Being procecuted is something very different from being convicted though. Many innocent people get procecuted. It's how the legal system works.
Some of these innocents end up in arraignment and have to spend some time in a cell before their trial. If they are found innocent, they recive compensation for the time they had to spend in jail.
Yes, it's true that this guy should probably never have been procecuted. But the same goes for all the innocent people who are procecuted every day. No legal system is perfect.
Another thing is, that nobody has probably ever been procecuted for this before in France. So there is no case law saying exactly what is legal and what is not. In those situations, procecutors like to persue cases, not necessarily because they think they'll win, but just so that the limits of the law will become better-defined.
The good side is that an aquittal will then contribute to this body of case law, and make it very unlikely for someone else to be procecuted for the same thing.
This isn't a Constitutional issue. It's a Congressional issue. Congress has the Constitutional power to establish copyrights. In order to change that system, Congress simply needs to pass a new copyright act.
Well, changing the system isn't the issue here (although it's undoubtedly the goal). The issue here is whether the change from opt-in to opt-out was constitutional.
Looking at the constitution, you'd hardly think it's an issue:
The Congress shall have Power [...] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
But there's of course more to the constitution than just the text itself. It's how the Supreme Court interprets that text which is important.
In Eldred vs. Ashcroft, which is very much the predecessor to this case (Larry Lessig being involved with both), the Supreme Court basically said that the Sonny Bono copyright extension act was OK, since it didn't alter "the traditional contours of copyright protection".
So, what they're arguing here is basically a follow-up on that: "Well, what about the opt-in system? Didn't that change the contours of traditional copyright?"
I'd say it's a long shot. But I'm thankful for them trying.
The problem is, if the shareholders have down-to-the-minute information on everything the board is doing, things get short-sighted. Every single decision the board does would be cause for speculation on the stock.
Whups. In the above paragraph I meant to write 'management' where it says 'board'.
Well, while I'd agree that transparency is good overall, it does depend on what kind of information we're talking about.
The management is appointed by the board, which represent the shareholders. Thing is, stocks don't work the way they used to, when people would hold their stock and get rich off the dividends. Today people aren't investing for stock dividends. They buy in the hopes of selling them for more. So the business has to keep growing and keep that stock price up to keep everyone happy.
The problem is, if the shareholders have down-to-the-minute information on everything the board is doing, things get short-sighted. Every single decision the board does would be cause for speculation on the stock.
This, in turn, could make it difficult for the managment to do their job, namely run the company, because any decision which could means lower stock prices, even in the short run, is going to get them into some heavy criticism from the unhappy and increasingly short-sighted investors.
In the worst case, you'd risk ending up with management looking only at what's good for the next day and not what's good for the next decade.
(Of course, it's already a lot like this. I'm just saying it might get worse.)
DMCA and other laws that protect the "intelectual property" is already harming this. In France, Guillaume Tena, is in jail for the simple reason that he validate a piece of saoftware and found ou that it has bugs. The bad thing is that this not even involve patents, it is copywrite and anti-reverse-engenieer laws.
You know what's harmful too? Exaggerating to the point of lies to try to make your point. It only serves to discredit your cause. I don't like that, because I think it's an important cause.
As ZDNet reports. That case is in progress and due to be ruled on March 8. He is not in jail. (Judging from his web page, he's currently in Boston. Which isn't quite as bad as that.)
Besides that, it is not even likely he will end up in jail. European law, under EU directive 91/250/EEC, (implemented in law in all EU member states) article 5, paragraph 1:
In the absence of specific contractual provisions, the acts referred to in Article 4 (a) and (b) [Note: Using and altering the program] shall not require authorization by the rightholder where they are necessary for the use of the computer program by the lawful acquirer in accordance with its intended purpose,
including for error correction.
It's explicitly permitted under european law to reverse-engineer code to find bugs. This also means that an EULA cannot void this right either.
Java is not open source any more than Microsoft's "shared source" is open source.
Neither java's new license or their old license qualify as Open Source under the OSI definition.
The license Sun is now using for Solaris does qualify under the OSI definition, and this has also been verified by the OSI.
Despite previous ramblings from Mr Schwartz claiming that Java is open source, it's pretty obvious from their different licenses that Sun knows what 'open source' really means.
Huh? One is an incompatible format that made using Sony players an incredible chore. The other is a universally-accepted format that, while frowned upon, doesn't encrypt content (and it can very easily be avoided by using a multi-region DVD player).
I think the GP was referring to that Sony does not make any multi-region DVD players, and is just about the only manufacturer who doesn't. And for the very same reason Sony had for not making MP3 players: the interests of Sony's music and film products were allowed to take precedence over the interests of electronics consumers.
