Sorry, can't agree with the conclusion that it "demands far more of the scripter to make it safe and useful".
What it requires is the discipline to learn how to use the whole stack and set of library routines properly and reduntantly, that is, to get in the habits of using the modules that put out properly developed and sanitized x/html or HTML5 front end code that is jquery / json / ajax 'ified and validated connecting to pages that then also properly sanitize the incoming "post" variables -- is an extremely HARD to hack combination -- and every last bit of the code at all levels between my script and the real world has had literally thousands of eyes looking for security holes to plug. . All I have to do is use those libraries correctly over, and over, and over again until I am faster at coding things right than I am at having to track and fix bugs later because not enough eyes have looked through the os/server/database code.
Thing is, just by using those libraries at a host provider who is up to the task of patch testing and implementing the big fixes for linux/apache/php/mysql, I don't have to worry about it
Bogus data on the "letting Republicans have their way", at least from what I have read. Bigger problem was that Walter Mondale was closer to Congressional leaders than he was to the President and that apparently gave Tip O'Neill et. al an edge they used to basically ignore much of the Carter agenda, which IIRC was much more moderate in scope and more "American" in terms of the preservation of individual and States rights than anything the national Democratic party has stood for since the early '70's.
Let's see, so if I use an IR mouse, my friend uses a bluetooth driven mouse, and another friend uses the touch screen on his mobile device. One person is networked in via Cat5, etc. All to select "B" as the answer to a question, and the web server collects the data and syncs it up to produce a right/wrong poll for the teacher.
Exactly what part of the mouse, the bluetooth, the touch screen, or the network, the web server, or the education application software (which can be copyrighted but not patented) does Microsoft claim to have invented? Or even a business model? (sorry, Blackboard et. al have something along those lines first, for all the good it will do them)....
So, if the biggest bully in the neighborhood tells you that he means you no harm, do you silently give in and give him the keys to not only your house, your car, but also to your kid's online educational future?
Having passed all of the different Acid Tests with a perfect score on the latest JavaScript oriented Acid test.
My thumbnail look at Sunspider scores shows about a 20% overall speedup over the latest Firefox beta, but Firefox wins in enough of the individual tests that I expect BOTH to improve quite a bit, that is if the fastest times on each are used, even Chrome's time would be 20% better.
They only license the copies, not sell them. Hmmm.
Last I read, a license is a form of a contract that defines who may legally do what, what each party is agreeing to, has liability for, etc. and has to be agreeable to both parties in advance. For example, when I apply for a driver's license, I agree to certain things, but the governments obligation is that they will [at least here in the US and most of the time] enforce them fairly.
How does, you bought a copy without signing and agreement but we unilaterally reserve the right to make it "not work" fit under copyright again? which governs copying and performance for profit, NOT ownership?
Because, as most/. readers tend to believe, "information wants to be free", and the Blackboad patent was so directly a contravention of that idea that even their own case filings ignored the idea of courseware to focus on a single aspect -- allowing a student who is also a teacher in another role -- to use one login. Then they used a faulty decision in that court to target their competitor -- who made no infringing claim.
The appeal judges state "On the merits, we hold that those claims do not contain a âoesingle loginâ limitation and that the district courtâ(TM)s contrary interpretation of the claim language in its JMOL ruling was error" (I think they meant "erroneous").
The problem is later where the Appeals court did not consider whether or note Blackboard's patent was wholely discardable because they did NOT rule as to whether or not the single login multiple role functionality is OBVIOUS or not.
As another poster has noted, reusing the carbon once and reburning it halves the carbon consumption. But when you clean burn an alcohol based fuel, what do you get? Water and Carbon Dioxide. Meaning that you now have two of the three inputs into the fuel cycle, and if you only recycle the carbon dioxide one more time that makes the net carbon hit only a fourth of what it would be from coal fired, etc.
Meaning that given the solar input which drives the algae to produce anyway, that if scalable this seems like it could be a game changer. Here's why: That 100,000 gallons per year [if I calculated this correctly] translates to about around 100KW per of round the clock power. Since most cities and towns have folks that mostly sleep at night, call it double that for the daylight hours and half or a third after most folks go to bed. That's not a bad chunk of power -- for one location -- at the pilot plant size.
