The Constitution says what the gov't can or cannot do, nothing about what private persons and organizations can do. Of course, in the case of school censorship, you've got a perfect illustration of how not everything that is legal is a good idea...
And just what happens to the carbon in the hydrocarbon? A cracker, fuel cell, & electric motor combination might be cleaner than a modern IC engine, but it's also heavier, larger, and much more expensive. If you are going to spend extra money on the drivetrain, get a hybrid-electric (small IC engine with electric drive and batteries or flywheel good for a few minutes at full power).
What does limit acceleration: (1) The batteries are so heavy, an electric car will weigh 50 to 100% as much as the equivalent gasoline car, so you need a lot more power to the rubber. (2) They normally use undersized electric motors to make the batteries last longer. After all, you only expect to sell these things to ecofreaks who regard decent performance as a sign of the owner's moral shortcomings...
Where do you think hydrogen comes from? Ok, it comes from water, but it takes power to extract it, a little more than you are going to get back when you use the hydrogen in a fuel cell, or a LOT more than you'll get back if you fuel an engine with hydrogen. Hydrogen cars would put the same load on the power plants as electric cars do. Plus which the idea of some dolt hotdogging down the freeway with half his SUV occupied by a tank of highly compressed hydrogen bothers me for some reason...
For fixed installations (power plants, heating, etc.), hydrogen does have some theoretical advantages. You could generate it from solar energy in Arizona and pipe it to places where there isn't enough sunshine to make solar worthwhile. That's assuming that someday we'll be able to make solar panels that are (1) cost effective, and (2) don't create more pollution in their manufacture and recycling than a well-filtered coal-fire power plant would. But hydrogen in mobile applications is nuts.
Just about anyone can drive down it, right to your door!
So lock the door, dummy.
I'm no expert on TCP, but I think that anyone who cares about security at all already knows that it's not secure, it was not designed to be secure, and it never will be secure by itself. If you need security, you pile it on top of TCP/IP, by encrypting packets, etc.
ALL events can theoretically be traced back to a specific cause.
Wrong. Quantum events are inherently random and not predictable. All you have to do is to amplify such events into strings of 0 and 1. One example is radioactive emissions -- if you can keep the source and detector in the range where you count one particle at a time. That's rather difficult to do in a way that's both safe and will keep running without adjustments. Another possibility: resistor shot noise, which originates in the fluctuations as individual electrons pass through the resistor. I am not good enough at analog design to figure out just how to use that, but it should be possible to generate random numbers from shot noise in a small circuit with common parts.
If you are generating pseudo-random numbers entirely from software, then it is predictable, if you can guess the formula used. The simple formulas you'll find in pre-packaged "random number generator" subroutines are probably easily guessed. Go to a cryptographer and you can get formulas that are alterable by plugging in a secret key of hundreds of bits, so even if the basic formula is publicly known, guessing the key takes enormous computer power...
No, the numbers aren't instantly recyclable. Scroll up to the part where someone says that retailers are required to keep the charge slips for 3 to 7 years. They attributed this requirement to charge-backs, but I think 3-6 months would be sufficient for that purpose.
However, the number of people alive now is a 10-digit number, so (even ignoring that most people on Earth now will never have a credit card), a 16-digit number with one digit for checksum provides 100,000 numbers per person. I don't think they'll have to recycle the numbers too fast.
There definitely were religious wars between Buddhist sects in the middle ages, not to mention that Japanese sect that used nerve gas a few years ago. These incidents do seem to be less frequent and involve fewer killings than the ones arising from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, but they do happen. I think the difference is not deism or non-deism, but rather that the Buddha's works are very clearly against violence. A murderous Christian is a bad Christian, but he can find scripture to quote out of context in support of his actions. It's very hard to see how a murderous Buddhist could fail to notice that he was a bad Buddhist...
"If an organization wants to copyright their material or mark it as a trade secret, that's their business." The issue is just what they are trying to protect -- sometimes it would seem to me to be against public policy for a court to help them keep their secrets. It can be a corporation that doesn't want it's manual instructing customer service people on how to stall and lie exposed to public view, or a religious organization that doesn't want it's manuals on how to get the maximum contributions published.
The news article is pretty confusing, and seems to have various concepts mixed up. Or else Swedish laws are decidedly strange -- if the work was unpublished, then why is copyright even at issue? And IANAL, but it can't be copyrighted and a trade secret both... But whatever is going on, it should be legal to cite portions of a copyrighted work under "fair use" in an article criticizing the organization that issued that work. Putting the whole book on the web is indeed a copyright violation. So remember--just use the embarrassing parts, intermixed with your commentary...
