Depends on the advance warning. With 30-40 years notice, we'd probably have time to send out a scout team to characterize the asteroid. Then, we could send a follow on team with the proper explosives and nukes. Hit it soon enough (at least a couple years before collision), and we could deflect it.
Some folks think that painting it is a better solution. You see, if you paint part of it white, it will deflect the asteroid by about 1 earth-radius 20 years ahead of time. (Less than the margin of error in our guess, most likely. Might knock it into us.) And, to paint a 100-meter or 1-kilometer rock takes A LOT of paint.
Anyways, the short of it is, if it's an asteroid, we can probably have 100 years notice if it's big enough (not today, but our detection ability is improving). If it's a comet, we might only have a few months notice. Then we'd be in trouble.
Y'know, the guy is obviously enthused about MS products, and likes spreading the word. He has 1 paragraph in a long article discussing OS X, and people jump down his throat. Here's an idea: let it go! Some people really do like Windows. Big deal. Neither Linux or Mac OS X is inherently superior than Windows-- they're different tools designed for many of the same project.
Why Slashdot chose to publish this troll of an article is beyond me. How so many Slashdot users are convinced that he's "wrong" and just needs to be "educated" is depressing. It's no wonder that people refer to Mac users as zealots and Linux as a religion. They're both unfair charges, but it's easy to see where people get the idea from.
Forget all that, disposable digital cameras are so three months ago. Now, people are going so far as renting real digital cameras. Although these guys, Big Day Snapshots, only seem to be targeting the wedding camera rental crowd. Maybe that's all we really want anyways-- to rent a real digicam and have the stuff processed and sent to us to use.
This idea is a silly, feel-good proposal that will not compensate artists in a reasonable way. Instead, people will assign their voucher to a friend, whether or not they'd ever pay for any of their music. Cash is a very effective way to compensate artists, and consumers choosing to use their own cash (not some free voucher that every taxpayer will subsidize) is the best way to allocate these scarce dollars.
Music consumers like these "compulsary licensing" schemes because it means that non-music listening people will be forced to subsidize their favorite things. Seems like a good idea. Let's require poor kids to pay $10 a year so the rich kid driving his dad's Ferrari doesn't have to spend an extra $100 a year on his music.
It's nothing more than a naked political grab, and the EFF is losing mainstream support because of their regressive stance.
I thought that the FCC was trying to obfuscate the issue and put this forth as an anti-piracy feature while downplaying the anti-consumer nature of it. But after reading the first 10 pages of their report, I'm not so sure. These guys either 1) do not know how the hell the system will work, or 2) can't explain it anyone.
I've read 5-6 articles on the subject, and not one discusses the mechanics of how this could possibly work. It will allow consumers to make unlimited copies, but won't allow us to distribute it over the internet? How the heck will any devide know whether it's being copied over the internet or over my local network? Obviously it restricts my ability to copy the programs I record, otherwise it couldn't do anything else.
Either the FCC commissioners are the most self-deluded bureaucrats outside of the Pentagon, or they think they can tell us bald-faced lies in order to advance their agenda. C'mon, it will restrict copying by consumers, how can they lie like that and not get called for it? Please, News.com, Wired, WSJ, NY Times, please call these guys out for their blatant lies. It's not spin, it's not a viewpoint, they are straight lies. Will the press ever get its act together?
Did you try doing the math? If the average American listens to music 1 hour a day, and each song is 4 minutes, that's 15 songs a day. 5475 songs/ year. At your compensation rates, that works out to $0.55/year for every man, woman & child. Whatta deal! The record industry would now have total revenue of about $160 million. If a typical employee earns $50,000/ year, the recorded music industry could employ about 3300 people. How many good record can you produce with 3300 people? 'course, there'd be no money left to actually pay the artists.
Honestly, schemes like this where a clearly unsustainable business model is proposed are just silly. Maybe if everyone had to pay $50/year for unlimited music there'd be a working model. And that estimate of 15 songs/person/day is on the high side of reality. Most people don't download music. And many songs would be downloaded once and played repeatedly on devices not connected to the computer.
