One problem it won't solve is the mindless moron behind you who nearly slams into your back end because you had to brake suddenly. This happened today in fact - I was on my way back from the store, doing about 35mph in a zone so marked, when a stray dog started to cross the street in front of my, and I instinctively stomped the brakes to avoid killing an innocent animal.
This is a problem driverless cars will fix. Unlike you, a computer doesn't react instinctively. It has 360-degree vision, knows where all of the surrounding vehicles are, including distances and velocities, and is capable of accurately deciding whether or not braking is safe. Assuming it can also distinguish dogs from children (very likely, I think, though I don't actually know), it should be capable of deciding that it's safer to simply run the dog over if that's the situation.
IMO, all of the comments and discussion about whether genes are inventions or discoveries or natural or artificial are completely irrelevant.
The purpose of the patent system is to advance the useful arts and sciences. Given that there is obviously a lot of scientific (and commercial) value in identifying the functions of particular parts of our genetic code, that's something we want to encourage. Patents are supposed to do this by encouraging research results to be published so that other researchers can use them for inspiration and as building blocks. If that's not happening, then patents aren't providing any value.
So, a very simple test: If researchers routinely use the patent database as a source of inspiration and a place to find tools to solve specific problems, and are very willing to look for and license patents that help them make progress, then they're good and useful. If, however, patents are an obstruction, if researchers actively avoid looking at patents to avoid possible treble damages from willful infringement, or if they block useful avenues of research, then they're not providing any value and should be discarded.
The question of whether something is invented or discovered is just semantics with no real impact on whether or not it's useful or whether or not patent protection will accelerate or slow progress in the field.
The usual reason given for privatizing is the old canard "the private corporations can do this at a much lower cost"
And it's nearly always true... when there is competition.
When there's no competition, when a single private corporation is set up as a government-mandated monopoly, the result is always going to be very bad. You can make it less bad by adding a government regulatory body to provide oversight, but the result will still be less efficient than if there were true competition.
just enact reasonable measure to ensure only appropriate guns are available for appropriate means
Who decides what's appropriate? I strongly suspect that my definition of appropriate is quite a bit different from yours.
I'd like to see a substantial fraction of stable, law-abiding citizens armed at all times, and in all places, which is why I teach concealed weapon permit classes. I'd also like to see lots of military-style arms in private homes, and I'd specifically like to ensure that the government does not know who does or does not have them, since an important part of their purpose is to maintain the appropriate balance of power between the citizenry and the government. Oh, and people who like to hunt or shoot for sport should have those guns as well, though that's not nearly as important.
And, for that matter, there are plenty of people who disagree with you in the other direction as well, who feel that only soldiers and law enforcement officials should have guns. So for those people the appropriate means would be military training/action and law enforcement only.
My point is that your statement is vacuous, until we can reach some consensus on what "appropriate guns" and "appropriate means" mean.
However, we actually already have a clear definition, given in the prefatory clause of the second amendment. Historical analysis including evidence from contemporary state constitutions, writings of the founders, and especially some of the first laws passed after ratification of the bill of rights make it abundantly clear that the purpose of the second amendment was to ensure that all members of the militia (all able-bodied men 18 through 45) had ready access to appropriate military arms, to be able to form the foot soldiers for the national defensive force, which lacked only organization and some training to be prepared for battle, to repel invasion or to overthrow local tyranny. In the early 21st century, therefore, the appropriate guns for that purpose are M4 and M16 assault rifles -- and by "assault rifles" I mean real, select-fire rifles, not the semi-automatic rifles generally available to civilians. In US v Miller, the Supreme Court laid out this view when they determined that weapons appropriate for military use are what is protected by the second amendment.
My view is consistent with that original intent.
If you hold a view that is different, not only do you need to build consensus around your view, but you also need to amend the Constitution again to bring it around to your view, or at least convince courts that the "reasonable measures" you'd like to enact can survive strict scrutiny, because while the Supreme Court has not yet established a standard of scrutiny for second amendment issues, that's the only one that makes any sense given the stark language and the history of the amendment.
I'd be willing to bet that most of the server admins at Google have no idea how many servers they have.
(Googler here) You'd be wrong, actually. Google is a very numbers-oriented place; I can see the totals, including CPU, disk, RAM, etc. The numbers are... large.
