Assume the following premise: if I, Senator (fill in the blank) come from a state where M$ has a large presence and/or I receive a large PAC or other donation traceable to M$ or M$ dominated interests, I will of course want to investigate all of the other nasty players in the software industry who are of course trying to become (presumably) evil monopolies. If I, Senator (fill in the blank) come from California, etc. where Google, et. al is strong and Apple is strong, I of course will want to investigate all of the other nasty players ________ who aren't buying my influence..... (?)
Now does anyone wonder why a Senator from Utah is so up in arms that he wants unpaid unelected bureaucrats to get nasty with Google, et. al?
Yes, I recognize that MS can abuse UEFI. Given that my work machines are WinXXXXX I don't have a choice about that, and I would assume that at some point there will be mobos that aren't controlled by M$.
My question is ten times simpler: If this thing is flashable memory, etc., doesn't it open the doors to way more cracking by folks I'd really rather avoid, that is, identity thieves et. al? How is going away from silicon going to affect this?
For every thousand people wringing their hands about all of the "coulda shoulda woulda(s)", there seems to be only a voice or two that really comprehends the size of either the quake or the Tsunami. Yes, TEPCO and the government regulators should have paid attention to what other researchers were saying about the likelihood of a big tsunami hitting the Tokai plain, including the area where Fukushima Daiichi, etc. were located.
I lived in three of the areas hardest hit: Ishinomaki, Northeast Sendai, and Fukushima. Damages further north and south on the coast are equally indescribable. To put it in perspective though..... Let's say California got pitched the same distance to the west that Japan did in the mega quake. There would now be an eight foot moat around anything west of the fault line. Any building lower than about 30 feet (the highest tsunami readings were nearly double that) not made of pretty much stone, brick, or cement would be gone. Assume you'd built a ten meter sea wall -- and then not only does the seawall get smacked by the quake, but the quake takes out all the backup systems designed to shut your big old project down safely -- and the roads required to get new backup equipment in place. In fact, pretty much all you can do is spray water on a hot spot.
You'd have as much luck avoiding a disastrous ending as you would n putting out a forest fire with the results of that 32 oz big gulp soda you drank an hour before the fire broke loose.
This would be NEWS.... or is news, but not technology -- yet. Nearly the last sentence in the article states that it worked: at higher frequencies than are likely to be found and therefore useful at the vibrations available where MEMS devices normally would be used. In other words useful news that matters -- "once the lab techies make it work for real world conditions."
Thought that was supposed to be well established by DNA research.... and now we are being told that they can't get the count below 10,000? Make up your minds, science folks.
There are aspects of the law that are good-- strengthening the reporting requirements, etc. to make sure an abuse case can't be suppressed by the school administration, et. al. The problem is quite profound in terms of our current legal system in fact. A comparable case is that "it is legal in the United States to buy certain types of high explosives, but not to make them", as the buying can be regulated so that not just anyone can go out and buy TNT at the local "five and dime let's make a bomb shop". But because of the Bill of Rights, nearly anyone (felons excluded) can own just about any type of "arms" (weapons) because we have the right to keep and bear arms. And that right is strongly protected.
Even though we all agree that teachers coercing or molesting students is a bad thing, it's not a preventable by destroying an aspect of the bill of rights thing. They call it the slippery slope and it's the same kind of thing with free speech. You are free to yell "fire" at the top of your lungs --but not in a public place --unless there is actually a fire. So the laws designed to protect students can't just say who can talk to whom and how as a method of preventing child abuse, they have to be crafted so dang specifically that they fit existing crime statutes, for example, it's illegal to engage in speech "soliciting" or "coercing" behaviors such as sex with minors, prostitution, etc., but not to call and talk to a student about an activity or grade. And a parent monitoring a child's FB account would have the right to raise holy hell for any teacher risking that kind of speech, etc. online anyway.
So the likelihood of the freedom of speech issue surviving a court challenge as written is probably nil.
--sarcasm mode on-- Of course we need all of those things in the budget for the next X number of years. It's either that or lay off the trained force that builds the darn things and scale back the number of defense spending related jobs in my home state. And those people vote, darn it, and they by golly are not going to vote for me if I cost them their jobs by doing the RIGHT THING!!
