If currency _did_ work that way, then we could increase the total amount of wealth by just printing tons more money. But in reality, that would just cause extra inflation.
I must be missing something here. Usually, when the Federal Reserve dictates the inflation rate for the next three months, they're planning to simply print more money to invoke inflation. So I guess Economists such as yourself have mastered the art of looking through a kaleidoscope and calling that the real world.
There is limited money - just because you cannot count it yourself doesn't mean there is an infinite supply.
By definition, 50% of everyone is below median IQ, not average IQ.
In a Normal Distribution, the two are the same. But what if you're skewed to one end, and you find that the average IQ is 100 but the median is 80? Lots of dumb people, with a few smart ones raising the average.
The centralised data store is but one of the many claims of the patent. You have to infringe all of the claims of the patent in order to infringe the patent, and you have to do so "substantially".
The Internet is not made up of many "central computers" as described in the patent. The whole purpose of the central computer in the patent is that the terminals talk to that computer and that computer only. Read page 24 of the judgment.
Imagine an Internet where there was only one IP address, so you didn't need to specify it anymore - URLs would just be "/a/b/c.html" with no protocol or host name. That's the only kind of arrangement that would infringe on the central computer claim.
The WWW and hyperlinks still wouldn't infringe on any other claims of that patent, thus the BT patent wouldn't apply to Prodigy or any other web hosting business.
Read page 24 of the Memorandum and Order Granting Summary Judgment.
I think the Judge was clued in - the "central computer" in the BT patent was the essential component that all the terminals talked to. They only talked to one computer because that computer was central to the operation of the ViewData system. The terminals wouldn't have a clue how to talk to another computer.
Perhaps it is this Anonymous Coward who doesn't understand what a "central computer" is in the context of the BT patent.
It's full of stories of supposedly smart people making big mistakes by being overconfident, or led astray by their boss/client/whatever.
The URL for the book, at Barnes and Noble, is: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?isbn=0738205427
I'm in the middle of it myself - the first half is a bunch of example stupidity-induced-failures, the second half is a bunch of theorising/proselytising by the authors on what a company should do to avoid the same stupid mistakes. It's funny to watch people trying to codify common sense.
I would fully support a black back installed in my car - it would save me the cost of installing it myself! I'm intending to build a "black box" that tracks telemetry from the engine, position from GPS, and eventually movies from cameras on the front and rear of the vehicle.
However, the data collected will deteriorate in resolution as you go further into the "past", and it will be stored on a stegfs file system that only I (the owner) have the keys to. Movies would be stored at high resolution, high frame rate for the last 5-30 seconds, then resolution and frame rate would be dropped to allow longer records to be kept. Telemetry data would be stored at high resolution (samples/second), then eventually averaged out (5 second samples).
When commercially deployed black boxes become compulsory, I'd want to make sure that:
The data collected cannot be used to prosecute you (in the USA, I think that's the 5th amendment - you don't have to answer questions that may incriminate you)
The court cannot order the release of the information to anyone
The only purpose of installing the black box would be to give you real-time feedback about the lack of safety in your driving habits, and to give you (the owner/user) the ability to improve your safety and efficiency as a driver. The box will be there for my purposes, not for the abuse of the legal system or potential complainants.
Remember, when passing new laws don't look at what good the law will achieve if used correctly - rather, look at what evil the law will achieve if abused.
Of course, you pig Americans are so inbred and stubborn that you need proof that different sized and coloured notes would be an advantage.
Very well. Open your wallet. Spread the notes section open - just peek inside. Don't take any of the money out of your wallet - don't even pull the corners out to read the numbers. Just by looking at the notes, lying there in their sessile state, count how much you have in your wallet. Even better, locate one of the three $50 notes you have in your wallet, amongst the $5, two $20 and a stack of receipts - without leafing through the notes, trying to read the "50" in low light.
It's much easier to count money in your wallet by looking at the coloured edges, than by fingering through and looking for the numbers. Especially in a crowd, where you don't necessarily want to take the notes out of the wallet for everyone to see.
