I guess you will never read this because this article is pretty old now, but it sounds to me like you want to work for a better-funded early stage startup that can provide you with benefits, but where you can still get equity and influence what happens. The question is, what can you do exceptionally well enough to find such a position?
Not that I would want to defend the healthcare system, but I think another part of your problem with seriously expensive medicine is that all of those countries with universal healthcare that you admire are paying only for the manufacturing costs of those drugs, and so *you* are paying for the research. If the U.S. did the same thing we wouldn't have many drugs and both of us would be in trouble.
It's a comment submitted by Aladdin Enterprises (the makers of ghostscript) during the Copyright Office's review of the DMCA two years ago. It addresses almost exactly the current situation:
"...There is, in fact, a commercially important situation where this is currently the case. A software package called Fontographer is used very widely for creating TrueType font files. A bug in Fontographer causes it to improperly mark the fonts it produces in a way that causes certain other widely used software packages to consider that the font may not be embedded in documents that use the font. This incorrect marking happens by default, contrary to the wishes of the font author. The authors of Fontographer have been unresponsive to users and authors and have not fixed this problem. Thus a situation has been created where the author of the font wishes to allow users to embed it, but users who remove the protection marking (which is extremely simple technically -- it involves changing one easily-located bit in the font) will be in violation of the law."
Okay, how can this possibly work? How can the driver or anything else possibly guess the distances at which we're supposed to perceive different objects?
3D accelerator cards do hidden-surface removal with a depth buffer, so depth information has to be available to the driver and the card. Quake 3 passes the depth of every vertex to the OpenGL driver along with the X and Y coordinates.
This information is sufficient to reconstruct the scene from two different eye positions. The drivers for some kinds of shutter glasses work in this way.
I don't know anything about this particular display.
Re:But look at what you are getting
on
The Eroded Self
·
· Score: 1
However, having data about you available by some means other than face to face does have its advantages, if used wisely. I, for one, do not catagorically object to data about me being known, only known by certain agencies.
This is a straw man argument. No one is suggesting that we outlaw databases. The point is that people should have some degree of control over the collection of personal information about them.
You are in a car accident. Okay. If you want to be in the "Central Medical Database" you can sign a contract with the company or agency that provides it, specifying to whom they may release your information. Better yet, encode all the information directly on your "Universal ID card" so that no one can take the information from you while you are conscious. No global database required.
Your 8 year old son is kidnapped. Okay. You can implant transmitters in your children. Just as long as the rest of us can make our own decisions.
Your credit card number is stolen. I have a better idea. Instead of using "profiling" to shore up a system that is pathetically insecure on the face of it, we could move to a digital cash system that would be more secure and improve privacy.
When you approach the private parking garage by your office, you drive up to the gate and it opens for you. Sounds great, but doesn't need to keep logs, does it? In fact, it doesn't even need to broadcast your identity, just a challenge and response.
You are receiving threatening phone calls from a stalker. I bet that if you thought really, really hard about it, you could come up with a way to provide Caller ID service without keeping permanent logs of all phone traffic. Of course, stalkers would just make calls from pay phones. Oh, right. They do that anyway. Hey, what if all the stalkers follow the transmitter signal from your "sub-dermal ID chip" to track you within 2 meters?
Being cataloged has its advantages. Don't dismiss them simply because there are disadvantages as well.
You're right: I don't want to give up the advantages of technology. I would like to see systems designed to limit the potential for abuse, whether by individuals, corporations, or government.
For ADSL, the most talked-about xDSL technology, there are two competing modulation schemes: carrierless amplitude phase (CAP) modulation and discrete multitone (DMT) modulation. CAP and DMT use the same fundamental modulation technique--quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)--but differ in the way they apply it.
QAM, a bandwidth conservation process routinely used in modems, enables two digital carrier signals to occupy the same transmission bandwidth. With QAM, two independent message signals are used to modulate two carrier signals that have identical frequencies, but differ in amplitude and phase. QAM receivers are able to discern whether to use lower or higher numbers of amplitude and phase states to overcome noise and interference on the wire pair.
> It is a mathematical law that the connectivity > of a network is in fact O(N^N). These > connections are the generators of value on > the net.