* Rubber Stamp *
---sarcasm mode off---
Any questions about why we need these weapons now?
Okay, just joking. But IIRC the fellow who designed the 6502 that started the PERSONAL microcomputer revolution big-time, AKA Apple, Commodore, etc. drew the masks by hand and to most people's astonishment got it right on the first interconnect cut. Hand him the pen and let him loose!
Now that Microsoft is thinking about patenting the ability to let law enforcement folks tap VoIP conversations when wrongdoing is suspected, our beloved congress persons will have to do their dirty deals without using Skype. What Will We Do?
K a minor correction, same article... "Unlike most antibiotics, antiviral drugs do not destroy their target pathogen; instead they inhibit their development"
to which I add <a href="http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6445&page=79"> quotes</a> about what the review of many scientists say on the subject:
Genomic sequencing and limited study of variola surface proteins derived from geographically dispersed specimens is an essential foundation for important future work. Such research could be carried out now, and could require a delay in the destruction of known stocks, but would not necessitate their indefinite retention....
1. The most compelling reason for long-term retention of live variola virus stocks is their essential role in the identification and development of antiviral agents for use in anticipation of a large outbreak of smallpox. It must be emphasized that if the search for antiviral agents with activity against live variola virus were to be continued, additional public resources would be needed.
Very well put. Thanks. Wish that we'd get a whole lot of commentary just on your thoughts and get it refined to the level where the EFF could try to get something like this posted to the type of sites where they generate the "model" laws that a whole lot of smart people think are both good at the civil liberties level and that will withstand the weird challenges that it might need to from nefarious folks like corporate sponsored local government officials...
--sarcasm mode on-- I can sleep better knowing that Sen. Leahy is looking out for my civil liberties, especially where the 'Net and privacy are concerned. --sarcasm mode off--
This may sound jaded but any time that particular name is associated with anything to do with our rights and civil liberties, I always seem to be saying under my breath "repeat after me: check the fine print" as there are very few individuals at the national level that I trust less. And I would love to see if the/. community agrees or disagrees with my assessment of his record on those issues.
See my other post on this. And yes you are correct that smallpox virus is not required to MAKE the vaccines.
Try this thought on for size though. Do you really want to test a smallpox vaccine on anything other than the deadly cousin of the vaccine's organizm, aka the REAL smallpox virus?
Mankind has yet to invent event one "antiviral" that stops an infection from progressing, in say the way that antibiotics can stop a bacterial infection in it's tracks. Meaning that vaccines/inoculation are the only way to stop them -- via prevention, not cure. SO until a cure exists for even ONE virus, the world's most dangerous viruses need to have vaccines for them available.
The point for keeping the viruses is that because mankind can't re-synthesize an active virus to test against, there needs to be a stock against which the vaccines can be tested. The point to having a particular number of vaccinations available is that in the event that an outbreak were discovered, a much lower threshold of containment can be accomplished by inoculations in a circular shape around the outbreak(s) so that responders and other possible people exposed can be protected.
Change the name of the virus to "Ebola" for which they can still basically only theorize the still don't know the original transmission vector. Or "hantavirus" in the US, [if it were spreadable other than by rodent / flea type infestation]. Assume 25 years has gone by and now that there's no ebola samples or hantavirus samples to test against, and then a vector hits a major population center at the time of the World Cup in soccer, or the Olympics, etc.
Change the topic back to smallpox... Do you still want them to destroy the few remaining smallpox VIRUS stocks they need to test new vaccines and drugs against?
Heck, I blocked that many by myself a couple years ago. Switched to Linux on my home machine, Firefox with noscript ON, and Chrome on my work machines. No more MS updates or weird IE toolbar launches.
Oh wait. I forgot to put on my flameproof underwear before I posted that...
Given that there is nothing MS would have liked to do more than to shut down Novell for ANY reason whatsoever, why would people consider the demise of ".NET" ness that is clearly open source and in many ways immune to patent litigation (although possibly not DMCA reverse engineering litigation -- I've heard that folks thought that was a possibility at one time) a good thing?
That would be like saying that SCO's lawsuits had merit for including major Linux distributions in it's target scope, would it not? And I don't think Miguel et. al are so stupid as to put themselves blindly as targets in microsoft's corporate crosshairs, do you?
