That would have been a short-sighted decision. CDMA was a much better upgrade path form our existing networks than GSM was and better suited for large rural areas, which the US has more of than western/central Europe. Where the FCC screwed up was that the way LTE frequency was allocated let to greater fragmentation, when it should have been an opportunity to improve compatibly and thus competition.
LibreOffice is licensed under LGPL, like Sun OpenOffice.org was before it. Apache OpenOffice is licensed under the Apache license, which is more permissive than the LGPL. There is no problem using Apache licensed code with LGPL code, however the Apache Foundation refuses to use any license that is less permissive than Apache license in any of it's projects. It is one of the core tenants of the foundation. So OpenOffice can choose to merge into LibreOffice, but the opposite cannot happen short of getting every developer who has worked on LibreOffice/Go-OO over the past decade to agree to re-license their code.
Weird, I don't see that last link. I even searched the page for "explore" and got nothing. I tried with the lastest version of Firefox on windows, Iceweasel 10 & Chromium 6 on Debian.
You're forgetting every county and municipal sales tax there might be.
The collection of these taxes isn't included in the bill that just passed.
When this came up years ago, there was a push for there to be one body per state responsible for sorting out all of the sales taxes (and to be the point of payment), so that it'd be closer to the problem you describe (although, you forgot DC and territories).
The bill that passed includes rules that require exactly that (and you forgot that some some states don't collect any sales tax).
how is this 1 person suposed to handle tax law in over 2000 different locations?
They don't. The bill passed requires the internet sales/use taxes to be uniform for the entire state. So there are less than 50 sets or rules that the retailers have to deal with.
Secondly, you could say the same thing about credit card processing. How can a small mom and pop deal with the rigors and complexity of PCI compliance? They don't - they contract out the work to a credit card processor, and don't worry about it.
The same thing will happen here. These credit card processors already have the ability to handle collecting sales tax in every possible jurisdiction, because they already work with thousands of mom & pop's who combined span every possible tax jurisdiction. They will do all the work of computing, collecting, and tabulating all the taxes, and at most the mom & pop's will just have to file the forms that the processors give them.
There is a distinction between enjoying art separately from it's creator, and participating in commerce that funds people and organizations that you don't support.
In order to get to orbit, you need to go straight up, and then go about double that to really get out of the atmosphere, and then tack on around 8km/s velocity.
But you don't need to go orbital, just a ballistic. While the trajectories of some of the longer flights like Sydney to London are approaching the energy needed for orbit, there are plenty of medium length ones like LA to NY, or NY to London that are well within the grasp of a scaled-up version of SS2.
Even more aptly, it only took 3 years for SpaceShipOne to go from concept to first powered flight. And a little less than an year after that to complete the X-prize. SpaceShipTwo has taken three times as long to get to the same point in development. I know that building the craft for commercial customers and not experimental jet pilots would take some extra time, but I figured most of that would be testing related, and they would have gotten to this point long ago. That engine explosion must have really set them back a long time.
This isn't a problem that is unique to open source. Several commercial libraries that we have used in the past have entered the twilight zone where the developer is neglecting them, and refuses to release any sort of roadmap or EOL announcement. Eventually, you just have to make your own call based on how much work it will be to move to a new library vs the risk of staying with the current one. At least with open source if you get stuck with a dead library you can choose to take over maintaining it on your own either as a long term strategy or a short-term stop-gap until you can move onto something else.
Well the GPL specificly isn't a problem here, however it is really nice to have an alternative to GCC that actually encourages and facilitates reuse of their code rather than one that puts up deliberate obsticles to reuse even by other free software projects.
One of the big reasons that CLang was created was because there were some free software developers that wanted to integrate high quality front-ends (parser, etc) into other projects like IDEs, LLVM, and such. They prefered to work together with GCC to share the effort, but GCC refused. They were so paranoid about proprietary applications using GCC code that they refused to seperate the front-end into a GPL library that GPL applications could use. Their rational was that someone could easily write a GPL wrapper application around that GPL library that just serialized the data to/from a text representation, which could then be legally used with a proprietary application. In their mind, it was more important to make it difficult for proprietary applications to use their code than to make it easy for free software to use their code.
