1) A lot of these so called "obvious" patents are, in my experience, really limited patents when you go and look at them. It's easy to make fun of, for example, the patent on peanut butter sandwiches (US Patent #6,004,596). On the surface, this is a really stupid patent, but if you look at it, it's really just a patent on a particular method of manufacturing a sealed, round, sandwich containing a layer of semi-liquid filling sealed inside 2 layers of another (non-porous) filling and crimped around the edge so that the resulting sandwich doesn't leak or get soggy (actually, in my opinion, a nifty and reletively sanely patentable idea).
2) Software patents necessary if patents are to be consider a valid concept at all. These days, it's almost inconceivable that there exists any invention at all that couldn't also be accomplished by a device that incorporates software to perform some part of the inventive steps. If we prevent patents on software-containing inventions, it's very hard for me to see how any patent could protect any invention.
If patent claims were not allowed to incorporate software ideas, someone could just build the same invention as claimed by any patent, incorporate software to perform some of the steps, and then say that this clearly isn't covered by the patent claims for that invention. Patent claims are very picky things.
Honestly, people, we are not the first industry to feel that innovation is being "stifled" by patents and that patents "shouldn't apply to us". Every nascent industry that exists has gone through this stage at some point. There are industrys that still are in this stage (like the automotive industry... you may not realize this, but practically every part in every car is covered by some kind of patent). Somehow, they still manage to survive and thrive.
3) The reason the PTO doesn't search anything but the Library of Congress (which includes most significant journals, BTW) and prior patents is because the patent system is primarily about making sure that inventions are preserved for the public trust in the long term. Journals too small to find their way into the Library of Congress, web pages, etc. don't satisfy that primary goal. If you don't limit the search to some reasonably defined permanent storage, people will continue to hide their inventions as trade secrets and try to "protect" them by obscure references in non-commonly searched locations.
Also, most of these "trivial" examples of "prior art" that people talk about do not disclose how to perform the operation. A closed source program that does X really shouldn't count as prior art for X, because it's just another form of the trade secrets patents were invented to prevent.
Of course, one could look on this as an advantage of Open Source Development in terms of preventing stupid patents.
This isn't the only person that's asked whether it's wise to transmit info about ourselves to potentially hostile aliens.
Probably this is obvious, but...
It doesn't matter.
It's extremely unlikely that there are any aliens with the ability to receive (and therefore transmit) radio messages within 100 light years that have been broadcasting for >100 years.
This is because we would have heard them by now. If they have only been broadcasting radio for 100 years, they aren't very dangerous (unless they *stopped* broadcasting radio 10^7 years ago:-).
Since it's impossible to exceed the speed of light (without, as an unintended consequence, creating a time machine), and even assuming instant acceleration, no decisions by committee, etc., it would take a minimum of 200 years for any alien spacecraft to reach here.
By this time we will have either killed ourselves off or we will have passed through a technological singularity that makes it impossible to predict whether we will a) care, or b) have any reason to be worried.
I think it's pretty accurate. The existance of a small number of 2.5G 56K phones out somewhere in the world does not constitute true 3G service to the masses.
Of course, there's a good reason for that:
3G service to the masses is a logical impossibility. The bandwidth simply doesn't exist at this time. People that talk about doing this seriously need to read up on Shannon's Law.
AFAICT, true 3G phones would be completely crushed by their success immediately upon release. Sort of like the slashdot effect for physics.
That, of course, is assuming that cell phone companies could find the money somewhere to actually even make an attempt at deploying such a system.
Of course, we shouldn't be surprised at any of this. *1G* cell phones that *actually* work as real telephones are still vaporware.
Re:Why this film will win awards and top lists
on
LotR Cleans Up at AFI
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· Score: 1
I've read the books 44 times (I kid you not).
I can list the significant (non-"got to do this to make/sell/fit it at all") inaccuracies on 1 hand:
1) Almost no time passes between the long expected party and Rivendell (almost in the "gotta do it" category). Also in this catagory: abbreviated Gandalf/Saruman interactions.
2) No Tom Bombadil scene (again...).
3) Arwen saves Frodo rather than Glorfindel lending him his horse.
4) Aragorn explicitly deciding to let Frodo go because he fears the corrupting influence of the Ring rather than that happening implicitly.
Oh, yeah, there are a few in jokes about actors or characters that weren't in the book. So sue them. Also, exposition was used rather than implication in many places. Sad, but unavoidable if it's to make sense at all as a movie in it's own right. And a few other things were shortened considerably... again, it was already a 3 hour movie.