With the duly noted sarcasm meter note, it is sad that NEITHER of the major political parties are one whit interested in this little thing known as the preservation of civil rights as much as they are about the seizing and holding of the political power of the purse for their own ends. If that meets kowtowing to corporate and monied interests, so be it.
What is more disturbing is the lack of public and news outlet reaction. Of course, most news outlets now being owned by extremely large corporate interests is in this case, no help at all...
While this list is interesting, it requires an excessive amount of two commodoties: precision cut metal engines and "green friendly" fuel/energy sources and doesn't address three issues: lack of ground source water, lack of non-mosquito generating water purification, and what we could simply call the 'community cost of ownership". Because if there's not enough groundwater available, all the wells drilled by the machine simply compound a problem. If you have sufficient ground water but it is not pure, or mosquito free, you generate another set of problems. Finally, every member of the community needs to have the economic ability to participate in both the work requirement AND the benefit of large scale farming, which, to my knowledge has never been accomplished in the history of the world, including in the so called "first world".
Open source machine designs are cool. Making something work for 3,4,5,6 or ten family units on a reasonable amount of land with good clean water will do a lot more because after that it's mostly fertilizer, seed, and sun.
Interesting question. Let's assume a theoretical person "I". "I" am "pre-emptively arrested" for a felony in order to get a DNA sample, but that specific arrest itself is later to have been found to be without reasonable cause, AKA it was a fishing expedition. Let's also assume that "I" have other warrants or am a suspect in crimes where there is an existing DNA sample. Mostly these would be sexual crimes, assaults, and murder related, that is, I don't think that police departments are DNA swabbing every known crime scene (burglaries, car thefts, etc.). In this scenario, the tainted match results in the possibility of a conviction for an unrelated issue. The false arrest is a legal taint -- the police aren't allowed to do it -- and so any evidence recovered in this manner would become unusable in BOTH cases.
As opposed to "I am brought in for questioning", offered a drink of water, a cigarette, or WHATEVER as a ruse for the police to get a DNA sample, a fingerprint, etc. -- tactics that have been held to be legal in many many court cases. Why would I as a police department risk the inevitable lawsuit and serious legal expense, or the loss of a predator/violent criminal/murderous type with an arrest when I can do something much cheaper to get the DNA sample I need?
I think the bigger "security vs. freedom" issue would be along the lines of "we got a DNA sample on file for you and we can keep it and share it with anyone we want for whatever reason and you will never know who/how/why it was shared". Because we trust governments SO much to only do the right things with our personal information, to never allow their databases to be sold, shared, hacked, etc., right?
Having just read a very interesting (read: somewhat frightening in terms of implications) article about GPS jammers, I am wondering if it's the wifi signal or the fact that a lot of wifi devices (read: smartphonee) now have GPS apps, etc. which would very definitely be competing for signal/timing/ etc. that ARE in use in aircraft systems... Thoughts from the Slashdot technorati please?
IE till lags Firefox and Chrome in some of the larger "real world" benchmarks, but compared with prior iterations of IE, the improvements to V9 are nothing short of stunning. Similarly Firefox 4 Beta 12 cooks over 3.6.15 -- but even 3.6.15 has improved dramatically over prior 3.6 versions. The big stunner for me is how close all of the browsers are becoming in performance, while taking slightly different directions in browser tabs, menus, etc. -- but that most of the "nasty trick tests" I know for XHTML and CSS through what we sorta call "2.1" don't fail in any of the new browsers. (I've been stuck in VB land for the last year, so I can't claim enough knowledge to test either HTML5 or the CSS 3.X stuff at this point).
Anyway, what that means for me as a professional coder is that now I can concentrate on cross-PLATFORM applications, instead of cross-BROWSER. Which is nothing short of the best news I've had this year in terms of IT work.
That is close to what I was thinking about relative to IBM, etc., but I should have probably related it more to the patent stores held by Motorola, Hitachi, Samsung, and others.
The problem there is that all those chip makers are also partially beholden to apple, etc. as well for part of their profit margins.
Curious... A Google/ARM related consortium would NOT have similar enumbrances would they?
