The problem isn't that he's getting prosecuted for theft. If he were I'm all for that, he probably stole those CDR's, wasted hours of his employers time, etc. But he's being prosecuted for profiting from the copying, when he clearly did not. He wasn't paid for releasing the information, he probably even lost money on the whole thing. I personally think there should be some legal punishment for what he did, he certainly betrayed a trust and we should discourage this type of damage. There may be a legal punishment for all I know. But, he has been prosecuted for something everyone knows he didn't do, that worries me greatly.
Re:Great Leap forward but still falsl short
on
First HDTV Camcorder
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I wish JVC all the luck, I wish I could buy one to play with, but In my opinion the technology isnt quite ready for John Doe and his girlfriend to make HD pr0n.
I think the initial market will be film students. Right now a lot of them struggle to raise $50k mostly to buy and develop 35mm color film stock for their thesis films. With this camera they can buy the camera and the editing setup for $5-6k, this is easy to raise in comparison. Some are already doing digital editing of scanned 35mm anyway so for them it's just the cost of the camcorder really. It's surprisingly cheap to scan film btw, like $13 for 8 minutes of B&W film; I guess it's volume since that's about as much as my local photo shop wants to charge for a 36 exposure roll of still photographs, or maybe I'm just a sucker.. The mpeg2 will suck, but at that resolution maybe it won't matter so much, a student film needs to look good on a 10' screen not a 300' one. Eventually this will make it into the hands of your uncle, and then hopefully he'll make good use of iMovie to edit the thing down to just a few minutes of torture.;)
Parks were ALWAYS provided by the wealthy as free land trusts. So were libraries. This was the case for 200 years in this country. It changed when we became more socialist and when we took away incentive for the wealthy to develop these programs. College wings were paid for by the wealthy, not public funds.
Woah! That's just wrong. Parks were provided FOR the wealthy, supported by TAXES. Colleges, in the USA at least, were provided for and paid for by wealthy. There were some colleges created by the middle class for the middle class, and later by states for the lower middle class. After the federal govenment started paying for research and the like the schools opened up more and more. In the 1970's and 80's the Ivy's even started letting women attend their undergraduate schools. Your arguement would have been much stronger if you stuck to public libraries, which were in large part created by the robber barons almost a hundred years ago, and now are being destroyed by the government both through monopoly maintenance laws like copyright, and through starvation funding.
In some countries monopoly maintenance is more liberterian, there is a "use tax" for profits provided through copyright. Triple income tax on government supported monopoly profits! Of course this wouldn't work with our highest income tax rate... something like 40% now? (I think there is no SS tax on royalty income in the US.)
You can't move your data offsite on HDs, first of all. Ask those shops in the WTC. Some learned it the hard way. "Offsite" really means "some km away".
Hehe, some friends of mine in WTC were saved only because they had sent a debugging version of their code to a customer. They decompiled it and started adding comments... the company is still in business but their best programmers left after that and now the VC's are in control. Made me a believer in offsite backup, I keep my cvs repository on two continents now.
Next, create a system of trust-association so that anyone who wants to voice an opinion about a particular identity can. This is relatively easy to do stand-alone, but DNS is also suited to it (look for the RFCs on key recovery via DNS).
Ultimately people will begin to standardize on a few trust-sources, but there's no reason that joe average can't fire up his own trust authority for his friends and familly to use.
Identity tracking != centralization!
If you haven't noticed DNS is centralized and is a major pain in the ass. Sure there may be millions of DNS servers, but they all depend on the 13 root servers. The RFC's don't prevent me from setting up my own root server and asking everyone to point to that instead, but efforts to do that have failed. Even when they mirror the root DNS in addition to their own domains, and hence depend on the 13 root servers anyway.
Should my machines at home be able to connect to a target random system for SMTP transmission? If not, how do I send mail direct-to-MX for security and privacy reasons? How do I engage TLS if my provider doesn't support it? How, in short, do I partake of the network of peers that is the Internet? Or should we toss that out the window at the first opportunity because users don't like spam?
Odd that you advocate a decentralized Internet except when it comes to sending mail....
RTFP! The whole point is that everyone should send their mail directly to the destination through SMTP. The only time you need relays at all with hash-cash is when you're on a device that simply can't send an e-mail in a resonable time, like a cell phone. And also as a transitionary measure while clients get updated. Clients are things like Eudora, Mozilla, or sendmail/postfix servers run only to send mail, a server is any computer that receives e-mail. I was explaining how you could do the transition, which the article implied would be hard.
The receiver of the e-mail sets the charge. That means if her e-mail is only known to her friends, she can set the fee low. If she needs to post it on her web-page and announce it on CNN, she can set the CPU cost so high that it takes two days to send her an e-mail. Any relays would have to set the maximum amount of bits they were willing to calculate or someone could send one e-mail that takes 5000 years to send, all the time leaving the CPU at 100% utilization, costing real money in power bills. Even a spammer that makes an average of $50,000 per e-mail has to set a threshold of cycles they are willing to spend on a single e-mail. Since the person receiving the e-mail sets the cost she has much more control than she has over the snail mail spam she gets in her mailbox. There the post office charges spammers less than regular mail, she can charge more for unsolicited mail.