Even better, it's practically impossible to confuse an Australian note with a shopping receipt or voucher. Coloured notes also aids the 40% of adults who are illiterate (you don't have to be able to read to know that a yellow Australian note is $50). Admittedly, Australian notes don't have Braille on them. That's cool - I might have to move to Canada just because of the cool currency:)
Change the colour of your money. It's about convenience, accessibility and security, not just aesthetics.
Are you serious? Why wasn't your comment moderated as a troll or flamebait?
If you use computers for anything more than just running screensavers, you really do need to have a UPS. Here are some things that have caused outages at my home or office:
1) Vandals who break the lock on the fusebox and flip the main switch 2) Lightning striking the nearest substation, resulting in a half-second outage as the substation's circuit breakers break then reset 3) Trees rubbing the powerlines, shorting them out, thus tripping the circuit breakers at the substation 4) Housemate doing dodgey things with power supplies, thus leading to blown fuse in the fuse box
These are not catastrophes.
Besides, the money for a decent UPS is (from my POV) worth it to prevent my computers spending the next day and a half being rebuilt (by me) after suffering major hard drive corruption. I keep backups in case my machines are stolen, I'd like to have a UPS to protect against power failure.
There's nothing quite as bad as being seconds away from that final epic battle in Baldur's Gate 2: Throne Of Bhaal, having spent two hours already, then having the power fail. Ouch.
Lead Acid batteries are not Nickel-Cadmium batteries.
If you slowly drain a car battery, then slowly recharge it, you'll end up warping the lead plates. That's one reason car batteries die so quickly in winter - people leave the lights on and the battery gets totally discharged.
The charging/discharging of a lead acid battery affects the structure of the battery. During the charge/discharge cycle, the lead sulphide isn't being laid exactly where it was taken from. The thickness of the plates changes, and any heat works to warp the plates a little. Eventually plates will crumble, or warp enough that they're in contact with each other. Dead battery.
No, it's not "memory effect", since you can't remove the crystals by running high amperes through the battery. But it's still "dead battery" land.
It's what the code is doing that's the problem - not how it's doing it. There's nothing "bad" about the code as far as exploits is concerned.
The problem is that the code is loaded by a site (eg: Telstra) without the user being warned that this reporting is happening. From what I could see when it was working, the reporting doesn't stop when you leave the Telstra site - they're recording everywhere you go.
I think you're mixing your statistics there. If you're "matching" 1:1000 odds, 50% of the time, you're really "matching" 1:2000 odds.
There are two situations being described here - a "false negative" and a "false positive". A false negative is where the system is supposed to say "Yes" but instead says "No". A false positive is where the system is supposed to say "No" but instead says "Yes".
What the article describes is that you get false negatives in 53% of "face captures", and false positives in 0.3% of "face captures".
That means that if you had one known terrorist boarding a plane of 200 people, the chances are that you would not capture the terrorist, and that you would wrongly detain 1 innocent on suspicion of being a terrorist.
Now go look at those wonderful Acts that were hastily passed through your Senate last year, and see what kind of situation that puts this mistakenly identified innocent in.
And yes, I'd leave it to the experts. This might even be the kind of project that a University student would want as part of their studies relating to the preservation of cultural materials.
FWIW: I found a bibliography claiming to deal with Archives and Digital Longevity at http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/archivebib.html
I think the guys writing "Star Trek" have the right idea - a decent voice interface would be much easier for ad hoc, definite answer queries. GUIs and funky interface tools might be fine for complex work, especially work that requires visualisation.
So according to Senator Hollings' wording, all the content industry has to do is stall for a year, then they get to dictate a solution without the consumers or electronics industry getting in the way?
As far as the effective application of a country's money is concerned, there may be financial gains to be had by paying for infrastructure through one means than some other means.
As far as telecommunications links between countries are concerned - unless there is some financial gain to be had by sharing the cost of the cable, why would anyone do it?