Actually I would like to suggest that Google's main approach and threat would be to counter the whole software is patentable paradigm in ways that the big three (Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle) will not want to defend against. Plus the likely scenario that IBM would rather see Google succeed than the other three, and their patent portfolio in the form of prior art assistance to Google would change the game entirely, or the fact that Google is likely to code around any patents more quickly than any trial can move forward. So I think that trying to take Google and Android down via patents is a losing proposition.
Plus the Google ecosystem can effectively fight off alot of threats simply by the fact that they are have no obligation to play nice when it comes to search engine trafficking/optimization and/or investments.
For example, picture what happens if Google puts resources into Postgres, MariaDB, or any of the other major database platforms that would cut into the profitability of Oracle or Microsoft. Or takes up the banner of Open Office to free it from the clutches of Sun, further weakening Microsoft profit margins. What people are learning is that Google at least so far tends to be a very worthy adversary. So far we also like Google more than the billionaires clubs as run by Gates and Ellison.
At last, someone who read the article. Thank you!!
And for the record I am anti-gaming, anti-casino, but also anti-abuse of the gaming establishment, which seems weird until you realize one thing: The casino(s) are not in it to cheat stupid people out of their money. They are in it to make a profit margin based on the concept of fair play, meaning that "even if we make a bunch of money because of the margins and scale of the casino operation, everybody has an equal chance at getting the payouts.
It would sort of be like going to a restaurant where you paid the same amount for a burger, but sometimes you get the mini-burger with ketchup only and sometimes you get the big burger with everything on it. As long as we all have an equal chance of getting the big burger, and not to many small burgers (i.e. usually getting the "middle" burger), we might keep trying. And the restaurant makes say 7-10% of the overall total no matter what as profit. Now then, someone comes in and always pays the minimum price, and gets not only the big burger every time but two big burgers, because they have figured out how to trick a restaurant employee and then cheat the restaurant. Meaning that the restaurant has to give everyone else smaller burgers or raise the price of the burgers to cover the cost of the cheater. The cheater in the restaurant can be arrested for fraud, and maybe even the employee.
Slashdot Mirror
Assume the following premise: if I, Senator (fill in the blank) come from a state where M$ has a large presence and/or I receive a large PAC or other donation traceable to M$ or M$ dominated interests, I will of course want to investigate all of the other nasty players in the software industry who are of course trying to become (presumably) evil monopolies. If I, Senator (fill in the blank) come from California, etc. where Google, et. al is strong and Apple is strong, I of course will want to investigate all of the other nasty players ________ who aren't buying my influence..... (?)
Now does anyone wonder why a Senator from Utah is so up in arms that he wants unpaid unelected bureaucrats to get nasty with Google, et. al?
Yes, I recognize that MS can abuse UEFI. Given that my work machines are WinXXXXX I don't have a choice about that, and I would assume that at some point there will be mobos that aren't controlled by M$.
My question is ten times simpler: If this thing is flashable memory, etc., doesn't it open the doors to way more cracking by folks I'd really rather avoid, that is, identity thieves et. al? How is going away from silicon going to affect this?
For every thousand people wringing their hands about all of the "coulda shoulda woulda(s)", there seems to be only a voice or two that really comprehends the size of either the quake or the Tsunami. Yes, TEPCO and the government regulators should have paid attention to what other researchers were saying about the likelihood of a big tsunami hitting the Tokai plain, including the area where Fukushima Daiichi, etc. were located.
I lived in three of the areas hardest hit: Ishinomaki, Northeast Sendai, and Fukushima. Damages further north and south on the coast are equally indescribable. To put it in perspective though..... Let's say California got pitched the same distance to the west that Japan did in the mega quake. There would now be an eight foot moat around anything west of the fault line. Any building lower than about 30 feet (the highest tsunami readings were nearly double that) not made of pretty much stone, brick, or cement would be gone. Assume you'd built a ten meter sea wall -- and then not only does the seawall get smacked by the quake, but the quake takes out all the backup systems designed to shut your big old project down safely -- and the roads required to get new backup equipment in place. In fact, pretty much all you can do is spray water on a hot spot.
You'd have as much luck avoiding a disastrous ending as you would n putting out a forest fire with the results of that 32 oz big gulp soda you drank an hour before the fire broke loose.
Any questions?