I'm not saying this is the only solution, but it's important to preserve anonymity if we want a non-totalitarian society. When there are obvious solutions like this one, one has to wonder if there is something more insidious than ignorance behind those that want to link identity with communication.
From Article FIND a space that's at least one and a half times as long as your car.
Yeah, Right! I'm happy with six inches on each side in New York, the real problem is getting out of the spot when you have 2 inches in front and the car behind you is sitting on your bumper. The the "trick" is that in first gear you can push each car an extra couple inches, then you have enough space to get out little by little. If one of the cars is an SUV or has a car alarm you can push it 6 or 8 inches, you shouldn't drive either if your too cheap to park in a garage.
Personally, I think if you can't park anywhere, at anytime, then you shouldn't be driving. What about a special "Midwestern" drivers license. If you live in North Dakota you hardly ever see another car anyway, parking is not an issue. Still it is way to easy to get a license in the US. In most 1st world countries you pay through the nose for driving classes and then take a long drive through city traffic with the DMV official. I got my license by studying while in line for the permit and then a week later, after spending an hour in a car -- so I'd know which petal was the break and which was the clutch, I took a 5 minute drive in the suburbs. I rented a car the next day, in California, with a piece of paper that said I wasn't so good with the clutch but would still be mailed a drivers license. Getting the plastic one with my picture on it turned out to take friggin six weeks, though the official drivers permit arrived even later.
Instead try "If you wanted to X what would you do?"
Ans 1: I'd type man "X" Ans 2: I'd grep -R X/usr/src/linux/Documentation/ And 3: I'd google "X"
Am I hired?
Seriously, I use the interview to evaluate if I want to work there. If I do they'll find me pleasant and smart, if not I'll be pleasant and appreciative of the free meal. Well if they didn't take me out to lunch they're already on thin ice, eh? (Disclaimer: I did accept an internship once over the phone, but only because my advisor recommended them and one of the interviewers was someone knew and respected.)
Whatever the benefits, this would be highly disruptive.
Highly disruptive, expensive and undesired.
Having a central authority for tying identity to e-mail not only concentrates power and points of failure, but also adds unneeded hasle and real dollar cost.
What you really want is to charge hash cash. The hash cash means the reciever uses just a few cycles to generate a challange and the sender must expend many cycles to create the response. You could set this up so the first time someone sends you a message it will take about one second, or one minute, on a modern computer to actually get permission to send you a message, and then later on you put them on a whitelist that lets them send you a message without as high a cost. Devices like cell-phones couldn't send messages directly unless you wanted to spend a LONG time for it to go out, but the cell phone providers could provide a gateway that charged say a penny per message.
The best part is you can add this to SMTP through an extension. For backward compatibility you could at first accept regular e-mail. Then 6 months later implement a challenge-response to the e-mail sender, you send them a message with a GIF attachment, and a message about what to tell their sysAdmin to install. Then you ask them to resend the message with the numbers printed in the GIF attachment (you can randomly perturb the vertices so that it is difficult to OCR.) Then finally another 6 months later you cut them off, you just send a message telling them where to download Mozilla or another SMTP-new-improved e-mail client.
If I had the time I'd write the RFC myself. There's already an RFC for crypto connections between SMTP servers and clients, I expect the implementation would be simple on most if not all servers. The only thing you need to consider is how a user sets the amounts she wants her e-mailers to pay for sending her a message, there has to be some way for her to authenticate herself to the server that recieves her e-mail, there are many ways to do this... But this doesn't need to be standardised, different mechanisms might be appropriate in different situations. Once you can authenticate you could just configure the server through a specially crafted e-mail, which maybe should be standardised so your e-mail program can configure this for you. This should be a different RFC, you can set up the system with just the people setting up e-mail servers setting the thresholds.
Dealing with identity on the internet should be handled with PK-crypto automation. If your e-mail dealt with your keys like ssh does you would know that the wierdly annoying e-mail you got from that guy you've been e-mailing for the last 6 months is really from him, or at least someone who broke into his computer. Having a public key signer like Verisign doesn't mean much to me, since 90% of the people I e-mail I've never seen and only know through their e-mail. What do I care if they payed someone $399 last year to vouch that they are really John X. Smith of 14 Pentigonia Road, Yujoguha, Uganda 21AV-4GTC3? I never visited the guy, he just e-mailed me about the widget and then started sending good patches. Not that I think this is completely useless, but if I were working on the problem I'd first write the RFC and patch some common e-mailers for ssh style PK handling. Only then would I write the RFC for certificate chains, since I doubt everyone would implement this since it's harder and doesn't provide the immediate benefit to users that the first improvement does.