So LLVM was forced with the decision to either fork GCC or write their own. GCC was never designed with front-end modularity in mind, and a lot of changes would be necessary to do so. Once that massive refactoring was complete, it would be difficult to share improvements between the two codebases. Between that and some compelling technical reasons they chose go write their own and CLang was born.
What the article is describing (an IMU) have been around forever (since before GPS), and pretty much any system that uses GPS for navigation has one to supplement the GPS. What is new here is the size; a full IMU on a single chip the size of your pinky finger nail. Pretty cool considering that not too long ago these used to comprise of multiple separate physical devices (gyrometer x3, accellerometer x3, magnetometer), but have been getting progressively smaller over the years. MEMs has come a long way.
I've read in a few places that if you enable encryption on either Android or an iPhone, it encrypts the entire flash chip at a low level, which has pretty much the same effect as writing a disk with random data if you don't know the key. These articles therefore recommended the following process to sanitize your phone before reselling/discarding it: 1) Enable encryption 2) Perform a factory reset/wipe 3) Disable encryption 4) Repeat if paranoid That way all your data is deleted, and all "deleted" files are scrambled and impossible to recover if you don't have the key.
It doesn't look like researchers looked at phones where that had been performed.
Ubuntu makes it easier to use proprietary drivers, and Valve probably rightly assumes that most people that want to play proprietary games through a proprietary DRM-lite storefront will want this. Don't know if that outweighs all the other downsides to Ubuntu but it's something.
Plus, there is no real advantage to using a 64-bit browser unless you want it to use more than 2gb of memory
ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) is far more effective in a 64-bit address space than in a 32-bit address space. Browsers need all the layers of protection they can get from exploits.
On the other hand, WebGL gives any website in the world nearly direct access to exploit bugs in GPU drivers, significantly increasing the attack surface of the browser. I say nearly, because the browser does check all parameters for possible buffer overflow conditions before passing them onto OpenGL calls, but any other type of exploit is still possible.
I would definitely prefer that Firefox prioritize features that increase security over those that decrease it.
There are over 25 million known open DNS resolvers that can be used in DNS amplification attacks. Directly contacting the administrators of all the servers used in the attack is not a tractable problem. The same is true of pretty much any DDOS attach vector; there are too many broken machines to deal with them directly.
I have no problem paying for software that is useful, especially if it reasonably priced. However, there have been many times where I needed to get a job done and was hindered in doing so because of the hoops I had to jump through to get software activated on an offline machine, or didn't have access to the serial number at the time. This has burned me enough that I won't buy any software that requires activation, and am even leery of simple serial number activation.
Nearly all the software on pirate sites has been cracked, so the pirate's version won't require the user to enter a serial number or be calling home on the first install anyway. Even these simple anti-piracy methods hurt the user and not the pirate.
If your software is at all popular, people will remove your phone home check, and distribute this cracked version of the software instead. Furthermore, if you have any sort of bug in your phone-home software (say date comparison that starts failing in the future due to incorrect leap year handling), then you open the possibility of your legitimate customers being harmed even though you didn't mean to.
IMHO, the best approach is to have no DRM at all, but to seed all the major torrent sites with legal shareware versions of your software that include infrequent and unobtrusive requests to upgrade to the full version if you like what you see. Some people will still pirate the full edition, but you'll up-sell to a few of the downloaders, which is more than you would have gotten otherwise.
The government regulators have no desire to prevent you from buying or selling higher power lasers. They do care when you lie to your customers and tell them the lasers are less dangerous than they actually are. They care when you use shoddy manufacturing that allows harmful IR to escape the casing, while again telling the customer that they are completely shielded against this. If these lasers worked as advertized, then there wouldn't be a problem. Alternately if they were sold as class 3B devices (which is what they effectively are) there would be no problem, as the purchasers would know the risks and could plan accordingly. But they weren't and the manufacturers/importers should be held responsible for their recklessness.
But the body of law is frequently contradictory, and the Constitution is frequently vague. That give the justices a fair bit of latitude in their decisions while still being constant with the law. It is good to see them choosing to err on the side of individual's rights in a case that could very legitimately gone either way.
The best way to approach this problem is to go to audiologist and get fitted for custom earplugs. They will make a mold of your ear and send it to a company like http://www.etymotic.com/hp/erme.html. You can select the filter up to a maximum of -25dB over a much more even bandwidth than cheap earplugs. It will likely solve the problem without introducing masking noise willy-nilly.
