Kind of like the way that one photo of Jupiter through a telescope will be blurry and useless.
But take 10,000, choose the best 5%, layer them over each other, centre them, then form an overlaid image, and you can get some STUNNING results from even a blurry, horrible, 10,000 image source.
(For reference - google "Registax").
I'd go for that. It doesn't seem implausible at all, and DNA is much more simple in construction than you might think - which gives fewer combinations but more tricky fitting together. Get enough fragments, though, and you can throw it through a computer and get something useful out of the other end.
But bear in mind that "forced entry" is pretty much a requirement of any insurance payout. If someone BREAKS in, no matter how minor the method they use, you get paid from your house insurance.
If someone uses a key, or a copy of a key, and walks in without breaking anything - then you get precisely zip.
We all know that cars and houses aren't "secure", nobody wants to live in Fort Knox. The point of a key is to increase the time it would take to enter the premises without forcing entry, in order that you might attract attention in any observant neighbourhood.
I wouldn't give people I didn't trust a key. I also do the key-ring thing with people (I have my keys on a carabina, so I just unscrew it and take off the relevant ring of keys from it). Not because I think they'd be unable to enter my premises without it (hell, what about key-cutting places who spend all year playing with keys and locks?), but because they'd have to force entry without it. And that attracts more attention and makes my house insurance valid for any lose. It's also much more likely to end in capture / conviction for them, and more likely to trigger the alarm system.
Keys aren't a security device, now. They are a single authorisation device for a single system that's easily duplicated. They are just one step in a proper security system. But they serve a vital purpose. To make it so that you have to force entry without them.
More importantly - what does it do for your house insurance premium.
I'm pretty sure that I just "left a copy of my key" with even a key-smith, and the insurance company found out, they wouldn't be happy to pay out in future.
More important than anything in this article though (in the EU, they probably wouldn't be allowed to store the image, even with your permission, and that just turns it into a more-reliable key-cutting service), is 3D printers.
Just how hard is it to copy a modern key on a 3D printer nowadays and would the material be stiff enough to turn?
I think we're going to see a shift towards non-physical entry systems like codes, cards and fobs. Commerce is already there and many shared-access systems are there (e.g. entrance to apartment blocks). How long before even the humble house key is dead due to the ubiquity (not existence, notice) of a simple home 3D manufacturing process?
The atoms in the material are not "conjoined", there are no solid things pushing against each other. They are point forces that act upon each other. The closer they are, the more they will "push" away the other, like atomic springs. But they aren't touching to begin with, merely held in a nice "valley" of forces where they can rest naturally in a particular material. In a dense material, that valley is probably closer to other atoms than in a less dense one but at no point are the protons from one atom hitting those of another (or else you could start a nuclear reaction by banging two things together or putting Uranium under pressure by - say - burying it under a million tons of rock).
Shoving one end of a pole six feet long might only take some infinitesimal fraction of a second to see the effect on another but it doesn't mean it was instantaneous.
Imagine you had a box full of rubber balls. Now imagine you push the bottom of the box up. Are you suggesting that the top rubber ball responds instantly at the same rate at the force at the bottom? Or that the force you applied compresses the bonds between atoms that push each other away, and so that pushes on the next, and that, eventually, when it reaches a point where it can't be compressed any more, pushes on the next and on the next and so on. It's a physical chain of events, not magic.
Then, are you suggesting that happens instantly in any material that isn't a material at absolute zero of the highest possibly achievable density? Because Brownian motions mean that the atoms are pushing off each other all the time but still they "react" instantaneously? No.
Think of a tube of Smarties (a small tube of sweets). When you push the bottom of it the top one drops out but that isn't "movement" of that one across the whole distance of the tube. And it's not instantaneous.
And if you scaled it up, shoved it with a huge stick and filmed it in slow motion, are you suggesting that you would not see the smarties compress and distort and fight the force for a fraction of a second before they poured out of the other end? Now think of atoms as smarties and see what happens.
By applying a force, no matter how small, to an solid object you are STILL compressing that object's atoms to be in closer proximity But they are NOT touching (think about electron orbitals, etc. - if they could touch you have MUCH bigger problems, like electrons being trapped and held still). The "movement" of that object as a whole is the resulting actions of those atoms while still caught within the atomic bonds that they are.
The atom is also mostly vacuum. The forces within it are what make you think it's "solid". It's not. Those forces can be added to from any direction and the result is NOT that the molecules of atoms move in that direction automatically. It might compress, bringing the atoms closer, but then they fight each other back. Hence we *can* turn carbon into diamonds when the carbon atoms are compressed and forced into a certain state. And we can "break" an atom by firing something and powerful direct at its nucleus.
The atom is not solid. As a result, no solid material is "solid". They can all be compressed with the application of force except for a material at the maximum possible density at absolute zero (the heat is enough to make the material have a force to fight back). As they can be compressed a lot, they can also be compressed a tiny, infinitesimal amount on a sliding scale. And the gaps between them are not solid-steel-girders of reinforcement but the forces at play (similar to a magnetised ball-bearing near another, oppositely-magnetised ball-bearing) that can be overcome up to a point.
And by pushing on the bottom of a pole, you are putting an atom with a certain force near another atom with another force and pushing them into proximity. If it's easier for that atom of the pole to push you back, the object doesn't move and your hand stops. If it's not, it will push it's neighbour the
Maybe there's no discussion, because there's nothing to discuss? The information available is too sparse and basically contained in the articles linked to. If there was something worth saying about it, it would get said.
At the moment it's the announcement of a new technique that we have NO idea if it can scale at all or be of actual practical use - not even the people who made it.
Treat it like articles on battery technology, "camouflage" materials, flexible electronics, carbon nanotubes, etc.:
- When you can buy it in the shops, then it's worth worrying about.
Otherwise, take a course in Quantum Mechanics for yourself if it's of personal interest.
"Just one has enough hydrogen and oxygen to fuel every Space Shuttle thatâ(TM)s ever been launched."
Providing you have a free energy source, and lots of time and gas storage, in which to convert it all.
Yes, you might get away with a solar panel churning through it for a thousand years, but more likely the energy you need to separate it from the water will cost you more than the energy you get from recombining it with an ignition source to go boom at a later date.
This is one of those "there's enough carbon in a pencil to make 50 diamonds" kinds of things - utterly true, and completely misleading at the same time.
You don't want to be using asteroid water to make hydrogen and oxygen, in space, in large enough quantities to fly a spaceship by the sorts of processes available today. From Earth - yes. But that's because you accept a certain amount of resource / energy loss to achieve orbit.
You can't get more out of banging H and O2 together than you have to put in to separate H and O2 in the first place.
This is a US problem. I stopped caring about a week ago. If he's broke the law, issue an international arrest warrant. If he hasn't, don't.
And that's quite possibly the worst/. summary I've ever seen in that it would take me about 5 readings to even get the gist of what you are trying to convey. Quotes should be minimal, pertinent, and not obscure the actual fact of the matter, and summaries should be short, enticing, easy-to-read statings of the matter and (maybe) a small, relevant quote or two at most.
As someone that's just had to write a long missive to my old car insurance company, I have to wonder why such things are even allowed to get that far without someone stepping in and saying "Hold on, that's just going to cause trouble". In legal cases, there should surely be some penalty for a false representation such as the C&D letter.
My own frustration stemmed from the fact that my insurance company changed something on my policy that I agreed to. Then the next thing I know, they've cancelled the policy because I didn't pay the difference for the change. News to me, given that I actually had two letters that said my next regular payment had been adjusted accordingly for EXACTLY that payment, and that I didn't need to do anything.
It was also quite interesting in that the envelope that the notice of cancellation was received in only arrived on my doorstep the DAY AFTER the insurance was cancelled. Pretty sure that no matter what you do there, I have a came for "untimely service" or some such.
None of that matters, though, as I can prove it all if required. What really annoyed me was the letter demanding the missing payment (the one that you didn't ask for, that you told me would be taken from my regular payments, and that you cancelled the contract - I would assert illegally - before that payment ever came due?) with threat of court action.