For those two examples you probably want a fast integer unit, and cache isn't terribly important. For most math applications you want a cache as big as you can get it and a decent FPU, and then you worry about the clockspeeds. i.e. if you're multiplying two big matricies an old Sparc with 1M cache will kick the ass of a 3Ghz P4, if you can fit or almost fit in a 256k cache the P4 will win hands down. Umm, so you want a Athlon or P4, prolly an nforce2 motherboard with Athlon is the best performance/$ (get two SIMMs for dual channel to work). Unless you think you might want to do more general purpose math stuff then you might want to look on ebay for cheap MIPS/SPARC workstations.
So there is a 33% improvement, which is cool. (i.e. the P4 is 50% slower)
The SSE2 instructions were pretty much in equal to the P4 in throughput per cycle, that is as a SEE2 processor it performs like a 1.6Ghz P4... Hopefully they can push the clocks up as fast as Intel has with NetBurst.
For instance, suppose that equal income housing varies greatly in Rochester, NY, and that certain children are growing up in worse or older neighborhoods than others? These worse neighborhoods might have a higher lead exposure than others, which might cause the subsequent decline more than the lead.
This is certainly true, but considering they also found that lead levels currently considered harmful lead to small additional IQ lowering it's pretty good evidence that we haven't found the floor where the exposure begins to have negative effects, further studies are needed at even lower exposure levels to try to find a safe level of lead in the blood. It might be lower than 1 microgram per deciliter which was this study's threshold, once we think we've found the floor we can do multiple studies to try to verify that level. I wouldn't recommend changing the EPA requirement until we really find the right level, but if I was considering a home renovation now I would certainly want to know about this study to try to avoid future cleanup costs if the marginal cost now was low enough.
I haven't kept up with this but when I last researched this problem the EPA was only requiring water systems to bring 70% of their customers to the current clean standard. If the 70% that are safe by today's standard are actually safe with respect to the actual floor then we should move quickly to make the other 30% safe since an extra 7 IQ points for 30-40% of the population would almost certainly boost tax revenues enough to pay for the conversion (It's probably more than 30% of the children simply because parents on average can't afford the safest housing. I'm also assuming the paint problem will be solved, there are already good notification systems for homeowners and decent ones for renters at least in larger metropolitan areas.)
I'm looking forward to a day when BSA (and other above-law organisations) will enforce all win users to buy ms licences for everything they use. That'd be a happy day for Linux.
Nah, the wierdo Linux zelots will be complaining, "We don't use MS Windows, Word, or Powerpoint, we shouldn't have to pay the $1500 pc software pirating tax."
Again, WRONG. Only if the key is set up with several separate pins in each tumbler. Otherwise, there is only ONE position where all the pins will clear.
Actually the way master lock systems work is by having a subset of the pins have two levels that will open the lock. You do this by having the "pin" consist of three segments instead of two. So you have two gaps that will allow the lock to open. The paper was nothing new, it was simply not published in a scientific journal before. All it said was if you already have a non-master key you can find the other valid setting for that pin. All you do is make or obtain maybe 30 blanks and make an exact copy of the non-master key except for one pin. You start that pin out at the highest allowable setting and then shorten it little by little until you can open the lock at a setting other than the one you already have. Now you repeat the procedure for each pin. Since there are only a few pins you can do this pretty quickly. You could of course just open the lock up and figure this out the settings directly, but this method allows you to do obtain the key less invasively at the cost of wasting more blanks (at least one per pin). I can't imagine a locksmith using any less efficient method than this, but I think the point of the paper was to wake up the managers/administrators that allow master locks use in sensitive areas like boiler rooms, server rooms, etc.
Managers often don't consult with anyone technical when making these decisions. I visited one university that installed high tech encryption chip using locks that could be opened more quickly and easilly by just carding it with your student ID... You could be a visitor from Mars unfamiliar with locks and see the flaw immediately. Installing something as simple as a door frame would have made carding difficult enough for their purposes. (Most students with the $10 keys would let you in anyway so a deadbolt would have been overkill, as was the whole encryption chip key system.)
I was just reading the "article" and getting more and more annoyed with how clueless and full of unfounded and dumb opinions it was. . . Then I looked at the big warning label on top, "Op-Ed" this is an Editorial! This should not be in the "Science" heading it's just creationist political opinion. It's by a philosophy professor not a scientist. As an op-ed it isn't even a well argued one, no facts no educated opinion even.
Though you cant really replace a *real* keyboard for lots of number crunching..
True, but if you were getting a good deal of use out of them the keyboard would have been shot by now. I was already considering my GX before my SX was stolen cuz the keys were getting mushy. These days I'm so used to mushy keyboards....
There's a certain species of Apple (I think it's the Golden Delicious) that originates from a single plant found in the US many years ago.
All the apples you eat are clones. Apples "go to seed." If you plant apple seeds, 99.999% of them will be inedible. But, apples actually provide a bit of a clue here. All the popular apples except for the Granny Smith got that way because they were both hardy and sweet. Today they are still sweet, but are the least hardy things we grow. We have to absolutely bathe them in insectisides. A cloned species would be similar, at first it's hardy but then the microbes catch up with them. See they are clones too, but they can try more mutations in any given decade. But impossible odds are what humans are all about, I think we could bring a species back, it would just require some serious shepherding the first couple dozen generations.
