Just a clarification, the title is Rainbows End. The missing apostrophe is intentional; in fact, Vinge even titled one of the chapters "The Missing Apostrophe." (It's chapter 35.)
In fairness to Rainbows End, Vinge's use of augmented reality (not my favorite term for the concept, but I'll use yours for consistency) was more of a plot device than an end in itself. I should also point out that the Qeng Ho of A Deepness in the Sky used a "consensual virtual reality" visualization system to overlay on top of the world around them, something the autocratic Emergent culture was distrustful of. This plays up Vinge's libertarian views of technology as a force of social equalization and good.
Actually, that sentence should read "Now, cue steganography." The "queue/cue" thing is a word nerd (read: grammar Nazi) thing. (From American Heritage, cue as a transitive verb means "To give a cue to; signal or prompt." Typically used in theatrical directions, e.g., "Cue the lighting." A queue is a line of people or things waiting for their turn; used as a verb, it means to enter a queue, or to form a queue. The confusion probably comes in because "cue" can be used as a variant of "queue," but not vice versa, at least in American usage.) On a more relevant note, steganography has to do with hiding messages, often in plain sight (and is not the same thing as cryptography). On the other hand, stenography has to do with writing in shorthand.
With a strong cipher encrypted data is mathematically indistinguishable from noise unless you have the key. Lets see their filters distinguish between an audio stream recorded using a noisy microphone and a stream containing an encrypted stream overlay.
The Wikipedia article explains why steganography isn't the same as cryptography, so you should probably be careful not to conflate the two.
Funny, I always thought real men did it in straight TeX. (LaTeX being a set of macro packages layered on top of TeX to simplify document creation, etc. As I recall, Leslie Lamport invented LaTeX as a way of leveraging TeX to effectively replace Scribe. If you don't remember Scribe, it was a non-free document formatting system which used to be very popular at many universities.)
In fairness, LaTeX is a lot more usable by mere mortals. Personally, I always found TeX to be a little less restrictive when it came to fancy formatting that didn't fit neatly into one of LaTeX's categories. Pity that TeX isn't XML, or it'd be a perfect portable document format that would be acceptable to nearly everyone. As it is, I'm sure a TeX to ODF converter (or vice versa) would be trivial to write.
I called the author of the article out on that point. First off, let me quote the relevant section of the article to establish context:
Consumers' rights are based on the general idea of "fair use," which isn't a right defined in law. Instead, it's a general defense against claims of copyright infringement. If the recording industry were to sue an individual for copying music from their CDs onto their iPod, they would likely lose because the idea of fair use generally determines that consumers can use their own music in reasonable ways.
Unfortunately, fair use has not been upheld in clear court precedents or in law to the point where it can really be called a right. This leaves things enshrouded in a grey fog where consumers assume that anything they can do with "their music" is fine, while the music industry seeks to find new ways to sell its products.
Let me quote the salient points from the U.S. Copyright Office's website:
One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of "fair use." Although fair use was not mentioned in the previous copyright law, the doctrine has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years. This doctrine has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law.
Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered "fair," such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair[...]
So, what have we learned about TFA?
The author of TFA claims that fair use is not actually defined in law. This is contradicted by Section 107 of Title 17, U.S. Code. Section 107 even helpfully enumerates examples of fair use.
The author of TFA totally misses one of the oldest and best-known prior legal precedents establishing the right to time-shift and space-shift, the infamous Betamax case, Sony vs. Universal City Studios
The author apparently doesn't know how to do basic fact checking using a resource like Google.
The article was great right up until the section on fair use, and I couldn't really stomach reading the rest of the article because the author clearly didn't bother checking any facts. Whether that's due to laziness or some twisted personal interpretation of U.S. copyright law, I couldn't say. I thought maybe this article was written from a European/British perspective (since fair use is not an established right in the U.K., for example), but no, he's using American spellings and seems to be writing from an American (albeit ignorant) POV. Sad, really.
The info about the dispute between Apple and NBC is interesting, as it explains Apple's comments about needing to charge almos
Actually, what the (confused) person meant was, there are people out there scheming to mine Helium-3 from the moon and return it to earth for use in specially designed reactors. The appeal is that fusion of He3 releases virtually no by-products, so a company running a fusion reactor running solely on He3 wouldn't have to periodically replace parts due to the reactor itself becoming radioactive from low-level particle bombardment.
There was actually a rather informative documentary on the Science Channel recently about this. Of course, it's hideously expensive to mine the moon for anything and return it to earth in an economically practical manner; one of the choice quotes from the documentary describes how, even if someone stacked bricks of gold on the moon, it would cost too much money to send a ship there, pick them up, and return them to earth. Yet He3 is such a rare commodity on earth, but so plentiful in lunar regolith, that it would actually be cost effective (by some estimates) to mine the stuff there and return it to earth. It wouldn't take much of the stuff to run a fusion reactor designed to solely react He3, and supposedly this enterprise would pay for itself in terms of energy output versus the amount of energy expended to extract this stuff from the moon.
The Wikipedia article that the parent refers to (grandparent to this comment, parent to yours) actually makes mention of this. The main reason why no R&D has gone into designing He3 fusion reactors is that He3 is extremely rare on this planet, so we're focusing all our effort on hydrogen and deuterium fusion; in the case of H and D fusion reactions, you're right, He3 is one possible product that would enter into second-generation reactions. But there has been real discussion of bypassing using H and D altogether and reacting only He3, and it's being discussed by real commercial entities in the U.S. and Russia, not just theorists.
