Surveillance changes things because it is often less visible (some places cameras with significant zoom capability is placed high above street level, and you wouldn't notice it unless you know where to look) than someone taking photos, and because it can contribute to much more extensive tracking of your movements, as well as a potentially permanent record of your activities.
Now, if you're out shopping, it's unlikely to be worth caring about.
But what if you belong to some legal but controversial political group, and someone wants to use the surveillance against you?
What if you purchase a new butchers knife they day before a someone gets killed with one and end up being a suspect because the police decides it's easier to use surveillance than spend time looking for real evidence?
What if your employer happens to see you on surveillance tapes reading about drug rehabilitation and fire you assuming it was for you?
The opportunities for abuse are endless, and while it isn't reason for immediately refusing to accept surveillance, one should be aware that it DOES change the game unless the usage is tightly controlled.
There is a huge difference between surveillance that isn't watched until "after the fact" when investigating a specific crime, for instance, than surveillance where someone is actively following what is happening. Both can be appropriate in the right setting, but the former would make me much more comfortable in most cases.
The main reason for concern for any technology like this isn't how it is used now. It is how adding surveillance everywhere and making it accepted make it easier for people who wish to abuse power in the future.
Once surveillance is in place the opportunity for abuse is there.
I'm not saying it will happen, or that all surveillance is bad. But it IS important to consider how much power you would be willing to grant government officials, considering that it is not given that a government 10, 20, 50 years down the line will be anywhere near as concerned about how they use the available surveillance infrastructure as the current government wherever you are.
Eclipse, Jikes, i8n support libraries used in Xerces among others, and a LONG list of other projects, a ton of Linux contributions (JFS, for instance).... Just to mention a few. IBM have released more code as open source than most software companies produce during their entire existence.
Court isn't like on TV. If they don't present their claims during discovery they will not be able to bring them up later, regardless of how much "proof" they have.
Of course pressing a music CD costs much less than 1 or 2 euros in reasonable volumes... As an example, for USD 1.45 - 0.77 per CD (in volumes of 1000 or 10,000 respectively) I found pressing + jewel cases, cover and distribution via Amazon and Barnes and Noble, or if you just want to press discs, $1.65 per disc for a volume of 250 to 0.65 at a volume of 1,000 and 0.40 for 10,000.
Even in volume prices on CD-R's those prices are competitive.
Ok, so lets assume your number of 15GB a day for 15 million mails a day is accurate. That's 450GB a month. By buying bandwidth in bulk, I can get that at less than $200 a month, EASILY. Colocating a server is a much cheaper than hiring the lines. One small server would easily handle a mail volume like that when the number of messages are small (everything can trivially be cached in RAM, so no IO bottleneck). Bandwidth + leasing a suitable server would be unlikely to go much above a $500-600 unless he's had to pay a premium to find an ISP willing to host his crap.
Any turn based board game are "really simple search-and-prune" systems. The problem is how to minimize the time taken by the search, and how to decide what a to prune, and how to decide which move to take.
Brute forcing a chess game tree based on basic alpha beta minimax for instance is no way to play well against an experienced human player - first of all you won't get many moves ahead, and a good player that know how the computer work can easily set up a trap that will make the board look good X moves ahead, to make the computer to do stupid moves they can't easily reverse later.
Second you face the problem of definining and weighting what a "good position" is. What is a good position depends on the strategy of the opponent.
Most modern chess programs will augment the basic search and prune with a lot of heuristics to guide the search and weighting of choices, exactly for that reason. They also often contain massive databases of games, sequences of moves etc., to hunt for known strategies that humans might try to recycle against it.
Chess isn't "simple". Chess is a game where it's easy to beat beginners, possible to beat intermediate players on modest hardware, and possible to face grand masters if you have lots of time and access to millions of dollars worth of hardware, and you can still expect to be surprised every now and again.
It makes it interesting, because you have a good foundation to research algorithm improvements on, and because a good algorithm will be more and more useful as hardware costs come down, but it certainly doesn't invalidate the need for better algorithms.
It's also interesting because better algorithms might help us appreciate how humans approach the problem, and as such benefit AI research.