Consider this, you produce millions of these cow clones. Then you expose some of them to a high stress environments, high viral infections for some, high radiation for others. Then you mix and match, repeat. You always keep animals in completely seperate environments so that no plague wipes out the whole herd. I know it sounds hard, but one day we will stop wiping out more and more swaths of nature and start reversing the process. The atheists will have more guilt about it than the Germans have for the Holocaust or the Americans have for wiping out the "Indians." The popular monotheists all have standing orders from God to treat the world as they would have it treat them. Many of the polytheists believe in reincarnation...it's gonna happen...
The single most important development that would come out of a room-temperature superconductor would be the elimination of batteries, fuel cells, gas tanks, and every other such power storage technology.
All the superconductors I've read about stop being superconductors when exposed to a strong magnetic field. Wouldn't this keep you from increasing the current arbitrarily? If so wouldn't you possibly get more power per gram or power per m^3 with a battery/fuel cell? Superconductors might still make great storage devices for fixed applications like a solar/wind farms, but I'm not so sure they would make sense in your laptop.
His University almost certainly has an academic license so he could have gotten the CD without attending the recruiting seminar. From his CS department or academic computing office, whatever their setup is. So they weren't worth 109 CND, prolly $1+(RIAA tax) for the blank CDROMs he may have needed to bring to his CS department. It's strange that the MS employee didn't just say, "Hey you're covered by the university license while you're matriculated." My university got a free MSDN subscription, a million bucks, plus government matching funds to sign up for the MS licensing, I think in these hard times many will sign up. Some public universities may be barred from dealing with MS due to contracting laws, but private universities can deal with convict corps so long as they aren't involnved in the wrongdoing.
Secondly, since Swing is NOT THREADSAFE it is already mandatory to implement any code that touches the UI in the event handler. What. You didn't know that? Did you read my post? One of the things I pointed out was how easy they made it to run things in the event loop when you were done. Not being comfortable writing callbacks is a really scary 'programmer' attribute. It was done for performance reasons, knowing the order of drawing makes alpha blendings much more efficient. Even if alpha is 1.0. It's also more memory efficient, you don't need to buffer all the mostly hidden panels. Double buffering in SWING only needs a single copy per AWT object. (JFrame, JWindow, etc.)
I do not want to implement an entire data model just for a drop-down list thank you! I agree with this, but it's not the complaint I hear most. It's surprisingly cumbersome to use things like a table. I've implemented ones large enough that their approach made sense, but often I'm just using one for convenience and then the whole stamping thing isn't worth the annoyance.
I looked at the survey and I think they're just considering whether to suck up the gtk/KDE L&F, and whether to make that the default L&F. Someone was telling me the Eclipse IDE does this for gtk to good effect.
When you see doButton1Click() suck 5000 records from a database
Chills just ran down my spine. We had some of those at a custom app house that moved from PowerBuilder to Java. The transition started before SWING and we rolled our own Thread pool and a "run in AWT Thread" utility. We finally did manage to get them out of the event loop on database queries by throwing up an error message if a blocking database call was attempted in the event loop, hehe (never got a complaint on that...they knew better after months of being told not to do it.). We never got them using sensible layout managers though. I should have just disabled the absolute layout manager to begin with, we had wrapped the AWT objects so we could customize them, disabling absolute layout would have been easy, but I worried too many forms had been built badly already. Now, I'd write in a check for legacy classes by name and then assign them a few at a time for upgrade, perhaps giving orphaned ones to trainees. Ah, the mistakes we make when first working with the less able.
I'm so annoyed by this "SWING is slow" canard. As a graphics programmer I can tell you aside from a few glitches in a few select JVM's SWING is much faster. Only poor programmers who try to implement their whole program in the event handler ever have a problem with SWING. Their programs would suck in AWT too, they would simply freeze with the OS redrawing the buttons. With all the work Sun has put into making threads drop dead easy to use there is absolutely no excuse. They have a hook for running things in a thread from a managed pool, and even a utility for running things in the Swing thread when you're done...
Journalism is supposed to be accurate and unbiased. In practice this rarely happens, but the theory is there. The paper has a policy forbidding the modifying of photos, and they enforce it.
It's not enforced at any newspaper. Often just cropping the image can completely change the meaning of the photograph. Also dodging, burning, red eye removal is sometimes required to get a "professional looking" photo. I think he crossed the line, and they did the right thing. But I wish it were done to creative croppers too, but when caught I bet most of them just get a slap on the wrist.
I hope Mr. Walski is picked up by another outfit with the lesson learned. If I had seen the modified photograph first I'd have felt cheated, but I don't think the meaning was changed by the editing. The originals told the same story, just less compactly, either of them with a tag line would have made a good news photograph.
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The problem isn't that he's getting prosecuted for theft. If he were I'm all for that, he probably stole those CDR's, wasted hours of his employers time, etc. But he's being prosecuted for profiting from the copying, when he clearly did not. He wasn't paid for releasing the information, he probably even lost money on the whole thing. I personally think there should be some legal punishment for what he did, he certainly betrayed a trust and we should discourage this type of damage. There may be a legal punishment for all I know. But, he has been prosecuted for something everyone knows he didn't do, that worries me greatly.