Needless to say my reply was significantly less polite, and less humorous than this, but probably contained a lot more legalese. I'm waiting for the 60-day offer I gave them to resolve the situation (which includes £100 payment back to myself because - even if we take that debt as valid - they incurred costs for myself by cancelling the contract illegally and in an untimely manner) before I do anything else. I think that's pretty reasonable, personally, given that I had already assumed the matter was settled without either side paying the other. My next step will be to claim for the lost day at work that it cost me, though, and that's when it gets so expensive I'm hoping they have the brains to not force me to employ the services of a lawyer or the courts to get that from them.
I did once write one of my suppliers a song, though. They'd taken forever to supply the school I worked for with a Microsoft licence, and I was literally seconds away from cancelling the order after much messing about (which, apparently, including Microsoft manually typing in my email address and not being able to spell "administrator", which is worrying in so many ways).
The school were in the middle of being closed because of the snow at the time, which gave me time to write it, and it felt quite Christmassy being in a school in the snow, so it's to the tune of "The Night Before Christmas":
------- 'Twas the week after purchase and all through the school, Not a computer was stirring, not even a "machine, virtual".
The machines were hung on blue screens in their lair, In the hopes that new Windows soon would be there,
The children nestled all snug in their homes, While snow-days were debated and staff manned the phones,
And hoped that everyone were all travelling well, While wishing that Microsoft had at last learned to spell.
When out in the ICT suite there arose such a clatter, And all came running to see what was the matter.
'Twas the IT Manager with eyes full of wrath, Melting down old Windows disks to de-ice the path.
"Don't worry," he cried as he stoked up the flames, "A Linux disk I have, and some educational games."
Needless to say, my licence was sorted within the hour.
And when I was eight, I picked up a book from the 1970's that suggests putting strobing LED's on your bike using a PWM circuit. They've been around forever. Hell, I have an LED alarm clock from when I was that old that runs off the mains voltage.
Very, very, very few people are sensitive to these things. In fact, most of the these things are present more in your everyday life than you even imagine. Like the warnings for people with photosensitive epilepsy, these people won't be able to use commodity electronics if their symptoms are actually that consistent, and the number of people like that are vanishingly small.
But if you ask people, you'll find that 1 in 3 think they are sensitive to something-or-other that actually can't be verified at all, like the examples I state. They've heard they are bad, or they think it's bad, and lump themselves into the same category as people who can "feel" microwaves coming out of their wifi or whatever other nonsense.
I'm not saying that this guy's monitor doesn't make him think he's ill. I'm not even saying it doesn't. I'm saying the chances are it has more to do with a noise from the PSU, or a particular smell, or even the heating of the air above it. And if it does - well, what do you want us to do? Throw all the LED's in the world in the bin? No. You'll just have to learn to cope with it.
I'm sorry about that, I really am, it must be a pain. But there are people who can't play sports, people who can't not wear glasses, people who can't be outside in the summer, people who can't breathe if you spray air freshener, etc. The only thing you can do is not do those things, or find a way to manage your symptoms.
Please don't make every LED / LCD on the planet more expensive because of a tiny minority of people who blame things like PWM for their symptoms (correctly or not).
Like with flourescent lamps, and people who can't be in an air-conditioned room, and people who have to play games with altered FOV's because it makes them sick. You're a tiny minority, or else half the world would feel ill all the time. Please find another way to cope with it (i.e. glasses, double-blind tests to convince yourself it's placebo, or whatever).
I come from what was considered a "rough" area of London. My schoolfriends were all police-hating idiots. Even through to today, I've had to remove people from Facebook because they were doing things like suggesting to "fight the pigs" when it came to the London riots. Just the terminology used tells you EXACTLY what kind of reaction they would have to being pulled over, and precisely WHY the police bother them so much.
I've been pulled over by the police just as much. I have a tendency to drive old bangers of cars - legal, but they look scruffy and even I would admit that I'd pull them in "just to check" if I was a police officer. Fact is, I know they are legitimate and roadworthy or I wouldn't be driving the damn things.
But when pulled over, I don't start yelling. I'm not all sucking up, either, I just tell them the truth. If you have to lie to a police officer to make things go smoothly with them, then maybe that in itself is a kind of retro-active JUSTIFICATION for them to have pulled you over in the first place. They have the power to pull over anyone for anything, of course they have to or they couldn't act on suspicions. And if you have had to LIE then it meant that you were doing something you SHOULDN'T have and that would be of interest to them.
I've had any number of interesting conversations with police officers where I could quite easily see them tend towards the "It's close enough, let's nick him" kind of attitude if they really wanted to. Fact is, I tell them the truth.
"What speed where you doing there when I pulled you over?" "I honestly have no idea."
Is that an admission of driving without due care and attention? It could be interpreted as so. Did they have speed-measuring equipment on their vehicle? I have no idea. Probably, because it was a fancy ANPR vehicle with all the cameras and he'd been following me for a while. What happened? Nothing. "Okay, thank you, I'll let you get on your way, sir", after checking documents.
Pulled over after a police car spotted me and obviously "targeted" me from a whole queue of traffic. I'd even tried to let him out in front of me as he was joining traffic and he waved me in front of him, then pulled me over a mile up the road.
"We just pulled you over because your car looks like it's had a hard life, doesn't it, Sir?" [His colleague walks around the car, inspecting it while we talk] "Yes, I know. I buy cheap cars and run them into the ground, officer, it's easier than trying to buy a car outright when you have no money. But I have a full MOT here, done yesterday". [Officer checks paperwork, asks me about my job - IT Manager for a private school, which could probably be assumed that I *could* afford a car, asks me where I'm going, where I've come from, etc.] "Okay, sir, it says on here that X, Y, Z are advised. You should get them checked out." [X, Y, Z are not MOT failures, but an MOT pass is not a guarantee of roadworthiness, so advisories are put on for potential roadworthiness issues. He doesn't even bother to look at them] "Absolutely." [Officer walks away after a nod from his colleague. Turns back to tell me to be careful when rejoining the road, spots a broken rear light - how the hell it passed MOT I have no idea - and both our eyes are unconsciously drawn to it as he speaks. Officer smiles.] "Sorry to inconvenience you, sir. It appears you were missing the mandatory duck-tape on the bumper." [Gets in car, drives off back to the spot he was sitting at before I came past - the duck-tape on the bumper is a reference to the type of car I was driving because you ALWAYS see them in the worst state of repair with bits taped back on]
I got stopped driving back from Europe to the UK late at night. Late, single male in an old, knackered car, was chosen from a line and pulled over for a customs inspection.
I was asked who owned the car (me) and how long (I said about a year). He asked for documentation of the car, it was already o
The UK equivalent of "Miranda Rights" (why does everything have to have an unrelated name?) has said:
"You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
or words to that effect since about 1912.
Of course you have the right to be silent. And of course the court will be able to draw inferences in the absence of your answers. If you don't speak for a month and then tell police, after hearing all the evidence they have, that fantastical situation X was what you meant all along, then of course it's reasonable to assume that you're just making it up now that you know all the facts and were silent before because it's a fabrication that you didn't have at the time. You have the RIGHT to do that, but it doesn't mean that it won't come back to bite you.
That's been in law since God-knows-when, and the arrest warning is really just a formal restatement so that you aren't tricked into thinking you MUST answer any question a policeman asks you ("Have you stopped beating your wife?" - an unanswerable question either way).
You have the right to remain silent, in any decent first-world legal system. Nowhere does it say that that right is without cost. Or else, you'd never say anything, at all, whatsoever in court and they'd have to convict/release you without your side of the story at all. Similarly you have the right to a lawyer. It doesn't mean you have to have one, have a particular one, or use the incompetent one that they give you.
However, even in a UK court, "Where inferences may be drawn from silence, the court must direct the jury as to the limits to the inferences which may properly be drawn from silence. There may be no conviction based wholly on silence."