Ummm... if you actually read the Wikipedia article you cited, you'd see that He3 fusion reactions have almost zero reaction byproducts. Perhaps you were confused by the subsequent section in the Wikipedia entry explaining that He3 is key for use in neutron detectors (i.e., devices that detect neutrons). He3 is not radioactive, and therefore does not emit neutrons (or any other particle).
Actually, Mach by itself doesn't comprise a complete kernel. Typically, you host another OS kernel "personality" on top of Mach, which in theory allows you to run multiple OS personalities on top of the same Mach (micro)kernel at the same time. Hurd itself was originally designed to sit on top of Mach, but from 2004 onward the developers have attempted to move Hurd to other microkernels. See the Wikipedia article for more info.
Hope this answers at least one of your questions. Potentially more than one if you read the Wikipedia entry. Also try checking out the status section on Hurd's homepage.
I almost hate to admit this (as I don't want to appear to be an RMS fanboy), but I feel the same way. The more I realize the costs of "pragmatism" and compromise, the more I realize why Richard is fighting. I do disagree with some of Mr. Stallman's ways of expressing his ideas, and I don't like how he sometimes comes across as a sleazy pitch-man when he's trying to get people to join his cause. (The former is in regards to some of his tantrums, like when he spoke of KDE application authors needing to "ask forgiveness" for coopting code from Gnome projects, instead of merely putting their houses in order and complying with the appropriate license; the latter I mention because I really dislike people who only view others in terms of what they can do to further a pet agenda.) But you know what? The ideas that he's fighting for are worth fighting for.
Not that I'm about to start calling it GNU/Linux anytime soon, just because that's inconvenient in casual discourse, but I do appreciate everything the GNU/FSF folks have done for us in providing the majority of the code to create a fully functioning OS. Now, if only Hurd were more usable! (Let's pray Hurd is finished before Vernor Vinge's prediction from Rainbows End comes true and Hurd is made illegal.)
That and no-one in their right mind uses emacs willingly.
You had an excellent post right up until you injected that immature bit of unsubstantiated personal opinion. I use emacs quite frequently, as do most MIT graduates (and undergraduates, unless that's changed recently), and I personally resent the insinuation that I must not be in my "right mind" because I happen to like emacs. I'd say that one line makes your entire comment flamebait. Why someone got modded "Troll" for asking (innocently) what was wrong with emacs is an injustice. Some people like emacs, and some people like vi, but just because I like emacs doesn't give me carte blanche to go around ragging on people who like vi.
You rank right up there with the IT fossils who insist that "it's not a real computer unless it runs COBOL." Grow up.
Hurd development has indeed been glacial, but based on the historical information present in the Wikipedia article, it seems that there have been more than a few false starts. At least Stallman is a big enough man to admit that some of his early architectural decisions may have been in error.
I worked for a materials science company that was trying to manufacture ultra-pure Calcium Fluoride optics for extreme UV lithography. Our vacuum furnaces had a lot of specially-constructed silicon carbide parts which were manufactured using a vacuum deposition process, and were very strong and heat resistant (for the temperatures we were generating in the furnace). My boss, a material scientist of some renown, told me he wanted to eventually get into manufacturing SiC semiconductors because they could be made extremely heat-tolerant. He was specifically interested in military applications (because he knew that was where the big money was), although I told him I could imagine building ultra-compact, high current power amplifiers (being the hi-fi nut that I am).
One thing that always struck me about silicon carbide, though, was how porous most of the parts we had were. Apparently, this was an artifact of the manufacturing process used, but I do wonder how NASA got the process to work for making chips; up til now, I had only seen SiC transistors in labs, not chips with many transistors etched on them. When I say porous, I mean you could hold a SiC railing up to your mouth and actually breathe through the seemingly solid surface (albeit with a fair amount of resistance).
So the entire European Union is going to be made to suffer intellectual poverty and repression of information because of a representative of a member state that has a historical disregard for (or outright hostility to) the institutions of democracy and free exchange of ideas (which I consider a necessary ingredient for true liberty). Expect to see more lunacy like this in the future.
I would venture to say that anyone who can seriously put forth such a proposal doesn't "get" the notion of liberty. Amazingly, nobody seems to be batting an eye at this, certainly not in Italy.
This just underscores that nothing has really changed that dramatically since the mid-20th century. Fascism is alive and well; people with ties to Mussolini's government (even tenuous ties, like being children of known fascists) extoll the virtues of the "good ol' days" and the sheeple smile and nod their heads in agreement. Of course, the roots of these sentiments really go back much farther than Mussolini. Some would say they are ancient. And I'm saying this as someone who was born into a family with a large, culturally conservative Italian contingent.
I wonder how much of Frattini's comments were distorted due to language barrier issues, how much were due to plain ignorance of how difficult it is to contextualize information (e.g., historical data about genocide or terrorism versus news about terrorism versus how-to guides on conducting terrorism), and how much were attributable to pure demagoguery. I suspect all three factors were at play here.
Only to clarify that by "native English" I meant people from England, as opposed to any other definition
Thanks for clarifying that you're pandering to provincialism. IMHO, that's just as bad as the douchebag who "corrected" you for using "maths" instead of "math."
Just because England is where the language originated doesn't make your particular dialect any more "correct" than any other dialect. English is a family of languages. I shouldn't need to point out that American English is in many ways a version of the language that was frozen in time -- many idioms that died out in the UK persisted in the colonies.