The main design goal for most good earplugs like Etymotic's is to have a flat frequency response which means they decrease the volume level without distorting sound. That is great for music concerts, working around heavy machinery, and any other situation where you want to protect against hearing loss but still hear clearly. However, that same feature makes them horrible for blocking out voices, as they cut all sound equally so the volume difference between the voices and noise floor stays the same, and they are just as easy to hear. Noise canceling headphones are worse as they can only cancel relatively constant background noise, and can't cancel voices or percussive sounds at all.
I have used both of these in a setting like a dorm, and the net effect is to eliminate the beneficial background white (or colored) noise, while largely preserving the distracting noises. I found the foam plugs designed for shooting or sleeping to work much better because they muffle the sounds which makes them less distracting, and the total attenuation can be just as low as expensive earplugs (30-35dB).
It is possible that someone makes custom fitted earplugs design to decrease distraction which would be better than the foam ones, but don't spend all that money without having a long talk with the audiologist first and making sure they will make things better not worse!
Those plots are a bit misleading, as they intentionally leave out the Information Sciences Institute at USC. The ISI is responsible for drafting the lions share of early and fundamental RFCs including those defining IP, ICMP, UDP, TCP, SMTP and more. The internet did exist prior to 1988, unlike those plots would lead you to believe:) The core of the internet was developed almost entirely by government research agencies. Furthermore, the recent portions of the time plots are also misleading as they leave out "unknown" which largely consists of individuals who don't officially represent an organization.
Now the Internet is commercialized, a large number the RFCs do come from large companies whose business in the internet, but they didn't create it, and their various attempts to create something similar over the years all failed, because they insisted on proprietary closed systems. The internet is a textbook case of how the government does well at fundamental research, and the market does well with mass deployment and incremental R&D.
Slashdot Mirror
That would have been a short-sighted decision. CDMA was a much better upgrade path form our existing networks than GSM was and better suited for large rural areas, which the US has more of than western/central Europe. Where the FCC screwed up was that the way LTE frequency was allocated let to greater fragmentation, when it should have been an opportunity to improve compatibly and thus competition.
LibreOffice is licensed under LGPL, like Sun OpenOffice.org was before it. Apache OpenOffice is licensed under the Apache license, which is more permissive than the LGPL. There is no problem using Apache licensed code with LGPL code, however the Apache Foundation refuses to use any license that is less permissive than Apache license in any of it's projects. It is one of the core tenants of the foundation. So OpenOffice can choose to merge into LibreOffice, but the opposite cannot happen short of getting every developer who has worked on LibreOffice/Go-OO over the past decade to agree to re-license their code.
Then how do applications even display images to the user if they won't fit in memory?
Weird, I don't see that last link. I even searched the page for "explore" and got nothing. I tried with the lastest version of Firefox on windows, Iceweasel 10 & Chromium 6 on Debian.
Okay, I must be blind. Where is the link to the site where you can choose what to look at? All I can find are the four canned videos.
You're forgetting every county and municipal sales tax there might be.
The collection of these taxes isn't included in the bill that just passed.
When this came up years ago, there was a push for there to be one body per state responsible for sorting out all of the sales taxes (and to be the point of payment), so that it'd be closer to the problem you describe (although, you forgot DC and territories).
The bill that passed includes rules that require exactly that (and you forgot that some some states don't collect any sales tax).
how is this 1 person suposed to handle tax law in over 2000 different locations?
They don't. The bill passed requires the internet sales/use taxes to be uniform for the entire state. So there are less than 50 sets or rules that the retailers have to deal with.
Secondly, you could say the same thing about credit card processing. How can a small mom and pop deal with the rigors and complexity of PCI compliance? They don't - they contract out the work to a credit card processor, and don't worry about it.
The same thing will happen here. These credit card processors already have the ability to handle collecting sales tax in every possible jurisdiction, because they already work with thousands of mom & pop's who combined span every possible tax jurisdiction. They will do all the work of computing, collecting, and tabulating all the taxes, and at most the mom & pop's will just have to file the forms that the processors give them.
There is a distinction between enjoying art separately from it's creator, and participating in commerce that funds people and organizations that you don't support.
