Wow, that's a really creative reading. However, the law doesn't say "services which generate...", it says "offering a capability for generating...". And it specifically includes "a service that permits a customer to retrieve stored information"... Web pages, for example, are stored information that an ISP permits a customer to retrieve.
Why not believe in some supernatural being, until such time as we have something more concrete?
Well, mostly because it doesn't really answer any questions either. Now I just have to figure out where that supernatural being came from, and I have no hope of ever figuring that out because by definition a supernatural being is outside of nature.
Is there something hard to understand about conservation of mass-energy? If there's matter and energy in the Universe today, then well proven physical laws tell us that it was *always* there. It didn't "come from" anywhere. Such a statement is a meaningless noise.
What you can blame is the legal institution. This is the institution that teaches lawyers they are to do whatever is needed in order to best serve their client, rather than whatever is needed to best serve justice... and in fact, holds them to this by licensing restrictions and even legal liability.
The Constitution plainly states that the way of promoting progress *is* by securing such rights. Now, The Constitution may be *wrong* about this, but that doesn't make a law that upholds that statement unconstitutional.
It's just like our understanding of the atom, we have a decent working definition that has need for improvement but that is not to imply that it isn't mostly true.
Interestingly, the "theory of the atom" that is taught in grade school is mostly BS. Atoms are not "mostly empty space", they don't have "electrons orbiting around the nucleus", nor are any of the parts "little indivisible point masses".
Of course, the problem is that teaching the (more) *real* story of Quantum Mechanics to grade schoolers would a) confuse them, b) fail to enlighten them, c) make them doubt science and turn them off of it forever, d) give an impression that science is fundamentally bizarre and counterintuitive and that we don't really understand atoms at all, and e) cause an even bigger uproar than evolution (if you don't think that the fundamental randomness of the universe would be controversial, you haven't been following the evolution debate very long:-).
Evolution is interesting, because the exact opposite is happening. The basic theory is normally taught to grade schoolers in a way that is fundamentally correct. The problems with the theory are extremely technical, and should probably only be taught to advanced students for the same reasons as the above. However, teaching the "basically correct" description of evolution is the part that's controversial, and people are clamoring for schools to teach the picky details that don't really matter if you're trying to gain basic understanding.
There are a number of reasons why this is so (from the perspective of a programmer/gamer of > 20 years in both):
RPGs are extremely attractive to emotionally repressed people who, nonetheless being human beings, desparately need a way to express their emotional side in a "safe" way (BTW, up until very recently I would have accounted myself as such).
Both programming and RPGs are rule-based systems with vast opportunities for creative thought and problem solving.
RPG gamers are socially repellent to people that view them as nerdy. Programmers are, naturally, immune to this effect or they wouldn't still be programmers. And vice versa. This is an anti-selection, but none the less powerful for all that.
Other people go to bars to hang out with their friends. Programmers need their brain cells.
Many programmers are nerdy and feel socially and physically powerless. RPGs provide a mechanism for feeling powerful. GMs create entire universes, and players get to be Conan and Merlin, if only vicariously.
While many of these statement may seem to denigrate either gamers or programmers, please realize that a) a generalization doesn't have to be used against individuals, and b) I'm just trying to be coldly accurate.
If Google loses these lawsuits, can I then sue Google for caching [and copying] my website without my permission?
The huge difference here is that the architecture of the web implies (inherently) consent to make copies (many of them, in a large number of places strewn around the net) when you download the page in the first place.
It's really easy, if the web site owner wishes, to have an alternate license that says: "members of the public other than search engines are allow to make copies of this". It's called a robots.txt file. Otherwise the legal presumption pretty much *has* to be that copying is allowed.
Now... caching and replaying on demand is an interesting argument, but the architecture of the web again indicates that this must be allowed, because it's part of how a page is "normally" downloaded by individual members of the public, in fact I would hazard to say that probably the majority of times that a random person downloads a page it's actually coming from a cached copy somewhere along the network (mostly because I really doubt AOL fails to do this).
If a website wanted to prohibit caching, there might not be any technical way to do it currently, but let's suppose they succeeded. They'd pretty much fall off of the majority of the web, because ISPs have such powerful incentives to try to cache as much as possible, at least for a short period of time. You're welcome not to allow copying of your stuff. Just don't put it on the web, because its architecture can't prevent, and in fact encourages, third party copying.