This would be NEWS.... or is news, but not technology -- yet. Nearly the last sentence in the article states that it worked: at higher frequencies than are likely to be found and therefore useful at the vibrations available where MEMS devices normally would be used. In other words useful news that matters -- "once the lab techies make it work for real world conditions."
Thought that was supposed to be well established by DNA research.... and now we are being told that they can't get the count below 10,000? Make up your minds, science folks.
There are aspects of the law that are good-- strengthening the reporting requirements, etc. to make sure an abuse case can't be suppressed by the school administration, et. al. The problem is quite profound in terms of our current legal system in fact. A comparable case is that "it is legal in the United States to buy certain types of high explosives, but not to make them", as the buying can be regulated so that not just anyone can go out and buy TNT at the local "five and dime let's make a bomb shop". But because of the Bill of Rights, nearly anyone (felons excluded) can own just about any type of "arms" (weapons) because we have the right to keep and bear arms. And that right is strongly protected.
Even though we all agree that teachers coercing or molesting students is a bad thing, it's not a preventable by destroying an aspect of the bill of rights thing. They call it the slippery slope and it's the same kind of thing with free speech. You are free to yell "fire" at the top of your lungs --but not in a public place --unless there is actually a fire. So the laws designed to protect students can't just say who can talk to whom and how as a method of preventing child abuse, they have to be crafted so dang specifically that they fit existing crime statutes, for example, it's illegal to engage in speech "soliciting" or "coercing" behaviors such as sex with minors, prostitution, etc., but not to call and talk to a student about an activity or grade. And a parent monitoring a child's FB account would have the right to raise holy hell for any teacher risking that kind of speech, etc. online anyway.
So the likelihood of the freedom of speech issue surviving a court challenge as written is probably nil.
(EFF ==> Electronic Freedom Foundation, btw).
Congress critter discussion:
--sarcasm mode on--
Of course we need all of those things in the budget for the next X number of years. It's either that or lay off the trained force that builds the darn things and scale back the number of defense spending related jobs in my home state. And those people vote, darn it, and they by golly are not going to vote for me if I cost them their jobs by doing the RIGHT THING!!
* Rubber Stamp *
---sarcasm mode off---
Any questions about why we need these weapons now?
Okay, just joking. But IIRC the fellow who designed the 6502 that started the PERSONAL microcomputer revolution big-time, AKA Apple, Commodore, etc. drew the masks by hand and to most people's astonishment got it right on the first interconnect cut. Hand him the pen and let him loose!
Now that Microsoft is thinking about patenting the ability to let law enforcement folks tap VoIP conversations when wrongdoing is suspected, our beloved congress persons will have to do their dirty deals without using Skype. What Will We Do?
K a minor correction, same article... "Unlike most antibiotics, antiviral drugs do not destroy their target pathogen; instead they inhibit their development"
to which I add <a href="http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6445&page=79"> quotes</a> about what the review of many scientists say on the subject:
Genomic sequencing and limited study of variola surface proteins derived from geographically dispersed specimens is an essential foundation for important future work. Such research could be carried out now, and could require a delay in the destruction of known stocks, but would not necessitate their indefinite retention....
1. The most compelling reason for long-term retention of live variola virus stocks is their essential role in the identification and development of antiviral agents for use in anticipation of a large outbreak of smallpox. It must be emphasized that if the search for antiviral agents with activity against live variola virus were to be continued, additional public resources would be needed.
Very well put. Thanks. Wish that we'd get a whole lot of commentary just on your thoughts and get it refined to the level where the EFF could try to get something like this posted to the type of sites where they generate the "model" laws that a whole lot of smart people think are both good at the civil liberties level and that will withstand the weird challenges that it might need to from nefarious folks like corporate sponsored local government officials...
--sarcasm mode on--
/. community agrees or disagrees with my assessment of his record on those issues.
I can sleep better knowing that Sen. Leahy is looking out for my civil liberties, especially where the 'Net and privacy are concerned.
--sarcasm mode off--
This may sound jaded but any time that particular name is associated with anything to do with our rights and civil liberties, I always seem to be saying under my breath "repeat after me: check the fine print" as there are very few individuals at the national level that I trust less. And I would love to see if the
See my other post on this. And yes you are correct that smallpox virus is not required to MAKE the vaccines.
