then what I am saying has no effects. But MS clearly thinks so, and I agree with its arguments, as do many CIOs/CTOs, otherwise MS wouldn't be grabbing for exclusivity in such a technical area. Any benefits would thereby be denied Linux (and other) developers, unless making a deal with MS (right...).
MS was unable to use its Active-X patents against, say, Flash and Java, as far as we know. Maybe they did - MS has cut many deals with Macromedia/Adobe and Sun since then, and we don't know the details. But that's different from "Linux", which doesn't really have an Adobe or Sun - RedHat etc each has its own distro, but it's not "Linux" like Sun is "Java". And just because some other bogus security patent wasn't used successfully in the past, doesn't mean a new one won't be now. And again, MS is evidently betting that way, too.
We paid for all that energy - we don't owe them an extra asskissing, too. Especially since they extracted so much extra profit by lying to us and rigging our governments to subsidize them every which way. And of course all the thousands, millions of lives they've taken already in wars, pollution and other crimes.
I didn't say it's just oil companies to blame. That's your ridiculously simplistic strawman. But you are using that strawman in another logical fallacy to act like we therefore shouldn't blame them. Which, since you seem to think we've got only coal, oil and nuclear options, is no surprise. It's all very consistent. And dead wrong.
But they are not "hominems", "people", in rhetoric. Attacking a corporation for its behavior is not the same as attacking a person for theirs. Especially when the corporate behavior is what we're arguing about. No matter how much liability evasion corporate people might be used to getting, they haven't changed the rules of debate, except perhaps rigged in a courtroom. Which this is not.
No, now you're cherrypicking, where I never did. And merely flatly denying the facts I'm citing to back up my argument.
FWIW, I'll offer you the advice to look at how reforestation is increasing carbon sinks, even under the weak Kyoto credit system.
It was interesting to look up the latest data to back up the conclusion that's been running for years: ethanol is a better fuel for energy, carbon and conversion than the competing candidates.
But if you're not going to offer anything for me to learn from you, just contradiction (especially flawed ones like claiming the volume of diesel means its infrastructure is larger than gasoline), it's not worth it to me anymore. I'll see you in 10 years, behind the wheel of my fuelcell vehicle, while you're still searching for a McDonalds with reasonable used fryer oil prices.
You sound like Scooter Libby's lawyer. We've finally got incontrovertible evidence of one oil company buying science to fight their liability, just like everyone's always known they all do, so we'll finally admit they do it, but we'll absolutely deny they do it. And a website that oil companies (and the spin doctors who love them) have always portrayed as demented or liars, too "liberal" to trust, is now the gold standard that exonerates all those oil companies by encouraging them for finally admitting the beginning of the changes they should have made, and stopped lying about, generations ago.
Alberto Gonzales, is that you?
Maybe in a perfect simulation of a perfect world. But the history backs up the common sense: oil companies pay for science that serves only their agenda, which is to cover up the true costs of their industry to protect their maximum profits at everyone else's expense.
Pointing out real bias is not "ad hominem". Corporations are not "hominems". Diluting the obvious interest conflict demonstrated in oil companies buying scientists to write against the IPCC report is work for the oil companies. And pitting the extreme, unaccountable oil companies' self interest against the factual analysis of the IPCC report is pretending to "balance" the facts against propaganda.
Let's not game the system any more, now that the seriousness of the threat is finally being widely analyzed and reported after generations of lies, coverups and propaganda all serving the oil companies at the expense of everyone else.
Mostly we disagree because the total energy system is extremely complex among the different choices. Especially when considered in the context of existing infrastructure and current pollution. Which have their own unacceptable costs, even measured only in energy, especially counting the energy cost to cope with environmental collapse. But my analyses show ethanol to be the best bet, with some exceptions in the huge complex of niches that define how we consume fuel.
"Close" energy content depends what we mean by "close". The relative energy contents are gasoline: 42.7Mj:Kg; biodiesel: 37.8Mj:Kg; petrodiesel: 42.5Mj:Kg ethanol: 26.8Mj:Kg. Ethanol has 63% the energy content of gasoline, 63% of petrodiesel. Biodiesel is 89% of gasoline, 88% of petrodiesel. Ethanol is 71% of biodiesel. However, ethanol burns more completely than does bio/diesel or gasoline, more energy efficiently in the total process (including manufacturing the fuel). That makes their net energy budget even closer. The differences are outweighed by the rest of the system's inefficiencies.
Meanwhile, the carbon content is directly relevant, even when dealing with a "closed system" of bioproduction. Because we need more than just reduced emissions: we need net carbon decrease from our current overall pollution production. Reducing the carbon emissions while replacing petrofuel products like fertilizer and pesticide with ecological biomass strikes a triple whammy on current emissions and energy budgets. The carbon contents of various fuels were too tedious to compile for the sake of this argument, but also considering the "carbon equivalence" of different emissions, the biofuels' lower Greenhouse damage multiples are much greater than the petrofuels' energy efficiency.