I think the point is supposed to be: for those Africans with cell phones and the education to use computers, price isn't the huge issue that these "western world" people you speak of think it might be.
It's really only when you start talking about the actually starving and poorly educated Africans that price really becomes that much more of an issue than it is for the rest of the world, and they're right that education is actually a far larger barrier than the incremental price of an operating system.
You make it sound a lot like you've never written or debugged code in the past.
When breathalizers were simple chemical analysis tools, calibration may have made sense as a sole mechanism for verifying the accuracy of the device, especially if scienfically acceptable proof could be offered that the device inherently drifts from its calibrated position at a maximum of some rate and that it was calibrated recently enough.
Once software enters the picture, it only matters how recently the device was calibrated because that can validate the chemically active part of the process. Calibration doesn't tell you *anything* about whether there are bugs in the software that might have caused a misreading at that particular moment under those exact conditions.
I wouldn't be so concerned about this if it weren't leading us off towards a state where the powerful democractic effect of juries is being destroyed. Once you allow evidence of the form: "trust us, this software, which we can't provide to the defense to analyze because it might expose a trade secret, is perfect and should be considered valid proof of the defendant's guilt", you're merely a tiny step away from a police state. A "simple matter of programming", in fact.
The reason it's significant is that alcohol dissipates in different people at different rates. The only *objective* measure we have of intoxication is blood alcohol level. That doesn't mean that there aren't also numerous *subjective* measurements available to determine intoxication, and those are frequently used to convict even in cases where the BAL was measured at below the legal limit. They're prosecuted under a slightly different law (usually) is all.
What matters isn't how much alcohol the person had at some time in the past, but how much it was still affecting that individual person at the time of the incident. But by your logic, any person that has ever in their life had a beer must forever refrain from driving.
Uhh, yeah, right.
The answer to your question, BTW, is that it doesn't matter whether they killed your mommy and sweety due to being under the influence of some amount of alcohol or because of some other form of negligence (of which there are numerous... sleep deprivation being one of the most common). They're dead either way.
More to the point, TV ads don't use up my paid-for bandwidth, and are kept rigidly separate from the programmes: You don't get banner ads plastered across the top of the screen in climactic moments of the TV show, but you frequently encounter them on web pages.
Eris, don't I *wish*... I truly despise those popup ads that stations are scrawling all over the corners of my screen these days. If I could figure out a way of blocking those I'd be right on it, but unfortunately they actually remove content from the underlying program, so really they're much worse.
The thing I don't really understand about this is this: what's the difference between the competing copies being available for $0.00 and being available for $3.00 in terms of the harm done to the publisher or author?
Is it just that people willing to pay $3.00 might have been the people more likely to pay for the legitimate copy? If so, it seems like that just shifts the number of copies likely to actually be distributed.
Or is it that people paying $3.00 might be more likely to think they already possess a legitimate copy and therefore less likely to buy one? I admit the possibility that the more people pay, the more likely they think their copy is legitimate, but I think recent history shows that the vast majority of people are willing to view $0.00 copies as legitimate.
I'm having a hard time finding the actual numbers right now, but my understanding is that there are several reasons why this doesn't happen:
1) Maximum efficiency gas turbines are not very well "impedance matched" to the task of moving a car. The main problem with this is the RPM requirements, as you've noted, and those aren't trivial concerns. Even if you can make one mechanically, remember that unlike airliners and power plants, cars are agile mobile devices, and the angular momentum and therefore gyroscopic effects of the turbine are quite high.
2) In order to run at peak efficiency, turbines have to run continuously at a fairly high fraction of their maximum power output. However, cars have very peaky and widely varying power needs. In fact, there's no battery size that will completely solve this problem. This is another consequence of the poor "impedance" match.
3) Gas turbines are very slow to start and stop, which means that you can't gain the efficiency possible by turning off the engine during stops. This is a restatement of #2, but it's different enough in character to warrant separate mention.
4) Turbines may be efficient, but it's really hard to make a small, light, mobile one that also emits low pollution levels (power plants use extensive scrubbing of their smokestack outputs to fix this, but that's not very practical in a car). Constricting the exhaust with catalytic converters robs turbines of a higher fraction of their efficiency than it does for ICEs.