Try this thought on for size though. Do you really want to test a smallpox vaccine on anything other than the deadly cousin of the vaccine's organizm, aka the REAL smallpox virus?
Mankind has yet to invent event one "antiviral" that stops an infection from progressing, in say the way that antibiotics can stop a bacterial infection in it's tracks. Meaning that vaccines/inoculation are the only way to stop them -- via prevention, not cure. SO until a cure exists for even ONE virus, the world's most dangerous viruses need to have vaccines for them available.
The point for keeping the viruses is that because mankind can't re-synthesize an active virus to test against, there needs to be a stock against which the vaccines can be tested. The point to having a particular number of vaccinations available is that in the event that an outbreak were discovered, a much lower threshold of containment can be accomplished by inoculations in a circular shape around the outbreak(s) so that responders and other possible people exposed can be protected.
Change the name of the virus to "Ebola" for which they can still basically only theorize the still don't know the original transmission vector. Or "hantavirus" in the US, [if it were spreadable other than by rodent / flea type infestation]. Assume 25 years has gone by and now that there's no ebola samples or hantavirus samples to test against, and then a vector hits a major population center at the time of the World Cup in soccer, or the Olympics, etc.
Change the topic back to smallpox... Do you still want them to destroy the few remaining smallpox VIRUS stocks they need to test new vaccines and drugs against?
Heck, I blocked that many by myself a couple years ago. Switched to Linux on my home machine, Firefox with noscript ON, and Chrome on my work machines. No more MS updates or weird IE toolbar launches.
Oh wait. I forgot to put on my flameproof underwear before I posted that...
Given that there is nothing MS would have liked to do more than to shut down Novell for ANY reason whatsoever, why would people consider the demise of ".NET" ness that is clearly open source and in many ways immune to patent litigation (although possibly not DMCA reverse engineering litigation -- I've heard that folks thought that was a possibility at one time) a good thing?
That would be like saying that SCO's lawsuits had merit for including major Linux distributions in it's target scope, would it not? And I don't think Miguel et. al are so stupid as to put themselves blindly as targets in microsoft's corporate crosshairs, do you?
With the duly noted sarcasm meter note, it is sad that NEITHER of the major political parties are one whit interested in this little thing known as the preservation of civil rights as much as they are about the seizing and holding of the political power of the purse for their own ends. If that meets kowtowing to corporate and monied interests, so be it.
What is more disturbing is the lack of public and news outlet reaction. Of course, most news outlets now being owned by extremely large corporate interests is in this case, no help at all...
While this list is interesting, it requires an excessive amount of two commodoties: precision cut metal engines and "green friendly" fuel /energy sources and doesn't address three issues: lack of ground source water, lack of non-mosquito generating water purification, and what we could simply call the 'community cost of ownership". Because if there's not enough groundwater available, all the wells drilled by the machine simply compound a problem. If you have sufficient ground water but it is not pure, or mosquito free, you generate another set of problems. Finally, every member of the community needs to have the economic ability to participate in both the work requirement AND the benefit of large scale farming, which, to my knowledge has never been accomplished in the history of the world, including in the so called "first world".
Open source machine designs are cool. Making something work for 3,4,5,6 or ten family units on a reasonable amount of land with good clean water will do a lot more because after that it's mostly fertilizer, seed, and sun.
Interesting question. Let's assume a theoretical person "I". "I" am "pre-emptively arrested" for a felony in order to get a DNA sample, but that specific arrest itself is later to have been found to be without reasonable cause, AKA it was a fishing expedition. Let's also assume that "I" have other warrants or am a suspect in crimes where there is an existing DNA sample. Mostly these would be sexual crimes, assaults, and murder related, that is, I don't think that police departments are DNA swabbing every known crime scene (burglaries, car thefts, etc.). In this scenario, the tainted match results in the possibility of a conviction for an unrelated issue. The false arrest is a legal taint -- the police aren't allowed to do it -- and so any evidence recovered in this manner would become unusable in BOTH cases.
As opposed to "I am brought in for questioning", offered a drink of water, a cigarette, or WHATEVER as a ruse for the police to get a DNA sample, a fingerprint, etc. -- tactics that have been held to be legal in many many court cases. Why would I as a police department risk the inevitable lawsuit and serious legal expense, or the loss of a predator/violent criminal/murderous type with an arrest when I can do something much cheaper to get the DNA sample I need?
