The Australian police still need a magistrate's permission to tap someone's telephone. How is SMS different from phone messages? The EFA's commentary clearly states that "Communications made using new technologies would have less privacy protection than a telephone call."
Access to voice mail should also mean access to the room containing the recordings... so will this also replace the notion of a "search warrant"?
Sounds ugly when applied solely to the police. But look at the collection of agencies who stand to benefit from this law: Taxation Office, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Immigration Department. So this may be a back-door way of gaining more prosecutions of those most hideous of criminals: tax dodgers!
If it makes you feel any better, Australia's gov't is not alone in this type of thinking.
-AD
The Soviets had a similar system to DSN. If I remember correctly they had 2 land stations and a ship in the Atlantic. They used it to track, among other missions, the Venera missions to Venus... that still hold the record as the only human missions to ever transmit from the surface of Venus!
Assuming that the antennae (note English spelling) are the expensive part, they why not buy up one or two from the Russians and stuff new signal processing equipment (aka computers) in them?
Quantity is not the only consideration - distance also impacts on the overall Internet load. I can tell you that, living in Australia, downloading a file from Melbourne Uni mirror is not only faster than downloading it from the States, but it is also less load on the global telecom system.
Why should a 1Mb file from the Brisbane Courier, aka local, newpaper cost the same as a 1Mb file from Cape Town? Try pinging www.mg.co.za from Aus and you may see the route go from.au to.us to.uk to.something before it gets to.za! How many hops until the price goes up?
-AD
Re:adding "expiration" field to a copyright form..
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
>Remember if even one patch, security enhancement >or minor improvement is made after initial purchase, >the vendors will probably try to extend the >Copyright by the date of the change.
Good. This will encourage people to do things like release patches and not abandon their software.
I posted earlier that only Abandonware should be quickly escorted into the public domain. Software that is still commercially viable should be covered until such time as the company ditches it and their customers!
A competitor of my present Client spent over $10million of R&D to develop a new process for treating an oil feedstock. My Client wants to use this 10 year old technology in her new plant... does the first company deserve their patent and the associated royalties? Yes, I feel they do. They applied actual research that created a more energy efficient process for extracting oil than what they used previously. We now want to use the equipment and their design criteria in the new plant. This is exactly the kind of application patents exist for, so this application qualifies as type #1. These guys deserve between 15-25 years worth of royalties to reward their research.
In this same job, there is a different part of the plant where we wanted to 'wash' chemical A out of a stream by using chemical B. My mining industry experience told me to use a 'counter-current decantation (CCD) wash circuit' in this application; the designs for these are in my undergraduate textbooks. But no, a senior engineer informed me than another company had already patented the idea of using a CCD in that application. This doesn't sit well with me as the other company did no significant research to implement a CCD circuit (the plans are in textbooks). All these folks did was go to the patent office and said 'me too'. This is obviously a type #2 patent, the folks holding are doing nothing but holding other away from using that technology. This type of patent should hold only for a couple of years as the registrant did no real research. In the event that a outsider shows up with the same idea, then the original patent will be judged to fail the 'novel and not intuitive' test and will immediately cease.
The last kind are the worst. People who take out patents with the idea of intimidating others into paying royalties. The current case of pop-under ads falls into this category. Yes, I despise ads as much as the next geek, but there is no way this deserves to be vetted by the patent office. Type #3 deserve no term of protection!
-AD
Abandonware vs. music et al.
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
Music and books arguably don't lose significant value after a few years. One look at Charley Pride's CD sales should tell you that not publishing for a while won't kill your market (in spite of gnutella!). That is why you can (usually) still find commercial music and books long after initial publication.
But the same does not apply to software. I spent a long time trying to find a legal copy of an old DOS game and had no luck. The US publisher doesn't support 10 yr old games, and the Japanese authors are not even around any more. Ebay had never flogged a copy of it -- it was abandoned long before the Internet appeared. In desperation I ended up at an 'abaondonware' website that had a cracked copy of the game available for download.
