Not them. I doubt they wrote it in English, you're reading a translation. It's possible they used a more specific term, and 'evils' is just an approximation.
The Masked Magician did one trick just to show this rule flawed: He made a tank disappear. Tank was there, he lowered a screen over it, waved hands, tank gone. It was a camera trick: Camera, screen and magician were all mounted on a moveable platform. While the screen was down the whole lot shifted position to point away from the tank.
Given even a little of the technology becoming available now, it'd be very easy to 'cheat' at magic. For example, an e-paper playing card. The processor might make it a little thick to handle, but it'd look just like a normal card... except it changes face at the command of the magician or his assistant. Suddenly, every card trick is a joke.
Would this suck the fun out? While magicians may still take pride in their skill, it'd be much harder to impress an audience who realise that those tricks could be done with ease and gadgetry. I imagine television magicians have been through similar issues too: How can you convince the audience that what they see isn't all achieved with camera trickery, short of revealing your method after the trick?
It isn't the first case of a patent covering an already commonplace idea used in a new setting. A lot of software patents are simply for doing something old 'on a computer.' The general rule for patent-driven companies is to just grab every possible patent they can, without a thought to how valid the patent may be - there's no penalty for having a patent denied, and the US patent office is basically a rubber-stamp engine anyway. Once the patents are granted by the thousand, then they start looking through to see if they got anything good.
Pharmacuticals sometimes runs a similar model. They discover a new interesting compound, and patent it right away - and only then try to work out exactly what it does or might be good for. If they waited to figure that out before fileing, a competitor might beat them to it.
I do much the same, with a few minor tweaks:
- Rather than NFS, I use a tarpipe: Source box uses xinetd. It's a little faster, and uses less processor time at the backup box. Which is important, because...
- The backups box also compresses the data it gets (pigz or bpzip2, depending where the data is from) and encrypts it (gpg - have to use assymetric encryption so the backup box doesn't need to store the key) in case of theft. It takes rather a lot of processing power to handle this, but a Core 2 Quad does the job nicely.
As you're running it over the internet you'd want to replace the xinetd-and-tar with an ssh connection (You can make ssh run tar directly in place of a shell) in order to avoid sending plaintext over the internet. Depending on the data, you might want to move the compression to the source device as well so reduce the pain inflicted upon your usage caps.
I went the compression route myself. It was effective. Then it became more than effective: It became fun!
Now I spend many an evening studying and devising new means of compression by which I may squeeze a tiny bit more useful information into those bits. I'm good at it, too.
Also... in my very extensive testing experience, though winrar beats zip with ease, the contest is close between rar and 7z on small files - and once the files get big, the advantage of 7zs -md=256m dictionary size gives it a clear edge. 7z beats winrar.
I've got a block-deduper program I wrote myself too that works miracles on full-drive backups and virtual machines, but it takes a very long time to run, rendering it rather impractical. Some day I'll rewrite the slowest part to use quicksort rather than a radix sort, then it'll be much faster.
True... but in the experience of my own family, none of it ever gets looked at. It just becomes data you are obliged to keep safe forever even though no-one really cares to access it.
My approach is to buy a few drives at a time of exactly the same model. I've had more electronics failures than mechanical failures - this way if a drive fails electronically, I can swap in the board from another drive to get the data off.
Runs into free-speech issues, although I would like to see one minor adjustment: A law requiring clear identification when something is an advertisment, or when a company has accepted payment of any form to promote a product. I do think consumers need to at least know that when a movie is showing product X doing something amazing, it's because the manufacturer handed a pile of money to the studio for placement. Currently the situation is so bad that in some fields manufacturers are actually making up fake news report segments to promote their product in the hope that viewers won't realise it's an advertisment.
If such things get too effective it could have impacts elsewhere. Think news, for example: A poll gets going on some news site, and a few friends from the pro-X side go to vote... but in doing so, they identify the poll as something of interest to the pro-X community, and recormendation engines drive more pro-Xers there to vote, making it appear even more popular...
Online polls are essentially worthless already for that very reason, but now extend the situation to businesses (Ten orders one day, a million the next), social forums (Instant mobs forming of commenters all pressing the same side of an issue) and misinformation (A boycott could go on for years prepetuated by forgotten dislikes, long after the company ceased to do whatever got people disliking it in the first place).
I'm not sure how easy it is to enforce things like that though. Every rejection letter I've ever had (And that's quite a few) has been of the form 'You application has not been successful' or something similar. They never provide any reasoning. So how can a rejected applicant determine if they were truely discriminated against, or just passed over for someone more experienced/qualified?