I was wrong about being able to send any information using quantum mechanics. The probability of being able to read any individual bit is 50%. So you can only ever read 50% of any message.
Including eavesdroppers, which, if they are intercepting the signal, lower the probability to zero for the intended recipient.
However, you can then contact the other person and tell them which photons you were able to read, and use those photons as the key.
Yes, and this can be done using a series of parity checks and other techniques which reveal no useful information. That way, noise-affected (or intercepted) bits can be discarded, and the probability of a match between the sent and recived information can be lowered to an arbitrarily low number. This information can then be used as an encryption key (as you wrote).
But as I said, if your message is the same size as the number of bits transferred, you can still send the message directly (not encrypted). You can publicly state "Bit 5 is the first bit of the message, Bit 7 is the second.." and so on. Since these are bits you know that the eavesdropper does not have, you provide no information.
All the quantum part does is tell you when a third party has intercepted your data stream. It does not prevent a person from reading it.
That is not quite right either. Because by intercepting the data, you alter it. I didn't say it physically prevented anyone from reading it - I said it prevented eavesdropping. And if you're changing the data, (and it's detectable too) then that's hardly 'eavesdropping' is it? Communication is not possible at all if someone is listening in, since the data is being destroyed by the eavesdropper. Because the way the scheme works, is that if a message from A to B is not recived correctly by B (which it is not if someone is 'listening in'), then neither B nor the eavesdropper will gain any information.
You just keep trying to send a new random key until it is sent without anyone reading it. Once it is sent successfully you encrypt your message using it, and transmit the newly encrypted message to the other person using traditional methods.
This is quantum key exchange. It's an application of quantum cryptography, practical since you can send a nearly uncrackable conventional crytographic key which is still smaller than the data you want to send, and use a conventional (and faster) method of communication.
But if you're going to use a random one-time-pad, where the key is the same size as the data you want to send, you might as well send the message instead.
I think [..] Eventually, we will have quantum computers capable of brute-forcing even quantum encryption...
Well, you think wrong. Quantum encryption cannot be 'brute-forced'. Because it's not 'encryption' in the conventional sense but rather 'secure transmission'. The data is not encoded, but rather transmitted in a way which makes eavesdropping impossible. Since you can't intercept any 'coded message', there is nothing for you to brute-force.
And this holds as long as what we know of quantum mechanics holds. (More specifically, the Bell inequality. Which was verified in the famous Aspect experiment.)
So no, nothing in quantum physics is going to invalidate quantum encryption. And I wouldn't get my hopes up for future theories, either, because this 'wierdness' of quantum mechanics so well-verified experimentally that it'd be unlikely that any future theory would change it. (But hopefully explain it)
What if I sue and loose on a technicality? I can't afford the chance.
You don't need to have an all-encompassing 'loser-pays' system. For instance, in Australia it defaults to 'loser-pays' but is ultimately at the discretion of the court.
And this is used in a way which exactly adresses what you brought up: If your case had good merit, but failed in some small respect, then the court would likely have you only pay your own fees.
Whereas if someone brought an obviously frivolous case, it would be very unlikely for the court to exersize its discretion.
First: a loser-pays system does not in itself bar settlements. (Although, yes, it does discourage settling on the grounds that it'd be more expensive to go to court and have the case thrown out)
Second: That comparison is given that the a frivolous case already has been brought. The entire idea here is that there would no longer be any point in bringing a frivolous suit, since you're not going to win and you're not going to get a settlement because it's cheaper that way.
Also, you're ignoring the fact that settling a frivolous case because it's cheaper than going to court is an injustice. And IMHO serving justice by discouraging unfair settlements is a heck of a lot more important than saving the courts' time.
Instead you'll see the steady accretion of functionality that covers one situation after another, until there's nothing left for the 'driver' to do.
I doubt it. Driverless subway trains have been around for 70 years. Yet the vast majority of the world's subway trains are not controlled by AI. Despite:
Control can be centralized easily
You have a far simpler 'road network' to control
You have full knowledge of the location and destination of every train at any given moment
The 'freedom' of the trains are far less
It's a single system, you can replace all trains simultaneously.
Full automation of a subway system is far easier than an automobile/road network. Certainly the computing power to do it has been around for at least 20 years. So why hasn't it taken off? The answer is probably part psychological.
Anyway, my point is: Just because we have the technogy doesn't mean it's going to happen. And with automobiles, we don't even have the technology. So if it does happen, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
Still, I can't wait for people to start complaining about accidents that happened because they thought the car would stop, or rear end collision because the car did stop. There's so much liability that car makers are about 15 years behind where we could be.
Which is probably why this is happening in Europe, where people are less litigious.
