I think that at a minimum, we should require all patents to be licensed under fair reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. While providing some means for inventors to recoup their research costs is reasonable, the approach of giving them a government granted monopoly on ideas is an anachronistic throwback to merchantilism/feudalism that should be abhorred in modern capitalistic society. Researchers should get paid, but they shouldn't be allowed to hold back progress for 20 years.
Mandatory licensing would wouldn't solve the patent troll issue, or many other problems with patents, but it would at least solve a large amount of the abuse of patents within the industry.
Subscribers get to see stories slightly before the rest of users (but can't comment until the story goes live), and they are shown with a red title to indicate that they haven't gone live yet. However on occasion, a bug in slashcode causes regular users to see a red title for a short time after the story has gone live.
And in this case, they didn't even do that; they just chartered ballistic zero-G flights. These SS2 flights replace/supplement the vomit comet, not any of NASA's actual space flight. The fact that the Shuttle was recently retired has nothing to do with this deal at all, and was just a red-herring/troll that should have been cut from the summary.
They have been purchasing airplanes from private companies to perform low gravity training/experiments for decades. First they used a Convair C-131 then a Boeing KC-135 then a McDonnell Douglas C-9, and now a Scaled Composites SpaceShipTwo. Building airplanes isn't in NASA's mission or goals, so I don't see why using an existing commercial solution is any different than using commercial toilet paper in their offices.
Unless you are one of the lucky few who have a full class address space, you are stuck with the will of the ISP to either setup reverse entries for you or to delegate resolution to you. Alphatel has it right. Use it if you choose, and grade along with other tests.
Any ISP will setup rDNS entries if you have a business account. The only time this is an issue is if you are trying to run a server from a home account. Most of the ISPs I have used or looked into prohibited running servers with a consumer account. Those that didn't were also happy to provide a rDNS entry if you paid for a static IP.
Trying to run a server when your ISP is opposed to you doing so is inherently problematic, rDNS just being one of your many concerns. It is fine for experimenting and learning, but not for servers that do anything important. The only excuse for a business or government agency not having a rDNS entry is incompetence.
The real question is how tolerant should you be of the incompetent, and from a business point of view the unfortunate answer is "very tolerant".
Yes this is caused by a poorly written misbehaving application, but it's not his application. It is one of the other 30 applications that he has to share the database server with. So all 30 applications get shit for uptime while they dick around trying to figure out what is wrong with the one.
That said I think his solution is backwards; rather than giving his application a dedicated server, they should move the misbehaving application to a development server until the team that wrote it can get their shit together.
The whole point of the WWW was that it was supposed to be resolution independent
It still would be. The fundamental of the web design now is to seperate content from style; the first goes in the HTML, and the second goes in CSS. What this guy is proposing is that sites provide multiple CSS files, and the browser decides which to use (if any). This is already possible today with print, handheld, tty, and other media types other than monitor; he is just adding one more tailored to a new computing form factor.
My eyes aren't what they used to be and I would like a bigger font (and even if you can't imagine it YOU will also be in that situation sooner than you think) - if they lock down font size to get pages that would be bad for accessibility.
The websites don't choose where the page breaks occur, the browser does. You will be able to modify the font size just like you can now. Good web-designers will use relative font sizes so their site still looks good at multiple font sizes, but any website will be readable.
But you say, they could reflow and recalculate it. Yes, the could, but then what is the point of "pages" it would still be a long page with artificial breaks.
There are a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't view more than a page at a time anyway, and page swapping is simpler on a tablet than scrolling. Another advantage is that text is easier to read in columns than in a big wide paragraph. On a large screen my choices now are either to maximize the browser and have text be difficult to read or adjust it to have comfortable text width, and not be able to see as much of the content. His extensions would allow the browser to break the text into columns, allowing you to see more content at once in a more readable format. Finally, a lot of sites already do create artificial breaks. If they could be convinced to use this so that the breaks occurred based on my screen size, then it would be much more convenient.
Plus there is nothing more annoying on the new 'generate as we fly using javascript' pages that you can't search for content.
