The way you do the math is kinda subjective. The author picked the worst case prices for SMS messages.
I mean unlimited internet access *and* text messaging cost me $15/month or so total on my sidekick. So, saying that sending the same ammount of data via txt messages as via TCP/IP in that case is just arguing that TCP/IP is faster than SMS.
Likewise, in a hotel I stayed at in Las Vegas, wireless internet access costs $1/minute! Unlimited SMS messages in the same location cost less than $15/month (see above). So, for SMS to be more expensive, you would have to conclude that the data you could transfer in 15 minutes of TCP/IP communications takes more than a month to send via SMS.
Anyway, my point is that the math is subjective...
There are an uncountably infinite number of stupid ideas. But your web site can only handle a finite number of obvious ideas. It seems unlikely that you will pick many ideas that overlap real ones.
Plus, the people who want to patent obvious ideas can look at your web site and then pick ideas that are not there. I think the patenting-stupid-stuff game consists of amassing a large number of stupid patents. So, if one or two are thrown out it is no big deal.
Well, it depends on exactly what Myspace tells the person when they delete their profile. If Myspace states that they are removing their account because they are a sex offender, then the person might be able to sue for Libel.
There was a case one time where someone was fired because their employer thought that they were guilty of stealing. So, anyway, when they went to interview for other jobs, they were asked why they left the previous company. They said it was because they were accused of stealing. Then, they went back and sued their former employer. They won, despite the fact that their employer never directly told other people. The court felt that they should not have to lie to the people they interview with.
So, let's say that you were some kind of marketing company with a myspace profile that had 10 million friends on it. Now say that Myspace comes along and deletes your profile, and they say that they did it because you were a sex offender. If your 10 million friends ask you why Myspace deltes your profile, and you tell them, then I would think you would have a (perhaps weak) case against them based on the similarity to the above situation.
I could be wrong, but I think Windows (2000, XP) generally allows processes running under the same user to look at each other's memory and such. This is useful when you want to debug a program or whatever. It's generally designed to protect users from each other, rather than protect users from themselves.
You know, part of the problem with dicsuccions about terrirism is that no one seems to understand what terrorism means. It doesn't mean "People who I don't like," or even people who attack our military forces. I would define terrorism as politically motivated violence by a subnational group agains civillian targets.
Some people think that if the government thinks someone might be a terrorist, that person suddenly forfeits all of their civil rights. They think that the government should be able to lock them up indefinitely without bringing any charges against them, and send them off to be tortured.
The problem is, the definition of terrorism has gotten so watered down that practicaly everyone is a suspected terrorist. By law, we have declared that someone who hacks into a military or hospital computer is a terrorist. We are arresting people who put up cute little signs and saying they are suspected terrorists. Why would you need a chemistry set if you are not a terrorist? Why would you need a gun if you are not a terrorist? Why would you need to read books written by terrorist sympathisers if you were not a terrorist? Why would you need to make international phone calls if you are not a terrorist? Meanwhile, in addition to the paranoia, the government is insisting that rights granted to us by the Constitution are suggestions. It is a small stretch from where we are today to the government shipping the people who put up the signs to a detention camp somewhere and torturing them. The government wants that power.
It's sure a good thing that they would never suspect anyone of terrorism who was innocent, right?
Repost the video and send Viacom a Cease and Desist letter asking that they stop telling people that your copyrighted works are there's. Then, when they do it again, they cannot claim ignorance or that it was an oversight or whatever. Put up the video on a web site with an advertisement that pays you per page view, and claim that by lying to Google, they are causing you a loss of income.
So, essentially, they are lying about you, in writing, and it is negatively affecting you. Then you would probably have a better legal case. In addition, thanks to the RIAA and others like them, there is a great deal of negative coverage for people who engage in copyright infringement. So, now that it has been slashdotted, it could also damage your reputation...
When someone makes an imperfect copy of something, how can it be called "Genuine"? I know some of you are thinking that the pirated copies of Microsoft Software and not imperfect copies. However, there is a whole industry that forges legitimate looking physical copies of Microsoft Software complete with forged holographic logos. It is hard to imagine that this falls under the definition of a geuine copy.
