If you use their image in advertising or sell it as clip art then you need it. But if you are going to make money from selling prints after a gallery showing or you will make money indirectly from having their picture in a news story you don't need a release. This isn't law per-say but based on precident from Judges deciding how to balance free speech against privacy.
The reasoning might be that an artist or photojournalist needs your picture to get their point across, but an advertiser is trying to sell a product not advance an idea so they could use someone else's mug if you wouldn't sign the release. It's a good idea to get a release if you can since you might want to sell the picture for commercial use someday. Magazine covers count as commercial art for instance. And the legal climate may very well change, IP law is extending further everyday, you may not be able to show in a gallery someday soon without releases.
My picture was used in a postcard once without a release, or even a thank you. This was 15 years ago, these days ppl could be sued for that. (Not that I would, nor that anyone should win.)
If we shorten it to only the life of the author, how much harm will that do?
A publisher wouldn't touch a mid-list authors book if she were close to death and the copyright would expire on her demise. I think the original copyright law was the correct one for books. 18 years, renewable for another 18 if the author is still alive. Maybe it should be shorter today because of distribution, etc. But then there are children's books to consider. I think life and a minimum of 10 years makes sense.
This is the same model of registration that the software industry has been using for years.
We really don't know enough about this to say Universal didn't break the patent. We all know there are 10,000 ways to implement this that don't break any patents. But we also know that the Patent office hands out patents for left handed bum washing, so they may very well have a defendable patent on a say a particular formula for computing a one way hash, and if Universal copied that willy nilly then maybe they should cough up the pocket change they are asking for.
We don't even know if it is like the keys on software, since the features sound like a web site it could just be a random string that's easy to type but hard to remember.
Spammers specifically are already starting to abuse open Wi-Fi networks.
Really? According to who? I've read one article where they said this, I think BBC, and the guy they quoted said it he was misquoted. I mean it will eventually happen, but has it really yet?
Not so hard to stop anyway, ISP's that encourage their users to share 802.11 just put authentication mechanisms on their SMTP server. If you're not an ISP, but just a AP owner, block port 25 in your DSL Router. Visitors can still send mail through POP3 & IMAP4.
DoS attacks rely on r00ting lots of machines on well connected networks. This is not likely to include wireless anytime soon. Maybe when this waterlilly network is up and running and some vulnerability is found in the routing OS, or more likely in Windows F-, then someone will write a worm that builds a parallel network of p2p hosts that accept commands from any IP as long as it has the right RSA signature to attack some random IP. But that won't really rely on Wi-Fi mesh anymore than it rely's on any network. The Wi-Fi mesh will most likely store the route in an accessible way so you can trace them to their last hop. At that point the problem is easier than finding a rouge FM station, and the Feds would be much more motivated...
Actually, why do we have whois records for any domain?
To catch hackers.
When someone breaks into a a computer on your network, calling the owner of the domain can help you find the bastard. Or stop him in his tracks if he picks up the phone. You could probably get the same info by figuring out the ISP from their IP address or the route, then calling the ISP. This is probably even more accurate, but directness is good. Esp if the computer you see is just the first hop along the way to the bastard.
Hmm hands up who installs a compiler on WEB SERVER?!
Me me me! I wouldn't dream of doing it on something I intended to serve web pages to the world from. But I've fired up Apache a couple times on my computer just to quickly look at something before commit. I didn't do it at all in the 3-4 days after I the exploited hole was discovered and my vendor released the patched version. I'm a programmer who occasionally writes a web page, I could do with a much simpler web server, even one written in Java that can't do buffer overflow, but that's not what is already installed....
Seriously, what's your point? When you copy another corporations source and forget to take out their "Stacker" copyright strings they can sue you and win even if you have more lawyers and drive them out of business? What does that have to do with debugging being easier with source code? Like Microsoft didn't debug the code before stealing it? They are just one corporation, bugs are only shallow when there are lots of eyeballs. Do you think the proprietary voting companies stole some GNU source? And are hence afraid of having the code inspected?
