I stumbled upon a cool web page that will Daltonize images. Apparently, this is a way to run images through a filter, changing colours around to make them easier to distinguish for colour blind people.
I'm not colour blind myself, so I don't know how well it'd work on that particular image, but I hope it helps.
Let's assume (assumption number one) they mean the voltage of the received signal in the antenna is 20 billion times weaker than a watch battery.
Now, a watch battery is approximately 3 volts in voltage, if I recall correctly. 3 / 2e10 == 1.5e-10 V -- so if that's what they meant by signal strength, they're getting a voltage of 150 picovolts somewhere in the antenna.
P = U^2 / R. If we assume (assumption number two) they've got their antenna matched to 50 Ohm wherever they connect their antenna to their equipment. (1.5e-10)^2 / 50 = 4.5e-22 W == 450 yoctowatts. (That, incidentally, is also how far down the SI prefixes go.:-)
You wanted to know how many picowatts that is... well, that's 4.5e-10 picowatt -- or -184 dBm. This is probably the power they get in their connector after their antenna.
Or, in other words, 20 billion times weaker than a hypothetical watch battery that emits a RF signal at 3 Volt transmitting into a 50 ohm antenna.;-)
This, of course is assuming that's what they meant. They could have meant something else arbitrarilly entirely.
There's also the matter of economics. It's simply not economically possible to guard against every threat. If it were, then someone on this planet would be nigh-immortal.
Tell that to Fidel Castro.:-) Then again, look at Cuba's economy...
No. The FSF already covered that smart-ass cop out.
From GPL v. 2:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
I doubt platinum punch cards would qualify as a medium customarily used for software interchange. Nor, for that matter, a print-out in paper form, even if OCR-able.
Population density isn't the whole explanation though.
Here in Europe, for example -- Belgium, with a population density of 343 people/km^2, has realtively crappy broadband, with bandwidth caps of a few tens of gigabytes per month being prevalent with most ISPs. At least, last time I checked. I might be out of date.
Sweden, however, with a population density of just 22 people/km^2, has great broadband. I have uncapped cable at 24 Mbit/s down and 8 Mbit/s up, and I do use it rather heavilly, although I use far less than my total theoretical capacity. I haven't received any nastygrams from my ISP about this either. The very young wireless 3G broadband market, which used to have an industry standard of a 1 GB/month cap, has under the last few months come under competition, with most providers giving uncapped access. Broadband in rural areas is less spectacular, but ADSL is available in many areas, if you're lucky enough to have bought in before they ran out of space for equipment in your local telephone station. (A widespread problem right now, it seems.)
The most important piece of the puzzle is working competition between providers. Sure, a dense population helps, but it's in no way so significant as you make it out to be.
Except you'd probably want to carry a battery around for those times that you need to go "off the grid".
You might be able to squeeze battery capacity significantly by limiting speed when off the grid to improve range -- beause of reduced aerodynamic drag, as well as improved efficiency (most batteries don't like being discharged too fast for extended periods)
That'd make it pretty practical to install wireless power too. You'd only have to cover main streets in cities and non-urban main roads.
You might even want to throw a small ICE in there as an option, or on a trailer, for extended-range operation.
Hell, the most practical system might be simply to simply retrofit a Toyota Prius with a wireless electricity receiver. Then you could just gradually install wireless power transmission systems on main roads as demand arises. A retrofit of such a system might even be pretty cheap in an existing hybrid.
Require all traffic information messages to be signed using your car's private key, which is registered to your licence plate number. Also send the car's public key, signed by the DMV.
Other cars would be required to check for message authenticity by requesting a copy of public keys when it receives a signature it can't verify, then checking it against a copy of the DMV's public key to verify whether the car's keys are in fact authentic.
On abuse, all traffic messages are digitally signed, so finding the source of the fraudulent transmissions is trivial.
All of this is trivial to automate, the technology is fairly cheap, especially considering the cost of the rest of the system, and can be verified in a fraction of a second. It's the exact same technology used to verify the authenticity of web sites using SSL -- ever had to wait around for one of those checks to happen?