You would hope that since Americans love their cars so much it'd inspire some tort reform, but in the long run, what we'll get is some half-assed laws restricting liability.
But given the current state of things, I'm pretty unsure that you can write any computer program of complexity beyond 'hello world' without infringing on at least one software patent.
PS2/Cube/Xbox/PC are all gaming platforms. Linux is not, it was never designed as a gaming platform and probably never will be as long as video card manufacturers refuse to open source their drivers. What is the point of porting games to a platform if the likelyhood of them working is minimal.
Being 'designed' as a gaming platform doesn't mean anything. Windows was not designed as a gaming platform either. In fact, games were the last of the old DOS programs to make the shift to windows. That happened because Microsoft cleared the way for them by creating DirectX.
The open-or-closed status of drivers has relatively little to do with it. It's not a big problem for the graphics card people to recompile their drivers for the major distros. Games are a mass-market thing. So only mass-market Linux (i.e. major distros) are really relevant there anyway. You don't see them releasing drivers for NT 4 either.
The issue is the API:s. While Direct3D and OpenGL are pretty much on par, DirectX provides quite a lot of other stuff which OpenGL does not. And in those areas, the alternatives like SDL just aren't good enough.
So what are the options? Develop for DirectX, and you have Windows and the Xbox covered. Develop for OpenGL and you'll probably need to write your own code for networking, keyboard/mouse/joysticks and so on. And rewrite it if you want to support other platforms.
What the world would really need is a gaming API which could compete with (or be better than) DirectX in every respect, and which is cross-platform. Ideally, you would have a collaboration between Red Hat, SuSE, Apple and Sony. An API supporting Windows and Linux and Apple and the PS2 would certainly be a DirectX-killer. You could develop for four platforms for the price of one.
Given that scenario, who wouldn't put out a Linux port (even an unsupported one)? It's certainly technically possible. I'm just waiting for someone important to 'get it'.
If hydrogen is "green" then alkaline or lead acid batteries are "green".
Hardly. But for different reasons. Lead and cadmium are highly toxic, and tons of the stuff gets into nature every year from batteries. Switching from those to hydrogen or LiH would in itself have environmental benefits.
I was annoyed by the articles opening line about hydrogen being some magical abundant fuel that has absolutely no strings or drawbacks.
The opening line of the article doesn't really say any such thing. (did you read as far as the qualifier: 'at least in Iceland'?) You chose to interpret it that way so you could go beat up a straw-man.
Except that hydrogen isn't found, or mined, it's created. Either from fossil fuels or by electrolyzing water, which requires electricity, which comes from fossil fuels.
Not in Iceland it doesn't.
It's easy for iceland to claim 70% "green" because geothermal heating is a real option for them. The air is cold, the earth is hot. It doesn't work for most of the rest of the world.
What the heck is your problem?
First you go off about how hydrogen is useless since you've got to get the power from somewhere. Then you lambast the icelanders just because they don't get power from a dirty source and make the point that somehow doesn't count, since their solution doesn't work for every single nation in the whole world. (As if anyone claimed it would!)
Oh that is ridiculous. It simply doesn't hold up. (And referring to the Jargon File as some kind of technical reference?!)
Sound cards do digital sound mixing. Graphics cards do MPEG decompression. Z-buffering. Texture-mapping. Lighting effects. All these things used to be done on the main processor, 10-20 years ago (depending on the tech).
There are no signs at all they're going to be moved back.
That said, I don't think it's going to happen for this particular compression tech. It doesn't load the processor too much and it's too small a niche anyway.
And it's idiotic to assume the client can or should do moderation. There is no foolproof way to determine if the data it's transferring is 'authentic'.
As for 'seed', I'm using that word in the bittorrent context, where 'seed' means someone with the whole file. And this is something which both Bittorrent and this proposed protocal make easy to verify, since the clients respond to queries of which chunks they have, it's possible for the clients to determine how many users have the whole thing.
Your reference does not answer the question, either. But if you believe you really have a terrific solution to all problems: Write a protocol specification, or even better: an actual program.
I doubt you could. I can't. And the reason is simple: It's simply not possible to write an *anonymous* and *efficient* P2P program, especially not with the features you want. If it was, then someone smarter than you or I would already have done so.
WRONG. I can put any file up online and call it "Metallica - Sanitarium.mp3". It'll get listed as "Metallica - Sanitarium.mp3", and people will download it thinkint that it's Sanitarium, when really it's an 80 year old man reading recipies for lentil soup. Hashes don't come into play.
Uh, I believe we were talking about P2P clients here? And more specifically BitTorrent? Hashes certainly do come into play on such a network. They do not validate the content, they do validate that "the file 100 people are distributing with this name is the same file". As for moderation:
You can't just ignore files that have no seeds but the original - otherwise, no new files could ever be listed. PLUS, working with a friend lying client, you can both seed the malformed file.