I think hiring the company that did those NYCSubway Metrocard machines to do the interface design and hiring a few companies to write competing open-source back-ends, with 10 million dollar prizes for each bug discovered, would quickly and cheaply create a voting system that could be given to governments the world over at great benefit to everybody. This isn't even a OS thing, there shouldn't be an OS on these things, just a monolithic application that is simple, on a chip that is open(so nothing up to date), with a simple non-optimizing C compiler written in machine code bootstrapping the thing. The thing must be auditable. That means the chip, the machine code, the code. And a few corps should be hired for a professional audit before it is first deployed. The prizes for additional bugs found could be made larger if there isn't enough interest at 10 million a piece.
Come to think of it maybe it's easier to audit a mechanical voting machine... Still if we ever want to get rid of that stupid Senator/Representitive system we'll need an electronic replacement for voting.
Re:Any compromise is a defeat for the consumer
on
"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 2
Appeasement is a the way to defeat, but compromise doesn't have to be. It all depends on the exchange. If say we allowed mp3's to decay with a semaphore that got decrimented on each copy, disallowing copies after the fifth copy. If you own the original that makes for 5! or 120 copies, but the first person to copy your copy only gets a maximum of 4!=24 copies, the next 3!=6 max, the next 2!=2, the next 1!=1, and the next 0 copies. But in exchange for putting this in every legal p2p program, cd copier, etc. we get the copyright shortened to the intended maximum of 14 years, shorter for software, music, etc. I think that would be a net gain to the consumer and society at large. That's a compromise not appeasement.
Note: In reality there would never be 120 copies made. Prolly everyone would back up the original and then never touch it until the first copy died, and prolly share that one, reduced to 20(24 - 4 for personal use) individual non-copyable files. And there would be programs that allowed you to reset the counter, but they would be illegal and their distributors cracked down on. The crackdown would work because people would buy into the copyright scheme if they saw it as something whose benefits outweighed it's high costs. Right now most educated people see it as a perversion perpetrated by Disney. I can't tell you how many lawyers really thought the name of the Sonny Bono Act was the "Disney Act II."
Did anyone else notice that the antenna's are not connected to anything. And, that they look like the Linksys antennas, while the Wi-Fi card looks like one of those crappy PRISM2 cards?
It looks more like a mockup than a reference design. Some video of it working might have made it more convincing, or source code... though I guess under the GPL they can just distribute that to their licencees. (Who really don't have a compeling interest to redistribute unless say the FSF buys a kit.)
Heh! I remember always clicking the Netscape logo and being bounced to their web page. I guess this must have been why I was always clicking that thing. Pretty effective advertizing, the stop button makes more sense so they wouldn't piss off users too much, but anyone sitting using your Netscape install will learn where to get the browser that can lay out the text and download the pictures as it goes.
Mozilla still doesn't seem to have the incremental layout capabilities of Netscape 0.9... I remember that thing had some kind of priority queue, fetching pictures actually on the screen first, making as many connections as you wanted (later capped at 20). These days the thing will freeze as it loads some plugin or other, maybe this is somehow harder than images, but we've had multi-threading for a few decades now...
Now when someone wants to log into those ultra-secure fingerprint protected CIA/NSI/whatever servers they just have to get a job at the local supermarket and grab an employees e-fingerprint.
Better yet if you want to frame someone when you crash the electrical grid you just do it from a "secure" e-fingerprint equiped computer and make sure that you leave a long log-trail... Hehe, might be easy to get some high profile military industrial complex types to break into various government provisioning systems and put in large orders for $100,000 toilet seats, the fingerprint is proof, right? Then we could all laugh our butts of when the government is only allowed to buy equipment from foreign, mostly Russian, providers.
Wasn't there some quote "One step backward for fraud, one great leap backward for freedom" ? No, not yet?
ION drives require power. The idea is to design newer satelites with larger solar arrays so they can last 20 years up there instead of 10. If you're going to add a booster you don't want it to have solar panels because they would be unlikely to work with all those old satelites without a redesign based on where the existing solar panels are on each one. Plus it might not make sense economically to add a 20 year propulsion system to a satelite with 10 years left in it.