Might it be hacked? Not likely. Public key cryptography is a proven technology. The largest known vulnerability is if the DMV's private key were leaked. This isn't some kind of DRM red herring -- unlike with DRM, as an attacker you don't have control of the hardware verifying the keys in the first place. So you could hack your own car to accept fraudulent signatures, but that wouldn't really give you any advantages, now would it.
I wonder what video game Jack Thompson on the like will be trying to blame this on, and what insane laws will be passed to Stop This From Ever Happening Again(TM).
Seriously. This is a tragic incident, and I have the deepest sympathies for the families of all struck. But I predict a lot of knee-jerking in the days, weeks and months to come, which will showcase an even worse human behaviour, politicking and fear-mongering.
I don't want to diminish the significance of this event, but hundreds, possibly even thousands of people die in equally tragic human-created events every day -- most of them don't even make the news. Most of them are in other countries -- Darfur anybody? Remember that when you consider what happened here today, and when you see the long-standing ramifications and moral panic that will follow this.
A wise man once said, his name escapes me, and I paraphrase -- the world will be considered to be sane as soon as no new laws are passed, simply because some nut guns down a school full of people.
Actually, the GPL would be very slightly reduced in its effictiveness.
It'd be entirely possible for somebody to redistribute copies of a binary based on altered source code without releasing the source code, as long as he were doing it non-commercially.
Also, a shorter time of protection means older GPL code can be appropriated into commercial software.
I'm not dictating anything. I'm offering what I think are helpful suggestions.
However, copyright is dictating that I may not, for non-commercial purposes, use one of the most basic features of digital media -- to duplicate it freely. I for one don't want people dictating to me what I may or may not do with digital media.
To be even more semantic - FairPlay isn't built into iTunes. It's built into QuickTime. Removing QuickTime on OS X is non-trivial because it's seen as a core OS technology and as such is used by very many applications.
You'd have just about as much luck removing QuickTime from OS X as removing Internet Explorer from Windows.
That doesn't mean Apple or some industrious hackers couldn't rip out the part of Quicktime capable of playing DRM:ed files, though.
How would DRM stop somebody selling their vote allowing the vote-buyer to stand over his shoulder to verify that the vote is being cast according to specifications?
I never said it was easy to make money making music. I just said copyright law doesn't really play a big role in the economics you mentioned.
Never once have you mentioned that you're currently making considerable money or even any money based on recordings. And the law hasn't even been changed yet.
In fact, I'm hard pressed to see which part of my post you're refuting. My argument is based mostly on the fact that recorded music is a non-product. And then you counter with the fact that you're not covering your expenses playing music live. Non sequitur.
DVD's provide the lions share of the *profits*, but a movie will still break even on movie theaters.
Also, copyright reform won't stop copyright owners from selling copies of what they've produced. As long as it's more convenient than peer to peer, and it's priced reasonably, people will come, if they intend to pay.
If they don't intend to pay, they won't come either way.
It might interest you to know that Norsk Venstre are not communists or socialists at all. I'd rank them closer to libertarians by the US way of categorising political parties.
I would also class myself as a libertarian, but that's not a reflection of the Swedish Pirate Party as a whole. We have people from all sides of the political spectrum in our leadership.
Now, I can't speak for the motivations of those to the left of the spectrum, but from my social liberal standpoint, I basically think that overly broad private monopolies are bad.
Copyright isn't a natural right, it's an artificial restriction put in place to encourage artists to publish their works by granting them a monopoly on exploitation of that work.
I believe that an unconditional monopoly on duplication is harmful in that it prevents the otherwise completely natural spread of art.
However, I believe that a monopoly on commercial exploitation of said work for a reasonable amount of time is a good thing.
The main difference is that commercial goods can't be infinitely copied by any schmuck at home. When you steal a car, there is a tangible amount of resources and work that has been lost.
Did that friend of yours tell you that a lot of pharmaceutical research is already financed by the government?