So a few users get burned trying to download the file if it's fake, or continue to seed if it's not. An authentic file will rather quickly gain seeds. A fake will have fewer or no other seeds, and a file which doesn't check-out will never have any. It works just fine. People won't get turned off even if they get burned 10% of the time. And that's an overestimate, since you'd think the P2P system would have more than ten users per hosted file.
The benefit of doing this, however, is that if you do it with any sort of significant percentage at all, the concept of mass lawsuits become untenable, because a significant percentage of defendants could prove that their computers were just having data routed through them.
Two words: Contributory infringement.
Bittorrent works by *exchanging* packets. The more work you do for others, the more work they do for you. This would work no differently - by being a proxy, you would be rewarded on your downloads.
So X passes a chunk from A to B. Who rewards him? A or B? And with what? If A and B are in the same file-swarm as X, the entire thing is pointless since they're all distributing the same file anyway, just in an inefficient roundabout manner.
If they're not distributing the same file, you cannot guarantee A or B has the file you want. Unless you tell them. In which case you're not anonymous: Other users can find out who you are and what you're downloading. And the exersize is again pointless.
Or are you suggesting some kind of system where you get 'credit' for proxying? That would of course be compromised by leechers and not work.
1: Start serving falsely-labelled file data that is correctly represented internally. There appears to be no moderation system built in, so bogus file data will pollute the system.
Can't be done. There is a moderation system built-in to BT. The SHA1 hashes which identify the file chunks simply cannot be 'correctly represented internally'. If you know a way of doing this without changing the chunk size by several gigabytes, I think some crypto researchers would like to talk to you. Any reasonably coded client will start ignoring a peer who delivers enough bad chunks.
For example, make all of your hash entries but one accurate, but make that one hash entry inaccurate. Users end up downloading most of the bad file before it errors out.
Which will leave you with no 'seeds' but the original one. People would wise to this quickly.
Hash cracking: Brute force hash cracking could allow fake data to pass as real, hash-matching data; only a single cracked piece per file is needed.
See above. This is nowhere near practically possible. You have to add gigabytes of data. A chunk is far smaller than that. It won't fly.
#4 has a simple solution: Involuntary mirroring. If this system would automatically force the mirroring of data into a cache on the destination machine, and serve it from there, there would be no way to know whether a person was actually uploading copyrighted material or simply acting as a "router".
This would not work. First, most net users have lower upload speeds than download speeds. Second, and more important is that this requires a lot of bandwith for helping someone else. Expect a hacked client to be produced which does not proxy anyone else, saving their bandwidth, but leeching others'. You could create a tit-for-tat scheme where someone will only proxy for you if you proxy for them. On the other hand, bandwidth is still the main constraint here.
all too frequently, people use this misconception. Heat is not equivalent to infrared energy.
Yes it is, actually.
Mechanical heat is the vibrations and rotations of molecules. The energies of the modes in which molecules can vibrate and rotate are equivalent to the IR spectra. Heat can be transferred in one of two ways: 1) The (say) vibrating molecule collides with another nonvibrating molecule, causing it to start vibrating, while the first stops*. (heat conduction)
2) The vibrating molecule emits a photon containing some of its vibrational energy and stops vibrating. This is blackbody radiation, and at normal temperatures, most of it is in the infrared, because that's what corresponds to the lower modes of vibration.
The emitted radiation can of course be reabsorbed and turns back into vibrations/rotations/motion. That's radiative heat transfer.
So as long as you're talking 'normal' temperatures, heat does indeed correspond to IR radiation.
And if you want to be _really_ nitpicking, then 1) is actually 2). Because in quantum-electrodynamical terms, what actually happens during that collision is that a virtual photon gets exchanged. You could see it as an emission/absorption which happens so fast, the photon is never observable. And that photon would (again, for 'normal' temperatures) be in the IR range.
(* Actually they never stop vibrating completely. Quantum physics doesn't allow for that.)
No, heat is two things. Molecules vibrating (mechanical heat), and IR radiation. These things are in equillibrium with eachother.
These devices don't suck the radiation out of stuff, just like a (digital) camera doesn't suck light from the object you photograph. You can therefore not use them to cool anything, afaik.
Incident IR radiation can do one of two things. 1) Be absorbed 2) Not be absorbed.
In the second case, it just continues on its way. In the first case it turns into molecular vibrations (heat), eventually it will be re-emitted. When something is holding a constant temperature, you have an equillibrium, the radiation absorbed equals the amount emitted.
Now, in a photocell, the absorbed IR radiation is being turned into electricity, and not molecular vibrations. Removing heat radiation from a closed system is the same as removing heat, given the equillibrium. Basic conservation of energy.