The tax *rate* isn't the issue. The complexity is in what is considered *taxable*, and currently that's a giant mish-mash of regulations with gazillions of exemptions that are all different in different states.
Even if Amazon only sold books, I believe there exist states (localities?) where textbooks (and only those used in classes, no less) are tax exempt. I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of such a state, but this kind of #$%@# is the rule rather than the exception.
Of course you always need to trust people with physical access to the machines
No, no, no. The whole *point* of trusted computing is to make it so that you *don't* have to trust the people with physical access to the machine (e.g. the owner). Trusted attestation of OS and application code via public/private key encryption assures that the software being run is the software the host server wants run, regardless of what the holder of the machine wants. If it doesn't match, it isn't accepted as valid.
Now, that leaves open a *denial of service* attack on voting machines, which is almost as bad, but that can be detected reasonably quickly and corrected (if you trust the people with access to the machines to actually do it:-).
Have you considered that perhaps it's *reasonable* for the company to own code that you write for the company, at the company's behest on company time and company equipment, paid for by the company? Personally, I think it's a bit greedy to expect both to be paid for writing it and to own it.
If I were going to write such a contract I'd make it clear that I own code that I write on my own time with my own resources (of course, you're already granted this protection in many states, so that may be superfluous).
If you really want to use the tools later yourself (which I don't think is unreasonable either), then perhaps you could turn around this idea of a license agreement and say that *they* grant *you* a non-revokable, transferrable, no-royalty license to use the code on future projects, without limitation. Then you're in alignment with the default legal state of affairs of the code being work-for-hire, but you're still allowed to use it as you like.
If you try to reverse the default legal state of affairs, that's where you start needing a lawyer, IMO, because it's going to be up to you to prove that the agreement is valid that way. A simple license is something you can find text for in a lot of places, and is a common thing that would be hard to argue against.
BTW, don't count on the GPL to protect you here. Unless the code is distributed (and the company could argue that it's a trade secret that you misappropriated if you do it yourself), the GPL doesn't really provide any useful rights.
Password safes considered unsafe
on
Too Many Passwords
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The notion of having some master password that unlocks a "password safe" that stores all of your crazy passwords for different sites is a powerful one, but it has one huge hole that has bitten me more than once.
Windows (as would be any OS that attained broad use) and/or disk hardware are sufficiently unstable that I occasionally have to scrap my existing data and start over from scratch. Additionally, I use many different computers on different networks to access the same websites, etc. Backups are a pathetic workaround for this, and are themselves a vulnerability.
In fact, any scheme that relies on a password safe resident on one machine will always be susceptible to catastropic lossage, and is a pain to use on other machines. And any scheme that relies on 3rd party storage of the passwords is vulnerable to attacks on that storage and is inherently harder to maintain.
Personally, I think the only thing that will eventually solve this problem is a single password plus a smartcard-like system (with automated backup to some other local storage). We're not going to get there easily, though. And it's not a panacea either, because smart cards can be lost, stolen or fried just as easily.
Ironically, this problem is essentially another variant of the fundamental issue surrounding identity theft: in an information society, it's absolutely crucial that we be able to reliably uniquely identify every person, but anything we use to do that will end up being abused just like SSNs.
Because, frankly, polishing stuff so it's easy to install and configure is boring work that no one really wants to do. In the open source world that means it doesn't get done unless there's some organization with the power and motivation to assign someone to do it.
Most places that have preference engines also have customer reviews and sample-before-you-buy.
While, theoretically, those things could be gamed too (and probably occasionally are), people aren't likely to long continue to use a system that doesn't work for them. I use Amazon's preference system because it (mostly) works for me, and I hardly just blindly take its recommendations. Anyone that did that would quickly figure out that it was stupid.
So, could it happen? Sure... occasionally. But I don't think it would be very effective if used on a large scale, and I think the online retailers by-and-large understand that.
Ok, let me be the 100th to say that I think clickers are a complete copout on the part of universities that don't want to spend (a comparatively ridiculously small amount of) money to hire enough grad students to have effectively sized recitation sections for their large-scale frosh classes.
That said, though, this isn't an easy problem to solve, at least if you want to be able to give individuals credit rather than just getting feedback, because the whole point is that that inherently can't be anonymous, and inherently involves implementing a mechanism that can handle 2-300 simultaneous uniquely identifiable signals. That's not a trivial problem, even given expensive hardware.