I think this scheme would actually generate closer to $15 million, which Apple has already exceeded all by itself. And this would kill CD sales. Why would the record industry choose to drastically lower their revenue & potential revenue for one outlet (online sales), while irrerparably (sp?) harming their sales in their primary outlet (CD sales)? Any record label executive who pursued this would be sued by their shareholders, and probably removed by the board.
It's pretty clear you're a lot more knowledgable on this subject than I am. But isn't it true that most of records of past CMEs are based on those directed towards earth? If they weren't at least somewhat in our direction, we'd be unlinkely to know about them (especially in the past). A second question: given the relative short time frame that these CMEs occured over, is it possible/likely/certain that both CMEs came from the same spot on the sun? Is the sun's rotation much greater than 24 hours? If so, that would strongly imply that these were not independent events, since they occured in the same region of the sun.
If, however, we do have 100+ years date on all CME events, we would be able to say that it's a statistical anomaly. I just think it's more likely that we don't understand enough about the sun's behavior to properly characerize this event.
When I read this line, "I have not seen anything like it in my entire career as a solar physicist. The probability of this happening is so low that it is a statistical anomaly.", I cringed. Either a) This guy thinks his model is great & really believes that this is a 1/1,000,000,000 event, or b) he knows that this indicates a whole in his model, but the reporter ripped the quote out of context to make the story more sensational.
A little statistics primer is in order. In order to quote odds on anything, a statistician needs a model, generally based on existing data. When there is an event that's off the charts, it will usually indicate to the scientist (or engineer) that there is a deficiency in their model (or their process is out of control, for manufacturing types). If I were a solas scientist, this event would indicate to me that the model is not adequate for predicting this sort of thing. Which makes sense, since we probably only have 40 years worth of data; you expect to be thrown a curve-ball every now and then.
So I doubt it really is a statistical anomanly; maybe these solar-flare pairs occur every 50 years or so & that's why we haven't seen it before. But either the reporter needs to better explain the meaning of the quote, or the quotee needs to take a basic course on the limits of statistical probability.
Good idea, but no real reason to mange the text. Just ask them to initial a box or enter same non-mangled text, and it should work. From the sounds of it, as long as your blog isn't cookie-cutter, the spam-bots will probably ignore it.
I predict you will be waiting a very long time for your uber music service. The idea of not wanting to buy from a store that does business with the RIAA is laughable. Your concept of paying the artists 75% of the costs is another nice one, too; tell me, how many items that sell for under a dollar have margins of less than 25%? I suppose that you would also require that the independent labels pay for all costs of producing the record and are limited in the return that they make.
Anyways, good luck waiting for this service. I doubt you could raise enough capital to run the server farms, as it looks like a terrible business proposition.
And honestly, enough complaining about the "evil" record labels and the angelic recording artists. No one is forced to sign a record label contract with a gun to their head. THe artists that go the major label route have obviously done the calculation and decided that's what they want to do. Many of the these artists are every bit as greedy as the record label execs (who, despite their consistent ability to ignore their contracts and steal from their performers, are only marginally profitable), and many record label employeers do it more out of love for music than money.
Until then, go ahead and stick with your RIAA-free music. I'm sure there are hundreds of labels that put out great music, and I bet most of these guys sell their stuff direct. But unless the artists pays for the album production out of their own pockets, they'll never see anywhere close to 75% of the retail cost going straight back to them.
Check out who wrote this... why, it's Rob Enderle if the Enderle. A research analyst who doesn't bother to find the facts before writing. Instead, he listens to the Linux Zealots and assumes they must be wrong. Brilliant!
Other than his ridiculous invocation of the murder of 3,000 people on September 11, it's a well-written piece. He'll love coming to Slashdot to read the perceptions of others based on 3rd-hand sources of his article. And his categorization of the different groups is pretty good. Sadly, he acts as if MS zealots don't exist, nor even MS priests. Takes the oppurtunity to slur OS/2 and Macs while he's at it though.
Curious how he reveals his own bias by attacking 3 of the 4 (he says nice things about BSD users, though) most signifiant OS's of the last 15 years, while giving the dominant one a free pass.A Windows priest, perhaps?
