No software is currently safe from patent trolls. That is, any complex piece of software could probably be found to be infringing on some patent if someone looked hard enough. Google is taking a stance of protecting WebM from such trolls, while H.264 is explicitly patent encumbered (and therefore ineligible for use in any W3C standard) regardless of what ISO says. It really comes down to money and other resources and that's why I think WebM has a chance of being a useful open format regardless of what one "expert" with a vested interest in H.264 thinks. Or are you saying you expect Google to start charging people to use it?
It's not silly for the state to collect cell phones that are unnecessary for employees to do their jobs. If such employees want to use a cell phone, then yes, they do have to use their own just like most of us. I've never imagined that my employer should care what my minutes cost on my personal phone I use for things unrelated to work (even if I use it at work).
Sure the work-provided cell phone is cheaper for you than a land line you pay for. That says nothing about cost of a desk phone line vs a cell phone for a California employee. Where I work (a small non-proift), we have our own VoIP system, so we only have to pay someone per line that connects our internal system with the outside world.
I don't see strong evidence that Java applets pose a bigger risk than Flash applets or tricking users to download EXEs. I also think that if more attention had been paid to Java applets development and they'd kept up with Flash, we'd be in a lot better position today. Java applets are not specified by web standards, but it's a much more open technology than Flash. Of course, we'll ultimately be able to replace Flash with standard technologies.
Yeah, I don't think this is much more dangerous than downloading EXEs. However, when Java applets were first used, they were always in a very restricted sandbox; perhaps there should be a return to that policy.
Yeah, determining what rights should be given any animal is very subjective. I propose that when dolphins can communicate with us well enough to ask for special rights, we should seriously consider it. Enabling this communication may involve work by dolphins and/or humans.
Of course, all of this is based on the assumption that we're the superior species. Perhaps they've been trying to communicate something of immense import for some time and we've just been interpreting those attempts at particularly elaborate tricks.
Gun training doesn't solve anything. With the proliferation of guns all you're doing is ensuring that at some point someone will think "I hate that person, and I have an easy weapon with which to kill them".
If everyone was willing to pull the trigger every time he saw someone he hated, human society wouldn't be possible. Murder has been with us since almost the beginning of human history, and societies have almost universally treated it as one of the most egregious offenses.
Since there are some who are willing to pull the trigger whenever they see someone they hate, others need to be able to oppose them, and being armed and capable with the weapon is useful for that purpose. Sometimes police will be able to do that and sometimes it will be ordinary citizens.
I'm afraid no matter how hard you try you can't compare this to anything else. A gun is a weapon. End of. A car isn't. It's used to get around. People getting killed by cars is part of the risk of living and getting around. There is no sane reason why anyone would need to live with a gun.
Why is the risk of being in a deadly accident a reasonable risk, but the risk of being killed (or watching someone else killed) because you don't have a weapon or training to use it always acceptable? I don't currently own a gun for defense because I don't need it where I live, but some do. There are also places and situations in which people don't need cars for their daily lives.
It depends what you mean by "faster computer." Nobody expects clock speeds to advance much beyond the several GHz possible today. Therefore, more and more components are being devoted to parallel processing, such as multiple cores, pipelines, and processor threads.
It seems to me that chip designers like Intel, AMD and others are doing pretty well at getting more and more processing power out of each clock cycle, though I'd hesitate to call anything about chip design "easy." Writing software to take advantage of the increasing parallelism seems harder.
You've obviously, never tried downloading torrents of popular games, most of which work with little or no trouble. Sometimes they need "cracks," sometimes not. The people that are stupid are ones that pay for unauthorized copies. Sharing something for no cost is one thing, but supporting a criminal enterprise is extremely irresponsible. I've played some of these games I've obtained from unauthorized copies, but usually end up paying for an authorized copy eventually if it's a good game.
I suspect that most schools are still far behind yours and rely on real paperwork. I can imagine the politics around trying to make the common application completely electronic would be ugly.
Thankfully, there is no one proprietary messaging system out of the many incompatible ones that is dominant enough to replace email. Maybe we'll need an open replacement for email at some point, but so far I'm not too concerned about the Facebooks, Myspaces, Twitters, and other flavors of the week.
Same accelerator concept though. Maybe what they have built is flexible enough to handle both roles.
Yeah, it's the same concept much as a firearm and internal combustion engine are based on the same concept. How many gasoline engines are also capable of firing high velocity projectiles?