I normally shun warez. I do a lot of both public domain plus I have several friends trying to make a living in the music industry. So the notion of stealing IP does not sit well with me. But the software I wanted is simply not availble by legit means.
So here is my proposal for IP law reform:
"computer software shall enter the public domain five years after the software ceases to be available by normal commercial sale"
What does this mean in reality? Software that is valuable will be sold until it ceases to have value. 5 years after that, it enters the public domain. Windows 95 ceased being available, when, about 1998? So after 2003 it would revert to the public domain UNLESS the copyright owner makes it available for sale again. If it has no value, then the company won't sell it. If it does have value, then they won't abandon it!
-AD
Democracies have moon colonies?
on
China Plans Moonbase
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sounds like the 'good ole days' when the communists and capitalists were competing in space instead of wasting their tax revenues on welfare and corruption.
Is this what it will take for the "West" to quit navel-gazing and start exploring again? Will the democracies now have a reason to shoot for the moon again? Or will the Reds get there first?
I don't object to the concept of hogs paying extra. I run a small server on my Telus ADSL connected computer, but I don't generate anywhere near the traffic that the MP3 and video file hogs do. It is mostly used so I can get into my home files when I'm on the road or working.
The one beef I do have with paying by the megabit is the quantity of cracking, spam, Melissa virus and other garbage traffic coming back up my DSL line. Should I pay for some gerk in Hong Kong to attack my FTP server with 150 connection attempts in 5 seconds? Or should I be able to dictate to my ISP to block all traffic from the former Crown colony?
Clementine was largely a US ballistic missile defense department proof-of-concept prototype.
more here.
Besides, if the US millitary is not allowed to blow things up, then what is happening here?
Remember that he who pays the bills calls the tune! When he decides to stop paying the bills, then should the government take over?
Check out this link where the Clementine and Lunar Prospector spacecraft may have found water ice hidden in a permanently shadowed crater in the moon's south pole.
So the dark side of the moon is actually the bottom
-AD
Monsanto and "Round-up Ready Canola"
on
Patented Seeds
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Canada has already had a problem with exactly this sort of patent. The case involved a farmer who was "caught" with a special strain of Canola growing on his farm. Well, it was really only growing on a small part of his farm that happened to border a farm that regularly used this special high-priced seed. The farmer claimed that the seed or pollen blew over his field without his knowledge nor consent.
Monsanto sued the farmer for "stealing" seed, he counter-sued Monsanto for "contaminating" his farm with GM canola. You can see a bit of the story here.
The end result? The farmer lost and was fined C$19000.
It is a marsupial, the closest relative is likely either the Tasmanian Devil or the Wombat.
It was called a tiger because it was a predator with stripes. Keep in mind that most settlers in Tasmania had never seen a real tiger, so all they had to go on were stories about beasts in Asia that were predators with stripes.
I'm a metallurgical engineer, and I mentioned in another thread that nearly all the equipment we typically use in mineral processing won't work in space. What would a flotation cell or a leach tank look like in a vacuum?
I doubt they can even get a multi-string drill to work properly up there. The lack of lubricating fluids to flush out the holes will be a real irritation!
The moon may be closer to the earth, but the amount of delta-v required to go to mars is less than that required to go to the moon.
How do you figure that? I don't feel like doing the math right now, but departing the earth-moon gravity well to go to mars should take more energy than departing the earth gravity well to get to the moon. The only way I can see lower fuel is if you use aerobraking at the end of the trip, and that is something that you DON'T want to do with a human crew. Retro-rockets are more reliable than aerobraking.
So we throw some comets at the moon and suck up the debris. Environmental impact statment takes on a new meaning with a multi-billion tonne impact on a site with no environment, n'est-pas?
Let's see. The size of the oceans is approx 1,300,000,000 km^3 of water. The density of sea water is between 1.0 and 1.1 tonnes/m^3, so the mass of water is approx 1.3*10^9*(10^3)^3 tonnes = 1.3*10^18 tonnes.