I wish JVC all the luck, I wish I could buy one to play with, but In my opinion the technology isnt quite ready for John Doe and his girlfriend to make HD pr0n.
;)
I think the initial market will be film students. Right now a lot of them struggle to raise $50k mostly to buy and develop 35mm color film stock for their thesis films. With this camera they can buy the camera and the editing setup for $5-6k, this is easy to raise in comparison. Some are already doing digital editing of scanned 35mm anyway so for them it's just the cost of the camcorder really. It's surprisingly cheap to scan film btw, like $13 for 8 minutes of B&W film; I guess it's volume since that's about as much as my local photo shop wants to charge for a 36 exposure roll of still photographs, or maybe I'm just a sucker.. The mpeg2 will suck, but at that resolution maybe it won't matter so much, a student film needs to look good on a 10' screen not a 300' one. Eventually this will make it into the hands of your uncle, and then hopefully he'll make good use of iMovie to edit the thing down to just a few minutes of torture.
Parks were ALWAYS provided by the wealthy as free land trusts. So were libraries. This was the case for 200 years in this country. It changed when we became more socialist and when we took away incentive for the wealthy to develop these programs. College wings were paid for by the wealthy, not public funds.
Woah! That's just wrong. Parks were provided FOR the wealthy, supported by TAXES. Colleges, in the USA at least, were provided for and paid for by wealthy. There were some colleges created by the middle class for the middle class, and later by states for the lower middle class. After the federal govenment started paying for research and the like the schools opened up more and more. In the 1970's and 80's the Ivy's even started letting women attend their undergraduate schools. Your arguement would have been much stronger if you stuck to public libraries, which were in large part created by the robber barons almost a hundred years ago, and now are being destroyed by the government both through monopoly maintenance laws like copyright, and through starvation funding.
In some countries monopoly maintenance is more liberterian, there is a "use tax" for profits provided through copyright. Triple income tax on government supported monopoly profits! Of course this wouldn't work with our highest income tax rate... something like 40% now? (I think there is no SS tax on royalty income in the US.)
You can't move your data offsite on HDs, first of all. Ask those shops in the WTC. Some learned it the hard way. "Offsite" really means "some km away".
Hehe, some friends of mine in WTC were saved only because they had sent a debugging version of their code to a customer. They decompiled it and started adding comments... the company is still in business but their best programmers left after that and now the VC's are in control. Made me a believer in offsite backup, I keep my cvs repository on two continents now.
Next, create a system of trust-association so that anyone who wants to voice an opinion about a particular identity can. This is relatively easy to do stand-alone, but DNS is also suited to it (look for the RFCs on key recovery via DNS).
Ultimately people will begin to standardize on a few trust-sources, but there's no reason that joe average can't fire up his own trust authority for his friends and familly to use.
Identity tracking != centralization!
If you haven't noticed DNS is centralized and is a major pain in the ass. Sure there may be millions of DNS servers, but they all depend on the 13 root servers. The RFC's don't prevent me from setting up my own root server and asking everyone to point to that instead, but efforts to do that have failed. Even when they mirror the root DNS in addition to their own domains, and hence depend on the 13 root servers anyway.
Should my machines at home be able to connect to a target random system for SMTP transmission? If not, how do I send mail direct-to-MX for security and privacy reasons? How do I engage TLS if my provider doesn't support it? How, in short, do I partake of the network of peers that is the Internet? Or should we toss that out the window at the first opportunity because users don't like spam?
Odd that you advocate a decentralized Internet except when it comes to sending mail....
RTFP! The whole point is that everyone should send their mail directly to the destination through SMTP. The only time you need relays at all with hash-cash is when you're on a device that simply can't send an e-mail in a resonable time, like a cell phone. And also as a transitionary measure while clients get updated. Clients are things like Eudora, Mozilla, or sendmail/postfix servers run only to send mail, a server is any computer that receives e-mail. I was explaining how you could do the transition, which the article implied would be hard.
The receiver of the e-mail sets the charge. That means if her e-mail is only known to her friends, she can set the fee low. If she needs to post it on her web-page and announce it on CNN, she can set the CPU cost so high that it takes two days to send her an e-mail. Any relays would have to set the maximum amount of bits they were willing to calculate or someone could send one e-mail that takes 5000 years to send, all the time leaving the CPU at 100% utilization, costing real money in power bills. Even a spammer that makes an average of $50,000 per e-mail has to set a threshold of cycles they are willing to spend on a single e-mail. Since the person receiving the e-mail sets the cost she has much more control than she has over the snail mail spam she gets in her mailbox. There the post office charges spammers less than regular mail, she can charge more for unsolicited mail.
I'm not saying this is the only solution, but it's important to preserve anonymity if we want a non-totalitarian society. When there are obvious solutions like this one, one has to wonder if there is something more insidious than ignorance behind those that want to link identity with communication.