As for wanting a "real tugboat" that attaches to multiple satelites... well the biggest problem is the docking, when we've had these working long enough to have confidence in automatic docking, then we can think about a general purpose tugboat. Remember it would have to dock with each satelite many times over a 10 year span, and transit between all the satelites it wants to service. Perhaps an ion based one could have a 25-30 year life span, but then you'd be testing two undertested technologies at once instead of just the docking. I'm not even sure they should be allowed to do this in geosynchronus orbit before it is tested in other less essential orbits; it's going to cost $$$ for the shuttle to go up there and clean up the mess when one of these fails.
Even if the linked article proves to be true, we will never see widespread adoption of this low-cost treatment. Why? Because it directly threatens the large profit margins enjoyed by pharmaceutical companies the world over.
Actually these things exist and you can buy them to clean a pool. My understanding is they either just invented a better way to move the fluids around inside the device so more of the water touches the Na+ and Cl-, or they are just trying to let more people know about this. The real reason this won't become widely used is that clorene is a chemical byproduct of creating fertilizer, which just happens to be a pretty good disinfectant. The most widespread adoption will do is decrease the cost of clorene and increase the cost of fertilizer slightly. They chemical companies that produce clorene could pay you to take it and still make a profit since fertilizer is such a boon to farmers.
Not that I don't think chemical companies would resort to dirty tricks. They just don't need to for clorene to be produced. It's good for their profit margins if fertilizer is cheaper, but not essential for the industry to exist. The only way it would seriously hurt them is if they couldn't pay people to take it, and had to pay for dumping it. Presumably after combining it with something to make it neutral.
That will happen the same day there are stickers on your laptop telling you not to move it.
It may make sense for a UPS, as someone else mentioned. And there was a story a while back on using it to store energy coming off the third rail in NYC subways. The problem is that you can't completely cancel out that bicycle effect. Though it would be ultra cool to hold up your powerbook with one finger on one of the corners, it's not so practical to have a laptop where reorienting it drains half the "battery"
In most states in the US if you have the right lights, a mirror on the drivers side, and one either on the passenger or windshield you can get it registered and inspected. If the mod looks like it might weigh to much it might not pass inspection, or if you had that flagpole or whatever.
You probably could get insurance to cover damage to your car but you could get liability as long as it passed inspection. In NJ, the only state I've had an inspection done, you need seatbelts and to pass emission. Even that could be gotten around by having it inspected at your local garage for a fee. The funny thing is if it's a classic car (over 20 yrs old) the emission standards are very low, and you even get registration and insurance for less. It's a sort of "Sunday Driver" clause, since they don't expect you do drive the thing everyday.
Parts will come flying off on any car on some of the roads in the states. I lost a my muffler on a bridge that was being refurbished because my car couldn't clear the uneven road surface(NJ). It only cost a $1000 to have the undercarage repaired and the muffler reattached so I didn't bother filing for any kind of reimbursement. 10ft deep potholes are not uncommon in NYC, I just saw a brand new one on my way to work yesterday(4ft). It happens when there is a flood underneath the road surface. There congrete under the blacktop is 3ft thick in places but it isn't steel reinforced so if the earth beneath it is gone, the road eventually fails. A few months ago a delivery truck fell completely underground when the intersection collapsed. That one took 3 days to repair, a watermain had broken at least a week before underneath. My neighboorhood used to be a marsh 200 years ago, so it's not surprising when an buried river goes amuck.
At best, the GPL inconveniences "embrace and extend" tactics, since you can't re-use the source, but there's nothing whatsoever to prevent someone re-implementing the program and performing embrace and extend on that.
This is true in most of the world but in the US most government sponsored research is heavily patented. So in order to embrace and extend you without staying under GPL you have to relicence the patents. The article didn't mention patent policies, probably because they don't allow software patents, but I bet most universities will get US patents so they can get a little sponsorship for commercial applications. Not that it stops E&E, but they could create a policy that prevented any company from selling a non-GPL'd version of anything they invented in the US. Just because GPL gives you a non-exclusive patent license for the software and it's derivatives, which must be GPL...
I'm more interested in how they're going to get this gas into space. I realize it can be compressed, but 3 cubic kilometers worth?
There is very little air pressure in space, so you don't need a lot of pressure for the ballon to inflate. You do need to keep enough pressure in it so your rocket doesn't push through the ballon and hit the asteroid. Getting a big rocket to the asteroid is beyond what we could do by next year say. (By "we" I mean Russia since they still have some big rockets, but not that big, it would have to be an international thing with the US sending up supplies, Russia supplying the big fuel tanks and engines, and Europe and Japan footing the bill.)