If you mean that the Second Coming would cause the Bible to come under copyright, which in the US is currently good for the life of the author + 75 years, think again. Jesus didn't write anything. The Gospels were written about 70 to 120 AD by several anonymous authors. So unless you want to claim that God was the real author working through the hands of humans -- well, if He comes down, files suit for copyright infringement, and presents proof, then I wonder which court would have jurisdiction? 8-)
And evidently you missed the news reports about the Taliban (Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan) destroying Buddhist statues from the time of Alexander, for fear that someone might worship these idols. And if anyone thinks that's just a Moslem peculiarity, the Judeo-Christian Bible contains the same prohibition against worshipping grraven images. Catholics and many Protestants use a very narrow interpretation of that: they aren't worshipping that statue of Jesus, just using it as an aid to concentration on worshipping Jesus -- but it looks a lot like worshipping the statue. But the Catholics used to be pretty intolerant of anyone else's religious icons, for instance the Spanish destroyed most of the history of the Mayans as "idols". And even among modern-day Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses take that commandment quite seriously, and if they were in power I think they'd be dynamiting statuary.
There are big problems at the patent office in finding prior art in business methods and software patents. Some of the problems have to do with the PTO budget (too low--Congress is stealing part of the fees for other agencies) and the bureaucratic incentives (examiners have a quota # of cases to close per month, the fastest way to close a case is to grant the patent, the PTO only gets sued when it doesn't grant a patent, and nothing adverse happens to an examiner who grants a bad patent). But the biggest problem is that the PTO almost entirely relies on their database of patents to research prior art; since software and business methods used to be non-patentable, the prior art isn't there.
As far as I know, Apple didn't pay, they just swapped licenses to some dubious patents of their own. The only way they could lose is if their patents do hold up in court _and_ are something Amazon would have been willing to pay for...
Sounds like prizog has the simplest idea--while hacking the MD5 code is probably way beyond the understanding of the slackers that spend all day on napster, "run this program on an MP3 and then Napster won't reject it" is simple enough for any drooling idiot who can operate a mouse. And I think that program would be written about 10 minutes after someone who understands the format first realizes that an MD5 code check is what's preventing him from getting pirated music anymore.
Not that I approve of piracy in general, but the RIAA seems to be shooting itself in the foot, repeatedly. The artists are almost ready to give away their recordings, because the RIAA has their royalties so low they make most of their money on live performances anyhow. The consumers were buying CD's on the basis that they liked the MP3's ripped from them -- now that's more or less blocked. But what I'm really waiting for is for the RIAA to impose ever more onerous restrictions on Napster, until even a dimwitted judge is going to notice that what they are really doing is blocking the distribution of music that they don't own. The law on that is too clear for even a Bush appointee to ignore...
Could you explain more about the MD5 sum? Text searches are easy (as long as it's for exact text), and in this case all they have to search is the names submitted to their database. If it can do the name searches to match requests to available files, it can also look for the name in a blocked list.
I assume MD5 is some sort of file checksum. That is, you have to fetch the file to find it, rather than just looking at the database listing. That puts quite a load on Napster's pipes. Maybe you have to add up all the bytes in the file to calculate it -- that's quite a computational load, plus it means Napster has to download every file they list, and takes a lot of bandwidth. Or maybe the MD5 sum is pre-calculated and embedded in the file header?
In any case, couldn't you just add.01 second of silence to the end of the file and change the MD5 sum?
If they had really de-regulated, rising electrical rates would have persuaded people to be a bit more efficient in using electricity -- as well as making building plants more profitable. But if it's cheap by gov't decree, why conserve it?
Calling what CA did "de-regulation" sounds like a leftie plot to destroy the meaning of the word. They forced the power companies to spin off their generation stations into separate companies, then buy their electricity on a "free" market -- but they weren't free to make long term contracts to ensure their supply. And then they capped the price of power to the consumers. Then there were all the environmental regulations, but given the regulations on distributors I don't know if they mattered much; who'd _want_ to build a power plant where you couldn't tell if anyone would be able to pay the fair market price for the power?