I don't know how it works where you live (you didn't say), but here in Sweden, pharmaceuticals are developed through income through patents as well as government funding.
There's nothing to say pharmaceutical development and pharmaceutical production couldn't be effectively split up. As long as the government is still there to pay for pharmaceutical research, there's no real problem.
The fact is that within Sweden, domestically, for pharmaceuticals in particular, we have a system known as the high cost protection system. Basically, if you need prescription meds for a lot of money, the government will pay them for you once you exceed something like US $250 per year. The system is actually gradulal and a little more complicated than I just mentioned, but that's not really important.
So, basically, our government is funding pharmaceutical research both directly, and indirectly by paying the inflated prices back to those same pharmaceuticals through a high cost protection company.
Frankly, the idea of a compensation based on profit per dose which is the current model of pharmaceutical companies offends me. Reproducing medicine is relatively cheap -- except in cases where the production is so expensive the cost is actually jusified. Case in point - one popular over-the-counter antihistamine known as Clarityn recently dropped in price 20x because the patent expired.
Pharmaceutical research should be funded through the numbers of unique drugs produced, through government grants (as it is today), and not by deciding what drug will let the company get the most patent revenue.
Funny you should mention paintings. You couldn't have picked a better example.
They're one of the few works of arts where the original has considerable value that can't be copied, and the painter continuously develops a new stream of art.
Copyright law is irrelevant to this, really. A painting can either be commissioned or just made, then sold. Either way, it's the fact that it's an original that drives up its price.
I don't see anything wrong with photographs of said painting turning up on the web. That's just allowing a much wider audience appreciate a unique piece of art.
Slashdot Mirror
My dad, for one, has a 10-year old hotmail address.
Changing it now would be a real PITA.
I stumbled upon a cool web page that will Daltonize images. Apparently, this is a way to run images through a filter, changing colours around to make them easier to distinguish for colour blind people.
I'm not colour blind myself, so I don't know how well it'd work on that particular image, but I hope it helps.
As a part-time grammar nazi and xkcd reader, I'm not falling for that one. ;-)
I'm tagging this one obvious.
You can install iTunes, drag in your ordinary MP3's, and sync them over, just as normal, exactly the same as any other mp3 file.
No matter, space or time you say? Hmm. No mention of energy, I bet you had gobs of it. Luxury, I say!
Let's assume (assumption number one) they mean the voltage of the received signal in the antenna is 20 billion times weaker than a watch battery.
:-)
;-)
Now, a watch battery is approximately 3 volts in voltage, if I recall correctly. 3 / 2e10 == 1.5e-10 V -- so if that's what they meant by signal strength, they're getting a voltage of 150 picovolts somewhere in the antenna.
P = U^2 / R. If we assume (assumption number two) they've got their antenna matched to 50 Ohm wherever they connect their antenna to their equipment. (1.5e-10)^2 / 50 = 4.5e-22 W == 450 yoctowatts. (That, incidentally, is also how far down the SI prefixes go.
You wanted to know how many picowatts that is... well, that's 4.5e-10 picowatt -- or -184 dBm. This is probably the power they get in their connector after their antenna.
Or, in other words, 20 billion times weaker than a hypothetical watch battery that emits a RF signal at 3 Volt transmitting into a 50 ohm antenna.
This, of course is assuming that's what they meant. They could have meant something else arbitrarilly entirely.
Yes, but omröstning doesn't have that dual meaning.
(See the "deltagit i omröstningen med mer än en röst" part.)
It's abundantly clear that the meaning of röst = vote is meant here.
From GPL v. 2:
I doubt platinum punch cards would qualify as a medium customarily used for software interchange. Nor, for that matter, a print-out in paper form, even if OCR-able.
Population density isn't the whole explanation though.
Here in Europe, for example -- Belgium, with a population density of 343 people/km^2, has realtively crappy broadband, with bandwidth caps of a few tens of gigabytes per month being prevalent with most ISPs. At least, last time I checked. I might be out of date.