I wish Iran all the best with their endeavor, but I'm skeptical.
So the only long-term way to make a living is to ensure that you're working on something specialized (so there's less competition), or that you're at the top of the skill heap (so you can charge more), or you're working on something that can't easily be sent elsewhere.
I'd call that medium-term, or even short-term, not long-term. Long-term, standard of living and cost of living will equalize worldwide.
FYI, at least at some of the offices, Googlers are taxed on their meals... and Google then provides an end-of-year payment to offset the taxes so there's no net effect on our income.
As a Googler, I can tell you we ARE taxed for meals, to the tune of $4,650.00 in 2012. The company then pays a 'gross up' to make it a non-event for the employees. So all this complaining about 'free lunches' is entirely off-track, and this Professor of Law has demonstrated he doesn't know how to do basic research before talking.
I can confirm this. My understanding was that the IRS negotiated an agreement which required taxes to be paid on meals at the smaller campuses, because on larger campuses the time it would take for Googlers to go off-campus to eat was accepted by the IRS as sufficient business value to justify it as a business expense. But that may be incorrect, or maybe the IRS changed its mind later.
In any case, I work in the Boulder office and I do pay income taxes on my meals, and Google then offsets it with a grossed-up payment so the tax doesn't impact my income.
I read a lengthy article some time ago about how many ports restrict anything larger than small arms, and some even restrict those. If your ship has more armament than is allowed by the ports it's going to touch, then you can't deliver your cargo. I'm sure you can find it if you google for it.
No question that ship-mounted weapons are nothing to play around with no matter what technology they employ, but an electrical weapon only contains the potential energy for a few shots most likely (the rest being generated on demand)
From potential energy stored in the massive fuel bunkers...
Of course, the fuel doesn't explode the same way high explosives in shells do, and doesn't even burn nearly as fast as the non-explosive smokeless powder used as propellant. But it's worth pointing out that the potential energy still has to be present, in a fairly readily-usable form.
Even easier: Just relax the restrictions on armed merchantmen. Rather than spending a lot of taxpayer money to operate extra decoy ships, just allow the real targets to arm themselves.
Require them to safe their weapons before entering any harbor, and hold them liable for any damage they do (against non-pirates). On the scale of commercial shipping operations adding a few weapons and training the crew to operate them would be very inexpensive.
I keep two boarding passes, typically - one folded in my pocket, and one in my carry-on. If I lose one, I just grab the other one.
You worry too much about boarding passes. If you happen to lose one it takes about 60 seconds to get a replacement at the nearest airline kiosk or at the gate.
I always use my phone. If something happens, I have my ID and can quickly get a paper pass. That hardly ever happens.
That said, I never encountered a hurricane, and I wonder if the Bounty's captain was either incompetent (as to read forecasts), or simply overwhelmed by the speed of the hurricane
The way I read it, he knew the hurricane was coming and decided to leave port anyway. I don't know that you can even call that incompetence. More like just utter stupidity.
I would bet if I were to sit down with the folks at JST Labs working on this project I would find we share a lot of common interests in technology and such. It is from such common interests that broader cultural bridges can be built from.
My experience is that I get along like a house on fire with geeks from any nation, culture or ethnicity. Interests in technology and building cool stuff cross all other boundaries. I often feel like there's a vast, unknown international brotherhood of geeks. It's seriously beautiful. I'm sure I could walk into any city in the world, and if I could just find a brother nerd I'd be safe, well cared-for and building cool stuff right away.
Well, except for those idiots who use vi. I just can't stand being in the same room with anyone who uses that crap editor. EMACS is the One True editor. Duh. And don't get me started on the cult of Ruby "brogrammers"; anyone who doesn't see that monkey patching is of Satan deserves to be burned at the stake for practicing that witchcraft. Oh, and those utter fools who let themselves get sucked into the Evil Empire's gaping maw should just give up and die because they've already sold their souls for a slightly-improved version of Java.
But other than that, yeah, geeks are geeks the world over -- it's like our brains all work on the same wavelength. If only we they'd put us in charge we'd end all conflict in a jiffy, and the world would be a place of peace, beauty and freaking awesome quadcopters for all.