As others have pointed out, voting would be unlikely to work. I think that real collaboriation could, but the game would be impractical. The problem is that voting doesn't get you any benefit, and destroy any hope of a coherent strategy. Put together a proper group of people and let them discuss and educate eachother on the proposed moves and you might get somewhere, but coordination would be hell.
It's hyped because a) more people in Europe and the US at least "know" chess, at least the basics, and b) it's reasonably easy to get a chess program to a level where it will beat beginners, and doable to get it to a level where the best players around will find it a challenge. The latter is important because the problem is mostly academical until the programs reach a reasonable quality. I know that Go is interesting from an AI perspective, but it's also an extremely hard problem. Chess is hard, but you can get fairly far by combining good historical data, heuristics and sheer brute force (minimax variations) on the game tree, and any AI approach is about moving from good to world quality - you don't have to struggle just to give beginners a reasonable opponent.
Re:Google is Google's Worst Enemy
on
Google v. Microsoft
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"People" (read: investors) have a problem with what you call self-sufficient companies because they don't make any money out of that. Googles investors didn't exactly get into the game in order to set up a company to do search well - they put up the money to get a high return on their investment. When you take investments from people, they will naturally expect to make money back.
It would be the FTC or the DOJ that would be looking at Microsoft, not the SEC. The SEC would be involved only if there were concerns about the reporting of either of the companies, or share price manipulation.
No, they would own licenses to resell and sublicense certain specific versions of the original Unix that is to a large extent irellevant outside SCO's fantasy world.
I liked Final Fantasy, but it was easy to understand why it flopped... You don't market a movie as "gee, come and see how good we are at computer graphics, it looks almost real" and leave people with no clue what the movie is about all through the movie and expect it to do well - people don't go see animated movies to see how realistic the graphics look.
MIDI != musical score format. MIDI is great for driving a synth, but it doesn't contain enough information to reproduce a well written musical score correctly without in a way that makes it easy to reconstruct the score again afterwards.
First of all, less than 40% of all Norwegian boys complete military service. It is by no means universal, and who gets out of it is to a large part a result of chance and whether or not you happen to be depressed, lazy, willing to lie, or had any type of medical condition when you happened to be processed.
That's the first injustice - the decision of whether or not you have to serve is arbitrary.
The second is that it is forced upon you. You are forced to accept a chain of command and rules that may see you forced to take up arms in a situation where it would be against your moral and ethics to do so. I would never accept putting myself in a situation where I was bound to participate in the invasion of another country for instance.
I stood up for myself, and was prepared to take the consequences, may include a prison sentence. As I'm currently a UK resident I'm temporarily out of the system, but if I move back to Norway before my 47th birtday I still face that possibility - I'd rather take the time in prison than accept to be forced to serve, despite the fact that I would likely face at least 7 months in prison, versus the 6 months of service they tried to draft me for the last time.
Personally I see much more bravery in being ready to accept prison than in silently accepting whatever the government asks of you regardless of how it fits with your moral and ethical standards.
(for the non-Norwegians: 6 months is the minimum, 18 months the maximum I think, unless they've changed it again since I moved to the UK)
You get a good lawyer by a) hoping you get a good one because a good one was available and was assigned the case by the government as part of the public defender system, or b) if you get one you don't like you shop around and find a good one that is available and ask him to take the case for government rates (which are quite high) which he likely will.
This is the way "socialism" works in Norway (a country generally far more left wing than the UK)
There are occasional cases where lawyers hesitate to take cases at government rates, but few lawyers would be able to charge hourly rates much higher than what the government pays as part of the public defender system anyway, so it doesn't happen often.
As for your characteristic of the UK health system, I know there are types of surgery for instance where you have to wait, but based on experience to people close to me you can often get surgery very quickly too. The system is far from perfect, but it's good enough that private health insurance in the UK is usually offered as "incremental protection" where you go to a private hospital only when the public hospitals have too long waiting lists, and where you will usually rely on public hospitals for emergency services etc. because their quality in general is at the same level as the private hospitals for all but the most specialised procedures.
Yes, usually they are good. Norway doesn't have a system of public defenders employed by the government, but a system where lawyers are remunerated on an hourly basis (with some limits) and where most lawyers will accept cases as public defenders. There are occasionally cases where lawyers are unwilling to accept cases at the government rates, but it's rare.