One question I have is: does this system *really* need to have instant feedback? If not, it would be a heck of lot easier for the student's boxes to just record the answers and then spit them out when passed over/through an RFID-style reader on the way out of the classroom (RFID chips are really cheap, and readers are readily available which is a benefit). They probably should be time coded to avoid synchronization problems without having to have 2-way communications during the class.
If instant feedback is required, certainly I can't imagine that unique identifiers would be needed for the instant feedback itself, so you could combine a system like the above with a simple amplitude system. Each box could put out a pulse of known length on one of N different frequencies or codes at a reasonably known power (the antennae would have to be uniformly enough distributed to receive similar power from most locations in the room), and the received power on that frequency could be integrated simply by running the (demodulated?) signal through an FFT and some accumulators.
The Great Depression almost certainly actually accelerated US economic growth over a 50 year period due to all of the infrastructure projects put in place in order to try to get through it alive.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that's a really creative reading. However, the law doesn't say "services which generate...", it says "offering a capability for generating...". And it specifically includes "a service that permits a customer to retrieve stored information"... Web pages, for example, are stored information that an ISP permits a customer to retrieve.
Well, mostly because it doesn't really answer any questions either. Now I just have to figure out where that supernatural being came from, and I have no hope of ever figuring that out because by definition a supernatural being is outside of nature.
Is there something hard to understand about conservation of mass-energy? If there's matter and energy in the Universe today, then well proven physical laws tell us that it was *always* there. It didn't "come from" anywhere. Such a statement is a meaningless noise.
What you can blame is the legal institution. This is the institution that teaches lawyers they are to do whatever is needed in order to best serve their client, rather than whatever is needed to best serve justice... and in fact, holds them to this by licensing restrictions and even legal liability.
The Constitution plainly states that the way of promoting progress *is* by securing such rights. Now, The Constitution may be *wrong* about this, but that doesn't make a law that upholds that statement unconstitutional.
Interestingly, the "theory of the atom" that is taught in grade school is mostly BS. Atoms are not "mostly empty space", they don't have "electrons orbiting around the nucleus", nor are any of the parts "little indivisible point masses".
Of course, the problem is that teaching the (more) *real* story of Quantum Mechanics to grade schoolers would a) confuse them, b) fail to enlighten them, c) make them doubt science and turn them off of it forever, d) give an impression that science is fundamentally bizarre and counterintuitive and that we don't really understand atoms at all, and e) cause an even bigger uproar than evolution (if you don't think that the fundamental randomness of the universe would be controversial, you haven't been following the evolution debate very long :-).
Evolution is interesting, because the exact opposite is happening. The basic theory is normally taught to grade schoolers in a way that is fundamentally correct. The problems with the theory are extremely technical, and should probably only be taught to advanced students for the same reasons as the above. However, teaching the "basically correct" description of evolution is the part that's controversial, and people are clamoring for schools to teach the picky details that don't really matter if you're trying to gain basic understanding.
RPGs are extremely attractive to emotionally repressed people who, nonetheless being human beings, desparately need a way to express their emotional side in a "safe" way (BTW, up until very recently I would have accounted myself as such).
Both programming and RPGs are rule-based systems with vast opportunities for creative thought and problem solving.
RPG gamers are socially repellent to people that view them as nerdy. Programmers are, naturally, immune to this effect or they wouldn't still be programmers. And vice versa. This is an anti-selection, but none the less powerful for all that.
Other people go to bars to hang out with their friends. Programmers need their brain cells.
Many programmers are nerdy and feel socially and physically powerless. RPGs provide a mechanism for feeling powerful. GMs create entire universes, and players get to be Conan and Merlin, if only vicariously.
While many of these statement may seem to denigrate either gamers or programmers, please realize that a) a generalization doesn't have to be used against individuals, and b) I'm just trying to be coldly accurate.
The huge difference here is that the architecture of the web implies (inherently) consent to make copies (many of them, in a large number of places strewn around the net) when you download the page in the first place.
It's really easy, if the web site owner wishes, to have an alternate license that says: "members of the public other than search engines are allow to make copies of this". It's called a robots.txt file. Otherwise the legal presumption pretty much *has* to be that copying is allowed.