Video and image editing, any kind of engineering, programming, and anything else where being able to see more information at the same time makes you more productive. And I think this would be lighter and take up less room than a 17" CRT monitor. The cost is a killer though -- if you are being paid $100K, maybe you can have a shot at convincing your employer that you'd get another $8,000 worth of work done. Where I work, though, we had a heck of a time convincing management to spend just $800 on bigger monitors for the guys doing CAD...
It depends on how you read the post. 2cm^2 should be read as "2 square cm", that is 1 cm x 2 cm, or any equivalent area. "2 cm squared" (2cm x 2cm) is what was meant. Erroneous mathematical notation aside, what he was trying to say was that the area goes with the square of the display size. A 24" screen has twice the area of a 17" monitor, and more than three times that of a 14" screen.
I think that has been done, to cover the walls at the NY Stock Exchange with displays a few years ago. If I remember right, 20-some inch LCD's cost $25,000 then, and they bought hundreds of them. Stockbroking must be a mighty lucrative business. These were considerably lower resolution than the ones described in this article, but they were intended to be read from across the room. This also helped with the dead zone that you are bound to have at the edge of any LCD display; at a minimum you have to seal the edges, so the liquid crystals can't go all the way to the edge. If you are going to be reading it from 10 feet away it isn't visible, but on your desktop it would be highly noticeable. Most displays also have a protective case around the edge so the glass doesn't get chipped, etc., so I assume the NYSE special-ordered their displays "bare".
And among teenagers, status will be determined by whose logo is scrolling across the forehead... Oh god, this might actually work. Quick someone, delete this whole discussion before some corporate drone happens to see it! 8-)
In US currency, there are tight controls on the paper and the ink, and there are finer lines than you can duplicate with even a 1200 dot per inch printer. If you check the bill under a microscope and closely examine the paper, anything that gets past you wasn't counterfeited with new technology, but rather by someone as skilled at the centuries old engraving-on-metal technology as the US Mint's engravers -- and with access somehow to paper that is legally sold only to the Mint. But since most cashiers hardly look at the bills, a lot of lousy color-copier counterfeits do get passed. So the Mint has changed the design of the larger bills.
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The Constitution says what the gov't can or cannot do, nothing about what private persons and organizations can do. Of course, in the case of school censorship, you've got a perfect illustration of how not everything that is legal is a good idea...
Thanks guys, two good resources there for anyone who needs _really_ random numbers.
And just what happens to the carbon in the hydrocarbon? A cracker, fuel cell, & electric motor combination might be cleaner than a modern IC engine, but it's also heavier, larger, and much more expensive. If you are going to spend extra money on the drivetrain, get a hybrid-electric (small IC engine with electric drive and batteries or flywheel good for a few minutes at full power).
What does limit acceleration: (1) The batteries are so heavy, an electric car will weigh 50 to 100% as much as the equivalent gasoline car, so you need a lot more power to the rubber. (2) They normally use undersized electric motors to make the batteries last longer. After all, you only expect to sell these things to ecofreaks who regard decent performance as a sign of the owner's moral shortcomings...
Where do you think hydrogen comes from? Ok, it comes from water, but it takes power to extract it, a little more than you are going to get back when you use the hydrogen in a fuel cell, or a LOT more than you'll get back if you fuel an engine with hydrogen. Hydrogen cars would put the same load on the power plants as electric cars do. Plus which the idea of some dolt hotdogging down the freeway with half his SUV occupied by a tank of highly compressed hydrogen bothers me for some reason...
For fixed installations (power plants, heating, etc.), hydrogen does have some theoretical advantages. You could generate it from solar energy in Arizona and pipe it to places where there isn't enough sunshine to make solar worthwhile. That's assuming that someday we'll be able to make solar panels that are (1) cost effective, and (2) don't create more pollution in their manufacture and recycling than a well-filtered coal-fire power plant would. But hydrogen in mobile applications is nuts.
Just about anyone can drive down it, right to your door!
So lock the door, dummy.
I'm no expert on TCP, but I think that anyone who cares about security at all already knows that it's not secure, it was not designed to be secure, and it never will be secure by itself. If you need security, you pile it on top of TCP/IP, by encrypting packets, etc.
ALL events can theoretically be traced back to a specific cause.
Wrong. Quantum events are inherently random and not predictable. All you have to do is to amplify such events into strings of 0 and 1. One example is radioactive emissions -- if you can keep the source and detector in the range where you count one particle at a time. That's rather difficult to do in a way that's both safe and will keep running without adjustments. Another possibility: resistor shot noise, which originates in the fluctuations as individual electrons pass through the resistor. I am not good enough at analog design to figure out just how to use that, but it should be possible to generate random numbers from shot noise in a small circuit with common parts.