And, you're right. A lot of it was "look at the pretty pictures". That was my point about it being an artistic travelogue or a visual aid for the novel rather than a movie.
BTW, places in which Moria was "right": the wolf cries that convince Boromir that Moria is the right path, the dried up river on the valley going up to the door, the watcher in the lake scene was just about perfect, the door itself, and the entrance to it (including Gandalf's bizarrely obscure "Merry was on the right track" comment), the light Gandalf uses to show the way, the way he "risks a little more light" in the great hall, the Hall of Records (many lines lifted directly from the book) with Balin's tomb (including accurate inscription) and crumbling record book, the decision point of which of the 3 routes to take (including the reason), the bottomless pit into which Pippin drops something (a little out of order, and with a whole skeleton used instead of a pebble for comic relief... whatever), the drums from the deep (though they didn't take the extra time to start them off as hammer taps), many elements of the fight with the cave troll (though it wasn't the one that pinned Frodo to the wall with a spear in the book, and they didn't have such a protracted battle with it in the book), the terrified flight to the bridge (not including the dwarf tossing joke and its setup, but hey... this thing was dark enough as it was), the practically perfect rendition of the bridge itself, the lines Gandalf utters on the bridge, the Balrog (almost perfect), breaking Gandalf's staff on the bridge, their fall into the bottomless depths after the Balrog's whip entangled his legs (a little drawn out so the audience can see the details), the flight out, the lower levels being on fire (including a dim utterance of "Ghashk" (sp? orcish for "fire") in the background), the emergence in Dimrill Dale (even a brief moment of silence there, though greatly shortened, and not explained). I suppose I could go on...
If I made a few mistakes, well, I'm doing this all entirely from memory...
Why this film will win awards and top lists
on
LotR Cleans Up at AFI
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· Score: 2, Insightful
People have commented on how silly it is that this film is on top of the IMDB (www.imdb.com) listing, and how it's a bad film. While the former can be easily explained by the existance of vast hoards of "fans" in the "fanatic" sense, it may be hard to see for some why traditional awards organizations might want to honor this film.
After all, the character development is minimal (so far in the story), the plot is fractured by being 1/3rd of a story, etc. It doesn't have any of the characteristics of a good movie, viewed standalone.
While I think there's a reasonable possibility that these accolades will be entirely justified, even in traditional movie terms, once the entire 8-9 hour movie is complete (LotR being a single 3 volume novel, after all), I think there's something deeper going on.
Think of it this way: LotR:FotR isn't a movie. Even viewed as 1/3 of a movie (which is a more accurate in any event), it isn't really a traditional movie.
It's much more accurate to view this film as some kind of artistic travelogue or visual aid for the book.
A movie is an entirely self-contained form of entertainment. The film version of LotR seems to have been developed in a completely unique manner, AFAICT.
Look closely: half of the film is inside "jokes". That's not really accurate but it's the closest analogy I can think of. There's no explicit reason in the movie for many of the little details, but if you pay attention, you'll find that almost every off hand line by an extra, or reference to a far off place in passing is an accurate allusion to the books.
I left the whole thing speachless, not so much because of the excellent cinematography, but because of the shear *depth* of the translation of the novel. On the surface, they had to change many things to produce a "movie" that would have a chance of selling to a mass audience and pay for it's production costs. It's the 3d quality of the interpretation that I found so mentally stunning.
Viewed in this way, it's clear why the film is doing so well critically and in mass appeal: it's absolutely the best movie ever made in its class... and I don't mean at all to damn it with faint praise by saying that's because it's the *only* movie ever made in it's class.
The big advantage of OOP is not in getting a job done the first time, it's in working with the code 6 months from now (and again 6 months after that).
OOP, when done correctly (and when you don't go overboard and forget that you're using it to make your life *easier*:-), encourages programming in a general way, and organizes things so that they are easier to morph and add to later without breaking your original sound design.
Contrary to what many OOP zealots would tell you, my experience is that this actually takes more time up front (again, if done right), rather than less. You spend a lot of time on seemingly useless activities, such as coming up with good names for your objects (if you can't name it succinctly and accurately, you haven't designed it properly).
There is one situation in which OOP can result in faster implementation, and that is when the project gets big enough that you need multiple programmers in order meet the schedule. In many ways, OOP is a reaction to "The Mythical Man Month". It's an extremely useful paradigm for splitting up tasks and defining interfaces that can be independently implemented. This is probably why people tend to think of it as only applying to large projects.
But even small projects need maintaining, upgrading, and resuing later on in life, and OOP helps tremendously with this.
You know, I'm really wondering why this is supposedly so impressive. They talk about how current systems are suffering from density limitations.