Welcome to the 20th/21st Century legal system. If you're stupid enough to stay completely silent and/or not seek legal advice at the first opportunity, that's your problem.
This has been going on for decades. Is this any different to even, say, Windows CE office apps?
MS has a market which it's tried to (or said it's tried to) break out of several times. Hell, it took since Windows XP Tablet Edition for everyone to say "Yeah, that's usable on a tablet now", by which time so many other competitors came and went in the same area that MS are still the outsider. It doesn't really care about / has no clue how to handle other platforms.
It likes Office on desktop because it sells Office and Windows licences. "The Cloud" messed it up for them a bit but now they can sell Office 365 on Windows. Anything outside that remit? Forget it. It's not "real" Windows and they won't dedicate to it (and if you ever see something like the OOXML standards, you'll learn why - they basically created this mess for themselves, deliberately or not).
Office on ANYTHING else is secondary and unimportant and only exists to get some cash and will never be the mainstream product. Hell, I wouldn't even chance my arm on Office 365 on Linux or Mac personally, let alone phones.
Microsoft has one core base that makes it money. Even their consoles have to confirm to that base, basically, because that's the nature of their business. Lip service is sometimes paid to other things but they rarely follow through.
Windows RT on ARM Windows CE on whatever. Even mainstream Windows on other architectures died a death.
It's all there. They've had decades of experience on it. They could make just about anything work with enough effort. They were pushing for tablets decades before people were even exposed to usable tablets. But they are only really interested in working on x86-compatibles with all the functionality they can get on them, so they can sell Windows, sell Office and lock you in.
In the tradition of the XKCD cartoon about the Matrix movies...
But, really, they made other sequels?!
Sorry, but T2 was the best. T3 - while I liked the idea of using the Internet being Skynet (clever twisting of an old plot to take account of a new technology that would otherwise be problematic to explain why they DON'T have that in the future of T2), it was lacklustre. The main actor? Not convinced. The baddie? Sure, that was okay, but a mite overpowered with shooting things directly from the body. The "take control of the cars electronics" - stole my damn idea for a story I was writing, but how the hell were they steered? etc. etc. etc.
I didn't even know there was anything after that. Like all things, after X amount of sequels it gets commercialised into TV series and spin-offs and I totally lose interest. Highlander, Matrix, Aliens, etc. all the same. As soon as you get a TV series or crossover of something like that, it's dead. It doesn't matter how many times you bring back the original actor to try to legitimise the spin-off, it's gone.
The problem is, once something spins off into the spin-off abyss, then it dies pretty quickly and never really recovers, but "the fans" (the blindly loyal ones who don't care enough to say "Sorry, that's just wrong even if the same writer wrote it") will make them milk it into oblivion. And then they can "reboot" it. Or pretend a movie never happened. Sigh.
I don't hold out any hope at all. In the meantime, I know what MY Terminator 3 / 4 / 5 and world look like. That's about as much as I can do.
I would. Also, do you think Stephen Hawking would go for it?
But more importantly - who the hell is going to run a machine "just for you" forever, and how would they do so? We might be able to fund a genius or two and a celebrity or two might be able to get a few hundred years, but beyond that who's going to solve the practical everyday problem of funding you and then looking after you? And are you going to have the life expectancy of the average electronic product?
And, sorry, but all your experiences - EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM - have little to do with your body. Your brain experiences because it's instructed to by the laws of physics and it's correlated that to sensations of pain, even emotion. If you can get to the point that you can put "yourself" into a computer, all that has to be connected to something inside the computer too. There's nothing you *can't* experience that way, once you have that kind of technology.
And I don't think fear-of-death is something I'd miss (or that you'd lose - you can still die, even in this highly hypothetical scenario) and the rest - breathing? I'm sure there are any number of people who'd be glad not to have to breath (those in pain, those on iron lungs, etc.) and not be tied to oxygen (even spacefarers!). Everything else is just your brain's reaction to the environment sensed by it. All that love and joy and excitement? Neurons firing and nothing more. Sorry, but it's just your reaction to that particular bunch of neurons firing in that particular way. Nothing "special" or strictly organic there (hell, you can pretty change people's mood by zapping their brain - we call it ECT and use it as a medical treatment even today).
But it's so pie-in-the-sky that it's not worth worrying about in our lifetime anyway. Hell, I doubt my grand-daughter's generation would even have the ability and she doesn't exist yet.
Before we get that far, we need ever-lasting power resources, ever-replenished amounts of resources, insanely complex computers, unbelievable amounts of knowledge of the brain and how it works (of which we have precisely zip so far), the ability to never work again (or have work fund you to do all the above) and a legal framework for it all to happen in.
And the changes implemented by ANY of those things are going to have a greater impact on your life than just about ANYTHING ELSE if they ever come around in your lifetime.
Okay. You can have the right to patent anything you like so long as it only applies to things that you (or someone else) makes an actual, physical circuit to do.
So all those people running software on general purpose processors are not hindered in one bit and can replicate your methods (note: not necessarily your exact work) to their heart's content.
That's basically the situation specified and if you can't see how that differs from, say, someone patenting some obscure part of MPEG decompression and suing, say, VideoLAN for it, then you probably shouldn't be a patent lawyer.
Yes, all computer programs are Turing-compatible (if you like) and you can implement a computer using wooden blocks that modify a flow of water if you really wanted to - it's not hard. But the fact is that your patent shouldn't cover such a general range of specified equipment that nobody can ever use your technique on a general purpose computer.
What you've found isn't a "loophole", it's exactly the narrowing that someone has deliberately introduced. Patent holders will now be able to patent "an electrical circuit that does X" (maybe, possibly, if they jump through lots of hoops and nobody ever discovers their PUBLISHED patent and reimplements it somehow else) but not "any program on a general purpose computer that does X".
It's the right fix. It allows someone to invent, say, ABS and protect that invention. But it prevents someone from "inventing", say, a way to compress files by looking for common strings and building an index. Sure, you can make a computer that does the same as the circuit part of the ABS system, but you CAN'T make it actually control an ABS system without hitting the patent.
1) Those steps aren't "easy". They involve conscious, thoughtful decisions at every point in your life and no mistakes. 2) That doesn't stop you appearing - in fact, it makes you more suspicious and thus worth investigating. Absence of data is a data point in itself - any old spy movie would tell you that. The guy who exists but has no records, no data, no phone? Yeah, we'll look into him first. 3) You're paranoid if you ACTUALLY do that. 4) As someone whose just trawled their Slashdot history going back years while looking for a particular post I made, I can tell you that I've crowed on these forums multiple times about everything from Guantanamo Bay, the government treatment of Alan Turing, the fact that I have an interest in cryptography, the stupidity of people who can't work out to encrypt data properly, even "potential terrorist scenarios" (i.e. if terrorists are so bright, why did they do X, leave trail Y, or not do Z?).
If the above targets me for interest, then I would be in deep, deep trouble already. Maybe I have been flagged already. Who cares? The fact is that I'm not doing anything that any random, thoughtful person isn't doing anyway - and I have zero intention of causing harm. And it's basically my country's intelligence services job TO FIND THINGS EXACTLY LIKE THAT, but most importantly to SORT THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF.
I once considered applying for jobs with MI5 and GCHQ. I'm a maths and computer science graduate, with an interest in cryptography, and they were advertising positions for exactly that. It seemed like an avenue worth looking into.
I didn't, mainly because 1) I disagree with militarisation of anything I do (a conscientious objector, you could say) and 2) I disagree with an awful lot of the military decisions made by my country (still "backing" the US and their illegal torture programs in Guantanamo, for instance - OOPS! I did it again!). Though I love the work of Turing, I don't love that it probably ended up, indirectly, killing people too. Sinking U-boats, things like that. Yeah, they were the enemy, and it was better than the alternative (i.e. more people dying), but still it's military action.