I think the bigger "security vs. freedom" issue would be along the lines of "we got a DNA sample on file for you and we can keep it and share it with anyone we want for whatever reason and you will never know who/how/why it was shared". Because we trust governments SO much to only do the right things with our personal information, to never allow their databases to be sold, shared, hacked, etc., right?
Having just read a very interesting (read: somewhat frightening in terms of implications) article about GPS jammers, I am wondering if it's the wifi signal or the fact that a lot of wifi devices (read: smartphonee) now have GPS apps, etc. which would very definitely be competing for signal/timing/ etc. that ARE in use in aircraft systems... Thoughts from the Slashdot technorati please?
My conclusion is "FINALLY".
IE till lags Firefox and Chrome in some of the larger "real world" benchmarks, but compared with prior iterations of IE, the improvements to V9 are nothing short of stunning. Similarly Firefox 4 Beta 12 cooks over 3.6.15 -- but even 3.6.15 has improved dramatically over prior 3.6 versions. The big stunner for me is how close all of the browsers are becoming in performance, while taking slightly different directions in browser tabs, menus, etc. -- but that most of the "nasty trick tests" I know for XHTML and CSS through what we sorta call "2.1" don't fail in any of the new browsers. (I've been stuck in VB land for the last year, so I can't claim enough knowledge to test either HTML5 or the CSS 3.X stuff at this point).
Anyway, what that means for me as a professional coder is that now I can concentrate on cross-PLATFORM applications, instead of cross-BROWSER. Which is nothing short of the best news I've had this year in terms of IT work.
That is close to what I was thinking about relative to IBM, etc., but I should have probably related it more to the patent stores held by Motorola, Hitachi, Samsung, and others.
The problem there is that all those chip makers are also partially beholden to apple, etc. as well for part of their profit margins.
Curious... A Google/ARM related consortium would NOT have similar enumbrances would they?
Actually I would like to suggest that Google's main approach and threat would be to counter the whole software is patentable paradigm in ways that the big three (Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle) will not want to defend against. Plus the likely scenario that IBM would rather see Google succeed than the other three, and their patent portfolio in the form of prior art assistance to Google would change the game entirely, or the fact that Google is likely to code around any patents more quickly than any trial can move forward. So I think that trying to take Google and Android down via patents is a losing proposition.
Plus the Google ecosystem can effectively fight off alot of threats simply by the fact that they are have no obligation to play nice when it comes to search engine trafficking/optimization and/or investments.
For example, picture what happens if Google puts resources into Postgres, MariaDB, or any of the other major database platforms that would cut into the profitability of Oracle or Microsoft. Or takes up the banner of Open Office to free it from the clutches of Sun, further weakening Microsoft profit margins. What people are learning is that Google at least so far tends to be a very worthy adversary. So far we also like Google more than the billionaires clubs as run by Gates and Ellison.
So, if being born in the USA automagically grants Citizenship, would the first child born ON Mars, be the 1st and therefore only Martian Citizen?
Would they then own the whole dang planet? If so, I apply to be the dad!
At last, someone who read the article. Thank you!!
And for the record I am anti-gaming, anti-casino, but also anti-abuse of the gaming establishment, which seems weird until you realize one thing: The casino(s) are not in it to cheat stupid people out of their money. They are in it to make a profit margin based on the concept of fair play, meaning that "even if we make a bunch of money because of the margins and scale of the casino operation, everybody has an equal chance at getting the payouts.
It would sort of be like going to a restaurant where you paid the same amount for a burger, but sometimes you get the mini-burger with ketchup only and sometimes you get the big burger with everything on it. As long as we all have an equal chance of getting the big burger, and not to many small burgers (i.e. usually getting the "middle" burger), we might keep trying. And the restaurant makes say 7-10% of the overall total no matter what as profit. Now then, someone comes in and always pays the minimum price, and gets not only the big burger every time but two big burgers, because they have figured out how to trick a restaurant employee and then cheat the restaurant. Meaning that the restaurant has to give everyone else smaller burgers or raise the price of the burgers to cover the cost of the cheater. The cheater in the restaurant can be arrested for fraud, and maybe even the employee.
Get it the rest of y'all?