The equipment we use in the terrestrial mining industry tends to be big, rather brute force, and require a lot of infrastructure to maintain (note the water, power, and air lines in the photo). Making things big in space is no big deal, making them brute force (extra-heavy castings, for example) is presently not possible, and the infrastructure doesn't exist.
Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks
Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.
Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.
We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.
Consider yourself fortunate. Not everyone can be so secure.
How about going to a church? If you are a Muslim in Afghanistan, conversion to Christianity is a capital offense. That means the government will kill you.
You are not afraid of your government, but what about the rest of us?
Encryption is bad. Encryption allows people to transmit data without the [insert country's spook agency] finding out about it. People might be able to do things like conduct commerce across borders with something like this!
So make sure that all cookies are broadcast in PLAIN TEXT and that they can be read by [spook agency] after obtaining the proper court order, Papal Bull, etc.
I run an engineering web site that has online tools. Imagine how horrified users are that they have to pick through a list of 200 sieve mesh possibilities to configure what their assay lab uses. Once is bad enough.
Now imagine if I can't use cookies. They have to pick through the list EVERY time they visit because I can't store their preferences. I'm not uniquely ID'ing a machine, just which mesh sizes they use.
I use Opera (http://www.opera.com) for most of my browsing. It allows configuring cookies by site; so Slashdot and the bank are allowed to store cookies, flycast and double-click are not.
And I can change this list on the fly, so if I want to <horror>visit a pay-porn site</horror>, then I can configure it as "per session".
-AD
Extra goodies for subscribers???
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, and just like we could buy mulligans at the United Way golf tournament, can us subscribers get extra moderating ability? Or better yet, limit the moderating only to the subscribers? After all, we are the ones who are willing to put our pocket book on the line for the site...
And the ODSN bar doesn't really bug me. The colours are neutral enough that they don't cause a problem.
...it would be like Islam, whereas the Microsoft model is more like the Catholic church.
In the MS model, there is a hierarchy of allegence, and you allways know where you stand (and where you kneel). There is a central authority that decides how the congregation shall evolve, err, find enlightenment. Everybody is promised that "things will be better the next time around" and that you just need to suffer through this current life... Forgiveness is a virtue.
Contrast that with Open Source, it has no central authority, but there are a lot of self-declared experts around tossing their particular spin on how things should be. Some are more radical than others, and some can be downright dangerous (I mean script-kiddies, of course). But most are simple, practical, and simplistic. The lack of central authority in the regligion seems to make it impossible to have a central political authority too.
Which is better? Well, after 2000 years, Islam outnumbers Catholicism but still can't manage to organise a single peaceful and prosperous country.
Domino (and Notes in general) is much more than just a email system. Unfortunately that is the most common application that people use it for.
Domino is also a database(á la Access), wordpad type text editor, front end (á la Explorer) and even sort of a file server. So using it for just email is like buying a porsche because it can travel in reverse!
If you only want an email server, use something smaller. If you want to pull off collaborated work with something more integrated than ODSN (like combined approval of timesheets, expense reports, and project management), then you can consider using Notes.
More on Notes: http://www.notes.net
One of my Domino databases: http://www.sagmilling.com
Only the Canadian 'spy' agency goes leaving important data lying around. You all heard about the briefcase fully of documents that were stolen from a spymaster at the parking lot of a hockey game? Seems some bums were scrounging for booze money and broke into her car. Not thinking the documents were valuable, they emptied them into a dumpster and sold the case.
Fingerprint recognition won't stop people from stealing things.
Slashdot Mirror
Access to voice mail should also mean access to the room containing the recordings... so will this also replace the notion of a "search warrant"?
Sounds ugly when applied solely to the police. But look at the collection of agencies who stand to benefit from this law: Taxation Office, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Immigration Department. So this may be a back-door way of gaining more prosecutions of those most hideous of criminals: tax dodgers!