The unanswered questions for me in the article are this: given the assumption that scalability were achievable, how much outside the system energy expense is required to operate the system anyway, and how many years would it take the fuel value to pay for a fuel plant both in terms of actual monetary investment and the actual power required to build the thing in the first place?
on the Acid3 test, lagging both Opera and Safari which have reached 100% on this fun benchmark. About 50% faster on avg when I "thumb in the air" tested it (ran 10X and wrote down the times, then averaged them than Firefox was as little as six months ago, so this release is definitely one to pick up in terms of browser security and performance, though.
Music is not melody? Where'd you come up with that line of BS? Check Wikipedia's definition, for example. The first paragraph of their Entry on the subject states that:
Music is an art form whose medium is sound organized in time. Common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek (mousike), "(art) of the Muses".
Me, I have trouble calling large parts of the techno and of rap stuff on the radio anything other than junk because they are specifically not very "musical sounding", aka having melody, harmony, articulation, timbre, texture, etc. ' Course, it might also be that the "art of the muses" was supposed to INSPIRE, not degrade.
The idea of due diligence would work -- if over the years the drug companies hadn't invested massive amounts of money to slant research results to get that ever more valuable patent, and cover up bad results that might actually mean that the drug isn't safe enough for widespread economically valuable usage.
But because for a number of years the FDA has had some "too much in bed with the drug company" personnel problems, the fact is that juries still have the right to decide that if a drug manufacturer cheats on the system, then they can pay massive amounts of money for the ill health and other problems caused by deceptive business practices.
Excuse the momentary lapse into offtopic soapbox pontificating that I am about to do here.
I know plenty of LDS folks. Nearly all of them good people who would prefer that McBride and company had been dismissed outright because SCO's bad ethics started at the top and the mindset is that bad ethics by any member of a religious community taints the whole community.
I can think of a few more:
the controversy about the cover up of pedophile Roman Catholic priests by the hierarchy does not mean that the Pope nor the Catholicy laity support child abuse,
Extremist groups like Al-Qaida, Islamic Jihad, and even Hamas does not mean that all teachers and believers in Islam are bomb-making terrorists,
all North Africans are one way and all Africans of non-Arab descent are ignorant jungle dwellers, etc., etc., etc.
and finally, being a citizen of the US does not automatically make me or you or any other "American" is a jerk or somehow better or worse than any other average person.
What it does mean is that the bad apples spoil the reputation of the whole, and so part of what we as large groups in a good society should insist on is that "all bad apples get run out of town on a rail."
The original writer posted their with the conclusion that much of what he said wasn't well thought out, he wouldn't suggest the same thing now, and that his whole point was that if the original developers made a few cents on the dollar it might stop DRM from encroaching on the games market.
Thing is, how do you implement even that idea without running up huge infrastructure costs. And when do the royalties stop, or who do they go to if the game company goes --fffffttt-- ??
Certainly the idea of supporting gaming developers is good. We do it by buying games new -- but good games nowadays take teams, teams take $$, and $$ take corporate involvement -- and as a result the gaming developers don't get their ROI for their hours that they used to.
And like the articles authors, I don't know the answer either.
When Google arrived on the scene, they used an original idea to build a really great search algorithm, which I could trust to get me to the best results quickly without a lot of cruft at the top of the list.
Well, that hasn't happened in a while. It's now quite laborious to find what I need quickly.
So let's assume that a) the folks at Google are smart, and b) they gave me a chance and some sort of small but reasonably anonymous incentive to sort of rate their search engine results.
Multiply me by a million Google users and see how fast the cruft disappears from the top of the lists again, and Google can then charge more for better advertising than their competitors because they are again ahead of the curve...
Using the analogy, the RIAA is saying that if someone posts an offer, that constitutes infringement even if the book at the laundromat is never copied?
Would it be correct to assume that on appeal the bad part of the decision could be overridden while leaving intact the "higher bar" part of the ruling?
..but it seems like this court case could prove definitive in terms of future lawsuits. Because I'm not a lawyer, I'm going to resort to a common analogy and let Ray & Co critique....