What all the proponents conveniently gloss over is that biometrics has not solved one fundamental problem: How to change the "password" once it gets stolen.
Biometrics are not passwords. They have some similarities, but also some important differences. Equating the two will just result in misunderstanding both -- as in this case; thinking that biometrics must be changeable like passwords to be useful.
The intent of a biometric isn't to provide a replaceable, short-lived secret authenticator, it's to provide a public (though not necessarily widely-distributed) authenticator permanently bound to an individual. When designing a biometric security solution you should never assume that the biometric data is secret. Instead, you need to assure that the following assumptions hold:
1. The object being scanned is actually the subject being authenticated. This is the greatest weakness of biometric authentication in most circumstances, because it's generally fairly easy to scan some other object which replicates the authorized user's characteristics. This is also where biometrics fundamentally differ from passwords, since if this assumption holds it doesn't matter if an attacker knows the characteristics of your face/fingerprint/whatever.
2. The path between scanner and matching engine is secure, otherwise replay attacks can easily subvert the authentication.
3. The template storage and matching engine are secure. This is also a problem for password authentication, but it's generally fairly easy to assure in both cases.
4. The resolution of the matching, at the selected match threshold, is sufficient. The analogous concern in the case of passwords is password length/complexity, but it's a little different because when we talk about password complexity we do it in the context of brute force attacks. The biometric analogy of a brute force attack is presenting many different people, trying to find one that coincidentally matches, which is rarely a concern (assuming the biometric isn't being misused for both identification and authentication). With biometrics, used properly, you just need to assure that the false positive rate is low enough for the threat model.
So, what does that mean for the idea of biometric security for phones? Assumptions 2 and 3 can probably be invalidated by a sophisticated attacker, but a sophisticated attacker can likely bypass the whole authentication process regardless, so biometrics are no worse than passwords. The same is basically true of assumption 4.
For cellphones, the problem is obviously assumption #1. The sensors that will be embedded in a phone will of necessity be inexpensive. Even worse, the phone's environment is completely uncontrolled. This creates an ideal environment for an attacker to spoof the sensor with gummy fingers, photographs, etc.
However, that doesn't make it useless. In particular, incidental and continuous re-authentication is idea. Rather than using your face or finger to "unlock" the phone, have the phone occasionally check the faces within view of the front-facing camera, or the print of the finger swiping. That won't make it impossible for an attacker to use the phone, but it will make it significantly more difficult and -- this is the key -- do so with zero inconvenience to the authorized user. That sort of security should be added to a password for unlock, though for some people with low personal security requirements it might be able to stand alone.
I just don't see a case for corporations buying their own TLD. Is there a substantial usability or branding difference between www.disney and disney.com? Everybody will just type "disney" into the address bar anyway, it will find the right site even if it has to go via google...
Sure it will, after multiple DNS queries, then a query to Google, then a user click. If the TLD resolves directly to the company's web site, users will get there faster. Sites that load pretty slowly anyway won't benefit much, but those that care about page load times can see significant benefits.
There are other reasons, I'm sure, but there's one, anyway. I'm guessing Google's registration of the "google" TLD is to accomplish exactly that (note: I work for Google but don't know anything about why Google has asked for the TLDs it has, or what it plans to do with them).
Sandwich. Laundromat. Mac(k)intosh. Zipper. Wellingtons. Escalator. Thermos. Uhm, Xerox? This has been happening for centuries. If you study language development, this is completely normal.
Sure it is. It's also quite destructive to a company's trademarks when it happens to affect one. It's possible to keep from losing your trademark even though it's becoming a common word by aggressively searching out print uses of the trademark and requesting that a trademark notice be added. The fact that it's used as a word in spoken language doesn't affect its trademark status.
My wife's uncle has made several cannon, and shoots them all the time. Of late he just loads them with birdseed, but he used to compete in cannon-shooting competitions, hitting garbage can lid-sized targets from 1000+ yards.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time all the gold on Earth is mined, asteroid mining will be in full swing.
Perhaps even before then, at some point it may become cost-effective to synthesize gold.
One problem it won't solve is the mindless moron behind you who nearly slams into your back end because you had to brake suddenly. This happened today in fact - I was on my way back from the store, doing about 35mph in a zone so marked, when a stray dog started to cross the street in front of my, and I instinctively stomped the brakes to avoid killing an innocent animal.