Now... caching and replaying on demand is an interesting argument, but the architecture of the web again indicates that this must be allowed, because it's part of how a page is "normally" downloaded by individual members of the public, in fact I would hazard to say that probably the majority of times that a random person downloads a page it's actually coming from a cached copy somewhere along the network (mostly because I really doubt AOL fails to do this).
If a website wanted to prohibit caching, there might not be any technical way to do it currently, but let's suppose they succeeded. They'd pretty much fall off of the majority of the web, because ISPs have such powerful incentives to try to cache as much as possible, at least for a short period of time. You're welcome not to allow copying of your stuff. Just don't put it on the web, because its architecture can't prevent, and in fact encourages, third party copying.
It's really only when you start talking about the actually starving and poorly educated Africans that price really becomes that much more of an issue than it is for the rest of the world, and they're right that education is actually a far larger barrier than the incremental price of an operating system.
When breathalizers were simple chemical analysis tools, calibration may have made sense as a sole mechanism for verifying the accuracy of the device, especially if scienfically acceptable proof could be offered that the device inherently drifts from its calibrated position at a maximum of some rate and that it was calibrated recently enough.
Once software enters the picture, it only matters how recently the device was calibrated because that can validate the chemically active part of the process. Calibration doesn't tell you *anything* about whether there are bugs in the software that might have caused a misreading at that particular moment under those exact conditions.
I wouldn't be so concerned about this if it weren't leading us off towards a state where the powerful democractic effect of juries is being destroyed. Once you allow evidence of the form: "trust us, this software, which we can't provide to the defense to analyze because it might expose a trade secret, is perfect and should be considered valid proof of the defendant's guilt", you're merely a tiny step away from a police state. A "simple matter of programming", in fact.
What matters isn't how much alcohol the person had at some time in the past, but how much it was still affecting that individual person at the time of the incident. But by your logic, any person that has ever in their life had a beer must forever refrain from driving.
Uhh, yeah, right.
The answer to your question, BTW, is that it doesn't matter whether they killed your mommy and sweety due to being under the influence of some amount of alcohol or because of some other form of negligence (of which there are numerous... sleep deprivation being one of the most common). They're dead either way.
Eris, don't I *wish*... I truly despise those popup ads that stations are scrawling all over the corners of my screen these days. If I could figure out a way of blocking those I'd be right on it, but unfortunately they actually remove content from the underlying program, so really they're much worse.
Is it just that people willing to pay $3.00 might have been the people more likely to pay for the legitimate copy? If so, it seems like that just shifts the number of copies likely to actually be distributed.
Or is it that people paying $3.00 might be more likely to think they already possess a legitimate copy and therefore less likely to buy one? I admit the possibility that the more people pay, the more likely they think their copy is legitimate, but I think recent history shows that the vast majority of people are willing to view $0.00 copies as legitimate.
b) It was a joke, man... you have to admit that Fiats have this reputation...
Of course, the main fuel savings from driving a Fiat coupe is having to take the bus while it's in the shop.
1) Maximum efficiency gas turbines are not very well "impedance matched" to the task of moving a car. The main problem with this is the RPM requirements, as you've noted, and those aren't trivial concerns. Even if you can make one mechanically, remember that unlike airliners and power plants, cars are agile mobile devices, and the angular momentum and therefore gyroscopic effects of the turbine are quite high.
2) In order to run at peak efficiency, turbines have to run continuously at a fairly high fraction of their maximum power output. However, cars have very peaky and widely varying power needs. In fact, there's no battery size that will completely solve this problem. This is another consequence of the poor "impedance" match.
3) Gas turbines are very slow to start and stop, which means that you can't gain the efficiency possible by turning off the engine during stops. This is a restatement of #2, but it's different enough in character to warrant separate mention.
4) Turbines may be efficient, but it's really hard to make a small, light, mobile one that also emits low pollution levels (power plants use extensive scrubbing of their smokestack outputs to fix this, but that's not very practical in a car). Constricting the exhaust with catalytic converters robs turbines of a higher fraction of their efficiency than it does for ICEs.
Even if Amazon only sold books, I believe there exist states (localities?) where textbooks (and only those used in classes, no less) are tax exempt. I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of such a state, but this kind of #$%@# is the rule rather than the exception.