But... A trillion of these fit in a test tube with a volume of, what, ~5 cubic centimeters? And they perform a billion calculations per second.
Ooooh. Uhhhh. Wait a minute...
A Pentium 4 performs a billion operations per second in a volume of what... 5 *square* centimeters? Times a thickness of say 1 micron, for a volume of.000005 cubic centimeters...
People talk a lot about how globalism is US cultural imperialism, but I think that's missing the mark.
More than any other country in the world, the US has a history of bringing together peoples from all different cultures and figuring out a way to get them to live (relatively) peacefully together.
There's no way that communications mechanisms are going to get less efficient in the future without some serious work by the Luddites, and so it is inevitable that people from different cultures will have increasing interactions with each other.
The result of that can only possibly be one of 2 things:
1) The world descends into horrible chaos, violance, and destruction.
2) People around the whole world learn many of the same lessons that we've learned here in the US over the course of our history about how differing peoples can get along (relatively) peacefully.
I would be very suprised to discover that there are rules that work to prevent #1 that don't ultimately cause the world to end up looking much like the US in some, or perhaps many, ways.
Basically, in order for it to work, you have to preach and practice tolerance for differing viewpoints. You have to allow free speech, freedom of religion, and in general structure your legal system to favor not a particular cultural norm of behavior, but to favor reduction in conflict and encourage political solutions rather than violent ones. You basically have to give people the maximum amount of freedom consistent with the rights of others.
Most people have to feel as though they have a chance to rise to the top from within the system through hard work, or they'll never work to make things better for themselves, and will turn to theft and destruction in frustration (it's irrelevant whether they actually could make it big, the illusion of this possibility serves the same purpose, and in some sense makes for more cultural and economic stability). Sorry if that sounds callous, it's only intended to be accurate.
At the same time, you have to allow people the ability to defend themselves if they feel that they need to, or they cannot develop the sense of security that is necessary for them to be tolerant of others. While this increases the chance of small violence, it ironically decreases the chance of violence on a grand scale.
Obviously, like every other country, the US isn't perfect (or even halfway there, really) in this regard. But we have managed to succeed at this task better than anyone else, by and large. If we hadn't, we wouldn't be where we are today. Any country that doesn't develop the kind of culture that allows peaceful coexistance of disparate peoples couldn't have survived bringing them together, as will inevitably happen with more and more people around the world.
Despite the fact the cause has some degree of validity, the extremes which he takes it to regularly stomps on people's toes, and is generally antisocial.
Tell me about it. An almost perfect example of this observation from my personal experience:
Don't know if he still does this, but on the rare occasions when he used to join the dinner group I hung out with in the early 90's, Stallman used to leave these little photocopied fake GNU dollars in place of a tip at the restaurant.
If that wasn't bad enough, they had a manifesto printed on them decrying the practice of tipping, and telling the poor abused servers they should rise up and demand a fair wage.
Oh, forgot to mention: renting complicates the system a bit, as does watching at a friends house, but all that's required for either one is a small inexpensive device that caches a time-restricted secure certificate and connects to the player via a standard interface (probably wireless, like Bluetooth or even just IR).
So you have to take your remote with you (or rent one)... Big deal...
It doesn't seem all that inconvenient to use to me. The user doesn't know any of this is going on. They just hook up their (secure) player to their (secure) digital TV, in exactly the same way the currently hook up their DVD player (well, ok, plus the very small extra effort of connecting a phone line or cable modem connection), and never notice any of this happening in the background.
Same for making backup copies, all you have to do is connect the 2 devices (generally necessary for copying the data anyway) and it all happens in the background.
If cables are too inconvenient, though, Bluetooth could be substituted without invalidating the argument.
Nothing is perfect. The best you can hope for is to make it too expensive to be worth doing (a sufficiently long encryption key would take more compute power to defeat than would be available in the useful life of the data, but that doesn't mean it couldn't (eventually) be cracked).
But, ok, "sufficiently perfect" would have been a better and more efficient use of ASCII characters than "nearly competely perfect". However, "Imperfect" doesn't convey anywhere near the same concept in this case.
The dongle was "defeated" (well, some of them, anyway) because the people designing it cared more about cheap and mostly effective than in making a really uncrackable system.
Those in the know in cryptography will tell you that's it's perfectly possible to create an "uncrackable" (in quotes only because nothing in this world is certain) zero-information exchange secure handshake, at least one that is uncrackable for a *very* long time.
Here's the basic scheme: the 2 devices use public/private key encryption to share a known secret (a certificate in lay parlance), which is then used to encrypt further transmissions.