There's a limit for storage. Superconductors lose their superconductivity in the presence of magnetic fields over a threshold strength that depends on material used. This is why record-breaking electromagnets still use the really thick coil of copper construction.
Space is actually very hot - there may not be many particles, but they are moving fast. The only reason it seems cold is that, even though most things in space will gain heat by conduction, the rate is negligable compared to radiative transfer.
There was an incident in the UK with a patchy-magenta squirrel that briefly became a local celebrity. No-one was ever able to prove the cause, but the most likely explanation is that it was searching in bins and had an encounted with a discarded laser printer cartridge.
You miss a vital question: Are grey squirrels cute? Hurting non-cute animals will cause little if any public outrage, but even causing a little inconvenience to the cute ones will summon an angry mob. People are stupid that way.
That's because advertising companies might sue. I'm not sure exactly what they will sue for, but I'm sure their lawyers can think of something. Interference with a contract, something like that.
When I was at school, sites about gardening were often blocked. Weed, grass, pot... the filter kept classifying them as promoting drugs. Filters have improved a bit since then.
I've been through the same thing, on Vodaphone. Except that they actually were a contract service, so they already had my name and age. It took a few days to disable it, as they used the take-a-payment-from-the-card thing for age validation and their badly-written site kept complaining that they were unable to process my card. Eventually I figured out the cause: I was using a debit card, but they can only validate age using a credit card. So I borrowed someone else's card and used that to make the token-proof-of-age payment.
I didn't even want to look at porn (Got the PC for that, bigger screen!), but they blocked an art site that I sometimes need to read messages on.
I'm not saying cultured don't change. I'm saying that they do change, all the time - but there is no real way to say that any given change is for the better, or for the worse. There is no universial standard by which cultural standards may be judged
It would be more accurate to say one religion banned eating pork. Islam inherited it from the Jewish religion it decended from. Some of the Jewish dietary restrictions may have some medical basis in avoiding meat likely to transmit disease, but a lot of it looks to be a cultural identification thing - like the sabbath, and circumcision. It's a way to keep the tribe intact, a visible way for people to proclaim 'This is who we are, and why we are not like the outsiders.'
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Not them. I doubt they wrote it in English, you're reading a translation. It's possible they used a more specific term, and 'evils' is just an approximation.
I'm sure they are sensible enough not to say so in public. Or in private, when someone might be listening in.
The Masked Magician did one trick just to show this rule flawed: He made a tank disappear. Tank was there, he lowered a screen over it, waved hands, tank gone. It was a camera trick: Camera, screen and magician were all mounted on a moveable platform. While the screen was down the whole lot shifted position to point away from the tank.
Given even a little of the technology becoming available now, it'd be very easy to 'cheat' at magic. For example, an e-paper playing card. The processor might make it a little thick to handle, but it'd look just like a normal card... except it changes face at the command of the magician or his assistant. Suddenly, every card trick is a joke.
Would this suck the fun out? While magicians may still take pride in their skill, it'd be much harder to impress an audience who realise that those tricks could be done with ease and gadgetry. I imagine television magicians have been through similar issues too: How can you convince the audience that what they see isn't all achieved with camera trickery, short of revealing your method after the trick?
It isn't the first case of a patent covering an already commonplace idea used in a new setting. A lot of software patents are simply for doing something old 'on a computer.' The general rule for patent-driven companies is to just grab every possible patent they can, without a thought to how valid the patent may be - there's no penalty for having a patent denied, and the US patent office is basically a rubber-stamp engine anyway. Once the patents are granted by the thousand, then they start looking through to see if they got anything good.
Pharmacuticals sometimes runs a similar model. They discover a new interesting compound, and patent it right away - and only then try to work out exactly what it does or might be good for. If they waited to figure that out before fileing, a competitor might beat them to it.
I do much the same, with a few minor tweaks:
- Rather than NFS, I use a tarpipe: Source box uses xinetd. It's a little faster, and uses less processor time at the backup box. Which is important, because...
- The backups box also compresses the data it gets (pigz or bpzip2, depending where the data is from) and encrypts it (gpg - have to use assymetric encryption so the backup box doesn't need to store the key) in case of theft. It takes rather a lot of processing power to handle this, but a Core 2 Quad does the job nicely.
As you're running it over the internet you'd want to replace the xinetd-and-tar with an ssh connection (You can make ssh run tar directly in place of a shell) in order to avoid sending plaintext over the internet. Depending on the data, you might want to move the compression to the source device as well so reduce the pain inflicted upon your usage caps.
I went the compression route myself. It was effective. Then it became more than effective: It became fun!