Sweden, however, with a population density of just 22 people/km^2, has great broadband. I have uncapped cable at 24 Mbit/s down and 8 Mbit/s up, and I do use it rather heavilly, although I use far less than my total theoretical capacity. I haven't received any nastygrams from my ISP about this either. The very young wireless 3G broadband market, which used to have an industry standard of a 1 GB/month cap, has under the last few months come under competition, with most providers giving uncapped access. Broadband in rural areas is less spectacular, but ADSL is available in many areas, if you're lucky enough to have bought in before they ran out of space for equipment in your local telephone station. (A widespread problem right now, it seems.)
The most important piece of the puzzle is working competition between providers. Sure, a dense population helps, but it's in no way so significant as you make it out to be.
Except you'd probably want to carry a battery around for those times that you need to go "off the grid".
You might be able to squeeze battery capacity significantly by limiting speed when off the grid to improve range -- beause of reduced aerodynamic drag, as well as improved efficiency (most batteries don't like being discharged too fast for extended periods)
That'd make it pretty practical to install wireless power too. You'd only have to cover main streets in cities and non-urban main roads.
You might even want to throw a small ICE in there as an option, or on a trailer, for extended-range operation.
Hell, the most practical system might be simply to simply retrofit a Toyota Prius with a wireless electricity receiver. Then you could just gradually install wireless power transmission systems on main roads as demand arises. A retrofit of such a system might even be pretty cheap in an existing hybrid.
Digital signatures.
:-)
Require all traffic information messages to be signed using your car's private key, which is registered to your licence plate number. Also send the car's public key, signed by the DMV.
Other cars would be required to check for message authenticity by requesting a copy of public keys when it receives a signature it can't verify, then checking it against a copy of the DMV's public key to verify whether the car's keys are in fact authentic.
On abuse, all traffic messages are digitally signed, so finding the source of the fraudulent transmissions is trivial.
All of this is trivial to automate, the technology is fairly cheap, especially considering the cost of the rest of the system, and can be verified in a fraction of a second. It's the exact same technology used to verify the authenticity of web sites using SSL -- ever had to wait around for one of those checks to happen?
Might it be hacked? Not likely. Public key cryptography is a proven technology. The largest known vulnerability is if the DMV's private key were leaked. This isn't some kind of DRM red herring -- unlike with DRM, as an attacker you don't have control of the hardware verifying the keys in the first place. So you could hack your own car to accept fraudulent signatures, but that wouldn't really give you any advantages, now would it.
Suitably, my captcha was details.
Does it matter if the deaths were random or part of some bigger plan?
People are dead. Killed by other people. That's all that matters in the end.
It's a pity the media won't see it that way, and countless douchebags like Jack Thompson are already using this to push their own agenda.
I wonder what video game Jack Thompson on the like will be trying to blame this on, and what insane laws will be passed to Stop This From Ever Happening Again(TM).
Seriously. This is a tragic incident, and I have the deepest sympathies for the families of all struck. But I predict a lot of knee-jerking in the days, weeks and months to come, which will showcase an even worse human behaviour, politicking and fear-mongering.
I don't want to diminish the significance of this event, but hundreds, possibly even thousands of people die in equally tragic human-created events every day -- most of them don't even make the news. Most of them are in other countries -- Darfur anybody? Remember that when you consider what happened here today, and when you see the long-standing ramifications and moral panic that will follow this.
A wise man once said, his name escapes me, and I paraphrase -- the world will be considered to be sane as soon as no new laws are passed, simply because some nut guns down a school full of people.
Actually, the GPL would be very slightly reduced in its effictiveness.
It'd be entirely possible for somebody to redistribute copies of a binary based on altered source code without releasing the source code, as long as he were doing it non-commercially.
Also, a shorter time of protection means older GPL code can be appropriated into commercial software.
I'm not dictating anything. I'm offering what I think are helpful suggestions.
However, copyright is dictating that I may not, for non-commercial purposes, use one of the most basic features of digital media -- to duplicate it freely. I for one don't want people dictating to me what I may or may not do with digital media.
