Prints are NOT just taken from criminals. Prints are held in some smartcards for identification. Prints are scanned for access into secure areas of many governments and private enterprises. My prints are on file with the FBI and US State department because I held a security clearance over a decade ago.
In US-Visit you are not taken over to a table where your fingers are guided over ink and paper by a police officer. You put your hand on a scanner, just like NOC access at any number of security-focused companies.
US-Visit is a horrible, henious scheme. Verifying the identity of a visitor doesn't help if the person is not on any wanted lists. It would never have helped to stop September 11th; all of the hijackers flew on their own perfectly valid travel documents, all under their own names. Under US-Visit they still would have been allowed entry.
Since when is the standard for all US policy "would it have stopped the September 11 attacks"? US-Visit has managed to catch thousands of people trying to enter the US while legally banned from doing so. It is not the least bit invasive -- as you said, if you're prints aren't there to be matched, they've got nothing more from you. It's a simple biometric identification system, like the photo on your passport is. National customs services have every right to know exactly who is entering their country. I'm sure your wife can attest to the seriousness with which the British passport control stations are taken.
Oh, and lets not forget that one of the post-September 11th attacks that was foiled was attempted by a British citizen. Yes, we tend to like you, and you tend to like us. But it's not like we get to go through the short line at Gatwick.
One of the things you explicitly CANNOT patent is a business process.
Long standing patent office policy had been "We don't patent mere business processes". SCOTUS stepped in a while back (10 or 15 years, maybe) and said "Yes you will patent business processes, so long as they meet the standards of other patents.", giving the patent office an impossible workload and requiring that they patent bullshit.
I really hate having to quote my own post in reply to a post replying to my post.
There's not one single mention of how any portion of the "technology" in question would actually do anything.
That's because you don't patent the software technology itself -- you patent the business process for using the software. Yes, this means you can have a patent that covers use of software owned by someone else, and written by them long before your patent, so long as your use is "non-obvious and novel" or some such. The technology itself is irrelevant to the patent, as is the implementation or lack thereof.
Long standing patent office policy had been "We don't patent mere business processes". SCOTUS stepped in a while back (10 or 15 years, maybe) and said "Yes you will patent business processes, so long as they meet the standards of other patents.", giving the patent office an impossible workload and requiring that they patent bullshit.
Of course, the patent was FILED in April of 2000. I thought that's when art needed to be prior to. Meaning, of course, that the companies he's suing are prior art.
Lots of mention here of needing to be willing to take a less-than-ideal job. Not much mention (that I saw) of working in a less than ideal (for you) location.
Job markets vary considerably by region. Being willing to work anywhere for your first couple of years can go a long way toward mitigating the need, in some areas, to be willing to do anything. If you want to do network engineering, then two years of systems development in Po-dunk (wherever that is for you) will get you a lot closer to network engineering in Glitsville than 2 years of answering phones in Glitsville will, and will put you higher on the food chain when you get there.
Finally, if you are qualified to do network engineering more than support, and it's clear from your education and background that you don't want to do support, why would I (were I the manager of a support team) want to hire you? Sure, you'd might be a good member of my team -- for the 3 months between when you get fully up to speed and when you apply for the network engineering position down the hall. I don't need that kind of aggrivation.
Face Blindness is an actual condition, not just a shitty memory for names. Recognizing other people's faces is a big, very early step in the evolution of humans as social creatures, and it's an ability that's severely stunted in some people's brains.
An example of the difference: I teach at a community college. I have a poor memory for names. By the end of the term I have trouble remembering more than a couple dozen of my 120 or so students' names. Someone with face blindness wouldn't be able to recognize which ones were in his classes when walking around campus.
Since every electron has a pair somewhere in the universe whose spin will change when the electron in the computing device changes, how long will it be before someone playing DOOM XI unintentionally causes the navigation systems aboard the Narthon flagship to fail, leading to it inadvertantly straying into Drakoid space, setting off an interstellar conflict that eventually leads to the destruction of all life in our galaxy?