This is a problem driverless cars will fix. Unlike you, a computer doesn't react instinctively. It has 360-degree vision, knows where all of the surrounding vehicles are, including distances and velocities, and is capable of accurately deciding whether or not braking is safe. Assuming it can also distinguish dogs from children (very likely, I think, though I don't actually know), it should be capable of deciding that it's safer to simply run the dog over if that's the situation.
IMO, all of the comments and discussion about whether genes are inventions or discoveries or natural or artificial are completely irrelevant.
The purpose of the patent system is to advance the useful arts and sciences. Given that there is obviously a lot of scientific (and commercial) value in identifying the functions of particular parts of our genetic code, that's something we want to encourage. Patents are supposed to do this by encouraging research results to be published so that other researchers can use them for inspiration and as building blocks. If that's not happening, then patents aren't providing any value.
So, a very simple test: If researchers routinely use the patent database as a source of inspiration and a place to find tools to solve specific problems, and are very willing to look for and license patents that help them make progress, then they're good and useful. If, however, patents are an obstruction, if researchers actively avoid looking at patents to avoid possible treble damages from willful infringement, or if they block useful avenues of research, then they're not providing any value and should be discarded.
The question of whether something is invented or discovered is just semantics with no real impact on whether or not it's useful or whether or not patent protection will accelerate or slow progress in the field.
The usual reason given for privatizing is the old canard "the private corporations can do this at a much lower cost"
And it's nearly always true... when there is competition.
When there's no competition, when a single private corporation is set up as a government-mandated monopoly, the result is always going to be very bad. You can make it less bad by adding a government regulatory body to provide oversight, but the result will still be less efficient than if there were true competition.
Personally, I stopped bothering to distinguish between Bush and Obama years ago. I call them Obushma.
just enact reasonable measure to ensure only appropriate guns are available for appropriate means
Who decides what's appropriate? I strongly suspect that my definition of appropriate is quite a bit different from yours.
I'd like to see a substantial fraction of stable, law-abiding citizens armed at all times, and in all places, which is why I teach concealed weapon permit classes. I'd also like to see lots of military-style arms in private homes, and I'd specifically like to ensure that the government does not know who does or does not have them, since an important part of their purpose is to maintain the appropriate balance of power between the citizenry and the government. Oh, and people who like to hunt or shoot for sport should have those guns as well, though that's not nearly as important.
And, for that matter, there are plenty of people who disagree with you in the other direction as well, who feel that only soldiers and law enforcement officials should have guns. So for those people the appropriate means would be military training/action and law enforcement only.
My point is that your statement is vacuous, until we can reach some consensus on what "appropriate guns" and "appropriate means" mean.
However, we actually already have a clear definition, given in the prefatory clause of the second amendment. Historical analysis including evidence from contemporary state constitutions, writings of the founders, and especially some of the first laws passed after ratification of the bill of rights make it abundantly clear that the purpose of the second amendment was to ensure that all members of the militia (all able-bodied men 18 through 45) had ready access to appropriate military arms, to be able to form the foot soldiers for the national defensive force, which lacked only organization and some training to be prepared for battle, to repel invasion or to overthrow local tyranny. In the early 21st century, therefore, the appropriate guns for that purpose are M4 and M16 assault rifles -- and by "assault rifles" I mean real, select-fire rifles, not the semi-automatic rifles generally available to civilians. In US v Miller, the Supreme Court laid out this view when they determined that weapons appropriate for military use are what is protected by the second amendment.
My view is consistent with that original intent.
If you hold a view that is different, not only do you need to build consensus around your view, but you also need to amend the Constitution again to bring it around to your view, or at least convince courts that the "reasonable measures" you'd like to enact can survive strict scrutiny, because while the Supreme Court has not yet established a standard of scrutiny for second amendment issues, that's the only one that makes any sense given the stark language and the history of the amendment.
I'd be willing to bet that most of the server admins at Google have no idea how many servers they have.
(Googler here) You'd be wrong, actually. Google is a very numbers-oriented place; I can see the totals, including CPU, disk, RAM, etc. The numbers are... large.
I wish Iran all the best with their endeavor, but I'm skeptical.