I used Kanotix, Sidux, and Aptosid (related debian-derived distros)for a long, long time.
Maybe you can answer this since the website doesn't. What is the difference between aptosid and just running sid?
In order to get to orbit, you need to go straight up, and then go about double that to really get out of the atmosphere, and then tack on around 8km/s velocity.
But you don't need to go orbital, just a ballistic. While the trajectories of some of the longer flights like Sydney to London are approaching the energy needed for orbit, there are plenty of medium length ones like LA to NY, or NY to London that are well within the grasp of a scaled-up version of SS2.
Even more aptly, it only took 3 years for SpaceShipOne to go from concept to first powered flight. And a little less than an year after that to complete the X-prize. SpaceShipTwo has taken three times as long to get to the same point in development. I know that building the craft for commercial customers and not experimental jet pilots would take some extra time, but I figured most of that would be testing related, and they would have gotten to this point long ago. That engine explosion must have really set them back a long time.
This isn't a problem that is unique to open source. Several commercial libraries that we have used in the past have entered the twilight zone where the developer is neglecting them, and refuses to release any sort of roadmap or EOL announcement. Eventually, you just have to make your own call based on how much work it will be to move to a new library vs the risk of staying with the current one. At least with open source if you get stuck with a dead library you can choose to take over maintaining it on your own either as a long term strategy or a short-term stop-gap until you can move onto something else.
Well the GPL specificly isn't a problem here, however it is really nice to have an alternative to GCC that actually encourages and facilitates reuse of their code rather than one that puts up deliberate obsticles to reuse even by other free software projects.
One of the big reasons that CLang was created was because there were some free software developers that wanted to integrate high quality front-ends (parser, etc) into other projects like IDEs, LLVM, and such. They prefered to work together with GCC to share the effort, but GCC refused. They were so paranoid about proprietary applications using GCC code that they refused to seperate the front-end into a GPL library that GPL applications could use. Their rational was that someone could easily write a GPL wrapper application around that GPL library that just serialized the data to/from a text representation, which could then be legally used with a proprietary application. In their mind, it was more important to make it difficult for proprietary applications to use their code than to make it easy for free software to use their code.
So LLVM was forced with the decision to either fork GCC or write their own. GCC was never designed with front-end modularity in mind, and a lot of changes would be necessary to do so. Once that massive refactoring was complete, it would be difficult to share improvements between the two codebases. Between that and some compelling technical reasons they chose go write their own and CLang was born.
What the article is describing (an IMU) have been around forever (since before GPS), and pretty much any system that uses GPS for navigation has one to supplement the GPS. What is new here is the size; a full IMU on a single chip the size of your pinky finger nail. Pretty cool considering that not too long ago these used to comprise of multiple separate physical devices (gyrometer x3, accellerometer x3, magnetometer), but have been getting progressively smaller over the years. MEMs has come a long way.
I've read in a few places that if you enable encryption on either Android or an iPhone, it encrypts the entire flash chip at a low level, which has pretty much the same effect as writing a disk with random data if you don't know the key. These articles therefore recommended the following process to sanitize your phone before reselling/discarding it:
1) Enable encryption
2) Perform a factory reset/wipe
3) Disable encryption
4) Repeat if paranoid
That way all your data is deleted, and all "deleted" files are scrambled and impossible to recover if you don't have the key.
It doesn't look like researchers looked at phones where that had been performed.
Ubuntu makes it easier to use proprietary drivers, and Valve probably rightly assumes that most people that want to play proprietary games through a proprietary DRM-lite storefront will want this. Don't know if that outweighs all the other downsides to Ubuntu but it's something.
Yes it is. It is news to anyone who uses MapReduce-style open source software, which includes a lot of people who read slashdot.
Plus, there is no real advantage to using a 64-bit browser unless you want it to use more than 2gb of memory
ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) is far more effective in a 64-bit address space than in a 32-bit address space. Browsers need all the layers of protection they can get from exploits.
On the other hand, WebGL gives any website in the world nearly direct access to exploit bugs in GPU drivers, significantly increasing the attack surface of the browser. I say nearly, because the browser does check all parameters for possible buffer overflow conditions before passing them onto OpenGL calls, but any other type of exploit is still possible.