What is this lust people Gates and others have for handwriting recognition? Why are we trying to teach computers to recognize handwriting when we aren't teaching people to write by hand?
I teach at a community college in Minnesota. I have trouble making out the handwriting of around 20% of my students, and I guarantee you that I have better pattern-recognition skills than a consumer computer 10 years from now will have.
It depends on how the light is being transmitted. In most cases, you're right, and I believe the speed is about equal. It can, at least as I understand it, be focused to propogate roughly straight, but at greater cost.
Come to think of it, electrons through copper are about 2/3 the speed of light through air, so unless they're way slower through semiconductors, it's not a speed of travel issue, it's a data/time issue.
For anyone not familiar with the difference, propogation is the time it takes any particular bit to get from a to b (and is the big downside of using satellites). Transmission is the number of bits per second sent. It's like two cars going from a to b. They can both get there in 10 minutes, but the one carrying 5 passengers is transmitting more than the the one with the lone driver.
Propogation of light through fiber is only about 50% faster than propogation of electrons through a copper conductor. The comments about making distance irrelevant seems completely unrelated to what's been accomplished.
What Intel seems to be discussing is much faster transmission rates though the line (ie: bandwidth), which in itself is a really good thing if it's being done at reasonable heat and power levels.
Somewhat ironic timing on the information from a week ago, as today's blog entry is that the site is being completely rewritten with some changes to address these concerns and will be back up soon.
In part:
TeacherReviews.com is coming back, and it's going to be better than ever - for both students and professors.
The professor who threatened a lawsuit has decided to drop the case. This happened after we talked about the situation, the site as it is today, and the intent of the site, which has always been to help students, as opposed to insult professors. This professor is now helping the site by providing feedback to the new features from a professor's point of view, which is something I have not looked into before.
They declared war. And sat. And waited. And dropped passifist pamphlets on Germany.
Guaranteeing the integrety of the Polish borders would have involved the British and French using their 4-1 numerical superiority on Germany's western border in 1939 to actually come to the aid of the Poles.
2) If the law says "thou shalt not make a product that can copy money", then Adobe would be exhibiting gross negligence (at the very least) if their product was in fact able to produce lifelike copies of money.
That's rather the same logic that banned DeCSS for so long. "We don't want people copying these things, so lets get rid of their ability to do something (almost) completely unrelated to copying these things." Photoshop is irrelevant to copying money unless you want to do something legal, like change its size. If you just want to copy it, scan it into a nice, uncompressed bitmap and send it to the printer.
Sure, you could use Photoshop in the process of copying money, just like you could bypass a DVD's region code before doing a bit by bit copy of the DVD, but you'd just be making more work for yourself and not accomplishing much.
I just think that was the most craptacular review I've ever read.
Does that include the one about the book "evaluating" eXtreme Programming that was posted a few days ago? At least this review actually talked about the book itself.
This is the constant claim of the meaning of computers outpacing humans at chess, and it's complete BS.
Machines have been outpacing humans in various endeavours for years. Eventually computers will be powerful enough and well programmed enough that they'll never lose (although they certainly will still draw).
Big deal. Either show me the sprinter who can beat a formula 1 or show me the movement to claim there are no longer human champions in speed. I don't see either of those, so I don't see why it should matter for a mental game.
I see no reason why we should care if computers can someday see all possible positions 35 moves out. Chess isn't about that. Chess is a game of reason, of insight, of spacial perception, of memory, of stamina (you try concentrating on one thing for 6 hours), and of emotion. Seeing forcing variations a dozen moves out is rarely part of the game for humans, and plenty of players have risen to the top of the game almost never calculating beyond 2 or 3 moves out. Giving a machine an 800HP engine and wheels takes absolutely nothing away from the human accomplishment of mastering the game.
As Doug Rosenberg says "I don't want to be nearby when somebody decides to deploy an air traffic control system or some missile-targeting software that has been developed with no written requirements, and where the programmers made the design up as they went along." At least don't say you weren't warned!
XP, like any other process, fits some places and doesn't fit others. While some XP nut-cases may claim otherwise (just like people who market Rational products may claim that RUP should be used for everything), I've never seen the claim made in the pro-XP literature that XP was good for everything.