But if I'd applied seriously, with those organisations I would quite expected someone to dig around on the net and find these things out about me by themselves. That's their damn job, and they wouldn't want to be letting people like me in - people who place their own morals above that of orders from above. If someone tells me "shoot/kidnap/kill/injure him", my first question would be "What? Why? Is he about to do the same to me?" (unless I'm playing Counterstrike, in which case he'll be missing his head before you finished the sentence).
This is what they do. This is what they have to do. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. It's very easy to get the wrong people into a place that you don't want them to be. Hell, there's a CIA agent in the news at the moment telling everyone their secrets because he disagrees with how they function. That could be me, in the same position.
You have nothing to fear but driving yourself crazy trying to avoid the things you fear. "I don't like surveillance" leading to absolute paranoia that infests your daily life and stops you meeting up with friends? Yeah, the worst of two evils, I think.
That's not to say that I support a surveillance state (but, if I support ANY element of a surveillance state, it's to have constant, recorded surveillance of police and military procedures so that there is NO element of doubt when it comes to questions of justice being served and law enforcement following the law - hell, what I wouldn't give to have proper footage of some of the greater terrorist incidents that have been reported released, and even parts of the "war on terror"), or spying, or anything else.
There's a lot more wrong in this world than a few cameras here and there. In fact, I'd say there aren't ENOUGH cameras in the right places. Imagine how different the world would be right now if ever
Almost all the countries below the half-way-mark on that table are the former Russian states or their immediate neighbours. It's hardly surprising.
And, despite being in the EU, all these places have their own economies. If you force a minimum wage of the UK on, say, Armenia, then employers will have to pay 26 times more on the minimum wage than they do now. In case you don't know, that would basically mean about 20 times more unemployed as a consequence.
There is nothing stopping those people migrating to other EU countries that will take them (open market! For the most part, except where countries are in such a bad economic state that other EU countries won't allow them to emigrate to the rest of the EU), or in campaigning to get the minimum wage to the same levels.
And minimum wage is a bad indicator, average wage would be better. A country that states a £1 an hour minimum wage would not necessarily have anyone working for that, especially if it's 26 times below the cost of living there.
And, sorry, but the cost of living in places in the "top" half of that table (sorted by minimum wage in Euros) is significantly higher than those in the bottom half.
The EU is not there to make us all earn the same, do the same, work the same. It's there to work together, and there's a difference. The UK, for instance, pays a greater proportion of certain subsidies (e.g. farming subsidies) to other countries than the rest of the EU. Something like 2-3 times more, per person, than other countries that reap the benefits of the subsidies.
Nobody said the EU is there to make everyone the same. It's there to make everyone work together to help each other. Which means that some countries have weaknesses and strengths and some countries are in a weaker position than others and is helped out a little.
Are you honestly trying to say that someone in Maldova should be guaranteed the same minimum as someone in the UK is, just because they are in the EU? There's more factors to take account of than that. If you really want something to moan about, look at people who work in the UK, gain benefits they wouldn't be entitled to in their home (EU) country, and then send them back home. Is that really fair? Those who can afford to have a cousin living in the UK getting "free money" (not to mention healthcare, etc.) than those who don't can't get?
Quite what were they expecting? Rubbish like tyres and ropes (i.e. stuff that sinks), which are disposed of in/around water will end up at the bottom of the water. Is this shocking?
Sea animals might become trapped in it. Not news. Sea animals might use it. Not news.
Quite what is the point? To make those of us who DON'T realise what millions of tons of junk does when you throw it in an ocean think bad of themselves?
And, to be honest, on the sea-floor it's more likely to be buried than it is to decay. That's probably a good thing for the life down there. In a few million years it'll be rock again.
Are these "scientists" genuinely astonished that they discovered this rather than the alternative (which is presumably that there's no rubbish down there at all?). I was taught that dense stuff sinks back in primary school.
Actually, I've not even touched an original XBox in my entire life. Not once. Ever. Don't use XBox Live as a consequence of that, and don't pay for gaming subscriptions (have a Steam account... is that allowed? Never had a monthly-subscription to anything but New Scientist magazine - paper edition -, though).
So, if no-one has yet taken apart the Kinect 2, how the hell is any of your argument about it NOT nonsense?
"NSA spying on all electronic communication is (very) old news."
If so, why do they need to order Verizon to do it? And can I finally tell all those people who talk about the "acres of supercomputers analysing every phone call" to shut the hell up now? If they already have that access, why are they asking for it? And if they ask for it now but we "all knew" they have it already, what's the story, why is this controversial, why should it be news?
Or maybe, just maybe, the government are pretty damn inept unless they are following you specifically and then doing things like tapping YOUR phone is probably better than any underground datacenter with ENORMOUS power draws and analysis code on that scale. And to find out who to follow? They track contacts of known people, and ask for phone records of people they already know. You know, good old-fashioned spying and intelligence. Rather than a blind statistical hunt through a billion innocent records.
Fact is, even if they are doing what you said, the amount of value they get out for what they put in is horrendously pathetic (i.e. they'd been watching the Boston bombers and didn't know anything was going on). If all that Kinect bollocks is anywhere near true (it isn't), then just by the number of Kinects experiencing false positives, you've probably made more time wasted than you'd ever recover.
If nothing else, that's what you should be protesting about. A return to good-old-policing, where people used their 'intelligence' in all senses of the word, not needle-in-a-haystack hunts.
But, honestly, you're talking bollocks. People have taken apart Kinects and even USB-traced them, and people are constantly putting both PC's and XBox's through network packet capture. If there's anything dodgy there, it would be noticed pretty quickly.
But the simplest thing - it comes back to the "acres of supercomputers" argument. Even if they WERE capturing all this data, they certainly don't have the time to analyse it or the manpower to catch up with all the BILLIONS of false positives that such a system would generate.
So maybe it's just a games console. And like every military intelligence agency in the world, they don't mind you spreading bollocks so long as you don't know what it is they ACTUALLY do. And they are liable to be doing very, very little compared to this kind of paranoia, just through sheer time, money and manpower costs.
This is a flaw in a system. It's the difference between "Joe Blogg's car has code XXXX" and "All Fords let you in if you do XXXX". The personalisation of the information brings it under different laws - and preventing people from discussing flaws will also stop people from, for example, discussing faults in systems (e.g. cars that have faulty brakes etc.) which brings about whole new levels of capability for companies to forgo their responsibilities and claim they didn't know about it.
However, if you think your garage door openers and information on how to bypass them, copy them, fake them, scan them, intercept them, etc. isn't already on the Internet, you're being naive. Same for car locks.
It's not illegal to discuss a particular encryption system used on a satellite TV system, for example, or it's weaknesses or how it can be bypassed. It's not even illegal to take apart the box and try it. It's definitely a grey legal area, though, to do so with the intention of infringing copyright (but how do you prove that?), or selling "cracked" boxes onto other users. Also, it is illegal to distribute, say, Sky's satellite codes that allow you to decrypt their channels.
You don't want to stop people investigating and finding and discussing flaws in systems. The knock-on effects are huge and not even constrained to IT systems (i.e. if someone's voting system is vulnerable, you wouldn't be able to report that, and nobody would ever know). The law in almost all countries takes the middle line - you can discuss flaws inherent in the system, but you can't go providing information specifically tailored so that random people can use to access random people's accounts.
This exploit has C code. Go compile it. See how it works. Get a working binary. All legal. Distribute it? Legal. Sneak it onto someone's machine? Illegal. Get someone to run it with the intention of accessing things you shouldn't? Illegal. Anything already "bad" is covered. Making more steps along the way illegal just has too much of an impact elsewhere on things that you WANT happening.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you're one guy who needs a database for himself that he doesn't need to expose to clients at all, it's only $200 a year.
Sorry, but I can't imagine they have much take-up of that at all, except for testing / experiments / copyright infringement.
Kind of like the way that one photo of Jupiter through a telescope will be blurry and useless.
But take 10,000, choose the best 5%, layer them over each other, centre them, then form an overlaid image, and you can get some STUNNING results from even a blurry, horrible, 10,000 image source.