A lot of the respondents below are missing Little Brother's point. Salon had a great interview with Bev Harris disussing this. Anytime there is no paper trail, there's always going to be a question about the veracity of the audit log. For example, the machines could be tampered with at the point of voting. Yes, I'm sure the open-source wizards would come up with the perfect solution, because we all know there are no vulnerabilities in Linux, right?
The solution is simple. Touch screen voting. The machine prints a receipt with your choices on it, printed in plain English (or Spanish, Chinese, etc). This receipt is put into a ballot box after the voter verifies it. The ballot box is sealed, and saved for the next few months in case there is a recount. During the recount, the ballots are manually counted (or perhaps there's a 2D bar code along with the voter choices). Anything else, and everytime there is an election upset (Truman v. Dewey) or someone commits fraud to steal an election (Georgia 2002), there will always be a question about the accuracy of the electronic voting system.
Forbes support SCO against Linux et.al. User of Linux should have to pay SCO license fees.
Forbers supports Cisco against Linux. Cisco should be able to take Linux code and do whatever they want.
So riddle me this: should Cisco have to pay SCO for using GPL'ed Linux code? Or should Cisco be able to use it for free, since they don't want to share? I'm sure Forbes will tackle this issue in their next article. I'll be holding my breath waiting for the un-biased writer on the SCO/Linux beat to do his typical bang-up job.
The writer of the article seems to have drunken (grammer? [sp?]) the Kool-Aid. The giveaway is
In a way, Robertson is trying to do with SIP what he did for MP3 and later with Linux with his still-kicking Lindows operating system: Take a technology that works well but is understood only by the geekiest of computer users, simplify it to its most basic form, and market it to typical consumers directly.
OK, Robertson may have capitalized on these trends as they were becoming mainstream, but he's really been only a marginally succesful player in both endeavors. He's very good at generating publicity and anticipating trends, but I don't think he's really created wealth for anybody else just yet (he's done well for himself, though). That quote is just a throaway line that sounds grandiose but says very little, and what it does say is essentially wrong.
Maybe Michael Robertson portends the success of the SIP protocol. But he will be responnsible for its success in, at best, a very minor way. Expect him to attract lawsuits and press coverage.
The last line in the article, a quote from CEO Jacobs, says it all:
"It's 10 million bucks, but maybe I can make it back, and maybe [Halderman] can learn a little bit more about our technology so as not to call it brain dead."
Or, you could design a system that isn't braindead.
The saddest part is that they acknowledge this will only deter casual copying, i.e., fair-use. The real CD pirates (the ones selling pirated CDs) will just laugh, and no matter what system they use, it will get uploaded to Kazaa (people ripped their old 45s and put them up on Napster for crying out loud). So we have a system which prevents "honest" customers from listening to their music on their iPod, does nada to prevent uploading to Kazaa, and less than nothing to stop CD pirates.
Will somebody please give these guys a giant dope-slap to the back of their heads?
Cringley points out how standard engineering tools, in this case Taguchi's Design of Experiments (DOE) methods, can be used to increase the effectiveness of advertising. Claiming that he "plugs spam" is a complete mis-reading of the article. He points out the original study used "spam" in order to prove it's effectiveness; the study isn't dated.
DOE is how engineers make complex design decisions with as few experiments as possible. Mostly, he uses eBay as an example. He slightly mis-reads what Taguchi's DOE is about when he says that the old eBay data can be mined to re-create an orthogonal array. The whole point of DOE is a priori deciding what experiments to run, instead of the shot-gun approach used in the past. If you're gonna use data mining, then you don't really need Taguchi excpet for data reduction.
Personally, I recommended this approach to a high-volume eBay seller a couple years ago. He sells widgets with 3-4 different features (style, size, color), and uses a variety of terms to describe them (i.e. [stunning|beautiful|awesome] [rare|unique|one-of-a-kind]). Basically, he could run 16 or so tests using these various terms in the right combination, and determine which combinations were likely to work best. Ultimately, he didn't go down that route, but I'm pretty sure this is what Cringley was getting to before he got it confused w/ data mining.