No javascript involved at all. All the formatting/reflowing would be done by the browser. Furthermore, you would be loading the entire article into your browser at once, and could search the whole thing, rather than the situation now where the server splits it into multiple pages, and you can only search that one page at a time.
Finally, many of the CSS extensions he is proposing would be useful in standard screen layout in addition to the pages layout.
But that is exactly what he is proposing. As far as I can tell, the server won't even know what "flavor" of the page is going to be displayed anymore than it knows whether the print or screen CSS stylesheet is being used now.
In Lie's ideal world, a Web page could come with different CSS formatting code, then show the paged version when appropriate. The HTML, though, which describes things like text and graphics, would be fixed.
The websites I have made already have a separate CSS stylesheet for print media. Adding another for online paged content wouldn't be that much work. I don't know how much benefit there would be to it, though. Tablets would need to be much more popular before I would consider it.
I'm also curious about how tablet browsers would indicate whether a site is in scroll mode or paged mode. I would hate for them to get confused by the lack of scrollbar and think that the first page is all there is.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation
I highlighted the important part. The heart of the concept of "due process of law" is that no one will be punished until they have been declared guilty of breaking a law in a fair trial. If the meaning of a law is so vague that neither judge nor jury can reasonably ascertain who is guilty of the law and who is not, then the only fair ruling it to acquit everyone accused of it. If the Supreme Court decides that a law cannot be reasonably interpreted, then no other court in the land should attempt to do so. In this case the law is void due to being unconstitutionally vague.
This same principle works for unfocused images as well. In both cases, you need to figure how the image was blurred. In the case of motion blur the pixels were smeared along a path. In the case of an unfocused image, the pixels are blurred according to a gaussian (bell curve). Once you have this "blur kernel" (normally called a point-spread function in the field), it is just a matter of using deconvolution techniques to remove the distortion.
In both cases, the information is there, it is just not in the form you want. What you can't do is recover information that has been discarded, by pixelation, quantization, clipping, or in the analog world exceeding the optical resolution defined by the f-stop, or the grain resolution of the film, or the dynamic range of the film.
We have done this in my image processing class. It isn't CSI bullshit.
It won't make missing data suddenly appear.
The thing is that the data isn't missing, it is just distributed throughout the image. For example consider an unfocused camera. Instead of each point in the image mapping to a single point in the image, it results in a gaussian centered at that point, and these are all summed together. In signal processing terms, you can think of the blurred image as being the convolution of the desired image and a gaussian function (plus some noise): xb = x # g + n Take the Fourier transform, an this becomes a simple multiplication. Xb = X * G + N Divide it out, and invert the transform and you get the original image (plus noise): xEst = X + n#(1/g)
The same can be done with motion blur, except now G is is a curve through space, not a gaussian. The hard part is knowing exactly how the image was blurred (what path it followed for motion blur, or the optic properties for unfocused images). I don't know what they are doing to discover the blur kernel, but it is impressive.
The other hard part is that this procedure can really amplify high-frequency noise, (consider dividing the 1/G; the tail of the gaussian is close to zero, which makes the reciprocal very large), and JPEG artifacts in particular are hell to deal with. There are ways to minimize this problem (for example, optimal Weiner filters), but you have to have a fairly high-quality image to begin with.
If you want to learn more the key terms to search for is image deblurring with deconvolution.
which patents could apple possibly be violating that they were violating already?
This is over patents that Apple has been violating all along. Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and have all been tryng to negotiate licensing deals with Apple since the day the iPhone was shipped and they still haven't come to an agreement. The different companies have had different thresholds of how far they are will to push negotiations before suing. Apple crossed Samsungs threshold when they used a shitty German "Design Patent" to force the Galaxy Tab off the market because it was a black rectangle with rounded corners.
What it all comes down to is that Apple thinks that it should be able to license all the hardware/communication patents that these companies hold under FRAND terms, while at the same time refusing to license any of it's software patents. Many of the communication patents are related to the GSM/CDMA standards, and thus do require FRAND licensing, but not all of the hardware patents.
You honestly think that for example Microsoft would response to my suggestions with a "fuck you"?