The reason you can't crack this (practically and/or cost-effectively) is mathematical. Of course, quantum computers may come along and break all of that, but by that time the studios have recouped their investment, and the next generation of player uses quantum encryption.
Yes, it requires prior collusion (i.e. a certificate authority) to work, but's it's as close to uncrackable as anything in security, which is to say it that the effort required can be set so that it would take *far* more expense in computer equipment/time (even assuming P2P) than (even practically infinite copies of) the value of the item being stolen.
One problem with such a scheme is that once a device *is* cracked, it opens up all new data files. However, there are ways around this that involve securely changing the device's private key in each transaction. Harder to do (in the earlier days of dongles, impossible to do cost effectively, because EEPROM/Flash memory was too expensive then), but perfectly possible.
At this point, of course, people just record the image off the screen with a camera, so nothing's perfect. It costs them a lot in quality, though, and is usually pretty easy for a consumer to at least detect (though maybe not care about), which is more than can be said for pirated DVDs otherwise.
The best you can hope for at that point is perhaps to track the theft using some kind of watermarking scheme, but that's not easy, and probably isn't worth the trouble anyway.
Of course, most criminals are stupid, so perhaps it's good enough...
I wish people would understand that it *is* in fact, perfectly possible to have extremely nearly perfect copy protection, as long as you don't care about backward compatibility with existing hardware.
Of course, as a practical matter, the studios want to have their cake and eat it too. They want perfect copy protection and also take advantage of all the installed base of players and displays out there. This, of course, they cannot have.
But, here's a sketch of a scheme that allows for fair use, but where the only way to bootleg it would be to point an (expensive, frame rate synchronized) video camera at the display and record it that way (nothing can prevent that, of course, but the quality degradation is sufficient to make it pointless, at least currently... if it's desired to make this more difficult, the display frame rate can be randomly shifted slightly in a way that humans wouldn't notice, and I would claim that the non-infringing use of a camera that can track this would be sufficiently low that it would be reasonably justified to outlaw such devices, making it prohibitively expensive to even do that). The scheme is as follows:
Make each DVD individually, heavily, securely encrypted, and designed such that it requires a special box to play it. Upon first insertion, the box securely connects to the internet and downloads a sufficiently encrypted decryption key which only that box can decrypt (using, say, an *excessively* long private key in its ROM). The box writes this key into its internal hard disk (which has enough capacity for as many disks as will be published in its useful lifetime).
From now on, only this special box can ever have the "root" key for that disk, because the server will refuse to serve up another key for another player.
For fair use purposes, any device that wants to display or play back or copy this disk would have to be verified as a valid, studio-authorized rights-preserving device that is physically connect to the special box, engage in a secure transaction with this box to get a newly encrypted decryption key that only this new device can decrypt (the box can use timeouts on the initial zero-information exchange secure handshake to determine whether the device is physically connected by a sufficiently short cable:-). Even the sharing with friends variety of fair use would work with this, though I suspect studios would be unhappy about that.
Of course, if the criminal were willing to require that the customers bring their player with them to the site of the transaction, they could connect to the criminal's box and get a key, but this would still prevent widespread bootlegging. Also, such a transaction could be made easy to trace if desired (e.g. allow only, say, 10 different devices to get a key before another internet connection to the server was required).
To deal with the fair use problem of the box or its disk crashing, the consumer could connect to the data center and satisfy a support person that reseting the server's "don't serve up another key" bit for this one disk is justified (this would allow at most 1 bootleg copy per such transaction, which I suspect the studio wouldn't care about).
Even the digital display that would be required to show this disk wouldn't be able to show the video without a physical connection to the player box with sufficient handshaking, because unencrypted data from would never be sent anywhere in digital form.
You can make as many bitwise copies of the disk as you want and it won't make a damn bit of difference because nothing will be able to play it.
If this sounds scary, it's essentially what Micro$oft is proposing with their rights protected media services, at least in terms of downloaded media... Luckily, being Micro$oft, they will inevitably f*ck it up royally in the first several implementations, so there will be a contaminated gene pool of insecure players out there that will require yet another round of incompatibility to fix...
Re:electric motors kick ass on piston engines
on
Fiddler on the RUF
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· Score: 1
Why do people say stuff like this?
Allow me to translate: "if some genius could just invent pixie dust that would solve the energy density problems of current battery technology, we'd all be driving magically powered vehicles!!!"
Oh right, I forgot to add: "and, BONUS!, we could move all our pollution into someone *else's* backyard where it belongs (because, of course, we can't possibly have those nasty dangerous nuclear power plants)."
