In this case it may be well spent. Cream cheese is one of few the commodity grocery items that I've found where the store brands have quality levels that are too erratic to buy (sometimes ok, more often like shiny playdough), so I have to stick with the much more expensive Kraft Philadelphia brand. If this research yields practical advances that make it into the hands of the generic cream cheese manufacturers, I would stand to save much more cash than the fraction of a cent of my taxes that went to fund this.
In reality, though, they'll probably just keep cranking out the playdough anyway, so the research money probably did go to waste after all.
Not even close. The use of synthetic pesticides disqualifies an item from being organic. Some of the pesticides that they were spraying on your food 20 years ago are now banned because they were found to be unsafe.
They'll probably end up banning some of the current genetic modifications if and when they find problems with it, but that doesn't mean that 20th century agriculture was especially safe. (And prior to the 20th century, there were major health risks in the food supply from natural causes like bacterial contamination. There has never been a safe food utopia.)
At any rate, allowing him access to earth orbit was a major security breach. Anybody in possession of WMDs should have been pre-screened out of the program.
Eventually, with some more articles like this one and yesterday's Cell piece, people will start to figure out that the x86 architecture is brain-dead and needs to be put out of its misery.
Why? Because the x86 isn't a DSP?
The x86 is a general-purpose CPU. It isn't brain dead; historically it's almost always been at least half as fast as the latest expensive processor fad du jour, and sometimes it has actually been the fastest available general purpose processor. As these fads have come and gone, the x86 has quietly kept improving by incorporating many of their best ideas.
The cell processor is basically a POWER processor core packaged with a few DSPs tacked onto the die. That sounds like a kludge to me, but if it turns out to be a success, there's nothing stopping people from tacking DSPs onto an x86 die.
All a DSP is good at is fast number crunching. It usually has little in the way of an MMU, along with a memory architecture tuned mainly for vector-like operations, branch prediction tuned only for matrix math, etc. DSPs would make a bad choice for running general purpose programs, especially with cache and branch issues becoming the dominant performance bottleneck in recent times. DSPs would a horrible choice for running an OS with any kind of security enforcement. Using a GPU as a poor-man's DSP is interesting, but it suffers even more from these same limitations. If DSPs really offered a better solution for general-purpose problems, they would have replaced other CPU architectures decades ago.
You'd probably end up with a few companies who excel at cheap manufacturing putting out commodity units without any economic incentive to improve them.
Or, maybe some would just skip silly the razor/blade business model and sell the players for at least what it cost to develop and produce them. Then those people who think that they need Apple-like bling could still get it (for a price) without saddling everyone else with stunted media formats.
Is it good for consumers if it means that players and media are removed from the market?
Yes, because as soon as the players and media are removed from the market, the manufacturers and producers will realize that they have nothing to sell and aren't making any money. So their next move will be to turn around and put their products back on the market, but without the vendor lock-in.
Yeah, that's why I never use Python, Ruby, Scheme, Lua, Perl, Sed, Awk, m4, sh, batch files, etc: Someone might add pointers to them one day, and if that happened, I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to control myself, and then I might end up falling off the no-pointers wagon. I just can't accept that risk.
The current system is already a conflict of interest. The review decision is based largely upon the declarations in the application which are written by the party that stands to gain from the patent grant, and the reviewers get their funding from fees charged to the patent applicants (the more patents they grant, the more people are encouraged to apply for patents, and the more money they rake in).
I say we need more applications to get walloped. This whole "little guy" thing is mostly a myth anyway; the vast majority of patent royalties collected by large coporations. It their applications are truly valid, then they'll have the resources to fight off any challenges. There's no need to let big patent holders with deep pockets run rampant over the industry landscape just because a handful of individuals might theoretically get lucky and hit the big time; it just doesn't happen often enough to justify the damage done to all the other little guys who are shut out by big corporations who form cross-licensing cabals with each other in order to stifle competition from newcomers.
Oh yeah? Well, in my day, we didn't have "Coding Forms". We typed our first programs straight onto punched cards....Except our high school's card punch irreparably broke after a couple of weeks, so then we had to scratch out code combinations for each character by hand onto "mark sense cards" with a #2 pencil. (I'm not joking.) And we HATED it. Talk about RSI; after spending a few hours scratching out a 100-line program this way our wrists would feel like Jello.
Anyway, the debate back then wasn't about IDEs, but instead whether you had to draw up a flowchart before you wrote down your algorithm. I was in the camp against flowcharting, and thankfully it's been made mostly obsolete by the introduction of modern structured languages anyway.