No, but MS fanboys do that all the time on discussion boards. Just like happened here. It doesn't make sense to equate a random idiot on a discussion board with the actual developers of the software.
Yes the ODF1 spreadsheet specification was complete crap. Huge portions, like the entire formula language definition, and all the function definitions were completely left out, and what was there was vague and inconsistent. As a result, while word processor documents largely transfer well between OpenOffice, KWord, MS Word, and others, but spreadsheets don't transfer at all. You loose not only formating and plots but even calculations. ODF1 is a completely worthless standard for spreadsheets.
If he gets charged with a crime you might have a point. As of now, the only punishment is that he might loose his job. Since his job requires holding a security clearance, and he obviously can't follow the rules about handling classified information, I don't see what the problem is.
When a supposed leak appears there is still some amount of uncertainty about whether the leak is authentic or not. Furthermore, there is the issue that several pieces of sensitive information may be unclassified on their own, but when combined become classified. So it may be prudent to classify some previously sensitive but unclassified data upon the release of other data.
Each individual person who works with classified data doesn't always have the whole picture, and are thus not in a position to judge whether they are causing additional harm by confirming that leaked information is authentic, or worse by providing additional commentary on the subject. People who are aware of the full picture need to assess the impact of the initial leak before determining the best course of action. This is why we have explicit declassification and review-and-approval procedures for public comments on sensitive information.
While the wisdom (or speed) of some of these decisions may be questionable, commenting on leaked data when you hold a security clearance is unquestionably stupid, unless you are intentionally and publicly whistle-blowing, and are prepared to deal with the backlash.
Yeah, even ignoring wear on the rocket, these number would mean that their integration, test, fuel, launch ops and profit only account for less than 1% of the cost of a current launch. There is no way that is correct. Either someone took that number out of context or they are on crack (I'm guessing the former).
Except the Constitution explicitly gives congress the power to collect taxes. It is not at all clear that it has the power to "mandate that individuals enter into contracts with private insurance companies for the purchase of an expensive product from the time they are born until the time they die".
All laws where similar things are done (such as requiring car insurance, requiring contractors to be licensed and bonded,etc), differ in significant ways. Some are enforced by the state, not the federal government, who have different powers granted to them. Some only apply when participating in an arguably optional activity not to everyone alive. Some are only required to engage in business, and thus more clearly fall under the interstate commerce act. This is an open legal question, one that was bound to challenged when the law was passed. The faster it gets resolved in the Supreme Court the better.
However, I have no reason to believe that the Supreme Court will come to the obvious and logical conclusion here. That's not their job.
No it isn't their job. Their job is to interpret the law and constitution as it is written, not according their own personal opinion/logic nor yours.
Is there any list of successful software created entirely inside universities' labs that became widely used?
That is an odd restriction to make. Students are only at university for a short time. If their work during that time turns into something useful then they naturally continue it after they leave, either as a an open source project or as a business venture. This is how it is meant to work, and there are tons of examples of such software.
MATLAB and Maple were both created at universities and later commercialized. Same for SPICE. On the open source side there is Apache, Sendmail, PostgreSQL, and the original implementations of nearly every RFC protocol on the internet.
Yeah, blocking third-party cookies is a good thing to do. The third-party can still see your IP address every time you visit a page that embeds their content, but it at least provides a thin layer of anonymity on the web. Furthermore, it is far less painful than using no-script. The only think that I have noticed break is that embedded Vimeo videos won't play with third-party cookies disabled and you have to right-click and view them on Vimeo instead (or white-list them).
It is a lot easier to track objects moving in a near frictionless environment than to track a object with unstable and constantly changing aerodynamic properties tumbling through the atmosphere.
That doesn't make any sense to me. Copyright protects the expression of the work, the text of the thesis itself, but not the ideas in it. People will take the ideas in the thesis and build off of them, but no-one should be copying and pasting large chunks of someone else's thesis, even if they are rewording it. Besides, anyone who builds off of his work will only contain a brief summary and citation in their writing, as they will spend the bulk of their writing talking about their improvements, and that length should be considered fair use anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that at a minimum, we should require all patents to be licensed under fair reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. While providing some means for inventors to recoup their research costs is reasonable, the approach of giving them a government granted monopoly on ideas is an anachronistic throwback to merchantilism/feudalism that should be abhorred in modern capitalistic society. Researchers should get paid, but they shouldn't be allowed to hold back progress for 20 years.