One advantage of crashing into this thing with a big airbag before doing a 20-30 second big burn is that the momentum of the rocket would be fully transfered to the comet as more of a translation than a rotation. Plus landing on the comet in a place were it would just translate and not rotate would be difficult.
It doesn't really rule out the nuclear option either. Since you only get to do that once you'd try this first, then check if you moved it enough. If not an H-Bomb isn't so heavy, you'd have brought one along. Now you just land on the comet and set it off. Hopefully enough of it is vaporized quickly enough to push the remaining fragments off the they collision path to Earth.
Not that it will matter, we're not looking out the front windshield. Hopefully the first one to hit us in modern times won't be the big one. But I bet if Sydney disappeared one day, we'd arrest all the usual suspects and suspend free-speech immediately. Oh, and maybe do something after the an election cycle, or two.
Re:What is Habeas Corpus??
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Habeas Corpus in the US means you shouldn't be arrested and kept jailed indefinately without being accused of doing something possibly illegal. It's based on an English law passed in 1679.
The interpretation has been left up to the Courts and Congress. There are rules in different parts of the country but usually if you can prove you are a citizen you won't be held more than 3 days under normal circumstances, or 10 days or so if there is a riot or flood or some other act of god, without being charged with a crime. The idea being that you can't defend yourself if you aren't accused of anything.
The US constitution allows the president to suspend Habeas Corpus if Congress declares war. This is a bit of a controversy in the States right now because Congress refused to declare war in the early days after Sept 11, but instead gave Bush some extraordinary powers indefinately and others that needed to be renewed in a few years. Congress purposely didn't give him a suspension of Habeas Corpus, but apparently he has been holding lots of people more than the 10 day or so maximum, more or less since Sept 11, without being charged with any crime. Most of the people arrested pleaded to some minor offense to get released, but many have either not been offered that option or refused it. It's hard to know since they aren't allowed lawyers and their names and number are unknown. Even if there had been a declaration of war it would be illegal to not allow someone to contact any governement approved lawyer.
Everybody is pretty much right around here if it's a manufacturing line you should do it because it costs almost nothing and the payoff can be significant. But if you're just making research components in small batches that will be used for 10 days and disgarded then go with the tech's idea of ESD. If she thinks she's more productive without the wrist strap she'll buy a couple extra components and hopefully save you multiples of that in her labor costs.
But I bet if she's working with CMOS chips or anything without well protected IO pins she'll probably want all the static protection she can get. If she's making passive filters with surface mount components, why bother? (resistors, caps & inductors aren't likely to be damaged.)
That has to be the stupidest thing they've ever done. I thought they wanted to stop future war crimes by prosecuting the murderers. Now we won't even try to stop war crimes cuz there will be no paid reporters telling us what's up.
There is a less than perfect solution: Filter off all machines from vendor-X using products from vendor-Y. Make all machines from vendor-X resistant to attacks from the vendor-Y machines. Oh, and be damn sure that the two vendors are not affiliated, and are not controlled by the same government.
This won't work, MS is slap happy about RPC over HTTP. They can even do it through a caching proxy. That means any firewall that allows web traffic won't prevent access to their Windows software on your machine. But even if you took the medical records completely off the internet this is a legal problem not a technical one. You gave them access, they might demand physical access if you don't give them electronic access. I don't see it happending, but legally, in any state where EULAs apply, they can.
The only solution here is to get MS to sign a supplementary agreement either that is satisfactory for HIPAA, or for the congress critters to pass a law forbiding overbroad hacking clauses in contracts, forcing Microsoft to rewrite their EULA for everyone.
I still think the best thing to do is deny copyright protection to any work distributed with license. Sort of a patent vs. trade secret distinction, instead you get a choice between copyright or contract.
Slashdot Mirror
If you use their image in advertising or sell it as clip art then you need it. But if you are going to make money from selling prints after a gallery showing or you will make money indirectly from having their picture in a news story you don't need a release. This isn't law per-say but based on precident from Judges deciding how to balance free speech against privacy.