Saying that math is not an art or that it doesn't produce anything beautiful is like saying cooking is not an art. Cooking has at its core one of the most basic human needs: nutrition. Like math, it can be used as a tool (to satisfy nutritional needs) and nothing more. But, would you tell a French chef that what he doesn't isn't an art and doesn't produce something beautiful? Similar comparisons can be made to writing, speech, and many other human disciplines that are both tools and arts.
Yeah, I see this, like so many issues, as a balance between the rights and power of individuals, governments and corporations. We individuals need governments to protect us from corporations, but to not be so powerful that they are repressive themselves. It's a balance that's never ideal.
I agree in general with the sentiment that neither governments nor ISPs should be able to tell me what I can and cannot do on the Internet. However, it's complicated by the fact that ISPs are part of the Internet. We tend to think of the Internet as one big network that one just needs "access" to. However, it's really a network of networks, many of which are operated by the ISPs. The access is between each of the thousands of networks, not just the individual and his ISP. So, it's somewhat inconsistent for a government to regulate what an ISP can do and not do the same to individuals.
I think only way to ensure ISPs don't abuse their power is to make sure they have no interests other than connecting their clients with all the other networks on the Internet as efficiently as possible. Obviously, that means that "content"-oriented companies can't operate networks at all. I can't claim to know how this could be accomplished in a market-driven, legislative, or political fashion.
Another point of the article is that there will be PHBs that interpret a misconfiguration or risk of misconfiguration as a reason not to deploy DNSSEC. Unfortunately, that's very plausible.
Slashdot Mirror
JPEG, GIF, and PNG are not patent-encumbered and nobody requires royalties to use them.
No software is currently safe from patent trolls. That is, any complex piece of software could probably be found to be infringing on some patent if someone looked hard enough. Google is taking a stance of protecting WebM from such trolls, while H.264 is explicitly patent encumbered (and therefore ineligible for use in any W3C standard) regardless of what ISO says. It really comes down to money and other resources and that's why I think WebM has a chance of being a useful open format regardless of what one "expert" with a vested interest in H.264 thinks. Or are you saying you expect Google to start charging people to use it?
Since when did Adobe run the most popular video site on the web? This is one more move to break YouTube's dependence on Adobe, which is great AFAICT.
It's not silly for the state to collect cell phones that are unnecessary for employees to do their jobs. If such employees want to use a cell phone, then yes, they do have to use their own just like most of us. I've never imagined that my employer should care what my minutes cost on my personal phone I use for things unrelated to work (even if I use it at work).
Sure the work-provided cell phone is cheaper for you than a land line you pay for. That says nothing about cost of a desk phone line vs a cell phone for a California employee. Where I work (a small non-proift), we have our own VoIP system, so we only have to pay someone per line that connects our internal system with the outside world.
I don't see strong evidence that Java applets pose a bigger risk than Flash applets or tricking users to download EXEs. I also think that if more attention had been paid to Java applets development and they'd kept up with Flash, we'd be in a lot better position today. Java applets are not specified by web standards, but it's a much more open technology than Flash. Of course, we'll ultimately be able to replace Flash with standard technologies.
Yeah, I don't think this is much more dangerous than downloading EXEs. However, when Java applets were first used, they were always in a very restricted sandbox; perhaps there should be a return to that policy.
It was some marketing genius at Netscape. The language was originally known as "Livescript" but Netscape was pushing Java applets, so they renamed it.
Yeah, determining what rights should be given any animal is very subjective. I propose that when dolphins can communicate with us well enough to ask for special rights, we should seriously consider it. Enabling this communication may involve work by dolphins and/or humans.
Of course, all of this is based on the assumption that we're the superior species. Perhaps they've been trying to communicate something of immense import for some time and we've just been interpreting those attempts at particularly elaborate tricks.
Gun training doesn't solve anything. With the proliferation of guns all you're doing is ensuring that at some point someone will think "I hate that person, and I have an easy weapon with which to kill them".
If everyone was willing to pull the trigger every time he saw someone he hated, human society wouldn't be possible. Murder has been with us since almost the beginning of human history, and societies have almost universally treated it as one of the most egregious offenses.
Since there are some who are willing to pull the trigger whenever they see someone they hate, others need to be able to oppose them, and being armed and capable with the weapon is useful for that purpose. Sometimes police will be able to do that and sometimes it will be ordinary citizens.