(For reference - google "Registax").
I'd go for that. It doesn't seem implausible at all, and DNA is much more simple in construction than you might think - which gives fewer combinations but more tricky fitting together. Get enough fragments, though, and you can throw it through a computer and get something useful out of the other end.
I don't think he does.
But bear in mind that "forced entry" is pretty much a requirement of any insurance payout. If someone BREAKS in, no matter how minor the method they use, you get paid from your house insurance.
If someone uses a key, or a copy of a key, and walks in without breaking anything - then you get precisely zip.
We all know that cars and houses aren't "secure", nobody wants to live in Fort Knox. The point of a key is to increase the time it would take to enter the premises without forcing entry, in order that you might attract attention in any observant neighbourhood.
I wouldn't give people I didn't trust a key. I also do the key-ring thing with people (I have my keys on a carabina, so I just unscrew it and take off the relevant ring of keys from it). Not because I think they'd be unable to enter my premises without it (hell, what about key-cutting places who spend all year playing with keys and locks?), but because they'd have to force entry without it. And that attracts more attention and makes my house insurance valid for any lose. It's also much more likely to end in capture / conviction for them, and more likely to trigger the alarm system.
Keys aren't a security device, now. They are a single authorisation device for a single system that's easily duplicated. They are just one step in a proper security system. But they serve a vital purpose. To make it so that you have to force entry without them.
More importantly - what does it do for your house insurance premium.
I'm pretty sure that I just "left a copy of my key" with even a key-smith, and the insurance company found out, they wouldn't be happy to pay out in future.
More important than anything in this article though (in the EU, they probably wouldn't be allowed to store the image, even with your permission, and that just turns it into a more-reliable key-cutting service), is 3D printers.
Just how hard is it to copy a modern key on a 3D printer nowadays and would the material be stiff enough to turn?
I think we're going to see a shift towards non-physical entry systems like codes, cards and fobs. Commerce is already there and many shared-access systems are there (e.g. entrance to apartment blocks). How long before even the humble house key is dead due to the ubiquity (not existence, notice) of a simple home 3D manufacturing process?
Why would it?
The atoms in the material are not "conjoined", there are no solid things pushing against each other. They are point forces that act upon each other. The closer they are, the more they will "push" away the other, like atomic springs. But they aren't touching to begin with, merely held in a nice "valley" of forces where they can rest naturally in a particular material. In a dense material, that valley is probably closer to other atoms than in a less dense one but at no point are the protons from one atom hitting those of another (or else you could start a nuclear reaction by banging two things together or putting Uranium under pressure by - say - burying it under a million tons of rock).
Shoving one end of a pole six feet long might only take some infinitesimal fraction of a second to see the effect on another but it doesn't mean it was instantaneous.
Imagine you had a box full of rubber balls. Now imagine you push the bottom of the box up. Are you suggesting that the top rubber ball responds instantly at the same rate at the force at the bottom? Or that the force you applied compresses the bonds between atoms that push each other away, and so that pushes on the next, and that, eventually, when it reaches a point where it can't be compressed any more, pushes on the next and on the next and so on. It's a physical chain of events, not magic.
Then, are you suggesting that happens instantly in any material that isn't a material at absolute zero of the highest possibly achievable density? Because Brownian motions mean that the atoms are pushing off each other all the time but still they "react" instantaneously? No.
Think of a tube of Smarties (a small tube of sweets). When you push the bottom of it the top one drops out but that isn't "movement" of that one across the whole distance of the tube. And it's not instantaneous.
And if you scaled it up, shoved it with a huge stick and filmed it in slow motion, are you suggesting that you would not see the smarties compress and distort and fight the force for a fraction of a second before they poured out of the other end? Now think of atoms as smarties and see what happens.
By applying a force, no matter how small, to an solid object you are STILL compressing that object's atoms to be in closer proximity But they are NOT touching (think about electron orbitals, etc. - if they could touch you have MUCH bigger problems, like electrons being trapped and held still). The "movement" of that object as a whole is the resulting actions of those atoms while still caught within the atomic bonds that they are.
The atom is also mostly vacuum. The forces within it are what make you think it's "solid". It's not. Those forces can be added to from any direction and the result is NOT that the molecules of atoms move in that direction automatically. It might compress, bringing the atoms closer, but then they fight each other back. Hence we *can* turn carbon into diamonds when the carbon atoms are compressed and forced into a certain state. And we can "break" an atom by firing something and powerful direct at its nucleus.
The atom is not solid. As a result, no solid material is "solid". They can all be compressed with the application of force except for a material at the maximum possible density at absolute zero (the heat is enough to make the material have a force to fight back). As they can be compressed a lot, they can also be compressed a tiny, infinitesimal amount on a sliding scale. And the gaps between them are not solid-steel-girders of reinforcement but the forces at play (similar to a magnetised ball-bearing near another, oppositely-magnetised ball-bearing) that can be overcome up to a point.
And by pushing on the bottom of a pole, you are putting an atom with a certain force near another atom with another force and pushing them into proximity. If it's easier for that atom of the pole to push you back, the object doesn't move and your hand stops. If it's not, it will push it's neighbour the
Maybe there's no discussion, because there's nothing to discuss? The information available is too sparse and basically contained in the articles linked to. If there was something worth saying about it, it would get said.
At the moment it's the announcement of a new technique that we have NO idea if it can scale at all or be of actual practical use - not even the people who made it.
Treat it like articles on battery technology, "camouflage" materials, flexible electronics, carbon nanotubes, etc.:
- When you can buy it in the shops, then it's worth worrying about.
Otherwise, take a course in Quantum Mechanics for yourself if it's of personal interest.
"Just one has enough hydrogen and oxygen to fuel every Space Shuttle thatâ(TM)s ever been launched."
Providing you have a free energy source, and lots of time and gas storage, in which to convert it all.
Yes, you might get away with a solar panel churning through it for a thousand years, but more likely the energy you need to separate it from the water will cost you more than the energy you get from recombining it with an ignition source to go boom at a later date.
This is one of those "there's enough carbon in a pencil to make 50 diamonds" kinds of things - utterly true, and completely misleading at the same time.
You don't want to be using asteroid water to make hydrogen and oxygen, in space, in large enough quantities to fly a spaceship by the sorts of processes available today. From Earth - yes. But that's because you accept a certain amount of resource / energy loss to achieve orbit.
You can't get more out of banging H and O2 together than you have to put in to separate H and O2 in the first place.
I know you're joking but...
Earth: 6 x 10^24 kg.
Weight of the Pyramid of Giza: 6 x 10^9 kg.
Thus, if you brought in enough stuff to weigh the same as a huge stone pyramid, you might alter the Earth's mass by:
0.00000000000001%
This is a US problem. I stopped caring about a week ago. If he's broke the law, issue an international arrest warrant. If he hasn't, don't.
And that's quite possibly the worst /. summary I've ever seen in that it would take me about 5 readings to even get the gist of what you are trying to convey. Quotes should be minimal, pertinent, and not obscure the actual fact of the matter, and summaries should be short, enticing, easy-to-read statings of the matter and (maybe) a small, relevant quote or two at most.
As someone that's just had to write a long missive to my old car insurance company, I have to wonder why such things are even allowed to get that far without someone stepping in and saying "Hold on, that's just going to cause trouble". In legal cases, there should surely be some penalty for a false representation such as the C&D letter.
My own frustration stemmed from the fact that my insurance company changed something on my policy that I agreed to. Then the next thing I know, they've cancelled the policy because I didn't pay the difference for the change. News to me, given that I actually had two letters that said my next regular payment had been adjusted accordingly for EXACTLY that payment, and that I didn't need to do anything.
It was also quite interesting in that the envelope that the notice of cancellation was received in only arrived on my doorstep the DAY AFTER the insurance was cancelled. Pretty sure that no matter what you do there, I have a came for "untimely service" or some such.