XP is appropriate for projects where:
Requirements are likely to change or are not well understood.
The customer is readily available
The team is reasonably experienced in the tools being used
etc
Air traffic control and missile guidence, while hopefully satisfying the third item up there, don't satisfy the first two. The customer is generally unavailable (I'm guessing here), and the requirements are understood remarkably well. Further, since these would be critical government projects, you wouldn't even have the choice to use XP. Heavy up front documentation is the only way to go on them.
Perhaps a better statement would be "I'd hate to be around when a major company decides to deploy an accounting system that has been developed with written requirements that aren't in the form I'm used to (user stories) and where the programmers modified the design to suit shifting requirements as they went along." Except, of course, that that is exactly how XP got started and it worked just fine (on a project that had previously been failing).
If memory serves, Beck disagrees. Unit testing frameworks can be put in independently of the rest of the XP system. Pair programming maybe. Everything else is only postulated to work on an all or nothing basis.
In other words, perhaps science fiction is suffering from too much science!
On the other hand, fantasy worlds like Tolkien's are completely unreachable, unimaginable in reality.
All in all, good observations. Not much in science fiction is new, and much of what was new is no longer fiction.
However, I think the simpler point is that literature doesn't survive in a vacuum. Science fiction hasn't had the support of either imagination-inspiring reality (as in the 60s) or high quality instanciations in other genres (read: Sci-fi movies and TV have sucked recently). On the other hand, tolkienesque fantasy has been thriving recently in both games and movies (well, two movies anyway). This makes fantasy literature that would be barely tolerable in a vaccuum potentially enjoyable, as the reader fills in the author's deficiencies with his own imagination.
I use a trackball that's controlled by my index and middle finger at home and in my office. (Yes, I have an office. Neener-neener.) Most computers have mice. I can't imagine that the motions of my whole arm for a mouse (or my thumb for the other kind of trackballs) would mimic those of my two fingers closely enough for me to sign anything anywhere that doesn't have the same or similar trackball that I'm used to.
Two words: Emminent Domain. When someone's property is needed by the governement for the public good, the government can appropriate it for pretty much whatever they deem it's worth. (Courts rarely prevent this, no matter how egregious an abuse by a governmental entity.) Linux is used in National Security situations and powers a good deal of the Internet. Having Linux remain free is of serious national interest. Claim emminent domain over SCO's intellectual property. If they fork over the disputed code, just take that and put it in the public domain. If they resist, raid them and take all of Unixware. I'll leave it to the bean counters to determine the appropriate worth of a dying piece of software from a dying company.
Standard IANAL, however a specific complaint (as in, a filed legal action) would be the one thing that SCO could not be sued over regardless of the claims made. Statements made in a suit are not actionable.
Slashdot Mirror
In US-Visit you are not taken over to a table where your fingers are guided over ink and paper by a police officer. You put your hand on a scanner, just like NOC access at any number of security-focused companies.
Since when is the standard for all US policy "would it have stopped the September 11 attacks"? US-Visit has managed to catch thousands of people trying to enter the US while legally banned from doing so. It is not the least bit invasive -- as you said, if you're prints aren't there to be matched, they've got nothing more from you. It's a simple biometric identification system, like the photo on your passport is. National customs services have every right to know exactly who is entering their country. I'm sure your wife can attest to the seriousness with which the British passport control stations are taken.
Oh, and lets not forget that one of the post-September 11th attacks that was foiled was attempted by a British citizen. Yes, we tend to like you, and you tend to like us. But it's not like we get to go through the short line at Gatwick.
Long standing patent office policy had been "We don't patent mere business processes". SCOTUS stepped in a while back (10 or 15 years, maybe) and said "Yes you will patent business processes, so long as they meet the standards of other patents.", giving the patent office an impossible workload and requiring that they patent bullshit.
I really hate having to quote my own post in reply to a post replying to my post.