From Article FIND a space that's at least one and a half times as long as your car.
Yeah, Right! I'm happy with six inches on each side in New York, the real problem is getting out of the spot when you have 2 inches in front and the car behind you is sitting on your bumper. The the "trick" is that in first gear you can push each car an extra couple inches, then you have enough space to get out little by little. If one of the cars is an SUV or has a car alarm you can push it 6 or 8 inches, you shouldn't drive either if your too cheap to park in a garage.
Personally, I think if you can't park anywhere, at anytime, then you shouldn't be driving.
What about a special "Midwestern" drivers license. If you live in North Dakota you hardly ever see another car anyway, parking is not an issue. Still it is way to easy to get a license in the US. In most 1st world countries you pay through the nose for driving classes and then take a long drive through city traffic with the DMV official. I got my license by studying while in line for the permit and then a week later, after spending an hour in a car -- so I'd know which petal was the break and which was the clutch, I took a 5 minute drive in the suburbs. I rented a car the next day, in California, with a piece of paper that said I wasn't so good with the clutch but would still be mailed a drivers license. Getting the plastic one with my picture on it turned out to take friggin six weeks, though the official drivers permit arrived even later.
Instead try "If you wanted to X what would you do?"
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/
Ans 1: I'd type man "X"
Ans 2: I'd grep -R X
And 3: I'd google "X"
Am I hired?
Seriously, I use the interview to evaluate if I want to work there. If I do they'll find me pleasant and smart, if not I'll be pleasant and appreciative of the free meal. Well if they didn't take me out to lunch they're already on thin ice, eh? (Disclaimer: I did accept an internship once over the phone, but only because my advisor recommended them and one of the interviewers was someone knew and respected.)
Whatever the benefits, this would be highly disruptive.
Highly disruptive, expensive and undesired.
Having a central authority for tying identity to e-mail not only concentrates power and points of failure, but also adds unneeded hasle and real dollar cost.
What you really want is to charge hash cash. The hash cash means the reciever uses just a few cycles to generate a challange and the sender must expend many cycles to create the response. You could set this up so the first time someone sends you a message it will take about one second, or one minute, on a modern computer to actually get permission to send you a message, and then later on you put them on a whitelist that lets them send you a message without as high a cost. Devices like cell-phones couldn't send messages directly unless you wanted to spend a LONG time for it to go out, but the cell phone providers could provide a gateway that charged say a penny per message.
The best part is you can add this to SMTP through an extension. For backward compatibility you could at first accept regular e-mail. Then 6 months later implement a challenge-response to the e-mail sender, you send them a message with a GIF attachment, and a message about what to tell their sysAdmin to install. Then you ask them to resend the message with the numbers printed in the GIF attachment (you can randomly perturb the vertices so that it is difficult to OCR.) Then finally another 6 months later you cut them off, you just send a message telling them where to download Mozilla or another SMTP-new-improved e-mail client.
If I had the time I'd write the RFC myself. There's already an RFC for crypto connections between SMTP servers and clients, I expect the implementation would be simple on most if not all servers. The only thing you need to consider is how a user sets the amounts she wants her e-mailers to pay for sending her a message, there has to be some way for her to authenticate herself to the server that recieves her e-mail, there are many ways to do this... But this doesn't need to be standardised, different mechanisms might be appropriate in different situations. Once you can authenticate you could just configure the server through a specially crafted e-mail, which maybe should be standardised so your e-mail program can configure this for you. This should be a different RFC, you can set up the system with just the people setting up e-mail servers setting the thresholds.
Dealing with identity on the internet should be handled with PK-crypto automation. If your e-mail dealt with your keys like ssh does you would know that the wierdly annoying e-mail you got from that guy you've been e-mailing for the last 6 months is really from him, or at least someone who broke into his computer. Having a public key signer like Verisign doesn't mean much to me, since 90% of the people I e-mail I've never seen and only know through their e-mail. What do I care if they payed someone $399 last year to vouch that they are really John X. Smith of 14 Pentigonia Road, Yujoguha, Uganda 21AV-4GTC3? I never visited the guy, he just e-mailed me about the widget and then started sending good patches. Not that I think this is completely useless, but if I were working on the problem I'd first write the RFC and patch some common e-mailers for ssh style PK handling. Only then would I write the RFC for certificate chains, since I doubt everyone would implement this since it's harder and doesn't provide the immediate benefit to users that the first improvement does.
For those two examples you probably want a fast integer unit, and cache isn't terribly important. For most math applications you want a cache as big as you can get it and a decent FPU, and then you worry about the clockspeeds. i.e. if you're multiplying two big matricies an old Sparc with 1M cache will kick the ass of a 3Ghz P4, if you can fit or almost fit in a 256k cache the P4 will win hands down. Umm, so you want a Athlon or P4, prolly an nforce2 motherboard with Athlon is the best performance/$ (get two SIMMs for dual channel to work). Unless you think you might want to do more general purpose math stuff then you might want to look on ebay for cheap MIPS/SPARC workstations.
Me: Looks around, ducks head...