Now I spend many an evening studying and devising new means of compression by which I may squeeze a tiny bit more useful information into those bits. I'm good at it, too.
Also... in my very extensive testing experience, though winrar beats zip with ease, the contest is close between rar and 7z on small files - and once the files get big, the advantage of 7zs -md=256m dictionary size gives it a clear edge. 7z beats winrar.
I've got a block-deduper program I wrote myself too that works miracles on full-drive backups and virtual machines, but it takes a very long time to run, rendering it rather impractical. Some day I'll rewrite the slowest part to use quicksort rather than a radix sort, then it'll be much faster.
True... but in the experience of my own family, none of it ever gets looked at. It just becomes data you are obliged to keep safe forever even though no-one really cares to access it.
My approach is to buy a few drives at a time of exactly the same model. I've had more electronics failures than mechanical failures - this way if a drive fails electronically, I can swap in the board from another drive to get the data off.
Runs into free-speech issues, although I would like to see one minor adjustment: A law requiring clear identification when something is an advertisment, or when a company has accepted payment of any form to promote a product. I do think consumers need to at least know that when a movie is showing product X doing something amazing, it's because the manufacturer handed a pile of money to the studio for placement. Currently the situation is so bad that in some fields manufacturers are actually making up fake news report segments to promote their product in the hope that viewers won't realise it's an advertisment.
If such things get too effective it could have impacts elsewhere. Think news, for example: A poll gets going on some news site, and a few friends from the pro-X side go to vote... but in doing so, they identify the poll as something of interest to the pro-X community, and recormendation engines drive more pro-Xers there to vote, making it appear even more popular...
Online polls are essentially worthless already for that very reason, but now extend the situation to businesses (Ten orders one day, a million the next), social forums (Instant mobs forming of commenters all pressing the same side of an issue) and misinformation (A boycott could go on for years prepetuated by forgotten dislikes, long after the company ceased to do whatever got people disliking it in the first place).
I'm not sure how easy it is to enforce things like that though. Every rejection letter I've ever had (And that's quite a few) has been of the form 'You application has not been successful' or something similar. They never provide any reasoning. So how can a rejected applicant determine if they were truely discriminated against, or just passed over for someone more experienced/qualified?
Now without air.
There's a limit for storage. Superconductors lose their superconductivity in the presence of magnetic fields over a threshold strength that depends on material used. This is why record-breaking electromagnets still use the really thick coil of copper construction.
You should be able to get a great improvement though. The current semiconductors aren't operating anywhere close to theoretical limits.
Space is actually very hot - there may not be many particles, but they are moving fast. The only reason it seems cold is that, even though most things in space will gain heat by conduction, the rate is negligable compared to radiative transfer.
There was an incident in the UK with a patchy-magenta squirrel that briefly became a local celebrity. No-one was ever able to prove the cause, but the most likely explanation is that it was searching in bins and had an encounted with a discarded laser printer cartridge.
You miss a vital question: Are grey squirrels cute? Hurting non-cute animals will cause little if any public outrage, but even causing a little inconvenience to the cute ones will summon an angry mob. People are stupid that way.
That's because advertising companies might sue. I'm not sure exactly what they will sue for, but I'm sure their lawyers can think of something. Interference with a contract, something like that.
When I was at school, sites about gardening were often blocked. Weed, grass, pot... the filter kept classifying them as promoting drugs. Filters have improved a bit since then.
I've been through the same thing, on Vodaphone. Except that they actually were a contract service, so they already had my name and age. It took a few days to disable it, as they used the take-a-payment-from-the-card thing for age validation and their badly-written site kept complaining that they were unable to process my card. Eventually I figured out the cause: I was using a debit card, but they can only validate age using a credit card. So I borrowed someone else's card and used that to make the token-proof-of-age payment.
I didn't even want to look at porn (Got the PC for that, bigger screen!), but they blocked an art site that I sometimes need to read messages on.
I'm not saying cultured don't change. I'm saying that they do change, all the time - but there is no real way to say that any given change is for the better, or for the worse. There is no universial standard by which cultural standards may be judged
It would be more accurate to say one religion banned eating pork. Islam inherited it from the Jewish religion it decended from. Some of the Jewish dietary restrictions may have some medical basis in avoiding meat likely to transmit disease, but a lot of it looks to be a cultural identification thing - like the sabbath, and circumcision. It's a way to keep the tribe intact, a visible way for people to proclaim 'This is who we are, and why we are not like the outsiders.'
Then the British team may sing along.
The NSA claims to have some super-secret data-mining operation going on... but a lot of people are doubtful about how effective such a thing could be.