Sigh...
I don't know if anyone else here has actually *read* this magazine, but... I had a subscription for a year or so (mostly for the amusement value), and I would describe it as a 50/50 mix of Scientific American and the National Enquirer.
Basically, their modus operandi appears to be to search around in the literature for the most outlandish claims they can find, and print them with big splashy headlines along the lines of "Scientists say aliens may have had sex with our women!!!!" (that's an exaggeration, but not by all that much).
So, ok, they only print articles purported to be based on statements or papers from "legitimate" scientists, but as Pons and Fleischman showed us, there are a heck of a lot of reasonably legitimate scientists with wacky ideas out there... way out there:-).
Grain, meet salt. Can I interest you in an edition of the New Scientist?
It's certainly true that it's amazing how many true discoveries in the history of science were ridiculed at their inception. That doesn't mean we should stop ridiculing the truly stupid ideas:-). The truth will eventually take care of itself.
I'm afraid I just don't get all the comments about H1B workers being indentured. It's *really* easy for a company to transfer your H1B and hire you (it takes about 2-3 weeks). I just recently hired someone that way myself.
So what's with that? Are these people just misinformed, or grinding axes, or what?
Slashdot Mirror
2) Software patents necessary if patents are to be consider a valid concept at all. These days, it's almost inconceivable that there exists any invention at all that couldn't also be accomplished by a device that incorporates software to perform some part of the inventive steps. If we prevent patents on software-containing inventions, it's very hard for me to see how any patent could protect any invention.
If patent claims were not allowed to incorporate software ideas, someone could just build the same invention as claimed by any patent, incorporate software to perform some of the steps, and then say that this clearly isn't covered by the patent claims for that invention. Patent claims are very picky things.
Honestly, people, we are not the first industry to feel that innovation is being "stifled" by patents and that patents "shouldn't apply to us". Every nascent industry that exists has gone through this stage at some point. There are industrys that still are in this stage (like the automotive industry... you may not realize this, but practically every part in every car is covered by some kind of patent). Somehow, they still manage to survive and thrive.
3) The reason the PTO doesn't search anything but the Library of Congress (which includes most significant journals, BTW) and prior patents is because the patent system is primarily about making sure that inventions are preserved for the public trust in the long term. Journals too small to find their way into the Library of Congress, web pages, etc. don't satisfy that primary goal. If you don't limit the search to some reasonably defined permanent storage, people will continue to hide their inventions as trade secrets and try to "protect" them by obscure references in non-commonly searched locations.
Also, most of these "trivial" examples of "prior art" that people talk about do not disclose how to perform the operation. A closed source program that does X really shouldn't count as prior art for X, because it's just another form of the trade secrets patents were invented to prevent.
Of course, one could look on this as an advantage of Open Source Development in terms of preventing stupid patents.
Probably this is obvious, but...
It doesn't matter.
It's extremely unlikely that there are any aliens with the ability to receive (and therefore transmit) radio messages within 100 light years that have been broadcasting for >100 years.
This is because we would have heard them by now. If they have only been broadcasting radio for 100 years, they aren't very dangerous (unless they *stopped* broadcasting radio 10^7 years ago :-).
Since it's impossible to exceed the speed of light (without, as an unintended consequence, creating a time machine), and even assuming instant acceleration, no decisions by committee, etc., it would take a minimum of 200 years for any alien spacecraft to reach here.
By this time we will have either killed ourselves off or we will have passed through a technological singularity that makes it impossible to predict whether we will a) care, or b) have any reason to be worried.
Of course, there's a good reason for that:
3G service to the masses is a logical impossibility. The bandwidth simply doesn't exist at this time. People that talk about doing this seriously need to read up on Shannon's Law.
AFAICT, true 3G phones would be completely crushed by their success immediately upon release. Sort of like the slashdot effect for physics.
That, of course, is assuming that cell phone companies could find the money somewhere to actually even make an attempt at deploying such a system.
Of course, we shouldn't be surprised at any of this. *1G* cell phones that *actually* work as real telephones are still vaporware.
I can list the significant (non-"got to do this to make/sell/fit it at all") inaccuracies on 1 hand:
1) Almost no time passes between the long expected party and Rivendell (almost in the "gotta do it" category). Also in this catagory: abbreviated Gandalf/Saruman interactions.
2) No Tom Bombadil scene (again...).
3) Arwen saves Frodo rather than Glorfindel lending him his horse.
4) Aragorn explicitly deciding to let Frodo go because he fears the corrupting influence of the Ring rather than that happening implicitly.