No, no, no. The whole *point* of trusted computing is to make it so that you *don't* have to trust the people with physical access to the machine (e.g. the owner). Trusted attestation of OS and application code via public/private key encryption assures that the software being run is the software the host server wants run, regardless of what the holder of the machine wants. If it doesn't match, it isn't accepted as valid.
Now, that leaves open a *denial of service* attack on voting machines, which is almost as bad, but that can be detected reasonably quickly and corrected (if you trust the people with access to the machines to actually do it :-).
If I were going to write such a contract I'd make it clear that I own code that I write on my own time with my own resources (of course, you're already granted this protection in many states, so that may be superfluous).
If you really want to use the tools later yourself (which I don't think is unreasonable either), then perhaps you could turn around this idea of a license agreement and say that *they* grant *you* a non-revokable, transferrable, no-royalty license to use the code on future projects, without limitation. Then you're in alignment with the default legal state of affairs of the code being work-for-hire, but you're still allowed to use it as you like.
If you try to reverse the default legal state of affairs, that's where you start needing a lawyer, IMO, because it's going to be up to you to prove that the agreement is valid that way. A simple license is something you can find text for in a lot of places, and is a common thing that would be hard to argue against.
BTW, don't count on the GPL to protect you here. Unless the code is distributed (and the company could argue that it's a trade secret that you misappropriated if you do it yourself), the GPL doesn't really provide any useful rights.
Windows (as would be any OS that attained broad use) and/or disk hardware are sufficiently unstable that I occasionally have to scrap my existing data and start over from scratch. Additionally, I use many different computers on different networks to access the same websites, etc. Backups are a pathetic workaround for this, and are themselves a vulnerability.
In fact, any scheme that relies on a password safe resident on one machine will always be susceptible to catastropic lossage, and is a pain to use on other machines. And any scheme that relies on 3rd party storage of the passwords is vulnerable to attacks on that storage and is inherently harder to maintain.
Personally, I think the only thing that will eventually solve this problem is a single password plus a smartcard-like system (with automated backup to some other local storage). We're not going to get there easily, though. And it's not a panacea either, because smart cards can be lost, stolen or fried just as easily.
Ironically, this problem is essentially another variant of the fundamental issue surrounding identity theft: in an information society, it's absolutely crucial that we be able to reliably uniquely identify every person, but anything we use to do that will end up being abused just like SSNs.
You don't seem to be worried about posting this criticism of the Bush Administration... Why is that?
Because, frankly, polishing stuff so it's easy to install and configure is boring work that no one really wants to do. In the open source world that means it doesn't get done unless there's some organization with the power and motivation to assign someone to do it.
A bunch of people on Slashdot arguing over the dangers of group-think?
Aiiieeeeeee!!!!!!!
While, theoretically, those things could be gamed too (and probably occasionally are), people aren't likely to long continue to use a system that doesn't work for them. I use Amazon's preference system because it (mostly) works for me, and I hardly just blindly take its recommendations. Anyone that did that would quickly figure out that it was stupid.
So, could it happen? Sure... occasionally. But I don't think it would be very effective if used on a large scale, and I think the online retailers by-and-large understand that.
That said, though, this isn't an easy problem to solve, at least if you want to be able to give individuals credit rather than just getting feedback, because the whole point is that that inherently can't be anonymous, and inherently involves implementing a mechanism that can handle 2-300 simultaneous uniquely identifiable signals. That's not a trivial problem, even given expensive hardware.
One question I have is: does this system *really* need to have instant feedback? If not, it would be a heck of lot easier for the student's boxes to just record the answers and then spit them out when passed over/through an RFID-style reader on the way out of the classroom (RFID chips are really cheap, and readers are readily available which is a benefit). They probably should be time coded to avoid synchronization problems without having to have 2-way communications during the class.
If instant feedback is required, certainly I can't imagine that unique identifiers would be needed for the instant feedback itself, so you could combine a system like the above with a simple amplitude system. Each box could put out a pulse of known length on one of N different frequencies or codes at a reasonably known power (the antennae would have to be uniformly enough distributed to receive similar power from most locations in the room), and the received power on that frequency could be integrated simply by running the (demodulated?) signal through an FFT and some accumulators.
So what, again, exactly, is your point?