Hashcash is a fine solution to spammers circa 2003, sending out all their mail from a single server on a cheap hosting service. But how does it help against botnets?
Catch-all signatures that basically say "sign here once and you agree to the past 200 pages of legal agreement" have been more or less considered to be illegal when brought to court.
Exactly. Whenever I've signed a proper contract, I've always had to initial each page and sign in wet ink. A signature captured on a PDA and attached to the end of a document that could not possibly be read in full on that screen is legally meaningless.
It is also only about 80% effective at preventing germination, so the destructive effect of the termination gene being cross pollinated does not just die out in a generation, it propagates forever.
Doesn't this come down to a total cost of ownership decision that any business should make:
Option A: I buy the traditional option, I lose X% to various natural hardships, I replant the seed I keep back next year.
Option B: I buy the new version, I lose a smaller Y% to various natural hardships, I have to buy the seed again next year.
In an ideal world, that would be the case. In an ideal world, terminator seeds would be 100% effective at terminating, and neighbours wouldn't have to worry about cross-pollination and the effects of the terminator gene spreading itself through the entire species over a few generations.
More like a thicker version (presumably to fit nicely between the contacts and the edge of a USB slot) of a mini-SD I think. I have a micro-SD here, and it is not only much thinner, but much narrower as well. SD adapaters for micro-SD have their own contacts, with the micro-SD fitting inside. This one appears to just be plastic to fill the gap, so presumably you could use it without an adapter in a pinch, if you have a steady hand.
Inventors: Doyle; Michael D. (Wheaton, IL) Assignee: Eolas Technologies, Inc. (Wheaton, IL) Appl. No.: 09/481,984 Filed: January 11, 2000
Inventors: Beezer; John L (Redmond, WA), Silver; David M (Redmond, WA), Zeman; Pavel (Kirkland, WA) Assignee: Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA) Appl. No.: 10/870,472 Filed: June 18, 2004
On the other hand, Netscape has had plugins since about 1994, so both patents should be declared void.
Because the Native Americans have a number of treaties with the Canadian government that state among other things that natural resources are to be shared between both parties. If the Canadian government is profiting, then they are entitled to a share of the profits.
A life sentence in some countries is 14 years, in others 25. It seldom means life. So 65 years is excessive. But this has been calculated by adding up all the maximum sentences for his individual crimes as if he would serve time for them end-to-end. Sentencing rarely works like this. Sentences for multiple related crimes are usually served concurrently, so the maximum he is likely to serve is whatever the maximum is for the most serious crime on the list. Also, first time offenders rarely get the maximum sentence.
They are asserting a "property right" that has been rejected via common, statutory, and international law time and time again. A nation can control physical objects that enter their airspace, but not energy.
But nations do control the airwaves, and make a tidy profit auctioning spectrum in a wireless bubble economy. It is hypocritcal to do this, and then deny native groups claims based on the logic that there are no property rights over airwaves.
The iPhone multi-touch patents are already quite specific, and will become more specific as they go through reviews before being approved. There is plenty of prior art in this field - MERL (Mitsubishi) went public with DiamondTouch at a conference in 2001 and it appears to have been well under development already at that point. There are a number of other companies with products on the market already, which others posting here have mentioned. So Apple is not much of a threat on the patent front.
In the case of Australia, it was mostly UK and US based publishers, record and movie companies that were benefiting from the regulated distribution. Their business model was to manufacture a CD/DVD/book somewhere cheap like China, but force the Australian distributors to order through head office so they get to cream more profit as the middleman. With gray importing legalised, the Australian distributors can buy direct from China, so it is good for the country as a whole. In the case of the UK and US, the government won't pass such laws, because the companies that are benefiting from such restrictions are based in those countries.
Whether they should have the right to do so is another matter, of course.
If we can't have their products, why should they be allowed to have our jobs? Oh right I forgot, globalisation is a one way street, and the law exists to protect the government's large corporate donors from the people.
Wouldn't it be a better idea to come up with a pluggable API for bookmark storage and retrieval? This way users could keep the old storage format if they had a reason to prefer it, or write a new backend that shared bookmarks directly with IE, use del.icio.us or other web based bookmark providers etc.
Personally, I switched to del.icio.us about a year ago, and will never switch back to being tied to local storage for bookmarks, no matter what advantages this change brings. The few sites I don't want to post to the web I can easily remember the addresses of, and autocompletion means they are only a couple of keystrokes away.
How do you get out of university without taking an architecture course that gives some assembly language, at least for a hypothetical machine?
Not all developers have a background in Computer Science. Mine is in Engineering, where we learned Fortran, C++ and MatLab, and algorithm analysis in addition to a lot of domain knowledge. Why do I need to know about OS and compiler design to develop high level software for solving real problems?
The key there was C-only programmers are finding it difficult to get work. Personally I would never hire anyone that claimed they could only program in one language, whatever that language was.
The ability to pull over HTTP is an advantage for open source projects, but for most commercial development, it would probably be seen more as a security hole. Sure you can set up HTTPS with client cert authentication, but then you might as well use SSH.
The quantity of data need not be significant. The killer will be the subscription fees that the information providers want. Much better is to use the traffic data that is broadcast over the airwaves after paying a one off license when you buy the GPS.
Some Audis have a security "feature", where if you leave your keys in the ignition without the engine on for more than 30 seconds, the doors automatically lock and the alarm arms. Of course, like all German engineering, this is perfectly logical, you don't want your car being stolen because you were forgetful.