Oh, yeah, there are a few in jokes about actors or characters that weren't in the book. So sue them. Also, exposition was used rather than implication in many places. Sad, but unavoidable if it's to make sense at all as a movie in it's own right. And a few other things were shortened considerably... again, it was already a 3 hour movie.
And, you're right. A lot of it was "look at the pretty pictures". That was my point about it being an artistic travelogue or a visual aid for the novel rather than a movie.
BTW, places in which Moria was "right": the wolf cries that convince Boromir that Moria is the right path, the dried up river on the valley going up to the door, the watcher in the lake scene was just about perfect, the door itself, and the entrance to it (including Gandalf's bizarrely obscure "Merry was on the right track" comment), the light Gandalf uses to show the way, the way he "risks a little more light" in the great hall, the Hall of Records (many lines lifted directly from the book) with Balin's tomb (including accurate inscription) and crumbling record book, the decision point of which of the 3 routes to take (including the reason), the bottomless pit into which Pippin drops something (a little out of order, and with a whole skeleton used instead of a pebble for comic relief... whatever), the drums from the deep (though they didn't take the extra time to start them off as hammer taps), many elements of the fight with the cave troll (though it wasn't the one that pinned Frodo to the wall with a spear in the book, and they didn't have such a protracted battle with it in the book), the terrified flight to the bridge (not including the dwarf tossing joke and its setup, but hey... this thing was dark enough as it was), the practically perfect rendition of the bridge itself, the lines Gandalf utters on the bridge, the Balrog (almost perfect), breaking Gandalf's staff on the bridge, their fall into the bottomless depths after the Balrog's whip entangled his legs (a little drawn out so the audience can see the details), the flight out, the lower levels being on fire (including a dim utterance of "Ghashk" (sp? orcish for "fire") in the background), the emergence in Dimrill Dale (even a brief moment of silence there, though greatly shortened, and not explained). I suppose I could go on...
If I made a few mistakes, well, I'm doing this all entirely from memory...
After all, the character development is minimal (so far in the story), the plot is fractured by being 1/3rd of a story, etc. It doesn't have any of the characteristics of a good movie, viewed standalone.
While I think there's a reasonable possibility that these accolades will be entirely justified, even in traditional movie terms, once the entire 8-9 hour movie is complete (LotR being a single 3 volume novel, after all), I think there's something deeper going on.
Think of it this way: LotR:FotR isn't a movie. Even viewed as 1/3 of a movie (which is a more accurate in any event), it isn't really a traditional movie.
It's much more accurate to view this film as some kind of artistic travelogue or visual aid for the book.
A movie is an entirely self-contained form of entertainment. The film version of LotR seems to have been developed in a completely unique manner, AFAICT.
Look closely: half of the film is inside "jokes". That's not really accurate but it's the closest analogy I can think of. There's no explicit reason in the movie for many of the little details, but if you pay attention, you'll find that almost every off hand line by an extra, or reference to a far off place in passing is an accurate allusion to the books.
I left the whole thing speachless, not so much because of the excellent cinematography, but because of the shear *depth* of the translation of the novel. On the surface, they had to change many things to produce a "movie" that would have a chance of selling to a mass audience and pay for it's production costs. It's the 3d quality of the interpretation that I found so mentally stunning.
Viewed in this way, it's clear why the film is doing so well critically and in mass appeal: it's absolutely the best movie ever made in its class... and I don't mean at all to damn it with faint praise by saying that's because it's the *only* movie ever made in it's class.
OOP, when done correctly (and when you don't go overboard and forget that you're using it to make your life *easier* :-), encourages programming in a general way, and organizes things so that they are easier to morph and add to later without breaking your original sound design.
Contrary to what many OOP zealots would tell you, my experience is that this actually takes more time up front (again, if done right), rather than less. You spend a lot of time on seemingly useless activities, such as coming up with good names for your objects (if you can't name it succinctly and accurately, you haven't designed it properly).
There is one situation in which OOP can result in faster implementation, and that is when the project gets big enough that you need multiple programmers in order meet the schedule. In many ways, OOP is a reaction to "The Mythical Man Month". It's an extremely useful paradigm for splitting up tasks and defining interfaces that can be independently implemented. This is probably why people tend to think of it as only applying to large projects.
But even small projects need maintaining, upgrading, and resuing later on in life, and OOP helps tremendously with this.
They can fit a trillion of these in a test tube, huh? What's that, a volume of about 5 cc's? And it can perform a billion operations per second?
Oooh! Ahhh! Uhhhh... Hmmmm... Wait a minute.
A Pentium 4 can perform a billion operations per second. It does so with circuitry a micron thick, over an area of ~5 square centimeters.