Wikopedia is wrong. The court did not rule that the states could legally require voters to vote as pledged. The court ruled that it was reasonable for a party to require someone pledge to vote for their party if they were elected. Essentially, someone was going to be an elector, but he refused to sign a party loyalty oath. The court made a distinction between this and requiring that he actually follow through with his oath. They specifically mentioned that this oath might very well not be legally enforceble. As they put it:
"However, even if such promises of candidates for the electoral college are legally unenforceable because violative of an assumed constitutional freedom of the elector under the Constitution, Art. II, 1, to vote as he may choose in the electoral college, it would not follow that the requirement of a pledge in the primary is unconstitutional. A candidacy in the primary is a voluntary act of the applicant. He is not barred, discriminatorily, from participating but must comply with the rules of the party. Surely one may voluntarily assume obligations to vote for a certain candidate. The state offers him opportunity to become a candidate for elector on his own terms, although he must file his declaration before the primary. Ala. Code, Tit. 17, 145. Even though the victory of an independent candidate for elector in Alabama cannot be anticipated, the state does offer the opportunity for the development of other strong political organizations where the need is felt for them by a sizable block of voters. Such parties may leave their electors to their own choice."
OK, so the Constitution says that each state is going to have electors that get to decide how to cast their votes. The states can pass whatever laws they want, but I doubt they can constitutionally prevent these electors from voting any way they want. So, there is no way to enforce making a state throw it's votes in favor of the majority decision.
I would question why you would think that Yahoo is a better search engine than Google. That has not been my (and also coincidently most other people's) experience...
Imagine that I am a hacker and that I want to get access to your internal network. Now, there is a firewall between you and me. But, if I spoof some e-mail address from your company and get just a single person to open it, it can connect out of your network back to me and I can then run commands inside your network. For example, I can then download SSH to the machine and set up encrypted tunnels to tunnel further attacks to other machines in the internal network.
In a targeted attack, the actual percentage of people that open the attachment is irrelevant. All you need is one...
In their Kitchen Sink Demo, click on the text tab. In the Text area box, type some text in. Then, highlight some of it. Notice how the Selection on the right shows what you have highlighted. Now, highlight some other text, but drag out of the window before you release the mouse button. Now, you have text in the box highlighted, but the selection indicates the wrong thing. It looks like they are updating the selection field only on mouseup...
The PS/3 is priced for early adopters, who will clearly pay that price if they paid $800-1000 for the X-box. The thing about the X-box is that the demand far exceeded the supply, which artificially drove up the price. They can always lower the price of the PS/3 based on their sales figures.
Having the blue-ray built in makes a lot of sense. It means you can have better games which leads to a sustained competitive advantage. Having wifi built in makes a lot of sense too because it probably didn't increase their cost of production very much.
I think that what will matter in the end is how good the unique games are.
Actually, your math is not realistic because you are including data from as far back as 1977. The economics of making computers has changed a lot since then. Look at the prices for the systems released from 1999 on:
SEGA Dreamcast launches in 1999 for $199.99 ____________ $228.09 in 2005 PlayStation 2 launched in 2000 for $299.99 ________________ $333.15 in 2005 Xbox Launched in 2001 for $299.99 _____________________ $325.34 in 2005 GameCube launched in 2001 for $199.99 _________________ $216.89 in 2005
As you can see, $400 is significantly higher than the average.
Offering free wireless internet access is better than launching free cell phone service. There is at least one cell phone that can switch seamlessly between using voice over ip and regular cellular networks even in the middle of a call. Plus, you could have a PDA do it as well. You could have a GPS device interface with Google maps over wireless to provide you driving directions. There are a ton of uses for this. If wireless internet access was availiable almost everywhere, then there are all sorts of wonderful things you could do.
It is not always easy to disprove things that are wrong using the scientific method. Sometimes it is pretty difficult. Especially if you come up with theories that are inherantly undecidable. In mathematics, for example, people tried to claim that all mathematical truths were proveble using the theorms in Principa Mathematica. But Godel (sorry for the mispelling, but I'm not sure how to type the right characters in Slashdot) proved that any recursively enumerable system of equations would either be incomplete or inconsistant. Not only that, but there are an uncountably infinite set of truths that cannot be proven. If something is true but it can not be proven, then you can also not prove that it is not true. And you cannot prove that the negation of that theorm is not true either. And all of that is found in pure mathematics. It becomes even more dicey when you start trying to apply math to the real world because there are often assumptions that you make that are wrong. Like, 1 could plus 1 cloud sometimes equals 1 cloud. Or, another example is that the Theory of Relativity shows that in some cases solutions to simple problems using Newton's basic equations is not correct. Even if Relativity is correct, it was not trivial to prove.