Likewise, I think that the need for IDEs and debuggers in general are a vestige of deficient languages. In many years of writing Python code, for example, I have only felt the need to fire up the debugger a couple of times. For C or C++ OTOH, I might need to use a debugger once or twice per week to track down some segfault, almost always due to a stupid braino. As time goes by and languages improve, the need to use external tools to effectively work with each language should diminish.
I know that this is a gray area, and supposedly some court decisions have sided with that position, but IMO it's still total BS. All software requires the APIs it interfaces with to work. So what?
Right now, my web browser requires a link to slasdot's servers so I can post this message. Does that make my browser a derivative work of Apache? Of course not. However, the only difference between this situation and the kernel module is the distance and electrical specs of the logic signals over which the pieces of software in question communicate.
Furthermore, the legal status of the binary module becomes subject to strange action-at-a-distance effects. If a third party were to implement another kernel that supports a module API compatible with Linux (and creating compatible alternate kernel is not covered by copyright; otherwise SCO would have a viable case), then all of a sudden, this module *doesn't* necessarily require Linux to function, and therefore is certainly not a "derived work". (And neither would any other Linux module on planet earth.)
I find it ironic that the FSF has been on the vanguard of extending the ever-increasing scope of copyright laws by pushing this legal theory to the limits of plausibility and beyond.
If the Europeans had had the technology to send robotic missions to the new world at 1% of the cost of sending manned missions, it would have made perfect sense for them to do so first.
Sending human explorers wasn't exactly a risk-free endeavor, either. If the situation had been a little different, and smallpox existed in the New World but not the old, European societies might have eventually ended up being wiped out and we could all be speaking Aztec today. (Of course that point doesn't apply to space exploration, but I'm just pointing out that it's not a given that exploration in blissful ignorance was going to end with the Europeans benefiting.)
Because w moves the cursor to the next word, and q starts recording a macro. You probably mean '[esc][shift]:[unshift]wq[shift]!' instead, which requires typing four characters and accurately toggling the shift key twice. '[esc][shift]ZQ' is less than half of that effort.
Of course there's no real savings in the Social Security trust fund. There wouldn't be even if it were filled with physical gold bullion.
You just can't save capital over time at that kind of scale. Every glass of milk consumed by a retiree has to be produced by a worker in that same year. Some of that worker's efforts will be diverted to feeding old people; there's no way around that fact. No matter how many slips of paper or even precious metals the government shuffles, it works out exactly the same, and it will end up the same exact pyramid-like scheme that it's always been. The economy is like the theory of relativity and the speed of light: any attempt to put too much pure money in one place distorts the framework of entire system until it cancels out much of that effort.
At the end of the day, there is exactly one parameter that is important in Social Security: the ratio of retirees to active workers. There is also exactly one way to "fix" Social Security: adjust the retirement age to change that ratio to a politically acceptable balance. Talk about anything else is just a red herring.
Or do you propose abandoning liquid fuel rockets for solid fuel rockets?
No, dimwit. I'm just proposing that they don't strap the friggin payload onto the side of a 200-foot popsicle. Mounting it on top will do the trick. That does seem to be the lesson that they've learned from the shuttle program, and the shuttle replacement will do it that way. I'm just saying that they should kibosh the shuttle now and wait for the replacement. It's not like NASA is doing anything vital with manned missions right now.
Here's a crazy idea, allow the few launches to use old foam as it's apparently safer.
I've got a better idea: Forget the damned foam. Put the Shuttles on flatbed trucks and tow them straight to the Smithsonian. Then pledge to never design or fly another rocket where chunks of loose ice are perched high above critical components.
It'll save the US taxpayers countless billions, and we'll finally get this 35-year episode of kludges, budget overruns and broken promises behind us.
That doesn't mean that we're in a war. 9/11 was a huge crime, but it was not carried out by the military forces of any foreign power. Maybe you could argue that Afghanistan was responsible for the attack, but we already went to war with them and that war is over. They are now simply an occupied country.
There is no war. The current situation is just as it has always been throughout the history of civilization: we live under risk that criminals will carry out terrorist acts.
In comparison to the terrorism risk, each person also happens to live under a much greater risk that they'll die in an automobile accident; however, no president has tried to use that more serious risk as a pretext to suspend the constitution.
You know full well it isn't a bug. It's the same exact "feature" that has been shared by all in their OSes for the past 20 years. It's not in Microsoft's interest to make it any easier for users to stray from their ecosystem, so this intentionally designed limitation is not going to change.
When did you ever own the content displayed on your TV by broadcasers?
The instant it enters my house.
The only thing that I don't own is the right to prevent people (including myself) from making further copies in most cases. That's the only thing that the producer owns, but most people have been hoodwinked into believing that the producer somehow owns something beyond that.
But Microsoft Patents are defensive patents.