There's actually evidence to suggest that the spelling in England was changed sometime after the Mayflower set sail. Quite a long time, actually; please see this article, which states:
Mathematics (pl.) originally denoted the mathematical sciences collectively, including geometry, astronomy, optics. Math is the Amer.Eng. shortening, attested from 1890; the British preference, maths is attested from 1911.
So "maths" is a neologism here, and "math" is the older form.
This isn't much different from the history of the spelling (and pronunciation) of "aluminum" vs. "aluminium" -- Sir Humphry Davy settled on "aluminum" in 1812, and an anonymous contributor to a British journal objected to this because (paraphrasing) it didn't sound right. We actually used "aluminium" in America for quite some time, until the early 20th century. Kind of odd how we reverted to Davy's choice of spelling while the British insisted on keeping that extra syllable.
I guess I must be a hippy-dippy liberal, because it's times like these I just want to say, "Can't we all just get along?"
If people have time to spend on worthless hacking like making an XBox run Linux, they should have the time to do something useful like reverse engineering these WiFi chipsets.
The problem is, wireless cards these days typically require two things to be reverse engineered -- the firmware (which is often not supplied in ROM, but as a binary blob that gets loaded by the driver during device init), and the driver itself (the thing that communicates between the OS kernel and the device). There are many problems with this.
First, the firmware is instructions for a custom microcontroller or DSP. This stuff is almost never documented. Imagine reverse engineering the instruction set for a CPU you've never seen before (orders of magnitude more difficult than many other types of reverse engineering projects). Most WiFi driver hackers in the BSD and Linux worlds either won't or can't reverse engineer this stuff (more on that in a second), so they either rely on getting the binary blob from the manufacturer of the chipset (as the madwifi folks do), or they extract it from the Windows drivers for the WiFi device.
Once you've got the firmware out of the way, then you have to reverse engineer the protocol to talk to the device at a slightly higher level. Somewhat easier, but still a daunting task, and there are few good tools right now to automate the process of discovering the protocol. Little is standardized, so you're pretty much starting from scratch every time. This is a far cry from getting Linux to run on an original Xbox, which was basically a bog-standard PC architecture (well known) with a few security tweaks in the BIOS.
Now, why wouldn't or couldn't you reverse engineer the firmware? Well, although reverse engineering itself is sacrosanct in the United States (totally legal for the purposes of compatibility), it is not in many other countries. Even if that were not an issue, the FCC in the United States (and other regulatory bodies in Europe and Japan that serve similar roles) regulates the dissemination of information about how to program devices that transmit over regulated radio frequencies, because they're afraid that you might use unauthorized frequencies or set the transmit power illegally high, for example. There are regs that prevent manufacturers from making their radios easy to tinker with to stomp on or snoop certain reserved frequencies (which is why it's difficult to find a scanner that can be easily modified to listen in on police frequencies). Not all WiFi channels are legal to use in all localities, which is why different countries have different firmware for the same chipset. So even if you actually manage to reverse engineer the firmware for a WiFi chipset, good luck being able to publish your findings. (If the chipset manufacturer doesn't sue you, pray you didn't screw up your custom firmware and broadcast on the wrong frequencies, or the FCC might take an interest in you... Hell, they might go after you anyway, even if you didn't screw anything up, just because you "documented the interface" so that someone else CAN use the hardware for nefarious purposes.) And that's a major problem for software you might want to release under an Open Source license such as BSD or GPL.
This is one of the reasons why the madwifi folks rely on Atheros to provide the firmware (the HAL), and why I recently had a major headache getting a laptop with one of the newer Atheros chips to play ball in Linux.
My laptop purchase algorithm automatically filters out laptops without an Intel wifi adapter (and Intel graphics, but that's another story).
Just to pick nits, if you're "filtering out," you're typically removing something as an option. But really, you meant the opposite of this (as was clear from the subject and the remainder of your comment). You probably should use "selects," as that is what you are doing -- choosing something, not rejecting it.
No, I think birds are meant to be able to fly, the wings are a bit of a clue.
No, you missed the point. The word "meant" implies intention, as in "I meant to hit that guy with my car," as opposed to "I accidentally hit that guy with my car." To say that birds are "meant" to fly implies that someone (e.g., God, Zeus, whatever) intended for them to fly. Or to put it in the words of the person to whom you were replying, "Creatures are not 'meant' to do anything, unless you believe in an invisible friend in the sky who is pulling all of our strings like puppets." Just because you might assume that's a true statement doesn't mean everyone else believes that. It's an article of faith, not a fact.
More on-topic, I agree with Yosho. These animals are not in their native habitats, but they are well cared for, respected, and even considered colleagues instead of mere research animals. They don't have to fear predation, and they have a mentally stimulating existence. That's a pretty good deal in my book.
Dave Hitz of NetApp was quoted with this gem (from the article):
"Those discussions obviously went nowhere and basically fell silent," he said. "By that time, [the ZFS file system] was in the public domain. They started this discussion by asserting we infringed on their patents and asked us to pay them royalties on their patents." Earlier this year, Sun released the ZFS source code, part of its Solaris operating system, to the open source community, Hitz noted.
Er, wait a minute. Sun released the code under an open source license; that's not the same as releasing into the public domain. For a company litigating an IP dispute with Sun, NetApp's representative sure has a way of bungling something so basic as the distinction between "public domain" and "copyrighted but released under an open source license."