In terms of Natural Processes like global warming, there are tons of experiments you can do. Just because you can not create a duplicate Earth and experiment on it, does not preclude research. For example, I can formulate a theory that temperatures in the last 100 years should be higher than say for the last 300 years. Then, I could maybe find evidence in ice formations, or geology, or in the way old trees grow or something that confirmed or did not confirm my hypothesis.
Likewise with evolution, I can theorize that species in the past who survived should have adapted to a large change in climate. Then, looking at the fossil record, I can determine whether or not that is the case. In addition, I might theorize that differing combinations of genes can create mutations in animals and plants. Then, through genetic testing and a lot of staistics, I can identify chromosomes that are responsible for certain traits.
There may have been a creator of all living things. But if so, what is clear is that He/She/It created animals and plants in a way that causes them to evolve.
OK, first of all, this hack does not require physical access and a blow torch. These sort of events happen all the time. Every time your computer realizes it is hot and starts the fan, one of these events is occuring.
Secondly, this is a privelege escalation from root to system level. Why is this important? Well, imagine that there is a system that implements multi-level security. (It's a fun feeling to hack root on a box only to find out that root has no ability to do anything.) This vunerability may allow someone to circumvent that and gain access to the higher level. Yeah, it would be tough, and probably require some pretty bright people and some money to research. But those are exactly the things that the kind of hackers who would want to do such a thing have.
Actually, software is not the only thing that is protected by both copyright and patents. You can now patent story lines. So, if you write a book, you can have a patent on the story and a copyright on the book.
I think that you can be intelectually consistant in opposing software patents but in thinking they are ok for physical things. The idea behind patents is to encourage people to disclose their discoveries in exchange for a monopoly for a limited time. But, I have yet to see a software patent on something that was
A. Not obvious, and B. Going to be a useful contribution to society after the monopoly wears off
Hence, software patents do not encourage any kind of useful disclosure as far as I can tell. Instead, software patents seem to stifle inovation by threatoning to restrict each somewhat obvious and useful feature to companies who can establish large patent portfolios and do cross licensing deals.
Slashdot Mirror
everyone made Beowulf clusters out of these things...
The way you do the math is kinda subjective. The author picked the worst case prices for SMS messages.
I mean unlimited internet access *and* text messaging cost me $15/month or so total on my sidekick. So, saying that sending the same ammount of data via txt messages as via TCP/IP in that case is just arguing that TCP/IP is faster than SMS.
Likewise, in a hotel I stayed at in Las Vegas, wireless internet access costs $1/minute! Unlimited SMS messages in the same location cost less than $15/month (see above). So, for SMS to be more expensive, you would have to conclude that the data you could transfer in 15 minutes of TCP/IP communications takes more than a month to send via SMS.
Anyway, my point is that the math is subjective...
A Utah based company... Is it SCO?
There are an uncountably infinite number of stupid ideas. But your web site can only handle a finite number of obvious ideas. It seems unlikely that you will pick many ideas that overlap real ones.
Plus, the people who want to patent obvious ideas can look at your web site and then pick ideas that are not there. I think the patenting-stupid-stuff game consists of amassing a large number of stupid patents. So, if one or two are thrown out it is no big deal.
I don't think you can have a "perfect phone" that doesn't have a keyboard at least as good as the Sidekick.
A "perfect phone" should take into account that text messaging and IMing are at least as important if not more so than actual audio calls.
Well, it depends on exactly what Myspace tells the person when they delete their profile. If Myspace states that they are removing their account because they are a sex offender, then the person might be able to sue for Libel.
There was a case one time where someone was fired because their employer thought that they were guilty of stealing. So, anyway, when they went to interview for other jobs, they were asked why they left the previous company. They said it was because they were accused of stealing. Then, they went back and sued their former employer. They won, despite the fact that their employer never directly told other people. The court felt that they should not have to lie to the people they interview with.
So, let's say that you were some kind of marketing company with a myspace profile that had 10 million friends on it. Now say that Myspace comes along and deletes your profile, and they say that they did it because you were a sex offender. If your 10 million friends ask you why Myspace deltes your profile, and you tell them, then I would think you would have a (perhaps weak) case against them based on the similarity to the above situation.
I could be wrong, but I think Windows (2000, XP) generally allows processes running under the same user to look at each other's memory and such. This is useful when you want to debug a program or whatever. It's generally designed to protect users from each other, rather than protect users from themselves.
You know, part of the problem with dicsuccions about terrirism is that no one seems to understand what terrorism means. It doesn't mean "People who I don't like," or even people who attack our military forces. I would define terrorism as politically motivated violence by a subnational group agains civillian targets.