So the only long-term way to make a living is to ensure that you're working on something specialized (so there's less competition), or that you're at the top of the skill heap (so you can charge more), or you're working on something that can't easily be sent elsewhere.
I'd call that medium-term, or even short-term, not long-term. Long-term, standard of living and cost of living will equalize worldwide.
ugh....no thanks.
I don't know... it sounds like this might be a good way to get a phone with stock Android. That has value.
FYI, at least at some of the offices, Googlers are taxed on their meals... and Google then provides an end-of-year payment to offset the taxes so there's no net effect on our income.
Yes, Google does treat us very well :-)
As a Googler, I can tell you we ARE taxed for meals, to the tune of $4,650.00 in 2012. The company then pays a 'gross up' to make it a non-event for the employees. So all this complaining about 'free lunches' is entirely off-track, and this Professor of Law has demonstrated he doesn't know how to do basic research before talking.
I can confirm this. My understanding was that the IRS negotiated an agreement which required taxes to be paid on meals at the smaller campuses, because on larger campuses the time it would take for Googlers to go off-campus to eat was accepted by the IRS as sufficient business value to justify it as a business expense. But that may be incorrect, or maybe the IRS changed its mind later.
In any case, I work in the Boulder office and I do pay income taxes on my meals, and Google then offsets it with a grossed-up payment so the tax doesn't impact my income.
I read a lengthy article some time ago about how many ports restrict anything larger than small arms, and some even restrict those. If your ship has more armament than is allowed by the ports it's going to touch, then you can't deliver your cargo. I'm sure you can find it if you google for it.
No question that ship-mounted weapons are nothing to play around with no matter what technology they employ, but an electrical weapon only contains the potential energy for a few shots most likely (the rest being generated on demand)
From potential energy stored in the massive fuel bunkers...
Of course, the fuel doesn't explode the same way high explosives in shells do, and doesn't even burn nearly as fast as the non-explosive smokeless powder used as propellant. But it's worth pointing out that the potential energy still has to be present, in a fairly readily-usable form.
Even easier: Just relax the restrictions on armed merchantmen. Rather than spending a lot of taxpayer money to operate extra decoy ships, just allow the real targets to arm themselves.
Require them to safe their weapons before entering any harbor, and hold them liable for any damage they do (against non-pirates). On the scale of commercial shipping operations adding a few weapons and training the crew to operate them would be very inexpensive.
I hate to tell you this, but once you're dead, you won't give a shit about ANYTHING.
Well, damn, I guess I should go cancel my life insurance policy. Once I'm dead I won't care if my family has food and shelter.
I keep two boarding passes, typically - one folded in my pocket, and one in my carry-on. If I lose one, I just grab the other one.
You worry too much about boarding passes. If you happen to lose one it takes about 60 seconds to get a replacement at the nearest airline kiosk or at the gate.
I always use my phone. If something happens, I have my ID and can quickly get a paper pass. That hardly ever happens.
I can't imagine why you are being sarcastic.
Because he's a troll, and you're biting.
Opera is moving to Blink also.
Google uses Ganeti and Borg. Different solutions for different problems.
That said, I never encountered a hurricane, and I wonder if the Bounty's captain was either incompetent (as to read forecasts), or simply overwhelmed by the speed of the hurricane
The way I read it, he knew the hurricane was coming and decided to leave port anyway. I don't know that you can even call that incompetence. More like just utter stupidity.
I would bet if I were to sit down with the folks at JST Labs working on this project I would find we share a lot of common interests in technology and such. It is from such common interests that broader cultural bridges can be built from.
My experience is that I get along like a house on fire with geeks from any nation, culture or ethnicity. Interests in technology and building cool stuff cross all other boundaries. I often feel like there's a vast, unknown international brotherhood of geeks. It's seriously beautiful. I'm sure I could walk into any city in the world, and if I could just find a brother nerd I'd be safe, well cared-for and building cool stuff right away.
Well, except for those idiots who use vi. I just can't stand being in the same room with anyone who uses that crap editor. EMACS is the One True editor. Duh. And don't get me started on the cult of Ruby "brogrammers"; anyone who doesn't see that monkey patching is of Satan deserves to be burned at the stake for practicing that witchcraft. Oh, and those utter fools who let themselves get sucked into the Evil Empire's gaping maw should just give up and die because they've already sold their souls for a slightly-improved version of Java.