That gives it a volume of .000005 cc's.
What's wrong with this picture?
But... A trillion of these fit in a test tube with a volume of, what, ~5 cubic centimeters? And they perform a billion calculations per second.
Ooooh. Uhhhh. Wait a minute...
A Pentium 4 performs a billion operations per second in a volume of what... 5 *square* centimeters? Times a thickness of say 1 micron, for a volume of
wow. i'm impressed.
More than any other country in the world, the US has a history of bringing together peoples from all different cultures and figuring out a way to get them to live (relatively) peacefully together.
There's no way that communications mechanisms are going to get less efficient in the future without some serious work by the Luddites, and so it is inevitable that people from different cultures will have increasing interactions with each other.
The result of that can only possibly be one of 2 things:
1) The world descends into horrible chaos, violance, and destruction.
2) People around the whole world learn many of the same lessons that we've learned here in the US over the course of our history about how differing peoples can get along (relatively) peacefully.
I would be very suprised to discover that there are rules that work to prevent #1 that don't ultimately cause the world to end up looking much like the US in some, or perhaps many, ways.
Basically, in order for it to work, you have to preach and practice tolerance for differing viewpoints. You have to allow free speech, freedom of religion, and in general structure your legal system to favor not a particular cultural norm of behavior, but to favor reduction in conflict and encourage political solutions rather than violent ones. You basically have to give people the maximum amount of freedom consistent with the rights of others.
Most people have to feel as though they have a chance to rise to the top from within the system through hard work, or they'll never work to make things better for themselves, and will turn to theft and destruction in frustration (it's irrelevant whether they actually could make it big, the illusion of this possibility serves the same purpose, and in some sense makes for more cultural and economic stability). Sorry if that sounds callous, it's only intended to be accurate.
At the same time, you have to allow people the ability to defend themselves if they feel that they need to, or they cannot develop the sense of security that is necessary for them to be tolerant of others. While this increases the chance of small violence, it ironically decreases the chance of violence on a grand scale.
Obviously, like every other country, the US isn't perfect (or even halfway there, really) in this regard. But we have managed to succeed at this task better than anyone else, by and large. If we hadn't, we wouldn't be where we are today. Any country that doesn't develop the kind of culture that allows peaceful coexistance of disparate peoples couldn't have survived bringing them together, as will inevitably happen with more and more people around the world.
It's not cultural imperialism. It's evolution.
Tell me about it. An almost perfect example of this observation from my personal experience:
Don't know if he still does this, but on the rare occasions when he used to join the dinner group I hung out with in the early 90's, Stallman used to leave these little photocopied fake GNU dollars in place of a tip at the restaurant.
If that wasn't bad enough, they had a manifesto printed on them decrying the practice of tipping, and telling the poor abused servers they should rise up and demand a fair wage.
Sigh...
Check out that DDR memory some time, and compare to Rambus.
So you have to take your remote with you (or rent one)... Big deal...
Same for making backup copies, all you have to do is connect the 2 devices (generally necessary for copying the data anyway) and it all happens in the background.
If cables are too inconvenient, though, Bluetooth could be substituted without invalidating the argument.
Nothing is perfect. The best you can hope for is to make it too expensive to be worth doing (a sufficiently long encryption key would take more compute power to defeat than would be available in the useful life of the data, but that doesn't mean it couldn't (eventually) be cracked).
But, ok, "sufficiently perfect" would have been a better and more efficient use of ASCII characters than "nearly competely perfect". However, "Imperfect" doesn't convey anywhere near the same concept in this case.
Those in the know in cryptography will tell you that's it's perfectly possible to create an "uncrackable" (in quotes only because nothing in this world is certain) zero-information exchange secure handshake, at least one that is uncrackable for a *very* long time.
Here's the basic scheme: the 2 devices use public/private key encryption to share a known secret (a certificate in lay parlance), which is then used to encrypt further transmissions.
The reason you can't crack this (practically and/or cost-effectively) is mathematical. Of course, quantum computers may come along and break all of that, but by that time the studios have recouped their investment, and the next generation of player uses quantum encryption.
Yes, it requires prior collusion (i.e. a certificate authority) to work, but's it's as close to uncrackable as anything in security, which is to say it that the effort required can be set so that it would take *far* more expense in computer equipment/time (even assuming P2P) than (even practically infinite copies of) the value of the item being stolen.
One problem with such a scheme is that once a device *is* cracked, it opens up all new data files. However, there are ways around this that involve securely changing the device's private key in each transaction. Harder to do (in the earlier days of dongles, impossible to do cost effectively, because EEPROM/Flash memory was too expensive then), but perfectly possible.