Many fewer cars use diesel to replace with biodiesel than gasoline to replace with ethanol. The delivery infrastructure for diesel is also much less deployed. Biodiesel does have a place in this complex calculus, because diesel engines last dozens, perhaps hundreds of years, so replacing them has a higher energy cost than the inevitable replacement of gasoline engines with newer technology. This is especially true in diesel-fueled stationary power plants. But that's a fraction of gasoline use, especially in new markets like India and China. Where new tech is driving the production as much as new money to spend (usually both in the same hands).
I don't know how you can call fuelcells just a government subsidy scam when they already offer greater energy efficiency. Fuelcells are already operating at 60% energy efficiency, while gasoline internal combustion is still about 20% efficiency - their tech maturity suggests they're going to stay that inefficient. Fuelcells, just getting started with industrial R&D money, will gain to at least 80% within the next 10 years, while all our fuel options are still available to use in the infrastructure conversions. And since fuelcells perform better with ethanol than with gasoline, the relatively small advantage in gasoline energy content is completely wiped out in the multiple of extraction efficiency.
I suggested methanol because its higher toxicity is offset by its much lower emissions than even ethanol. These fuels are all toxic, so some form of handling is necessary, and some cost of damage inevitable. We generally don't handle any of the petrofuels properly - millions of Kg are spilled just at the pump nozzle every year. If we handled them all properly, the difference in handling the more toxic methanol would be small, especially in light of its advantages in emissions, which is ultimately the most toxic when it destroys our environment.
There is already recent biotech increasing
The most notable characteristic of the sea is that it is constant, eternal, but always changes. Waves, tides, floods, storms, breezes, everything about the sea is always in constant change. It's a metaphor for change. And since smells are little pieces of the thing dissolving directly in the flesh of our brains, the smell changes all the time, too.
Different seas. Different tides. Different seasons. Different weather. Very different smells. I've lived on Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf and Great Lakes. I've visited the Eastern and Western shores of them, the eastern reach of the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, Mediterranean, North, Irish, Marmara and other seas. They've all got different, distinctive smells, which themselves vary.
When scientists can bottle that, an everchanging ocean of sea smells, they've really got something. Until then, they've just got some dirty water.
Kinda. Can you use those APIs to create your own rankings of the searches inside Google's indexed results, or do the custom apps still get results ranked by Google's secret formula?
Google can keep fighting its war against the spammers. That's one reason why I suggested that Google could keep some parameters secret.
But I would no longer have to have to depend on the illusion that my interests are identical to Google's.
That's why sharing the configs is so important. Wired magazine, for example, could share several different configs in an article about how they produce different results. And part of the SEO game would be promoting the configs best suited to feature your site. But the straitjacket would be slipped for those who care to live free.
Google should expose at least part of their ranking formula as a dead-simple GUI to control parameters to Google users. That way we can control our own "Google" rankings according to our own agendas. People could share their params with friends so we don't have to figure out what to do to be trustworthy, just which of our friends' searching techniques we trust. Just like in the real world.
Doing so would go a long way towards making it less necessary to trust Google. Eventually we would be best served by a totally open ranking client that searches multiple competing backend indices. But if Google handed us "trust web" to do it ourselves, they'd probably preempt that inevitable infomediation that would also disconnect them from the users, and thereby from their highest value relationship.
I dunno, all kinds of critical bugs that could stop people from deploying Windows in their offices for over a decade and a half haven't even really slowed it down. Look at how buggy/ineffective/insecure was Windows 3.1, the watershed, or Win95, or even 2000. But people everywhere use it, and put up with its bugs. Because they think it's good enough.
Disappointment is as much an expectations game as it is a delivery game. Linux culture, composed of lots of self-motivated "DIY" enthusiasts, created and improved Linux because it didn't quite do what we wanted. Which is great, but it can create impossibly high expectations that most people don't share. And which gets in the way of the "good enough" standard that most people live by.
I think they're doing noise cancellation on the mic. But your point about MS DRM possibly preventing them from decoding between the network and the speaker, because that conflicts with the MS "end to end DRM" model, is probably right on. Or, at least, if they can decode before the speaker for "preemptive speech recognition", that's a major hole in their multimedia DRM "between the ends".
Either way, they can't do both. And "biting itself in the ass" is a great way to describe the loop MS is now caught in. Monopolists never learn that you can't have it all: where would you put it?
Yes, but if Microsoft patents it then Linux can't benefit from it.
In general, patenting security, especially such broadly-effective security as OS security, is very bad for the environment, though it can benefit the patent holder. Imagine if MS had the patent on key and combination locks...
The other reply has got it right. Just make Vista recognize the speech Vista is emitting as audio, and compare those recognized symbols to the recognized speech symbols coming through the microphone. It would be easy to tell that the same symbols are coming out the speakers as coming in the mic. In fact that should also increase the recognition of the speech actually originating in the room.
Of course I have, but it's very unusual (despite Slashdotters' geeky preferences). And most of those computer rooms have admins who can control the audio and security, even if they're just the kind of savvy user with multiple computers for their own use.
Mostly this will attack single users of single computers in their homes and offices. That threat can be mitigated in the single OS instance. There are other threats like the one you imply, but that's no reason not to fix the biggest one that is easier to deal with.