Mandatory licensing would wouldn't solve the patent troll issue, or many other problems with patents, but it would at least solve a large amount of the abuse of patents within the industry.
Subscribers get to see stories slightly before the rest of users (but can't comment until the story goes live), and they are shown with a red title to indicate that they haven't gone live yet. However on occasion, a bug in slashcode causes regular users to see a red title for a short time after the story has gone live.
NASA chartered flights to low earth orbit.
And in this case, they didn't even do that; they just chartered ballistic zero-G flights. These SS2 flights replace/supplement the vomit comet, not any of NASA's actual space flight. The fact that the Shuttle was recently retired has nothing to do with this deal at all, and was just a red-herring/troll that should have been cut from the summary.
They have been purchasing airplanes from private companies to perform low gravity training/experiments for decades. First they used a Convair C-131 then a Boeing KC-135 then a McDonnell Douglas C-9, and now a Scaled Composites SpaceShipTwo. Building airplanes isn't in NASA's mission or goals, so I don't see why using an existing commercial solution is any different than using commercial toilet paper in their offices.
Unless you are one of the lucky few who have a full class address space, you are stuck with the will of the ISP to either setup reverse entries for you or to delegate resolution to you. Alphatel has it right. Use it if you choose, and grade along with other tests.
Any ISP will setup rDNS entries if you have a business account. The only time this is an issue is if you are trying to run a server from a home account. Most of the ISPs I have used or looked into prohibited running servers with a consumer account. Those that didn't were also happy to provide a rDNS entry if you paid for a static IP.
Trying to run a server when your ISP is opposed to you doing so is inherently problematic, rDNS just being one of your many concerns. It is fine for experimenting and learning, but not for servers that do anything important. The only excuse for a business or government agency not having a rDNS entry is incompetence.
The real question is how tolerant should you be of the incompetent, and from a business point of view the unfortunate answer is "very tolerant".
Yes this is caused by a poorly written misbehaving application, but it's not his application. It is one of the other 30 applications that he has to share the database server with. So all 30 applications get shit for uptime while they dick around trying to figure out what is wrong with the one.
That said I think his solution is backwards; rather than giving his application a dedicated server, they should move the misbehaving application to a development server until the team that wrote it can get their shit together.
As did I. My first thought was that they finally FTFF, although one OS too late :)
The whole point of the WWW was that it was supposed to be resolution independent
It still would be. The fundamental of the web design now is to seperate content from style; the first goes in the HTML, and the second goes in CSS. What this guy is proposing is that sites provide multiple CSS files, and the browser decides which to use (if any). This is already possible today with print, handheld, tty, and other media types other than monitor; he is just adding one more tailored to a new computing form factor.
My eyes aren't what they used to be and I would like a bigger font (and even if you can't imagine it YOU will also be in that situation sooner than you think) - if they lock down font size to get pages that would be bad for accessibility.
The websites don't choose where the page breaks occur, the browser does. You will be able to modify the font size just like you can now. Good web-designers will use relative font sizes so their site still looks good at multiple font sizes, but any website will be readable.
But you say, they could reflow and recalculate it. Yes, the could, but then what is the point of "pages" it would still be a long page with artificial breaks.
There are a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't view more than a page at a time anyway, and page swapping is simpler on a tablet than scrolling. Another advantage is that text is easier to read in columns than in a big wide paragraph. On a large screen my choices now are either to maximize the browser and have text be difficult to read or adjust it to have comfortable text width, and not be able to see as much of the content. His extensions would allow the browser to break the text into columns, allowing you to see more content at once in a more readable format. Finally, a lot of sites already do create artificial breaks. If they could be convinced to use this so that the breaks occurred based on my screen size, then it would be much more convenient.
Plus there is nothing more annoying on the new 'generate as we fly using javascript' pages that you can't search for content.