I would definitely prefer that Firefox prioritize features that increase security over those that decrease it.
There are over 25 million known open DNS resolvers that can be used in DNS amplification attacks. Directly contacting the administrators of all the servers used in the attack is not a tractable problem. The same is true of pretty much any DDOS attach vector; there are too many broken machines to deal with them directly.
I have no problem paying for software that is useful, especially if it reasonably priced. However, there have been many times where I needed to get a job done and was hindered in doing so because of the hoops I had to jump through to get software activated on an offline machine, or didn't have access to the serial number at the time. This has burned me enough that I won't buy any software that requires activation, and am even leery of simple serial number activation.
Nearly all the software on pirate sites has been cracked, so the pirate's version won't require the user to enter a serial number or be calling home on the first install anyway. Even these simple anti-piracy methods hurt the user and not the pirate.
If your software is at all popular, people will remove your phone home check, and distribute this cracked version of the software instead. Furthermore, if you have any sort of bug in your phone-home software (say date comparison that starts failing in the future due to incorrect leap year handling), then you open the possibility of your legitimate customers being harmed even though you didn't mean to.
IMHO, the best approach is to have no DRM at all, but to seed all the major torrent sites with legal shareware versions of your software that include infrequent and unobtrusive requests to upgrade to the full version if you like what you see. Some people will still pirate the full edition, but you'll up-sell to a few of the downloaders, which is more than you would have gotten otherwise.
The government regulators have no desire to prevent you from buying or selling higher power lasers. They do care when you lie to your customers and tell them the lasers are less dangerous than they actually are. They care when you use shoddy manufacturing that allows harmful IR to escape the casing, while again telling the customer that they are completely shielded against this. If these lasers worked as advertized, then there wouldn't be a problem. Alternately if they were sold as class 3B devices (which is what they effectively are) there would be no problem, as the purchasers would know the risks and could plan accordingly. But they weren't and the manufacturers/importers should be held responsible for their recklessness.
But the body of law is frequently contradictory, and the Constitution is frequently vague. That give the justices a fair bit of latitude in their decisions while still being constant with the law. It is good to see them choosing to err on the side of individual's rights in a case that could very legitimately gone either way.
The best way to approach this problem is to go to audiologist and get fitted for custom earplugs. They will make a mold of your ear and send it to a company like http://www.etymotic.com/hp/erme.html. You can select the filter up to a maximum of -25dB over a much more even bandwidth than cheap earplugs. It will likely solve the problem without introducing masking noise willy-nilly.
The main design goal for most good earplugs like Etymotic's is to have a flat frequency response which means they decrease the volume level without distorting sound. That is great for music concerts, working around heavy machinery, and any other situation where you want to protect against hearing loss but still hear clearly. However, that same feature makes them horrible for blocking out voices, as they cut all sound equally so the volume difference between the voices and noise floor stays the same, and they are just as easy to hear. Noise canceling headphones are worse as they can only cancel relatively constant background noise, and can't cancel voices or percussive sounds at all.
I have used both of these in a setting like a dorm, and the net effect is to eliminate the beneficial background white (or colored) noise, while largely preserving the distracting noises. I found the foam plugs designed for shooting or sleeping to work much better because they muffle the sounds which makes them less distracting, and the total attenuation can be just as low as expensive earplugs (30-35dB).
It is possible that someone makes custom fitted earplugs design to decrease distraction which would be better than the foam ones, but don't spend all that money without having a long talk with the audiologist first and making sure they will make things better not worse!
Those plots are a bit misleading, as they intentionally leave out the Information Sciences Institute at USC. The ISI is responsible for drafting the lions share of early and fundamental RFCs including those defining IP, ICMP, UDP, TCP, SMTP and more. The internet did exist prior to 1988, unlike those plots would lead you to believe :) The core of the internet was developed almost entirely by government research agencies. Furthermore, the recent portions of the time plots are also misleading as they leave out "unknown" which largely consists of individuals who don't officially represent an organization.
Now the Internet is commercialized, a large number the RFCs do come from large companies whose business in the internet, but they didn't create it, and their various attempts to create something similar over the years all failed, because they insisted on proprietary closed systems. The internet is a textbook case of how the government does well at fundamental research, and the market does well with mass deployment and incremental R&D.