My original point was that different rules apply to infrastructure support inside a country versus between countries. I don't see why Africa should get special treatment, when everyone else who connects to the USA foots the entire bill themselves. At my end of the world, Telstra charges between $0.12 and $0.20 per megabyte (1000000 bytes), because that's what they claim it costs them to ship those bytes around the place (they're full of it, of course, but what choice do we have?) Sure - that means I can't listen to webcast radio 24 hours a day or play Quake every waking moment, but I'll just have to cope, won't I;)
The catch is that providing telecommunications infrastructure to rural communities isn't a simple matter of "a couple of bucks a month". Most of these rural communities are hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest major urban area. The kind of investment that has to be made is in the order of millions of dollars - just to get a pair of wires out to a farm house.
At some point in time, a significant capital outlay has to be made by somebody.
It's much cheaper for the money to be collected by the Government through slightly higher telephone rates for the vast majority of the population, through one corporation, than it is for the money to be collected by many disparate farmers through higher prices for food.
There are fewer middle-men involved, which means more of the collected funds get to be injected into the actual infrastructure.
The cost to the city-dwellers is actually less if rural telecommunications is subsidised directly through higher costs for telecomms infrastructure, rather than through two or three layers of profit margins on food products. In this case, the Government is controlling the price of food by subsidising infrastructure, and it's only the people of that country that benefit.
There are plenty of other things that farmers (we call them "Primary Producers" along with miners) get subsidies on here in Australia - especially vehicles, and diesel fuel - mainly because it makes more economic (and political) sense to directly subsidise the primary producers, rather than pass the costs on through the system.
In the case of telecommunications links between countries - such as the USA and Australia or USA and Africa - there is no incentive for a subsidy to be provided, since there is no significant economic gain to be made. The USA don't want to give away money to Africa or Australia, so they don't subsidise the connection.
User-pays is fine in the case of a simple supplier/consumer model, but it falls apart in the larger model of trying to keep a country on its feet. The rich need to provide some support to the poor (ie: some basic standard of living), since without the poor they wouldn't be rich. It's quite simple, really.
Farmers need the phone to make contact with their customers. Otherwise, how are the City dwellers going to tell them how much food they want and where they want it?
The farmers aren't competing with anyone - this is purely a matter of infrastructure and support of rural communities. In fact, the only thing that is in "competition" is living standards - if all the farmers move to the city because the quality of living is better, who will grow our food?
If the farmers passed on the total cost of production to the consumers, and paid the total cost of supply of telecommunications infrastructure, we'd ultimately develop a system where food is grown by prisoners doing forced labour - noone would voluntarily live in the isolation of the farm environment with no means to communicate with their neighbours or customers.
... only right that people with special needs like that pay their own way. Otherwise, move closer to town or go without cable.
Here in Australia, we have lots of people who live a long way from "The Big Smoke". They're called Farmers. They make food for the rest of the country. If they moved to the city too, who would make our food?
In Australia, people living in the cities subsidise the people living in the rural areas, simply because we recognise the fact that our food has to come from somewhere.
In contrast, the USA don't care about the content or connectivity that is provided by Australia, so there's no subsidising happening there. The same applies for Kenya. Most of the Internet is routed through the USA, so the USA get to call the shots.
As for this whole "user pays" fiasco, you may want to read "Das Kapital", by Karl Marx. You'll find that he has some interesting things to say about how the gap between "rich" and "poor" is self-perpetuating, mostly because the Capitalist system doesn't allow for the concepts of "sharing" or "mercy" - exactly the qualities that are supposed to separate humans from machines in the first place.
We have to stop thinking about our own interests, if the world is going to be a place worth living in come the year 2010. People are becoming increasingly selfish - turning to litigation any time the scent of payout is in the air, looking for financial advancement at any cost. We're turning into a society of financial cannibals.
Slashdot Mirror
I must be missing something here. Usually, when the Federal Reserve dictates the inflation rate for the next three months, they're planning to simply print more money to invoke inflation. So I guess Economists such as yourself have mastered the art of looking through a kaleidoscope and calling that the real world.
There is limited money - just because you cannot count it yourself doesn't mean there is an infinite supply.
Don't make legal threats unless you are the one who is going to take action.
Your letter was good for a laugh though.
By definition, 50% of everyone is below median IQ, not average IQ.