If you are uncomfortable with the lawyer allocated for your defense you are always legally entitled to choose your own lawyer, and in most such cases the lawyer you choose can then be paid by the government at the fixed hourly rate.
This system also cover civil lawsuits if your salary and savings are below certain levels. In many cases you can get the government to cover your lawyers fees as a plaintiff in civil cases as well, provided the case meets certain criteria and your salary and savings are below the threshold.
Personally, I once got a publicly allocated defender as I was being drafted (Norway has compulsory military service) and refused to accept their denial of my application to be exempted.
The case never went to trial (I got it thrown out of court:)), but the lawyer I was allocated was actually one of the most prominent lawyers in Norway, with 30 years experience in similar cases. He took time to read all the documents, talked to me on the phone, had a very relaxed meeting with me in his office, not worrying about how much time we spent. I'm sure not everyone has as pleasant experience with their publicly allocated defenders as I had, but in general I think the system works fairly well.
I don't agree. If the trial was about establishing precedent, then I believe he would clearly be entitled to compensation. Norway has a strong tradition for compensating people in cases where the government prosecutor pursued a case based on incomplete evidence or seemingly based on other considerations than the merits of the case.
If the court action has been a benefit to him over all he will be unlikely to get much, as that would be taken into account, but if he believe he can meet the criteria then he should follow this through - the compensation arrangement is there specifically to provide relief to ensure that the government can't use prosecution in itself as a punishment in cases where they can't expect a conviction.
Many standards organisations survive to a large extent on income generated by selling copies of the standards documents. It's only in recent years started becoming common for standards documents to be available free. Still, even now most ANSI and ISO standards for instance still costs money.
Because it's likely that a company specialising in hard realtime embedded OS's that have been one of the market leaders in that area for years will know how to deal with realtime issues better than their own engineers? Or because they do it well enough, and NASA have their engineers busy on other parts of the project?
Why do you start bringing up the comptence of a specific contractor before NASA even know what the problem is?
There are A LOT of ways to get a case thrown out before the case gets heard. Arguing that the case is frivolous, that the plaintiff lacks standing to sue (typically because someone who isn't really a party to the issue involved in the case), that the court doesn't have jurisdiction to hear the case (federal vs. state courts, for instance), that the venue is inappropriate (should be heard by a court somewhere else), and many more (IANAL).
If you could sue anyone for anything you wanted you could do damage beyond what financial restitution in the form of getting my court costs paid could make up for. And I would have to be very careful not to spend more than I could afford on the defence in case the plaintiff didn't have the money to pay off if or when he loses.
That's why the bar to go to a full trial is pretty high and there is plenty of opportunity to get the case thrown out early on.
You can't copyright ideas, which means you can't copyright a file format. Any original restating of the description of the file format would be unencumbered by copyright.
I don't think it would be needed to find a word processor specifically that does this. Demonstrating that there are applications that include binary data in XML files should be sufficient to demonstrate prior art, and there are lots of apps that does that.
I don't know when the discussion first surfaced, but I'm pretty sure encoding binary data within the XML file in base64 and similar formats was being discussed on the Open Office mailing list well in advance of Microsoft adding it to their file formats. If that is the case, then the only problem would be if Microsoft have used an encoding that could be protected.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if you're out shopping, it's unlikely to be worth caring about.
But what if you belong to some legal but controversial political group, and someone wants to use the surveillance against you?
What if you purchase a new butchers knife they day before a someone gets killed with one and end up being a suspect because the police decides it's easier to use surveillance than spend time looking for real evidence?
What if your employer happens to see you on surveillance tapes reading about drug rehabilitation and fire you assuming it was for you?
The opportunities for abuse are endless, and while it isn't reason for immediately refusing to accept surveillance, one should be aware that it DOES change the game unless the usage is tightly controlled.
There is a huge difference between surveillance that isn't watched until "after the fact" when investigating a specific crime, for instance, than surveillance where someone is actively following what is happening. Both can be appropriate in the right setting, but the former would make me much more comfortable in most cases.
Once surveillance is in place the opportunity for abuse is there.