Some people think that if the government thinks someone might be a terrorist, that person suddenly forfeits all of their civil rights. They think that the government should be able to lock them up indefinitely without bringing any charges against them, and send them off to be tortured.
The problem is, the definition of terrorism has gotten so watered down that practicaly everyone is a suspected terrorist. By law, we have declared that someone who hacks into a military or hospital computer is a terrorist. We are arresting people who put up cute little signs and saying they are suspected terrorists. Why would you need a chemistry set if you are not a terrorist? Why would you need a gun if you are not a terrorist? Why would you need to read books written by terrorist sympathisers if you were not a terrorist? Why would you need to make international phone calls if you are not a terrorist? Meanwhile, in addition to the paranoia, the government is insisting that rights granted to us by the Constitution are suggestions. It is a small stretch from where we are today to the government shipping the people who put up the signs to a detention camp somewhere and torturing them. The government wants that power.
It's sure a good thing that they would never suspect anyone of terrorism who was innocent, right?
IANAL
But this is what I would do:
Repost the video and send Viacom a Cease and Desist letter asking that they stop telling people that your copyrighted works are there's. Then, when they do it again, they cannot claim ignorance or that it was an oversight or whatever. Put up the video on a web site with an advertisement that pays you per page view, and claim that by lying to Google, they are causing you a loss of income.
So, essentially, they are lying about you, in writing, and it is negatively affecting you. Then you would probably have a better legal case. In addition, thanks to the RIAA and others like them, there is a great deal of negative coverage for people who engage in copyright infringement. So, now that it has been slashdotted, it could also damage your reputation...
When someone makes an imperfect copy of something, how can it be called "Genuine"? I know some of you are thinking that the pirated copies of Microsoft Software and not imperfect copies. However, there is a whole industry that forges legitimate looking physical copies of Microsoft Software complete with forged holographic logos. It is hard to imagine that this falls under the definition of a geuine copy.
Wikopedia is wrong. The court did not rule that the states could legally require voters to vote as pledged. The court ruled that it was reasonable for a party to require someone pledge to vote for their party if they were elected. Essentially, someone was going to be an elector, but he refused to sign a party loyalty oath. The court made a distinction between this and requiring that he actually follow through with his oath. They specifically mentioned that this oath might very well not be legally enforceble. As they put it:
"However, even if such promises of candidates for the electoral college are legally unenforceable because violative of an assumed constitutional freedom of the elector under the Constitution, Art. II, 1, to vote as he may choose in the electoral college, it would not follow that the requirement of a pledge in the primary is unconstitutional. A candidacy in the primary is a voluntary act of the applicant. He is not barred, discriminatorily, from participating but must comply with the rules of the party. Surely one may voluntarily assume obligations to vote for a certain candidate. The state offers him opportunity to become a candidate for elector on his own terms, although he must file his declaration before the primary. Ala. Code, Tit. 17, 145. Even though the victory of an independent candidate for elector in Alabama cannot be anticipated, the state does offer the opportunity for the development of other strong political organizations where the need is felt for them by a sizable block of voters. Such parties may leave their electors to their own choice."
OK, so the Constitution says that each state is going to have electors that get to decide how to cast their votes. The states can pass whatever laws they want, but I doubt they can constitutionally prevent these electors from voting any way they want. So, there is no way to enforce making a state throw it's votes in favor of the majority decision.
I would question why you would think that Yahoo is a better search engine than Google. That has not been my (and also coincidently most other people's) experience...
Imagine that I am a hacker and that I want to get access to your internal network. Now, there is a firewall between you and me. But, if I spoof some e-mail address from your company and get just a single person to open it, it can connect out of your network back to me and I can then run commands inside your network. For example, I can then download SSH to the machine and set up encrypted tunnels to tunnel further attacks to other machines in the internal network.
In a targeted attack, the actual percentage of people that open the attachment is irrelevant. All you need is one...
In their Kitchen Sink Demo, click on the text tab. In the Text area box, type some text in. Then, highlight some of it. Notice how the Selection on the right shows what you have highlighted. Now, highlight some other text, but drag out of the window before you release the mouse button. Now, you have text in the box highlighted, but the selection indicates the wrong thing. It looks like they are updating the selection field only on mouseup...
x amples/kitchensink/demo.html#Text
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation/e
The PS/3 is priced for early adopters, who will clearly pay that price if they paid $800-1000 for the X-box. The thing about the X-box is that the demand far exceeded the supply, which artificially drove up the price. They can always lower the price of the PS/3 based on their sales figures.