In a Normal Distribution, the two are the same. But what if you're skewed to one end, and you find that the average IQ is 100 but the median is 80? Lots of dumb people, with a few smart ones raising the average.
The centralised data store is but one of the many claims of the patent. You have to infringe all of the claims of the patent in order to infringe the patent, and you have to do so "substantially".
The Internet is not made up of many "central computers" as described in the patent. The whole purpose of the central computer in the patent is that the terminals talk to that computer and that computer only. Read page 24 of the judgment.
Imagine an Internet where there was only one IP address, so you didn't need to specify it anymore - URLs would just be "/a/b/c.html" with no protocol or host name. That's the only kind of arrangement that would infringe on the central computer claim.
The WWW and hyperlinks still wouldn't infringe on any other claims of that patent, thus the BT patent wouldn't apply to Prodigy or any other web hosting business.
Read page 24 of the Memorandum and Order Granting Summary Judgment.
I think the Judge was clued in - the "central computer" in the BT patent was the essential component that all the terminals talked to. They only talked to one computer because that computer was central to the operation of the ViewData system. The terminals wouldn't have a clue how to talk to another computer.
Perhaps it is this Anonymous Coward who doesn't understand what a "central computer" is in the context of the BT patent.
If you read the press announcements, you'll see that the networking items aren't part of PGP either.
NAI is keeping them as part of their commercial products.
If you want run-time filesystem encryption, perhaps you should be using an encrypted filesystem.
You should read "Business @ The Speed of Stupid" by Dan Burke and Alan Morrison - ISBN:0-7382-0542-7.
It's full of stories of supposedly smart people making big mistakes by being overconfident, or led astray by their boss/client/whatever.
The URL for the book, at Barnes and Noble, is: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?isbn=0738205427
I'm in the middle of it myself - the first half is a bunch of example stupidity-induced-failures, the second half is a bunch of theorising/proselytising by the authors on what a company should do to avoid the same stupid mistakes. It's funny to watch people trying to codify common sense.
I would fully support a black back installed in my car - it would save me the cost of installing it myself! I'm intending to build a "black box" that tracks telemetry from the engine, position from GPS, and eventually movies from cameras on the front and rear of the vehicle.
However, the data collected will deteriorate in resolution as you go further into the "past", and it will be stored on a stegfs file system that only I (the owner) have the keys to. Movies would be stored at high resolution, high frame rate for the last 5-30 seconds, then resolution and frame rate would be dropped to allow longer records to be kept. Telemetry data would be stored at high resolution (samples/second), then eventually averaged out (5 second samples).
When commercially deployed black boxes become compulsory, I'd want to make sure that:The only purpose of installing the black box would be to give you real-time feedback about the lack of safety in your driving habits, and to give you (the owner/user) the ability to improve your safety and efficiency as a driver. The box will be there for my purposes, not for the abuse of the legal system or potential complainants.
Remember, when passing new laws don't look at what good the law will achieve if used correctly - rather, look at what evil the law will achieve if abused.
Check out Australia's currency.
Of course, you pig Americans are so inbred and stubborn that you need proof that different sized and coloured notes would be an advantage.
Very well. Open your wallet. Spread the notes section open - just peek inside. Don't take any of the money out of your wallet - don't even pull the corners out to read the numbers. Just by looking at the notes, lying there in their sessile state, count how much you have in your wallet. Even better, locate one of the three $50 notes you have in your wallet, amongst the $5, two $20 and a stack of receipts - without leafing through the notes, trying to read the "50" in low light.
This is what my notes look like in my wallet.
It's much easier to count money in your wallet by looking at the coloured edges, than by fingering through and looking for the numbers. Especially in a crowd, where you don't necessarily want to take the notes out of the wallet for everyone to see.
Even better, it's practically impossible to confuse an Australian note with a shopping receipt or voucher. Coloured notes also aids the 40% of adults who are illiterate (you don't have to be able to read to know that a yellow Australian note is $50). Admittedly, Australian notes don't have Braille on them. That's cool - I might have to move to Canada just because of the cool currency :)
Change the colour of your money. It's about convenience, accessibility and security, not just aesthetics.
Are you serious? Why wasn't your comment moderated as a troll or flamebait?