Let's assume that I check out a popular book from the local library, but leave it at the laundromat where other folks can read it. An unscrupulous laundry customer takes the book and makes a hundred copies and hands them out to other folks, who make copies etc. before I can retrieve it. The author and publisher then come after me for "making available" and seek a judgement, even though I never offered an illegal copy to anyone -- that was person #2 who got to the book and not only made illegal copies, they offered to distribute them. I assume that a judge would not hold me liable for copyright infringement because I never intended to break copyright, but WOULD allow the author/publisher, etc. to go after the downstream infringer(s) who knowingly made the copies and then attempted to distribute them.
It seems to me that this judge's decision makes the analogy pretty close to the legal precedent this decision would set in the realm of "electronic" distribution and cuts off the "shared folders == making available == legally actionable argument" at the knees.
Most of the data shows that Newtonian Physics really explains much of the physical universe really well. So if we leave out Einstein's experiments we can usually get along just peachy. But include Einstein's rules in your algorithm's and calculations and they will ALWAYS be superior to simple Newtonian physics in those areas where "more data" proves the calculations, and the calculations themselves yield more data.
So using an old saw --which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Or is there a superior question, how did chickens come to exist in the evolutionary chain? One question unanswerable, or a series of data driven questions that might eventually yield a definitive answer...
At the lowest possible but probably patentable level. Pretend that you're a patent examiner and include in your notes enough detail about what the code is designed to do and how it works to defeat subsequent attempts to patent the same tech, and then publish the piece as "open source software", and submit the code via the GPL to a larger project or code library such as Creative commons.
s Reason being, if the technique is truly useful, it is more likely to be used in other projects and more the more projects that it's in, the more eyes that are aware of the tech and the higher likelihood that if someone gets sneaky with a patent application they'll object during the patent evaluation process with NUMEROUS examples of prior art.
Good questions, but I still dispute the trust issue. No one in their right mind would attempt to compile an "open source" operating system with a proprietary or closed source provided compiler. The whole goal of the projects is to allow software to be created that meets or exceeds the NSA standards so that they don't have to do it themselves, so why would they then sabotage the process by trying to cheat and get backdoors into the very code they are trying to harden. AKA backdoors weaken security, not enhance it, and any back door they left would inevitably and eventually be discovered and therefore become usable to the black hat types.
Contrary to some of the more paranoid types around here, I think this is a great announcement. As I was reading regarding prior NSA work with Sun on security implementations, what I am seeing is an opportunity-- like Sun does -- to leverage the requirements of a hyper-security aware entity [ the NSA ] into open source systems [Open Solaris] but once opened sourced, those same techniques can be applied to harden just about any operating system.
On the NSA side, having many eyes analyzing their code has both risks -- if holes are found in their security model or implementations, potentially these could be exploited by the blackhat types and benefits -- more weaknesses discovered faster and holes plugged so that the blackhat types get closed out of NSA type stuff faster than they can do it with closed implementations.
But neither of these scenarios will let NSA somehow increase their "big brother reach" because with many eyes comes near perfect scrutiny that would quickly out any code back-doors, etc. that would be usable by the white hats or the black hats.
On the whole I find this to be a cool/worthwhile endeavor on Sun's part and look forward to it's efforts being leveraged into all of the Open Source stuff that can use it.
Marketing? no. The collective estimate of the effect of marketing on actual consumer purchasing is on the order of 1-2% of sales. The so called "mega artists" become so by being either quickly and enduringly good, or at least quickly and enduringly strange in a way that attracts attention. Then they negotiate the kinds of contracts that are the only items that bring the royalty averages UP to the figures shown in the original article, with most artists making far, far less.
I was once offered a "cough" standard contract once as a bass player of a decent regional band -- the label wanted us to pay most of the recording costs, most of our own expenses on a mini-tour, and whether or not we made a dime overall, they'd own the copyrights on the songs. Worse, if the album reached a slightly larger critical mass, we would have been bound to continue with that label for a certain time period whether or not they promoted our group or not, or risk being sued for any money we made elsewhere as recording artists. As the group's major songwriter, I found their offer very non-compelling, and the basic fallout was that they didn't give a rat's a-- about the rest of the group, nor were they interested in negotiating something fair with me -- because I would have forced the issue to protect the whole lot of us. Ethics was not a language they wanted to speak or for me to speak for that matter.