Athlon 64 2800+ (true clock 1.6Ghz)
latency: 96 cycles or 96/1.6 => 60 ns
Pentium 4 2.8C
latency: 260 cycles or 260/2.8 => 92 ns
So there is a 33% improvement, which is cool. (i.e. the P4 is 50% slower)
The SSE2 instructions were pretty much in equal to the P4 in throughput per cycle, that is as a SEE2 processor it performs like a 1.6Ghz P4... Hopefully they can push the clocks up as fast as Intel has with NetBurst.
For instance, suppose that equal income housing varies greatly in Rochester, NY, and that certain children are growing up in worse or older neighborhoods than others? These worse neighborhoods might have a higher lead exposure than others, which might cause the subsequent decline more than the lead.
This is certainly true, but considering they also found that lead levels currently considered harmful lead to small additional IQ lowering it's pretty good evidence that we haven't found the floor where the exposure begins to have negative effects, further studies are needed at even lower exposure levels to try to find a safe level of lead in the blood. It might be lower than 1 microgram per deciliter which was this study's threshold, once we think we've found the floor we can do multiple studies to try to verify that level. I wouldn't recommend changing the EPA requirement until we really find the right level, but if I was considering a home renovation now I would certainly want to know about this study to try to avoid future cleanup costs if the marginal cost now was low enough.
I haven't kept up with this but when I last researched this problem the EPA was only requiring water systems to bring 70% of their customers to the current clean standard. If the 70% that are safe by today's standard are actually safe with respect to the actual floor then we should move quickly to make the other 30% safe since an extra 7 IQ points for 30-40% of the population would almost certainly boost tax revenues enough to pay for the conversion (It's probably more than 30% of the children simply because parents on average can't afford the safest housing. I'm also assuming the paint problem will be solved, there are already good notification systems for homeowners and decent ones for renters at least in larger metropolitan areas.)
I'm looking forward to a day when BSA (and other above-law organisations) will enforce all win users to buy ms licences for everything they use. That'd be a happy day for Linux.
Nah, the wierdo Linux zelots will be complaining, "We don't use MS Windows, Word, or Powerpoint, we shouldn't have to pay the $1500 pc software pirating tax."
Again, WRONG. Only if the key is set up with several separate pins in each tumbler. Otherwise, there is only ONE position where all the pins will clear.
Actually the way master lock systems work is by having a subset of the pins have two levels that will open the lock. You do this by having the "pin" consist of three segments instead of two. So you have two gaps that will allow the lock to open. The paper was nothing new, it was simply not published in a scientific journal before. All it said was if you already have a non-master key you can find the other valid setting for that pin. All you do is make or obtain maybe 30 blanks and make an exact copy of the non-master key except for one pin. You start that pin out at the highest allowable setting and then shorten it little by little until you can open the lock at a setting other than the one you already have. Now you repeat the procedure for each pin. Since there are only a few pins you can do this pretty quickly. You could of course just open the lock up and figure this out the settings directly, but this method allows you to do obtain the key less invasively at the cost of wasting more blanks (at least one per pin). I can't imagine a locksmith using any less efficient method than this, but I think the point of the paper was to wake up the managers/administrators that allow master locks use in sensitive areas like boiler rooms, server rooms, etc.
Managers often don't consult with anyone technical when making these decisions. I visited one university that installed high tech encryption chip using locks that could be opened more quickly and easilly by just carding it with your student ID... You could be a visitor from Mars unfamiliar with locks and see the flaw immediately. Installing something as simple as a door frame would have made carding difficult enough for their purposes. (Most students with the $10 keys would let you in anyway so a deadbolt would have been overkill, as was the whole encryption chip key system.)
Oh, wait...
We didn't publish that?
Oh, shit...
Oops, he is a professor of "Natural Philosophy" or physics. But I stand by my opinion of the op-ed. Not worth debating.
I was just reading the "article" and getting more and more annoyed with how clueless and full of unfounded and dumb opinions it was. . . Then I looked at the big warning label on top, "Op-Ed" this is an Editorial! This should not be in the "Science" heading it's just creationist political opinion. It's by a philosophy professor not a scientist. As an op-ed it isn't even a well argued one, no facts no educated opinion even.
Though you cant really replace a *real* keyboard for lots of number crunching..
True, but if you were getting a good deal of use out of them the keyboard would have been shot by now. I was already considering my GX before my SX was stolen cuz the keys were getting mushy. These days I'm so used to mushy keyboards....
There's a certain species of Apple (I think it's the Golden Delicious) that originates from a single plant found in the US many years ago.
All the apples you eat are clones. Apples "go to seed." If you plant apple seeds, 99.999% of them will be inedible. But, apples actually provide a bit of a clue here. All the popular apples except for the Granny Smith got that way because they were both hardy and sweet. Today they are still sweet, but are the least hardy things we grow. We have to absolutely bathe them in insectisides. A cloned species would be similar, at first it's hardy but then the microbes catch up with them. See they are clones too, but they can try more mutations in any given decade. But impossible odds are what humans are all about, I think we could bring a species back, it would just require some serious shepherding the first couple dozen generations.