Using data mining to do the Taguchi stuff is tough, b/c there are too many uncontrolled factors. I'm sure he'll get 100 letters on the topic from DOE experts and write a follow-up column next week.
As for spammers, I bet they start using DOE techniques, as they'll have to as fewe & fewer emails are getting through, making it a less profitable venture. Of course, legitimate advertisiers should be using the same techniques, and maybe they do. But DOE can be applied to any process, whether it is building cars, designing rockets, baking cookies, selling on eBay and, yes, sending spam.
Geeze, RTFA. Or at least search TFA. The article says,
Arlene McCarthy regrettably added that in all the years that she had been an MEP, she had not been treated in such an aggressive manner. She said she and her staff had been bullied and harassed.
Ok, apparently the submitter of the story has a much better idea of what makes the MEPs tick than the write of the real article does. I mean, she says she was harassed-- maybe there were dozens of people lobbying her about the patents while walking to her car. I don't know. But the article clearly does not state that she feels harassed because, "they are suddenly being lobbied by numerous concerned citizens." The idea that she considers lobbying by citizens to be harassment is just a BS statement thrown in as redmeat to the anti-patent Slashdot crowd. It worked.
Obviously, the writer has an agenda, which is clear based on the link for the software patents. By knowingly mis-representing and mis-stating the complaint of the MEP, he only serves to call into question his own ethics. Ya, the story submitter seems like just the type who might actually bully an MEP, because he knows he's right. Slashdot lives down to its reputation once again.
And yeah, software patents seems like a bad idea (at least as implemented in the USA). That doesn't excuse the deliberate misrepresentation of facts (or, obviously, actual harrasment) by its opponents.
OK, so then who are the maintainers of the system answerable to-- whoever pays the bill, right? While there's always the possibility of a political bias creeping into the system, I think the best way to prevent is by having the stakeholders run the system. The libraries pay the bill, the libraries are ultimately going to be the ones in control.
I had no idea Dewey Decimal system was copyrighted. I also have no opinion on this lawsuit. However, I don't understand the outrage being directed at the maintainers of the system for charging to maintain it. I bet it takes money to maintain the Dewey Decimal system. Libraries benefit from Dewey. Ergo, libraries should pay to maintain it. Am I missing something? $500 is not a lot of money for just about any library.
Who do you suggest pay to maintain the system and catlog the works-- a governmnet entity, or maybe a self-organized group of volunteers. Seems the system works well, and provides a good value for the customers. How else would libraries organize their books-- alphabetically by author, ISBN number, or self-catalog every item that comes in? How much staff time would be spent cataloging each book. If it took 1 staff person 2 hours a week, that would cost a least double the current $500/year. For most libraries, it would take much more effort.
DDS offers a valuable service; why the outrage at collecting fees for that service?
Geeze, i read 100 posts, and no one pointed out the error in the original Slashdot story: the parents of the victims are suing, not the parents of the perpatrators. RTFA article before posting your social commentary.
Yes, Verisign is evil and the *.com thing is ridiculous. But they may be rotating typo-corretions in order to gather data. They probably want to come up w/ a better typo-correcting method, and that seems a good way to do it. Not that I approve. Boy, once they get a few thousand people hitting the same typo, do you think a "sister company" will register the domain?
Well, my friend Dave Copeland posted a couple of musings to RedPaper. Someone even decided to plunk down the $0.15! If you don't believe me, check it out for yourselves here. And who says micropayments can't work!
Those numbers seem about right, but it's actually.912g at 300 kilometers, not 300 meters. And 0.24g, while significantly reduced, is certainly non-trivial. And of course, not all satellites are geosynchronous; it's probably the most populare orbit these days, although there are a about 100 miles for things like taking pictures of the planet. And the point of the space elevator isn't just to put satellites into orbit, it's to provide a head-start for spacecraft going elsewhere.
There are some slight inconsistencies in your post, but this is a complicated problem and largely counter-intuitive. One common misperception is that gravity is greatly reduced in orbit; it isn't. The force of gravity at typical orbits is about 90% of sea-level; I think that's at ISS altitudes. At geosynchronous orbit, the gravity is much less.