Having the blue-ray built in makes a lot of sense. It means you can have better games which leads to a sustained competitive advantage. Having wifi built in makes a lot of sense too because it probably didn't increase their cost of production very much.
I think that what will matter in the end is how good the unique games are.
Actually, your math is not realistic because you are including data from as far back as 1977. The economics of making computers has changed a lot since then. Look at the prices for the systems released from 1999 on:
SEGA Dreamcast launches in 1999 for $199.99 ____________ $228.09 in 2005
PlayStation 2 launched in 2000 for $299.99 ________________ $333.15 in 2005
Xbox Launched in 2001 for $299.99 _____________________ $325.34 in 2005
GameCube launched in 2001 for $199.99 _________________ $216.89 in 2005
As you can see, $400 is significantly higher than the average.
Offering free wireless internet access is better than launching free cell phone service. There is at least one cell phone that can switch seamlessly between using voice over ip and regular cellular networks even in the middle of a call. Plus, you could have a PDA do it as well. You could have a GPS device interface with Google maps over wireless to provide you driving directions. There are a ton of uses for this. If wireless internet access was availiable almost everywhere, then there are all sorts of wonderful things you could do.
I imagine this will catch on since if it will work for interactive Porn...
It is not always easy to disprove things that are wrong using the scientific method. Sometimes it is pretty difficult. Especially if you come up with theories that are inherantly undecidable. In mathematics, for example, people tried to claim that all mathematical truths were proveble using the theorms in Principa Mathematica. But Godel (sorry for the mispelling, but I'm not sure how to type the right characters in Slashdot) proved that any recursively enumerable system of equations would either be incomplete or inconsistant. Not only that, but there are an uncountably infinite set of truths that cannot be proven. If something is true but it can not be proven, then you can also not prove that it is not true. And you cannot prove that the negation of that theorm is not true either. And all of that is found in pure mathematics. It becomes even more dicey when you start trying to apply math to the real world because there are often assumptions that you make that are wrong. Like, 1 could plus 1 cloud sometimes equals 1 cloud. Or, another example is that the Theory of Relativity shows that in some cases solutions to simple problems using Newton's basic equations is not correct. Even if Relativity is correct, it was not trivial to prove.
In terms of Natural Processes like global warming, there are tons of experiments you can do. Just because you can not create a duplicate Earth and experiment on it, does not preclude research. For example, I can formulate a theory that temperatures in the last 100 years should be higher than say for the last 300 years. Then, I could maybe find evidence in ice formations, or geology, or in the way old trees grow or something that confirmed or did not confirm my hypothesis.
Likewise with evolution, I can theorize that species in the past who survived should have adapted to a large change in climate. Then, looking at the fossil record, I can determine whether or not that is the case. In addition, I might theorize that differing combinations of genes can create mutations in animals and plants. Then, through genetic testing and a lot of staistics, I can identify chromosomes that are responsible for certain traits.
There may have been a creator of all living things. But if so, what is clear is that He/She/It created animals and plants in a way that causes them to evolve.
OK, first of all, this hack does not require physical access and a blow torch. These sort of events happen all the time. Every time your computer realizes it is hot and starts the fan, one of these events is occuring.
Secondly, this is a privelege escalation from root to system level. Why is this important? Well, imagine that there is a system that implements multi-level security. (It's a fun feeling to hack root on a box only to find out that root has no ability to do anything.) This vunerability may allow someone to circumvent that and gain access to the higher level. Yeah, it would be tough, and probably require some pretty bright people and some money to research. But those are exactly the things that the kind of hackers who would want to do such a thing have.
Actually, software is not the only thing that is protected by both copyright and patents. You can now patent story lines. So, if you write a book, you can have a patent on the story and a copyright on the book.
I think that you can be intelectually consistant in opposing software patents but in thinking they are ok for physical things. The idea behind patents is to encourage people to disclose their discoveries in exchange for a monopoly for a limited time. But, I have yet to see a software patent on something that was
A. Not obvious, and
B. Going to be a useful contribution to society after the monopoly wears off
Hence, software patents do not encourage any kind of useful disclosure as far as I can tell. Instead, software patents seem to stifle inovation by threatoning to restrict each somewhat obvious and useful feature to companies who can establish large patent portfolios and do cross licensing deals.
I for one welcome the new Eveready virus overlords.
Current versions of Windows have dropped support for a lot of legacy hardware that Linux supports. Overall, Linux supports more hardware than Windows.