No javascript involved at all. All the formatting/reflowing would be done by the browser. Furthermore, you would be loading the entire article into your browser at once, and could search the whole thing, rather than the situation now where the server splits it into multiple pages, and you can only search that one page at a time.
Finally, many of the CSS extensions he is proposing would be useful in standard screen layout in addition to the pages layout.
But that is exactly what he is proposing. As far as I can tell, the server won't even know what "flavor" of the page is going to be displayed anymore than it knows whether the print or screen CSS stylesheet is being used now.
In Lie's ideal world, a Web page could come with different CSS formatting code, then show the paged version when appropriate. The HTML, though, which describes things like text and graphics, would be fixed.
The websites I have made already have a separate CSS stylesheet for print media. Adding another for online paged content wouldn't be that much work. I don't know how much benefit there would be to it, though. Tablets would need to be much more popular before I would consider it.
I'm also curious about how tablet browsers would indicate whether a site is in scroll mode or paged mode. I would hate for them to get confused by the lack of scrollbar and think that the first page is all there is.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation
I highlighted the important part. The heart of the concept of "due process of law" is that no one will be punished until they have been declared guilty of breaking a law in a fair trial. If the meaning of a law is so vague that neither judge nor jury can reasonably ascertain who is guilty of the law and who is not, then the only fair ruling it to acquit everyone accused of it. If the Supreme Court decides that a law cannot be reasonably interpreted, then no other court in the land should attempt to do so. In this case the law is void due to being unconstitutionally vague.
This same principle works for unfocused images as well. In both cases, you need to figure how the image was blurred. In the case of motion blur the pixels were smeared along a path. In the case of an unfocused image, the pixels are blurred according to a gaussian (bell curve). Once you have this "blur kernel" (normally called a point-spread function in the field), it is just a matter of using deconvolution techniques to remove the distortion.
In both cases, the information is there, it is just not in the form you want. What you can't do is recover information that has been discarded, by pixelation, quantization, clipping, or in the analog world exceeding the optical resolution defined by the f-stop, or the grain resolution of the film, or the dynamic range of the film.
We have done this in my image processing class. It isn't CSI bullshit.
It won't make missing data suddenly appear.
The thing is that the data isn't missing, it is just distributed throughout the image. For example consider an unfocused camera. Instead of each point in the image mapping to a single point in the image, it results in a gaussian centered at that point, and these are all summed together. In signal processing terms, you can think of the blurred image as being the convolution of the desired image and a gaussian function (plus some noise):
xb = x # g + n
Take the Fourier transform, an this becomes a simple multiplication.
Xb = X * G + N
Divide it out, and invert the transform and you get the original image (plus noise):
xEst = X + n#(1/g)
The same can be done with motion blur, except now G is is a curve through space, not a gaussian. The hard part is knowing exactly how the image was blurred (what path it followed for motion blur, or the optic properties for unfocused images). I don't know what they are doing to discover the blur kernel, but it is impressive.
The other hard part is that this procedure can really amplify high-frequency noise, (consider dividing the 1/G; the tail of the gaussian is close to zero, which makes the reciprocal very large), and JPEG artifacts in particular are hell to deal with. There are ways to minimize this problem (for example, optimal Weiner filters), but you have to have a fairly high-quality image to begin with.
If you want to learn more the key terms to search for is image deblurring with deconvolution.
which patents could apple possibly be violating that they were violating already?
This is over patents that Apple has been violating all along. Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and have all been tryng to negotiate licensing deals with Apple since the day the iPhone was shipped and they still haven't come to an agreement. The different companies have had different thresholds of how far they are will to push negotiations before suing. Apple crossed Samsungs threshold when they used a shitty German "Design Patent" to force the Galaxy Tab off the market because it was a black rectangle with rounded corners.
What it all comes down to is that Apple thinks that it should be able to license all the hardware/communication patents that these companies hold under FRAND terms, while at the same time refusing to license any of it's software patents. Many of the communication patents are related to the GSM/CDMA standards, and thus do require FRAND licensing, but not all of the hardware patents.
You honestly think that for example Microsoft would response to my suggestions with a "fuck you"?