Anyways, once something is at the end of that cable, it will have already achieved orbital velocity, that's the beauty of the system. We think of there not being gravity in orbit b/c it's a weightless environment. You're in free-fall, which leads to the weighless sensation. But without gravity, ISS etc., would quickly leave orbit and head into the solar system.
I agree. I did not receive the virus directly from anyone, but I had dozens of emails sent to me warning about the infection on my computer (funny, since I still use Pine on that account). And a bunch of those actually contained the virus. As Jon Stewart might say, (rubbing eye) Waaaa? So not only are these folks sending more emai, they're often spreading the virus. Scratch that. They're knowingly spreading the virus. Aren't there laws about that sort of thing?
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the advance warning. With 30-40 years notice, we'd probably have time to send out a scout team to characterize the asteroid. Then, we could send a follow on team with the proper explosives and nukes. Hit it soon enough (at least a couple years before collision), and we could deflect it.
Some folks think that painting it is a better solution. You see, if you paint part of it white, it will deflect the asteroid by about 1 earth-radius 20 years ahead of time. (Less than the margin of error in our guess, most likely. Might knock it into us.) And, to paint a 100-meter or 1-kilometer rock takes A LOT of paint.
Anyways, the short of it is, if it's an asteroid, we can probably have 100 years notice if it's big enough (not today, but our detection ability is improving). If it's a comet, we might only have a few months notice. Then we'd be in trouble.
Y'know, the guy is obviously enthused about MS products, and likes spreading the word. He has 1 paragraph in a long article discussing OS X, and people jump down his throat. Here's an idea: let it go! Some people really do like Windows. Big deal. Neither Linux or Mac OS X is inherently superior than Windows-- they're different tools designed for many of the same project.
Why Slashdot chose to publish this troll of an article is beyond me. How so many Slashdot users are convinced that he's "wrong" and just needs to be "educated" is depressing. It's no wonder that people refer to Mac users as zealots and Linux as a religion. They're both unfair charges, but it's easy to see where people get the idea from.
Mod me down if you must, -1, He Hurt my Feelings.
Forget all that, disposable digital cameras are so three months ago. Now, people are going so far as renting real digital cameras. Although these guys, Big Day Snapshots, only seem to be targeting the wedding camera rental crowd. Maybe that's all we really want anyways-- to rent a real digicam and have the stuff processed and sent to us to use.
This idea is a silly, feel-good proposal that will not compensate artists in a reasonable way. Instead, people will assign their voucher to a friend, whether or not they'd ever pay for any of their music. Cash is a very effective way to compensate artists, and consumers choosing to use their own cash (not some free voucher that every taxpayer will subsidize) is the best way to allocate these scarce dollars.
Music consumers like these "compulsary licensing" schemes because it means that non-music listening people will be forced to subsidize their favorite things. Seems like a good idea. Let's require poor kids to pay $10 a year so the rich kid driving his dad's Ferrari doesn't have to spend an extra $100 a year on his music.
It's nothing more than a naked political grab, and the EFF is losing mainstream support because of their regressive stance.
I thought that the FCC was trying to obfuscate the issue and put this forth as an anti-piracy feature while downplaying the anti-consumer nature of it. But after reading the first 10 pages of their report, I'm not so sure. These guys either 1) do not know how the hell the system will work, or 2) can't explain it anyone.
I've read 5-6 articles on the subject, and not one discusses the mechanics of how this could possibly work. It will allow consumers to make unlimited copies, but won't allow us to distribute it over the internet? How the heck will any devide know whether it's being copied over the internet or over my local network? Obviously it restricts my ability to copy the programs I record, otherwise it couldn't do anything else.
Either the FCC commissioners are the most self-deluded bureaucrats outside of the Pentagon, or they think they can tell us bald-faced lies in order to advance their agenda. C'mon, it will restrict copying by consumers, how can they lie like that and not get called for it? Please, News.com, Wired, WSJ, NY Times, please call these guys out for their blatant lies. It's not spin, it's not a viewpoint, they are straight lies. Will the press ever get its act together?