At this point, of course, people just record the image off the screen with a camera, so nothing's perfect. It costs them a lot in quality, though, and is usually pretty easy for a consumer to at least detect (though maybe not care about), which is more than can be said for pirated DVDs otherwise.
The best you can hope for at that point is perhaps to track the theft using some kind of watermarking scheme, but that's not easy, and probably isn't worth the trouble anyway.
Of course, most criminals are stupid, so perhaps it's good enough...
Of course, as a practical matter, the studios want to have their cake and eat it too. They want perfect copy protection and also take advantage of all the installed base of players and displays out there. This, of course, they cannot have.
But, here's a sketch of a scheme that allows for fair use, but where the only way to bootleg it would be to point an (expensive, frame rate synchronized) video camera at the display and record it that way (nothing can prevent that, of course, but the quality degradation is sufficient to make it pointless, at least currently... if it's desired to make this more difficult, the display frame rate can be randomly shifted slightly in a way that humans wouldn't notice, and I would claim that the non-infringing use of a camera that can track this would be sufficiently low that it would be reasonably justified to outlaw such devices, making it prohibitively expensive to even do that). The scheme is as follows:
Make each DVD individually, heavily, securely encrypted, and designed such that it requires a special box to play it. Upon first insertion, the box securely connects to the internet and downloads a sufficiently encrypted decryption key which only that box can decrypt (using, say, an *excessively* long private key in its ROM). The box writes this key into its internal hard disk (which has enough capacity for as many disks as will be published in its useful lifetime).
From now on, only this special box can ever have the "root" key for that disk, because the server will refuse to serve up another key for another player.
For fair use purposes, any device that wants to display or play back or copy this disk would have to be verified as a valid, studio-authorized rights-preserving device that is physically connect to the special box, engage in a secure transaction with this box to get a newly encrypted decryption key that only this new device can decrypt (the box can use timeouts on the initial zero-information exchange secure handshake to determine whether the device is physically connected by a sufficiently short cable :-). Even the sharing with friends variety of fair use would work with this, though I suspect studios would be unhappy about that.
Of course, if the criminal were willing to require that the customers bring their player with them to the site of the transaction, they could connect to the criminal's box and get a key, but this would still prevent widespread bootlegging. Also, such a transaction could be made easy to trace if desired (e.g. allow only, say, 10 different devices to get a key before another internet connection to the server was required).
To deal with the fair use problem of the box or its disk crashing, the consumer could connect to the data center and satisfy a support person that reseting the server's "don't serve up another key" bit for this one disk is justified (this would allow at most 1 bootleg copy per such transaction, which I suspect the studio wouldn't care about).
Even the digital display that would be required to show this disk wouldn't be able to show the video without a physical connection to the player box with sufficient handshaking, because unencrypted data from would never be sent anywhere in digital form.
You can make as many bitwise copies of the disk as you want and it won't make a damn bit of difference because nothing will be able to play it.
If this sounds scary, it's essentially what Micro$oft is proposing with their rights protected media services, at least in terms of downloaded media... Luckily, being Micro$oft, they will inevitably f*ck it up royally in the first several implementations, so there will be a contaminated gene pool of insecure players out there that will require yet another round of incompatibility to fix...
Allow me to translate: "if some genius could just invent pixie dust that would solve the energy density problems of current battery technology, we'd all be driving magically powered vehicles!!!"
Oh right, I forgot to add: "and, BONUS!, we could move all our pollution into someone *else's* backyard where it belongs (because, of course, we can't possibly have those nasty dangerous nuclear power plants)." Sigh...
Basically, their modus operandi appears to be to search around in the literature for the most outlandish claims they can find, and print them with big splashy headlines along the lines of "Scientists say aliens may have had sex with our women!!!!" (that's an exaggeration, but not by all that much).
So, ok, they only print articles purported to be based on statements or papers from "legitimate" scientists, but as Pons and Fleischman showed us, there are a heck of a lot of reasonably legitimate scientists with wacky ideas out there... way out there :-).
Grain, meet salt. Can I interest you in an edition of the New Scientist?
It's certainly true that it's amazing how many true discoveries in the history of science were ridiculed at their inception. That doesn't mean we should stop ridiculing the truly stupid ideas :-). The truth will eventually take care of itself.
I'm afraid I just don't get all the comments about H1B workers being indentured. It's *really* easy for a company to transfer your H1B and hire you (it takes about 2-3 weeks). I just recently hired someone that way myself. So what's with that? Are these people just misinformed, or grinding axes, or what?