If it makes you feel any better, Australia's gov't is not alone in this type of thinking. -AD
Assuming that the antennae (note English spelling) are the expensive part, they why not buy up one or two from the Russians and stuff new signal processing equipment (aka computers) in them?
-AD
Quantity is not the only consideration - distance also impacts on the overall Internet load. I can tell you that, living in Australia, downloading a file from Melbourne Uni mirror is not only faster than downloading it from the States, but it is also less load on the global telecom system.
.au to .us to .uk to .something before it gets to .za! How many hops until the price goes up?
Why should a 1Mb file from the Brisbane Courier, aka local, newpaper cost the same as a 1Mb file from Cape Town? Try pinging www.mg.co.za from Aus and you may see the route go from
-AD
>Remember if even one patch, security enhancement
>or minor improvement is made after initial purchase,
>the vendors will probably try to extend the
>Copyright by the date of the change.
Good. This will encourage people to do things like release patches and not abandon their software.
I posted earlier that only Abandonware should be quickly escorted into the public domain. Software that is still commercially viable should be covered until such time as the company ditches it and their customers!
-AD
I work in the engineering industry and deal with patents every day. There are, IMHO, 3 types of patents:
1. genuine inventions
2. 'me-too' inventions
3. frivolous patents
A competitor of my present Client spent over $10million of R&D to develop a new process for treating an oil feedstock. My Client wants to use this 10 year old technology in her new plant... does the first company deserve their patent and the associated royalties? Yes, I feel they do. They applied actual research that created a more energy efficient process for extracting oil than what they used previously. We now want to use the equipment and their design criteria in the new plant. This is exactly the kind of application patents exist for, so this application qualifies as type #1. These guys deserve between 15-25 years worth of royalties to reward their research.
In this same job, there is a different part of the plant where we wanted to 'wash' chemical A out of a stream by using chemical B. My mining industry experience told me to use a 'counter-current decantation (CCD) wash circuit' in this application; the designs for these are in my undergraduate textbooks. But no, a senior engineer informed me than another company had already patented the idea of using a CCD in that application. This doesn't sit well with me as the other company did no significant research to implement a CCD circuit (the plans are in textbooks). All these folks did was go to the patent office and said 'me too'. This is obviously a type #2 patent, the folks holding are doing nothing but holding other away from using that technology. This type of patent should hold only for a couple of years as the registrant did no real research. In the event that a outsider shows up with the same idea, then the original patent will be judged to fail the 'novel and not intuitive' test and will immediately cease.
The last kind are the worst. People who take out patents with the idea of intimidating others into paying royalties. The current case of pop-under ads falls into this category. Yes, I despise ads as much as the next geek, but there is no way this deserves to be vetted by the patent office. Type #3 deserve no term of protection!
-AD
Music and books arguably don't lose significant value after a few years. One look at Charley Pride's CD sales should tell you that not publishing for a while won't kill your market (in spite of gnutella!). That is why you can (usually) still find commercial music and books long after initial publication.
But the same does not apply to software. I spent a long time trying to find a legal copy of an old DOS game and had no luck. The US publisher doesn't support 10 yr old games, and the Japanese authors are not even around any more. Ebay had never flogged a copy of it -- it was abandoned long before the Internet appeared. In desperation I ended up at an 'abaondonware' website that had a cracked copy of the game available for download.
I normally shun warez. I do a lot of both public domain plus I have several friends trying to make a living in the music industry. So the notion of stealing IP does not sit well with me. But the software I wanted is simply not availble by legit means.
So here is my proposal for IP law reform:
"computer software shall enter the public domain five years after the software ceases to be available by normal commercial sale"
What does this mean in reality? Software that is valuable will be sold until it ceases to have value. 5 years after that, it enters the public domain. Windows 95 ceased being available, when, about 1998? So after 2003 it would revert to the public domain UNLESS the copyright owner makes it available for sale again. If it has no value, then the company won't sell it. If it does have value, then they won't abandon it!
-AD
Sounds like the 'good ole days' when the communists and capitalists were competing in space instead of wasting their tax revenues on welfare and corruption.