Here's a nice list of some that you've probably heard of:t ml
http://digitalenterprise.org/ip/patented_models.h
That's because you don't patent the software technology itself -- you patent the business process for using the software. Yes, this means you can have a patent that covers use of software owned by someone else, and written by them long before your patent, so long as your use is "non-obvious and novel" or some such. The technology itself is irrelevant to the patent, as is the implementation or lack thereof.
Long standing patent office policy had been "We don't patent mere business processes". SCOTUS stepped in a while back (10 or 15 years, maybe) and said "Yes you will patent business processes, so long as they meet the standards of other patents.", giving the patent office an impossible workload and requiring that they patent bullshit.
Of course, the patent was FILED in April of 2000. I thought that's when art needed to be prior to. Meaning, of course, that the companies he's suing are prior art.
Job markets vary considerably by region. Being willing to work anywhere for your first couple of years can go a long way toward mitigating the need, in some areas, to be willing to do anything. If you want to do network engineering, then two years of systems development in Po-dunk (wherever that is for you) will get you a lot closer to network engineering in Glitsville than 2 years of answering phones in Glitsville will, and will put you higher on the food chain when you get there.
Finally, if you are qualified to do network engineering more than support, and it's clear from your education and background that you don't want to do support, why would I (were I the manager of a support team) want to hire you? Sure, you'd might be a good member of my team -- for the 3 months between when you get fully up to speed and when you apply for the network engineering position down the hall. I don't need that kind of aggrivation.
An example of the difference: I teach at a community college. I have a poor memory for names. By the end of the term I have trouble remembering more than a couple dozen of my 120 or so students' names. Someone with face blindness wouldn't be able to recognize which ones were in his classes when walking around campus.
Since every electron has a pair somewhere in the universe whose spin will change when the electron in the computing device changes, how long will it be before someone playing DOOM XI unintentionally causes the navigation systems aboard the Narthon flagship to fail, leading to it inadvertantly straying into Drakoid space, setting off an interstellar conflict that eventually leads to the destruction of all life in our galaxy?
I teach at a community college in Minnesota. I have trouble making out the handwriting of around 20% of my students, and I guarantee you that I have better pattern-recognition skills than a consumer computer 10 years from now will have.
I'm rooting FOR Amazon in a patent case? Ow ow ow ow ow. It hurts!
Come to think of it, electrons through copper are about 2/3 the speed of light through air, so unless they're way slower through semiconductors, it's not a speed of travel issue, it's a data/time issue.
For anyone not familiar with the difference, propogation is the time it takes any particular bit to get from a to b (and is the big downside of using satellites). Transmission is the number of bits per second sent. It's like two cars going from a to b. They can both get there in 10 minutes, but the one carrying 5 passengers is transmitting more than the the one with the lone driver.
What Intel seems to be discussing is much faster transmission rates though the line (ie: bandwidth), which in itself is a really good thing if it's being done at reasonable heat and power levels.
February 10th blog entry
In part:
TeacherReviews.com is coming back, and it's going to be better than ever - for both students and professors.
The professor who threatened a lawsuit has decided to drop the case. This happened after we talked about the situation, the site as it is today, and the intent of the site, which has always been to help students, as opposed to insult professors. This professor is now helping the site by providing feedback to the new features from a professor's point of view, which is something I have not looked into before.
I'm sure Taco would love it. He uses a dial-up, you know.
Guaranteeing the integrety of the Polish borders would have involved the British and French using their 4-1 numerical superiority on Germany's western border in 1939 to actually come to the aid of the Poles.
That's rather the same logic that banned DeCSS for so long. "We don't want people copying these things, so lets get rid of their ability to do something (almost) completely unrelated to copying these things." Photoshop is irrelevant to copying money unless you want to do something legal, like change its size. If you just want to copy it, scan it into a nice, uncompressed bitmap and send it to the printer.
Sure, you could use Photoshop in the process of copying money, just like you could bypass a DVD's region code before doing a bit by bit copy of the DVD, but you'd just be making more work for yourself and not accomplishing much.
The guy left on the station.
The guy who gave the tours.
Boomer.