They have never sued anyone for patent infringement.
So their "friendly" offers to solicit royalties on the VFAT filesystem from camera vendors is defensive? If the vendors refuse, they have no risk of being sued because Microsoft has never sued anyone yet?
That doesn't mean much. As a practical matter, AES is also currently just as unbreakable as quantum encryption. However, plenty of AES-based security solutions are insecure in the real world because of protocol errors, configuration flaws, OS flaws on the host system, etc. Any quantum-based system will also have these external factors to deal with, and many of them will have exploitable holes.
IOW, in the real world, quantum encryption systems will probably be no more secure than today's conventional systems.
It *is* easy to match the numbers with useful information. You can already buy matched SSNs on the black market. Every time another bank loses a laptop with a list of millions of customer accounts on it, more of this information gets out in the wild. This is already a huge problem for identity theft, etc.
SSNs are bad enough (and they should be eliminated and replaced with smart cards or some other tamper-resistant technology, and they should be banned as use for a key in commercial databases). But now we're talking about the government assigning numbers that are just like SSNs, but can be read remotely. That's an order of magnitude worse. It's like telling everyone that they have to tatoo their SSNs on their foreheads.
Slashdot Mirror
In reality, though, they'll probably just keep cranking out the playdough anyway, so the research money probably did go to waste after all.
Not even close. The use of synthetic pesticides disqualifies an item from being organic. Some of the pesticides that they were spraying on your food 20 years ago are now banned because they were found to be unsafe.
They'll probably end up banning some of the current genetic modifications if and when they find problems with it, but that doesn't mean that 20th century agriculture was especially safe. (And prior to the 20th century, there were major health risks in the food supply from natural causes like bacterial contamination. There has never been a safe food utopia.)
Maybe he got an H-1B visa?
At any rate, allowing him access to earth orbit was a major security breach. Anybody in possession of WMDs should have been pre-screened out of the program.
Why? Because the x86 isn't a DSP?
The x86 is a general-purpose CPU. It isn't brain dead; historically it's almost always been at least half as fast as the latest expensive processor fad du jour, and sometimes it has actually been the fastest available general purpose processor. As these fads have come and gone, the x86 has quietly kept improving by incorporating many of their best ideas.
The cell processor is basically a POWER processor core packaged with a few DSPs tacked onto the die. That sounds like a kludge to me, but if it turns out to be a success, there's nothing stopping people from tacking DSPs onto an x86 die.
All a DSP is good at is fast number crunching. It usually has little in the way of an MMU, along with a memory architecture tuned mainly for vector-like operations, branch prediction tuned only for matrix math, etc. DSPs would make a bad choice for running general purpose programs, especially with cache and branch issues becoming the dominant performance bottleneck in recent times. DSPs would a horrible choice for running an OS with any kind of security enforcement. Using a GPU as a poor-man's DSP is interesting, but it suffers even more from these same limitations. If DSPs really offered a better solution for general-purpose problems, they would have replaced other CPU architectures decades ago.
Or, maybe some would just skip silly the razor/blade business model and sell the players for at least what it cost to develop and produce them. Then those people who think that they need Apple-like bling could still get it (for a price) without saddling everyone else with stunted media formats.
Yes, because as soon as the players and media are removed from the market, the manufacturers and producers will realize that they have nothing to sell and aren't making any money. So their next move will be to turn around and put their products back on the market, but without the vendor lock-in.
Yeah, that's why I never use Python, Ruby, Scheme, Lua, Perl, Sed, Awk, m4, sh, batch files, etc: Someone might add pointers to them one day, and if that happened, I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to control myself, and then I might end up falling off the no-pointers wagon. I just can't accept that risk.
I say we need more applications to get walloped. This whole "little guy" thing is mostly a myth anyway; the vast majority of patent royalties collected by large coporations. It their applications are truly valid, then they'll have the resources to fight off any challenges. There's no need to let big patent holders with deep pockets run rampant over the industry landscape just because a handful of individuals might theoretically get lucky and hit the big time; it just doesn't happen often enough to justify the damage done to all the other little guys who are shut out by big corporations who form cross-licensing cabals with each other in order to stifle competition from newcomers.
Anyway, the debate back then wasn't about IDEs, but instead whether you had to draw up a flowchart before you wrote down your algorithm. I was in the camp against flowcharting, and thankfully it's been made mostly obsolete by the introduction of modern structured languages anyway.
Likewise, I think that the need for IDEs and debuggers in general are a vestige of deficient languages. In many years of writing Python code, for example, I have only felt the need to fire up the debugger a couple of times. For C or C++ OTOH, I might need to use a debugger once or twice per week to track down some segfault, almost always due to a stupid braino. As time goes by and languages improve, the need to use external tools to effectively work with each language should diminish.