If you are generating pseudo-random numbers entirely from software, then it is predictable, if you can guess the formula used. The simple formulas you'll find in pre-packaged "random number generator" subroutines are probably easily guessed. Go to a cryptographer and you can get formulas that are alterable by plugging in a secret key of hundreds of bits, so even if the basic formula is publicly known, guessing the key takes enormous computer power...
No, the numbers aren't instantly recyclable. Scroll up to the part where someone says that retailers are required to keep the charge slips for 3 to 7 years. They attributed this requirement to charge-backs, but I think 3-6 months would be sufficient for that purpose.
However, the number of people alive now is a 10-digit number, so (even ignoring that most people on Earth now will never have a credit card), a 16-digit number with one digit for checksum provides 100,000 numbers per person. I don't think they'll have to recycle the numbers too fast.
That got me wondering who would open the envelope marked "Priority Msil Letter Bomb". Wouldn't removing them from the gene pool be a public service? ;)
Of course, this guy doesn't need the CA law because he has a contract that says the same thing.
There definitely were religious wars between Buddhist sects in the middle ages, not to mention that Japanese sect that used nerve gas a few years ago. These incidents do seem to be less frequent and involve fewer killings than the ones arising from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, but they do happen. I think the difference is not deism or non-deism, but rather that the Buddha's works are very clearly against violence. A murderous Christian is a bad Christian, but he can find scripture to quote out of context in support of his actions. It's very hard to see how a murderous Buddhist could fail to notice that he was a bad Buddhist...
"If an organization wants to copyright their material or mark it as a trade secret, that's their business." The issue is just what they are trying to protect -- sometimes it would seem to me to be against public policy for a court to help them keep their secrets. It can be a corporation that doesn't want it's manual instructing customer service people on how to stall and lie exposed to public view, or a religious organization that doesn't want it's manuals on how to get the maximum contributions published.
The news article is pretty confusing, and seems to have various concepts mixed up. Or else Swedish laws are decidedly strange -- if the work was unpublished, then why is copyright even at issue? And IANAL, but it can't be copyrighted and a trade secret both... But whatever is going on, it should be legal to cite portions of a copyrighted work under "fair use" in an article criticizing the organization that issued that work. Putting the whole book on the web is indeed a copyright violation. So remember--just use the embarrassing parts, intermixed with your commentary...
If you mean that the Second Coming would cause the Bible to come under copyright, which in the US is currently good for the life of the author + 75 years, think again. Jesus didn't write anything. The Gospels were written about 70 to 120 AD by several anonymous authors. So unless you want to claim that God was the real author working through the hands of humans -- well, if He comes down, files suit for copyright infringement, and presents proof, then I wonder which court would have jurisdiction? 8-)
Uh, do you know what "sarcasm" is...
And evidently you missed the news reports about the Taliban (Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan) destroying Buddhist statues from the time of Alexander, for fear that someone might worship these idols. And if anyone thinks that's just a Moslem peculiarity, the Judeo-Christian Bible contains the same prohibition against worshipping grraven images. Catholics and many Protestants use a very narrow interpretation of that: they aren't worshipping that statue of Jesus, just using it as an aid to concentration on worshipping Jesus -- but it looks a lot like worshipping the statue. But the Catholics used to be pretty intolerant of anyone else's religious icons, for instance the Spanish destroyed most of the history of the Mayans as "idols". And even among modern-day Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses take that commandment quite seriously, and if they were in power I think they'd be dynamiting statuary.
There are big problems at the patent office in finding prior art in business methods and software patents. Some of the problems have to do with the PTO budget (too low--Congress is stealing part of the fees for other agencies) and the bureaucratic incentives (examiners have a quota # of cases to close per month, the fastest way to close a case is to grant the patent, the PTO only gets sued when it doesn't grant a patent, and nothing adverse happens to an examiner who grants a bad patent). But the biggest problem is that the PTO almost entirely relies on their database of patents to research prior art; since software and business methods used to be non-patentable, the prior art isn't there.
As far as I know, Apple didn't pay, they just swapped licenses to some dubious patents of their own. The only way they could lose is if their patents do hold up in court _and_ are something Amazon would have been willing to pay for...