Did you try doing the math? If the average American listens to music 1 hour a day, and each song is 4 minutes, that's 15 songs a day. 5475 songs/ year. At your compensation rates, that works out to $0.55/year for every man, woman & child. Whatta deal! The record industry would now have total revenue of about $160 million. If a typical employee earns $50,000/ year, the recorded music industry could employ about 3300 people. How many good record can you produce with 3300 people? 'course, there'd be no money left to actually pay the artists.
Honestly, schemes like this where a clearly unsustainable business model is proposed are just silly. Maybe if everyone had to pay $50/year for unlimited music there'd be a working model. And that estimate of 15 songs/person/day is on the high side of reality. Most people don't download music. And many songs would be downloaded once and played repeatedly on devices not connected to the computer.
I think this scheme would actually generate closer to $15 million, which Apple has already exceeded all by itself. And this would kill CD sales. Why would the record industry choose to drastically lower their revenue & potential revenue for one outlet (online sales), while irrerparably (sp?) harming their sales in their primary outlet (CD sales)? Any record label executive who pursued this would be sued by their shareholders, and probably removed by the board.
It's pretty clear you're a lot more knowledgable on this subject than I am. But isn't it true that most of records of past CMEs are based on those directed towards earth? If they weren't at least somewhat in our direction, we'd be unlinkely to know about them (especially in the past). A second question: given the relative short time frame that these CMEs occured over, is it possible/likely/certain that both CMEs came from the same spot on the sun? Is the sun's rotation much greater than 24 hours? If so, that would strongly imply that these were not independent events, since they occured in the same region of the sun.
If, however, we do have 100+ years date on all CME events, we would be able to say that it's a statistical anomaly. I just think it's more likely that we don't understand enough about the sun's behavior to properly characerize this event.
When I read this line, "I have not seen anything like it in my entire career as a solar physicist. The probability of this happening is so low that it is a statistical anomaly.", I cringed. Either a) This guy thinks his model is great & really believes that this is a 1/1,000,000,000 event, or b) he knows that this indicates a whole in his model, but the reporter ripped the quote out of context to make the story more sensational.
A little statistics primer is in order. In order to quote odds on anything, a statistician needs a model, generally based on existing data. When there is an event that's off the charts, it will usually indicate to the scientist (or engineer) that there is a deficiency in their model (or their process is out of control, for manufacturing types). If I were a solas scientist, this event would indicate to me that the model is not adequate for predicting this sort of thing. Which makes sense, since we probably only have 40 years worth of data; you expect to be thrown a curve-ball every now and then.
So I doubt it really is a statistical anomanly; maybe these solar-flare pairs occur every 50 years or so & that's why we haven't seen it before. But either the reporter needs to better explain the meaning of the quote, or the quotee needs to take a basic course on the limits of statistical probability.
Good idea, but no real reason to mange the text. Just ask them to initial a box or enter same non-mangled text, and it should work. From the sounds of it, as long as your blog isn't cookie-cutter, the spam-bots will probably ignore it.
I predict you will be waiting a very long time for your uber music service. The idea of not wanting to buy from a store that does business with the RIAA is laughable. Your concept of paying the artists 75% of the costs is another nice one, too; tell me, how many items that sell for under a dollar have margins of less than 25%? I suppose that you would also require that the independent labels pay for all costs of producing the record and are limited in the return that they make.
Anyways, good luck waiting for this service. I doubt you could raise enough capital to run the server farms, as it looks like a terrible business proposition.
And honestly, enough complaining about the "evil" record labels and the angelic recording artists. No one is forced to sign a record label contract with a gun to their head. THe artists that go the major label route have obviously done the calculation and decided that's what they want to do. Many of the these artists are every bit as greedy as the record label execs (who, despite their consistent ability to ignore their contracts and steal from their performers, are only marginally profitable), and many record label employeers do it more out of love for music than money.
Until then, go ahead and stick with your RIAA-free music. I'm sure there are hundreds of labels that put out great music, and I bet most of these guys sell their stuff direct. But unless the artists pays for the album production out of their own pockets, they'll never see anywhere close to 75% of the retail cost going straight back to them.