Think about it this way, if marketing were profitable and part of creating a "mega group", then why is the vast majority of the major label's newly promoted artists -- Nashville aside -- are from one hit wonders that are better at trying to stir up controversy (i.e. cheap word of mouth sales) than they are at producing quality music. Is the talent pool so low, or is it more profitable to push crap cheaply than promote quality over a period of time? You do the math.
Looking at the costs listed for the labels
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I say "like hell". Most of those costs only come into play for the so-called "mega" artists -- the major labels do not devote any where near the amounts shown for marketing, etc.
The only costs that matter are the royalties and the manufacturing, packaging, and distribution, as every other cost -- marketing included -- is variable based on the music being recorded and how heavily the particular CD is promoted. The major labels systematically cheat most artists on everything else, and if an act gets pennies on the dollar they are lucky.
That was exactly the problem. At the school I was in the overall GPA could disqualify you from receiving any scholarship assistance at all, even if "in department" a person was in the top n percentile for grades, which meant that most engineering students carried a lowered schedule of classes in terms of credit hours and took a year longer to graduate -- at a not friendly tuition rate, by the way for that fifth year.
There's a second reason, by the way.One of the courses I was in was forced to give only one 'A' out of around 90 students and 4 'B' grades to fix the department's bell curve because of scores in other classes often used by athletes, et. al as filler for their general education requirements. So the level for the 'A' grade was at around 98%, 'B' at 95%, and 'C' cut off at around 88%. Where the equivalent course would require something like a 90%, 80%, 70% levels for the same grade. What's fair about nuking someone's scholarship when in fact they are in the top 5 students in a class of 75? With a score modifier in place, the college university would have not so easily messed with the numbers if a "B" grade in a more advanced engineering course carried more weight than a "B" grade in the general ed math course offered by the same department.
My point isn't that 200% is the right "GPA enhancement" or an "A+ grade" in a doubly difficult course, by the way -- it's that other things need to be taken into account besides straight GPA.
In my college days it was easy to keep grades in the liberal arts classes that would keep a scholarship level GPA up -- and ponderously difficult to do the same in engineering classes: for a simple reason: in the liberal arts there isn't always a correct answer. AKA good writing skills and an adequate basis in logic is almost always enough to get a decent grade, and a dime's worth of studying gets a great grade. Thing is, no one dies when your English paper gets an "A" that time was wasn't really all that tough. But if a student gets an easy grade in an engineering class and learn to game the system, in the real world that same student might game the system under an employer -- or worse yet get promoted into a managerial position and not be trained well enough to catch bad engineering by subordinates -- and bad things happen. Or, would you trust your medical care to a doctor who got easy grades?
I don't have a solution but a suggestion: there needs to be a difficulty based "meritocracy" in terms of grading mechanisms and even scholarships that basically shows that if an engineering class is 200% more difficult than say Psych 101, then the grade for the engineering class needs to be weighted appropriately higher into the overall GPA, etc. For example, if the Psych 101 class is worth 12 points (for 3 credits x 4 pts for an "A+" grade), then Engineering XYZ at a difficulty 200% would be worth 24 points (3 credits x double difficulty * 4 pts for an A+ Grade) with an appropriate leveling algorithm that doesn't make a "C" grade in an engineering class an acceptable score.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, can't agree with the conclusion that it "demands far more of the scripter to make it safe and useful".
What it requires is the discipline to learn how to use the whole stack and set of library routines properly and reduntantly, that is, to get in the habits of using the modules that put out properly developed and sanitized x/html or HTML5 front end code that is jquery / json / ajax 'ified and validated connecting to pages that then also properly sanitize the incoming "post" variables -- is an extremely HARD to hack combination -- and every last bit of the code at all levels between my script and the real world has had literally thousands of eyes looking for security holes to plug. . All I have to do is use those libraries correctly over, and over, and over again until I am faster at coding things right than I am at having to track and fix bugs later because not enough eyes have looked through the os/server/database code.