(Did none of you actually pay ATTENTION to the end of the second night?????)
Does that include the one about the book "evaluating" eXtreme Programming that was posted a few days ago? At least this review actually talked about the book itself.
This is the constant claim of the meaning of computers outpacing humans at chess, and it's complete BS.
Machines have been outpacing humans in various endeavours for years. Eventually computers will be powerful enough and well programmed enough that they'll never lose (although they certainly will still draw).
Big deal. Either show me the sprinter who can beat a formula 1 or show me the movement to claim there are no longer human champions in speed. I don't see either of those, so I don't see why it should matter for a mental game.
I see no reason why we should care if computers can someday see all possible positions 35 moves out. Chess isn't about that. Chess is a game of reason, of insight, of spacial perception, of memory, of stamina (you try concentrating on one thing for 6 hours), and of emotion. Seeing forcing variations a dozen moves out is rarely part of the game for humans, and plenty of players have risen to the top of the game almost never calculating beyond 2 or 3 moves out. Giving a machine an 800HP engine and wheels takes absolutely nothing away from the human accomplishment of mastering the game.
XP, like any other process, fits some places and doesn't fit others. While some XP nut-cases may claim otherwise (just like people who market Rational products may claim that RUP should be used for everything), I've never seen the claim made in the pro-XP literature that XP was good for everything.
XP is appropriate for projects where:
Requirements are likely to change or are not well understood.
The customer is readily available
The team is reasonably experienced in the tools being used
etc
Air traffic control and missile guidence, while hopefully satisfying the third item up there, don't satisfy the first two. The customer is generally unavailable (I'm guessing here), and the requirements are understood remarkably well. Further, since these would be critical government projects, you wouldn't even have the choice to use XP. Heavy up front documentation is the only way to go on them.
Perhaps a better statement would be "I'd hate to be around when a major company decides to deploy an accounting system that has been developed with written requirements that aren't in the form I'm used to (user stories) and where the programmers modified the design to suit shifting requirements as they went along." Except, of course, that that is exactly how XP got started and it worked just fine (on a project that had previously been failing).
If memory serves, Beck disagrees.
Unit testing frameworks can be put in independently of the rest of the XP system. Pair programming maybe. Everything else is only postulated to work on an all or nothing basis.
In other words, perhaps science fiction is suffering from too much science!
On the other hand, fantasy worlds like Tolkien's are completely unreachable, unimaginable in reality.
All in all, good observations. Not much in science fiction is new, and much of what was new is no longer fiction.
However, I think the simpler point is that literature doesn't survive in a vacuum. Science fiction hasn't had the support of either imagination-inspiring reality (as in the 60s) or high quality instanciations in other genres (read: Sci-fi movies and TV have sucked recently). On the other hand, tolkienesque fantasy has been thriving recently in both games and movies (well, two movies anyway). This makes fantasy literature that would be barely tolerable in a vaccuum potentially enjoyable, as the reader fills in the author's deficiencies with his own imagination.
I use a trackball that's controlled by my index and middle finger at home and in my office.
(Yes, I have an office. Neener-neener.)
Most computers have mice.
I can't imagine that the motions of my whole arm for a mouse (or my thumb for the other kind of trackballs) would mimic those of my two fingers closely enough for me to sign anything anywhere that doesn't have the same or similar trackball that I'm used to.
Two words: Emminent Domain.
When someone's property is needed by the governement for the public good, the government can appropriate it for pretty much whatever they deem it's worth. (Courts rarely prevent this, no matter how egregious an abuse by a governmental entity.)
Linux is used in National Security situations and powers a good deal of the Internet. Having Linux remain free is of serious national interest. Claim emminent domain over SCO's intellectual property. If they fork over the disputed code, just take that and put it in the public domain. If they resist, raid them and take all of Unixware.
I'll leave it to the bean counters to determine the appropriate worth of a dying piece of software from a dying company.
Standard IANAL, however a specific complaint (as in, a filed legal action) would be the one thing that SCO could not be sued over regardless of the claims made. Statements made in a suit are not actionable.