Nothing is stopping a third party from writing their own JRE from scratch. Many corporations have done this already. If you have a favorite platform (OS, cpu architecture, whatever) that isn't supported by Sun, it isn't Sun's obligation to do the job of porting a JRE to that platform for free. If you want the JRE badly enough, pay for someone to write it from scratch or port the existing Sun code. The Java runtime/VM specification is published and can be implemented -- no, it's not trivial, but it can be done, and many companies have done it. The Java source code is open sourced, so if you want Sun's implementation, you just need to get your hands on the code and do it.
Quit your whining. A promise of portability doesn't mean a promise to port a runtime environment to every platform under the sun just because you happen to care about a platform that Sun does not. It means you are free to do the porting yourself, if you have the money and resources to do it.
People's sense of entitlement astounds me sometimes.
I've already written several times in the past about my run-in with Honeywell; the short version is, one of their idiot employees plugged in an unsecured WiFi access point, behind their corporate firewall, without permission, and I got in trouble with them because I not only connected to their AP with my iBook but blogged about my surprise at seeing an unsecured access point in my building. (I was not working for Honeywell at the time, but for another company sharing the same building.) In this instance, my iBook saw that its preferred base station -- the one I have at my house, which is password protected -- was nowhere to be found, so it connected to an open access point.
The software in OS X was assuming, by default, that an open access point is giving tacit permission to connect. This assumption may have been changed in subsequent versions of OS X, but that doesn't change what already happened.
Fast forward to last week. I bought a cheap Acer laptop from Staples and brought it home. While setting it up, I decided to keep the Windows Vista partition and configure it for my use. I was shocked to see that the network stack detected my neighbor's unsecured WiFi access point and connected to it preferentially; once I had completed most of the Windows setup and realized the situation, I immediately changed the settings in two fundamental ways:
I turned off the option to automatically connect to any open access point in range. (I also experimented with turning off the setting to "switch networks automatically," but this seemed to have an undesirable side effect.)
I explicitly set up my own, password-protected access point as the default to use.
I'm not sure how much of this behavior was due to defaults built into Vista and how much was due to Acer's own network management software, but still, this product was designed to connect to unsecured access points by default.
If the police are going to start enforcing "theft of service" laws, then either manufacturers are going to have to change the built-in assumptions of wireless networking devices, or people running these access points are going to have to start getting slapped with fines for running unsecured WiFi.
The Acer laptop wound up being returned for other reasons, one of them being my inability to get WiFi working under Linux. It's a pity -- the Atheros chip and custom antenna that Acer used actually had good range and speed.
Online gambling has been banned in the US for years by the same laws that made it illegal to wager over the phone. So there were never any domestic online gambling companies, because the US would just arrest the people running them for violating existing law.
Odd, since I'm not sure how this squares with TFA, in which it is explicitly claimed that there are legal avenues for domestic businesses to conduct online gambling -- specific cited examples are off-track betting on horse races, purchase of lottery tickets, etc. Not exactly saying you're wrong, just saying that the NYT has pretty good fact-checking on its articles, and if they say that online gambling is not illegal for companies to conduct within the U.S. (subject to certain restrictions), I don't see how you can make an absolute blanket claim that all online gambling in the U.S. has been banned for years.
As for the rumor posited above in another post that Microsoft paid a combined $150M to these two studios to induce a switch, the answer is obvious. Microsoft sells an HD-DVD player add-on for XBox 360, and likely hopes to see game titles released in the future utilizing it.
Two points. First, Microsoft has publicly stated that they never intend to release Xbox 360 games in HD-DVD format -- the HD-DVD add-on is purely for playing movies. Second, Microsoft has a much bigger stake in the HD-DVD format than a measly hardware add-on for their (as yet still unprofitable) game console: Microsoft licenses the HDi technology to the manufacturers of HD-DVD players as well as the disc makers. HDi is Microsoft's competitor to BD-J (Java for Blu-Ray), and is also referred to as iHD. Oddly enough, some sites claim that HDi was co-developed by Microsoft and Disney -- peculiar, since Disney is now backing Blu-Ray exclusively.
"It reduces storage space by 30 percent to 50 percent, but without compression."
Sounds like magic to me.
TFA was being imprecise in its language. What they should have said was, "FLAC reduces storage requirements by 30 to 50 percent, but using lossless compression instead of lossy compression." But then TFA would have had to explain what "lossy" and "lossless" mean. So the article's author (or his editor) dumbed it down and, as a result, geeks like us sneer.
Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol.
This means that, for example, targeting lasers mounted on tanks are perfectly fine to have. And although said targeting lasers are supposed to be used for things like laser-guided missiles and other ordnance, I have been told by some buddies who served in the Army that they were told how to use the targeting laser as a weapon in battlefield tactics. It's apparently great for blinding enemy infantry, etc.
One of my buddies was partially blinded during a training accident involving a tank-mounted targeting laser. (Protective goggles were not securely fastened in place when some goober fired up the laser, wouldn't ya know.) He's recovered a good percentage of his vision, but color remains a problem for him; unfortunately, since he's an artist, he now has to rely on friends to pick his prismacolor markers for him when he's doing coloring work.
Unless you build graphical tools that handle XHTML in all its aspects, coding by hand XML and namespace and co can become pretty difficult and I am not aware that such tool exists.
You mean like Dreamweaver? Or any number of other "smart" editors that have come out? I grant you that they might not all be perfect, but they do a lot of the heavy lifting for you -- enough to make them worthwhile for users who don't want to code everything by hand.