Thing is, just by using those libraries at a host provider who is up to the task of patch testing and implementing the big fixes for linux/apache/php/mysql, I don't have to worry about it
Bogus data on the "letting Republicans have their way", at least from what I have read. Bigger problem was that Walter Mondale was closer to Congressional leaders than he was to the President and that apparently gave Tip O'Neill et. al an edge they used to basically ignore much of the Carter agenda, which IIRC was much more moderate in scope and more "American" in terms of the preservation of individual and States rights than anything the national Democratic party has stood for since the early '70's.
Let's see, so if I use an IR mouse, my friend uses a bluetooth driven mouse, and another friend uses the touch screen on his mobile device. One person is networked in via Cat5, etc. All to select "B" as the answer to a question, and the web server collects the data and syncs it up to produce a right/wrong poll for the teacher.
Exactly what part of the mouse, the bluetooth, the touch screen, or the network, the web server, or the education application software (which can be copyrighted but not patented) does Microsoft claim to have invented? Or even a business model? (sorry, Blackboard et. al have something along those lines first, for all the good it will do them)....
So, if the biggest bully in the neighborhood tells you that he means you no harm, do you silently give in and give him the keys to not only your house, your car, but also to your kid's online educational future?
I think not.
Having passed all of the different Acid Tests with a perfect score on the latest JavaScript oriented Acid test.
My thumbnail look at Sunspider scores shows about a 20% overall speedup over the latest Firefox beta, but Firefox wins in enough of the individual tests that I expect BOTH to improve quite a bit, that is if the fastest times on each are used, even Chrome's time would be 20% better.
They only license the copies, not sell them. Hmmm.
Last I read, a license is a form of a contract that defines who may legally do what, what each party is agreeing to, has liability for, etc. and has to be agreeable to both parties in advance. For example, when I apply for a driver's license, I agree to certain things, but the governments obligation is that they will [at least here in the US and most of the time] enforce them fairly.
How does, you bought a copy without signing and agreement but we unilaterally reserve the right to make it "not work" fit under copyright again? which governs copying and performance for profit, NOT ownership?
Hmmm.....
Because, as most /. readers tend to believe, "information wants to be free", and the Blackboad patent was so directly a contravention of that idea that even their own case filings ignored the idea of courseware to focus on a single aspect -- allowing a student who is also a teacher in another role -- to use one login. Then they used a faulty decision in that court to target their competitor -- who made no infringing claim.
The appeal judges state "On the merits, we hold that those claims do not contain a âoesingle loginâ limitation and that the district courtâ(TM)s contrary interpretation of the claim language in its JMOL ruling was error" (I think they meant "erroneous").
The problem is later where the Appeals court did not consider whether or note Blackboard's patent was wholely discardable because they did NOT rule as to whether or not the single login multiple role functionality is OBVIOUS or not.
Prior art anyone?
Since we now have the "how they did it", let's game this into: Suppose that some big-a$$ set of rockets
Quickest here to Mars for the least energy output using the Apollo AGC wins...
Why doesn't this give Mayo an automatic win? Or is the clinic not a provider AKA only the people that work for the corporation are providers, or ?
As another poster has noted, reusing the carbon once and reburning it halves the carbon consumption. But when you clean burn an alcohol based fuel, what do you get? Water and Carbon Dioxide. Meaning that you now have two of the three inputs into the fuel cycle, and if you only recycle the carbon dioxide one more time that makes the net carbon hit only a fourth of what it would be from coal fired, etc.
Meaning that given the solar input which drives the algae to produce anyway, that if scalable this seems like it could be a game changer. Here's why: That 100,000 gallons per year [if I calculated this correctly] translates to about around 100KW per of round the clock power. Since most cities and towns have folks that mostly sleep at night, call it double that for the daylight hours and half or a third after most folks go to bed. That's not a bad chunk of power -- for one location -- at the pilot plant size.