No, but MS fanboys do that all the time on discussion boards. Just like happened here. It doesn't make sense to equate a random idiot on a discussion board with the actual developers of the software.
Yes the ODF1 spreadsheet specification was complete crap. Huge portions, like the entire formula language definition, and all the function definitions were completely left out, and what was there was vague and inconsistent. As a result, while word processor documents largely transfer well between OpenOffice, KWord, MS Word, and others, but spreadsheets don't transfer at all. You loose not only formating and plots but even calculations. ODF1 is a completely worthless standard for spreadsheets.
If he gets charged with a crime you might have a point. As of now, the only punishment is that he might loose his job. Since his job requires holding a security clearance, and he obviously can't follow the rules about handling classified information, I don't see what the problem is.
When a supposed leak appears there is still some amount of uncertainty about whether the leak is authentic or not. Furthermore, there is the issue that several pieces of sensitive information may be unclassified on their own, but when combined become classified. So it may be prudent to classify some previously sensitive but unclassified data upon the release of other data.
Each individual person who works with classified data doesn't always have the whole picture, and are thus not in a position to judge whether they are causing additional harm by confirming that leaked information is authentic, or worse by providing additional commentary on the subject. People who are aware of the full picture need to assess the impact of the initial leak before determining the best course of action. This is why we have explicit declassification and review-and-approval procedures for public comments on sensitive information.
While the wisdom (or speed) of some of these decisions may be questionable, commenting on leaked data when you hold a security clearance is unquestionably stupid, unless you are intentionally and publicly whistle-blowing, and are prepared to deal with the backlash.
What are you talking about? The entire US code is available for download here. The entire CFR (federal regulations) is available for download here.
Yeah, even ignoring wear on the rocket, these number would mean that their integration, test, fuel, launch ops and profit only account for less than 1% of the cost of a current launch. There is no way that is correct. Either someone took that number out of context or they are on crack (I'm guessing the former).
Except the Constitution explicitly gives congress the power to collect taxes. It is not at all clear that it has the power to "mandate that individuals enter into contracts with private insurance companies for the purchase of an expensive product from the time they are born until the time they die".
All laws where similar things are done (such as requiring car insurance, requiring contractors to be licensed and bonded,etc), differ in significant ways. Some are enforced by the state, not the federal government, who have different powers granted to them. Some only apply when participating in an arguably optional activity not to everyone alive. Some are only required to engage in business, and thus more clearly fall under the interstate commerce act. This is an open legal question, one that was bound to challenged when the law was passed. The faster it gets resolved in the Supreme Court the better.
However, I have no reason to believe that the Supreme Court will come to the obvious and logical conclusion here. That's not their job.
No it isn't their job. Their job is to interpret the law and constitution as it is written, not according their own personal opinion/logic nor yours.
Is there any list of successful software created entirely inside universities' labs that became widely used?
That is an odd restriction to make. Students are only at university for a short time. If their work during that time turns into something useful then they naturally continue it after they leave, either as a an open source project or as a business venture. This is how it is meant to work, and there are tons of examples of such software.
MATLAB and Maple were both created at universities and later commercialized. Same for SPICE. On the open source side there is Apache, Sendmail, PostgreSQL, and the original implementations of nearly every RFC protocol on the internet.
Yeah, blocking third-party cookies is a good thing to do. The third-party can still see your IP address every time you visit a page that embeds their content, but it at least provides a thin layer of anonymity on the web. Furthermore, it is far less painful than using no-script. The only think that I have noticed break is that embedded Vimeo videos won't play with third-party cookies disabled and you have to right-click and view them on Vimeo instead (or white-list them).
It is a lot easier to track objects moving in a near frictionless environment than to track a object with unstable and constantly changing aerodynamic properties tumbling through the atmosphere.
That doesn't make any sense to me. Copyright protects the expression of the work, the text of the thesis itself, but not the ideas in it. People will take the ideas in the thesis and build off of them, but no-one should be copying and pasting large chunks of someone else's thesis, even if they are rewording it. Besides, anyone who builds off of his work will only contain a brief summary and citation in their writing, as they will spend the bulk of their writing talking about their improvements, and that length should be considered fair use anyway.