None of that matters, though, as I can prove it all if required. What really annoyed me was the letter demanding the missing payment (the one that you didn't ask for, that you told me would be taken from my regular payments, and that you cancelled the contract - I would assert illegally - before that payment ever came due?) with threat of court action.
Needless to say my reply was significantly less polite, and less humorous than this, but probably contained a lot more legalese. I'm waiting for the 60-day offer I gave them to resolve the situation (which includes £100 payment back to myself because - even if we take that debt as valid - they incurred costs for myself by cancelling the contract illegally and in an untimely manner) before I do anything else. I think that's pretty reasonable, personally, given that I had already assumed the matter was settled without either side paying the other. My next step will be to claim for the lost day at work that it cost me, though, and that's when it gets so expensive I'm hoping they have the brains to not force me to employ the services of a lawyer or the courts to get that from them.
I did once write one of my suppliers a song, though. They'd taken forever to supply the school I worked for with a Microsoft licence, and I was literally seconds away from cancelling the order after much messing about (which, apparently, including Microsoft manually typing in my email address and not being able to spell "administrator", which is worrying in so many ways).
The school were in the middle of being closed because of the snow at the time, which gave me time to write it, and it felt quite Christmassy being in a school in the snow, so it's to the tune of "The Night Before Christmas":
-------
'Twas the week after purchase and all through the school,
Not a computer was stirring, not even a "machine, virtual".
The machines were hung on blue screens in their lair,
In the hopes that new Windows soon would be there,
The children nestled all snug in their homes,
While snow-days were debated and staff manned the phones,
And hoped that everyone were all travelling well,
While wishing that Microsoft had at last learned to spell.
When out in the ICT suite there arose such a clatter,
And all came running to see what was the matter.
'Twas the IT Manager with eyes full of wrath,
Melting down old Windows disks to de-ice the path.
"Don't worry," he cried as he stoked up the flames,
"A Linux disk I have, and some educational games."
Needless to say, my licence was sorted within the hour.
And when I was eight, I picked up a book from the 1970's that suggests putting strobing LED's on your bike using a PWM circuit. They've been around forever. Hell, I have an LED alarm clock from when I was that old that runs off the mains voltage.
Very, very, very few people are sensitive to these things. In fact, most of the these things are present more in your everyday life than you even imagine. Like the warnings for people with photosensitive epilepsy, these people won't be able to use commodity electronics if their symptoms are actually that consistent, and the number of people like that are vanishingly small.
But if you ask people, you'll find that 1 in 3 think they are sensitive to something-or-other that actually can't be verified at all, like the examples I state. They've heard they are bad, or they think it's bad, and lump themselves into the same category as people who can "feel" microwaves coming out of their wifi or whatever other nonsense.
I'm not saying that this guy's monitor doesn't make him think he's ill. I'm not even saying it doesn't. I'm saying the chances are it has more to do with a noise from the PSU, or a particular smell, or even the heating of the air above it. And if it does - well, what do you want us to do? Throw all the LED's in the world in the bin? No. You'll just have to learn to cope with it.
I'm sorry about that, I really am, it must be a pain. But there are people who can't play sports, people who can't not wear glasses, people who can't be outside in the summer, people who can't breathe if you spray air freshener, etc. The only thing you can do is not do those things, or find a way to manage your symptoms.
It's just you.
If you're sensitive to them, don't buy them.
Please don't make every LED / LCD on the planet more expensive because of a tiny minority of people who blame things like PWM for their symptoms (correctly or not).
Like with flourescent lamps, and people who can't be in an air-conditioned room, and people who have to play games with altered FOV's because it makes them sick. You're a tiny minority, or else half the world would feel ill all the time. Please find another way to cope with it (i.e. glasses, double-blind tests to convince yourself it's placebo, or whatever).
Tell the damn truth.
I come from what was considered a "rough" area of London. My schoolfriends were all police-hating idiots. Even through to today, I've had to remove people from Facebook because they were doing things like suggesting to "fight the pigs" when it came to the London riots. Just the terminology used tells you EXACTLY what kind of reaction they would have to being pulled over, and precisely WHY the police bother them so much.
I've been pulled over by the police just as much. I have a tendency to drive old bangers of cars - legal, but they look scruffy and even I would admit that I'd pull them in "just to check" if I was a police officer. Fact is, I know they are legitimate and roadworthy or I wouldn't be driving the damn things.
But when pulled over, I don't start yelling. I'm not all sucking up, either, I just tell them the truth. If you have to lie to a police officer to make things go smoothly with them, then maybe that in itself is a kind of retro-active JUSTIFICATION for them to have pulled you over in the first place. They have the power to pull over anyone for anything, of course they have to or they couldn't act on suspicions. And if you have had to LIE then it meant that you were doing something you SHOULDN'T have and that would be of interest to them.
I've had any number of interesting conversations with police officers where I could quite easily see them tend towards the "It's close enough, let's nick him" kind of attitude if they really wanted to. Fact is, I tell them the truth.
"What speed where you doing there when I pulled you over?"
"I honestly have no idea."
Is that an admission of driving without due care and attention? It could be interpreted as so. Did they have speed-measuring equipment on their vehicle? I have no idea. Probably, because it was a fancy ANPR vehicle with all the cameras and he'd been following me for a while. What happened? Nothing. "Okay, thank you, I'll let you get on your way, sir", after checking documents.
Pulled over after a police car spotted me and obviously "targeted" me from a whole queue of traffic. I'd even tried to let him out in front of me as he was joining traffic and he waved me in front of him, then pulled me over a mile up the road.
"We just pulled you over because your car looks like it's had a hard life, doesn't it, Sir?"
[His colleague walks around the car, inspecting it while we talk]
"Yes, I know. I buy cheap cars and run them into the ground, officer, it's easier than trying to buy a car outright when you have no money. But I have a full MOT here, done yesterday".
[Officer checks paperwork, asks me about my job - IT Manager for a private school, which could probably be assumed that I *could* afford a car, asks me where I'm going, where I've come from, etc.]
"Okay, sir, it says on here that X, Y, Z are advised. You should get them checked out."
[X, Y, Z are not MOT failures, but an MOT pass is not a guarantee of roadworthiness, so advisories are put on for potential roadworthiness issues. He doesn't even bother to look at them]
"Absolutely."
[Officer walks away after a nod from his colleague. Turns back to tell me to be careful when rejoining the road, spots a broken rear light - how the hell it passed MOT I have no idea - and both our eyes are unconsciously drawn to it as he speaks. Officer smiles.]
"Sorry to inconvenience you, sir. It appears you were missing the mandatory duck-tape on the bumper."
[Gets in car, drives off back to the spot he was sitting at before I came past - the duck-tape on the bumper is a reference to the type of car I was driving because you ALWAYS see them in the worst state of repair with bits taped back on]
I got stopped driving back from Europe to the UK late at night. Late, single male in an old, knackered car, was chosen from a line and pulled over for a customs inspection.
I was asked who owned the car (me) and how long (I said about a year). He asked for documentation of the car, it was already o
Welcome to the 21st Century.
The UK equivalent of "Miranda Rights" (why does everything have to have an unrelated name?) has said:
"You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
or words to that effect since about 1912.
Of course you have the right to be silent. And of course the court will be able to draw inferences in the absence of your answers. If you don't speak for a month and then tell police, after hearing all the evidence they have, that fantastical situation X was what you meant all along, then of course it's reasonable to assume that you're just making it up now that you know all the facts and were silent before because it's a fabrication that you didn't have at the time. You have the RIGHT to do that, but it doesn't mean that it won't come back to bite you.
That's been in law since God-knows-when, and the arrest warning is really just a formal restatement so that you aren't tricked into thinking you MUST answer any question a policeman asks you ("Have you stopped beating your wife?" - an unanswerable question either way).
You have the right to remain silent, in any decent first-world legal system. Nowhere does it say that that right is without cost. Or else, you'd never say anything, at all, whatsoever in court and they'd have to convict/release you without your side of the story at all. Similarly you have the right to a lawyer. It doesn't mean you have to have one, have a particular one, or use the incompetent one that they give you.