I'm not saying it will happen, or that all surveillance is bad. But it IS important to consider how much power you would be willing to grant government officials, considering that it is not given that a government 10, 20, 50 years down the line will be anywhere near as concerned about how they use the available surveillance infrastructure as the current government wherever you are.
Eclipse, Jikes, i8n support libraries used in Xerces among others, and a LONG list of other projects, a ton of Linux contributions (JFS, for instance).... Just to mention a few. IBM have released more code as open source than most software companies produce during their entire existence.
Court isn't like on TV. If they don't present their claims during discovery they will not be able to bring them up later, regardless of how much "proof" they have.
Even in volume prices on CD-R's those prices are competitive.
Ok, so lets assume your number of 15GB a day for 15 million mails a day is accurate. That's 450GB a month. By buying bandwidth in bulk, I can get that at less than $200 a month, EASILY. Colocating a server is a much cheaper than hiring the lines. One small server would easily handle a mail volume like that when the number of messages are small (everything can trivially be cached in RAM, so no IO bottleneck). Bandwidth + leasing a suitable server would be unlikely to go much above a $500-600 unless he's had to pay a premium to find an ISP willing to host his crap.
Brute forcing a chess game tree based on basic alpha beta minimax for instance is no way to play well against an experienced human player - first of all you won't get many moves ahead, and a good player that know how the computer work can easily set up a trap that will make the board look good X moves ahead, to make the computer to do stupid moves they can't easily reverse later.
Second you face the problem of definining and weighting what a "good position" is. What is a good position depends on the strategy of the opponent.
Most modern chess programs will augment the basic search and prune with a lot of heuristics to guide the search and weighting of choices, exactly for that reason. They also often contain massive databases of games, sequences of moves etc., to hunt for known strategies that humans might try to recycle against it.
Chess isn't "simple". Chess is a game where it's easy to beat beginners, possible to beat intermediate players on modest hardware, and possible to face grand masters if you have lots of time and access to millions of dollars worth of hardware, and you can still expect to be surprised every now and again.
It makes it interesting, because you have a good foundation to research algorithm improvements on, and because a good algorithm will be more and more useful as hardware costs come down, but it certainly doesn't invalidate the need for better algorithms.
It's also interesting because better algorithms might help us appreciate how humans approach the problem, and as such benefit AI research.
As others have pointed out, voting would be unlikely to work. I think that real collaboriation could, but the game would be impractical. The problem is that voting doesn't get you any benefit, and destroy any hope of a coherent strategy. Put together a proper group of people and let them discuss and educate eachother on the proposed moves and you might get somewhere, but coordination would be hell.
It's hyped because a) more people in Europe and the US at least "know" chess, at least the basics, and b) it's reasonably easy to get a chess program to a level where it will beat beginners, and doable to get it to a level where the best players around will find it a challenge. The latter is important because the problem is mostly academical until the programs reach a reasonable quality. I know that Go is interesting from an AI perspective, but it's also an extremely hard problem. Chess is hard, but you can get fairly far by combining good historical data, heuristics and sheer brute force (minimax variations) on the game tree, and any AI approach is about moving from good to world quality - you don't have to struggle just to give beginners a reasonable opponent.
"People" (read: investors) have a problem with what you call self-sufficient companies because they don't make any money out of that. Googles investors didn't exactly get into the game in order to set up a company to do search well - they put up the money to get a high return on their investment. When you take investments from people, they will naturally expect to make money back.
It would be the FTC or the DOJ that would be looking at Microsoft, not the SEC. The SEC would be involved only if there were concerns about the reporting of either of the companies, or share price manipulation.
No, they would own licenses to resell and sublicense certain specific versions of the original Unix that is to a large extent irellevant outside SCO's fantasy world.
You must be reading a different Slashdot than I do. The Redhat haters always come out in force whenever Linux distro's get discussed on Slashdot.
I liked Final Fantasy, but it was easy to understand why it flopped... You don't market a movie as "gee, come and see how good we are at computer graphics, it looks almost real" and leave people with no clue what the movie is about all through the movie and expect it to do well - people don't go see animated movies to see how realistic the graphics look.