The number of connections in a network is O(N^2). To be precise, there are N(N-1)/2 connections among N nodes. This is not even close to N^N (for 100 nodes there are 4950 connections, N^N would predict 10^200 connections)
"In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-pole. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo [Illinois] and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. " -- Mark Twain
From http://www.vacets.org/diction/English/H_Engl.txt:
Halt and Catch Fire
(HCF) Any of several undocumented and semi-mythical {machine instructions} with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the {IBM 360}. The {Motorola} {6800} {microprocessor} was the first for which an HCF {opcode} became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to {toggle} a subset of the {bus} lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could actually cause lines to burn up.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you will never read this because this article is pretty old now, but it sounds to me like you want to work for a better-funded early stage startup that can provide you with benefits, but where you can still get equity and influence what happens. The question is, what can you do exceptionally well enough to find such a position?
Not that I would want to defend the healthcare system, but I think another part of your problem with seriously expensive medicine is that all of those countries with universal healthcare that you admire are paying only for the manufacturing costs of those drugs, and so *you* are paying for the research. If the U.S. did the same thing we wouldn't have many drugs and both of us would be in trouble.
I searched the copyright office's web site for "fonts" and stumbled across this letter:
p df
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/1201/comments/004.
It's a comment submitted by Aladdin Enterprises (the makers of ghostscript) during the Copyright Office's review of the DMCA two years ago. It addresses almost exactly the current situation:
"...There is, in fact, a commercially important situation where this is currently the case. A software package called Fontographer is used very widely for creating TrueType font files. A bug in Fontographer causes it to improperly mark the fonts it produces in a way that causes certain other widely used software packages to consider that the font may not be embedded in documents that use the font. This incorrect marking happens by default, contrary to the wishes of the font author. The authors of Fontographer have been unresponsive to users and authors and have not fixed this problem. Thus a situation has been created where the author of the font wishes to allow users to embed it, but users who remove the protection marking (which is extremely simple technically -- it involves changing one easily-located bit in the font) will be in violation of the law."
3D accelerator cards do hidden-surface removal with a depth buffer, so depth information has to be available to the driver and the card. Quake 3 passes the depth of every vertex to the OpenGL driver along with the X and Y coordinates.
This information is sufficient to reconstruct the scene from two different eye positions. The drivers for some kinds of shutter glasses work in this way.
I don't know anything about this particular display.
This is a straw man argument. No one is suggesting that we outlaw databases. The point is that people should have some degree of control over the collection of personal information about them.
You are in a car accident. Okay. If you want to be in the "Central Medical Database" you can sign a contract with the company or agency that provides it, specifying to whom they may release your information. Better yet, encode all the information directly on your "Universal ID card" so that no one can take the information from you while you are conscious. No global database required.
Your 8 year old son is kidnapped. Okay. You can implant transmitters in your children. Just as long as the rest of us can make our own decisions.
Your credit card number is stolen. I have a better idea. Instead of using "profiling" to shore up a system that is pathetically insecure on the face of it, we could move to a digital cash system that would be more secure and improve privacy.
When you approach the private parking garage by your office, you drive up to the gate and it opens for you. Sounds great, but doesn't need to keep logs, does it? In fact, it doesn't even need to broadcast your identity, just a challenge and response.
You are receiving threatening phone calls from a stalker. I bet that if you thought really, really hard about it, you could come up with a way to provide Caller ID service without keeping permanent logs of all phone traffic. Of course, stalkers would just make calls from pay phones. Oh, right. They do that anyway. Hey, what if all the stalkers follow the transmitter signal from your "sub-dermal ID chip" to track you within 2 meters?
Being cataloged has its advantages. Don't dismiss them simply because there are disadvantages as well.
You're right: I don't want to give up the advantages of technology. I would like to see systems designed to limit the potential for abuse, whether by individuals, corporations, or government.
The following is quoted from this 3Com white paper
Sounds like a MODEM to me!
> It is a mathematical law that the connectivity
> of a network is in fact O(N^N). These
> connections are the generators of value on
> the net.
The number of connections in a network is O(N^2). To be precise, there are N(N-1)/2 connections among N nodes. This is not even close to N^N (for 100 nodes there are 4950 connections, N^N would predict 10^200 connections)
"In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-pole. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo [Illinois] and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. "
-- Mark Twain
From http://www.vacets.org/diction/English/H_Engl.txt:
Halt and Catch Fire
(HCF) Any of several undocumented and
semi-mythical {machine instructions} with destructive
side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several
well-known architectures going as far back as the {IBM 360}.
The {Motorola} {6800} {microprocessor} was the first for which
an HCF {opcode} became widely known. This instruction caused
the processor to {toggle} a subset of the {bus} lines as
rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could
actually cause lines to burn up.
[Confirm?]
(14 Dec 1995)
I don't think you can go to jail for contempt of Congress.
:)
If you could, a lot of Americans would be in jail