However, even in a UK court, "Where inferences may be drawn from silence, the court must direct the jury as to the limits to the inferences which may properly be drawn from silence. There may be no conviction based wholly on silence."
Welcome to the 20th/21st Century legal system. If you're stupid enough to stay completely silent and/or not seek legal advice at the first opportunity, that's your problem.
This has been going on for decades. Is this any different to even, say, Windows CE office apps?
MS has a market which it's tried to (or said it's tried to) break out of several times. Hell, it took since Windows XP Tablet Edition for everyone to say "Yeah, that's usable on a tablet now", by which time so many other competitors came and went in the same area that MS are still the outsider. It doesn't really care about / has no clue how to handle other platforms.
It likes Office on desktop because it sells Office and Windows licences. "The Cloud" messed it up for them a bit but now they can sell Office 365 on Windows. Anything outside that remit? Forget it. It's not "real" Windows and they won't dedicate to it (and if you ever see something like the OOXML standards, you'll learn why - they basically created this mess for themselves, deliberately or not).
Office on ANYTHING else is secondary and unimportant and only exists to get some cash and will never be the mainstream product. Hell, I wouldn't even chance my arm on Office 365 on Linux or Mac personally, let alone phones.
Microsoft has one core base that makes it money. Even their consoles have to confirm to that base, basically, because that's the nature of their business. Lip service is sometimes paid to other things but they rarely follow through.
Windows RT on ARM
Windows CE on whatever.
Even mainstream Windows on other architectures died a death.
It's all there. They've had decades of experience on it. They could make just about anything work with enough effort. They were pushing for tablets decades before people were even exposed to usable tablets. But they are only really interested in working on x86-compatibles with all the functionality they can get on them, so they can sell Windows, sell Office and lock you in.
In the tradition of the XKCD cartoon about the Matrix movies...
But, really, they made other sequels?!
Sorry, but T2 was the best. T3 - while I liked the idea of using the Internet being Skynet (clever twisting of an old plot to take account of a new technology that would otherwise be problematic to explain why they DON'T have that in the future of T2), it was lacklustre. The main actor? Not convinced. The baddie? Sure, that was okay, but a mite overpowered with shooting things directly from the body. The "take control of the cars electronics" - stole my damn idea for a story I was writing, but how the hell were they steered? etc. etc. etc.
I didn't even know there was anything after that. Like all things, after X amount of sequels it gets commercialised into TV series and spin-offs and I totally lose interest. Highlander, Matrix, Aliens, etc. all the same. As soon as you get a TV series or crossover of something like that, it's dead. It doesn't matter how many times you bring back the original actor to try to legitimise the spin-off, it's gone.
The problem is, once something spins off into the spin-off abyss, then it dies pretty quickly and never really recovers, but "the fans" (the blindly loyal ones who don't care enough to say "Sorry, that's just wrong even if the same writer wrote it") will make them milk it into oblivion. And then they can "reboot" it. Or pretend a movie never happened. Sigh.
I don't hold out any hope at all. In the meantime, I know what MY Terminator 3 / 4 / 5 and world look like. That's about as much as I can do.
And vinyl sounds better?
I would. Also, do you think Stephen Hawking would go for it?
But more importantly - who the hell is going to run a machine "just for you" forever, and how would they do so? We might be able to fund a genius or two and a celebrity or two might be able to get a few hundred years, but beyond that who's going to solve the practical everyday problem of funding you and then looking after you? And are you going to have the life expectancy of the average electronic product?
And, sorry, but all your experiences - EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM - have little to do with your body. Your brain experiences because it's instructed to by the laws of physics and it's correlated that to sensations of pain, even emotion. If you can get to the point that you can put "yourself" into a computer, all that has to be connected to something inside the computer too. There's nothing you *can't* experience that way, once you have that kind of technology.
And I don't think fear-of-death is something I'd miss (or that you'd lose - you can still die, even in this highly hypothetical scenario) and the rest - breathing? I'm sure there are any number of people who'd be glad not to have to breath (those in pain, those on iron lungs, etc.) and not be tied to oxygen (even spacefarers!). Everything else is just your brain's reaction to the environment sensed by it. All that love and joy and excitement? Neurons firing and nothing more. Sorry, but it's just your reaction to that particular bunch of neurons firing in that particular way. Nothing "special" or strictly organic there (hell, you can pretty change people's mood by zapping their brain - we call it ECT and use it as a medical treatment even today).
But it's so pie-in-the-sky that it's not worth worrying about in our lifetime anyway. Hell, I doubt my grand-daughter's generation would even have the ability and she doesn't exist yet.
Before we get that far, we need ever-lasting power resources, ever-replenished amounts of resources, insanely complex computers, unbelievable amounts of knowledge of the brain and how it works (of which we have precisely zip so far), the ability to never work again (or have work fund you to do all the above) and a legal framework for it all to happen in.
And the changes implemented by ANY of those things are going to have a greater impact on your life than just about ANYTHING ELSE if they ever come around in your lifetime.
Okay. You can have the right to patent anything you like so long as it only applies to things that you (or someone else) makes an actual, physical circuit to do.
So all those people running software on general purpose processors are not hindered in one bit and can replicate your methods (note: not necessarily your exact work) to their heart's content.
That's basically the situation specified and if you can't see how that differs from, say, someone patenting some obscure part of MPEG decompression and suing, say, VideoLAN for it, then you probably shouldn't be a patent lawyer.
Yes, all computer programs are Turing-compatible (if you like) and you can implement a computer using wooden blocks that modify a flow of water if you really wanted to - it's not hard. But the fact is that your patent shouldn't cover such a general range of specified equipment that nobody can ever use your technique on a general purpose computer.
What you've found isn't a "loophole", it's exactly the narrowing that someone has deliberately introduced. Patent holders will now be able to patent "an electrical circuit that does X" (maybe, possibly, if they jump through lots of hoops and nobody ever discovers their PUBLISHED patent and reimplements it somehow else) but not "any program on a general purpose computer that does X".
It's the right fix. It allows someone to invent, say, ABS and protect that invention. But it prevents someone from "inventing", say, a way to compress files by looking for common strings and building an index. Sure, you can make a computer that does the same as the circuit part of the ABS system, but you CAN'T make it actually control an ABS system without hitting the patent.
1) Those steps aren't "easy". They involve conscious, thoughtful decisions at every point in your life and no mistakes.
2) That doesn't stop you appearing - in fact, it makes you more suspicious and thus worth investigating. Absence of data is a data point in itself - any old spy movie would tell you that. The guy who exists but has no records, no data, no phone? Yeah, we'll look into him first.
3) You're paranoid if you ACTUALLY do that.
4) As someone whose just trawled their Slashdot history going back years while looking for a particular post I made, I can tell you that I've crowed on these forums multiple times about everything from Guantanamo Bay, the government treatment of Alan Turing, the fact that I have an interest in cryptography, the stupidity of people who can't work out to encrypt data properly, even "potential terrorist scenarios" (i.e. if terrorists are so bright, why did they do X, leave trail Y, or not do Z?).
If the above targets me for interest, then I would be in deep, deep trouble already. Maybe I have been flagged already. Who cares? The fact is that I'm not doing anything that any random, thoughtful person isn't doing anyway - and I have zero intention of causing harm. And it's basically my country's intelligence services job TO FIND THINGS EXACTLY LIKE THAT, but most importantly to SORT THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF.
I once considered applying for jobs with MI5 and GCHQ. I'm a maths and computer science graduate, with an interest in cryptography, and they were advertising positions for exactly that. It seemed like an avenue worth looking into.
I didn't, mainly because 1) I disagree with militarisation of anything I do (a conscientious objector, you could say) and 2) I disagree with an awful lot of the military decisions made by my country (still "backing" the US and their illegal torture programs in Guantanamo, for instance - OOPS! I did it again!). Though I love the work of Turing, I don't love that it probably ended up, indirectly, killing people too. Sinking U-boats, things like that. Yeah, they were the enemy, and it was better than the alternative (i.e. more people dying), but still it's military action.