The reasoning might be that an artist or photojournalist needs your picture to get their point across, but an advertiser is trying to sell a product not advance an idea so they could use someone else's mug if you wouldn't sign the release. It's a good idea to get a release if you can since you might want to sell the picture for commercial use someday. Magazine covers count as commercial art for instance. And the legal climate may very well change, IP law is extending further everyday, you may not be able to show in a gallery someday soon without releases.
My picture was used in a postcard once without a release, or even a thank you. This was 15 years ago, these days ppl could be sued for that. (Not that I would, nor that anyone should win.)
If we shorten it to only the life of the author, how much harm will that do?
A publisher wouldn't touch a mid-list authors book if she were close to death and the copyright would expire on her demise. I think the original copyright law was the correct one for books. 18 years, renewable for another 18 if the author is still alive. Maybe it should be shorter today because of distribution, etc. But then there are children's books to consider. I think life and a minimum of 10 years makes sense.
This is the same model of registration that the software industry has been using for years.
We really don't know enough about this to say Universal didn't break the patent. We all know there are 10,000 ways to implement this that don't break any patents. But we also know that the Patent office hands out patents for left handed bum washing, so they may very well have a defendable patent on a say a particular formula for computing a one way hash, and if Universal copied that willy nilly then maybe they should cough up the pocket change they are asking for.
We don't even know if it is like the keys on software, since the features sound like a web site it could just be a random string that's easy to type but hard to remember.
"Censoring is bad, unless applied to naughty porn sites?"
Didn't you know Amerika is the arbiter of what is Republican and what is Evil? Our lord and president George Eliza Bush said so himself.
Spammers specifically are already starting to abuse open Wi-Fi networks.
Really? According to who? I've read one article where they said this, I think BBC, and the guy they quoted said it he was misquoted. I mean it will eventually happen, but has it really yet?
Not so hard to stop anyway, ISP's that encourage their users to share 802.11 just put authentication mechanisms on their SMTP server. If you're not an ISP, but just a AP owner, block port 25 in your DSL Router. Visitors can still send mail through POP3 & IMAP4.
DoS attacks rely on r00ting lots of machines on well connected networks. This is not likely to include wireless anytime soon. Maybe when this waterlilly network is up and running and some vulnerability is found in the routing OS, or more likely in Windows F-, then someone will write a worm that builds a parallel network of p2p hosts that accept commands from any IP as long as it has the right RSA signature to attack some random IP. But that won't really rely on Wi-Fi mesh anymore than it rely's on any network. The Wi-Fi mesh will most likely store the route in an accessible way so you can trace them to their last hop. At that point the problem is easier than finding a rouge FM station, and the Feds would be much more motivated...
Actually, why do we have whois records for any domain?
To catch hackers.
When someone breaks into a a computer on your network, calling the owner of the domain can help you find the bastard. Or stop him in his tracks if he picks up the phone. You could probably get the same info by figuring out the ISP from their IP address or the route, then calling the ISP. This is probably even more accurate, but directness is good. Esp if the computer you see is just the first hop along the way to the bastard.
Hmm hands up who installs a compiler on WEB SERVER?!
Me me me! I wouldn't dream of doing it on something I intended to serve web pages to the world from. But I've fired up Apache a couple times on my computer just to quickly look at something before commit. I didn't do it at all in the 3-4 days after I the exploited hole was discovered and my vendor released the patched version. I'm a programmer who occasionally writes a web page, I could do with a much simpler web server, even one written in Java that can't do buffer overflow, but that's not what is already installed....
where the elites control the one party
Actually I sort of wanted to replace that with a democracy.
happy ignorant worker bees who know their place
So are you happy?
Does the word DoubleSpace mean anything to you?
Damn! I will never get those files back!
Seriously, what's your point? When you copy another corporations source and forget to take out their "Stacker" copyright strings they can sue you and win even if you have more lawyers and drive them out of business? What does that have to do with debugging being easier with source code? Like Microsoft didn't debug the code before stealing it? They are just one corporation, bugs are only shallow when there are lots of eyeballs. Do you think the proprietary voting companies stole some GNU source? And are hence afraid of having the code inspected?