So yes, you are making things colder. But given the scale of the world, and that it's not a closed system either (but you do have a local equillibrium where the temperature is such that the incident sunlight equals the amount radiated off into space) it's not going to make things noticeably colder.
Slashdot Mirror
Being procecuted is something very different from being convicted though. Many innocent people get procecuted. It's how the legal system works.
Some of these innocents end up in arraignment and have to spend some time in a cell before their trial. If they are found innocent, they recive compensation for the time they had to spend in jail.
Yes, it's true that this guy should probably never have been procecuted. But the same goes for all the innocent people who are procecuted every day. No legal system is perfect.
Another thing is, that nobody has probably ever been procecuted for this before in France. So there is no case law saying exactly what is legal and what is not. In those situations, procecutors like to persue cases, not necessarily because they think they'll win, but just so that the limits of the law will become better-defined.
The good side is that an aquittal will then contribute to this body of case law, and make it very unlikely for someone else to be procecuted for the same thing.
Well, changing the system isn't the issue here (although it's undoubtedly the goal). The issue here is whether the change from opt-in to opt-out was constitutional.
Looking at the constitution, you'd hardly think it's an issue:
But there's of course more to the constitution than just the text itself. It's how the Supreme Court interprets that text which is important.
In Eldred vs. Ashcroft, which is very much the predecessor to this case (Larry Lessig being involved with both), the Supreme Court basically said that the Sonny Bono copyright extension act was OK, since it didn't alter "the traditional contours of copyright protection".
So, what they're arguing here is basically a follow-up on that: "Well, what about the opt-in system? Didn't that change the contours of traditional copyright?"
I'd say it's a long shot. But I'm thankful for them trying.
The problem is, if the shareholders have down-to-the-minute information on everything the board is doing, things get short-sighted. Every single decision the board does would be cause for speculation on the stock.
Whups. In the above paragraph I meant to write 'management' where it says 'board'.
Well, while I'd agree that transparency is good overall, it does depend on what kind of information we're talking about.
The management is appointed by the board, which represent the shareholders. Thing is, stocks don't work the way they used to, when people would hold their stock and get rich off the dividends. Today people aren't investing for stock dividends. They buy in the hopes of selling them for more. So the business has to keep growing and keep that stock price up to keep everyone happy.
The problem is, if the shareholders have down-to-the-minute information on everything the board is doing, things get short-sighted. Every single decision the board does would be cause for speculation on the stock.
This, in turn, could make it difficult for the managment to do their job, namely run the company, because any decision which could means lower stock prices, even in the short run, is going to get them into some heavy criticism from the unhappy and increasingly short-sighted investors.
In the worst case, you'd risk ending up with management looking only at what's good for the next day and not what's good for the next decade.
(Of course, it's already a lot like this. I'm just saying it might get worse.)
You know what's harmful too? Exaggerating to the point of lies to try to make your point. It only serves to discredit your cause. I don't like that, because I think it's an important cause.
As ZDNet reports. That case is in progress and due to be ruled on March 8. He is not in jail.
(Judging from his web page, he's currently in Boston. Which isn't quite as bad as that.)
Besides that, it is not even likely he will end up in jail. European law, under EU directive 91/250/EEC, (implemented in law in all EU member states) article 5, paragraph 1:
It's explicitly permitted under european law to reverse-engineer code to find bugs. This also means that an EULA cannot void this right either.
Java is not open source any more than Microsoft's "shared source" is open source.
Neither java's new license or their old license qualify as Open Source under the OSI definition.
The license Sun is now using for Solaris does qualify under the OSI definition, and this has also been verified by the OSI.
Despite previous ramblings from Mr Schwartz claiming that Java is open source, it's pretty obvious from their different licenses that Sun knows what 'open source' really means.
So why don't you?
Huh? One is an incompatible format that made using Sony players an incredible chore. The other is a universally-accepted format that, while frowned upon, doesn't encrypt content (and it can very easily be avoided by using a multi-region DVD player).
I think the GP was referring to that Sony does not make any multi-region DVD players, and is just about the only manufacturer who doesn't. And for the very same reason Sony had for not making MP3 players: the interests of Sony's music and film products were allowed to take precedence over the interests of electronics consumers.
I was wrong about being able to send any information using quantum mechanics. The probability of being able to read any individual bit is 50%. So you can only ever read 50% of any message.
Including eavesdroppers, which, if they are intercepting the signal, lower the probability to zero for the intended recipient.
However, you can then contact the other person and tell them which photons you were able to read, and use those photons as the key.