The unanswered questions for me in the article are this: given the assumption that scalability were achievable, how much outside the system energy expense is required to operate the system anyway, and how many years would it take the fuel value to pay for a fuel plant both in terms of actual monetary investment and the actual power required to build the thing in the first place?
on the Acid3 test, lagging both Opera and Safari which have reached 100% on this fun benchmark. About 50% faster on avg when I "thumb in the air" tested it (ran 10X and wrote down the times, then averaged them than Firefox was as little as six months ago, so this release is definitely one to pick up in terms of browser security and performance, though.
Music is not melody? Where'd you come up with that line of BS? Check Wikipedia's definition, for example. The first paragraph of their
Entry on the subject states that:
Me, I have trouble calling large parts of the techno and of rap stuff on the radio anything other than junk because they are specifically not very "musical sounding", aka having melody, harmony, articulation, timbre, texture, etc.
'
Course, it might also be that the "art of the muses" was supposed to INSPIRE, not degrade.
The idea of due diligence would work -- if over the years the drug companies hadn't invested massive amounts of money to slant research results to get that ever more valuable patent, and cover up bad results that might actually mean that the drug isn't safe enough for widespread economically valuable usage.
But because for a number of years the FDA has had some "too much in bed with the drug company" personnel problems, the fact is that juries still have the right to decide that if a drug manufacturer cheats on the system, then they can pay massive amounts of money for the ill health and other problems caused by deceptive business practices.
I know plenty of LDS folks. Nearly all of them good people who would prefer that McBride and company had been dismissed outright because SCO's bad ethics started at the top and the mindset is that bad ethics by any member of a religious community taints the whole community.
I can think of a few more:
What it does mean is that the bad apples spoil the reputation of the whole, and so part of what we as large groups in a good society should insist on is that "all bad apples get run out of town on a rail."
The original writer posted their with the conclusion that much of what he said wasn't well thought out, he wouldn't suggest the same thing now, and that his whole point was that if the original developers made a few cents on the dollar it might stop DRM from encroaching on the games market.
Thing is, how do you implement even that idea without running up huge infrastructure costs. And when do the royalties stop, or who do they go to if the game company goes --fffffttt-- ??
Certainly the idea of supporting gaming developers is good. We do it by buying games new -- but good games nowadays take teams, teams take $$, and $$ take corporate involvement -- and as a result the gaming developers don't get their ROI for their hours that they used to.
And like the articles authors, I don't know the answer either.
When Google arrived on the scene, they used an original idea to build a really great search algorithm, which I could trust to get me to the best results quickly without a lot of cruft at the top of the list.
Well, that hasn't happened in a while. It's now quite laborious to find what I need quickly.
So let's assume that a) the folks at Google are smart, and b) they gave me a chance and some sort of small but reasonably anonymous incentive to sort of rate their search engine results.
Multiply me by a million Google users and see how fast the cruft disappears from the top of the lists again, and Google can then charge more for better advertising than their competitors because they are again ahead of the curve...
Maybe that's what this idea is all about...
Continuing the questions...
Using the analogy, the RIAA is saying that if someone posts an offer, that constitutes infringement even if the book at the laundromat is never copied?
Would it be correct to assume that on appeal the bad part of the decision could be overridden while leaving intact the "higher bar" part of the ruling?
Let's assume that I check out a popular book from the local library, but leave it at the laundromat where other folks can read it. An unscrupulous laundry customer takes the book and makes a hundred copies and hands them out to other folks, who make copies etc. before I can retrieve it. The author and publisher then come after me for "making available" and seek a judgement, even though I never offered an illegal copy to anyone -- that was person #2 who got to the book and not only made illegal copies, they offered to distribute them. I assume that a judge would not hold me liable for copyright infringement because I never intended to break copyright, but WOULD allow the author/publisher, etc. to go after the downstream infringer(s) who knowingly made the copies and then attempted to distribute them.
It seems to me that this judge's decision makes the analogy pretty close to the legal precedent this decision would set in the realm of "electronic" distribution and cuts off the "shared folders == making available == legally actionable argument" at the knees.
Thoughts?