I'm afraid no matter how hard you try you can't compare this to anything else. A gun is a weapon. End of. A car isn't. It's used to get around. People getting killed by cars is part of the risk of living and getting around. There is no sane reason why anyone would need to live with a gun.
Why is the risk of being in a deadly accident a reasonable risk, but the risk of being killed (or watching someone else killed) because you don't have a weapon or training to use it always acceptable? I don't currently own a gun for defense because I don't need it where I live, but some do. There are also places and situations in which people don't need cars for their daily lives.
It's not a good sign for the rest of us. However, many companies seem to be doing quite well with litigation as a core business stratagem.
It depends what you mean by "faster computer." Nobody expects clock speeds to advance much beyond the several GHz possible today. Therefore, more and more components are being devoted to parallel processing, such as multiple cores, pipelines, and processor threads.
It seems to me that chip designers like Intel, AMD and others are doing pretty well at getting more and more processing power out of each clock cycle, though I'd hesitate to call anything about chip design "easy." Writing software to take advantage of the increasing parallelism seems harder.
You've obviously, never tried downloading torrents of popular games, most of which work with little or no trouble. Sometimes they need "cracks," sometimes not. The people that are stupid are ones that pay for unauthorized copies. Sharing something for no cost is one thing, but supporting a criminal enterprise is extremely irresponsible. I've played some of these games I've obtained from unauthorized copies, but usually end up paying for an authorized copy eventually if it's a good game.
I'm sure that's exactly what Google will do if this law takes effect.
The fact that his theory has held up this long is incredulous.
Stop anthropomorphizing facts! Actually, now that I think about it, a fact that doubts its own validity makes for a compelling character.
BTW, you can do this with Scribus if you don't want to pay both arms and both legs for something proprietary.
I suspect that most schools are still far behind yours and rely on real paperwork. I can imagine the politics around trying to make the common application completely electronic would be ugly.
Thankfully, there is no one proprietary messaging system out of the many incompatible ones that is dominant enough to replace email. Maybe we'll need an open replacement for email at some point, but so far I'm not too concerned about the Facebooks, Myspaces, Twitters, and other flavors of the week.
Isn't one of the problems with railguns that sometimes the projectile will weld itself to the rail?
Only at sufficient speeds/friction. There's no reason a railgun-based aircraft launcher would be more prone to this problem than a steam-based one.
More importantly, this catapult isn't a railgun. Unlike a railgun, there's no projectile rubbing on the conducting rails in a linear induction motor.
Same accelerator concept though. Maybe what they have built is flexible enough to handle both roles.
Yeah, it's the same concept much as a firearm and internal combustion engine are based on the same concept. How many gasoline engines are also capable of firing high velocity projectiles?
Saying that math is not an art or that it doesn't produce anything beautiful is like saying cooking is not an art. Cooking has at its core one of the most basic human needs: nutrition. Like math, it can be used as a tool (to satisfy nutritional needs) and nothing more. But, would you tell a French chef that what he doesn't isn't an art and doesn't produce something beautiful? Similar comparisons can be made to writing, speech, and many other human disciplines that are both tools and arts.
Why does one have to choose?
Yeah, I see this, like so many issues, as a balance between the rights and power of individuals, governments and corporations. We individuals need governments to protect us from corporations, but to not be so powerful that they are repressive themselves. It's a balance that's never ideal.
I agree in general with the sentiment that neither governments nor ISPs should be able to tell me what I can and cannot do on the Internet. However, it's complicated by the fact that ISPs are part of the Internet. We tend to think of the Internet as one big network that one just needs "access" to. However, it's really a network of networks, many of which are operated by the ISPs. The access is between each of the thousands of networks, not just the individual and his ISP. So, it's somewhat inconsistent for a government to regulate what an ISP can do and not do the same to individuals.
I think only way to ensure ISPs don't abuse their power is to make sure they have no interests other than connecting their clients with all the other networks on the Internet as efficiently as possible. Obviously, that means that "content"-oriented companies can't operate networks at all. I can't claim to know how this could be accomplished in a market-driven, legislative, or political fashion.
Another point of the article is that there will be PHBs that interpret a misconfiguration or risk of misconfiguration as a reason not to deploy DNSSEC. Unfortunately, that's very plausible.