Yes, and this can be done using a series of parity checks and other techniques which reveal no useful information. That way, noise-affected (or intercepted) bits can be discarded, and the probability of a match between the sent and recived information can be lowered to an arbitrarily low number. This information can then be used as an encryption key (as you wrote).
But as I said, if your message is the same size as the number of bits transferred, you can still send the message directly (not encrypted). You can publicly state "Bit 5 is the first bit of the message, Bit 7 is the second.." and so on. Since these are bits you know that the eavesdropper does not have, you provide no information.
All the quantum part does is tell you when a third party has intercepted your data stream. It does not prevent a person from reading it.
That is not quite right either. Because by intercepting the data, you alter it. I didn't say it physically prevented anyone from reading it - I said it prevented eavesdropping. And if you're changing the data, (and it's detectable too) then that's hardly 'eavesdropping' is it? Communication is not possible at all if someone is listening in, since the data is being destroyed by the eavesdropper. Because the way the scheme works, is that if a message from A to B is not recived correctly by B (which it is not if someone is 'listening in'), then neither B nor the eavesdropper will gain any information.
You just keep trying to send a new random key until it is sent without anyone reading it. Once it is sent successfully you encrypt your message using it, and transmit the newly encrypted message to the other person using traditional methods.
This is quantum key exchange. It's an application of quantum cryptography, practical since you can send a nearly uncrackable conventional crytographic key which is still smaller than the data you want to send, and use a conventional (and faster) method of communication.
But if you're going to use a random one-time-pad, where the key is the same size as the data you want to send, you might as well send the message instead.
I think [..] Eventually, we will have quantum computers capable of brute-forcing even quantum encryption...
Well, you think wrong. Quantum encryption cannot be 'brute-forced'. Because it's not 'encryption' in the conventional sense but rather 'secure transmission'. The data is not encoded, but rather transmitted in a way which makes eavesdropping impossible. Since you can't intercept any 'coded message', there is nothing for you to brute-force.
And this holds as long as what we know of quantum mechanics holds.
(More specifically, the Bell inequality. Which was verified in the famous Aspect experiment.)
So no, nothing in quantum physics is going to invalidate quantum encryption. And I wouldn't get my hopes up for future theories, either, because this 'wierdness' of quantum mechanics so well-verified experimentally that it'd be unlikely that any future theory would change it. (But hopefully explain it)
Because you could implement Shor's factorization algorithm.
What if I sue and loose on a technicality? I can't afford the chance.
You don't need to have an all-encompassing 'loser-pays' system. For instance, in Australia it defaults to 'loser-pays' but is ultimately at the discretion of the court.
And this is used in a way which exactly adresses what you brought up: If your case had good merit, but failed in some small respect, then the court would likely have you only pay your own fees.
Whereas if someone brought an obviously frivolous case, it would be very unlikely for the court to exersize its discretion.
First: a loser-pays system does not in itself bar settlements.
(Although, yes, it does discourage settling on the grounds that it'd be more expensive to go to court and have the case thrown out)
Second: That comparison is given that the a frivolous case already has been brought. The entire idea here is that there would no longer be any point in bringing a frivolous suit, since you're not going to win and you're not going to get a settlement because it's cheaper that way.
Also, you're ignoring the fact that settling a frivolous case because it's cheaper than going to court is an injustice. And IMHO serving justice by discouraging unfair settlements is a heck of a lot more important than saving the courts' time.
I doubt it. Driverless subway trains have been around for 70 years. Yet the vast majority of the world's subway trains are not controlled by AI. Despite:
Control can be centralized easily
You have a far simpler 'road network' to control
You have full knowledge of the location and destination of every train at any given moment
The 'freedom' of the trains are far less
It's a single system, you can replace all trains simultaneously.
Full automation of a subway system is far easier than an automobile/road network. Certainly the computing power to do it has been around for at least 20 years. So why hasn't it taken off? The answer is probably part psychological.
Anyway, my point is: Just because we have the technogy doesn't mean it's going to happen. And with automobiles, we don't even have the technology. So if it does happen, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
Still, I can't wait for people to start complaining about accidents that happened because they thought the car would stop, or rear end collision because the car did stop. There's so much liability that car makers are about 15 years behind where we could be.
Which is probably why this is happening in Europe, where people are less litigious.
(See the NYT story "Three things your automobile can't do, which adresses this issue)
You would hope that since Americans love their cars so much it'd inspire some tort reform, but in the long run, what we'll get is some half-assed laws restricting liability.
But given the current state of things, I'm pretty unsure that you can write any computer program of complexity beyond 'hello world' without infringing on at least one software patent.
PS2/Cube/Xbox/PC are all gaming platforms. Linux is not, it was never designed as a gaming platform and probably never will be as long as video card manufacturers refuse to open source their drivers. What is the point of porting games to a platform if the likelyhood of them working is minimal.