MIDI != musical score format. MIDI is great for driving a synth, but it doesn't contain enough information to reproduce a well written musical score correctly without in a way that makes it easy to reconstruct the score again afterwards.
That's the first injustice - the decision of whether or not you have to serve is arbitrary.
The second is that it is forced upon you. You are forced to accept a chain of command and rules that may see you forced to take up arms in a situation where it would be against your moral and ethics to do so. I would never accept putting myself in a situation where I was bound to participate in the invasion of another country for instance.
I stood up for myself, and was prepared to take the consequences, may include a prison sentence. As I'm currently a UK resident I'm temporarily out of the system, but if I move back to Norway before my 47th birtday I still face that possibility - I'd rather take the time in prison than accept to be forced to serve, despite the fact that I would likely face at least 7 months in prison, versus the 6 months of service they tried to draft me for the last time.
Personally I see much more bravery in being ready to accept prison than in silently accepting whatever the government asks of you regardless of how it fits with your moral and ethical standards.
(for the non-Norwegians: 6 months is the minimum, 18 months the maximum I think, unless they've changed it again since I moved to the UK)
This is the way "socialism" works in Norway (a country generally far more left wing than the UK)
There are occasional cases where lawyers hesitate to take cases at government rates, but few lawyers would be able to charge hourly rates much higher than what the government pays as part of the public defender system anyway, so it doesn't happen often.
As for your characteristic of the UK health system, I know there are types of surgery for instance where you have to wait, but based on experience to people close to me you can often get surgery very quickly too. The system is far from perfect, but it's good enough that private health insurance in the UK is usually offered as "incremental protection" where you go to a private hospital only when the public hospitals have too long waiting lists, and where you will usually rely on public hospitals for emergency services etc. because their quality in general is at the same level as the private hospitals for all but the most specialised procedures.
If you are uncomfortable with the lawyer allocated for your defense you are always legally entitled to choose your own lawyer, and in most such cases the lawyer you choose can then be paid by the government at the fixed hourly rate.
This system also cover civil lawsuits if your salary and savings are below certain levels. In many cases you can get the government to cover your lawyers fees as a plaintiff in civil cases as well, provided the case meets certain criteria and your salary and savings are below the threshold.
Personally, I once got a publicly allocated defender as I was being drafted (Norway has compulsory military service) and refused to accept their denial of my application to be exempted.
The case never went to trial (I got it thrown out of court :)), but the lawyer I was allocated was actually one of the most prominent lawyers in Norway, with 30 years experience in similar cases. He took time to read all the documents, talked to me on the phone, had a very relaxed meeting with me in his office, not worrying about how much time we spent. I'm sure not everyone has as pleasant experience with their publicly allocated defenders as I had, but in general I think the system works fairly well.
(ObDisclaimer: IANAL)
If the court action has been a benefit to him over all he will be unlikely to get much, as that would be taken into account, but if he believe he can meet the criteria then he should follow this through - the compensation arrangement is there specifically to provide relief to ensure that the government can't use prosecution in itself as a punishment in cases where they can't expect a conviction.
(ObDisclaimer: IANAL)
Many standards organisations survive to a large extent on income generated by selling copies of the standards documents. It's only in recent years started becoming common for standards documents to be available free. Still, even now most ANSI and ISO standards for instance still costs money.
Why do you start bringing up the comptence of a specific contractor before NASA even know what the problem is?
And even so the DoD manufacture very little of their own material...
If you could sue anyone for anything you wanted you could do damage beyond what financial restitution in the form of getting my court costs paid could make up for. And I would have to be very careful not to spend more than I could afford on the defence in case the plaintiff didn't have the money to pay off if or when he loses.
That's why the bar to go to a full trial is pretty high and there is plenty of opportunity to get the case thrown out early on.
You can't copyright ideas, which means you can't copyright a file format. Any original restating of the description of the file format would be unencumbered by copyright.
Note that binary data embedded in the XML was explicitly REJECTED by OpenOffice.org.
I don't know when the discussion first surfaced, but I'm pretty sure encoding binary data within the XML file in base64 and similar formats was being discussed on the Open Office mailing list well in advance of Microsoft adding it to their file formats. If that is the case, then the only problem would be if Microsoft have used an encoding that could be protected.