I think hiring the company that did those NYCSubway Metrocard machines to do the interface design and hiring a few companies to write competing open-source back-ends, with 10 million dollar prizes for each bug discovered, would quickly and cheaply create a voting system that could be given to governments the world over at great benefit to everybody. This isn't even a OS thing, there shouldn't be an OS on these things, just a monolithic application that is simple, on a chip that is open(so nothing up to date), with a simple non-optimizing C compiler written in machine code bootstrapping the thing. The thing must be auditable. That means the chip, the machine code, the code. And a few corps should be hired for a professional audit before it is first deployed. The prizes for additional bugs found could be made larger if there isn't enough interest at 10 million a piece.
Come to think of it maybe it's easier to audit a mechanical voting machine... Still if we ever want to get rid of that stupid Senator/Representitive system we'll need an electronic replacement for voting.
Appeasement is a the way to defeat, but compromise doesn't have to be. It all depends on the exchange. If say we allowed mp3's to decay with a semaphore that got decrimented on each copy, disallowing copies after the fifth copy. If you own the original that makes for 5! or 120 copies, but the first person to copy your copy only gets a maximum of 4!=24 copies, the next 3!=6 max, the next 2!=2, the next 1!=1, and the next 0 copies. But in exchange for putting this in every legal p2p program, cd copier, etc. we get the copyright shortened to the intended maximum of 14 years, shorter for software, music, etc. I think that would be a net gain to the consumer and society at large. That's a compromise not appeasement.
Note: In reality there would never be 120 copies made. Prolly everyone would back up the original and then never touch it until the first copy died, and prolly share that one, reduced to 20(24 - 4 for personal use) individual non-copyable files. And there would be programs that allowed you to reset the counter, but they would be illegal and their distributors cracked down on. The crackdown would work because people would buy into the copyright scheme if they saw it as something whose benefits outweighed it's high costs. Right now most educated people see it as a perversion perpetrated by Disney. I can't tell you how many lawyers really thought the name of the Sonny Bono Act was the "Disney Act II."
Did anyone else notice that the antenna's are not connected to anything. And, that they look like the Linksys antennas, while the Wi-Fi card looks like one of those crappy PRISM2 cards?
It looks more like a mockup than a reference design. Some video of it working might have made it more convincing, or source code... though I guess under the GPL they can just distribute that to their licencees. (Who really don't have a compeling interest to redistribute unless say the FSF buys a kit.)
Heh! I remember always clicking the Netscape logo and being bounced to their web page. I guess this must have been why I was always clicking that thing. Pretty effective advertizing, the stop button makes more sense so they wouldn't piss off users too much, but anyone sitting using your Netscape install will learn where to get the browser that can lay out the text and download the pictures as it goes.
Mozilla still doesn't seem to have the incremental layout capabilities of Netscape 0.9... I remember that thing had some kind of priority queue, fetching pictures actually on the screen first, making as many connections as you wanted (later capped at 20). These days the thing will freeze as it loads some plugin or other, maybe this is somehow harder than images, but we've had multi-threading for a few decades now...
Now when someone wants to log into those ultra-secure fingerprint protected CIA/NSI/whatever servers they just have to get a job at the local supermarket and grab an employees e-fingerprint.
Better yet if you want to frame someone when you crash the electrical grid you just do it from a "secure" e-fingerprint equiped computer and make sure that you leave a long log-trail... Hehe, might be easy to get some high profile military industrial complex types to break into various government provisioning systems and put in large orders for $100,000 toilet seats, the fingerprint is proof, right? Then we could all laugh our butts of when the government is only allowed to buy equipment from foreign, mostly Russian, providers.
Wasn't there some quote "One step backward for fraud, one great leap backward for freedom" ? No, not yet?
It looks like they ARE using ion drives + solar panels. I wouldn't trust it, but it looks like they will be selling this as a fully insured package...
ION drives require power. The idea is to design newer satelites with larger solar arrays so they can last 20 years up there instead of 10. If you're going to add a booster you don't want it to have solar panels because they would be unlikely to work with all those old satelites without a redesign based on where the existing solar panels are on each one. Plus it might not make sense economically to add a 20 year propulsion system to a satelite with 10 years left in it.