Being 'designed' as a gaming platform doesn't mean anything. Windows was not designed as a gaming platform either. In fact, games were the last of the old DOS programs to make the shift to windows. That happened because Microsoft cleared the way for them by creating DirectX.
The open-or-closed status of drivers has relatively little to do with it. It's not a big problem for the graphics card people to recompile their drivers for the major distros. Games are a mass-market thing. So only mass-market Linux (i.e. major distros) are really relevant there anyway. You don't see them releasing drivers for NT 4 either.
The issue is the API:s. While Direct3D and OpenGL are pretty much on par, DirectX provides quite a lot of other stuff which OpenGL does not. And in those areas, the alternatives like SDL just aren't good enough.
So what are the options? Develop for DirectX, and you have Windows and the Xbox covered. Develop for OpenGL and you'll probably need to write your own code for networking, keyboard/mouse/joysticks and so on. And rewrite it if you want to support other platforms.
What the world would really need is a gaming API which could compete with (or be better than) DirectX in every respect, and which is cross-platform. Ideally, you would have a collaboration between Red Hat, SuSE, Apple and Sony. An API supporting Windows and Linux and Apple and the PS2 would certainly be a DirectX-killer. You could develop for four platforms for the price of one.
Given that scenario, who wouldn't put out a Linux port (even an unsupported one)? It's certainly technically possible. I'm just waiting for someone important to 'get it'.
I said it isn't "green energy".
And who did?
If hydrogen is "green" then alkaline or lead acid batteries are "green".
Hardly. But for different reasons. Lead and cadmium are highly toxic, and tons of the stuff gets into nature every year from batteries. Switching from those to hydrogen or LiH would in itself have environmental benefits.
I was annoyed by the articles opening line about hydrogen being some magical abundant fuel that has absolutely no strings or drawbacks.
The opening line of the article doesn't really say any such thing. (did you read as far as the qualifier: 'at least in Iceland'?)
You chose to interpret it that way so you could go beat up a straw-man.
Except that hydrogen isn't found, or mined, it's created. Either from fossil fuels or by electrolyzing water, which requires electricity, which comes from fossil fuels.
Not in Iceland it doesn't.
It's easy for iceland to claim 70% "green" because geothermal heating is a real option for them. The air is cold, the earth is hot. It doesn't work for most of the rest of the world.
What the heck is your problem?
First you go off about how hydrogen is useless since you've got to get the power from somewhere. Then you lambast the icelanders just because they don't get power from a dirty source and make the point that somehow doesn't count, since their solution doesn't work for every single nation in the whole world. (As if anyone claimed it would!)
And someone modded this 'insightful'?!
Oh that is ridiculous. It simply doesn't hold up.
(And referring to the Jargon File as some kind of technical reference?!)
Sound cards do digital sound mixing. Graphics cards do MPEG decompression. Z-buffering. Texture-mapping. Lighting effects. All these things used to be done on the main processor, 10-20 years ago (depending on the tech).
There are no signs at all they're going to be moved back.
That said, I don't think it's going to happen for this particular compression tech. It doesn't load the processor too much and it's too small a niche anyway.
And it's idiotic to assume the client can or should do moderation. There is no foolproof way to determine if the data it's transferring is 'authentic'.
As for 'seed', I'm using that word in the bittorrent context, where 'seed' means someone with the whole file. And this is something which both Bittorrent and this proposed protocal make easy to verify, since the clients respond to queries of which chunks they have, it's possible for the clients to determine how many users have the whole thing.
Your reference does not answer the question, either. But if you believe you really have a terrific solution to all problems: Write a protocol specification, or even better: an actual program.
I doubt you could. I can't. And the reason is simple: It's simply not possible to write an *anonymous* and *efficient* P2P program, especially not with the features you want. If it was, then someone smarter than you or I would already have done so.
WRONG. I can put any file up online and call it "Metallica - Sanitarium.mp3". It'll get listed as "Metallica - Sanitarium.mp3", and people will download it thinkint that it's Sanitarium, when really it's an 80 year old man reading recipies for lentil soup. Hashes don't come into play.
Uh, I believe we were talking about P2P clients here? And more specifically BitTorrent? Hashes certainly do come into play on such a network. They do not validate the content, they do validate that "the file 100 people are distributing with this name is the same file".
As for moderation:
You can't just ignore files that have no seeds but the original - otherwise, no new files could ever be listed. PLUS, working with a friend lying client, you can both seed the malformed file.
So a few users get burned trying to download the file if it's fake, or continue to seed if it's not. An authentic file will rather quickly gain seeds. A fake will have fewer or no other seeds, and a file which doesn't check-out will never have any. It works just fine. People won't get turned off even if they get burned 10% of the time. And that's an overestimate, since you'd think the P2P system would have more than ten users per hosted file.