Right now, my web browser requires a link to slasdot's servers so I can post this message. Does that make my browser a derivative work of Apache? Of course not. However, the only difference between this situation and the kernel module is the distance and electrical specs of the logic signals over which the pieces of software in question communicate.
Furthermore, the legal status of the binary module becomes subject to strange action-at-a-distance effects. If a third party were to implement another kernel that supports a module API compatible with Linux (and creating compatible alternate kernel is not covered by copyright; otherwise SCO would have a viable case), then all of a sudden, this module *doesn't* necessarily require Linux to function, and therefore is certainly not a "derived work". (And neither would any other Linux module on planet earth.)
I find it ironic that the FSF has been on the vanguard of extending the ever-increasing scope of copyright laws by pushing this legal theory to the limits of plausibility and beyond.
With that point in mind, NASA has commissioned a new official poster for the ISS project.
Sending human explorers wasn't exactly a risk-free endeavor, either. If the situation had been a little different, and smallpox existed in the New World but not the old, European societies might have eventually ended up being wiped out and we could all be speaking Aztec today. (Of course that point doesn't apply to space exploration, but I'm just pointing out that it's not a given that exploration in blissful ignorance was going to end with the Europeans benefiting.)
Because w moves the cursor to the next word, and q starts recording a macro. You probably mean '[esc][shift]:[unshift]wq[shift]!' instead, which requires typing four characters and accurately toggling the shift key twice. '[esc][shift]ZQ' is less than half of that effort.
(I find it easier to type)
That's basically the description of a fuel cell.
You just can't save capital over time at that kind of scale. Every glass of milk consumed by a retiree has to be produced by a worker in that same year. Some of that worker's efforts will be diverted to feeding old people; there's no way around that fact. No matter how many slips of paper or even precious metals the government shuffles, it works out exactly the same, and it will end up the same exact pyramid-like scheme that it's always been. The economy is like the theory of relativity and the speed of light: any attempt to put too much pure money in one place distorts the framework of entire system until it cancels out much of that effort.
At the end of the day, there is exactly one parameter that is important in Social Security: the ratio of retirees to active workers. There is also exactly one way to "fix" Social Security: adjust the retirement age to change that ratio to a politically acceptable balance. Talk about anything else is just a red herring.
No, dimwit. I'm just proposing that they don't strap the friggin payload onto the side of a 200-foot popsicle. Mounting it on top will do the trick. That does seem to be the lesson that they've learned from the shuttle program, and the shuttle replacement will do it that way. I'm just saying that they should kibosh the shuttle now and wait for the replacement. It's not like NASA is doing anything vital with manned missions right now.
I've got a better idea: Forget the damned foam. Put the Shuttles on flatbed trucks and tow them straight to the Smithsonian. Then pledge to never design or fly another rocket where chunks of loose ice are perched high above critical components.
It'll save the US taxpayers countless billions, and we'll finally get this 35-year episode of kludges, budget overruns and broken promises behind us.
That doesn't mean that we're in a war. 9/11 was a huge crime, but it was not carried out by the military forces of any foreign power. Maybe you could argue that Afghanistan was responsible for the attack, but we already went to war with them and that war is over. They are now simply an occupied country.
There is no war. The current situation is just as it has always been throughout the history of civilization: we live under risk that criminals will carry out terrorist acts.
In comparison to the terrorism risk, each person also happens to live under a much greater risk that they'll die in an automobile accident; however, no president has tried to use that more serious risk as a pretext to suspend the constitution.
You know full well it isn't a bug. It's the same exact "feature" that has been shared by all in their OSes for the past 20 years. It's not in Microsoft's interest to make it any easier for users to stray from their ecosystem, so this intentionally designed limitation is not going to change.
$ rename .jpg .jpeg *.jpg
The instant it enters my house.
The only thing that I don't own is the right to prevent people (including myself) from making further copies in most cases. That's the only thing that the producer owns, but most people have been hoodwinked into believing that the producer somehow owns something beyond that.
So their "friendly" offers to solicit royalties on the VFAT filesystem from camera vendors is defensive? If the vendors refuse, they have no risk of being sued because Microsoft has never sued anyone yet?
IOW, in the real world, quantum encryption systems will probably be no more secure than today's conventional systems.
SSNs are bad enough (and they should be eliminated and replaced with smart cards or some other tamper-resistant technology, and they should be banned as use for a key in commercial databases). But now we're talking about the government assigning numbers that are just like SSNs, but can be read remotely. That's an order of magnitude worse. It's like telling everyone that they have to tatoo their SSNs on their foreheads.