Since Knuth was the guy behind TeX, and Lamport was the woman behind LaTeX...
And one way in which I can see HTML5 not looking like LaTeX (or Scribe, or any other number of markup languages) is that HTML5 expressly allows for un-closed tags. To me, that seems kind of a throwback to pre-XML days... but then again, even the savviest HTML jockeys I've met haven't totally wrapped their heads around XHTML and the requirements of writing good, XML-compliant markup.
So basically, HTML5 codifies all the problems with prior versions of HTML and the bad practices of web developers, and expressly says they are OK, and the browser will just have to deal with bad logical structure using all the kludgy logic that browsers currently use. This is also a great way to insure that the current crop of parsing engines out there will maintain a strategic advantage over newer parsers, since you can't expect properly closed tags or the other rigorous features of XML. This also makes the prospect for slimmer/leaner parsers that are less forgiving of deviation from standards kind of, well, slim. (The advantage of such lean parsers is that they'd be great for deployment in memory-constrained environments like cell phones. As a developer, I'd happily deal with more stringent adherence to strict structural requirements in exchange for being able to shoehorn my application onto a device that otherwise couldn't run/display my application.)
I'm also not happy about the proposed overloading of the dt and dd tags. That seems like a bad idea to me.
I DRTFA, though I would hope they've taken all this into consideration already, of course. Some sort of way to prove you're not unhealthy just because a generic guideline number says so absolutely would have to be in place.
Well, I have a data point to contribute to this. I ran into a couple guys who were amateur body-builders (while at a car dealership, of all things), and they got into an interesting discussion with me about BMI and health insurance. According to them, it's nigh impossible for an amateur body builder to get insured because most insurance companies are using BMI as their sole metric. Body fat is not being measured, so even though these guys have hardly an ounce of fat on their bodies, they're being classified as "obese."
So, while a mechanism to provide a way for such people to prove that they are actually healthy would be a good thing, it doesn't seem to exist. Health insurance companies aren't interested in debating the finer points of their bureaucratic rules and regulations. They're interested in making money, and they typically do that by only insuring those who seem healthy, and by denying service to those who need it.
The upside of the system outlined in TFA is that, instead of denying insurance altogether to "unhealthy" people, you just charge them a (relatively small) premium. This probably is enough to overcome the insurer's natural inclination to avoid risk. A body builder might balk at the higher payments, but having insurance is better than not having it. It's the same kind of "lifestyle tax" that smokers are made to pay under this system.
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Just a clarification, the title is Rainbows End. The missing apostrophe is intentional; in fact, Vinge even titled one of the chapters "The Missing Apostrophe." (It's chapter 35.)
In fairness to Rainbows End, Vinge's use of augmented reality (not my favorite term for the concept, but I'll use yours for consistency) was more of a plot device than an end in itself. I should also point out that the Qeng Ho of A Deepness in the Sky used a "consensual virtual reality" visualization system to overlay on top of the world around them, something the autocratic Emergent culture was distrustful of. This plays up Vinge's libertarian views of technology as a force of social equalization and good.
Actually, that sentence should read "Now, cue steganography." The "queue/cue" thing is a word nerd (read: grammar Nazi) thing. (From American Heritage, cue as a transitive verb means "To give a cue to; signal or prompt." Typically used in theatrical directions, e.g., "Cue the lighting." A queue is a line of people or things waiting for their turn; used as a verb, it means to enter a queue, or to form a queue. The confusion probably comes in because "cue" can be used as a variant of "queue," but not vice versa, at least in American usage.) On a more relevant note, steganography has to do with hiding messages, often in plain sight (and is not the same thing as cryptography). On the other hand, stenography has to do with writing in shorthand.
The Wikipedia article explains why steganography isn't the same as cryptography, so you should probably be careful not to conflate the two.
Funny, I always thought real men did it in straight TeX. (LaTeX being a set of macro packages layered on top of TeX to simplify document creation, etc. As I recall, Leslie Lamport invented LaTeX as a way of leveraging TeX to effectively replace Scribe. If you don't remember Scribe, it was a non-free document formatting system which used to be very popular at many universities.)
In fairness, LaTeX is a lot more usable by mere mortals. Personally, I always found TeX to be a little less restrictive when it came to fancy formatting that didn't fit neatly into one of LaTeX's categories. Pity that TeX isn't XML, or it'd be a perfect portable document format that would be acceptable to nearly everyone. As it is, I'm sure a TeX to ODF converter (or vice versa) would be trivial to write.
Let's dissect those two paragraphs. A simple Google search yields the following reference as its first result: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
Let me quote the salient points from the U.S. Copyright Office's website:
So, what have we learned about TFA?
The article was great right up until the section on fair use, and I couldn't really stomach reading the rest of the article because the author clearly didn't bother checking any facts. Whether that's due to laziness or some twisted personal interpretation of U.S. copyright law, I couldn't say. I thought maybe this article was written from a European/British perspective (since fair use is not an established right in the U.K., for example), but no, he's using American spellings and seems to be writing from an American (albeit ignorant) POV. Sad, really.
The info about the dispute between Apple and NBC is interesting, as it explains Apple's comments about needing to charge almos
Actually, what the (confused) person meant was, there are people out there scheming to mine Helium-3 from the moon and return it to earth for use in specially designed reactors. The appeal is that fusion of He3 releases virtually no by-products, so a company running a fusion reactor running solely on He3 wouldn't have to periodically replace parts due to the reactor itself becoming radioactive from low-level particle bombardment.