To be even more semantic - FairPlay isn't built into iTunes. It's built into QuickTime. Removing QuickTime on OS X is non-trivial because it's seen as a core OS technology and as such is used by very many applications.
You'd have just about as much luck removing QuickTime from OS X as removing Internet Explorer from Windows.
That doesn't mean Apple or some industrious hackers couldn't rip out the part of Quicktime capable of playing DRM:ed files, though.
Norway isn't a member of the European Union.
How would DRM stop somebody selling their vote allowing the vote-buyer to stand over his shoulder to verify that the vote is being cast according to specifications?
I never said it was easy to make money making music. I just said copyright law doesn't really play a big role in the economics you mentioned.
Never once have you mentioned that you're currently making considerable money or even any money based on recordings. And the law hasn't even been changed yet.
In fact, I'm hard pressed to see which part of my post you're refuting. My argument is based mostly on the fact that recorded music is a non-product. And then you counter with the fact that you're not covering your expenses playing music live. Non sequitur.
DVD's provide the lions share of the *profits*, but a movie will still break even on movie theaters.
Also, copyright reform won't stop copyright owners from selling copies of what they've produced. As long as it's more convenient than peer to peer, and it's priced reasonably, people will come, if they intend to pay.
If they don't intend to pay, they won't come either way.
Heh heh. The communist argument again. :-)
It might interest you to know that Norsk Venstre are not communists or socialists at all. I'd rank them closer to libertarians by the US way of categorising political parties.
I would also class myself as a libertarian, but that's not a reflection of the Swedish Pirate Party as a whole. We have people from all sides of the political spectrum in our leadership.
Now, I can't speak for the motivations of those to the left of the spectrum, but from my social liberal standpoint, I basically think that overly broad private monopolies are bad.
Copyright isn't a natural right, it's an artificial restriction put in place to encourage artists to publish their works by granting them a monopoly on exploitation of that work.
I believe that an unconditional monopoly on duplication is harmful in that it prevents the otherwise completely natural spread of art.
However, I believe that a monopoly on commercial exploitation of said work for a reasonable amount of time is a good thing.
The main difference is that commercial goods can't be infinitely copied by any schmuck at home. When you steal a car, there is a tangible amount of resources and work that has been lost.
Digital media just doesn't work that way.
Did that friend of yours tell you that a lot of pharmaceutical research is already financed by the government?
I don't know how it works where you live (you didn't say), but here in Sweden, pharmaceuticals are developed through income through patents as well as government funding.
There's nothing to say pharmaceutical development and pharmaceutical production couldn't be effectively split up. As long as the government is still there to pay for pharmaceutical research, there's no real problem.
The fact is that within Sweden, domestically, for pharmaceuticals in particular, we have a system known as the high cost protection system. Basically, if you need prescription meds for a lot of money, the government will pay them for you once you exceed something like US $250 per year. The system is actually gradulal and a little more complicated than I just mentioned, but that's not really important.
So, basically, our government is funding pharmaceutical research both directly, and indirectly by paying the inflated prices back to those same pharmaceuticals through a high cost protection company.
Frankly, the idea of a compensation based on profit per dose which is the current model of pharmaceutical companies offends me. Reproducing medicine is relatively cheap -- except in cases where the production is so expensive the cost is actually jusified. Case in point - one popular over-the-counter antihistamine known as Clarityn recently dropped in price 20x because the patent expired.
Pharmaceutical research should be funded through the numbers of unique drugs produced, through government grants (as it is today), and not by deciding what drug will let the company get the most patent revenue.
Funny you should mention paintings. You couldn't have picked a better example.
They're one of the few works of arts where the original has considerable value that can't be copied, and the painter continuously develops a new stream of art.
Copyright law is irrelevant to this, really. A painting can either be commissioned or just made, then sold. Either way, it's the fact that it's an original that drives up its price.
I don't see anything wrong with photographs of said painting turning up on the web. That's just allowing a much wider audience appreciate a unique piece of art.