So using an old saw --which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Or is there a superior question, how did chickens come to exist in the evolutionary chain? One question unanswerable, or a series of data driven questions that might eventually yield a definitive answer...
s
Reason being, if the technique is truly useful, it is more likely to be used in other projects and more the more projects that it's in, the more eyes that are aware of the tech and the higher likelihood that if someone gets sneaky with a patent application they'll object during the patent evaluation process with NUMEROUS examples of prior art.
Good questions, but I still dispute the trust issue. No one in their right mind would attempt to compile an "open source" operating system with a proprietary or closed source provided compiler. The whole goal of the projects is to allow software to be created that meets or exceeds the NSA standards so that they don't have to do it themselves, so why would they then sabotage the process by trying to cheat and get backdoors into the very code they are trying to harden. AKA backdoors weaken security, not enhance it, and any back door they left would inevitably and eventually be discovered and therefore become usable to the black hat types.
On the NSA side, having many eyes analyzing their code has both risks -- if holes are found in their security model or implementations, potentially these could be exploited by the blackhat types and benefits -- more weaknesses discovered faster and holes plugged so that the blackhat types get closed out of NSA type stuff faster than they can do it with closed implementations.
But neither of these scenarios will let NSA somehow increase their "big brother reach" because with many eyes comes near perfect scrutiny that would quickly out any code back-doors, etc. that would be usable by the white hats or the black hats.
On the whole I find this to be a cool/worthwhile endeavor on Sun's part and look forward to it's efforts being leveraged into all of the Open Source stuff that can use it.
I was once offered a "cough" standard contract once as a bass player of a decent regional band -- the label wanted us to pay most of the recording costs, most of our own expenses on a mini-tour, and whether or not we made a dime overall, they'd own the copyrights on the songs. Worse, if the album reached a slightly larger critical mass, we would have been bound to continue with that label for a certain time period whether or not they promoted our group or not, or risk being sued for any money we made elsewhere as recording artists. As the group's major songwriter, I found their offer very non-compelling, and the basic fallout was that they didn't give a rat's a-- about the rest of the group, nor were they interested in negotiating something fair with me -- because I would have forced the issue to protect the whole lot of us. Ethics was not a language they wanted to speak or for me to speak for that matter.
Think about it this way, if marketing were profitable and part of creating a "mega group", then why is the vast majority of the major label's newly promoted artists -- Nashville aside -- are from one hit wonders that are better at trying to stir up controversy (i.e. cheap word of mouth sales) than they are at producing quality music. Is the talent pool so low, or is it more profitable to push crap cheaply than promote quality over a period of time? You do the math.
The only costs that matter are the royalties and the manufacturing, packaging, and distribution, as every other cost -- marketing included -- is variable based on the music being recorded and how heavily the particular CD is promoted. The major labels systematically cheat most artists on everything else, and if an act gets pennies on the dollar they are lucky.
There's a second reason, by the way.One of the courses I was in was forced to give only one 'A' out of around 90 students and 4 'B' grades to fix the department's bell curve because of scores in other classes often used by athletes, et. al as filler for their general education requirements. So the level for the 'A' grade was at around 98%, 'B' at 95%, and 'C' cut off at around 88%. Where the equivalent course would require something like a 90%, 80%, 70% levels for the same grade. What's fair about nuking someone's scholarship when in fact they are in the top 5 students in a class of 75? With a score modifier in place, the college university would have not so easily messed with the numbers if a "B" grade in a more advanced engineering course carried more weight than a "B" grade in the general ed math course offered by the same department.
My point isn't that 200% is the right "GPA enhancement" or an "A+ grade" in a doubly difficult course, by the way -- it's that other things need to be taken into account besides straight GPA.
I don't have a solution but a suggestion: there needs to be a difficulty based "meritocracy" in terms of grading mechanisms and even scholarships that basically shows that if an engineering class is 200% more difficult than say Psych 101, then the grade for the engineering class needs to be weighted appropriately higher into the overall GPA, etc. For example, if the Psych 101 class is worth 12 points (for 3 credits x 4 pts for an "A+" grade), then Engineering XYZ at a difficulty 200% would be worth 24 points (3 credits x double difficulty * 4 pts for an A+ Grade) with an appropriate leveling algorithm that doesn't make a "C" grade in an engineering class an acceptable score.
Thoughts?