There was actually a rather informative documentary on the Science Channel recently about this. Of course, it's hideously expensive to mine the moon for anything and return it to earth in an economically practical manner; one of the choice quotes from the documentary describes how, even if someone stacked bricks of gold on the moon, it would cost too much money to send a ship there, pick them up, and return them to earth. Yet He3 is such a rare commodity on earth, but so plentiful in lunar regolith, that it would actually be cost effective (by some estimates) to mine the stuff there and return it to earth. It wouldn't take much of the stuff to run a fusion reactor designed to solely react He3, and supposedly this enterprise would pay for itself in terms of energy output versus the amount of energy expended to extract this stuff from the moon.
The Wikipedia article that the parent refers to (grandparent to this comment, parent to yours) actually makes mention of this. The main reason why no R&D has gone into designing He3 fusion reactors is that He3 is extremely rare on this planet, so we're focusing all our effort on hydrogen and deuterium fusion; in the case of H and D fusion reactions, you're right, He3 is one possible product that would enter into second-generation reactions. But there has been real discussion of bypassing using H and D altogether and reacting only He3, and it's being discussed by real commercial entities in the U.S. and Russia, not just theorists.
Ummm... if you actually read the Wikipedia article you cited, you'd see that He3 fusion reactions have almost zero reaction byproducts. Perhaps you were confused by the subsequent section in the Wikipedia entry explaining that He3 is key for use in neutron detectors (i.e., devices that detect neutrons). He3 is not radioactive, and therefore does not emit neutrons (or any other particle).
Actually, Mach by itself doesn't comprise a complete kernel. Typically, you host another OS kernel "personality" on top of Mach, which in theory allows you to run multiple OS personalities on top of the same Mach (micro)kernel at the same time. Hurd itself was originally designed to sit on top of Mach, but from 2004 onward the developers have attempted to move Hurd to other microkernels. See the Wikipedia article for more info.
Hope this answers at least one of your questions. Potentially more than one if you read the Wikipedia entry. Also try checking out the status section on Hurd's homepage.
I almost hate to admit this (as I don't want to appear to be an RMS fanboy), but I feel the same way. The more I realize the costs of "pragmatism" and compromise, the more I realize why Richard is fighting. I do disagree with some of Mr. Stallman's ways of expressing his ideas, and I don't like how he sometimes comes across as a sleazy pitch-man when he's trying to get people to join his cause. (The former is in regards to some of his tantrums, like when he spoke of KDE application authors needing to "ask forgiveness" for coopting code from Gnome projects, instead of merely putting their houses in order and complying with the appropriate license; the latter I mention because I really dislike people who only view others in terms of what they can do to further a pet agenda.) But you know what? The ideas that he's fighting for are worth fighting for.
Not that I'm about to start calling it GNU/Linux anytime soon, just because that's inconvenient in casual discourse, but I do appreciate everything the GNU/FSF folks have done for us in providing the majority of the code to create a fully functioning OS. Now, if only Hurd were more usable! (Let's pray Hurd is finished before Vernor Vinge's prediction from Rainbows End comes true and Hurd is made illegal.)
You had an excellent post right up until you injected that immature bit of unsubstantiated personal opinion. I use emacs quite frequently, as do most MIT graduates (and undergraduates, unless that's changed recently), and I personally resent the insinuation that I must not be in my "right mind" because I happen to like emacs. I'd say that one line makes your entire comment flamebait. Why someone got modded "Troll" for asking (innocently) what was wrong with emacs is an injustice. Some people like emacs, and some people like vi, but just because I like emacs doesn't give me carte blanche to go around ragging on people who like vi.
You rank right up there with the IT fossils who insist that "it's not a real computer unless it runs COBOL." Grow up.
Hurd development has indeed been glacial, but based on the historical information present in the Wikipedia article, it seems that there have been more than a few false starts. At least Stallman is a big enough man to admit that some of his early architectural decisions may have been in error.
I worked for a materials science company that was trying to manufacture ultra-pure Calcium Fluoride optics for extreme UV lithography. Our vacuum furnaces had a lot of specially-constructed silicon carbide parts which were manufactured using a vacuum deposition process, and were very strong and heat resistant (for the temperatures we were generating in the furnace). My boss, a material scientist of some renown, told me he wanted to eventually get into manufacturing SiC semiconductors because they could be made extremely heat-tolerant. He was specifically interested in military applications (because he knew that was where the big money was), although I told him I could imagine building ultra-compact, high current power amplifiers (being the hi-fi nut that I am).
One thing that always struck me about silicon carbide, though, was how porous most of the parts we had were. Apparently, this was an artifact of the manufacturing process used, but I do wonder how NASA got the process to work for making chips; up til now, I had only seen SiC transistors in labs, not chips with many transistors etched on them. When I say porous, I mean you could hold a SiC railing up to your mouth and actually breathe through the seemingly solid surface (albeit with a fair amount of resistance).
So the entire European Union is going to be made to suffer intellectual poverty and repression of information because of a representative of a member state that has a historical disregard for (or outright hostility to) the institutions of democracy and free exchange of ideas (which I consider a necessary ingredient for true liberty). Expect to see more lunacy like this in the future.
I would venture to say that anyone who can seriously put forth such a proposal doesn't "get" the notion of liberty. Amazingly, nobody seems to be batting an eye at this, certainly not in Italy.