If you use computers for anything more than just running screensavers, you really do need to have a UPS. Here are some things that have caused outages at my home or office:
1) Vandals who break the lock on the fusebox and flip the main switch
2) Lightning striking the nearest substation, resulting in a half-second outage as the substation's circuit breakers break then reset
3) Trees rubbing the powerlines, shorting them out, thus tripping the circuit breakers at the substation
4) Housemate doing dodgey things with power supplies, thus leading to blown fuse in the fuse box
These are not catastrophes.
Besides, the money for a decent UPS is (from my POV) worth it to prevent my computers spending the next day and a half being rebuilt (by me) after suffering major hard drive corruption. I keep backups in case my machines are stolen, I'd like to have a UPS to protect against power failure.
There's nothing quite as bad as being seconds away from that final epic battle in Baldur's Gate 2: Throne Of Bhaal, having spent two hours already, then having the power fail. Ouch.
Lead Acid batteries are not Nickel-Cadmium batteries.
If you slowly drain a car battery, then slowly recharge it, you'll end up warping the lead plates. That's one reason car batteries die so quickly in winter - people leave the lights on and the battery gets totally discharged.
The charging/discharging of a lead acid battery affects the structure of the battery. During the charge/discharge cycle, the lead sulphide isn't being laid exactly where it was taken from. The thickness of the plates changes, and any heat works to warp the plates a little. Eventually plates will crumble, or warp enough that they're in contact with each other. Dead battery.
No, it's not "memory effect", since you can't remove the crystals by running high amperes through the battery. But it's still "dead battery" land.
It's what the code is doing that's the problem - not how it's doing it. There's nothing "bad" about the code as far as exploits is concerned.
;)
The problem is that the code is loaded by a site (eg: Telstra) without the user being warned that this reporting is happening. From what I could see when it was working, the reporting doesn't stop when you leave the Telstra site - they're recording everywhere you go.
What a way to gather a pr0n database
There is no "testing" required. Just look at the HTML source for the website http://www.telstra.com/
Now grep for "Red Sheriff".
There's a piece of HTML that tries several methods to get your browser to report your browsing habits to IMR Worldwide.
Nothing at all to do with Sun's JRE or JDK. Everything to do with Telstra thinking they're bigger than their boots.
I think you're mixing your statistics there. If you're "matching" 1:1000 odds, 50% of the time, you're really "matching" 1:2000 odds.
There are two situations being described here - a "false negative" and a "false positive". A false negative is where the system is supposed to say "Yes" but instead says "No". A false positive is where the system is supposed to say "No" but instead says "Yes".
What the article describes is that you get false negatives in 53% of "face captures", and false positives in 0.3% of "face captures".
That means that if you had one known terrorist boarding a plane of 200 people, the chances are that you would not capture the terrorist, and that you would wrongly detain 1 innocent on suspicion of being a terrorist.
Now go look at those wonderful Acts that were hastily passed through your Senate last year, and see what kind of situation that puts this mistakenly identified innocent in.
And I also found an article about archival storage of the original work.
Be careful - the high intensity light from the scanner is damaging to old paper. Even a strobe/flash from a film camera can hurt the paper.
The best media for long term storage is mylar tape - you know, the stuff with holes punched in it.
http://www.wps.com/texts/paper-tape/
The Trybus Company Inc, or
Western Numerical Control (52000E)
Western Numerical Control
And yes, I'd leave it to the experts. This might even be the kind of project that a University student would want as part of their studies relating to the preservation of cultural materials.
FWIW: I found a bibliography claiming to deal with Archives and Digital Longevity at http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/archivebib.html
I think the guys writing "Star Trek" have the right idea - a decent voice interface would be much easier for ad hoc, definite answer queries. GUIs and funky interface tools might be fine for complex work, especially work that requires visualisation.
Horses for courses, I guess.
So according to Senator Hollings' wording, all the content industry has to do is stall for a year, then they get to dictate a solution without the consumers or electronics industry getting in the way?
Monkeys live in trees. I don't know of many monkeys that are green.