Is this what it will take for the "West" to quit navel-gazing and start exploring again? Will the democracies now have a reason to shoot for the moon again? Or will the Reds get there first?
-AD
I don't object to the concept of hogs paying extra. I run a small server on my Telus ADSL connected computer, but I don't generate anywhere near the traffic that the MP3 and video file hogs do. It is mostly used so I can get into my home files when I'm on the road or working.
The one beef I do have with paying by the megabit is the quantity of cracking, spam, Melissa virus and other garbage traffic coming back up my DSL line. Should I pay for some gerk in Hong Kong to attack my FTP server with 150 connection attempts in 5 seconds? Or should I be able to dictate to my ISP to block all traffic from the former Crown colony?
-AD
Remember that he who pays the bills calls the tune! When he decides to stop paying the bills, then should the government take over?
-AD
So the dark side of the moon is actually the bottom
-AD
Monsanto sued the farmer for "stealing" seed, he counter-sued Monsanto for "contaminating" his farm with GM canola. You can see a bit of the story here.
The end result? The farmer lost and was fined C$19000.
-AD
It was called a tiger because it was a predator with stripes. Keep in mind that most settlers in Tasmania had never seen a real tiger, so all they had to go on were stories about beasts in Asia that were predators with stripes.
-AD
Right on!
I'm a metallurgical engineer, and I mentioned in another thread that nearly all the equipment we typically use in mineral processing won't work in space. What would a flotation cell or a leach tank look like in a vacuum?
I doubt they can even get a multi-string drill to work properly up there. The lack of lubricating fluids to flush out the holes will be a real irritation!
-AD
How do you figure that? I don't feel like doing the math right now, but departing the earth-moon gravity well to go to mars should take more energy than departing the earth gravity well to get to the moon. The only way I can see lower fuel is if you use aerobraking at the end of the trip, and that is something that you DON'T want to do with a human crew. Retro-rockets are more reliable than aerobraking.
-AD
So we throw some comets at the moon and suck up the debris. Environmental impact statment takes on a new meaning with a multi-billion tonne impact on a site with no environment, n'est-pas?
-AD
Let's see. The size of the oceans is approx 1,300,000,000 km^3 of water. The density of sea water is between 1.0 and 1.1 tonnes/m^3, so the mass of water is approx 1.3*10^9*(10^3)^3 tonnes = 1.3*10^18 tonnes.
The average metal concentration of sea water is:
Cu: 150 ng/kg = mg/tonne
Au: 0.02 ng/kg = mg/tonne
Pd: 0.04 ng/kg = mg/tonne
Rh: 0.08 ng/kg = mg/tonne
Metal prices, in rough numbers:
Cu: 0.64 us$/lb = 1.410 us$/kg
Au: 278 us$/oz = 8.90 us$/g
Pd: 360 us$/oz = 11.60 us$/g
Rh: 1600 us$/oz = 51.50 us$/g
So the in-situ value of these four metals are:
Cu: 1.3*10^18 t * 150 mg/t / 10^6 * 1.4 $/kg = 2.73*10^14 us$
Au: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.02 mg/t / 1000 * 8.9 $/g = 2.31*10^14 us$
Pd: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.04 mg/t / 1000 * 11.6 $/g = 6.03*10^14 us$
Rh: 1.3*10^18 t * 0.08 mg/t / 1000 * 51.5 $/g = 53.56*10^14 us$
So the insitu value of these 4 metals exceeds US$64,000 Trillion! Who needs a freaking space program to supply metals to earth?
-AD
Then there are the mining methods. Everybody's favorite part of a mining operation has never been attempted in space and it is not clear if the explosives used in our atmosphere will work in a vacuum (emulsions and gels will volatilize and disappear, ANFO can't be mixed due to the lack of diesel in orbit, etc...). We need to start really small in orbit to create this infrastructure to provide us mining types with enough gear to properly break rocks
Another example of how far we need to go, consider that terrestrial rock drills won't work in space. All drills require a flushing medium to lubricate the bit and flush out rock chips. We use air, water, and drilling mud for that application here on Earth, but all these either won't work or are too valuable to waste in blowing crap out of a hole. The article made reference to research into drilling methods for space, but remember that we are really starting over from scratch. What we do on Earth won't work in space.