Check out who wrote this... why, it's Rob Enderle if the Enderle. A research analyst who doesn't bother to find the facts before writing. Instead, he listens to the Linux Zealots and assumes they must be wrong. Brilliant!
Other than his ridiculous invocation of the murder of 3,000 people on September 11, it's a well-written piece. He'll love coming to Slashdot to read the perceptions of others based on 3rd-hand sources of his article. And his categorization of the different groups is pretty good. Sadly, he acts as if MS zealots don't exist, nor even MS priests. Takes the oppurtunity to slur OS/2 and Macs while he's at it though.
Curious how he reveals his own bias by attacking 3 of the 4 (he says nice things about BSD users, though) most signifiant OS's of the last 15 years, while giving the dominant one a free pass.A Windows priest, perhaps?
A lot of the respondents below are missing Little Brother's point. Salon had a great interview with Bev Harris disussing this. Anytime there is no paper trail, there's always going to be a question about the veracity of the audit log. For example, the machines could be tampered with at the point of voting. Yes, I'm sure the open-source wizards would come up with the perfect solution, because we all know there are no vulnerabilities in Linux, right?
The solution is simple. Touch screen voting. The machine prints a receipt with your choices on it, printed in plain English (or Spanish, Chinese, etc). This receipt is put into a ballot box after the voter verifies it. The ballot box is sealed, and saved for the next few months in case there is a recount. During the recount, the ballots are manually counted (or perhaps there's a 2D bar code along with the voter choices). Anything else, and everytime there is an election upset (Truman v. Dewey) or someone commits fraud to steal an election (Georgia 2002), there will always be a question about the accuracy of the electronic voting system.
Forbes support SCO against Linux et.al. User of Linux should have to pay SCO license fees.
Forbers supports Cisco against Linux. Cisco should be able to take Linux code and do whatever they want.
So riddle me this: should Cisco have to pay SCO for using GPL'ed Linux code? Or should Cisco be able to use it for free, since they don't want to share? I'm sure Forbes will tackle this issue in their next article. I'll be holding my breath waiting for the un-biased writer on the SCO/Linux beat to do his typical bang-up job.
Maybe Michael Robertson portends the success of the SIP protocol. But he will be responnsible for its success in, at best, a very minor way. Expect him to attract lawsuits and press coverage.
The saddest part is that they acknowledge this will only deter casual copying, i.e., fair-use. The real CD pirates (the ones selling pirated CDs) will just laugh, and no matter what system they use, it will get uploaded to Kazaa (people ripped their old 45s and put them up on Napster for crying out loud). So we have a system which prevents "honest" customers from listening to their music on their iPod, does nada to prevent uploading to Kazaa, and less than nothing to stop CD pirates.
Will somebody please give these guys a giant dope-slap to the back of their heads?
Cringley points out how standard engineering tools, in this case Taguchi's Design of Experiments (DOE) methods, can be used to increase the effectiveness of advertising. Claiming that he "plugs spam" is a complete mis-reading of the article. He points out the original study used "spam" in order to prove it's effectiveness; the study isn't dated.
DOE is how engineers make complex design decisions with as few experiments as possible. Mostly, he uses eBay as an example. He slightly mis-reads what Taguchi's DOE is about when he says that the old eBay data can be mined to re-create an orthogonal array. The whole point of DOE is a priori deciding what experiments to run, instead of the shot-gun approach used in the past. If you're gonna use data mining, then you don't really need Taguchi excpet for data reduction.
Personally, I recommended this approach to a high-volume eBay seller a couple years ago. He sells widgets with 3-4 different features (style, size, color), and uses a variety of terms to describe them (i.e. [stunning|beautiful|awesome] [rare|unique|one-of-a-kind]). Basically, he could run 16 or so tests using these various terms in the right combination, and determine which combinations were likely to work best. Ultimately, he didn't go down that route, but I'm pretty sure this is what Cringley was getting to before he got it confused w/ data mining.