But other than that, yeah, geeks are geeks the world over -- it's like our brains all work on the same wavelength. If only we they'd put us in charge we'd end all conflict in a jiffy, and the world would be a place of peace, beauty and freaking awesome quadcopters for all.
What all the proponents conveniently gloss over is that biometrics has not solved one fundamental problem: How to change the "password" once it gets stolen.
Biometrics are not passwords. They have some similarities, but also some important differences. Equating the two will just result in misunderstanding both -- as in this case; thinking that biometrics must be changeable like passwords to be useful.
The intent of a biometric isn't to provide a replaceable, short-lived secret authenticator, it's to provide a public (though not necessarily widely-distributed) authenticator permanently bound to an individual. When designing a biometric security solution you should never assume that the biometric data is secret. Instead, you need to assure that the following assumptions hold:
1. The object being scanned is actually the subject being authenticated. This is the greatest weakness of biometric authentication in most circumstances, because it's generally fairly easy to scan some other object which replicates the authorized user's characteristics. This is also where biometrics fundamentally differ from passwords, since if this assumption holds it doesn't matter if an attacker knows the characteristics of your face/fingerprint/whatever.
2. The path between scanner and matching engine is secure, otherwise replay attacks can easily subvert the authentication.
3. The template storage and matching engine are secure. This is also a problem for password authentication, but it's generally fairly easy to assure in both cases.
4. The resolution of the matching, at the selected match threshold, is sufficient. The analogous concern in the case of passwords is password length/complexity, but it's a little different because when we talk about password complexity we do it in the context of brute force attacks. The biometric analogy of a brute force attack is presenting many different people, trying to find one that coincidentally matches, which is rarely a concern (assuming the biometric isn't being misused for both identification and authentication). With biometrics, used properly, you just need to assure that the false positive rate is low enough for the threat model.
So, what does that mean for the idea of biometric security for phones? Assumptions 2 and 3 can probably be invalidated by a sophisticated attacker, but a sophisticated attacker can likely bypass the whole authentication process regardless, so biometrics are no worse than passwords. The same is basically true of assumption 4.
For cellphones, the problem is obviously assumption #1. The sensors that will be embedded in a phone will of necessity be inexpensive. Even worse, the phone's environment is completely uncontrolled. This creates an ideal environment for an attacker to spoof the sensor with gummy fingers, photographs, etc.
However, that doesn't make it useless. In particular, incidental and continuous re-authentication is idea. Rather than using your face or finger to "unlock" the phone, have the phone occasionally check the faces within view of the front-facing camera, or the print of the finger swiping. That won't make it impossible for an attacker to use the phone, but it will make it significantly more difficult and -- this is the key -- do so with zero inconvenience to the authorized user. That sort of security should be added to a password for unlock, though for some people with low personal security requirements it might be able to stand alone.
I just don't see a case for corporations buying their own TLD. Is there a substantial usability or branding difference between www.disney and disney.com? Everybody will just type "disney" into the address bar anyway, it will find the right site even if it has to go via google...
Sure it will, after multiple DNS queries, then a query to Google, then a user click. If the TLD resolves directly to the company's web site, users will get there faster. Sites that load pretty slowly anyway won't benefit much, but those that care about page load times can see significant benefits.
There are other reasons, I'm sure, but there's one, anyway. I'm guessing Google's registration of the "google" TLD is to accomplish exactly that (note: I work for Google but don't know anything about why Google has asked for the TLDs it has, or what it plans to do with them).
Sandwich. Laundromat. Mac(k)intosh. Zipper. Wellingtons. Escalator. Thermos. Uhm, Xerox? This has been happening for centuries. If you study language development, this is completely normal.
Sure it is. It's also quite destructive to a company's trademarks when it happens to affect one. It's possible to keep from losing your trademark even though it's becoming a common word by aggressively searching out print uses of the trademark and requesting that a trademark notice be added. The fact that it's used as a word in spoken language doesn't affect its trademark status.
My wife's uncle has made several cannon, and shoots them all the time. Of late he just loads them with birdseed, but he used to compete in cannon-shooting competitions, hitting garbage can lid-sized targets from 1000+ yards.