The benefit of doing this, however, is that if you do it with any sort of significant percentage at all, the concept of mass lawsuits become untenable, because a significant percentage of defendants could prove that their computers were just having data routed through them.
Two words: Contributory infringement.
Bittorrent works by *exchanging* packets. The more work you do for others, the more work they do for you. This would work no differently - by being a proxy, you would be rewarded on your downloads.
So X passes a chunk from A to B. Who rewards him? A or B? And with what? If A and B are in the same file-swarm as X, the entire thing is pointless since they're all distributing the same file anyway, just in an inefficient roundabout manner.
If they're not distributing the same file, you cannot guarantee A or B has the file you want. Unless you tell them. In which case you're not anonymous: Other users can find out who you are and what you're downloading. And the exersize is again pointless.
Or are you suggesting some kind of system where you get 'credit' for proxying? That would of course be compromised by leechers and not work.
1: Start serving falsely-labelled file data that is correctly represented internally. There appears to be no moderation system built in, so bogus file data will pollute the system.
Can't be done. There is a moderation system built-in to BT. The SHA1 hashes which identify the file chunks simply cannot be 'correctly represented internally'. If you know a way of doing this without changing the chunk size by several gigabytes, I think some crypto researchers would like to talk to you.
Any reasonably coded client will start ignoring a peer who delivers enough bad chunks.
For example, make all of your hash entries but one accurate, but make that one hash entry inaccurate. Users end up downloading most of the bad file before it errors out.
Which will leave you with no 'seeds' but the original one. People would wise to this quickly.
Hash cracking: Brute force hash cracking could allow fake data to pass as real, hash-matching data; only a single cracked piece per file is needed.
See above. This is nowhere near practically possible. You have to add gigabytes of data. A chunk is far smaller than that. It won't fly.
#4 has a simple solution: Involuntary mirroring. If this system would automatically force the mirroring of data into a cache on the destination machine, and serve it from there, there would be no way to know whether a person was actually uploading copyrighted material or simply acting as a "router".
This would not work. First, most net users have lower upload speeds than download speeds. Second, and more important is that this requires a lot of bandwith for helping someone else. Expect a hacked client to be produced which does not proxy anyone else, saving their bandwidth, but leeching others'. You could create a tit-for-tat scheme where someone will only proxy for you if you proxy for them. On the other hand, bandwidth is still the main constraint here.
all too frequently, people use this misconception. Heat is not equivalent to infrared energy.
Yes it is, actually.
Mechanical heat is the vibrations and rotations of molecules. The energies of the modes in which molecules can vibrate and rotate are equivalent to the IR spectra. Heat can be transferred in one of two ways:
1) The (say) vibrating molecule collides with another nonvibrating molecule, causing it to start vibrating, while the first stops*. (heat conduction)
2) The vibrating molecule emits a photon containing some of its vibrational energy and stops vibrating. This is blackbody radiation, and at normal temperatures, most of it is in the infrared, because that's what corresponds to the lower modes of vibration.
The emitted radiation can of course be reabsorbed and turns back into vibrations/rotations/motion. That's radiative heat transfer.
So as long as you're talking 'normal' temperatures, heat does indeed correspond to IR radiation.
And if you want to be _really_ nitpicking, then 1) is actually 2). Because in quantum-electrodynamical terms, what actually happens during that collision is that a virtual photon gets exchanged. You could see it as an emission/absorption which happens so fast, the photon is never observable. And that photon would (again, for 'normal' temperatures) be in the IR range.
(* Actually they never stop vibrating completely. Quantum physics doesn't allow for that.)
heat is not the same as IR
No, heat is two things. Molecules vibrating (mechanical heat), and IR radiation. These things are in equillibrium with eachother.
These devices don't suck the radiation out of stuff, just like a (digital) camera doesn't suck light from the object you photograph. You can therefore not use them to cool anything, afaik.
Incident IR radiation can do one of two things. 1) Be absorbed 2) Not be absorbed.
In the second case, it just continues on its way. In the first case it turns into molecular vibrations (heat), eventually it will be re-emitted. When something is holding a constant temperature, you have an equillibrium, the radiation absorbed equals the amount emitted.
Now, in a photocell, the absorbed IR radiation is being turned into electricity, and not molecular vibrations. Removing heat radiation from a closed system is the same as removing heat, given the equillibrium. Basic conservation of energy.
So yes, you are making things colder. But given the scale of the world, and that it's not a closed system either (but you do have a local equillibrium where the temperature is such that the incident sunlight equals the amount radiated off into space) it's not going to make things noticeably colder.