Consider this, you produce millions of these cow clones. Then you expose some of them to a high stress environments, high viral infections for some, high radiation for others. Then you mix and match, repeat. You always keep animals in completely seperate environments so that no plague wipes out the whole herd. I know it sounds hard, but one day we will stop wiping out more and more swaths of nature and start reversing the process. The atheists will have more guilt about it than the Germans have for the Holocaust or the Americans have for wiping out the "Indians." The popular monotheists all have standing orders from God to treat the world as they would have it treat them. Many of the polytheists believe in reincarnation...it's gonna happen...
The single most important development that would come out of a room-temperature superconductor would be the elimination of batteries, fuel cells, gas tanks, and every other such power storage technology.
All the superconductors I've read about stop being superconductors when exposed to a strong magnetic field. Wouldn't this keep you from increasing the current arbitrarily? If so wouldn't you possibly get more power per gram or power per m^3 with a battery/fuel cell? Superconductors might still make great storage devices for fixed applications like a solar/wind farms, but I'm not so sure they would make sense in your laptop.
His University almost certainly has an academic license so he could have gotten the CD without attending the recruiting seminar. From his CS department or academic computing office, whatever their setup is. So they weren't worth 109 CND, prolly $1+(RIAA tax) for the blank CDROMs he may have needed to bring to his CS department. It's strange that the MS employee didn't just say, "Hey you're covered by the university license while you're matriculated." My university got a free MSDN subscription, a million bucks, plus government matching funds to sign up for the MS licensing, I think in these hard times many will sign up. Some public universities may be barred from dealing with MS due to contracting laws, but private universities can deal with convict corps so long as they aren't involnved in the wrongdoing.
obsession over "freedom". Christ, do you ask that all cars be free? Or bridges? Or books? No? Then why software?
Actually, I do want to be free to bring my car to any mechanic, or walk over the Brooklyn Bridge any time of day, or read my books anyway I please.
Even if I may have to move to Paris, Freedom to do it.
Secondly, since Swing is NOT THREADSAFE it is already mandatory to implement any code that touches the UI in the event handler. What. You didn't know that?
Did you read my post? One of the things I pointed out was how easy they made it to run things in the event loop when you were done. Not being comfortable writing callbacks is a really scary 'programmer' attribute. It was done for performance reasons, knowing the order of drawing makes alpha blendings much more efficient. Even if alpha is 1.0. It's also more memory efficient, you don't need to buffer all the mostly hidden panels. Double buffering in SWING only needs a single copy per AWT object. (JFrame, JWindow, etc.)
I do not want to implement an entire data model just for a drop-down list thank you!
I agree with this, but it's not the complaint I hear most. It's surprisingly cumbersome to use things like a table. I've implemented ones large enough that their approach made sense, but often I'm just using one for convenience and then the whole stamping thing isn't worth the annoyance.
I looked at the survey and I think they're just considering whether to suck up the gtk/KDE L&F, and whether to make that the default L&F. Someone was telling me the Eclipse IDE does this for gtk to good effect.
When you see doButton1Click() suck 5000 records from a database
Chills just ran down my spine. We had some of those at a custom app house that moved from PowerBuilder to Java. The transition started before SWING and we rolled our own Thread pool and a "run in AWT Thread" utility. We finally did manage to get them out of the event loop on database queries by throwing up an error message if a blocking database call was attempted in the event loop, hehe (never got a complaint on that...they knew better after months of being told not to do it.). We never got them using sensible layout managers though. I should have just disabled the absolute layout manager to begin with, we had wrapped the AWT objects so we could customize them, disabling absolute layout would have been easy, but I worried too many forms had been built badly already. Now, I'd write in a check for legacy classes by name and then assign them a few at a time for upgrade, perhaps giving orphaned ones to trainees. Ah, the mistakes we make when first working with the less able.
I'm so annoyed by this "SWING is slow" canard. As a graphics programmer I can tell you aside from a few glitches in a few select JVM's SWING is much faster. Only poor programmers who try to implement their whole program in the event handler ever have a problem with SWING. Their programs would suck in AWT too, they would simply freeze with the OS redrawing the buttons. With all the work Sun has put into making threads drop dead easy to use there is absolutely no excuse. They have a hook for running things in a thread from a managed pool, and even a utility for running things in the Swing thread when you're done...
Journalism is supposed to be accurate and unbiased. In practice this rarely happens, but the theory is there. The paper has a policy forbidding the modifying of photos, and they enforce it.
It's not enforced at any newspaper. Often just cropping the image can completely change the meaning of the photograph. Also dodging, burning, red eye removal is sometimes required to get a "professional looking" photo. I think he crossed the line, and they did the right thing. But I wish it were done to creative croppers too, but when caught I bet most of them just get a slap on the wrist.
I hope Mr. Walski is picked up by another outfit with the lesson learned. If I had seen the modified photograph first I'd have felt cheated, but I don't think the meaning was changed by the editing. The originals told the same story, just less compactly, either of them with a tag line would have made a good news photograph.