This just underscores that nothing has really changed that dramatically since the mid-20th century. Fascism is alive and well; people with ties to Mussolini's government (even tenuous ties, like being children of known fascists) extoll the virtues of the "good ol' days" and the sheeple smile and nod their heads in agreement. Of course, the roots of these sentiments really go back much farther than Mussolini. Some would say they are ancient. And I'm saying this as someone who was born into a family with a large, culturally conservative Italian contingent.
I wonder how much of Frattini's comments were distorted due to language barrier issues, how much were due to plain ignorance of how difficult it is to contextualize information (e.g., historical data about genocide or terrorism versus news about terrorism versus how-to guides on conducting terrorism), and how much were attributable to pure demagoguery. I suspect all three factors were at play here.
Thanks for clarifying that you're pandering to provincialism. IMHO, that's just as bad as the douchebag who "corrected" you for using "maths" instead of "math."
Just because England is where the language originated doesn't make your particular dialect any more "correct" than any other dialect. English is a family of languages. I shouldn't need to point out that American English is in many ways a version of the language that was frozen in time -- many idioms that died out in the UK persisted in the colonies.
There's actually evidence to suggest that the spelling in England was changed sometime after the Mayflower set sail. Quite a long time, actually; please see this article, which states:So "maths" is a neologism here, and "math" is the older form.
This isn't much different from the history of the spelling (and pronunciation) of "aluminum" vs. "aluminium" -- Sir Humphry Davy settled on "aluminum" in 1812, and an anonymous contributor to a British journal objected to this because (paraphrasing) it didn't sound right. We actually used "aluminium" in America for quite some time, until the early 20th century. Kind of odd how we reverted to Davy's choice of spelling while the British insisted on keeping that extra syllable.
I guess I must be a hippy-dippy liberal, because it's times like these I just want to say, "Can't we all just get along?"
The problem is, wireless cards these days typically require two things to be reverse engineered -- the firmware (which is often not supplied in ROM, but as a binary blob that gets loaded by the driver during device init), and the driver itself (the thing that communicates between the OS kernel and the device). There are many problems with this.
First, the firmware is instructions for a custom microcontroller or DSP. This stuff is almost never documented. Imagine reverse engineering the instruction set for a CPU you've never seen before (orders of magnitude more difficult than many other types of reverse engineering projects). Most WiFi driver hackers in the BSD and Linux worlds either won't or can't reverse engineer this stuff (more on that in a second), so they either rely on getting the binary blob from the manufacturer of the chipset (as the madwifi folks do), or they extract it from the Windows drivers for the WiFi device.
Once you've got the firmware out of the way, then you have to reverse engineer the protocol to talk to the device at a slightly higher level. Somewhat easier, but still a daunting task, and there are few good tools right now to automate the process of discovering the protocol. Little is standardized, so you're pretty much starting from scratch every time. This is a far cry from getting Linux to run on an original Xbox, which was basically a bog-standard PC architecture (well known) with a few security tweaks in the BIOS.
Now, why wouldn't or couldn't you reverse engineer the firmware? Well, although reverse engineering itself is sacrosanct in the United States (totally legal for the purposes of compatibility), it is not in many other countries. Even if that were not an issue, the FCC in the United States (and other regulatory bodies in Europe and Japan that serve similar roles) regulates the dissemination of information about how to program devices that transmit over regulated radio frequencies, because they're afraid that you might use unauthorized frequencies or set the transmit power illegally high, for example. There are regs that prevent manufacturers from making their radios easy to tinker with to stomp on or snoop certain reserved frequencies (which is why it's difficult to find a scanner that can be easily modified to listen in on police frequencies). Not all WiFi channels are legal to use in all localities, which is why different countries have different firmware for the same chipset. So even if you actually manage to reverse engineer the firmware for a WiFi chipset, good luck being able to publish your findings. (If the chipset manufacturer doesn't sue you, pray you didn't screw up your custom firmware and broadcast on the wrong frequencies, or the FCC might take an interest in you... Hell, they might go after you anyway, even if you didn't screw anything up, just because you "documented the interface" so that someone else CAN use the hardware for nefarious purposes.) And that's a major problem for software you might want to release under an Open Source license such as BSD or GPL.
This is one of the reasons why the madwifi folks rely on Atheros to provide the firmware (the HAL), and why I recently had a major headache getting a laptop with one of the newer Atheros chips to play ball in Linux.
Just to pick nits, if you're "filtering out," you're typically removing something as an option. But really, you meant the opposite of this (as was clear from the subject and the remainder of your comment). You probably should use "selects," as that is what you are doing -- choosing something, not rejecting it.
No, you missed the point. The word "meant" implies intention, as in "I meant to hit that guy with my car," as opposed to "I accidentally hit that guy with my car." To say that birds are "meant" to fly implies that someone (e.g., God, Zeus, whatever) intended for them to fly. Or to put it in the words of the person to whom you were replying, "Creatures are not 'meant' to do anything, unless you believe in an invisible friend in the sky who is pulling all of our strings like puppets." Just because you might assume that's a true statement doesn't mean everyone else believes that. It's an article of faith, not a fact.
More on-topic, I agree with Yosho. These animals are not in their native habitats, but they are well cared for, respected, and even considered colleagues instead of mere research animals. They don't have to fear predation, and they have a mentally stimulating existence. That's a pretty good deal in my book.
Er, wait a minute. Sun released the code under an open source license; that's not the same as releasing into the public domain. For a company litigating an IP dispute with Sun, NetApp's representative sure has a way of bungling something so basic as the distinction between "public domain" and "copyrighted but released under an open source license."