:)
I think someone is trying to practice selective perception
Humans are from Earth, but aren't blue.
My favourite/most-productivity-inducing music comes from:
I find I program slowest when listening to:
As far as the effective application of a country's money is concerned, there may be financial gains to be had by paying for infrastructure through one means than some other means.
;)
As far as telecommunications links between countries are concerned - unless there is some financial gain to be had by sharing the cost of the cable, why would anyone do it?
My original point was that different rules apply to infrastructure support inside a country versus between countries. I don't see why Africa should get special treatment, when everyone else who connects to the USA foots the entire bill themselves. At my end of the world, Telstra charges between $0.12 and $0.20 per megabyte (1000000 bytes), because that's what they claim it costs them to ship those bytes around the place (they're full of it, of course, but what choice do we have?) Sure - that means I can't listen to webcast radio 24 hours a day or play Quake every waking moment, but I'll just have to cope, won't I
The catch is that providing telecommunications infrastructure to rural communities isn't a simple matter of "a couple of bucks a month". Most of these rural communities are hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest major urban area. The kind of investment that has to be made is in the order of millions of dollars - just to get a pair of wires out to a farm house.
At some point in time, a significant capital outlay has to be made by somebody.
It's much cheaper for the money to be collected by the Government through slightly higher telephone rates for the vast majority of the population, through one corporation, than it is for the money to be collected by many disparate farmers through higher prices for food.
There are fewer middle-men involved, which means more of the collected funds get to be injected into the actual infrastructure.
The cost to the city-dwellers is actually less if rural telecommunications is subsidised directly through higher costs for telecomms infrastructure, rather than through two or three layers of profit margins on food products. In this case, the Government is controlling the price of food by subsidising infrastructure, and it's only the people of that country that benefit.
There are plenty of other things that farmers (we call them "Primary Producers" along with miners) get subsidies on here in Australia - especially vehicles, and diesel fuel - mainly because it makes more economic (and political) sense to directly subsidise the primary producers, rather than pass the costs on through the system.
In the case of telecommunications links between countries - such as the USA and Australia or USA and Africa - there is no incentive for a subsidy to be provided, since there is no significant economic gain to be made. The USA don't want to give away money to Africa or Australia, so they don't subsidise the connection.
User-pays is fine in the case of a simple supplier/consumer model, but it falls apart in the larger model of trying to keep a country on its feet. The rich need to provide some support to the poor (ie: some basic standard of living), since without the poor they wouldn't be rich. It's quite simple, really.
Farmers need the phone to make contact with their customers. Otherwise, how are the City dwellers going to tell them how much food they want and where they want it?
The farmers aren't competing with anyone - this is purely a matter of infrastructure and support of rural communities. In fact, the only thing that is in "competition" is living standards - if all the farmers move to the city because the quality of living is better, who will grow our food?
If the farmers passed on the total cost of production to the consumers, and paid the total cost of supply of telecommunications infrastructure, we'd ultimately develop a system where food is grown by prisoners doing forced labour - noone would voluntarily live in the isolation of the farm environment with no means to communicate with their neighbours or customers.
Here in Australia, we have lots of people who live a long way from "The Big Smoke". They're called Farmers. They make food for the rest of the country. If they moved to the city too, who would make our food?
In Australia, people living in the cities subsidise the people living in the rural areas, simply because we recognise the fact that our food has to come from somewhere.
In contrast, the USA don't care about the content or connectivity that is provided by Australia, so there's no subsidising happening there. The same applies for Kenya. Most of the Internet is routed through the USA, so the USA get to call the shots.
As for this whole "user pays" fiasco, you may want to read "Das Kapital", by Karl Marx. You'll find that he has some interesting things to say about how the gap between "rich" and "poor" is self-perpetuating, mostly because the Capitalist system doesn't allow for the concepts of "sharing" or "mercy" - exactly the qualities that are supposed to separate humans from machines in the first place.
We have to stop thinking about our own interests, if the world is going to be a place worth living in come the year 2010. People are becoming increasingly selfish - turning to litigation any time the scent of payout is in the air, looking for financial advancement at any cost. We're turning into a society of financial cannibals.