But if I'd applied seriously, with those organisations I would quite expected someone to dig around on the net and find these things out about me by themselves. That's their damn job, and they wouldn't want to be letting people like me in - people who place their own morals above that of orders from above. If someone tells me "shoot/kidnap/kill/injure him", my first question would be "What? Why? Is he about to do the same to me?" (unless I'm playing Counterstrike, in which case he'll be missing his head before you finished the sentence).
This is what they do. This is what they have to do. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. It's very easy to get the wrong people into a place that you don't want them to be. Hell, there's a CIA agent in the news at the moment telling everyone their secrets because he disagrees with how they function. That could be me, in the same position.
You have nothing to fear but driving yourself crazy trying to avoid the things you fear. "I don't like surveillance" leading to absolute paranoia that infests your daily life and stops you meeting up with friends? Yeah, the worst of two evils, I think.
That's not to say that I support a surveillance state (but, if I support ANY element of a surveillance state, it's to have constant, recorded surveillance of police and military procedures so that there is NO element of doubt when it comes to questions of justice being served and law enforcement following the law - hell, what I wouldn't give to have proper footage of some of the greater terrorist incidents that have been reported released, and even parts of the "war on terror"), or spying, or anything else.
There's a lot more wrong in this world than a few cameras here and there. In fact, I'd say there aren't ENOUGH cameras in the right places. Imagine how different the world would be right now if ever
Almost all the countries below the half-way-mark on that table are the former Russian states or their immediate neighbours. It's hardly surprising.
And, despite being in the EU, all these places have their own economies. If you force a minimum wage of the UK on, say, Armenia, then employers will have to pay 26 times more on the minimum wage than they do now. In case you don't know, that would basically mean about 20 times more unemployed as a consequence.
There is nothing stopping those people migrating to other EU countries that will take them (open market! For the most part, except where countries are in such a bad economic state that other EU countries won't allow them to emigrate to the rest of the EU), or in campaigning to get the minimum wage to the same levels.
And minimum wage is a bad indicator, average wage would be better. A country that states a £1 an hour minimum wage would not necessarily have anyone working for that, especially if it's 26 times below the cost of living there.
And, sorry, but the cost of living in places in the "top" half of that table (sorted by minimum wage in Euros) is significantly higher than those in the bottom half.
The EU is not there to make us all earn the same, do the same, work the same. It's there to work together, and there's a difference. The UK, for instance, pays a greater proportion of certain subsidies (e.g. farming subsidies) to other countries than the rest of the EU. Something like 2-3 times more, per person, than other countries that reap the benefits of the subsidies.
Nobody said the EU is there to make everyone the same. It's there to make everyone work together to help each other. Which means that some countries have weaknesses and strengths and some countries are in a weaker position than others and is helped out a little.
Are you honestly trying to say that someone in Maldova should be guaranteed the same minimum as someone in the UK is, just because they are in the EU? There's more factors to take account of than that. If you really want something to moan about, look at people who work in the UK, gain benefits they wouldn't be entitled to in their home (EU) country, and then send them back home. Is that really fair? Those who can afford to have a cousin living in the UK getting "free money" (not to mention healthcare, etc.) than those who don't can't get?
Stuff that sinks, sinks.
Quite what were they expecting? Rubbish like tyres and ropes (i.e. stuff that sinks), which are disposed of in/around water will end up at the bottom of the water. Is this shocking?
Sea animals might become trapped in it. Not news. Sea animals might use it. Not news.
Quite what is the point? To make those of us who DON'T realise what millions of tons of junk does when you throw it in an ocean think bad of themselves?
And, to be honest, on the sea-floor it's more likely to be buried than it is to decay. That's probably a good thing for the life down there. In a few million years it'll be rock again.
Are these "scientists" genuinely astonished that they discovered this rather than the alternative (which is presumably that there's no rubbish down there at all?). I was taught that dense stuff sinks back in primary school.
Actually, I've not even touched an original XBox in my entire life. Not once. Ever. Don't use XBox Live as a consequence of that, and don't pay for gaming subscriptions (have a Steam account... is that allowed? Never had a monthly-subscription to anything but New Scientist magazine - paper edition -, though).
So, if no-one has yet taken apart the Kinect 2, how the hell is any of your argument about it NOT nonsense?
Ignoring the rife paranoia...
"NSA spying on all electronic communication is (very) old news."
If so, why do they need to order Verizon to do it? And can I finally tell all those people who talk about the "acres of supercomputers analysing every phone call" to shut the hell up now? If they already have that access, why are they asking for it? And if they ask for it now but we "all knew" they have it already, what's the story, why is this controversial, why should it be news?
Or maybe, just maybe, the government are pretty damn inept unless they are following you specifically and then doing things like tapping YOUR phone is probably better than any underground datacenter with ENORMOUS power draws and analysis code on that scale. And to find out who to follow? They track contacts of known people, and ask for phone records of people they already know. You know, good old-fashioned spying and intelligence. Rather than a blind statistical hunt through a billion innocent records.
Fact is, even if they are doing what you said, the amount of value they get out for what they put in is horrendously pathetic (i.e. they'd been watching the Boston bombers and didn't know anything was going on). If all that Kinect bollocks is anywhere near true (it isn't), then just by the number of Kinects experiencing false positives, you've probably made more time wasted than you'd ever recover.
If nothing else, that's what you should be protesting about. A return to good-old-policing, where people used their 'intelligence' in all senses of the word, not needle-in-a-haystack hunts.
But, honestly, you're talking bollocks. People have taken apart Kinects and even USB-traced them, and people are constantly putting both PC's and XBox's through network packet capture. If there's anything dodgy there, it would be noticed pretty quickly.
But the simplest thing - it comes back to the "acres of supercomputers" argument. Even if they WERE capturing all this data, they certainly don't have the time to analyse it or the manpower to catch up with all the BILLIONS of false positives that such a system would generate.
So maybe it's just a games console. And like every military intelligence agency in the world, they don't mind you spreading bollocks so long as you don't know what it is they ACTUALLY do. And they are liable to be doing very, very little compared to this kind of paranoia, just through sheer time, money and manpower costs.
A username/password is different.
This is a flaw in a system. It's the difference between "Joe Blogg's car has code XXXX" and "All Fords let you in if you do XXXX". The personalisation of the information brings it under different laws - and preventing people from discussing flaws will also stop people from, for example, discussing faults in systems (e.g. cars that have faulty brakes etc.) which brings about whole new levels of capability for companies to forgo their responsibilities and claim they didn't know about it.
However, if you think your garage door openers and information on how to bypass them, copy them, fake them, scan them, intercept them, etc. isn't already on the Internet, you're being naive. Same for car locks.
It's not illegal to discuss a particular encryption system used on a satellite TV system, for example, or it's weaknesses or how it can be bypassed. It's not even illegal to take apart the box and try it. It's definitely a grey legal area, though, to do so with the intention of infringing copyright (but how do you prove that?), or selling "cracked" boxes onto other users. Also, it is illegal to distribute, say, Sky's satellite codes that allow you to decrypt their channels.
You don't want to stop people investigating and finding and discussing flaws in systems. The knock-on effects are huge and not even constrained to IT systems (i.e. if someone's voting system is vulnerable, you wouldn't be able to report that, and nobody would ever know). The law in almost all countries takes the middle line - you can discuss flaws inherent in the system, but you can't go providing information specifically tailored so that random people can use to access random people's accounts.
This exploit has C code. Go compile it. See how it works. Get a working binary. All legal. Distribute it? Legal. Sneak it onto someone's machine? Illegal. Get someone to run it with the intention of accessing things you shouldn't? Illegal. Anything already "bad" is covered. Making more steps along the way illegal just has too much of an impact elsewhere on things that you WANT happening.