Nothing is stopping a third party from writing their own JRE from scratch. Many corporations have done this already. If you have a favorite platform (OS, cpu architecture, whatever) that isn't supported by Sun, it isn't Sun's obligation to do the job of porting a JRE to that platform for free. If you want the JRE badly enough, pay for someone to write it from scratch or port the existing Sun code. The Java runtime/VM specification is published and can be implemented -- no, it's not trivial, but it can be done, and many companies have done it. The Java source code is open sourced, so if you want Sun's implementation, you just need to get your hands on the code and do it.
Quit your whining. A promise of portability doesn't mean a promise to port a runtime environment to every platform under the sun just because you happen to care about a platform that Sun does not. It means you are free to do the porting yourself, if you have the money and resources to do it.
People's sense of entitlement astounds me sometimes.
The software in OS X was assuming, by default, that an open access point is giving tacit permission to connect. This assumption may have been changed in subsequent versions of OS X, but that doesn't change what already happened.
Fast forward to last week. I bought a cheap Acer laptop from Staples and brought it home. While setting it up, I decided to keep the Windows Vista partition and configure it for my use. I was shocked to see that the network stack detected my neighbor's unsecured WiFi access point and connected to it preferentially; once I had completed most of the Windows setup and realized the situation, I immediately changed the settings in two fundamental ways:
I'm not sure how much of this behavior was due to defaults built into Vista and how much was due to Acer's own network management software, but still, this product was designed to connect to unsecured access points by default.
If the police are going to start enforcing "theft of service" laws, then either manufacturers are going to have to change the built-in assumptions of wireless networking devices, or people running these access points are going to have to start getting slapped with fines for running unsecured WiFi.
The Acer laptop wound up being returned for other reasons, one of them being my inability to get WiFi working under Linux. It's a pity -- the Atheros chip and custom antenna that Acer used actually had good range and speed.
Two points. First, Microsoft has publicly stated that they never intend to release Xbox 360 games in HD-DVD format -- the HD-DVD add-on is purely for playing movies. Second, Microsoft has a much bigger stake in the HD-DVD format than a measly hardware add-on for their (as yet still unprofitable) game console: Microsoft licenses the HDi technology to the manufacturers of HD-DVD players as well as the disc makers. HDi is Microsoft's competitor to BD-J (Java for Blu-Ray), and is also referred to as iHD. Oddly enough, some sites claim that HDi was co-developed by Microsoft and Disney -- peculiar, since Disney is now backing Blu-Ray exclusively.
TFA was being imprecise in its language. What they should have said was, "FLAC reduces storage requirements by 30 to 50 percent, but using lossless compression instead of lossy compression." But then TFA would have had to explain what "lossy" and "lossless" mean. So the article's author (or his editor) dumbed it down and, as a result, geeks like us sneer.
One of my buddies was partially blinded during a training accident involving a tank-mounted targeting laser. (Protective goggles were not securely fastened in place when some goober fired up the laser, wouldn't ya know.) He's recovered a good percentage of his vision, but color remains a problem for him; unfortunately, since he's an artist, he now has to rely on friends to pick his prismacolor markers for him when he's doing coloring work.
Since Knuth was the guy behind TeX, and Lamport was the woman behind LaTeX...
And one way in which I can see HTML5 not looking like LaTeX (or Scribe, or any other number of markup languages) is that HTML5 expressly allows for un-closed tags. To me, that seems kind of a throwback to pre-XML days... but then again, even the savviest HTML jockeys I've met haven't totally wrapped their heads around XHTML and the requirements of writing good, XML-compliant markup.
So basically, HTML5 codifies all the problems with prior versions of HTML and the bad practices of web developers, and expressly says they are OK, and the browser will just have to deal with bad logical structure using all the kludgy logic that browsers currently use. This is also a great way to insure that the current crop of parsing engines out there will maintain a strategic advantage over newer parsers, since you can't expect properly closed tags or the other rigorous features of XML. This also makes the prospect for slimmer/leaner parsers that are less forgiving of deviation from standards kind of, well, slim. (The advantage of such lean parsers is that they'd be great for deployment in memory-constrained environments like cell phones. As a developer, I'd happily deal with more stringent adherence to strict structural requirements in exchange for being able to shoehorn my application onto a device that otherwise couldn't run/display my application.)
I'm also not happy about the proposed overloading of the dt and dd tags. That seems like a bad idea to me.
Well, I have a data point to contribute to this. I ran into a couple guys who were amateur body-builders (while at a car dealership, of all things), and they got into an interesting discussion with me about BMI and health insurance. According to them, it's nigh impossible for an amateur body builder to get insured because most insurance companies are using BMI as their sole metric. Body fat is not being measured, so even though these guys have hardly an ounce of fat on their bodies, they're being classified as "obese."
So, while a mechanism to provide a way for such people to prove that they are actually healthy would be a good thing, it doesn't seem to exist. Health insurance companies aren't interested in debating the finer points of their bureaucratic rules and regulations. They're interested in making money, and they typically do that by only insuring those who seem healthy, and by denying service to those who need it.
The upside of the system outlined in TFA is that, instead of denying insurance altogether to "unhealthy" people, you just charge them a (relatively small) premium. This probably is enough to overcome the insurer's natural inclination to avoid risk. A body builder might balk at the higher payments, but having insurance is better than not having it. It's the same kind of "lifestyle tax" that smokers are made to pay under this system.