Sounds like prizog has the simplest idea--while hacking the MD5 code is probably way beyond the understanding of the slackers that spend all day on napster, "run this program on an MP3 and then Napster won't reject it" is simple enough for any drooling idiot who can operate a mouse. And I think that program would be written about 10 minutes after someone who understands the format first realizes that an MD5 code check is what's preventing him from getting pirated music anymore.
Not that I approve of piracy in general, but the RIAA seems to be shooting itself in the foot, repeatedly. The artists are almost ready to give away their recordings, because the RIAA has their royalties so low they make most of their money on live performances anyhow. The consumers were buying CD's on the basis that they liked the MP3's ripped from them -- now that's more or less blocked. But what I'm really waiting for is for the RIAA to impose ever more onerous restrictions on Napster, until even a dimwitted judge is going to notice that what they are really doing is blocking the distribution of music that they don't own. The law on that is too clear for even a Bush appointee to ignore...
Could you explain more about the MD5 sum? Text searches are easy (as long as it's for exact text), and in this case all they have to search is the names submitted to their database. If it can do the name searches to match requests to available files, it can also look for the name in a blocked list.
.01 second of silence to the end of the file and change the MD5 sum?
I assume MD5 is some sort of file checksum. That is, you have to fetch the file to find it, rather than just looking at the database listing. That puts quite a load on Napster's pipes. Maybe you have to add up all the bytes in the file to calculate it -- that's quite a computational load, plus it means Napster has to download every file they list, and takes a lot of bandwidth. Or maybe the MD5 sum is pre-calculated and embedded in the file header?
In any case, couldn't you just add
If they had really de-regulated, rising electrical rates would have persuaded people to be a bit more efficient in using electricity -- as well as making building plants more profitable. But if it's cheap by gov't decree, why conserve it?
Calling what CA did "de-regulation" sounds like a leftie plot to destroy the meaning of the word. They forced the power companies to spin off their generation stations into separate companies, then buy their electricity on a "free" market -- but they weren't free to make long term contracts to ensure their supply. And then they capped the price of power to the consumers. Then there were all the environmental regulations, but given the regulations on distributors I don't know if they mattered much; who'd _want_ to build a power plant where you couldn't tell if anyone would be able to pay the fair market price for the power?
Video and image editing, any kind of engineering, programming, and anything else where being able to see more information at the same time makes you more productive. And I think this would be lighter and take up less room than a 17" CRT monitor. The cost is a killer though -- if you are being paid $100K, maybe you can have a shot at convincing your employer that you'd get another $8,000 worth of work done. Where I work, though, we had a heck of a time convincing management to spend just $800 on bigger monitors for the guys doing CAD...
It depends on how you read the post. 2cm^2 should be read as "2 square cm", that is 1 cm x 2 cm, or any equivalent area. "2 cm squared" (2cm x 2cm) is what was meant. Erroneous mathematical notation aside, what he was trying to say was that the area goes with the square of the display size. A 24" screen has twice the area of a 17" monitor, and more than three times that of a 14" screen.
I think that has been done, to cover the walls at the NY Stock Exchange with displays a few years ago. If I remember right, 20-some inch LCD's cost $25,000 then, and they bought hundreds of them. Stockbroking must be a mighty lucrative business. These were considerably lower resolution than the ones described in this article, but they were intended to be read from across the room. This also helped with the dead zone that you are bound to have at the edge of any LCD display; at a minimum you have to seal the edges, so the liquid crystals can't go all the way to the edge. If you are going to be reading it from 10 feet away it isn't visible, but on your desktop it would be highly noticeable. Most displays also have a protective case around the edge so the glass doesn't get chipped, etc., so I assume the NYSE special-ordered their displays "bare".
And among teenagers, status will be determined by whose logo is scrolling across the forehead... Oh god, this might actually work. Quick someone, delete this whole discussion before some corporate drone happens to see it! 8-)
In US currency, there are tight controls on the paper and the ink, and there are finer lines than you can duplicate with even a 1200 dot per inch printer. If you check the bill under a microscope and closely examine the paper, anything that gets past you wasn't counterfeited with new technology, but rather by someone as skilled at the centuries old engraving-on-metal technology as the US Mint's engravers -- and with access somehow to paper that is legally sold only to the Mint. But since most cashiers hardly look at the bills, a lot of lousy color-copier counterfeits do get passed. So the Mint has changed the design of the larger bills.