When the credit card companies have clauses in their contracts expressly forbidding merchants from carrying out their own checks on the identity of the cardholder, is it still fair that fraudulent card use is treated the same as counterfeit money?
I suspect it has something to do with the way they are funded. Many police forces these days are financially motivated to go for quantity of arrests rather than focussing on what matters.
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Hashcash is a fine solution to spammers circa 2003, sending out all their mail from a single server on a cheap hosting service. But how does it help against botnets?
Exactly. Whenever I've signed a proper contract, I've always had to initial each page and sign in wet ink. A signature captured on a PDA and attached to the end of a document that could not possibly be read in full on that screen is legally meaningless.
Henceforth, the Amazon patent shall no longer be known as the "1-click patent", but the "1-click and lots of hassle patent".
Given how US immigration has become over the last few years, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if they started applying this to personal phones.
And to think people worry about wifi in laptops and cellular masts near their childrens' school.
It is also only about 80% effective at preventing germination, so the destructive effect of the termination gene being cross pollinated does not just die out in a generation, it propagates forever.
In an ideal world, that would be the case. In an ideal world, terminator seeds would be 100% effective at terminating, and neighbours wouldn't have to worry about cross-pollination and the effects of the terminator gene spreading itself through the entire species over a few generations.
More like a thicker version (presumably to fit nicely between the contacts and the edge of a USB slot) of a mini-SD I think. I have a micro-SD here, and it is not only much thinner, but much narrower as well. SD adapaters for micro-SD have their own contacts, with the micro-SD fitting inside. This one appears to just be plastic to fill the gap, so presumably you could use it without an adapter in a pinch, if you have a steady hand.
Bonus points if you can get them to take you to lunch.
Because the Native Americans have a number of treaties with the Canadian government that state among other things that natural resources are to be shared between both parties. If the Canadian government is profiting, then they are entitled to a share of the profits.
A life sentence in some countries is 14 years, in others 25. It seldom means life. So 65 years is excessive. But this has been calculated by adding up all the maximum sentences for his individual crimes as if he would serve time for them end-to-end. Sentencing rarely works like this. Sentences for multiple related crimes are usually served concurrently, so the maximum he is likely to serve is whatever the maximum is for the most serious crime on the list. Also, first time offenders rarely get the maximum sentence.
But nations do control the airwaves, and make a tidy profit auctioning spectrum in a wireless bubble economy. It is hypocritcal to do this, and then deny native groups claims based on the logic that there are no property rights over airwaves.
The iPhone multi-touch patents are already quite specific, and will become more specific as they go through reviews before being approved. There is plenty of prior art in this field - MERL (Mitsubishi) went public with DiamondTouch at a conference in 2001 and it appears to have been well under development already at that point. There are a number of other companies with products on the market already, which others posting here have mentioned. So Apple is not much of a threat on the patent front.
As might the people at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, whose work in this area dates back to the 1990's IIRC.
In the case of Australia, it was mostly UK and US based publishers, record and movie companies that were benefiting from the regulated distribution. Their business model was to manufacture a CD/DVD/book somewhere cheap like China, but force the Australian distributors to order through head office so they get to cream more profit as the middleman. With gray importing legalised, the Australian distributors can buy direct from China, so it is good for the country as a whole. In the case of the UK and US, the government won't pass such laws, because the companies that are benefiting from such restrictions are based in those countries.
If we can't have their products, why should they be allowed to have our jobs? Oh right I forgot, globalisation is a one way street, and the law exists to protect the government's large corporate donors from the people.
Wouldn't it be a better idea to come up with a pluggable API for bookmark storage and retrieval? This way users could keep the old storage format if they had a reason to prefer it, or write a new backend that shared bookmarks directly with IE, use del.icio.us or other web based bookmark providers etc.
Personally, I switched to del.icio.us about a year ago, and will never switch back to being tied to local storage for bookmarks, no matter what advantages this change brings. The few sites I don't want to post to the web I can easily remember the addresses of, and autocompletion means they are only a couple of keystrokes away.
Not all developers have a background in Computer Science. Mine is in Engineering, where we learned Fortran, C++ and MatLab, and algorithm analysis in addition to a lot of domain knowledge. Why do I need to know about OS and compiler design to develop high level software for solving real problems?
The key there was C-only programmers are finding it difficult to get work. Personally I would never hire anyone that claimed they could only program in one language, whatever that language was.
The ability to pull over HTTP is an advantage for open source projects, but for most commercial development, it would probably be seen more as a security hole. Sure you can set up HTTPS with client cert authentication, but then you might as well use SSH.
The quantity of data need not be significant. The killer will be the subscription fees that the information providers want. Much better is to use the traffic data that is broadcast over the airwaves after paying a one off license when you buy the GPS.
Some Audis have a security "feature", where if you leave your keys in the ignition without the engine on for more than 30 seconds, the doors automatically lock and the alarm arms. Of course, like all German engineering, this is perfectly logical, you don't want your car being stolen because you were forgetful.
When the credit card companies have clauses in their contracts expressly forbidding merchants from carrying out their own checks on the identity of the cardholder, is it still fair that fraudulent card use is treated the same as counterfeit money?
I suspect it has something to do with the way they are funded. Many police forces these days are financially motivated to go for quantity of arrests rather than focussing on what matters.