As for wanting a "real tugboat" that attaches to multiple satelites... well the biggest problem is the docking, when we've had these working long enough to have confidence in automatic docking, then we can think about a general purpose tugboat. Remember it would have to dock with each satelite many times over a 10 year span, and transit between all the satelites it wants to service. Perhaps an ion based one could have a 25-30 year life span, but then you'd be testing two undertested technologies at once instead of just the docking. I'm not even sure they should be allowed to do this in geosynchronus orbit before it is tested in other less essential orbits; it's going to cost $$$ for the shuttle to go up there and clean up the mess when one of these fails.
Even if the linked article proves to be true, we will never see widespread adoption of this low-cost treatment. Why? Because it directly threatens the large profit margins enjoyed by pharmaceutical companies the world over.
Actually these things exist and you can buy them to clean a pool. My understanding is they either just invented a better way to move the fluids around inside the device so more of the water touches the Na+ and Cl-, or they are just trying to let more people know about this. The real reason this won't become widely used is that clorene is a chemical byproduct of creating fertilizer, which just happens to be a pretty good disinfectant. The most widespread adoption will do is decrease the cost of clorene and increase the cost of fertilizer slightly. They chemical companies that produce clorene could pay you to take it and still make a profit since fertilizer is such a boon to farmers.
Not that I don't think chemical companies would resort to dirty tricks. They just don't need to for clorene to be produced. It's good for their profit margins if fertilizer is cheaper, but not essential for the industry to exist. The only way it would seriously hurt them is if they couldn't pay people to take it, and had to pay for dumping it. Presumably after combining it with something to make it neutral.
So, are we completely giving up on flywheels?
That will happen the same day there are stickers on your laptop telling you not to move it.
It may make sense for a UPS, as someone else mentioned. And there was a story a while back on using it to store energy coming off the third rail in NYC subways. The problem is that you can't completely cancel out that bicycle effect. Though it would be ultra cool to hold up your powerbook with one finger on one of the corners, it's not so practical to have a laptop where reorienting it drains half the "battery"
In most states in the US if you have the right lights, a mirror on the drivers side, and one either on the passenger or windshield you can get it registered and inspected. If the mod looks like it might weigh to much it might not pass inspection, or if you had that flagpole or whatever.
You probably could get insurance to cover damage to your car but you could get liability as long as it passed inspection. In NJ, the only state I've had an inspection done, you need seatbelts and to pass emission. Even that could be gotten around by having it inspected at your local garage for a fee. The funny thing is if it's a classic car (over 20 yrs old) the emission standards are very low, and you even get registration and insurance for less. It's a sort of "Sunday Driver" clause, since they don't expect you do drive the thing everyday.
Parts will come flying off on any car on some of the roads in the states. I lost a my muffler on a bridge that was being refurbished because my car couldn't clear the uneven road surface(NJ). It only cost a $1000 to have the undercarage repaired and the muffler reattached so I didn't bother filing for any kind of reimbursement. 10ft deep potholes are not uncommon in NYC, I just saw a brand new one on my way to work yesterday(4ft). It happens when there is a flood underneath the road surface. There congrete under the blacktop is 3ft thick in places but it isn't steel reinforced so if the earth beneath it is gone, the road eventually fails. A few months ago a delivery truck fell completely underground when the intersection collapsed. That one took 3 days to repair, a watermain had broken at least a week before underneath. My neighboorhood used to be a marsh 200 years ago, so it's not surprising when an buried river goes amuck.
At best, the GPL inconveniences "embrace and extend" tactics, since you can't re-use the source, but there's nothing whatsoever to prevent someone re-implementing the program and performing embrace and extend on that.
This is true in most of the world but in the US most government sponsored research is heavily patented. So in order to embrace and extend you without staying under GPL you have to relicence the patents. The article didn't mention patent policies, probably because they don't allow software patents, but I bet most universities will get US patents so they can get a little sponsorship for commercial applications. Not that it stops E&E, but they could create a policy that prevented any company from selling a non-GPL'd version of anything they invented in the US. Just because GPL gives you a non-exclusive patent license for the software and it's derivatives, which must be GPL...
I'm more interested in how they're going to get this gas into space. I realize it can be compressed, but 3 cubic kilometers worth?