Then there is the whole issue of mineral processing the ores into useful concentrates and metals (I'm ignoring mining for volatiles). Concentration by flotation and leaching simply won't work, pyrometallurgy will be tough to control, and dry gravity methods need artifical gravity.
We'll get there, and we will mine the asteroids. I just don't think it will happen commercially in my lifetime.
-AD
Consider yourself fortunate. Not everyone can be so secure.
How about going to a church? If you are a Muslim in Afghanistan, conversion to Christianity is a capital offense. That means the government will kill you.
You are not afraid of your government, but what about the rest of us?
-AD
Encryption is bad. Encryption allows people to transmit data without the [insert country's spook agency] finding out about it. People might be able to do things like conduct commerce across borders with something like this!
So make sure that all cookies are broadcast in PLAIN TEXT and that they can be read by [spook agency] after obtaining the proper court order, Papal Bull, etc.
oh, wait a minute...
-AD
I run an engineering web site that has online tools. Imagine how horrified users are that they have to pick through a list of 200 sieve mesh possibilities to configure what their assay lab uses. Once is bad enough.
Now imagine if I can't use cookies. They have to pick through the list EVERY time they visit because I can't store their preferences. I'm not uniquely ID'ing a machine, just which mesh sizes they use.
Is that a crime?
-AD
I use Opera (http://www.opera.com) for most of my browsing. It allows configuring cookies by site; so Slashdot and the bank are allowed to store cookies, flycast and double-click are not.
And I can change this list on the fly, so if I want to <horror>visit a pay-porn site</horror>, then I can configure it as "per session".
-AD
Hmm, and just like we could buy mulligans at the United Way golf tournament, can us subscribers get extra moderating ability? Or better yet, limit the moderating only to the subscribers? After all, we are the ones who are willing to put our pocket book on the line for the site...
And the ODSN bar doesn't really bug me. The colours are neutral enough that they don't cause a problem.
-AD
...it would be like Islam, whereas the Microsoft model is more like the Catholic church.
In the MS model, there is a hierarchy of allegence, and you allways know where you stand (and where you kneel). There is a central authority that decides how the congregation shall evolve, err, find enlightenment. Everybody is promised that "things will be better the next time around" and that you just need to suffer through this current life... Forgiveness is a virtue.
Contrast that with Open Source, it has no central authority, but there are a lot of self-declared experts around tossing their particular spin on how things should be. Some are more radical than others, and some can be downright dangerous (I mean script-kiddies, of course). But most are simple, practical, and simplistic. The lack of central authority in the regligion seems to make it impossible to have a central political authority too.
Which is better? Well, after 2000 years, Islam outnumbers Catholicism but still can't manage to organise a single peaceful and prosperous country.
(flames incoming.... run for cover)
-AD
Domino (and Notes in general) is much more than just a email system. Unfortunately that is the most common application that people use it for.
Domino is also a database(á la Access), wordpad type text editor, front end (á la Explorer) and even sort of a file server. So using it for just email is like buying a porsche because it can travel in reverse!
If you only want an email server, use something smaller. If you want to pull off collaborated work with something more integrated than ODSN (like combined approval of timesheets, expense reports, and project management), then you can consider using Notes.
More on Notes: http://www.notes.net
One of my Domino databases: http://www.sagmilling.com
-AD
Only the Canadian 'spy' agency goes leaving important data lying around. You all heard about the briefcase fully of documents that were stolen from a spymaster at the parking lot of a hockey game? Seems some bums were scrounging for booze money and broke into her car. Not thinking the documents were valuable, they emptied them into a dumpster and sold the case.
Fingerprint recognition won't stop people from stealing things.
-AD