Using data mining to do the Taguchi stuff is tough, b/c there are too many uncontrolled factors. I'm sure he'll get 100 letters on the topic from DOE experts and write a follow-up column next week.
As for spammers, I bet they start using DOE techniques, as they'll have to as fewe & fewer emails are getting through, making it a less profitable venture. Of course, legitimate advertisiers should be using the same techniques, and maybe they do. But DOE can be applied to any process, whether it is building cars, designing rockets, baking cookies, selling on eBay and, yes, sending spam.
Obviously, the writer has an agenda, which is clear based on the link for the software patents. By knowingly mis-representing and mis-stating the complaint of the MEP, he only serves to call into question his own ethics. Ya, the story submitter seems like just the type who might actually bully an MEP, because he knows he's right. Slashdot lives down to its reputation once again.
And yeah, software patents seems like a bad idea (at least as implemented in the USA). That doesn't excuse the deliberate misrepresentation of facts (or, obviously, actual harrasment) by its opponents.
OK, so then who are the maintainers of the system answerable to-- whoever pays the bill, right? While there's always the possibility of a political bias creeping into the system, I think the best way to prevent is by having the stakeholders run the system. The libraries pay the bill, the libraries are ultimately going to be the ones in control.
I had no idea Dewey Decimal system was copyrighted. I also have no opinion on this lawsuit. However, I don't understand the outrage being directed at the maintainers of the system for charging to maintain it. I bet it takes money to maintain the Dewey Decimal system. Libraries benefit from Dewey. Ergo, libraries should pay to maintain it. Am I missing something? $500 is not a lot of money for just about any library.
Who do you suggest pay to maintain the system and catlog the works-- a governmnet entity, or maybe a self-organized group of volunteers. Seems the system works well, and provides a good value for the customers. How else would libraries organize their books-- alphabetically by author, ISBN number, or self-catalog every item that comes in? How much staff time would be spent cataloging each book. If it took 1 staff person 2 hours a week, that would cost a least double the current $500/year. For most libraries, it would take much more effort.
DDS offers a valuable service; why the outrage at collecting fees for that service?
Geeze, i read 100 posts, and no one pointed out the error in the original Slashdot story: the parents of the victims are suing, not the parents of the perpatrators. RTFA article before posting your social commentary.
Yes, Verisign is evil and the *.com thing is ridiculous. But they may be rotating typo-corretions in order to gather data. They probably want to come up w/ a better typo-correcting method, and that seems a good way to do it. Not that I approve. Boy, once they get a few thousand people hitting the same typo, do you think a "sister company" will register the domain?
Sneaky bastards.
Well, my friend Dave Copeland posted a couple of musings to RedPaper. Someone even decided to plunk down the $0.15! If you don't believe me, check it out for yourselves here. And who says micropayments can't work!
Those numbers seem about right, but it's actually .912g at 300 kilometers, not 300 meters. And 0.24g, while significantly reduced, is certainly non-trivial. And of course, not all satellites are geosynchronous; it's probably the most populare orbit these days, although there are a about 100 miles for things like taking pictures of the planet. And the point of the space elevator isn't just to put satellites into orbit, it's to provide a head-start for spacecraft going elsewhere.
There are some slight inconsistencies in your post, but this is a complicated problem and largely counter-intuitive. One common misperception is that gravity is greatly reduced in orbit; it isn't. The force of gravity at typical orbits is about 90% of sea-level; I think that's at ISS altitudes. At geosynchronous orbit, the gravity is much less.
Anyways, once something is at the end of that cable, it will have already achieved orbital velocity, that's the beauty of the system. We think of there not being gravity in orbit b/c it's a weightless environment. You're in free-fall, which leads to the weighless sensation. But without gravity, ISS etc., would quickly leave orbit and head into the solar system.
I agree. I did not receive the virus directly from anyone, but I had dozens of emails sent to me warning about the infection on my computer (funny, since I still use Pine on that account). And a bunch of those actually contained the virus. As Jon Stewart might say, (rubbing eye) Waaaa? So not only are these folks sending more emai, they're often spreading the virus. Scratch that. They're knowingly spreading the virus. Aren't there laws about that sort of thing?