There is very little air pressure in space, so you don't need a lot of pressure for the ballon to inflate. You do need to keep enough pressure in it so your rocket doesn't push through the ballon and hit the asteroid. Getting a big rocket to the asteroid is beyond what we could do by next year say. (By "we" I mean Russia since they still have some big rockets, but not that big, it would have to be an international thing with the US sending up supplies, Russia supplying the big fuel tanks and engines, and Europe and Japan footing the bill.)
One advantage of crashing into this thing with a big airbag before doing a 20-30 second big burn is that the momentum of the rocket would be fully transfered to the comet as more of a translation than a rotation. Plus landing on the comet in a place were it would just translate and not rotate would be difficult.
It doesn't really rule out the nuclear option either. Since you only get to do that once you'd try this first, then check if you moved it enough. If not an H-Bomb isn't so heavy, you'd have brought one along. Now you just land on the comet and set it off. Hopefully enough of it is vaporized quickly enough to push the remaining fragments off the they collision path to Earth.
Not that it will matter, we're not looking out the front windshield. Hopefully the first one to hit us in modern times won't be the big one. But I bet if Sydney disappeared one day, we'd arrest all the usual suspects and suspend free-speech immediately. Oh, and maybe do something after the an election cycle, or two.
Habeas Corpus in the US means you shouldn't be arrested and kept jailed indefinately without being accused of doing something possibly illegal. It's based on an English law passed in 1679.
The interpretation has been left up to the Courts and Congress. There are rules in different parts of the country but usually if you can prove you are a citizen you won't be held more than 3 days under normal circumstances, or 10 days or so if there is a riot or flood or some other act of god, without being charged with a crime. The idea being that you can't defend yourself if you aren't accused of anything.
The US constitution allows the president to suspend Habeas Corpus if Congress declares war. This is a bit of a controversy in the States right now because Congress refused to declare war in the early days after Sept 11, but instead gave Bush some extraordinary powers indefinately and others that needed to be renewed in a few years. Congress purposely didn't give him a suspension of Habeas Corpus, but apparently he has been holding lots of people more than the 10 day or so maximum, more or less since Sept 11, without being charged with any crime. Most of the people arrested pleaded to some minor offense to get released, but many have either not been offered that option or refused it. It's hard to know since they aren't allowed lawyers and their names and number are unknown. Even if there had been a declaration of war it would be illegal to not allow someone to contact any governement approved lawyer.
Everybody is pretty much right around here if it's a manufacturing line you should do it because it costs almost nothing and the payoff can be significant. But if you're just making research components in small batches that will be used for 10 days and disgarded then go with the tech's idea of ESD. If she thinks she's more productive without the wrist strap she'll buy a couple extra components and hopefully save you multiples of that in her labor costs.
But I bet if she's working with CMOS chips or anything without well protected IO pins she'll probably want all the static protection she can get. If she's making passive filters with surface mount components, why bother? (resistors, caps & inductors aren't likely to be damaged.)
That has to be the stupidest thing they've ever done. I thought they wanted to stop future war crimes by prosecuting the murderers. Now we won't even try to stop war crimes cuz there will be no paid reporters telling us what's up.
Was thinking of getting one of those milky plastic ones. I thought Jobs had mellowed with age, I guess not.
No use buying hardware from an evil RMS type. Who knows what's next? Must use Apple speakers, one button mouse, 'approved' software?
There is a less than perfect solution: Filter off all machines from vendor-X using products from vendor-Y. Make all machines from vendor-X resistant to attacks from the vendor-Y machines. Oh, and be damn sure that the two vendors are not affiliated, and are not controlled by the same government.
This won't work, MS is slap happy about RPC over HTTP. They can even do it through a caching proxy. That means any firewall that allows web traffic won't prevent access to their Windows software on your machine. But even if you took the medical records completely off the internet this is a legal problem not a technical one. You gave them access, they might demand physical access if you don't give them electronic access. I don't see it happending, but legally, in any state where EULAs apply, they can.
The only solution here is to get MS to sign a supplementary agreement either that is satisfactory for HIPAA, or for the congress critters to pass a law forbiding overbroad hacking clauses in contracts, forcing Microsoft to rewrite their EULA for everyone.
I still think the best thing to do is deny copyright protection to any work distributed with license. Sort of a patent vs. trade secret distinction, instead you get a choice between copyright or contract.